Is it time for a post-modern interpretation of nineties music?

[vurt]

Not all mind, and not saying there wasn't an awful lot of utterly imaginative dross in the 90s either.

every decade has been full of shite, with the diamonds in the rough.


the reason for example 80s stations are good is because they play the depeche mode, visage and all that. they don't play rene and renata or joe dolce.

[shonky]

In London it's a mix of landlords selling off to property developers, property developers who've built luxury apartments near clubs and their tenants complaining about noise, but mostly, increasingly insane licensing conditions imposed by councils/police crippling the few left. I've seen sniffer dogs on the door, needing to take your passport to gain entry (this one is depressingly common now), minimum number of people caught with drugs to be handed to the police every night, brighter internal lighting... Any less than perfect, consider your club permanently shut down. It's just grim out there man.

I remember a friend of mine working in a club in Brighton in the late 90s/early 00s and the police had a policy that a certain amount of drugs needed to be confiscated or it looked like the doormen weren't doing their job and the license would come into question.

Their solution was to befriend one of the dealers, buy sufficient pills and powders from them to keep in the office and hand them over to the police at the end of the week if pickings were a bit thin.

I remember going to way more outdoors and warehouse parties than clubs as your money would go further, you'd often get to hear a better mix of music from multiple sound systems, and usually the old bill didn't have enough bodies around to stop proceedings once the crowd were in. For a while, the police were pretty cool about it as although there was clearly drug dealing and taking afoot, people were generally pretty friendly and enjoying themselves and not really causing any trouble or disturbance miles from residential areas. I think there was even a party where one of the coppers had a quick spin on the decks at the end and got a round of applause from the partygoers at the end of his set

[rod_zero]

Everyone prefers the music from the era when they were in their teens and early 20's.

[chk071]

Everyone prefers the music from the era when they were in their teens and early 20's.

True. Even though my taste for music is always evolving. But, definitely rooted in a certain era.

[aMUSEd]

Nah I was that age in the 70's/80's and I love some 70's music but hate much 80's once it got yuppified - and love a lot of 90's stuff like Massive Attack, some grunge, Goldie/DnB, sophisticated electronic dance (not EDM but stuff like Electribe and Billie Rae Martin) - the 90's was a great period of creativity between the relative sterility of the 80's and 2000s

[ghettosynth]

Nope, that's a cliche. It might be true, in a statistical sense, for people who don't create music, but I've never found it to be all that common among music creators.

[yung-forever]

Nope, that's a cliche. It might be true, in a statistical sense, for people who don't create music, but I've never found it to be all that common among music creators.

It certainly seems to be the case here. Anyway, I'm surprised vaporwave hasn't been discussed more in this thread. It's quite literally a post-modern interpretation of nineties (and eighties, and '00s) music. There's also the avant-trance sound being pushed by the likes of HDMIRROR and the overtly ironic deconstructed pop of PC Music.

Straying from the (original) topic of this thread, I think the assertion that electronic music these days sucks is near-demonstrably false. The mainstream EDM circuit falls into the festival and pop camps, neither of which I particularly like. But dig a little deeper. Search "S280F" or "Eco Futurism Corporation" on Soundcloud and start browsing from there. Will that kind of stuff ever go mainstream? I kind of hope not. While the industry struggles to compete in the digital age, the new future is being made in the online underground. Check it out.

[wagtunes]

There was an episode of Outer Limits back in the mid 60s called "The 6th Finger" with David McCallum. There's a scene where David McCallum says that when man is drained of creative energy, he doesn't create. He procreates.

Maybe a lot of what we hear sounds like disposable noise because man himself is only capable of so much. After a while, it all starts to sound the same or, at best, similar to something else. I mean when was the last time you heard a piece of music and said to yourself "Wow, I've never heard anything like that before."

I know for me personally it's been a very long time, if ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdH4beFVBmU

[Aliens]

I mean when was the last time you heard a piece of music and said to yourself "Wow, I've never heard anything like that before."

I know for me personally it's been a very long time, if ever.

Thanks.

[ghettosynth]

Maybe a lot of what we hear sounds like disposable noise because man himself is only capable of so much.

