[MBTC]

Lately I've been listening to some really old school trance. The art has been mostly lost, so you have to be willing to listen to retro trance to even understand what it was all about. When you try to explain it to the up and coming generation of wish-they-could-be toddlers, they utilize their early-learned flame skills to debate the matter with you, because after all, the keys on their keyboard are the same size as yours even if their e-penis is not quite as lengthy as their life experience.

I see music as something parallel to home construction. I have a friend who lives in a home that is 80 years old. The windows are original construction material, yet they still function perfectly. The sashes are almost certainly covered in multiple layers of lead-based paint, but they are made of wood that was harvested from naturally grown trees. These days, most windows (if they are made from wood at all as opposed to plastic) are grown from trees that are genetically modified to grow faster, and are cut younger to maximize manufacturing profit. Then when put into practice, in the case of windows at least they are painted or stained with environmentally friendly materials like lead free paint or someone's blueberry stained snot juice that looks great when you buy them but needs full replacement in a decade or so. Full on expendable crap.

So how does this relate to music and where am I going with this?

Music is going the way of rapidly-manufactured building materials. So much information is easily obtained via the web, easily searchable -- why should anyone read and make an attempt to absorb it for life when they know they can search for it later and remember it on the fly as needed?

It is the musical equivalent of genetically modified trees and the building products that resulted from crap wood.

If you listen carefully to vintage trance, you find amazing soundscapes that took many hard-earned hours to sculpt. Then you had youtube tutorials and other BS that came along and said "here's how you do this with Massive in Ableton".

Don't get me wrong. Massive is a great softsynth and Ableton is a great DAW. But then again being able to modify the genetics of tree growth is an amazing achievement too. The important thing is that we understand the consequences of technological progress.

So now, new-school electronic music is more or less "I stumbled across a cool sound and sampled it". Don't think for a minute I'm completely innocent as charged, I do use Maschine and I do occasionally sample things and/or use samples, but sampling and any other technique designed to "speed" music making comes with its own set of consequences. Sampling allows me to create music faster and better, but the music loses a great deal of soul in the process. I'm not picking on sampling specifically, I'm only citing it as one technology that can accelerate music production, and speeding anything up tends to result in the same loss of quality I discussed in the window analogy with genetically modified trees. Soft synths, DAWs and computers, youtube tutorials.... all of these speed the process and result in lowered quality and less actual craftsmanship on the part of the music author.

A lot of synth junkies talk about analog... pure analog, and almost become bigots against virtual analog. Then virtual analog folks become bigots against soft synths.

Then at some point, if they are lucky enough, there is a watershed moment when they realize that the technology behind the music actually matters very little compared to what was going on in the mind of the creator of the music at the time they created it.