Gary Numan's compositions have often been running ahead of the times, either in terms of the music, instrumentation, lyrics... or all of the above. After the dystopian visions of Savage, the new concept album Intruder is more about the here-and-now than some imagined future - however, the sound design, music, and production aspects of the album have that otherworldly and unmistakable Numan feel that one expects.
It is again an introspectice record, in many ways connects us with the world of one of his recent and highly personal albums, Splinter.
Each track seems to be perfectly integrated into the whole that Intruder constitutes as an album, nothing feels out of place - and remarkably, after more than four decades of creative output, at least this reviewer could not find a single track that noticeably differs from the overall feel of the album, in terms of its quality and level of engagement triggered in the listener.
We have many tracks of an eminently anthemic quality, some with genuine head bobbing potential... Now and Forever is a perfect example, so is I Am Screaming - we may find ourselves singing along at the top of our otherwise modest voices. Numan's melodic inventiveness is still at a sustained peak - many of the melodic phrases of the album have earworm potential, and many melodies, especially in the expansive choruses, have a not often heard beauty.
Tracks like The Gift or The End of Dragons have those Eastern touches we last heard on Savage, whilst Black Sun takes us into the world of intimate, gentle Numan compositions. If Intruder, the title track, is suitably dark and reaching for harsher metallic rock sonorities, compositions like the aforementioned I Am Screaming show that quintessential Numan characteristic: a track can go from subtle, almost whispering vocal phrases to a soaring, uplifting, and ceiling-lifting chorus in under one second. The emotional effect, the lift, such tracks give the listener are hard to put in words, but Numan fans will be very familiar with the effect.
This album, too is a collaboration with Ade Fenton, thus in terms of production values, technical wizardry and the overall Numan-esque soundscapes, Intruder excels. It unleashes on us an instantly recognisable soundworld, across the entire range - and the album certainly has a vast range, going from delicate ballad-like passages to Earth-shattering passages. The Chosen or Is This World Not Enough are good examples of how the vast forces at work are managed, tamed, or unleashed with full force.
The electronic percussion, too is highly characteristic, decayed metal parts of dismantled androids and remains of alien spaceships are scraped, banged together, hit with other things...
As some may hear on some M83 albums, Intruder achieves the rare mixing and mastering fete of having even the soft, subtle, even quasi-whispered vocals come across with perfecly intelligible words whilst immersed in thundering electronic textures.
The term "synth-pop" or "electro-pop", which was used for decades to label Gary Numan's music, is still in use today... But if his recent albums were not sufficient proof of the fact that the use of this label nowadays is just a lazy shorthand, then Intruder once again demonstrates this.
To paraphrase one of the lines from The End of Dragons, Gary Numan still holds the sky as a bona fide electronic music hero, with yet another fully-fledged concept album that dares to move lightyears outside current stereotypical electronica.
One doesn't normally start a music technology-related piece with a (for all the wrong reasons) alleged and memorable expression from a former president... However, KARMA is perhaps one of the most "misunderestimated" technological innovations out there...
Some have asked recently in some synth groups whether KARMA is basically an arpeggiator of sorts. Well, that might be just one ice crystal on the tip of an impressive iceberg... and as KARMA has many modes, generated effects, and quite some depth of parameters, a number of its capabilities are exemplified below with some techie elements, too.
Korg KARMA workstation
KARMA (Kay Algorithmic Realtime Music Architecture, named after its inventor Stephen Kay) has had its debut on the Korg Karma music workstation. Latter has been used by Peter Gabriel, Rick Wakeman, Vangelis, Herbie Hancock, to name just a few...
Subsequently the technology was incorporated in flagship workstations like the Korg M3, OASYS, Kronos, but also as separate software app that can be used with e.g. the Yamaha Motif series synths, too.
Well, while it can be used as an extremely powerful and quite unprecedented generator of musical accompaniments, it has modes (or in proper KARMA terminology, generated effects or GEs) that possess some really dazzling capabilities.
