Electronic creativity
by Matt Arant
New sounds, new frontier
On a warm summer evening at the Abbey, a small group of musicians file into the back room with laptops in hand. They take their seats in a darkened corner next to a film projector and a sound system.
DJ Scott Matelic, left, along with DJ Paren, is one of numerous DJs redefining electronic sounds in the city.
An image of a mixing board appears on the opposite wall, with a chart like a seismograph below it. A man clicks a few buttons on his laptop and another bright red line like a stock-ticker appears over the first. Within minutes the Abbey walls have transformed into a red and green backgammon board.
Suddenly, a fast techno beat booms from the speakers, and the Abbey’s back room has transformed from a humble café into a house party. Another click and the room goes silent.
These aren’t ambush DJs. They’re just meeting to exchange tips and tinker around with a new music software program called Ableton Live.
While many enthusiasts exchange tips at online forums, the musicians and producers in the back room are the first Ableton Live group in the world.
DJ Greg Campbell, the group’s founder and resident tech-guru, has posed a contest. Everyone gets a packet of 70 sound-clips in their e-mail.
Using only the Live software and their own voice, they have a month before the next meeting to sample, splice and edit the sounds into a new song. Using outside judges, the winner gets a software package valued at $200.
“Limitations breed creativity,” Campbell said. “I know everyone here has such unique tastes that we’ll get multiple songs that sound nothing like each other.”
DJ Shiva agreed. “When you’re restricted by sound sometimes it makes you take a different direction,” she said.
The seven or eight musicians at the Abbey that night came from many backgrounds. Hip-hop MC and producer Rahlo of Blacksoil Project sat front and center with DJ Shiva, who is popular in the house and club scene.
They all go by many titles — simple club DJs, MCs, producers, beat-makers, musicians and your everyday record enthusiasts. But they’re all part of a growing number of musicians implementing electronics and other technical wizardry into their music.
Some are gaining notoriety in other places, like DJ Scott Matellic who produced a track for hip-hop slam poet Sage Francis on the
Personal Journals album. Other bands around town like Emory Salem are simple folk and rock outfits who’ve started using electronic beats to augment their sound. The jazzmen of ESW have done similar things and are taking fusion into a completely different direction.
Still others like “Actuel” or Ryan Faubion of Indy CD & Vinyl have recently gone as far as creating all-day festivals showcasing electronic music that invite collaborations with total strangers.
Electronic music might not be as prevalent around town as rock and punk. But more and more local musicians are incorporating it for different needs, and the unique results are stylistically all over the map.
But the proliferation of electronic music around town isn’t exactly new. At least with house and techno, some say it’s merely resurfacing after police shut down the party in the late ’90s.
“There was a huge crackdown on the rave scene about five years ago,” DJ Shiva said. “It was a boost of creativity because it forced a lot of people to make new music at home rather than play the same old stuff at the parties.”
John Daubenspeck of the Abbey Coffeehouse was active in Detroit’s electronic scene for a few years and founded Docile Records while living there. Daubenspeck said the crackdown might’ve been related to the music not having a home at clubs.
“That’s specific to our city,” he said. “In Detroit and Chicago it was always in the bars — City Club, St. Andrew’s Music Hall, it’s been going on for years. It’s only our city where the music stayed predominately in the rave scene and nowhere else.”
But while the underground rave scene might be pretty much gone, he thought it had benefits.
“It helped build passionate people,” he said. “If it weren’t for the rave scene a lot of younger people would’ve never gotten into electronic music.”
Means of production
While underground parties at warehouses might have been popular around town 10 years ago, seeing a DJ perform using strictly a laptop was practically unheard of. But since then music software programs have flooded the market to the point where analog gear like synthesizers, turntables and samplers are no longer the only options.
Like the software group that meets at the Abbey, many software interfaces around today are modeled off of old mixing boards and rack-mounted synths from the ’70s. Instead of turning knobs and dials with your hands, a simple click of the mouse now does the same thing.
Initially, this proved a cheaper alternative for veterans who couldn’t afford an expensive analog setup. But for younger musicians getting into computers, both the software interfaces and the original gear they’re modeled after are completely foreign. Still others have never found a computer necessary.
“You’ll always have purists,” Daubenspeck said. “It’s a matter of taste. But these days they’ve advanced digital so much there’s not a gap in sound quality like there was. The old analog gear wasn’t self-explanatory, and the new digital is easier. Anybody could use Ableton. You sit down and not know a thing and walk away two hours later having made a song.”
Other musicians at the Abbey agreed that the hardware and software debate boiled down to different strokes for different folks.
“I don’t think the learning curves are different with hardware or software,” Kenneth Rehm said. “Every tool is different. With hardware a 909 has a different learning curve than an MPC, and Ableton has a different learning curve than ProTools.”
But DJ Shiva added that price tags can play a role.
“For a reasonable price anybody can get a computer and learn to make music,” she said, “which sometimes results in really good stuff coming from unexpected places and sometimes results in absolute shit — that’s the exchange. I like that it’s more accessible. Some kid who never had the opportunity to make this music may be a genius and for under a thousand bucks they can start producing music.”
Cheap as it may be, most agreed that music software would never replace records and turntables — it would just augment them.
“It expands the possibilities of the possibilities of sampling records,” DJ Shiva said.
But when it comes to live performance, some contend that using analog equipment is more difficult.
“If someone comes out on stage with only records, samplers and analog stuff they get more respect,” Daubenspeck said. “It’s harder work than just using a laptop and software.”
