*Simon Reynolds writing in Pitchfork. This guy is the maestro of what’s happening now, and why it’s happening now, and why you probably shouldn’t listen to it.
http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8721-maximal-nation/
(…)
“Compared with the analog hardware that underpinned early house and techno, the digital software used by the vast majority of dance producers today has an inherent tendency towards maximalism. In an article for Loops, Matthew Ingram (who records as Woebot) wrote about how digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and FL Studio encourage “interminable layering” and how the graphic interface insidiously inculcates a view of music as “a giant sandwich of vertically arranged elements stacked upon one another.” Meanwhile, the software’s scope for tweaking the parameters of any given sonic event opens up a potential “bad infinity” abyss of fiddly fine-tuning. When digital software meshes with the minimalist aesthetic you get what Ingram calls “audio trickle”: a finicky focus on sound-design, intricate fluctuations in rhythm, and other minutiae that will be awfully familiar to anyone who has followed mnml or post-dubstep during the last decade. But now that same digital technology is getting deployed to opposite purposes: rococo-florid riffs, eruptions of digitally-enhanced virtuosity, skyscraping solos, and other “maxutiae,” all daubed from a palette of fluorescent primary colors. Audio trickle has given way to audio torrent– the frothing extravagance of fountain gardens in the Versailles style….”
A bit wordy, particularly if you don't follow music as closely as Reynolds in the above. But here's the point:
The music we create has always been shaped by the instruments we have to make it. But the above is interesting because it's now so easy to create instruments that various design philosophies emerge to distinguish them. As Reynolds notes, these design philosophies shape the nature of the music itself.
I'll take a leap to help explain, referencing something a little more familiar:
Dubstep exists as a genre because of the way music production tools are designed today. On some level that's not too profound. On another level this reflects the fact that at some point the designers of these production tools had to make decisions about how what the interface will look like; they happened to decide on a particular set of metaphors, and an entire genre is the result.
