Not Your Father's Techno
James Sandham

"I feel like my brain's bleeding."

That was Hesp speaking. He shot me an accusatory glance before looking dolefully back into his beer. In front of us cars splashed by, heading east on Toronto's west Queen Street. Behind us, against which we were leaning, was the Gladstone Hotel and, more specifically, the Gladstone Art Bar. Even through its thick stone walls we could feel the thump of the bass.

"Yup," Hesp continued, not content to experience his misery alone, "this is definite shite. What are we even doing here?"

Given the particular show under way, it did fairly beg the question. The easiest answer, perhaps, would have been: "We're suckers for punishment."

The show was punishing, or at least the set we had come to see was. Launching volley after sonic volley at the crowd, the First Seed, a.k.a. Adam Gabourie, was engaged in a full on battery as Hesp and I pushed our way back in among the frothing mass gathered in front of him and his laptop. Incorporating found noise, distortion, glitch, and a host of other digitally modulated nightmares, the First Seed was not only pushing the frenzied crowd to a breaking point, but stretching the coherency of the concept of music to a similar limit. The sounds of marching soldiers, electronic feedback, and spasmodically fluctuating bass lines strained against one another in an epileptic fit.

Hesp left the show angry. I left shaken but intrigued. I'd had the chance to sit down with the First Seed after his set and ask him whether the point of his music was merely an excuse to twitch around violently on the floor, as the majority of the crowd seemed to do at some point during the show, or whether there was a deeper meaning to his art.

“This music is a reflection of society at this state in time,” the First Seed told me. "You can't listen to more than one song on the radio without having a commercial. You can't watch a show without being interrupted by a commercial; we rarely listen to a full song. We're the ADD generation."

The twitchy, glitchy sounds he produces are the soundtrack for a technology-driven society. "A lot of people didn't get where I was coming from," he said of his initial music, but now there seems to be growing receptivity as artists and a hesitant general public come to question what defines artistic form and what defines their particular taste.

So there is a method to the madness -- in this case at least. But is the First Seed a mere musical misfit, or is there a broader consciousness in the musical and artistic community tapped into this peculiarly post-modern form of angst?

The Agoraphobic Nosebleed (ANb) has been producing music since about 1995, by front man J. Randall's best estimate. And if I'd thought the First Seed's music abusive and industrially abrasive, it was little more than elevator music compared with ANb's sonic meltdown. With tracks that rarely exceed the 60-second mark, ANb's latest release, PCP Torpedo, is hard, almost psychotic speedcore. It is devastatingly fast. The title track itself is only 11 seconds. These short tunes, comprised mainly of glitch, hyper-distorted guitar and vocals, and spliced audio samples, make up the first disc of this double album. The second disc remixes these mashups even further and features such artists as Hellz Army, Justin Broadrick, and DJ Speedranch, each doing their worst to further freak out our already fried eardrums. And while ANb remains virtually unknown on this side of the Atlantic, the DJs that spin and remix their tracks can fill events by the thousand in Europe.

"Yeah," Randall admits of his music, "it's quite a thing to see 5000 kids ripping each other to shreds to a DJ. It's something you're really not gonna see in the States [where ANb are based, in Massachusetts]. Here it's not really popular outside Los Angeles and New York."

Anb, said Randall, is simply driven by hatred and contempt for people that have just been sitting idle with their music.

“I always had this ideology when I was younger that this music was just gonna develop into this bigger, nastier monster. I'm tired of costumes, I'm tired of the articles they have, I'm tired of vague lyrics - it's so self-indulgent. I think a large part of me hates music. I think a large part of me wants to destroy it. I have an impulse to see metal die off in my lifetime."

Sound like a death wish? Not exactly, Randall explained. "I think a lot of people are just tired of bands," he said. "The whole dogmatic ritual of having a band -- playing live shows, having good stage presence. I just can't stand that." On the other hand, he explained, "One of the biggest appeals of Agoraphobic is that we write and record all our own stuff. So it gives the guy who lives in the remote area and who's got maybe a computer or something the hope that maybe he'll actually get out of the basement or out of the bedroom with his music. With a computer and a nice sound library, pretty much anyone can start producing tracks."

