ABC of the Noughties
ABC of the Noughties
Founded as a musical collective and independent label in San Francisco in 1997, and still owned today by its seven founding artists, Anticon Records stands as the leading light and a constant reference point for the most modernist wing of hip-hop, commonly known as avant-hop or abstract hip-hop. This movement, which emerged in the late Nineties but only fully developed over the past decade, represents one of the most futuristic and terminal evolutions within the sprawling universe of alternative rap. The style introduced by the acts belonging to this genre aims to radically reshape the traditional concept of rap music, both on a strictly musical level and, more broadly, on a linguistic and sociological one ("Music For The Advancement Of Hip Hop," as Anticon itself famously and fittingly put it).
Music: in abstract rap, the recovery of the essentialism and rhythmic stylization of oldschool hip-hop (with Afrika Bambaataa and Eric B as the most obvious models) merges with a tendency to broaden the harmonic spectrum and sample collage, absorbing sources traditionally far removed from black purism or canonical crossover: the most experimental electronica (of the Warp school, following the example of forerunners like Prefuse 73), a certain strain of trip-hop, classical minimalism, kraut, industrial, rock in its most post and indie variants, and, in some cases, even distant roots and traditional territories. This boldness and heterogeneity of sonic combinations is reflected both in the song構造 — sorry, in the construction of the songs, often metrically irregular (complicated by the use of break-beats, odd time signatures or bare ambient passages) and dotted with extended instrumental digressions — and in the vocal flow, which increasingly abandons traditional rhythmic accents in favor of expressive forms somewhere between singing and spoken-word.
Lyrics: the process of "abstracting" the original elements of rap music also extends to the writing of the lyrics. This applies both in terms of content, moving away from the reportage and self-referentiality typical of old-school mcing to embrace metaphysical, philosophical and introspective themes, or unusual, surreal dystopian and sci-fi constructions, and in terms of form, reducing the use of slang (African-American or otherwise) and rhyming couplets in favor of more experimental and elaborate constructs that often recall the cut-up technique and stream-of-consciousness style of Beat literature.
Ideology and social outlook: shunning ghettoization by style and territory and the excesses of a sectarian, neo-tribal division into schools and crews, abstract hip-hop generally champions a communal, collaborative spirit both in personal relationships and in artistic projects (often shared with figures from various corners of the alternative universe), at times embracing the libertarian and radical tenets of the American counterculture.
Key labels (besides Anticon): Warp, Big Dada, Def Jux, Lex Records and Mush Records.
Most significant artists and groups: Clouddead (Doseone, Why?, Odd Nosdam), Antipop Consortium, Dälek, Cannibal Ox (El-P), Alias, Subtle (Doseone, Jel), Buck 65, Sole, Busdriver (The Weather), Sixtoo (formerly Sebutones with Buck 65).
Ten years ago we discovered new songs on the radio, or through the static-laced frequencies of MTV. OndaRock didn't exist yet, so we bought magazines to read the reviews. Then there was the oldest method in the world, the only one that still hasn't gone extinct: word of mouth.
Where once there were friends, older siblings' friends and mixtapes, now there's the world wide web. It began quietly with the genre-specific chatrooms of p2p software, where you could "browse" other people's collections, try out something new, or ask for advice and information in chat. Then came the blog boom, and nothing was ever the same again. If with mp3s and p2p everyone could listen to anything, with blogs they could also write about anything — and thus promote it.
This is how "buzz" was born: global word of mouth, a means of music information that is now overtaking every other traditional marketing technique. There are plenty of names launched by "buzz": Of Montreal, Telepathe, Vampire Weekend, Saint Vincent and many more. Blogs are the lighthouse of indie music, and record labels have already started sending demos to the most influential bloggers: Stereogum, Daytrotter, Largehearted Boy (looking at these blogs now, they seem like proper webzines, but at the dawn of the millennium they were just simple fan blogs!).
In the latter half of the 2000s, with the spread of hosting sites (Rapidshare and the like), the influence of blogs grew even further, giving rise to mp3-blogs: text stripped down to the bare minimum, posts reduced to a list of links to entire albums. Much to the delight of collectors, rarities blogs exploded onto the scene: what was once impossible to find no longer is (there are thousands of them, focused on niche genres, but it's worth mentioning Mutant Sounds for post-punk-avant-wave; Ripped in Glasgow for Detroit techno, Lagrima Psicodelica for South American psych-prog, Paradise of Garage for obscure garage and Italian beat, and Orrore a 33 Giri for italotrash).
Undeterred by any attempt to stem this kind of music distribution, endemic as much as illegal, mp3 blogs became the “Robin Hoods of independent music” (to quote the now-defunct blog that pioneered the species), with a very clear mission: to promote new music, effectively replacing three steps of the traditional production chain — the label, the distributor and the promoter. The number one blog in this field is Bolachas Gratis, which boasts hundreds of albums linked every month (strictly no-profit). Music is like fresh milk: it hits the “airwaves market” in the morning, and you'd all better download it fast, before the link stops working because some clueless label demands its removal. Setting aside the reasons more or less established artists might have for not wanting their new album “given away for free”, a month before release, by some random Joe's blog, it's true that many blogs perform an indispensable service, introducing self-produced artists who would never find a place on MTV or in magazines (think of Breakfastjumpers for Italian indie).
It's clear that if the music industry has collapsed, blogs are partly to blame — or to thank. Fast, global, fresh, genuinely detached from the commercial dynamics that undermine the credibility of other media, blogs have overturned the system. Today, the only way to truly stay up to date on what's happening in the world of music is to follow blogs. Blogroll is the watchword and feed reader the tool, but for the less tech-savvy, let me point out the best “blog aggregators”: Hypemachine, Elbows and Tuneage; and what supersedes them altogether (direct fan-to-listener links): TheSixtyOne and Soundcloud. But here we're back in streaming territory, so I'll refer you to Y.
A bed, a desk, a couple of chairs, a poster or two on the walls. Maybe a guitar, if you're lucky. The home setting of the young music lover looks a lot like it always has. What sets it apart is the presence of one object, and the absence of another. Turntables and computers aren't just symbols of two different technological eras, but above all of the profound shift in the relationship with music that marked the passage from one to the other.