True, it generates MIDI events basically - but one must not think of MIDI events just in terms of musical notes. KARMA can actually control many aspects of the sound, hence it can actually be a powerful sound design tool, too. It is at its most powerful when integrated closely with the synth, so that coupling between the user interface (think of M3 or Kronos's panel of sliders and switches) and what it controls is tight.
Many of its GEs can create complex musical sequences whilst monitoring what one plays. The myriad parameters, which one can have real-time access to, elevate the resulting melodic and percussive lines far beyond the stereotypical and often robotic arpeggiator outputs. Real-time control of note randomisation, swing, generated pattern complexity etc. can give the resulting sequences a surprisingly human feel.
The fact that vast sets of parameters can be organised into so-called "scenes", and transitions between these can be done instantly while playing, means that user can build up different sections with helpful assistance from KARMA.
This clip shows some examples by Stephen Kay, with KARMA scenes and controls on the Korg M3. Some subsequent clips are taken from the net, but unashamedly from one's own tracks, too, where at least one knows exactly what was done with KARMA settings and why...
The areas where KARMA really starts to cross into a whole new realm is where its GEs create realistic imitations of how some instruments are played. Hammered dulcimer can be played with stunningly realistic action, as a section of this clip illustrates on the Kronos workstation - and one has fine control over how that hammer action shapes and decorates the resulting sound.
Similarly. KARMA can imitate strumming and specific ways of playing ethnic instruments with typical phrasings - from guitars to sitar. There aren't many things as annoying as a sitar or a koto that sounds like a keyboardist played it on a keyboard with some sitar or koto samples... KARMA's assistance in performing realistic triggering of notes and phrases of even fiendishly difficult instruments can be quite surprising.
However, one is very free to apply such KARMA modes or GEs to eminently different things - try run a "gong roll" effect on the decay parts of a piano sound for instance, stand back and admire what happens - a pulsating ambient texture unfolds.
The harmonic "modes" or GEs are hard to describe until one hears the effects. Not only they create chord structures, but also they can subtly alter and move notes, creating shifting textures. The exemplified section of this track was created with a modified Korg M3 combi, which uses subtle KARMA movements that slowly shift and decorate the ambient music-like textures.
Often the MIDI events are so rapid and subtle, that they do not actually fully trigger notes - but their effect on patches can be quite interesting. Some of the so-called "pad holder" GEs used with, one can guess, pad-type sounds can really move and blend things, creating interesting sonic textures.
One can unleash KARMA effects on patches that benefit from gated GEs and such, the MIDI control events ending up moving and shifting the sounds in ways that can give countless ideas in sound design, too.
Korg M3 workstation
This clip shows two Korg M3 modules connected together, and a lot of inventive custom programming allowing the improvisation to benefit from touchscreen controls changing parameters, while KARMA is creating the ambient sonic textures.
One, perhaps not every day used, ability of KARMA surfaces when one has the audacity to use a certain mode or GE for something entirely different compared to what it was actually meant to be used for.
Why not use something intended for a piano chord frenzy on a rich choral patch to create some interesting motions and atmospherics? The first section of this track inspired by Cordoba Cathedral is an example of this.
Or why not use gated GE to move some sounds around? Opening part of this track and the main motif uses this to add a lot of animation, as certain patches can react quite pleasingly to the KARMA controls (instead of merely hearing e.g. a panning effect).
KARMA ticking along with different scene settings while one builds up a largely improvised track can result in immediately usable results, for example a track dedicated to the Hubble space telescope has had the percussion and bouncing background patterns entirely created with KARMA scenes, which were set up before the improvisation session started. Clean up the result, add some ambiental intro and outro... and there it is.
Speaking of improvisations, the middle section of this semi-ambiental and new age-ish track was set up with two KARMA modules ticking along and playing calm inter-twined motifs on sitar patches... while improvisation could be layered on top.