According to Taliesen Cleveland, a.k.a. Talixzen, a Toronto-based IDM/breakcore producer and DJ working with the Pin:ksox label, "I think the internet has had a profound and wonderful effect on music because now pretty much any kid who feels like expressing themselves through sound can just download or pirate themselves a program, some of the programs are free, some of them might as well be free even though technically they cost hundreds of dollars. You can be a fifteen year old sitting in your bedroom, and you can be writing crazy stuff that normally people would pay twelve dollars a CD for. And I think that's amazing."

It's a scenario that resonates in particularly personal way for Talixzen. "I've been involved with music ever since I was a kid," he told me, "I had piano lessons when I was a kid, and then I started learning guitar, then bass and stuff when I was 15, and drums. But I didn't get into the computer stuff until about late '99 using a simple wave editor that wasn't very good. Then in 2000 or 2001 I got a copy of FruityLoops 2 and that's where everything started."

The digital medium opened new options. "With instruments it's really hard to write something because every time you come back and pick up the instrument you play it slightly different, your hands will move differently," he told me. "With the computer: you have a thought, you do it, and you hit save and it's done. And you can keep coming back and working on the same song over and over and over."

Not only did the digital medium allow for great consistency in his music, it also allowed for greater creativity and experimentation, allowing him to play with sounds and their interaction with other noises in new ways. As Talixzen explained, "I'm really big on 'music doesn't have to be music,' it doesn't have to follow the rules that people set down years and years ago. Any sound, absolutely any sound whatsoever, can become music very easily. I'm all about the breaking down of rules and the breaking down of structure because when you break it down and build it back up you come up with different things and new things and creative things."

A common theme the artists expressed when talking about their chosen genre is its accessibility and the freedom it provides to deconstruct existing musical form and structure. For them, the future of music is democratic -- even to the point of anarchy. But how, in that case, does one evaluate musical quality?

When I spoke with Talixzen he suggested, "Obviously, if you break [structure] down too much it descends into chaos and you get a lot of stuff that's not good." But he quickly dismissed such concerns, and stated, "If your ear enjoys it, then some other ear is going to enjoy it -- even if a bunch of people don't. We shouldn't just limit ourselves to 'oh, if you write this sound it has to follow with this kind of beat.' Everything is personal. Something I've kind of had to convince myself of is that there is no good and bad, there's what I consider good and what I consider bad.

“Sometimes I hear music and I'm like 'oh man this is so amazing,' but then I realize how it's put together and it's so simple and easy that there's nothing impressive about it. And the stuff that sounds really repetitive and really boring, you watch the DJ mix it, and it's like 'oh my god, they're looping and scratching and beat juggling' -- it sounds so incredibly simple, but when you watch it's so amazing."

Musicians aren’t the only artists questioning established forms.

David Listow, interpretive planner Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), explained that his gallery “definitely wants to expand our sense of responsibility on [the] subject [of creativity]. So how do we support our public having a creative experience with art? How do we help the public focus [on] works they find initially intriguing? But then the other half of it is how do we actually support creativity in the sense of art-making."

In other words, Listow and the AGO have come to realize that the art that piques the public's interest is not necessarily the art of great masters, decreed from on high as worthwhile. In fact, some of the AGO's most recently successful shows, such as the Degas and Modigliani exhibits, have included space for public interaction and engagement with art and the creative process. Both the Degas and Modigiliani exhibits provided space for the viewer to draw, sketch, or pose for portraiture by other members of the public. This realization in turn led to the AGO's In Your Face exhibit, an exhibit of portraits created entirely by the public. It is the first such exhibit in the gallery's history.

So does this herald the end of elite art? Has the definition of creativity and its value been expunged from regulatory institutions? While brash, such questions may not overstate the case. As the musicians I spoke with suggested, the organic redefinition of artistic form and standard is little more than a natural corollary of society's continually advancing technological capacity for democratic inclusion. Web sites such as myspace.com and youtube.com allow users to post video and audio files to share with and exert influence on anyone with access to an Internet connection. With such accessibility, it seems hard to imagine that the definition of artistic value will remain an elite-driven process.