From the collective ritual of listening to an Lp to the private backdrop of iTunes while browsing the internet. In between, the parenthesis of the CD, a “living fossil” of a past that already seems distant. Whether or not the legends about the turntable's “social” function are true, the LP was an object of shared devotion, an icon (and a fetish) from a time when music was the guiding spirit of generations.
The bedroom, once, was the antechamber to far more crowded rooms: parties, concerts, record shops were the natural habitat of the music fan. Today, the bedroom is all that's left: a reservation, where — somewhat in secret — they keep their pleasant addiction alive.
And where does the computer fit into all this? It's both a (co-)cause and an escape route from isolation. With forums, peer to peer, blogs, Web 2.0, you no longer need to leave the house to find an album, or to meet people to talk about it. The passion for music has become perfectly manageable within the walls of home.
The same goes for musicians. Playing with others is a treat best indulged in every now and then, just to inject fresh blood into artistic veins that are essentially self-sufficient. Music-making itself has retreated into bedrooms, and the power of software like Cubase, Reason, Logic, and Pro Tools has made it possible to build complex arrangements without any outside help. What's more, the gap between conception and recording has all but disappeared: once it's programmed on the computer, every track is already a finished product.
So is this the age of artistic solipsism? Just listen to a few emblematic products of this culture to realize it isn't. While the IDM and drill'n'bass of the late Nineties were indeed cold, even narcissistic music, the folktronica that opens the 2000s marks an unmistakable turning of the page. It's with this blend of electronic polychromy, indie melancholy and folk warmth that the new bedroom aesthetic crystallizes for the first time: a welcoming sound, shy atmospheres, absorbed yet enthusiastic about the world. The same intimacy runs through much of the new “homemade” singer-songwriter scene and the most communicative ambient music, both banking entirely on an empathetic, unforced relationship with the listener.
The music invites him in gently, makes him feel at home in a comfortable, special space. In his own bedroom.
In 2010, talking about Dubstep feels almost like an impossible task. It's like trying to draw a square on the shoreline: as soon as you finish the second side, a wave comes and washes it all away. The genre in question (a very forced term in this case) is perhaps the most shape-shifting movement of the 2000s: suffice it to say that by now the word “dubstep” can mean just about anything.
It all began vaguely: the suffocating emptiness of the basslines and the allure of sound diffraction of Jamaican origin, especially in its more industrial, urban interpretation (territory carefully explored by Mick Harris in his Scorn project), certainly played a part. So did the rhythmic insights emerging from the plundered jungle/drum'n'bass scene (in particular the long tail of 2step). Add to that a taste for the suburban decay of grime, and all the precedents are in place. It was Lewis Beadle, aka El-B, who struck the first chisel blows against the granite mass that was the early-2000s English electronic scene. His pre-2004 productions are indeed the foundations of the hybrid sound (that crossover of garage and dub) from which Dubstep originated. In 2009, the London label Tempa released the compilation “The Roots of El-B”, gathering much of his material.
And yet these were mostly isolated cases, natural evolutions of the sounds that had defined the Nineties. The fact is, when change is in the air, things simply happen. I mentioned a date earlier that can be considered Dubstep's year zero: 2004. That year saw the release of a mix titled “Dubstep Allstars, Vol. 1”. Reading the tracklist at the time, it was hard to imagine that people like Kode9, Benga, and Skream would go on to write the history of electronic music. The label was London's Tempa. The novelty attracted intuitions, and the intuitions led to ideas.
The ripples spread wider, washing ashore the sound that would define a decade: something like garage's rhythmic pincers, but slowed down to 80 bpm; and basslines never heard before, stuff reminiscent of old Jamaican dancehall records or the like.
It's precisely "Dubstep Allstars, Vol. 1" that contains one of the finest tracks in all of Dubstep: "The Judgement", credited to Skream/Benga. Benga is a burly African-American guy who speaks the language of gutted-out basslines; his "Diary of An Afro Warrior" (2008) is a relentless pursuit of rhythmic solutions bordering on a dub-inflected minimalism. Skream, on the other hand, is a kid (barely of legal age at the time) with a deep passion for reggae music; proof of that lies in his sole, self-titled full-length from 2006, which also contains another huge hit of the dubstep era: "Midnight Request Line", a true classic of the genre.
In 2005 came the first full-length worthy of the Dubstep label: Vex'd's "Degenerate" is a monolithic, rotting cross-breed of garage, hip-hop and dub, steeped in an industrial mood straight out of a post-atomic winter. The album came out on Planet Mu (the label run by μ-Ziq, to be clear), a hugely important name in the dubstep galaxy precisely for its attention to hybrid sounds straddling the line between dubstep and drum'n'bass (Milanese), garage (Boxcutter) and hip-hop (Virus Syndicate). Also crucial to Dubstep's growth was Rob Ellis's Tectonic label — Ellis being better known as Pinch — which brought to light underground phenomena such as the acclaimed 2562 and the enfant prodige Joker.
Dubstep's real explosion came in 2006. William Bevan, under the moniker Burial, released his self-titled debut: a metropolitan whirlwind that bends dub to its own will, birthing music steeped in industrial paranoia — exactly as post-punk had done 25 years earlier. In 2007 Burial's second record, "Untrue", reached extraordinary heights, pushing Dubstep beyond its own limits. Alienation in its purest form. Both Burial albums came out on Hyperdub. The London label, helmed by Kode9 (undisputed guru and pivotal figure of the scene), can rightly be considered the true face of dubstep. The compilation "5: Five Years of Hyperdub" gathers some of the label's finest releases and stands as a fascinating document of the scene's past, present and future.
