Philip K. Dickian sound world

ARP 2600

As Behringer has recently announced plans to make affordable "clones" of legendary instruments like the Minimoog, ARP 2600 and the like... one might feel we are landing in the world of Philip K. Dick's seminal novel, Ubik.

In Ubik, reality regresses such that even the most advanced objects inexorably metamorphosize into earlier, vintage, versions of themselves.

Combine this with a superlatively postmodern situation, where not only the most technologically innovative manufacturers constantly obsess about their legacy and release endless variations of their legends of yesteryear, but... also other manufacturers start to see cheaper imitations of these retrospective gems as central to their product roadmap and their related marketing strategy.

Nobody denies that the Minimoog Model D, the ARP 2600 and Odyssey, the OSCar, and various other instrument creations were and are gems, era-defining legends, et cetera, et cetera.

Their sound is truly unique, and plugins, digital models and recreations can get close but never quite equal the personality of these vintage greats. It is akin to buying a superb hackbrett or theorbo from centuries ago, for their exquisite and unmistakable sonic personality.

Making affordable versions of them, even if not quite exactly identically sonically and quality-wise, is commendable - let's face it, even remakes of the originals are often vastly overpriced, contradicting the realities of their manufacturing costs that have plummeted. People can get their hands on these vintage greats, if they cannot bring themselves to dish out vast extras for the name or the "legend".

However.

The painful reality for the great fans of great vintage gear is that in recent years the only true innovation has occurred in the world of the (in many ways understandably despised by analogue purists) software plugins and virtual modeling gear.

This, in itself, shows a macro trend that should not be neglected for its symbolic significance and betrays a very deep problem in what was the most innovative musical field.

While there were huge leaps in the processing power and the mathematics that can create, modify, shape and bend sounds in never before thought to be possible ways, these leaps have been turned into musician-usable realities by mostly software engineers churning out plugins and standalone software synths.

We had Camel Alchemy and Spectrasonics Omnisphere, Monark and Reaktor, even the truly deep expansion packs for Ableton Live, unleashing and making practically usable the deepest and most abstract signal processing concepts (think granular synthesis or physical modeling of impossible in reality acoustic processes)...

While we had all these inundating our Macs and PCs, with unprecedented creative possibilities... the big names and not so big names were obsessing mostly about re-iterated retro legends they produced many years ago.

Let's face it, they have inherent limitations in sound palette and, no matter what yours truly or any analogue fan may wish to say, they represent a tiny, absolutely tiny, portion of the state-of-the-art sonic landscapes at our fingertips in the studio.

When the big names and smaller names were not embarking on time travel (backwards), they were, at most, adding more FM operators and bigger RAM and ROM to their machines, more disk or SSD space, more sound libraries and more pre-existing synth engines under the bonnet.

See Korg Kronos, Yamaha Montage, all hugely overpriced for what they are (as shown by price trends and frequency of occurrences on second-hand markets), but essentially have they added anything new to previous mighty synth workstations? They are more powerful, but the deja-vu feeling is of Dickian proportions.

In a synth enthusiast group recently someone asked, when and what can we expect as the "next big thing" in terms of sonic innovation.

Indeed. Musicians and technologically apt sound sculptors alike may not be able to predict what the next thing could be, they may have a number of suggestions in terms of what the gear could improve on to be more real musical instrument.

Also, if we then focus on the sonic possibilities, and forget the unfortunate and unmarketable cases like the (otherwise absolute genius) Neuron, then we do not have to get a mental hernia trying to fathom what next technical innovation could be.

We could just ask the big and not so big names, who absolutely have the know-how and capability for this, to provide many of the landmark and novel synthesis and processing methods we have in not often very spontaneously controllable plugins as, at least, parts of physical synths.

Even if they caught up with where plugins have managed to go in terms of sonic possibilities, that would already be evolution.

However, while we are NAMM after NAMM treated to more and more variants of retro(spective) gear variants, with superficial additions and numbers games (how many synth engines, how many gigs of sample space)... we can only dream.

