Electronic Beats Established by Deutsche Telekom July 29, 2013 Follow eb.

net on Google+ tumblr youtube twitter facebook EventsFeaturesVideoSlicesRadioDepeche ModeMagazineApps scroll to top Most popular/30 Days Most recent Lana Del Rey Paradise Lost: An interview with Lana Del Rey pet-shop-boys-electronic-beats-electric-press Track by Track: Pet Shop Boys and Stuart Price on Electric dj-rashad-2-electronic-beats Chi-Life: An interview with DJ Rashad Rick_Jordan_Electronic_Beats Rick Jordan of Scooter recalls his Depeche Moment Juan_Atkins_Moritz_von_Oswald_Electronic_Beats Axis Powers: Moritz & Laurens von Oswald talk to Juan Atkins Lana_Del_Rey_Electronic_Beats_MU Powell_Interview_Electronic_Beats_220x150px_MU Dizzee_Rascal_Interview_Electronic_Beats_220x150px_MU Slices_2_13_Electronic_Beats_220x306px_MU Lana_Del_Rey_Electronic_Beats_Magazine_2_12_34_220x268px_MU Depeche_Mode_Monument_Electronic_Beats_MU Newsletter Sign-Up Subscribe to our newsletter and stay informed about upcoming events, special ann ouncements, and offers. Email Address Pattern Recognition Vol. 3: The Fantasy behind Veiled Musicians July 9, 2013 in Pattern Recognition by Adam Harper about Burial, Jandek, pepsi 7 up, The Residents Harper_Electronic_Beats_Pattern_05 In this edition of his monthly column for EB, Adam Harper the musicologist, Rouge s Foam blogger and author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Huma n Music-Making ponders musicians mysteriousness and its effect on listening.

No, Burial is not Four Tet. But thanks to an article published on a satirical ma gazine site recently, thousands of people seem to have gotten the idea that he i s. Though many of them will have identified it as a hoax, the theory is likely t o live on as an urban legend mistaken for truth by people who neglected to do th e research. I wonder how many of them knew that Burial s identity the face and name of Will Beva n was voluntarily posted on MySpace in 2008. Even those who did know seemed to acc ept the magical thinking provided by a Burial is Four Tet Tumblr account, which wa s precisely what Equalizer was probably making fun of. It s as if a face and a nam e wasn t enough to explain some of the most critically acclaimed electronic music of the past decade, and connecting it to Four Tet s longer, more conventional care er and releases did the trick. Dan Hancox, one of only two people to have interv iewed Bevan as Burial, explained everything succinctly for the Guardian, quoting Bevan s reasons for remaining outside the limelight: I can t step up, I want to be i n the dark at the back of a club it keeps my tunes closer to me and other people.

