Experimentaclub 2009
Image by experimentaclub on flickr.com
When the journalist and music critic Simon Reynolds coined the term “post-rock”, in the early 1990s, he was formulating an important transformation in the pop world. With the advent and development of new technologies, electronic music experienced an enormous expansion, giving rise to fusions with new sound proposals from fields as diverse as jazz and progressive rock. The artiest versions came from Chicago, with the pioneering Tortoise and, later on, Pan.American, who described themselves as living legends advocating a way of working in which electronica is an extra element and not the focus of the entire sound construction. This is the substantial difference displayed by the proposals presented at the eclectic line-up of the Experimentaclub 2009 festival, which took place at the La Casa Encendida in Madrid. Let us take a general look at the four stages on which the current trends in the electro-universe were defined last weekend:
We shall begin with Zombie Zombie. An example of a more organic trend, their proposal returns to the use of analogue tools to give weighty rhythmic formulae. Their use of drums and of a range of tribal sounds marked the prevailing tone, in which the rhythm base functions, paradoxically, as the spinal column of the increasingly invertebrate digital experimentation.
For their part, the Fuck Buttons remain faithful to the deconstruction of the climax, from one of the most aggressive dance formulae. A spiral of acid and cutting beats is gradually built up, by means of saturation, to an almost orgasmic moment. Here, electronic structures are turned around, with the sound embroiled in a perpetual rebalancing, a minimalism which offers consistently intense moments of tension in order to cancel out any explosive effect.
Wolf Eyes’ approach is somewhat different, with a fugue-like style revealing the uniqueness of countless sounds crashing against one another, in what is an antinomic proposal that treats noise as if it were music. Is this post-music or post-noise? For many, their aesthetic proposal was legitimised by the release of their album Sub Pop, which eventually gave rise to the normalisation of transgression, within the increasingly conventional field of “free-metal”.
If these new tendencies are to be seen as unlimited proof of the harmonious capacity and intensity of machines, it must be said that the true exercise in style was presented by the Pram collective, with what was perhaps the most radical proposal of this festival. The multi-instrumental combination of blasts, keyboards, percussion, guitars, bass guitars and many other instruments, reconstructed, from a strongly film-loving perspective, a highly personal imaginary which is reminiscent of the aesthetics of Too Pure.
Let us hope we maintain this thirst for experimentation in future decades, but not with the breathlessness generated by the imperious and vacuous need to create something new just for its own sake.
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