Misinformation on deadmau5

Ah, but he doesn't really. Strobe is just 2 melodical statements which are harmonically exactly the same every time. First one goes one for nearly 4 minutes, and then there's a loop inspired by the start of the second melody for 2 more minutes, before the second melody comes in, and a simple counterline is played on top a few repetitions down the road. That's Strobe. A + B and a looping counterline on B.

It only develops upwards, like 99% of electronic music. Basses get added in, filter envelopes open, supersaws start playing the chords, a kick drum comes in, etc. Harmonically, it's always the same. The mood is the same. It just has more stuff in it as the time progresses and it gets louder.

But he's not even trying for it to be anything else, he's fine with it. A quote from one of his livestreams I watched years ago went something like "It loops too much? Of course it loops. It's house music, what the fuck did you expect?"

 

Does anyone have a good example of the 1%?

 

A lot of electronic music is based around samples, and a lot of it is meant to set a mood/atmosphere rather than explicitly "go somewhere", so developmental goals will probably be different.

This one is pretty mellow and repetitive:

Less so:

I think these songs are so sonically interesting that they really don't need more development beyond what is happening. He's pretty fantastic at transitioning between dissimilar songs too. By nature of how it is conceived, a lot of electronic music indeed doesn't build horizontally that much, but given the intent, I often don't think it needs to (though the vast majority of EDM can be broken down into an extremely simple formula). ABA seems to be what usually happens (i.e. with Tobin) unless it's an especially long song.

 

Very good point, thanks a lot for your explanations and the examples! Those were interesting to listen to, never heard of Amon Tobin before. In the land of electronic music the artists I listened to most are probably Juno Reactor, Electric Universe, Spor, and Noisia.

 

Good points. I've often found throughout my life that casting aside what I "should" like and simply listening to what I "do" like tends to blow away the chaff in the end, too. The good stuff will stand the test of time in one's personal life. That said, there's music that I don't think is particularly good that I still do like, but that's generally a rarity.

I don't think I would call Deadmau5 or other similar DJ's "musicians", necessarily. "Electronic artist", perhaps? In any case, it indeed renders the term "musician" meaningless if one can lump Skrillex in with Hilary Hahn or John Williams.

 

if I was a betting man, I'd assume most of us here probably listen to really simple stuff intentionally.

infact if you don't listen to elementary music, you're bound to fall into the avante garde music for musicians trap, and make a bunch of needlessly complicated textbook material for professors to shoot the shit over while they pretend to be important despite having never moved a single persons emotions with their own music.

not saying I don't listen to the stuff myself, but I try to keep a 2-1 diet of really 1 dimensional folk music to actually interesting music. You can probably learn a lot more than you'd think from relatively straightforward music - because I'm willing to bet more people actually listened to deadmau5's latest release than dream theaters.

 

It's something that kind of goes hand-in-hand with creativity

We are on a sliding scale of being more or less procedural from each other... the less procedural your brain is wired, the more creative you are physically...

But it is an optimal at all to be extremely creative, in fact if you look at what people actually listen to, the best case scenario is that you are exactly creative enough

The downside of creativity is that the more creative it is the less relatable it is, and in a similar vein every time you make music, remember that it needs to be relatable, and not just to other musicians.

 

I don't listen to simple stuff intentionally. I don't really like approaching things in such a "bottom up" manner, and I never want to adulterate my love for music with "should"s or a desire to appeal -- I listen to complex and simple music because I love it, regardless of the genre, length or particular form it comes in. I listen to new music and new composers I don't immediately like because I know that if it's good, I eventually will, and it will build my taste in a positive way; I refuse to listen to music I consistently find uninteresting. Simple music can absolutely be interesting as well. In the end, I trust the development of my taste to inform my musical writing in such a way that it will be followable and well-structured by virtue of my own liking it. I think more than anything I simply appreciate simple music more than before. I trust my taste to lead me, because I know myself well enough to know what I "need", musically, in order to stay satisfied emotionally and intellectually (and no, those two need not be artificially separated).

