Print“In the garage where I belong, no one hears me sing this song,” Weezer (somewhat ironically) moaned to a generation of ’90s Gen X-ers. Rivers Cuomo’s descriptions of Ace Frehley and Peter Criss posters waiting for him to come home from high school and jam on his guitar depicted a classic American trope: the garage band. But now, instead of plugging in their amps and strumming on their guitars, many students turn on their browsers and click on a virtual guitar icon to load one of the many electronic production applications available.
Fittingly, today’s indie idols are the digital-sounding MGMT and Crystal Castles rather than longhaired grungers from Seattle. Even classic pop seems to have gone electronic: Lady GaGa’s “The Fame Monster,” released on November 24th, sounds a little more like synth-filled Europop than tried-and-true bubblegum to her American devotees.
Electronic music has also surged in popularity on Columbia’s campus. “Daft Punk has always been around, and now there’s Justice and MSTRKRFT,” says Tiffany Lee, a Columbia College sophomore. “I saw MSTRKRFT twice last year—the first time it wasn’t that crowded, and the second time everyone I knew from Columbia was going.”
Due to the ease of entry-level electronic music production, many student fans have also begun to produce and build extensive music portfolios on their own. Their reasons are numerous: traditional garage bands require multiple instruments, space, and understanding neighbors, while electronic music can be produced alone, on a computer wearing headphones. Teamwork, a technical knowledge of instruments, and a significant initial financial investment are no longer necessary.
“Now you can get access to all the tools you need to produce a decent electronic song for free if you know where to look,” says electronic music producer and Columbia College sophomore Simon Herzog.
“You can spontaneously work on electronic music. It doesn’t require a lot of setup, a lot of planning, a space for rehearsal,” says Coleman Moore, who co-produces music with his friend and fellow Columbia College senior Marcus Andersson, in a band called Feudal Soul. The two compose self-described “sensuous music for high school and college girls.”
“We’re all about feeling, our words don’t mean anything. It’s very ethereal,” says Moore.
Students may be drawn to electronic music production based on the novelty and openness of this new medium. “It’s an open field,” says Moore. Herzog describes the appeal of producing with “entire soundscapes that were impossible up until a few decades ago.”
In Lee’s words, “Because electronica is so restricted to uniform beats, being able to express creativity is a lot harder. A lot of people say electronic music is all the same, but to see a lot of artists doing such different things in such a confined structure.”
Herzog has already compiled and self-released a collection of his tracks and is looking to expand his Internet presence. Lee hopes to do the same with her electro-funk productions and remixes in the coming year.
Lee and Herzog are also in the process of forming the Columbia Electronic Music Society, which will serve as “a forum for exchanging music and knowledge, and even equipment, being able to jam together, learning new DJ and production techniques,” explains Herzog.
In fact, Columbia is already an intellectual powerhouse for music technology innovations. Founded in the 1950s, Columbia’s very own Computer Music Center was responsible for many early technological developments in digital music. SEAS alum Robert Moog conceptualized the modern synthesizer while studying at the CMC in the 1960s. The Moog is now regarded as “the Holy Grail of synthesizer technology,” as Herzog puts it.
The Center itself is a trek from campus on Broadway and 125th Street, but distance is no obstacle for undergrads with a passion for digital sound. With experimental spatial music scores adorning the walls and a confusion of wires, vintage synthesizers, and half constructed instruments crowding the rooms, the CMC screams musical genius.
Many current grad students have been continuing the work of their electro forefathers at the CMC. Jeff Snyder, a doctor of music arts composition student in the music department at the School of Arts and Sciences, has been developing a new hypersensitive controller that will allow producers to have more nuanced control over their music called the Manta. He is currently running a small business—SnyderPhonics—out of CMC’s offices.
Innovations like Snyder’s keep electro producers coming back for more. “It’s just getting more and more developed—there are new tools that come out every day,” says Herzog. “The types of sounds that you can make are literally boundless.”
Douglas Repetto, CMC’s director of research, explains that advancements in technology are not the driving force behind the burgeoning popularity of electronica in the United States. Instead, the “electro sound” is just an aesthetic choice certain bands make. “Bands like Daft Punk use effects to sound digital and harsh. The Jonas Brothers put reverbs in their voices, but no one would ever call them electro,” says Douglas.