Wave sequencing is also an area where the technology can create real time controllable sonic magic, if the synthesizer controlled by KARMA can do wavesequences - as exemplified in this clip . Latter shows the KARMA software that can be used on a computer, while it controls the connected synth, if latter has no built-in KARMA.
Can KARMA be used to bridge musical traditions several centuries apart? Well, yes, two of its modules with real-time controls provided backdrop and the electronic swells for a track that used a theme by John Dowland (Flow My Tears, 1600) and projected it into the sci-fi atmospherics of a Philip K. Dick-inspired album project.
The eternal discussion can ensure of course: what percentage of human input is at work, and how much is done by the algorithms...
Well, perhaps one is biased after years of interesting idea-triggering KARMA experiments, but the fact is that what makes the technology perhaps so non-obvious is actually its greatest strength: it has myriad, truly myriad, parameters one can set up and control also in real time.
So the human input cannot be ignored in setting up the desired KARMA scenes and the parameters of each. Even custom GEs can be created at will... As any tool, this, too it can be used for mechanical results or something human and creative. The difference is in the user, not the tool...
True, once it is set in motion, it runs along the human player, monitoring what is being played on the keyboard or in the incoming MIDI information set to trigger it. So one can forgive some beliefs that it is "just" a complex accompaniment generator.
However, the delimitation line between the human user and the tech at his fingertips is a very blurry one. Even mere step sequencers and arpeggiators in the right hands (think of Tangerine Dream's or Klaus Schulze's trailblazing and mind bending sequencer jams) can be astonishing creative and performance tools.
KARMA is light years beyond step sequencers and arpeggiators... so with all the philosophical doubts and debates one might have, we cannot consider it a robotic add-on in the creative or performance processes in studio or elsewhere.
Like everything else, it can be used for utter robotics, sure... but one can only blame one's own affinities and imagination if rigid patterns are the only things coaxed out of this technology...
Korg Kronos workstation with latest incarnation of KARMA technology
Last year's (in)famous announcement by Behringer, that it sets out to clone the legendary MiniMoog Model D, has driven social and specialist media into overdrive.
Purists, retro enthusiasts, gear heads, and countless other categories of people involved in any way in electronic instruments and electronic music have vented pros/cons (sometimes on the rational side) and everything from joy to outrage (on the emotional side).
This was followed by a "fake news" hiccup, when Behringer website announced a whole range of legendary synth clones, promptly taken off the website and, according to Behringer, it was merely a technical hiccup rather than an intentional marketing stunt.
Cue social and specialist media overdrive... again.
Now that we are counting the days until NAMM 2018, which undoubtedly will have its fair (or again overblown) share of retro technology in new robes as the nostalgy market is driving this insatiably, Behringer makes another announcement.
While the Model D clone is yet to turn up in shops, but pre-orders are made, the company announces not just an Oberheim OB-Xa clone, but also its estimated timeline.
Behringer UB-Xa clone of Oberheim OB-Xa
Cue social and specialist media overdrive... yet again. The OB-Xa's characteristic sound was present on myriad albums of artists ranging from Mike Oldfield to Jean-Michel Jarre to Depeche Mode and Gary Numan, to name just a few.
The repeated furore could be grouped essentially around the following topics:
How dare they clone the legends, making considerably cheaper versions?
The clones will not sound "good enough" compared to the originals
The quality will be worse compared to the originals.
Well, while everything in life is a compromise, above main threads have one huge elephant in the room, as uncomfortable it may be.
The price point, objectively, to anyone in the electronics business who is not subjectively swayed by nostalgia, is not a scandalous one for Behringer, it is actually a scandalous one for the likes of Moog.
The production of Model D in today's world, even with using the retro components that were reportedly in short supply (if we believe the classic marketing stunt), is a fraction of what it was back then.
The price point, regardless of individual synth musicians' pocket sizes (and the snobbish threads that ensued due to this, discussing affordability and who would spend what on what), is an unrealistic one - the real central driver is the name, the legend and the emotional capital factored into it. Full stop.