In every era there's someone who stays in the background, operating in the shadows and going unnoticed by most. In this landscape, the role of outsider is played by Sam Shackleton, co-founder, alongside Laurie Osborne (Appleblim), of the Skull Disco label. In his case, the term "urban jungle" couldn't be more fitting: Shackleton's music is a flexible, controlled psychosis, made of dense, impenetrable atmospheres wrapped in paranoid basslines. Worth noting is "Three EPs" (2009), a masterpiece both for the Londoner and for Dubstep as a whole, as well as the compilations "Soundboy's Punishment" and "Soundboy's Gravestone Gets Desecrated by Vandals", which collect scattered material released over the years.
By 2010 Dubstep was still an all-too-thriving phenomenon, with a flood of records and artists ready to reshuffle the deck once again, ready to start everything over from scratch. The history traced in this article is only an attempt to frame, as best as possible, five years of a genre that thrives on fleeting phenomena and unknown artists. An underground genre in the truest, most literal sense of the word.
Dubstep is the sound of one metropolis (London) resonating with every other metropolis in the world, turning collective psychosis into streams of rhythm and bassline.
The first half of the decade was dominated by a genre called electroclash, whose emblem resembled an ecstasy pill and whose motto was: "In limousines we have sex, in NYC we have clash". Unlike its distant cousin french-touch, this wasn't a genre invented by critics. Electroclash was the symbol and banner of Saturday nights from 2000 to 2004, and it even had its own dedicated festival. It's the drugged-up offspring of three utterly different genres — techno, punk and synth-pop — all dusted with a surreal glam-disco-gay atmosphere: picture Moroder, wired on amphetamines, locked away remastering Kraftwerk with Iggy Pop, while a gang of underage models grind against the studio glass.
Bearing in mind that electroclash was born in the German quarter of Brooklyn as a sickly offshoot of electro-techno, its other influences include DAF, Suicide, Wire, Kraftwerk and the early-80s CBGB's punk rock scene, from which it partly steals its look: shiny black leather, but torn; red lipstick on a model's flawless face, but smeared. It's an extremely well-defined genre, acidic and violent, steeped in a kind of sickly sensuality, cold and frantic at once: all these leitmotifs are already present in the proto-electroclash track "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass" by German producer I-F (1998). From there on, it's a sheer vertical climb from the clubs' underbelly straight to the pop charts. 2001 is the year of the genre's global explosion, marked by the single that defines it: "Emerge" by New Yorkers Fischerspooner. But by then the scene is already global. That same year sees the first dedicated festival, again in New York, while Death In Vegas release "Dirge" (whose video is the very emblem of electroclash's perverse imagery) and Detroit duo ADULT put out "Hand To Phone", instantly establishing themselves among the genre's leading names. The European scene is enriched by the odd couple Miss Kittin & The Hacker, who become the DJs of the moment. Electroclash is the music of dancing, of transgression, of sexual ambiguity. As long as it stays in Europe, it remains fairly obscure, tightly bound to its wave-punk influences, but once it crosses the ocean it inevitably cross-pollinates with 80s synth-pop, a genre that at that very moment begins a revival still ongoing today. And so you don't even need to go to a club to hear the acid house-pop of Felix Da Housecat (his is the most famous electroclash track of all: "Silver Screen Shower Scene") or that of Tiga, the world-famous Canadian DJ. His "Sunglasses At Night" spreads the electroclash sound into every club on the planet.
After 2001, with the exception of ADULT, who carry on down their alienated, alienating electroclash path, the genre's "poppification" goes hand in hand with its spread. Bands like Client, Mount Sims, Freezepop and above all Ladytron take over the scene, even landing on MTV. It's the moment of electroclash's widest reach, and also the beginning of the end: within a year or so the sparks of originality die out and the reheated leftovers start piling up. A few gems deserve a mention, though: the ironic indie-clash of My Robot Friend and the second album by Goldfrapp, whose gorgeous "Strict Machine" earns the English duo forgiveness from old fans for their turn toward "disco". 2003 brings the genre's masterpiece album: "Nuit Blanche" by Belgians Vive La Fête, a perfect symbiosis of techno, punk and pop; while 2004 belongs to German DJs Alter Ego with "Rocker", whose emblematic four-on-the-floor groove, showered in deranged, acid-drenched synths, still gives you goosebumps.
Electroclash's swan song is a track that harks back to its own origins: the devastating "My Friend Dario" by Vitalic. But the legacy of the mad electroclash world still lingers on in unexpected indie-funk-punk acts like Le Tigre and Cansei De Ser Sexy, and in europop's new princesses such as Roisin Murphy and Annie.
Shutting yourself in a room with your own guitar (or harp, or violin), and recounting yourself with simplicity and feeling. That's the essential recipe that has allowed an entire musical movement — one only marginally concerned with innovation for its own sake — to blossom and flourish, winning over an audience the genre (a convenient generalization) had perhaps never had before. Drawing a parallel with the world of blogs, with the internet's freedom of expression, with the compulsion to share one's own experience, is probably reductive, but it can, in some way, offer a clue as to what lies behind this sudden blooming of artists, carried along by an impressively devoted following. Quite simply, it's perhaps the need for emotions, for stories, that drives it all.
In some cases, the identification between the music and the persona runs so deep that the singer-songwriter's own life story becomes essential baggage for decoding their work. As in the case of Micah P. Hinson, an introverted young man who runs off with a stunning woman, who will later drag him into the vortex of drug addiction. The wall between artist and listener seems, in other words, to have crumbled: the problems remain those of the last century, but the ways of communicating them are radically different. There's a longing for innocence, for purity, for rising above certain hardships with a burst of energy: the myth of a return to the past (or to childhood, in some cases) lives on fully in this new century. Without giving up introspection, but letting it speak for itself. A small, perhaps insignificant, piece of evidence is the way Bonnie "Prince" Billy revisits his own repertoire as the decade draws to a close: festive, and ever more traditionalist.