I love that with old jungle and garage tunes, when you didn t know anything about them, and nothing was between you and the tunes. I liked the mystery; it was mo re scary and sexy. He was absolutely right. Burial might be one of the most famously anonymous musicians ( reclusive might be the better term) of recent times, but he s by no means the only one. Unlike Burial, t he producer Zomby actually is officially anonymous and faceless, but he s far from reclusive, giving interviews regularly and maintaining an active Twitter accoun t. Reclusive artists are often considered shy or modest, and Zomby isn t in fact it s easy to forget that the public don t know his name. But has his music and career b een affected boosted, even by his anonymity? There has long been something attractiv e, tantalising and romantic about an anonymous artist, especially one who choose s to be. Until the Middle Ages, all the biggest tunes were anonymous, and in folk music m any of them still are. But once names started getting attached to music, they in evitably became a part of the music and its appreciation. If not, why put (as ma ny Victorian families did) a bust of Beethoven or Mozart on the household piano if it was only the musical sounds that mattered? Why put up posters of cherished bands, especially when they re not holding or playing their instruments? Why read the biographies or autobiographies of musicians by far the most successful type o f book about music? Musicians are aestheticized, probably because music is mostl y a non-visual and often untexted medium, and usually the interaction with the f igure of the musician and the interaction with the music cannot be psychological ly separated. Arguably, in fact, there are some cases when the figure of the mus ician(s) and what they mean outweighs the aestheticization of the specific sonic details they create. It would be wrong and maybe even ignorant to point any par ticular fingers here, since I can t claim to speak for the listening experiences o f others, though it might not be too controversial to say that commercial pop an d pop music talent shows sometimes approach this territory. But wrong also becau se music and musician are so closely entwined that it would be very difficult to say definitively anyway, and because it s seen as offensive to suggest that someo ne enjoys the musician more than the music, or that an artist is more packaging than sounds. I wouldn t say this was a bad thing, I don t think I d even say it was an unmusical thing. Music is primarily artistic, social and performative; sounds a re just a component of that. Oddly enough, if you take away or drastically reduce the information given about the figure of the musician today, this aestheticization effect increases expone ntially, creating the sort of paradoxes that psychoanalytical theory would pounc e on. The more anonymity or reclusiveness ostensibly makes music just about the m usic, the more the obsession with the figure of the musician grows, especially at the socialized level of the music press. Anonymous or reclusive musicians are o ften held up as a heroic antithesis of commercial pop culture and its supposed e xcessive pre-occupation with image and the lives of its musicians, but the recep tion of such musicians equally often betrays a fascination with mystery that mig ht begin to outweigh the aestheticization of the musical sounds in the same way pop culture is supposed to do. Unless this leads to outright hypocrisy, this is, again, no crime. Sometimes anonymous or reclusive music gets the imagination wo rking in very positive ways. Take away the name, the face and the life story, and a big, mysterious hole appe ars, an empty space that people can fill up with their fantasies. But often they don t realize that that s what they re doing they think they re discovering something rea l. Especially when the music is unusual, the impression forms that the veiled re ality that generated it must be warped, extreme and fantastical, and yet real, a nd this is a thrilling discovery. It s the essence of romanticism. Were the musici an not so veiled, however, reality is nearly always just banal. The truth that Bur ial was Four Tet all along is more fantastical, and thus to many more satisfying , than the notion that Burial might just be someone who you don t know and who s mos

t likely pretty normal. The more you learn about the actual context of music that appears attractively e xceptional, the less exceptional it might become. This might not be very romanti c, but it, too, can be a good thing it might be better to make peace with reality as it is, rather than as our opportunistic fantasies might twist it to be. Becau se sometimes the reality is not banal, or not just banal, but something uglier a nd more challenging than we wanted it to be maybe even because it s banal. For examp le, fascination with reclusive or otherwise distanced musicians has often rested on the subject of mental illness, either lightly or more intensely, probably on the part of people who have never experienced a breakdown, extreme social anxie ty, a psychotic episode or a period in a psychiatric ward, or been close to some one who has. The most famous reclusive (and anonymous) band in underground music is The Resid ents, who have been working since the late 60s without revealing their names only a ppearing on stage wearing tuxedos, top hats and eyeball masks. But since the cos tumes and music of The Residents heavily imply an intention to be Dada, subversi ve, and thus contrived, the feeling that they represent a tantalizingly conceale d romantic reality is considerably weaker. The world of The Residents is offered to you and their inscrutability is a part of that game. You don t eavesdrop on Th e Residents in order to discover some weird, Lynchian reality. For that there is o r was Jandek. jandek The sleeve for Jandek s 1989 album The Living End Jandek s cult following overlaps with that of The Residents, but is probably large r. Since 1978, Jandek has been releasing LPs of avant-garde and probably mostly improvised folk and rock, recorded in more or less lo-fi style. He reached the h eight of his underground fame in the second half of the 1980s. Corwood Industrie s, the record label releasing Jandek s records, has traditionally maintained a not ional separation between Jandek and the label, with communications often being a ttributed to a representative from Corwood it has long seemed probable, however, th at Jandek and Corwood are ultimately a one-man team. Jandek s albums all have the same minimal design a casual-looking photo on the front often depicting a person n ow assumed to be Jandek, with track titles listed simply on the back. To the ind ie music community of the 80s, the music was thoroughly unusual not just atonal bu t regularly detuned, with a spooky voice and enigmatic lyrics. As the years went by, Jandek would incorporate other singers and instrumentalists, their first na mes given in the relevant track titles. Despite the repeated insistence that Jandek was obscure and highly challenging t o listen to, he was definitely one of the more celebrated and prominent musician s in the American underground music press. These were the days before Google: th ough it was often said that Jandek was anonymous, his name had been given as Ste rling Smith in the very first review of his music in a 1980 issue of Op magazine , though Corwood maintained anonymity subsequently. And it was often said that J andek never gave interviews, but he gave a relatively forthcoming one to Spin ma gazine in 1985 (again, the curtain subsequently fell). It was often emphasized t hat Jandek and his music were extremely uncommercial, but Jandek placed advertis ements in a number of underground music magazines in the 1980s (they were as min imal as the albums packaging simply a notice reading, Jandek on Corwood, and giving a PO Box address in Houston, Texas). The most telling aspects of Jandek s initial reception, however, were the assumpti ons that were made about what sort of a person he was and how and why the music was made. The most common and most intense was that Jandek s music was cathartic, that it represented a seriously troubled person it was often implied, sometimes st