The "good enough" sound is a perhaps eternal topic. Again, it comes down to motivations, priorities and... compromises.
Even if the clones approximate the originals, they are expected to be "better" than virtual analogue reincarnations of the originals. The elusive (and often subjective) difference may not matter in the final mix, and would not be (even in case of virtual analogue) detectable by vast numbers of people listening to the final mix on whatever sound equipment they have.
However, this just brings the traditional battle between virtual analogue and true analogue to another level, it is a battle between hearing the differences between true analogue original and clone.
The original and legendary Oberheim OB-Xa
Naturally, as with all such discussions, the central question remains whether the certain differences matter or not to the audience.
Famously, when Daft Punk recorded a track's narration with three different microphones belonging to three different eras talked about in the track, somebody asked: who will hear the difference? The sound engineer replied: Daft Punk will.
But then the big question is, if only the artist hears it, does it matter... and then we land in a stormy sea of heated debates that ultimately start regurgitating tenets of subjective vs. objective reality from age-old philosophy trends.
Regarding compromise, a certain difference then becomes also a matter of price difference vs. audible difference. This then becomes even more personal and tuned to the specifics of the music project. Therefore generalising takes on this lose all meaning, no matter how purists start sizzling in social media threads.
The quality point is also a self-defeating one. Sure, fundamentally it has to be "decent". Even at the price point of the clones, nobody wants it to fall apart within months or a few years. Considering how latest greatest offering from some of the biggest names is suffering of frankly outrageous quality issues nowadays, and there is a clear trend toward the negative, the picture is again a bit foggy.
A lot of anger was vented in threads about Behringer quality, endless sarcastic memes and posts circulated for months - but again the authors miss the central point.
Exactly as a hand-stitched leather seat in an Aston Martin does not alter the engine performance and "oomph" we feel driving it, in the same way the price-inflating claims of Moog about lovingly and individually hand-crafted parts do not alter the sound.
They may contribute to an overall feel of uniqueness and "made just for you" with a serial number we end up framing on the wall, but... the central logical phallacy in such takes is that the overall feel is not in any way related to the specific detail or difference in detail that is being argued.
It is impossible, due to human nature, to avoid such phallacies and their pitfalls when it comes to these topics. Especially when many look at their synths as things that define them as musicians instead of mere tools in their creative work.
However all purist thinking is by definition a deplorably self-limiting one. It is not a problem that one ends up limiting one's own choices (including the creative ones), but it is also human nature that the same psychology makes its possessor feel a desperate need to tell others to have the same self-limiting approaches to their creative processes and choices.
So instead, let's herald the superb OB-Xa reincarnation, if Behringer does produce it (frankly, credibility has taken a huge beating lately and some marketing or involuntary actions backfired).
As with the Model D clone, the UB-Xa (as it will be called) will naturally find its way into categories of sound designers and musicians' work places as Model D clone and virtual analogue imitations of true analogue originals have.
Everything is a compromise, and all synths are instruments - mere instruments in realising an imagined sound world.
How that instrument is used and whether it is "good enough" is down to, and only to, that creative musician.
As soon as the instrument becomes a tool for self-definition and therefore inevitably snobbery, it and its discussions are dead ends for the purists.
The third installment of what has become by now the Oxygene trilogy was released on 2 December.
What made the first Oxygene enduring and extraordinary, even to ears coming across its fluid soundscapes 40 years later, was the fact that in many ways it placed itself outside the language of, albeit early, mainstream electronic music. It was eminently different with its other-wordly, yet accessible, soundscapes and fluid, bubbling, ever-changing structures.
Oxygene 2 was somewhat different, with synth-pop and dance music inflections. The third album cannot escape the compulsion of delving into utterly mainstream and utterly popular sub-genres of electronica.
Its opening is surprising, and surprisingly pleasing, with its scintillating sonic fragments and melodic elements that pop in and out of the sound stage.
