Scene Wanted
So, in case nobody’s noticed, I’m about as excited about music lately as I’ve ever been–;and most especially post-technoish sorts of electronic music. I’m all up for listening to it, and talking about it, and sharing it with people, and making my own, and all of that. Even trying to get a little netaudio label thingo off the ground.
What I miss, though, is the feeling I used to get that taking part in this particular little niche subcultural enthusiasm made me, you know, a part of—;something going on, a group of people that might be too physically remote to be considered actually friends, but at least like-minded individuals. In a word, there was, at one time, a scene having to do with ambient techno and such music, and I felt like I was involved in that scene at least in my own small way and that was cool. I dug all the online conversations and getting email from guys (I must admit it’s always been mostly guys, for some reason) in like Europe and other far-flung locales, and uploading and downloading and collecting and listening to all sorts of interesting audio files. I was like really plugged into all this a few years back, say around 1999 especially, and it was superfun. One of the best parts for me was something that others would often complain about: I liked that most listeners were also producers: that everyone tended to upload around as much as they would download. It was like folk music from the future.
So, various things happen and I get busy with marriage and professional career and cross-country moves and suddenly there’s not so much time for the blips and beats, and I guess I just sort of drifted away. But also, apart from my own preoccupation elsewhere, the scene started looking a lot less compelling, and more than that a lot harder to find a comfortably-fitting spot in. Post-techno electronica has always been severely fragmented into myriad sub-genres–;I don’t have any sort of fundamental problem with that, really. The nerdy trainspotting has always been part of the fun, anybody who’s honest about it would have to admit that. But I seem to have lost the thread at some point. And there’s a lot of music coming out, both on commercial CD and over the web, that I just can’t get that excited about. Well-known big guns like Autechre and Aphex Twin seem to have gotten increasingly caught up in having to top their own reputations for post-digital signal-processed noisy experimentalism, to the pointwhere neither has released anything I can really even stand to listen to in years. Meanwhile, there’s a thousand kids uploading mp3s with very pretty pad washes and very cleverly programmed drum patterns made mostly of little popping and clicking noises and also a lot of them have these little cleanly chopped bits of sampled vocal audio, sliced too thin to make out the words. These are mostly nice and interesting enough in their way, and some of them are quite good indeed, but after awhile they start to all sound the same, and very many of them mysteriously lack any bass or soul whatsoever.
Recently, however, as my regular readers know, I’ve discovered some things like Múm and Four Tet and Mira Calix that keep the dreamy strangeness and sense of adventure going, but also bring some regular pop smarts and musicality to the table. Stuff that has me both scratching my chin AND bobbing my head, that engages head and hips about equally, and that finally finally finally turns me on like this stuff used to, without going back to anything old or retro. So that’s all very good. But what I feel like I’m missing now is the scene part. I want more people to be in on this sound with me, to hear it, and help find more, and make more and send it to each other and talk about it.
The trouble is, despite a well-deserved reputation for being tragically, almost cripplingly verbose, I’m also severely introverted and asocial–;in other words, I’m not the type of guy to effectively get this new electro-organic scene going on my own. I somewhat lamely went and tried to set up a new “tribe” over at tribe.net, which seemed to me to be as good a networking site as any. I decided to call the tribe post-glitch relaxation, a term I borrowed from pulsar astrophysics and which seemed to me as fitting as anything could be. So and but here comes the super lame and retarded and embarrassing catch-22 part: it turns out that to be listed in the tribe.net public directory, my little tribe has to have at least three members. Right now it has precisely one: me, with my pathetic tribe.net profile with zero listed friends.
So, I guess I’m kind of pathetically begging here. If anyone would like to be invited into my tribe, or has any other neat ideas about how to get a serious discussion going about music that’s sort of new and experimental and pretty and ambient and soulful and smart and poppy and brainy and geeky all at once, please let me know. Because I’m keen as anything on the idea, but have no earthly idea how to get started. Thank you for your consideration.
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