Over time one grows to see the commonality in all things, as Mike talks about -- good music, regardless of complexity or sophistication, follows the same structure (in essence) as good narrative, good poetry, good film, etc. The music I love that stands the test of time falls into this same structure, in one way or another. You can move this structure in different directions, reducing or increasing complexity, etc, and in the end it's about intent and control.
The nature of this structure definitely doesn't mean more "out there" writing isn't interesting, though -- it's a matter of "controlling the chaos" enough to still have it be relatable in one way or another. There are brilliant and influential stories that intentionally don't have a clear ending and feel unfinished because it allows the audience to continue wondering and to fill in the blanks themselves. This obviously takes control and understanding to execute effectively. The "pure chaos", i.e. serial music, tends to stop being interesting inherently because of its nature -- chaotic and without order. Works great for representing i.e. cosmic horror in a piece of music, but it can't tell a story. I know I won't be able to control a high degree of complexity and sophistication well enough, and so I avoid attempting to write in this manner for the time being. I "see" much more clearly now that, as with everything else, control of basics inform the success of more complicated and specialized endeavours -- whether you're a painter, a Tier 1 operator, a photographer, a writer, a parent, etc.

Re: Dream Theater and the "avant garde". I've never really understood why mass appeal matters -- Dream Theater has their moments of "Berklee-ness", but they're also more than capable of writing simple-form ballads, as their side projects and back-catalogue illustrates. They still sell out large venues and have millions of fans worldwide. Many of their songs are actually relatively simple in structure, but are just longer than a conventional song (having more in common with "long form", as much of progressive music does), and a lot of their riffs and melodies are relatively simple. I'm not a huge fan anymore, but little of that has to do with the complexity of their music. The phrase "avant-garde" has also gotten thrown around a lot lately, and I'm not sure what people mean by it because it's certainly not limited to serial music. Debussy was sure as hell avant-garde for his time.
I also don't get the burden to intentionally create something that appeals to the most people -- look at the crap that gets the most radio plays and makes the most money; look at the state of music in film. Most people don't even listen to music anymore, beyond having it on in the background; their attention span is trained to check their phone or treat music overall as nothing more than a backdrop. The current taste of the masses shouldn't inform one too strongly. Almost none of the most genre-defining and groundbreaking bands, writers, or creatives in history have done that. What instead seems to be the case, is that their desire to accurately reflect their experience or ideas in a way that is inherently understandable naturally manifests itself as a result of their learning from and understanding that inherent structure. What this often seems to look like, practically, is having a diverse audience -- average Joes, music lovers, musicians, and academics alike. That and surviving the test of time.

I always feel the urge to reject this idea but I quite frankly can't think of any composers/musicians I love and who have influenced me who do the latter without the former. It's interesting that some seem to begin with the avant-garde and gravitate more toward the simple, however, and probably no coincidence that quite often their so called "best work" seems to be in the early middle of these two periods (most have also been writing and playing for 10+ years at this point). I appreciate how much you've changed and influenced my thinking when it comes to music.
That said, I'm curious to know what people mean by "avant-garde". There are bands/musicians that use more complex and lengthy song structures (I'm thinking i.e. Tool, King Crimson, Iron Maiden, Genesis, etc, to varying degrees) that still utilize repetition and alternating sections to "ground" the song, with more repetitious sections that don't return or alternate, interconnected by passages and phrases containing inherent melodic and scalar similarities, etc and build on one another to construct a longer narrative -- many people would call this "avant garde".
They'd probably also call this "avant-garde", but the structure (thought intentionally atmospheric) is relatively obvious and the collaborative musicians here can write a hell of a pop song or a 21 minute prog monster. I suppose if they hadn't been able to do the former then this would sound a lot more like the "soundscapes" common to YouTube.

I assume it's being used here more to refer to music devoid of intentional patterns, repetition and logical structure, as opposed to simply "less conventional form"? I suppose context is key, because there are proggressive rock records that function much more similarly to a film score structurally than a conventional "album".