Great veterans (Oldham, Callahan) and rising talents (Bon Iver, Scott Matthew), America (Iron&Wine, Woodpigeon) and Europe (The Leisure Society, The Tallest Man On Earth)… It all comes together in a collective embrace with glocal contours: on one hand an ecological awareness, the "Do It Yourself" ethic, on the other a fruitful relationship with the opportunities of the web and with unconventional means of distribution (and we have proof of that right at home, with the OndaDrops initiative). Despite its backward-looking suggestions and ideals of purity and universal love, the folk world of the 2000s is probably the one that best understands the needs of the contemporary listener. A total communion with the artist, one that almost literally expresses the famous quote from the late Salinger: “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
The recurring refrain among the genre's detractors insists on its uniformity, both among contemporaries and compared to the past. A criticism that's understandable at times, but one that risks missing the point entirely. How should we classify the "rose-tinted" medieval-revivalist (or more broadly classicist) strand that links artists like Josephine Foster, Marissa Nadler, Joanna Newsom and, on the other side of the Atlantic, the lesser-known Sharron Kraus? Diaphanous, elusive figures, they seem like incarnations of their own music, with its ancestral pull and its limpid, captivating sound. Not to mention that there are plenty of examples of strong musical personality to be found elsewhere. The playful orchestrations of Sufjan Stevens and the learned contaminations of Matt Elliott are important cases in point.
The true meaning of the folk movement, of its journey through the decade just ended, seems instead to be captured in the (iconic) saga of Alex Supertramp's odyssey into the wilderness. Both experiences arrive at the same conclusion: “Happiness is only real when shared.”
In other words: the allure of imperfection. Glitch music was born, conceptually, from the sonic "dirt" that sound engineers in the Seventies avoided like the plague during recording sessions. And while works like Milan Knizak's "Broken Music" or Canavarro's "Plux Quba" stand out as forerunners of the movement, it was only around the Nineties that glitch achieved real autonomy, a well-defined aesthetic, and above all a generation of artists trying to shape it in the most varied ways. If the Nineties marked its development, it was from the 2000s onward that glitch began merging with pop, folk or techno.
One of the countries where the glitch idiom has been explored most thoroughly is Japan, where, building on Ikeda's seminal work for the German label Raster-Noton, a multitude of musicians have devoted themselves to the genre in various ways. The two fundamental strands are undoubtedly glitch applied to songwriting, and a more brutal, granitic variety. Regarding the former, we must mention the discography of Gutevolk or the essential “28” by Takamasa and Noriko. Blending pulsing beats, glitch and a sugary sense of harmony, these works, along with “Ephemeral” by Piana, stand out as the high points of this genre-crossing. Takamasa himself also became known for an approach that fuses glitch with techno elements, arriving at a highly distinctive synthesis. As for the more hardline, brutal wing of this approach, we can't overlook the essential, harshly-tinged work of Shibuya, or the excellent “Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep” by Mitchell Akiyama.
If the Japanese scene is highly varied, the same can be said of the German and Austrian ones. Here too we're talking about glitch in several different guises. The pioneer here is undoubtedly Vienna's Christian Fennesz, who gave the sound a crucial push as early as the late Nineties with "Hotel Paral.Lel," and then in the 2000s with "Endless Summer" and “Venice“, works in which glitch is given anything but a secondary role, often grafted onto ambient-drone structures.
For convenience, we should mention the enormous catalogue of Editions Mego, as well as that of Blast First, which boasts Pan Sonic as its flagship act, a duo that often makes use of glitch (just listen to the monumental “Kesto“). In Germany, Raster-Noton, founded by Alva Noto, is undoubtedly the label that has explored this element most deeply. The works released under the Alva Noto name (think of the triple EP “Transrapid”, “Transvision” and “Transpray”, as well as the stunning “Transform”) probably represent the summa of the European glitch movement, just as the latest work under the SND name ranks among the most interesting releases.
Still in Germany, Morr Music, and in particular Notwist and Lali Puna, stand out, as do Múm and Tunng, as part of that circle of artists who make pop-electronic contamination their starting point. Glitch also appears with a certain frequency on albums like “Neon Golden” or “Finally We Are No One”, blending gently with the melody. One last mention should go to the work of groups like Mouse On Mars, Matmos and The Books, whose approach is more closely tied to electronic music.
So complex and branching that it defies precise classification, glitch has risen to the status of both an autonomous musical genre and a means of hybridization, effectively becoming part of the most common stages of music composition.
And finally it arrived. The long-awaited, surprising, inevitable, unhoped-for decade of historicization. House music dissected, analysed, chronicled, reconstructed. Digital reissues of the great classics have sprung up everywhere, now listened to and discussed as never before.
Meanwhile, just as happened with other music that was once dance music and today enjoys the status of "high art," these historic productions strike us as increasingly unlikely to be danced to, and instead feel like (splendid) pop or soul songs. Deep down, we're finally starting to understand that these are the new pages of the history of black music, written in parallel with a fairly close relative: hip-hop.
As proof of what we've just said, the sheer number of house compilations released in these years is staggering, especially compared to the near-total absence of them in the previous decade. It seems incredible to say now, but even at the end of the Nineties there were no compilations dedicated to founders and essential names like Frankie Knuckles, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, Todd Terry, or Masters at Work, just to name a few. Today Trax puts out collections covering all its major names, while two exhaustive quadruple anthologies of MAW's work came out at the turn of the millennium. The triple retrospective of the Basement Boys boasts the same thoroughness, while “76:14”, the ambient gem by Global Communication, has been reissued with an added disc of the duo's house classics. Meanwhile, excellent producers have begun appearing worldwide who rework and reproduce the history of house. The Africanisms of Italy's Pastaboys at the time of “Daylight In The Invisible World” (2004). Japanese artists turning out a velvety deep house that has nothing to envy in the genre's masters (Japanese Synchro System, “The Elaboration”, 2006). Australia's Cam Farrar, who under the moniker Kikumoto Allstars reproduces in vitro all of house music's historic styles on an album tellingly titled simply “House Music”.
And bear in mind that house has already rounded the quarter-century mark. That's an impressive longevity, especially when you consider the lifespan of other crucial phenomena in the history of dance music, and by extension of culture at large, such as the twist and disco, to name two well-known examples. Even disco, with all its offshoots and tamed variants, at a certain point seemed irreparably dated. That happened when it was about ten years old, and even though today there's no shortage of musicians building shamelessly loving, thoroughly successful revival acts (Daniel Wang, The Emperor Machine, and, though projected much further forward, Hercules And Love Affair), its presence in the musical world has undeniably become marginal again.
