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

Things are confusingly scary. From UPS’s intimidatingly efficient human and technological infrastructure to the underlying motivations for military operations in the Middle East, things are weird. For something closer to home, let’s just think about the fact that the majority of the music that you’ve ever listened to has most likely been filtered by lossy data compression. Bizarre, right? When was the last time your body and eardrums experienced the real-time creation of music? Even for you audiophiles, when was the last time you experienced the simultaneity of a mallet hitting a timpani and its thunderous vibration? What about the molar-piercing shriek of a live electric guitar? I know, friends, it’s been a while.

Our lives have been devoid of the joy of the experience of music!

In my eyes, this is where live performances play such a crucial role. Shows, recitals, and concerts are great, but to really get at the heart of the matter, why aren’t we singing every day? If you have a friend who likes to sing, let him sing about his trombone sandwiches. If your other friend likes to make up spontaneous songs and funny sounds as she walks to the supermarket, let her! In my mind, there is nothing more intimate than being in the presence of the creation of music. Even if it’s your friend trying to make weird noises with his throat out in the cold while he waits for the bus, it’s absolutely beautiful. As humans, these friends of yours are interpreting the rhythmic patterns and sounds of the musical and non-musical world around them. They’re claiming the essence of those worlds as their own.

My tip to you, friend? If you’ve only been a listener, I highly suggest you try to become a music maker. Pick up an instrument. Sing a made-up song in a new language. And hey, if being a music maker is too tough, just be a noisemaker. You’ll be the better for it, I promise.

-Juan Fernandez

Disco rules hard. When I say disco, I don’t want you thinking of Donna Summer and the Village People. They’ve got no funk, no real mojo. When I say disco, I’m strictly speaking of the kind of music that will get you out of your seat.Let me start out with some background about this music. Disco’s birth was in Europe, but it found a rich environment for its own evolution in New York and Philadelphia. Disco was a reaction by New York City’s gays, as well as black and Latino heterosexuals, against both the domination of rock and the demonization of dance music.

So how do we get from 1976 to 2010? Well, an album to check out for examples that reveal the uniform underlying tendencies of disco is SH-01. It was released in 1997 by Soundhack. Each of their 12”s focused on extracting loops from various disco tracks from 1978 through 1980. The tracks work very well as DJ tools for layering on top of other songs or for further distillation.

And there you have it: In a very well-articulated LP you can see the lineage from which Afrojack, Daft Punk, Hot Chip, A-track, Mr. Oizo, and Louis La Roche are coming. Of course, that doesn’t take into account melodic tendencies, but that’s because that defines what sub-genres a particular song will fall into. Those distinctions are what bring about deep-house, fidget house, and nü disco.

Let’s bust out of bounds for a while. Who’s hot on the dance floor these days? Skrillex. His latest release, Scary Monster & Nice Sprites, takes us one step closer to a genre-less music platform. His potent mixture of melodic progressions and deafening drops has allowed him to ravage the Beatport charts with dubstep chunes, which rarely ever chart. Check out the following two tracks. “What is Light, Where is Laughter (Skrillex Remix)” by Twin Atlantic serves as a good introduction to dubstep-infused drum to synth and indie rock lovers. The second, “Seventeen (Skrillex Remix)” by Casxio is for you lovers of fidget dance tracks like MSTRKFT.

-Juan Fernandez