The phased vintage string machine pads are present in various places in the album, vintage white noise sweeps and percussion elements, and even the instantly recognizable Elka Synthex (which made Rendez-Vous so magnificent sounding) makes an appearance a few times.
There is pleasing amount of experimentation, there are tracks that sound as if arpeggiators' patterns were chopped randomly to pieces and the melodic fragments bubble up unpredictably from the depth of closing and opening filters.
However, the predictable appearance of in-your-face electronic dance music tracks are quite jarring again. The lush soundscapes being suspended by trendy thumping of not only predictable, but terribly banal and already over-used, beat patterns is not exactly a positive effect. There is Jarre inventiveness at work, but the cliched drum patterns are just too... cliched to ignore.
As with Oxygene 2, the complete changes in mood and direction with much too ordinary dancey interludes manage to utterly ruin the otherwise cohesive flow of the album.
The changes in dynamics and effervescence is not a problem, even the first album had its gear shifts that were perfectly blended with the other tracks - but it would be great to hear any intriguing or innovative spins on mainstream electronica, instead the very tired deja-entendu patterns.
As someone remarked about the deplorable Theo & Thea album some years ago, it would be good to leave the forays into dance electronica to those who do it best - and with innovative ideas.
Otherwise, if we discount the jarring (and unfortunately jarringly banal) outings into EDM territory, Oxygene 3 is again quite a remarkable achievement with eminently state-of-the-art technology behind it.
It is quite endearing, that Jarre in 2016 can still stay fresh and full of ideas, and we tend to take for granted the not everyday feast of being able to keep up to speed with the exponential increase (and at extremely fast pace) of electronic sound producing software and hardware.
It sets an example to many electronic musicians who not only get stuck in their ways, but even start out with genre cliches and are are completely in the grips of the technology that they choose to use.
Imaginative, ever-changing, fluid and surprising in many places - Oxygen 3 delivers. If only we could somehow make abstraction of the intrusions of off-the-shelf EDM sonorities that pop up in a few places...
After a long hiatus, the unsurpassed synth legend that is Vangelis is back with a new studio album...
It is said to be released on 23 September, and it is a project inspired by, and dedicated to, ESA's Rosetta probe launched in 2004.
The tracks so far released on the internet show that the music, as many fans expressed on forums, thankfully is not a bombastic symphonic score in the vein of the rather controversial Mythodea.
Whilst Vangelis always excelled in orchestral and quasi-orchestral creations, one has to go back to the '70s and '80s to find real emotional punch and intricate musical ideas in the few albums he released in this vein... The more recent output, with the exception of the score for 1492 Conquest of Paradise and El Greco (the studio album, not the soundtrack), was marked by hugely overblown arrangements where the emotional impact and the musical inventiveness has suffered at the expense of wall-to-wall orchestrations.
The teaser tracks (so far a few short excerpts on Youtube) show that this is not a return to the vintage Albedo 0.39 and such space music albums from Vangelis. It sounds like a through-and-through contemporary affair, and the orchestral passages sound more like the epic and passionate sounds of El Greco.
Rosetta's Waltz also shows that, again unlike Mythodea, we shall be treated to incomparably more melodic content and passionate driving arrangements reminiscent of the Vangelis albums of yesteryear.
Let's see how the full album hangs together - alas, we have to wait a couple of months until then...
Vangelis, in one of his '80s interviews, stated quite aptly that a lot of development has gone into electronic instruments, but what he really lacked in synth producers' output was the effort put into making the instruments, well, really musical instruments for musicians...
A lot has changed since, and by not only going for the usual "endorsements" from keyboardists but also involving them in the creative process, synth makers have been releasing gear that could increasingly be seen as intuitive instruments. With the exponentially increasing complexity of the synth engines, this was obviously not an easy achievement...
Apart from this obvious evolution that we now take for granted whenever we approach a new synth beast, there has been an intriguing polarisation of the gear landscape.