House music, on the other hand, hasn't just survived but is thriving, which raises a question. It's generally agreed that instruments (or at least the broad categories of instruments) have all already been invented. What if dance music itself had already all been invented, and house were the last dance music? What if its capacity for mutation had made it eternal? What if it were the definitive fine-tuning of the invincible power of the four-to-the-floor beat?
House in the 2000s underwent no epoch-defining changes. No upheavals, few significant stylistic or production evolutions. Sure, there were Daft Punk, who out of nowhere brought a wealth of new elements into house music with “Discovery”, but that's perhaps the only real break in this decade's story. House has instead shown that same propensity for continuity that, speaking of other macro-genres, Simon Reynolds identified as characteristic of all Black music, from blues to soul to disco. And the 2000s mostly carried forward the conversation started in the '90s, just as you can bet that ten years from now the decade just begun will look like the natural continuation of the one that just ended.
So, while it can't be considered a static genre, house today seems more than ever destined to remain — alongside techno — the quintessence of dance music for a good while yet. Or should we say forever?
Inert and provincial. That's what Italy has been, musically speaking but perhaps not only, over the past decade. Our homegrown scenes are narrow, poorly dynamic, and given no support whatsoever by a short-sighted and conservative cultural industry. New trends take hold with an embarrassing delay compared to the heart of the pop/rock galaxy, and very rarely manage to make a dent in the Vasco/Ferro/Liga/Pausini oligopoly that paralyzes the Italian mainstream.
And yet, the Italian landscape shows unique and original traits compared to its European counterparts. Traits that a fair number of artists have managed to work into new musical formulas that are appealing and unmistakably Italian. Lone wolves? Not always. Beyond the many outsiders, a few homegrown movements have visibly rippled the waters of our domestic pond in recent years.
The greatest weight – in terms of audience, that is – still belongs to the “alternative” circuit tied to the student left, the Centri Sociali, the various May Day gatherings. Much of this music gathers up, in simplified, “street-rally” form, the legacy of politically committed cantautori. The formula is by now standardized: social critique + generic Third-Worldist optimism + festive patchanka built on ska, dancehall and Mediterranean flavors. The lyrics are less all-encompassing than in the past, but still remain front and center: it's music meant for having fun with friends while convincing yourself you're Changing The World, and the invective is just as central as the danceability.
Among the many names involved in this scene (quite a few of them genuinely worthwhile), what stands out is the educated hip-hop/rock of Caparezza: histrionic, biting and chameleonic in his wordplay, he has won over segments of the audience who had never wanted anything to do with street slang and posse logic.
In the indie world too, a focus on social issues and the cantautore tradition (or rather, wordiness) continue to dominate. The reference points are different here though: CCCP, Massimo Volume, Afterhours. Nostalgia for a past that is nonetheless seen as mediocre seems to be the dominant feeling in the music of Offlaga Disco Pax, Luci della centrale elettrica, and Baustelle – the latter being the first to fully “Italianize” the British indie-pop aesthetic. The music of these artists is understated, intimate and tinged with cynicism; even in its ironic moments it reveals a disillusionment – more or less conscious – toward any prospect of improvement.
The air is different in the literate twee-pop of Perturbazione and Artemoltobuffa: the songs are lighter, brighter and more lavish. Behind the veil of lightheartedness, though, lies a melancholy worthy of the Smiths, and the lyrics' “escape into the everyday” (everyday epiphanies seen through the lens of Calvino and Rodari) only heightens the sense of powerlessness they convey. Lightness and melancholy also mark the Riotmaker Records aesthetic – homemade funky/dance-pop steeped in indie nostalgia, with one name above all: Amari.
Same premises, but a more mocking mood defines the “blend-everything” non-scene centered around the Snowdonia and Trovarobato labels. With irony and irreverence, these bands stage the aesthetic of precariousness (or of precarious labor?), crafting a meltin’ pop of genres and eras, “style exercises” ranging from the most easygoing lo-fi pastiche (Maisie) to a chameleonic idleness with a hint of Canterbury (Mariposa). Attempts to push back against the imperative of “depth” upheld by the cantautore imagery and the '90s “decadentists”, but also to give voice to a culture increasingly untethered from stability and strong values.
It's the underground territory, however, that best embodies “precarious” culture: music that renounces from the outset any place in society, “educated” yet uninterested in solid structures or long-term projects. Structures that veer off into their own convolutions, in an unselfconscious and, ultimately, somewhat naive mix of impulsiveness and cerebral rigor. All of it filtered through a resigned outlook on inevitable disintegration, on the impossibility of building foundations of any kind. Shambling looseness and pure instrumentality as a shield against utopianism; harsh, jagged sounds like protective quills for a tiny wonderland of weak thought.
In the harshest, noisiest terrain, the impressive scope of the jazzcore scene and the long tail of math-rock and post-noise phenomena hold sway. An essential reference point are Rome's Zu – extremely active on the live circuit and by now followed abroad as well. Around them and the Wallace Records label, a recognizable style has taken shape, one that absorbs the geometric aphasia of Starfuckers and fuses it with the chaotic dynamism of the jazzcore school. Ties with ambient and electroacoustic improvisation have grown stronger thanks to releases on the Die Schachtel label and composers Giuseppe Ielasi and Fabio Orsi. On the metal side too, post-rock/post-metal drifts play an important role, fueling a broad free-space-doom(-ambient-noise) strand whose guiding lights are Lento, Morkobot, and Dead Elephant.
On the electronic front, meanwhile, we're witnessing a “brain drain” phenomenon. The caliber of our beatmakers (Santos, Touane, Raiders Of The Lost Arp, just to name a few) has led them to record for leading labels on the international scene: an honor, but also a symptom of the indifference their music arouses on Italian soil.