Do you have something against disposable noise? I mean, that's pretty much my style right there. I like to fill up other people's hard drives with it because I get a perverse pleasure out of knowing other people are spending actual money to store music that even I don't listen to.

[Kinh]

Everyone prefers the music from the era when they were in their teens and early 20's.

Rubbish. I hated the music in my younger years. Couldn't wait for the 90s to be over and the industry to get its shit together. I spend the entire decade listening to 70s and 80s.
Grunge was too dark and busy, electronic dance had no heart.
Good riddance 1990s, just a pity you had to waste a whole decade of my life.

[Asuyuka]

I'm a huge fan of 90's sounds, hence I've had the M1 and Wavestation for quite some time. Now I bought SoundCanvas VA as my personal Christmas present. <3

I've got a project I'm working on right now that's using Rapture, of all things, for a gritty early 90's/late 80's New Beat type sound. It's amazingly grainy, and seems to fit right in with everything else.

Also, Synth 1 works great for everything else. I had a demo of Rhythm is a Dancer performed with Synth 1 and SC VA drums completed a while back.

Going to combine these with some Vocaloids. I wish I had Ruby, but I do have Dex and Daina right now. Wish we had more American accented ones, though. <3

As for Vaporwave, it works for nostalgia, but it really falls flat as a permanent medium IMHO. And honestly, a lot of Future Funk sounds like French House. Not that that's bad, but the 90's have already started coming full circle.

Me, I just like my corny 80's New Beat, Italo, House and Tech House tracks. Cheesy, but good fun, and I love the stuff to death.

My influences are basically Psykosonik, Jade 4U, KLF's Stadium House, and Snap!/16 Bit.

[progtronic]

...I mean when was the last time you heard a piece of music and said to yourself "Wow, I've never heard anything like that before."

I know for me personally it's been a very long time, if ever.

Folks love to hate on Zappa.. but he really was a master of genre mashing and basic musical weirdness, long before it was even a thing.

So yeah.. Zappa was the first that made me go "wow..".

Beyond that, I like to listen to experimental stuff, to escape.. the noise of the day:

Escape From Noise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82fshB1F_tE&t=97s

[recursive one]

Everyone prefers the music from the era when they were in their teens and early 20's.

Not quite the case with me. I listened to metal at this age, now I can't stand anything with distorted guitar in it.

I was listening to electronic music during a short period of my early teens in 90's and then drawn back to it when I was 25, it was the time when trance was very popular but still haven't degraded into "teh tarnce", also there were lots of great psytrance, psychill, liquid DnB, IDM, progressive breaks/house releases, for me it all was sounding very exciting and awesome.

I know that all the above genres (with the exception of mainstream trance, these are what I'm still listening to now) were mainly born in 90's but the 90's versions of them mostly sound "underproduced" to me - too simplistic or too hectic, poorly mixed, hit and miss sound-design. It was just the right balance between good production and good musical content in mid-00's.

[shonky]

Maybe a lot of what we hear sounds like disposable noise because man himself is only capable of so much. After a while, it all starts to sound the same or, at best, similar to something else. I mean when was the last time you heard a piece of music and said to yourself "Wow, I've never heard anything like that before."

In keeping with the topic, and for the most part, probably the late 90s. The reason for this? By that point, pretty much all synthesis types were available, most of what people can do with sampling/sample manipulation/resampling now was available, and musicians were limited by cost in how many tools they owned so tended to know what they possessed, and its potential capabilities, inside out.

There were genuinely new sounds coming through at that time and a huge amount of cross-pollination between current genres. Purely in the realm of manipulated breakbeats, this moved from basic loop sampling to Remarc to the likes of Aphex Twin and Squarepusher within a matter of years, while moving into altogether wonkier, disorientating rhythmic territory with hip hop producers and their MPCs.

To be honest, since the 00s, the "wow" and "I've never heard anything like that before" have been rather independent experiences and I think this is due to the latter rarely contributing much to the track its heard in, and set amongst so many other constant edits and sounds that they lose any impact and are often detrimental to what was the core of the song.

Still hear enough that makes me go "wow" but now it's usually just about being absorbed into the space of that tune, or thinking something is strange, beautiful, emotional or a combination of the above.