Shape of sounds to come

Bebe and Louis Barron: US composers of the first fully electronic film score (Forbidden Planet, 1956)

If the first wave of electronic music broke during the 1950s and 60s, we are currently riding the second. Back then the breakthroughs were forged by a handful of individuals on rarefied equipment, before electronic music splintered into a dizzying array of genres and subgenres as the 20th century hurtled to a close. Now we are all computer nerds – musos more than most – and this widespread acceptance of digital technology has prompted a new revolution in music making.

For decades, electronic music was known as an expensive art form but the door is now open to academics and professionals, hobbyists and chancers. There are few composers alive today who can afford to shun computers entirely, and those that do – self-confessed Luddites like John Tavener or Arvo Pärt – are making a conscious decision. From notation and processing software through to online promotion and distribution, digital technology has now saturated the production of new music – and computers are increasingly being accepted as instruments in their own right.

Yet suspicion is still widespread. For the most part, it manifests itself as nervous ambivalence, a dithering approach to the funding and programming of digital music. In the extreme, it dismisses digital music as cold, mercantile, urban and derivative – the final spasms of a cultural swansong.

Institutions have inevitably struggled to define this recent explosion of new ideas, and present them in a palatable way, but new electronic music is now a force to be reckoned with. Digital advances over the last decade have opened up a sonic playground where the boundaries between musical genres have been systematically broken down. In turn, a new generation of composers, musicians and listeners has emerged, omnivorous and hungry.

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One of the most exciting platforms to appear in the UK in recent years is Faster Than Sound (FTS). This experimental offshoot of the Aldeburgh Festival – a thread of programming that aims to “join the dots between musical genres and digital art forms” – was considered dangerous and novel at first. But according to Jonathan Reekie, chief executive of Aldeburgh Music, it was the natural response to a growing demand:

“As music became more easily available and distributed, people started to listen to a much wider range so the influences started to broaden,” he says. “Around the turn of the millennium we realised that more and more composers were asking about new technology.”

Faster Than Sound at the former airbase at Bentwaters, 2006

The first FTS event took place in 2006, on a heady midsummer evening on the former airbase at Bentwaters, in the heart of Suffolk. As Joana Seguro, an independent producer and an associate of FTS until May last year, explains, it was a careful choice of venue. “If you put a classical musician in a club they’re out of place, and if you put an electronic musician in a concert hall they’re out of place. So we needed a neutral space that could be used as a sort of laboratory.”

A collection of cold war hangars and runways provided the backdrop for a provocative line-up: rowdy turntable sets by the likes of Shitmat, Venetian Snares and DJ Scotch Egg, interspersed by ethereal video installations and a performance of Bach’s first Cello Suite. It was a roaring success and after three consecutive years at Bentwaters, FTS was given a more secure home in the Hoffmann Building, one of Aldeburgh Music’s recent renovations at Snape Maltings, and its format expanded.

The programme now consists of five week-long residencies, each culminating in a public event, and benefits from substantial funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Most recently, FTS hosted a collaboration that brought together contemporary dance music, in the person of dubstep artist Roly Porter, and one of the earliest electronic instruments – the ondes Martenot, invented in 1928 – as played by Cynthia Millar.

Cynthia Millar playing the 'ondes Martenot' at Faster Than Sound

As well as providing a fully equipped rehearsal space (a rare luxury in the world of electronica), the FTS scheme aims to make the composition process less solitary and introverted. “You could pretty much reduce my normal set-up to a tiny cupboard space, with my monitors, my laptop and a controller,” Porter explains. “So to spend an entire week in the hall, where we also performed, with the entire sound system at my disposal, was unlike anything I’m used to.”

One of the biggest challenges of early electro-classical events was audience engagement. Seguro made her name as a pioneering producer and curator of electronic music in the late 1990s, and helped to establish the Ether festival of experimental arts at London’s Southbank Centre in 2001.

“When I first started I was doing lots of gigs, lots of really cutting-edge music, but from a performance point of view it was just a bloke behind a laptop,” she says. “Over the last decade the laptop has really opened up as an instrument – you can now have a multitude of sounds, you can loop, you can collaborate and you can have electronics talking to other instruments a lot more. It’s now much more interactive.”

Mira Calix: 'playing a computer is still an oddity, but it's not the freak show it used to be'

Suffolk-based DJ and electronic artist Mira Calix, aka Chantal Passamonte, has been associated with FTS from the start. In the early 1990s, she established herself on London’s experimental music scene, and in 1996 she was signed to Warp Records, an influential Sheffield-based label that specialises in electronica. Over the last decade Passamonte has taken part in a wide range of electro-classical music projects, and has witnessed a change in attitudes towards electronic artists.