ated explicitly, that he was mentally ill. Some writers reported the ongoing rum or that, he s a manic-depressive who does the records as therapy under his doctor s s upervision, and there are even hints made that Jandek was likely to commit suicid e. The association of dissonance with states of extreme emotional distress goes back to Hollywood thrillers of the 1950s and 60s, back to composers like Arnold S choenberg in the early 20th century, Richard Wagner in the mid-19th century, and to Gesualdo in the turn of the 17th century. The suggestion that the emotion in Jandek s music was merely performed or inferred rather than real was barely made. There was also the overlapping assumption that Jandek was naive, a hopeless amate ur , some sort of idiot savant, that he was a social or artistic outsider, that hi s music was significantly unintentional. Jandek told Spin that he was a machinist , and this got caught up with the assumption that Jandek was working class or rur al poor a machinist working, for example, in the same record plant that pressed hi s music. Most of the time, all these assumptions converged. One critic, for exam ple, began a feature on Jandek by setting the scene as he imagined it: a bare, du sty room in Texas. A man sits hunched over a microphone, guitar in hand, gushing forth unresolvable [sic] demons from the darkest recesses of his soul. No time for second takes, no time to correct the mistakes or mix over the rough edges. A cheap tape player records every moan and pluck of the strings for posterity. Eve ry one of these sentences contains several assumptions. It fascinated many of those who listened to and wrote about Jandek that all this was really happening, and they were witnessing it. But was it? The reality look s less shocking and fantastical today. In 1999, a reporter for Texas Monthly, Ka ty Vine, tracked down a man who was almost certainly Jandek, finding his house in one of the city s nicer neighborhoods. He looked like a late-thirties version of th e youth on the record covers, wore beautiful cufflinks, took Vine to an upscale bar, and was an affluent-looking, well-groomed man, like a well-travelled businessman and someone with a white-collar career. Shortly afterwards, it emerged that there was a Sterling Smith Corporation in Houston with the same telephone number as Corwo od Industries it was an investment securities specialist. In short, Jandek was ver y different from what he d been assumed to be, and in fact not at all far from the sorts of lifestyles that indie music vehemently opposed, and often used Jandek to oppose. Machinist was probably metaphorical. But was his music naive or outsider even so? Probably not very, certainly not enti rely. Jandek or a representative from Corwood Industries has been performing live sinc e 2004, often in jams with other musicians improvising under his control. Recent ly, a trailer for a documentary about Jandek the improviser featured footage of him speaking about it in technical terms. And in the 80s, one music critic notice d a reference to some Mothers of Invention lyrics (albeit apparently not deliver ed by Jandek himself), unless the use of the phrase Caledonia mahogany s elbows is a complete coincidence. Indeed, it s worth noting that if Jandek really is Sterling Smith, he was born in 1944, making him part of the same pioneering generation a s Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Charlemagne Palestine, David Lynch, Lou Reed, John Cale, Neil Young, Jefferson Airplane, The Residents and T he Beatles. He started releasing music later than they did Jandek was in his mid-3 0s when he began releasing recordings, and in his 40s at the height of his under ground fame. Although he clearly isn t a complete insider , it seems likely that he w as to some degree acquainted with experimental directions in popular music and a ware of what his music sounded like to other people. Besides, it s not inconceivable that as a businessman he knew or noticed that he a nd his recordings had mystique, even that it was a good way to get challenging m usic attention and sales. Communications from Corwood to music journalists often suggested that their articles would be better without them one of them knowingly read, intrigue goes a long way sometimes. It s known that Sterling Smith was aware o f his reception from the get-go once his music had begun to register with the unde rground music community, he may well have understood, wisely, that his music wou

