On New Music

Watching Planet Earth last night, I was struck once again by the sonic similarities between the natural and electronic worlds. I have noticed before how some of the bleeps and whistles of electronica remind me of the clicks of whales and dolphins; how the vague and threatening booms of bass wash out of the speakers like deep sea depth charges. In last night’s programme on seasonal forests, a tough beaked bird drilled arhythmically against a tree; leaves rustled with the soft shoe shuffle of predators and prey. Listening afterwards to the Kitchen Motors Compilation, the sounds of the forest echo in my head (even though, with a lovely touch of irony, there are no trees in Iceland).

This, as yet unlabelled and indescribable new music, has for me an acute psychological effect – with Bjork and Múm you roam icy craggy aural landscapes; listening to CocoRosie is like regressing to the womb: with some electronica like Mystical Sun it feels like regressing further to a primordial world. Perhaps this electronic simulation of the natural world is connected to the mechanics of how this effect is achieved.

Of course many of my two and a half readers will be wondering what I am going on about; well if you have sound on your pc it is very easy to find out – just let your mouse roam right and down a bit and click the link to my my space site; stick a bit of mouldy cheese there if you like to tempt the mouse.

But the best description of it comes from the lovely Cibelle, and I leave you with her words (taken from her my space site)…

“on another note, music, the way i put it in the juicer or splash it on the canvas, is not about mixing this with that, or that with the other, the genre, the country where one was born or where one lives, it is not about being from this or that scene or this box or the next. If it's just me then, when that piece was done, with all i had inside of me at that second until that chapter got closed when the lights of the studio go off, taking up poems and embracing them with sounds in layers and punctuations, water, powder, bricks. Even better, is to sculpt out of a big mass of collected particles of sound, sweat, glue, lick, purple, silver, air, wood, wind, anything thats been stuck together by living life and all these and other things accumulating inside of me just like breathing and the only things remaining being the ones that match me at that moment, then letting them out, all merged inside me by osmosis, letting it all come out, all that, is that mass, that will be sculpted until it gives me goose bumps and butterflies. then i know it's ready.”