The generation that can now easily afford the retro gear that shaped the sounds of their youths are buying in vast numbers the sometimes truly bland variations of retro gear, then flood eBay with them after few months of "fun".

The resulting electronic music is hopelessly backward looking, (mostly) hopelessly and relentlessly rooted in the past. There is nothing more tiring than looking at and listening to 1970s arpeggios and step sequencing dressed up in 21st century robes by the extra technological oomph that modern gear can create, but in a desperately and hopelessly retrospective manner.

It is deeply worrying, or it should be for those "innovators", that musicians who come from vastly different background (think of classical minimalists and piano visionaries like Olafur Arnalds or Niels Frahm) can use a vintage Juno vastly more imaginatively than the through-and-through electronic wizards of today. Painful, or at least it should be, as pain might wake one up.

All this, while the instruments we have, emphasis on instruments, can bridge seamlessly centuries and thousands of miles of musical tradition and project us into sound worlds that are in need of imagination.

It may hurt or even upset to state this absolute and for too many years too obvious fact, but unless there is a paradigm shift and we start to focus on the true capabilities of these astounding instruments, and make truly imaginative music that exploits the vast capabilities, nothing can really change.

Money is money, and laws of supply and demand states that while we are gobbling up echoes of our past, there is zero incentive for true innovation.

Now, since the aforementioned Behringer announcement, we are not even gobbling up echoes of our own past. We shall be making and buying others' past.

The time travel has come full circle, the loop has closed in most postmodern fashion.

This is truly Ubik, but in a way that the late and great Philip K. Dick has never imagined it to affect also our sonic reality.

In the aftermath of NAMM 2017

NAMM 2017 has finished recently, and although it is always far from just an electronic instrument show, it has further emphasized a very solid trend among big and small synth manufacturers alike.

If one questions the countless retro and retro-emulating gear being paraded again by the the big and small names, and the scarcity of truly innovative thoughts, well, this is merely a response to a demand.

Synthesizers are, fundamentally and by definition, unique instruments in their ability to create and shape old and new sounds. Also, they can bridge the sonic and temporal gap between many centuries' and many distant realms' musical tradition - they can produce an often-thought-to-be impossible sonic world that can be, at the same time, ancient and contemporary, even futuristic, in the right hands.

However, while they had been the vehicles and, no pun intended, instruments of sonic and musical innovation for decades, the present shows a different direction.

Unprecedented technological advances created an everyday and increasingly affordable reality in which, to quote a recent line from Klaus Schulze, one can only be limited by one's imagination and not the instrument's capabilities.

Is then electronic music of today marked by unprecedented sonic innovation? Are the newer and newer synth and studio gadgets forward looking innovations to facilitate this sonic progress?

Occasionally, and increasingly rarely, yes.

Occasionally, there are leaps in sound-making and sound-shaping ability - think of samplers, FM synthesis, granular synthesis, variphase processing, morphing filters...

Occasionally, even if underlying mathematics and technology are relying on pre-existing concepts, the instruments themselves represent leaps in how a musician can unleash his/her creative powers. Think of compact affordable modular synths, or the astounding music workstations like the M1 and its successors, or the vast sample libraries shaped further by complex processing plugins and/or sampler keyboards.

However, as the latest NAMM also demonstrated, a heavy trend is filling rooms with... recycled history.

Some are caught in a loop of releasing endless remakes and variations of their glorious classics from the past decades, others add more polyphony to previous classic models and/or architectures.

Certainly, there is a demographic element that creates insatiable demand for such retro gems being recycled endlessly. The blogger is part of that demographic, but hopefully not yet caught in this mental loop.

As it happened with motorcycles, there is an age group that once dreamed about those beasts, but now can afford them in much beefed-up versions. There are entire new genres established that are nostalgically re-creating past trends in electronic music, or in general, of music that was predominantly relying on electronic instruments.

Beyond this demographic phenomenon, there are new generation musicians who reach for the retro sounds and retro instruments' recreated or souped-up versions with an aim to add a certain special flavor to established mainstream electronic music sub-genres.