ld do better off with them as the output of a mysterious folk singer, Jandek , than the hobby of an investments specialist. Perhaps Jandek is better understood as a figure rather like the early 20th centu ry composer Charles Ives, who was a successful insurance salesman by day and an educated but highly dissonant composer on his own time, and whose music didn t qui te fall into the right context until decades later. But unlike Ives, Smith is fo r whatever reason reclusive and perhaps rather shy which is not to say he s salivati ngly haunted. Does any of this undermine Jandek s music? Of course not. Not unless your appreciation of the music is dependent on his being a hopeless, impoverish ed outsider or on gossip about his mental health. For a lot of listeners and wri ters in the 1980s, it at least partially looks like it was. When the music is unusual, critically acclaimed, or both, whip up some mystery a bout its maker (intentionally or not) and you have the makings of electric hype and a considerable cult following. But not for much longer: with the growth of s traight-to-internet music distribution, anonymity is increasingly the banal rule rather than the exciting exception. Jandek spent considerable cash on pressing his albums to vinyl, and probably didn t make much profit on them, but nowadays di stributing music is as easy as logging in. So, with anonymity practically the no rm, it takes some special music and a truly surprising online presence to rekind le the Jandek effect. It happened recently with a Soundcloud account named pepsi 7up . All you get is pepsi 7up, United States and a picture of a glass of water being po ured (I know it should be 7up, but it doesn t look like it). This low level of inf ormation is not unusual for musicians who are not looking to get work off their profiles, especially the artier ones. But here there s not even any particular att empt to look interesting, which, as discussed above, can make it highly interest ing. There s also a Facebook account for pepsi 7up with, at the time of writing, a picture of a smiling young man and all of 5 likes. Written in the influences box is the legend, America, Kraftwerk, Pop . pepsi 7up seems to have come to the attention of the underground pop community i n February 2011, when the account s track Over The Rainbow was posted to the Weird M agic site. Underneath a computer-generated picture by Seychelle Allah of a smili ng tribal woman lying in a field of grass with MSN butterflies landing on her (w ell chosen) was the comment, music strange enough to alter your reality, taking y our mind to places unforeseen occasionally pieces like this pop up, delivered by life via some soundcloud page with no photo, no bio, no links, no followers , no ot her songs to go by. sometimes perhaps it s better that way. for now, we re better ad vised to just close our minds and glide through this gleaming roy g. biv icefiel d again. It was an apt description. Over a year later in July 2012, the Fokkawolf e blog posted Over The Rainbow again, and I found it soon after when it was posted to Tumblr. It s very difficult to describe just how surprising and captivating Pepsi 7up s Over The Rainbow is. You have to listen yourself, and since it s been taken off the Soun dcloud account now, I have uploaded it to YouTube with 7up s permission. It begins with a sequence of eight regularly spaced pitches played on glockenspiel-like s ynthesiser it s no mere opening phrase, it s a structural element that seems to functi on as something that could be translated (badly) as both an orchestral conductor tapping on a music stand for attention and as a television test card. Then the song begins: a choir of synthesized voices, a voice probably designed to be fema le leading with the fragmentary melody and lyrics, accompanied by a number of ma le voices, the glockenspiel and another synthesiser. The voices are so startling familiar in some ways and so estranged in others you can almost feel mouths prono uncing consonants, but the beginning and endings of the sounds and the ways they change over time are not human. The ending is jarringly abrupt, like something ran out.