Given the current direction of musical tastes and technologies, some producers of electronic music wonder about the consequences of using controllers rather than traditional instruments. “With a string quartet, so many nuances are available to the performer in a physical, sensual way. In electronic music, those things have to be hard-coded in,” says Moore.
And despite his electronic focus, Herzog mourns the move away from the meaningful ballads of decades past: “In electronic dance music, you find no lyrics or really mundane and meaningless lyrics.”
Repetto emphasizes that electronic and acoustic styles can collaborate to achieve different results, saying,
“Electronic music hasn’t taken the place of acoustic, it’s increasing the numbers—just in the same way radio hasn’t taken the place of performance.”
But could electronic music take the place of performance?
Electronic music is easier and cheaper to make initially, but even students who invest time and energy into this purely digital art form have a difficult time taking it into the real world. Gone are the days of student garage bands playing shows in local bowling alleys, street fairs, and neighborhood dives. Though it’s easier to produce at home, electronic music requires rethinking before performance.
“You can never produce [electronic] music live—you can only play simplified versions, or have a lot of automated loops and effects in the background,” says Herzog. Herzog and Lee both DJ, which gives them a place to play their electronically produced songs. Moore’s band Feudal Soul performs with acoustic guitar, but he has yet to perform his electro set live. “That’s a hurdle we haven’t jumped over yet,” he says.
Electronic music presents these challenges because it changes the very nature of composing. “It’s as much a craft as it is an art,” explains Herzog. “I spend equally as much time thinking about the technical side—I draw diagrams about how I’ll connect my synthesizers and instruments and how I’ll construct the sound in a physical sense—as I will about the music I’m producing.”
Before the digital revolution, instrumentation evolved at a much slower rate than musical style. Electronic music allows the artist to construct both the sound and the means of creating it. Rapidly progressing technology means that the sound possibilities are theoretically limitless, but once a song has been produced utilizing this technology, it can’t be reproduced on stage without sacrificing some of its original intricacies.
With the electro technology producing endless sound possibilities and acoustic instruments providing musicians with a familiar interface, some musicians envision a merging of the two methods. “A lot of students combine the two: they play on an instrument then add some effects,” says Repetto, noting that a few students at the Center have been busy building hybrid electro-acoustic instruments.
Other artists attempt to modify production equipment to play and sound like familiar instruments in a movement called “controllerism.” The brainchild of Brooklyn-based controllerist Moldover, this movement is paving the way for a future of electronic music performance. Herzog describes Moldover’s innovations, saying,
“They’re more than tools, and can be actual instruments where every button, fader and knob has a direct and predictable musical effect so that you can literally play it.”
But even with creativity, can a controller ever really look as sexy as a bass guitar?
The nostalgia factor also affects the purely electronic music community. Many modern synthesizers specifically market themselves as having an “analog sound.” Repetto lists students who work to configure retro synthesizers from the ’60s and ’70s with their laptops, giving them the power to fine tune low-quality sound.
“Some people feel electronic music got ahead of itself. What analog equipment does is give you back some of that raw feeling—the irony being that they produce that raw feeling artificially and completely digitally,” says Herzog. This general feeling prompted the LoFi movement, which involves producers using “really crappy equipment and really high end digital distortions to create a more down sampled raw sound.”
“I don’t agree with anyone who holds up some kind of vintage thing for the sake of vintage,” Moore weighs in. “I like all kinds of music still, but philosophically, I don’t know why you would say, ‘This music’s imperfect, so it’s cool.’”
Ultimately, the potential threat to live performance and acoustic rawness doesn’t seem to bother Columbians who crowd Webster Hall every weekend to see DJs and live music producers.
“There’s that kind of physicality in the [electronic] music that I think is stronger than in most kinds,” says Herzog, summing up his thoughts. “For example, electronic dance music has such a driven feeling and it moves you—the bass, and the beat—sounds below 100 Hz that are not perceived by your ears but your solar plexus.”
Music so technologically advanced that your ears can’t even hear it? Now that’s progress.