This is perhaps *the* problem with Italy's “poor” music scene: the condescension with which it's treated, not just by fans but by industry insiders themselves. The former are generally well disposed toward the new sensations from across the Channel, but far more demanding toward homegrown ones. The latter, beneath a facade of enthusiasm and the prevailing everyone's-pals mentality, conceal a fundamentally cowardly balancing act: everyone gets a chance (“well, they're just kids...”), but no one is ever truly believed in. As if the important thing were just to get by without rocking the boat too much, each with their own inflated little reviews and their Sunday mini-tour: keeping the (hamster) wheel spinning, while passing it off to one another as a great sign of “independence”.
The indie macro-niche is, at bottom, just a replica of the mainstream cultural business, with the leading names of trade publications playing the role of poor man's Mollica and Fazio – enslaved to a system that doesn't even feed them.
* Or of the poor Italian music scene: the difference is subtle.
Mine is a battered little black metal box. Whenever anyone sees it, they laugh, but I got it for next to nothing and it holds 20 gigs. That was all I needed: lots of space, low price.
The mp3 player revolution is a flexible one. For every lifestyle – musical, that is – there's a tailor-made object: the one with shuffle and a clip to attach to your belt, for joggers; the pretty, design-focused one; the one with videos, video games, a parental volume lock. The one that looks like a phone. The one that is a phone.
Quite a leap from the old walkman. There wasn't much you could do with that: it played cassettes, full stop. It was the domain of city kids and Sunday runners. The versatility of the mp3 player, on the other hand, has let it reach the most diverse social groups. It's listened to on the train by the office worker heading home, and in the living room by the housewife doing chores. It has cut across our culture entirely.
Credit for this also (or above all?) goes to the .mp3 format itself. Born in 1992, by 1999 it had combined with the Napster platform to kick off the filesharing phenomenon and the dematerialization of music. Liquid music, passing effortlessly from one container to another. All told, it's the biggest shake-up in the relationship between music and its medium since the commercialization of the gramophone – that is, since the very concept of a “medium” came into being.
The mp3 turned personalized playlists into a mass phenomenon and spread the utopia of free culture. It sparked a revolution in the music economy whose ripest fruits we'll only see further down the line: the album format is proving unexpectedly hard to kill off, netlabels have turned out to be (half) a flash in the pan, but the market's headlong rush toward digitization seems unstoppable. Having thrown their weight around with largely ineffective anti-sharing campaigns, even the much-reviled majors have started coming to terms with the change: ringtones, ad placements, “free” mp3s bundled with all sorts of gadgets are the new frontier on which they're asserting their dominance.
Alongside solid “pirate” networks like eMule and Soulseek, and the boom of Youtube and mp3 blogs, legal downloading is playing an ever-bigger role. Apple's iTunes Store, which offers files in lossy format (without data compression), became the biggest music retailer in the United States in early 2008, with 19% of the total market (25% by mid-2009).
What does the future hold? We'll see. It's more instructive to look back at the past: far fewer devotees, tons of records impossible to find, music coverage (even niche coverage) huddled around a handful of big names. The mp3 era has put everything within reach for a number of enthusiasts greater than ever before. And while it's comforting to tell ourselves things were better when they were worse, denying the merits of modernity is, to say the least, dishonest.
A provocative, in its own way ecumenical label, tinged with exploitation and coined right on the OndaRock forum (in March 2007 to be exact), “merda music” (“shit music”) was a defining phenomenon of the 2000s. That same blunt phrase genuinely anticipated similar labels that surfaced in the international press about a year later (think of the so-called “shit-gaze”, coined in the pages of the New Musical Express). Boiled down to its essence, merda music, seen from the end of the decade, turns out to be fundamentally an aesthetic – or rather an anti-aesthetic, among the most abject and deliberately “ugly” ever heard. It was an exasperation of what in the '90s people simply called “lo-fi”, i.e. cheap recordings and, to put it kindly, pauper's orchestrations, which back then were mostly reserved for crudely singer-songwriterly material, cloyingly naïve stuff, garage rock, or exercises in bleak, borderline-shambolic noise rock. A line that in the 2000s was crossed with disarming ease and consistency.
It's a Luddite attitude, openly anti-modern and superficially dystopian, that infused, with rusty urgency, a good deal of the underground music of the messiest, most overcrowded decade ever, with countless “shitty” productions marked by blatant slapdashness, primitivist benders, exhibited amateurism, and an obsessive quest for “let's-do-something-weird” at all costs. The material chosen for plunder and desecration is no longer the depressed, dazed singer-songwriter fare or the noise rock of the '90s: in the new century the focus shifts to far more forbidding music, preferably buried in the folds of history, which resurfaces in the present thanks to the propulsive force of the internet – the very same force responsible for the productive nihilism of merda-music's followers, having completely upended every previous market logic and, as a result, all but nullified the economic potential of selling records. The reissue becomes, more than the new business model, something akin to a new Gospel*. There's no parricidal polemic here, just the endless resources made available by the web and a genuine, childlike urge to be endlessly amazed and amazing.
So we see the rediscovery of bizarre experiments carried out on the battered body of folk (see the piece on Weird&Free), unpresentable outsiders, reckless experimenters light years removed from any academy (see Angus MacLise or Henry Flynt), exotic pioneers of the most overflowing psychedelia, shadowy, misunderstood geniuses of radical improvisation, marginal and improbable ethno-world traditions, sacred monsters of noise internationalism (from Smegma to Dead C, from Skullflower to Fushitsusha) and heralds of the most peripheral industrial schools. Yet the “ideological” baggage of that latter subculture is entirely absent from a musical weltanschauung that has repurposed the “ugly, forbidding and ignoble” sounds par excellence into something breezy, mirthful and “just for fun”. What was once perceived (and meant to be perceived) as “ugly and difficult” today becomes, if not beautiful, at least “fun” – in theory, at any rate. And while it was hard to make out such intentions clearly in the isolated work carried out in the '90s by labels like Majora and Siltbreeze (the latter, not by chance, reactivated a few years back), the early signs of what was about to happen (exploding into plain view in Fort Thunder's Providence scene and with Lightning Bolt at the start of the decade) could already be glimpsed in the noisiest, most colorful releases put out by Skin Graft and Gravity. It's also worth remembering that several leading bands of early-2000s merda music (Wolf Eyes, Jackie-O' Motherfucker, No Neck Blues Band above all) had already been active for a good fifteen years, and so were already brewing their ungrammatical, raucous revolution in the shadows, back in the years of “respectable”, introverted post-rock.