Perhaps the greatest effect comes from how despite the fact that the timbres, th eir orchestration and the structure is so bizarre, the harmonies and snatches of the melody are so warmly familiar. It s like that hit of happiness you get from r ecognizing a loved one occurring even though or maybe because their skin is shimmeri ng aquamarine and the lower half of their face is barely recognizable. It s like f iguring out you have a crush on a being from another dimension. You would think that the effect of vocal synthesis would be a chilling, mannequin-esque uncanny valley, but here it s an arrival in heaven. Here was something fantastical that had been witnessed deep in the new digital w ilderness. What s more, Over The Rainbow had been uploaded in two versions, numbered one and three (where was two?), each arranged differently onto different synthe sizers. Conventional musicians never do this, not consecutively it s just not how yo u make music. But the Pepsi 7up account suggested that it s not just doable, but e njoyable. What if providing two versions was not just the result of work in prog ress, but a confidently made artistic decision? Other Pepsi 7up tracks had the same mix of sweet simplicity and something baffli ng. Demo M4l Phonetic Effects is a bassline from early 60s bubblegum pop transformi ng into a rack of metal objects and forced through some sort of box. It came wit h the download link of a software patch that seemed to be something to do with s ynthesizing speech. At the time of writing, Pepsi 7up has a track called How do I reactivate VOCALOID editor for LOLA? which is an atonal series of pitches on the trademark synth in the caption is a detailed technical question hinting that 7up had used Vocaloid vocal synthesis software for Over The Rainbow but Soundcloud is no t a message board. Or is it? If it were, every post would require a track. About a month ago, 7up uploaded something completely mystifying again, a blending of two new-agey ethnographic CDs, but it s not so much the collage-like blend that s st arkly original as the way the sounds fade in and out rapidly, like speeding obje cts glimpsed through cracks in the pipes they re travelling through. Most recently , 7up uploaded Thunderstorm music , a descriptive piece as if he were scoring music for a film with his signature choppy rhythms, atonality and delicate synths, co mpletely with an unusually long field-recording outro. There was probably something more to this account than just someone being arty o n Soundcloud, and it clearly had something to do with experimenting with some de eper-level synthesis software. It seemed likely that Over The Rainbow didn t quite s ound so out of the blue to its maker as it did to us. But so fragmentary and sur real were the leavings on the page that it even crossed my mind that an artifici al intelligence of some kind might be wholly or partly behind it, an unpersuasiv e spambot gone amok like the celebrated Twitter account @horse_ebooks. Perhaps a ssuming someone is a spambot is the 21st century equivalent of assuming, as in J andek s case, that someone has a mental illness. The truth is, as ever, not so fantastical. After a Soundcloud message went unrep lied last summer, I tried again when writing this article, and got a response. Th is page is sort of a landing spot for unfinished music, he says. He works in soft ware and is hoping to go to grad school. He was aware of the reception of his wo rk on Weird Magic and follows the site. In fact, today his Soundcloud account is following several other accounts run by underground music artists, magazines, b logs, particularly those associated closely to vaporwave, so many that it feels probable that he was into the new music underground before the Weird Magic cover age. Pepsi 7up is no idiot savant or dysfunctional cyborg, unwittingly producing nectar for explorers in the wilds of the new online weird. Sure, the output mig ht not have been entirely intended for them every step of the way, but even so. The music seems a mixture of unintentional accident and intentional creativity, I just don t know what the ratios are 60% software experimenter, 40% avant-garde onl ine musician? 80%, 20%? 30%, 70%? But it doesn t matter all music-making is a mixtur e of accident and intention that develops dynamically in response to an audience

. Jandek s was. For this reason I felt it was an wrong to ask Pepsi 7up to what ex tent he knew what he was doing. In any case, unless you re doing so against someon e s wishes, it certainly isn t somehow wrong to enjoy the by-products of an experime ntal, accidental or unfinished process. Anyone who has found something beautiful or previously unimaginable in something serendipitous, like when a digital vide o file has inadvertently become datamoshed, knows this. Whatever the intention or not, I m deeply grateful to Pepsi 7up for providing me a nd many others with one of the most invigorating musical experiences in recent m emory. In fact it s exciting to think that someone working in this area has such t echnical ability, and I look forward to getting my mind around his next upload. He can stay mysterious, because like Burial and Jandek he s part of the even more fantastic reality: that fantastic music doesn t come from fantasy places.~

You can read previous editions of Pattern Recognition here. Weird Magic Pattern Recognition Vol. 2: The Evolving Architecture of the Underground June 14, 2013 in Pattern Recognition Pattern Recognition Vol. 2 In the second edition of his monthly column for EB, Adam Harper the Rouge s Foam blo gger and author of Infinite Music examines the current structure of the new music un derground in the digital age. more Adam Harper s Pattern Recognition Vol. 1: The New Online Weird May 6, 2013 in Pattern Recognition Pattern Recognition #1: The New Online Weird In the first edition of his new monthly column, the Rouge s Foam blogger and autho r of Infinite Music trawls Bandcamp and Soundcloud to find new strains of music bu bbling up online. more High Anxiety: An interview with Autre Ne Veut March 1, 2013 in Interviews Read our interview with Autre Ne Veut Adam Harper speaks with the pop auteur, signed to Oneohtrix Point Never s Software label, making art from the dark side of the human condition. more Show Back Play Forward Imprint Privacy policy Contact Press 2012 - 2013 EB ShareThis Copy and Paste - See more at: http://www.electronicbeats.net/en/features/columns/pattern-recogn ition/pattern-recognition-vol-3-the-fantasy-behind-veiled-musician/#sthash.d0QoR TA0.dpuf