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Originally Posted by Genteel Death
Glice- I've copied and pasted your earlier post and still mean to reply to it when I have more mental energy. I like to feed you with shit to talk about, though, so I was thinking what you think of much of the Def Jux rooster when it comes to musique concrete making an appearance in the (more) popular culture. I can hear it on there more than anywhere else. Much grime, for instance, I can't. Obviously you can argue back that I should listen to more grime than I do already. Dubstep is a different kettle of fish for me.
Album download time:
E-LP's Fantastic Damage
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Yeah, that El-P album is a corker.
The thing with the concrete influence isn't so much about how it sounds as the process. In terms of obvious influences, I can only really think of a handful of obvious concrete influences in 'pop' (in its broadest sense) - Sgt Peppers, an electric storm (which is a massive stretch of 'pop') and bits and bobs of post-hip-hop dance music. For the biggest influence of concrete is in terms of production - sound doesn't have to be 'live' (or 'as live'), concrete takes a bit of sound, moves it around, processes it, repeats it and so on. The recording itself becomes the material of the music, rather than the idea that a piece of music is a representation of an instrument.
It's really a stretch to say that hip-hop had much conscious awareness of concrete (although I suspect Bambataa knew about it), but the process of treating a small element of a recording as material for new recordings strikes me as one of those inadvertent inheritances. Concrete very much came from the academy (necessarily - the idea of a skiffle musician being able to afford the equipment required is preposterous), but it's fascinating how hip-hop and its fallout (so I'd include pretty much all dance music except for funk since about 85 or so) uses pretty much the same process for radically different ends.
From another perspective, I really feel that as pop music moves into album territory it becomes about studio craft more than it is about an authentic representation of the live experience. Pet Sounds and Sgt Peppers (again) are the two most obvious instances of the 'break' with albums representing the live experience. I tend to think that without the earlier electronic and concrete pioneers, there really isn't that impetus to push the idea that the studio can be as much of an instrument as anything else, rather than merely the medium of repetition and representation. As you're probably aware, I still can't stand Sgt Peppers, but I think it's definitely telling that Martin and McCartney were aware of P Schaeffer.
One of the interesting things for me is that pop music's exploration of studio craft seemed to have quite a detrimental affect on musique concrete. There are a handful of digital concrete guys, and some of the second-generation concrete guys moved into the digital world, but I tend to think that Parmegiani or Ferrari were pretty much the last concrete guys to do anything exciting to the non-hardcore concrete* fan.
So yeah, you're entirely right that there's minimal obvious influence from concrete to the pop world, but the process of making musique concrete has had a phenomenally enormous influence on popular music in the 20th-century. This is one of those things I was talking about earlier in the thread - I think that technological advances are the bigger influences in pushing music
in general forward, but sometimes it does take a handful of people to make use of new technologies. I'm not sure who the first DnB record was, and it's interesting that dance music doesn't quite work in terms of crediting one or another person with a new movement, but in terms of avant-garde 'moments' it's easy to forget how astonishing DnB was at the time (and I was very late in the game with that). We might look back on 2009 as year 0 for wonky in years to come. That'd be exciting.
*I'm so glad I used this post for the shittest pun I've ever made.