Raw Materials
Electronic music is powerful in that a producer can put everything exactly where they want it, and as digital editing becomes more and more powerful, we are seeing this trend in all sorts of music. The highly produced pop music on the radio doesn’t have a beat out of place.
There’s something gained from this, and something lost as well.
I wrote a bit about my process of sanding, but I didn’t mention that it was possible to sand too much. If you remove all the texture, you end up with something featureless. A little grippy-ness here and there isn’t a bad thing. Part of this can be achieved by the raw materials you use to begin with. If you start with a drum synthesizer and a drum kit played by a human being, you will have very different results, even if you polish the heck out them. If you mix materials together – a synthesizer and a piano, a precise drum pattern with a hand drum – then there is an interaction which has some potential. It doesn’t always work, but it puts you in a place where some magic could happen.
An example of some successful magic is DJ Krush’s collaboration with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, Ki-Oku, which blends trip-hop and jazz, electronic and acoustic, controlled and wild, into something much more than the sum of its parts.
