more time

The thing I find most interesting in music is the use of time. You have, of course, the time signature - does the rhythm pound or ebb or flow or scatter? Then you have the recorded versus the live - the past or the present. Music drawing its authenticity from rock roots favours live delivery - the present counts. Music drawing from more electronic roots favours the prerecorded, i.e the past - samples, remixes, and playback of records (as literal a noun as you can get).

The thing I find most thrilling and inspirational in music is the combination of such approaches to time. There are some musicians and performers around at the moment who are, if you care to search for such things, nurturing a rather fresh, forward thinking musical subculture. One that fuses the live with the recorded, the recorded with the live, and ends up making such distinctions rather redundant.

In its more philosophical guises, hip hop has long sported a mindset that turntablism, beatboxing and sampling are remixers of history. You can take what went before and present it now, recontextualised (or not), the past becoming the present with the passage of time pitch shifted to a squeek of vinyl. Hip hop, and many subsequent musical styles, have also demonstrated the mirror of this phenomenon. Using cutting edge noise making equipment (instruments, then) and by creating new ways of communicating through music, these styles have had a distinctly futuristic vibe (e.g., techno and IDM) – so suddenly we're whisked into the future.

Artists like Matthew Herbert and Jamie Lidell take it a stage further, recording a traditionally live performance as it happens and applying traditionally electronic, pre-recorded effects to the sound. Jamie Lidell, for instance, records and loops his own beatboxing and vocal diversity to layer complicated rhythms with a raw, energetic, very present and very funky vibe. During his Big Band's stage show, Matthew Herbert got the umpteen-person jazz band to tear up copies of the Daily Mail. He recorded the sounds of shredding paper, tweaked them in several black boxes, and resequenced them into a beat, over which the band played. Indeed, Herbert has a fascinating manifesto by which he makes his music which forbids, amongst other things, the use of prerecorded anything – sampling must be done on the fly and in the now. Using the destruction of a hateful newspaper as an instrument also incorporates an element of politics, albeit rather ambiguously and artistically. The tune is constructed from the ground up with a statement of political belief. I think that’s a different post though…

With the addition of multimedia elements such as interactivity and visuals (see post, below, on last nights Coldcut gig), this time-scrambling approach to music making and performing is heading in even more exciting directions. The past, present and future, the live and recorded, the electronic and acoustic, the song and the tune, all becoming one big, happy, boundless union of sound. How very healthy.