But... in many ways, we are witnessing a polarisation of electronic music.

Apart from the still purely academic ventures in the vein of IRCAM experiments, in the accessible electronic music there are extremely few names who truly make use of these instruments' unique capabilities.

The rest are using eminently unconventional instruments in extremely conventional manner - and when innovation is celebrated because it sounds exactly like a sequencer-laden track from 40+ years ago, then something is very warped in our perception.

To return to NAMM, one of the highlights was the Arturia Matrixbrute - and an otherwise superb demo showed the sequencer capabilities... heralded as a major sensation and as an innovative beast of an instrument, whilst the produced music sounded exactly like Tangerine Dream's Ricochet from 1975. Yes, it was 42 years ago.

The time warp could not be more complete nor more obvious.

Nobody can produce quantum leaps in musical instruments every year, but perceptions of what is innovation are being distorted by mere addition of more polyphony, more sampling disc space, more pre-existing synth engines crammed under a single bonnet, more step sequencer buttons now affordably bolted on top of some otherwise unremarkable analog engine.

While this perception distortion is occurring in the market, it is then also occurring in the music that is produced with these "innovative" instruments.

With notable exceptions, some popular trends in electronic music are re-tracing their steps or someone else's steps, and media heralds them as "new voices" while they are faithfully reproducing decades-old sounds (in widest sense).

There have been and there are some extremely popular electronic musicians in mainstream genres, who could blend the dance music of their era with gregorian choir passages... or high-octane EDM with sounds of the '50s, or with sounds of distant musical cultures.

However, while even media perception is warped by the retro "innovations", there is a danger that the most imaginative and boundless instruments are predominantly becoming mere tools to clear or smooth some beaten paths or widen them a little bit.

If our expectations of what sonic exploration is does not get out of the grip of retrospective loops, then we must not blame manufacturers for coming up with endlessly regurgitated history,

They are running a business and they are responding to demand that does not seem to decay any time soon.

Resurrection of an Analogue

Photo: Engadget

Klaus Schulze (in)famously entitled one of his 1980s tracks Death of an Analogue... whilst entirely switched to digital gear, for a while at least... before reversed the admittedly overdone hasty switch-over...

In recent years we have seen a series of analogue revivals, after a long analogue modelling era... Most big names, just to think of Korg and Roland, have released "true" analogue synths and/or revived classics.

Now Moog, as also presented at the recent Moogfest, have revived the legendary Minimoog Model D. Well, actually the first ever Minimoog model that has seen the light of day as far as the public is concerned (previous models were prototypes).

Whilst it retains the original circuitry, it has a few additions like dedicated LFO and, of course, MIDI.

Aside from the news of the most recent resurrection of a true classic, on the surface one may feel that the rapid and increasing analogue revival trend is somehow the opposite of an expected continuous innovation in the field of electronic instruments...

As someone commented on a MusicRadar article, it is the pinnacle of irony how some artists and producers rave about their love for the vintage analogue sound, whilst they compress the life out of the music material...

However, this clash of worlds is not new by any means. There will be nostalgic adventures in what represents the past for many, there will be excesses and mistaken philosophies in using the vintage classics or the brand new 'true' analogue beasts.

As long as the market does not drive the manufacturers to a point where they scale back investment in innovation, while chasing the trend-guaranteed quick buck with their resurrected classics, nor do we increasingly define (as annoyingly certain camps do) the most here-and-now sound as the one based on the use of retro gear, it's fine...

Let's not forget that there have also been hundreds, if not thousands, of man-years of effort invested into the digital modelling of the vintage classics, whether in the form of HW or SW products - so in that sense, perhaps with different affordability in some cases, the resurrection of the 'real' things seems to make more sense... and one hopes that the research & development efforts can then go into the new innovative gear rather...

Surely, some riding the trend hastily and opportunistically get close to the point of heralding the Death of a Digital in a (misconceived) world where just using the vintage classics is automatically chic... but once the initial overshoots of the system settle, even in the case of this new-by-revival movement, we shall get the real gems, as always...