One one extreme, we have what one may call the "total" syndrome (as in some toothpastes). Forgive the analogy for a tiny moment... and let us think of e.g. Korg's Kronos workstation. A mighty beast by any measure, and a major evolutionary step after the already unprecedented M3's achievements.
However, it is philosophically belonging to this "total" approach: let us cram as many as possible synth engines into it, integrate them nicely, make a revolutionary change of direction toward expandable/upgradeable software rather than focusing on mainly hardware updates.
Musicians in certain genres may never use the myriad Hammond organs, nor the myriad piano or physical modelling capabilities, hence ignoring some if not most of the packed-together synth engines.
Something like Kronos wants to do everything, albeit in an integrated way, but without major customisation possibilities in the sense that e.g. some musicians in certain genres may wish to only pay for some of the synth engines, whilst enjoying what the user interface and the operating system offers. As long as this "total" approach does not take one away from the focus on what musicians really need as users, then fine...
On the other extreme, we have the small, focused, sometimes tiny and bordering on the irresistibly cute, synths... Think of Roland's Boutique series, Korg's analogue (and analogue modelling) gear released in the past few months, or the interesting comeback of hardware sequencers and, generally speaking, the revival of the "oldies and goldies"... Even Minimoog Model D has seen a re-release few weeks ago...
Therefore, personally, it will be very interesting to see where the next evolutionary step comes from and just what the next strategic step will be. Also, personally, one hopes it will not be the direction of the, again forgive the closest analogy, "total" toothpastes with added endless series of comma-separated words that were not in the after-all-not-so-total previous products...
The risk is that workstation landscape will shift toward this latter nightmare-ish scenario that will take us backward, focusing away from what was becoming more and more instrument-like despite its inner complexities... One hopes that with the trend seen so far, the big names shifting the big workstations will not be seduced by such marketing race, i.e. cramming more and more into same or updated hardware.
If the success of "total" workstations will be seductive and make strategists take this latter path of bloating the beasts without really thinking of the musicians' needs, hence inevitably, as seen many times in the past, sacrificing usability, spontaneity and playability in favour of feature lists... then that would definitely be a huge step back.
As Klaus Schulze said few decades ago, when digital gear was seemingly taking over the world and there was seemingly no return, one does not want to stop for minutes, or, one may add, tens of minutes, for poking around menu systems in order to set something up. Hopefully neither "total" magnificent workstation beasts, nor the specialised little beasts will take that route again...
Moog Music has just named Gary Numan as the recipient of the 2016 Moog Innovation Award.
The British synth music pioneer, whose seminal debut albums in the late 1970s have set a novel tone within the emerging electronic music genre, has been a consistently unique voice in what has rapidly become a vast landscape of imaginative records.
His darker, yet instantly accessible and recognisable, influential sound was not the result of some superficial stylistical choice. For me, Numan has always been the Philip K. Dick of electronic music - a dark, to some perhaps on the surface 'cold' sounding electronica, yet actually deeply human and, above all, deeply concerned with the human condition. As in the case of Dick's seminal science fiction, in Numan's works we find complex meditations on the (increasingly) difficult relationship between humans and the technological environment they created around them.
It is a quite special achievement, as it is the the case of Dick's works, too, that Numan's meditations, some dating back almost four decades, are currently more relevant and poignant than ever.
It so happens, that Gary Numan has actually began his experimentations with an early Moog synth he found in a studio - and it triggered in him, as he described in recent interviews, too, an instant realisation of its potentials and creative possibilities.
"Replacing guitars with heavily effected synthesizers, Numan’s early work is almost single handedly responsible for introducing post-punk electronica into the popular consciousness, while propelling synth music beyond Prog Rock to inspire the wave of 80s synth pop that soon followed. His impact on the three generations of music since can’t be understated.", writes Moog Music, "Gary Numan is a manifestation of electronic culture’s progressive nature to explore the limits of traditional sound and develop new mechanisms for expression."
The Award will be presented on 22 May at this year's Moogfest.