In the early 2000s there's an avalanche of micro-releases coming out on self-produced CD-Rs in tiny runs, plus cassettes of every length imaginable — more than anything, it's Luddite exhibitionism and flimsy pretexts to get out on tour and really put across the potential of music that is, at bottom, maximalist and improvised, and which finds its best expression live and in performance, leaving the record itself with a mostly documentary function (the hypertrophic and quite literally hallucinatory saga of California's The Skaters is perhaps the summa of this unmanageable "poetics").
Something shifts around 2006/07, once the propulsive thrust of free-noise and free-folk fundamentalism has burned itself out, and while on one hand vinyl re-establishes itself as the format of choice, and an unexpected, deranged variable emerges from the dark periphery of the empire in the form of black metal — arguably crazier than almost anything else — people go back to playing songs, obviously vile, mangled and amateurish ones. At the center of this disreputable salvage operation are garage-rock (a reactionary, primitivist genre and thus a close neighbor to certain aesthetics, relaunched in brutalist form by the Hospitals at the start of the decade), the notorious and never-quite-arrived synth-punk, but also a rudimentary and effective lo-fi synth-pop. The phenomenon (mostly located in Columbus, Ohio, but with significant outposts on both coasts) takes the name "shit-gaze" (English shoegaze is an avowed influence for many, and above all it's music that's easy to replicate — who cares if it doesn't come out as good as My Bloody Valentine, especially since here it's almost always contaminated with cavemannish punk sores). Further evidence that every musical-ideological bastion is by now crumbling comes from the productions of Ariel Pink, the protégé of "ambassadors" Animal Collective, who applies an ultra-lo-fi approach to docile FM pop ditties with a 70s scent. Not long after, the contested labels "hypnagogic pop" and "glo-fi" spring up, the former far more complex than the latter, which turns out to simply be a cool way of reviving, with the usual studiedly slapdash and anti-aesthetic approach, music that is ever more historically remote from the underground universe — namely the cheesiest italo-disco, the crudest aspects of 80s mainstream pop, and even new age (which, however, pulls things away from song form once again). Myriad names and one-day heroes hidden in the shadow of a melancholic, dirty and threadbare sentimentalism (and what's missing entirely from this postmodern approach is ironic detachment). Postcards from a dreamlike past never actually lived, using crude, wrecked aesthetics for the sole purpose of conjuring up worlds. Because at this endless party — "shit" party, of course — people dance and drink using only what's left of their brains.
* Take a look at the catalogues of labels like Locust, Ultra Eczema and DeStjil, which alternate old and new, but also at the unlikely rediscoveries put out by Em Records.
Sorry, but who would have guessed? Already by the late Eighties the inseparable words "new" and "wave" were all but tucked away in the closet of discarded things, sealed tight in their own obsolescence. The split had already happened: a new generation of rockers, all blood sweat and tears, on one side, techno-house and its many hybrids on the other. And then indie rising up as a genre unto itself with its hundred faces, while two legitimate children of new wave, goth and industrial, went off kicking their own paths under their own steam. Gone was the desperate, sometimes garish ostentation, and the decadent individualism that got packed away in the attic along with the analogue synths, the makeup and the thousand colours that once offset those emaciated black-and-grey faces: the 90s spoke sonic languages steeped in lo-fi and low profile. That a faint wave-flame was still glowing under the embers was hinted at by the unusual presence of old lions (New Order, Depeche Mode and The Cure above all), artists who owed their humus to the 80s and occasionally made a cameo appearance (Luke Haines and Jarvis Cocker, though both were too busy with Britpop at the time), and then the eclectic Stephin Merritt, the man with Marc Almond and Gary Numan in his heart.
But towards the end of the millennium a shared sensibility flares back up, and the spark turns to fire again. On the electronic front, vintage instruments are exhumed to run alongside the digital, eventually swallowing it whole: embryos of electroclash that, through singles and EPs from the likes of Ladytron, The Adult and Zoot Woman, timidly prepare the ground for the invasion to come. Synth plus dance plus punk: something already heard, yet not quite. On the guitar-driven front, no one is simply standing by watching — quite the opposite. Sensing which way the wind is blowing, explicit references come to the fore: short hair, skinny ties and tormented existentialism take on substance in the New York of Interpol and the Strokes. A trendy revival for some, something substantial for others, with the soul of Ian Curtis and the heart of Tom Verlaine respectively taking shape. All this after The Rapture, also from New York, had already tried mixing Gang Of Four with the new dance sounds. And so onward marches the neo-punk-funk brigade, which, especially by the middle of the decade, gets declined in every possible way.
Sales charts, even amid the peer-to-peer crisis, move plenty, and so the early 2000s turn into a proliferation of front pages devoted to whichever wave big thing happens to be trending. England, land of the music-image pairing, certainly isn't going to just watch, and indeed it goes all in. So the historic names already partly flagged up by Interpol (The Psychedelic Furs, The Chameleons, The Teardrop Explodes and Josef K are the most cited) regain a voice through the sounds of Editors, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party, White Lies, while leanings closer to vintage The Clash, The Stranglers and The Fall are revitalised through Art Brut, Kaiser Chiefs, Maximo Park, Arctic Monkeys, in a vigorous game of cross-references that quite often lands them at the top of the charts.
Just how global the phenomenon had become in the meantime is shown by the brilliant forays of Canada's Arcade Fire, who lift many of their tensions straight from primal new wave — but more broadly, the long wave running from the mainstream to the underground ends up soaking genres far removed from each other, from the broken pop of Germany's Tarwater (huge DAF fans, and not by chance invited to collaborate by Tuxedomoon) to the new no-wave of New York's Liars, all the way to the various "DFA" tributaries, where LCD Soundsystem and co. toss easy listening, house, synth-pop and punk-funk into the blender, getting absolutely everyone dancing.
