Talkhouse Contributing Writer Jonathan Meiburg is the singer for the band Shearwater, whose new album Jet Plane and Oxbow will be released early next year by Sub Pop Records. You can follow Shearwater on Twitter here.
“Drones play an important role in that they don’t risk the lives of pilots and crew when out on a mission… which is why the military services are trying to recruit video gamers into their ranks.”
— “New drone OS allows control of multiple types of UAS,” GCN (“Technology, Tools and Tactics for Public Sector IT”), June 20, 2013
It’s a funny time for electronic music. In the pre-digital world, it used to be a real challenge to force synths, drum machines, and occasional “real” instruments to mesh together into music that seemed designed by a single robot overlord. But current recording and performance software, for good or ill, now lets you cook up elaborate music “in the box” without ever having to interact with another human being, and a modular, cut-and-paste method of composition that used to be experimental has become the norm. As electronic instrumental music enjoys another vogue, the old problem ends up on its head: how, now, to make machine-generated music that retains some real life?
Fuck Buttons’ new album Slow Focus takes a now familiar way out of the doldrums of infinite options: a rush for the electronic sounds of the analog age, of old synths, toys, tape echoes, and drums. The premise seems to be that music that sounds overtly synthetic in a familiar way feels “truer” than music from the uncanny valley where we actually live. (In this light, Daft Punk’s retreat into straight-up disco looks like thumb-sucking.) Repurposing yesterday’s music of the future has a comforting and self-referential gravity, as it embraces, mocks, or defiles our nostalgia for Tomorrowland.
And Slow Focus definitely opts for “defiles.” It could be the soundtrack to a blood-spattered video game, and its buzzsaw synths and relentless, severely filtered drums sound like a really bad trip (in either sense). It took me back to a festival we played in Iceland last year, just days after Sandy hit New York and New Jersey. The far side of the storm hurled 60 mph winds and low clouds through a dark and ominous Reykjavik, where it blew the sign off our hotel and whipped the harbor into a black-and-white froth while an international parade of bands ground away inside a cavernous, multi-chambered arts center. It felt like playing a mandatory bacchanal on a moon base, and you could have scored the whole thing to Slow Focus— load-ins, load-outs, the MDMA-chomping festival crowd, the doggedly hedonic afterparties, the late, lonely nights, sleepless and spooked, listening to the buildings thrumming in the gale.
I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not. The emotional scorched earth of Slow Focus may be the point, but it’s hard not to feel dispirited by it. There isn’t the thrilling sense of a complex, evil intelligence at work à la, say, Aphex Twin, or Eno in his darker moments, or Kraftwerk, or even Trent Reznor, whose instrumental Ghosts I-IV (2008) sounds and feels inhabited and thoughtful to me in a way that this album doesn’t.
Or am l listening to it wrong? I can’t deny that it has some chill-inducing moments — in the aptly-titled “Sentients,” for instance, a cascading set of ghastly, mechanized “I!” sounds evoke a pulsing mass of dim-witted automata that has just become self-aware. But each of the album’s seven tracks unreels more or less predictably, usually scaling up from a single filtered drone, loop, or drum figure to a chorus of percussion, square waves, and doomy string and choir patches, and something’s always changing in an overt way, leading you by the nose to the next level. These guys clearly know what they’re doing; the sounds are beautifully recorded, filtered, and edited. But they also don’t take you anywhere you don’t expect them to go, and the record ends up feeling like a party on the game grid that’s gotten too big, run on too long, and started to sour.
Looking at the actual devices that were originally built to make these kinds of sounds, 30 or 40 years ago, is almost poignant — their designs imply so much promise, so much excitement about what music might become. In a studio a few weeks ago, I spent a few hours exploring some racks of old synths and synth-derived doodads, from MiniMoogs and ARP Odysseys to Casios and Omnichords, and it was an unexpectedly moving experience. Suddenly the exact sounds I remembered from sci-fi and animated films I loved as a kid came out of the little keyboard amp I’d placed on a chair in front of me; the noise generator of a Sequential Circuits Pro-One, for example, had a melancholy wind hidden in it that I’m sure I’ve heard moaning and whistling through a hundred soundtracks. It was like holding a conch shell to my ear for the first time and hearing the ocean. Fuck Buttons surely have a real fondness for these beguiling machines, and I’d be curious to hear them chase that further, with a little more faith in their audience’s attention span — though, God knows, that faith can be misplaced, and it’s probably bad career advice.
While I was tripping down the pre-digital memory lane, I kept noticing how many of the synths’ controls were dedicated not to sound production, but to automation: to rudimentary sequencers, programmable patches, arpeggiators. In those heady days, the idea of an instrument that could play itself must have been thrilling. But the machines have nearly come to life now, on a scale that would have boggled minds in the ’70s, and left us with bands whose live performances consist of a couple of guys triggering various controllers while bobbing around to a light show. And the tide’s still rising: even standard-model rock bands now often incorporate a lot of triggered or sequenced elements. We toured, a couple of years ago, with a band whose members were sealed off from one another by in-ear monitors, into which metronome tracks and sequenced loops were fed, and even the guitarist’s effects pedals were controlled, remotely, by software. The resulting show made live performance itself seem nearly irrelevant; it was like the musicians and the audience were watching each other on a screen. It was an admirably but eerily consistent set night after night, in every moment — as if someone had dialed it all in, pressed “play,” and walked away.
