You’re back at your cramped flat in New York City, bone-tired, a deadline looming heavy over your shoulders.

You swallow hard and pull back from your desk. Your FM radio pulls at your fingertips and has you turning the knob. Static. Tchaikovsky. Static. Right-wing banter. Hissing. Warm static. Then you hear it.

“Come on man, don’t just stand there….” A police radio flickers and a bass glides through and a beat begins to form. A police squadron patrols the airwaves and on comes the wave of keys. A chorus of stuttered vocals pulses alongside an uptempo rhythm. A guitar chokes on its own feedback and then a high end filter squelches all but the low end. You look out again and it’s there, the chase, the delivery, the redemption. Your city captured in sound: “1987” by Poka.

Artists like Poka and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros strike a chord in the hearts of many because they induce a nostalgia for imagined pasts. This nostalgia kickstarts an odd process of historical revision. We imagine the ’80s being far more neon and full of oversized sweaters than they were. With the Cold War in full swing, things were real, unpredictable, and dark, And yet, we think of neon oversize sweaters.

The fact that we often search for fictitious pasts and try to revise the emotional tenor of particular eras reveals that there’s a lot going on for us as observers and creators of culture. How do we reconcile the creation of collective imagined pasts and a desire for objective historicity? I’m not sure, but I think it’s because we want exciting stories, and the past doesn’t give them to us. The result? We make fiction into fact with our music.

If you want to delve into a sound that openly claims to replicate a feeling that may or may not have ever existed, visit Poka at http://www.myspace.com/pokaremixprojects.

-Juan Fernandez

To explain minimal music to a public that cannot distinguish between techno and house is a bit like trying to force-feed chili peppers to a two-year-old. To be fair, the advent of contemporary hipsters and their slightly more refined taste in media has advanced the public’s understanding of electronic music to a point where anyone with an ugly Christmas sweater and big glasses could probably give you a crude, working definition of house music. Yet to our surprise, their hipster radars have stopped short of what we might call the richest, most compelling form of music.

We are surprised, because hipsters are very visual people, and understanding minimal is akin to understanding the principles of good visual communication: It requires a basic understanding of Gestalt psychology. And like the designers of the Modernist era, minimal does away with all but the most basic elements of a given piece of music to achieve its purpose with the utmost efficiency and restraint. Minimal is to music as Swiss typography is to design: clean and succinct, yet rich and humanistic. In minimal, nothing is accidental, and the best artists meticulously craft the most tedious intricacies in their soundscape, teasing out of a computer what seems possible only through a real instrument.

If you don’t believe us, listen to “Miss You” by Anders Trentemøller, a Danish producer whose 2006 album The Last Resort still dominates our top plays on iTunes. http://ResidentAdvisor.net, our version of Pitchfork, describes the album as “electronic Romanticism.” If you haven’t heard Trentemøller yet, tune into WRCT on 88.3 FM at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday during WRCT’s Massive Music Weekend to listen to a full half hour of nothing but Trentemøller.

“But what about Gold Panda?” you might ask. “Aren’t they clean and succinct and meticulously crafted?”

No. Go outside, smoke your cigarette, and think about what you just said.

-Alex Price and Mirko Azis

Call me old-fashioned, but file sharing and portable music devices have spoiled us. It is my belief that the infinite world of audible vibrations has been hit hard by those iPods of ours.
Music and sound have become commodities. We buy them and sell them in cute digital packages. That’s a sad thing. Why? Well, think of this: If you were now asked to act as a Foley artist to reproduce the soundscape of the world around you, you would hardly even know where to begin. Do oak trees hiss? How would you describe the song of a gutter? What about the musical interludes of the brakes on a bus ride? If you can’t answer these questions, maybe you’re no longer listening. Well, maybe you are, but there are a lot of folks who aren’t.
Today, in the year 2011, we all have our own personal soundtracks. With these soundtracks, we are now capable of muting life’s daily chance encounters. We dictate what plays when and thereby plan how we’ll be feeling throughout the day. We are now in control of what symphony will be pulling at our heartstrings on a train ride from Lisbon to Lyon.
When we do experience life’s chance encounters, there is no vibrancy to the color of these memories. It’s sound that makes these realities we experience memorable. Some argue that this lack of memorability has begun to lead to a disintegration of direct human communications. That may hold true, but what I find more alarming is how this degrades our individual relationships with the world of sound.
Sound will always be that billowing force that, despite man’s efforts to sculpt, will always at its core be untouchable. To treat sound in any other manner, to attempt to wield it greedily like a drug that can rocket you into states of orgiastic bliss, is hubris.
Love music and love the noise. Make the music and make the noise.
-Juan Fernandez