“If I sit on the stage with my laptop and the London Sinfonietta people don’t think it’s strange any longer, they’ve seen it enough times,” she says. “Playing a computer is still considered an oddity but it’s not the freak show that it used to be.”

Like Seguro, Passamonte credits the massive advances in processing power for opening up a more sophisticated and appealing sound world. “I made my first album a decade ago and it was written with less memory than my mobile phone, that’s in terms of both hard drive space and processing power,” she says. “That album was under 1GB and it lasted an hour, and the song I’ve just made I condensed to 36GB for 30 minutes.” It’s a change, she says, that can be identified across the full spectrum of new music. “If you listen to a new Beyoncé track it’s really clear how much has changed in a decade, in the quality of the sound, how dynamic everything is.”

Such is the speed of these changes that it’s tempting to wonder whether FTS collaborations would have been worthwhile or even possible just 15 years ago. Certainly, Mira Calix’s output has expanded dramatically, and over the last decade she has worked with companies and artists as diverse as Opera North, Radiohead and composer Tansy Davies.

One of her most wide-reaching projects was a work devised with cellist Oliver Coates and the visual artist Quayola, entitled Natures. This set of five cello and electronic pastorals, each coupled with high definition visuals of morphing plants, was originally commissioned by FTS, but throughout summer 2010 it toured to the nearby Latitude festival, the Loop Festival in Brighton and the Nemo Festival in Paris.

Natures (2008): Imagery by Quayola to music by Mira Calix and Oliver Coates

Coates had worked with Mira Calix a number of times before. “Coming from my stricter classical background I experienced freer improvisation, playing over the top of [Mira Calix’s] music,” he says. “We wrote Natures together in her studio. I came up with little fragments of melodies and she was producing and arranging them.”

A graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, Coates is highly regarded as a classical performer and well known for his experimental work alongside the likes of Massive Attack, Sigur Ros, and the beatbox artist Shlomo. “I think we’re now reconciled to the fact that a composer who might work for orchestra would also learn how to make electronics perform a poetic function that they couldn’t get at with just, say, the brass section,” he says. “There’s not so much of a split anymore and I think when I came out of college [in 2004] that became more obvious.”

Another reason why Natures attracted attention was its subject matter. For a number of years Mira Calix has used field recordings – birdsong, rustling leaves or the sound of ice melting – in works that challenge the urban stereotypes surrounding contemporary electronica. She traces her influence back to musique concrète, a mid-20th century movement that championed the use of prerecorded materials, and believes that rural electronica “is still a minority sport”. But it certainly seems to be on the increase.

Since its founding, FTS has presented a wide range of projects that explore the local environment. Last May, for example, it hosted Soundfields, a 24-hour performance that used a range of electronic and meteorological equipment to explore the landscape and weather around Snape Maltings.

Four Tet aka Kieran Hebden, performing in an Oxfam shop in Dalston

Related to this theme is the more mainstream trend dubbed “folktronica” – a term most frequently associated with work of British DJ and electronic artist Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden. In 2001 he released Pause, followed in 2003 by Rounds, two albums that were celebrated for their warm and evocative use of everyday found sounds, including children’s voices, a dog’s heartbeat and a squeaky rubber duck. Along with contemporaries including Caribou and Leafcutter John, Four Tet has helped to redefine electronica in the collective consciousness as an art form that can be homespun, small-scale and cheap to produce.

It is an approach that has chimed well with the democratisation of electronic music making. Now that recording and processing tools are so accessible (most laptops come with basic software) the number of new artists emerging on the scene is both thrilling and overwhelming, as Roly Porter explains. “I work in this world and there are just so many artists I’ve never heard of – it’s completely out of control – but on the plus side there is a constant stream of ground-breaking new work.”

Thomas Dolby shot to fame as an early star of MTV with the chart-topping single “She Blinded Me With Science” but throughout his career he has explored a range of electronic music, from synth-pop through to sound design and video art. In 2001, he was appointed Music Director of Technology Education and Design (TED), and like other prog rockers of his generation (Brian Eno among them) Dolby is considered by many to be one of the godfathers of contemporary electronic music. Last November he chaired a spin-off, TEDx event at Snape Maltings and released A Map of the Floating City, his first new album in 20 years.

Thomas Dolby: the synth-pop pioneer in the early 1980s

Not surprisingly, Dolby is excited by the opportunities presented by digital technology. “Now you can make a YouTube clip in your pyjamas and wake up the next morning and be a superstar,” he says. “It no longer requires an investment upfront from a label to get into the game, so that really changes the economy.”

Of course, this change in the economy is both a blessing and a curse. Falling record sales, compounded by free online streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud, are making it increasingly difficult for artists outside the protective umbrella of mainstream pop to make a living.

“I’d be surprised if my latest album brings in enough to pay for a single month’s rent,” Porter says, “but it was in the top 50 of Fact magazine’s albums of the year.” He goes on to cite the case of Jon Hopkins (a producer and electronic artist best known for his work on Coldplay’s Viva la Vida album) who recently Tweeted outrage that he had earned just £8 from 90,000 plays on Spotify. “I can’t think of a single other product in the world that you could sell 90,000 times over for so little.”

Many worry that this fertile period of experimental music is in danger of slowing into stalemate, although Dolby sees it as a short period of restructuring. “You hear about the woes of EMI but what isn’t pointed out is that, although the revenues are down, the costs are really down…I think there’s the potential for a much more efficient and profitable music industry but it does mean a lot of the intermediaries being out of a job in the meantime.”

Dolby is optimistic – but then, perhaps he can afford to be. Having established his reputation in the music industry, he moved to Silicon Valley in the 1990s and founded Beatnik, the company behind the development of the polyphonic ring tone. So is diversification the key to success? “I think you definitely need a calling card to stand out from the crowd,” he says, “and it’s important to distinguish yourself with cross-media activity.”

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A blurring of artistic media is one of the few clear consequences of digital advances over the last decade. Joana Seguro has just got back from COMA, a hybrid music and performance festival in Brazil, and she mentions the growing number of multi‑media events around the world – chief among them, Mutek in Montreal, Sonar in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin and Austria’s ARS Electronica.

Although digital art forms are, by their nature, very international, Seguro has noticed a number of geographical differences. “In the States, the universities are very engaged in digital music, and they tend to put on small showcases,” she says. “And in France there is a budget within local governments to support the digital arts.” Despite a handful of comparable events, the FTS remains a unique scheme within the UK, and Jonathan Reekie is currently in talks with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to extend their funding, which is due to expire towards the end of this year.

Seguro believes there should be much more support for digital arts in the UK. “Everyone has mobile phones and computers, and if you look at the pop charts most of it is digitally led, but that is yet to have an impact on the subsidised sector.” It’s a difficult axe to grind in the current economic climate but, as Seguro explains, the problem is not so much funding itself, but rather focus and distribution: “There’s a lot of money being invested in communications, marketing and audience engagement but no support being put into digitally led innovation,” she says.

“There is so much talent in the UK within the audio-visual industries, and whenever you go to these international festivals so many of the artists are UK-based, but as yet, there aren’t enough opportunities to showcase this at home.”

The next Faster Than Sound event, “Symmetry” presented by Marcus du Sautoy, is on January 21

www.aldeburgh.co.uk

www.fasterthansound.com

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Gabriel Prokofiev

Gabriel Prokofiev

A key player in London’s experimental music scene is the 36-year-old composer, producer and DJ, Gabriel Prokofiev. With roots in the classical tradition (he is the grandson of the Russian composer Sergei) and an interest in electronica, Prokofiev was perfectly poised to launch his own record label specialising in new compositions. Founded in 2003, Nonclassical has released 13 albums of new music and expanded its format to include a monthly club night.

Many of Prokofiev’s own works are written for traditional instruments, but digital advances over the past decade have influenced the way he works.

“A lot of my ideas come to me when I’m out and about,” he says, “and I sing them into the voice memo on my iPhone.”

Last summer he made his Proms debut with “Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra”, a hybrid piece written for the celebrated turntablist, DJ Yoda. It involves the soloist “scratching” pre-recorded fragments of the orchestral score over the top of the live orchestral performance. “Vinyl emulation” software known as Serato (debuted in 2004), which allows DJs to control music files on their laptop through coded vinyl records, is key to its performance.

Central to Nonclassical’s identity is the idea of the remix. Troubairitz, an album of work by Tansy Davies released last year, includes Davies’ own compositions performed by the Azalea Ensemble alongside remixes of these pieces by DJs and electronic artists including Tivannagh L’Abbé. Previous albums have featured Hot Chip and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

“Before the 90s you’d just get a club remix of a track, but as producers gained more respect and integrity they would start to create a new piece of music out of the original,” Prokofiev explains. “By the 21st century the remix becomes an established art form, and with Nonclassical we’ve tried to take it even further by remixing classical textures and harmonies.”

Like the recordings, Nonclassical’s monthly club nights intersperse acoustic performances with related DJ sets; Prokofiev has extended the idea to gigs in New York, France and Germany. The next club night is a “minimal special” at XOYO in Shoreditch, featuring work by minimalist composers John Adams, Steve Reich and Louis Andriessen. “We’ll start with some orchestral classical performances and then slowly the night will morph into a full electronic DJ set for everyone to dance,” Prokofiev says. “We really want to take the classical club theme to the limit.”

Nonclassical is at XOYO, London, on January 19

www.nonclassical.co.uk