In this context, it should come as no surprise that a thoroughly-90s mainstream band like No Doubt chose to release a cover of Talk Talk's "It's My Life" as the lead single from their "Best Of" (2003), nor that r'n'b guru Kanye West turned Tears For Fears's "Memories Fade" completely inside out in 2008. Or that Madonna entrusted the fate of her "Confessions On A Dancefloor" (2005) to Stuart Price (Zoot Woman).
All this while droves of pop-dance acts compete to namecheck OMD, The Human League, Gary Numan, Pet Shop Boys, not to mention the inevitable New Order. From this sprawling company we can mention Australia's Cut Copy, Britain's Late Of The Pier and Hot Chip, Canada's Junior Boys, Norway's Röyksopp, and forgive us for the other six thousand we've left out: certainly very different proposals, but all sharing that unmistakable synth-eighties attitude as common denominator.
We leave it to each listener's own tastes and inclinations to sort the good from the bad, the bluffs from the names that endure, and to untangle a knot every bit as complicated as its source material. That said, we can't help warning anyone who finds in the new new wave nothing but empty nostalgia, or old ideas simply copied out in fair hand. Too often one runs into glib takes, as if all the soulless copycats were clustered right here: pop, by its very nature, is a continuous process of shaping, revisiting, updating, and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge between the Eighties and this "new new zero" moment — and it shows. The revivalist label is often a matter of convenience — the laziness of hasty listening — and an attentive ear, on close comparison, can't help but notice it. For better or worse.
Or rather, how a site created just for fun (and on Geocities, no less!) became a successful music webzine. Wonders of the internet age! Despite the terrible early graphics, the debates about Scaruffi, about the sitar, about Eno/Bowie and whatever else you can think of…
Passing through pale-blue forums, red-hot chatrooms and brightly coloured homepages, the Onda (a nod to its creator's notorious "wave roots") grew. Eventually outgrowing its own original intentions. A crazy acceleration, dribbling between reviews, milestones, albums of the month, charts, sprawling monographs and, one by one, new columns. Then came the arrival of an art director, who literally gave the pages a new look. And the final realisation of having become a genuine editorial staff. Or maybe a freak commune, or even a "kraut" one — as its founder once rambled on about — where, once you're in, you're always at home, and you might even find the love of your life (it's said to have really happened, more than once!).
So here we have an inexhaustible plurality (nearly a hundred by now) of voices and areas of expertise: old-school rockers and prog nerds, pop devotees and cacophony-lovers, goth kids and bearded folksters, hedonistic ravers and dandy wavers, avant-everything and "behind-the-times". With one crazed music obsessive at the helm, always trying to find the right balance.
But seriously, what is OndaRock? A hybrid creature, and perhaps a unique one on the web: half current-affairs magazine (reviews of new releases, live reports, interviews, charts), half historical archive (monographs, milestones, specials, chapters in the history of rock). A varied, ever-restless container that aims to rigorously assess the music of today and yesterday (with due respect to its readers above all), while shunning like the plague the snobbery that afflicts the indie world. An in-depth guide to navigating the countless evolutions of rock music (and its surroundings), without ever pretending to hand down little lessons to be learned by heart. Above all, a stimulus to dig deeper into your own musical passions, to follow curious, even zigzagging paths, ranging from Stockhausen to the jukebox.
For those of us behind the "machine," it's meant great passion and no small commitment: our annual publishing rate has more than tenfolded over these nine years. The result is a now-enormous database, with over 5,200 reviews and 900 monographs, just to name those figures. And our audience has grown right alongside it, with averages of 60,000 visits a day.
We've followed this decade from the very start, with its chaos of styles, genres, trends, niches and sub-niches. It's almost impossible to fully decode it, but we hope we've at least offered a compass to help make sense of it. And who knows — in this decade zero of Italian music journalism, maybe we managed to carve out a small niche of our own too.
People started talking about an "after" (or rather, "beyond") metal in the 90s, once the genre's cohesion had already dissolved into a proliferation of thrash, death, grind, black metal and so on. Having lost most of its unifying formal traits, metal music from that point on became open to manipulation by all sorts of authors and experimenters, repeatedly paired with attitudes and styles that had once been its "rivals": uncompromising hardcore, industrial, jazz, noise-rock, the no-wave of the early Swans. Especially seminal were the experiences of Godflesh (a rotten, obsessive, industrial sound), Neurosis (who started out in hardcore and thrash before arriving at a deeply personal, visceral sonic quest), and eclectic outfits such as John Zorn's Naked City and Painkiller, tortuous sonic pastiches drawing heavily on these embryonic heavy-sound manipulations. Also notable were bands like Tool (the odd one out in this vast landscape, with their progressive esotericism), Faith No More, Helmet, Unsane, and Today Is the Day.
At the hands of Melvins and their ironic, drugged/drug-inducing, chameleon-like sound, sludge metal was born (the filthy Eyehategod were also key players here), a lumbering, experimental sound that the early Earth would stretch out into what became known as drone metal. With every musical ambition abandoned, the sound is pure, undiluted — granite-like and timeless. The lesson would be picked up, riding the wave of hype, by Sunn O))), and simultaneously reworked in a more minimal, lethal and effective key by Khanate. Their Japanese friends Boris picked up where Earth and Melvins left off, played around with the power-trio format, cranked the amplification to absurd levels, and added the now-lost irreverence of the days when rock was just fun — becoming, in the process, Pitchfork's favorite band.
The ideas of this first wave of experimenters would produce an enormous echo in the musical generation that immediately followed, spawning plenty of slavish imitators, but also a great many genuinely original acts, which often had nothing left to do with metal and instead pursued their own personal experimental language.
Post-metal, bonding and blending with post-rock and post-hardcore, forged its own "aesthetic" through the releases of a few pivotal labels: Aaron Turner's Hydrahead (Isis), Mike Patton's Ipecac, and Neurot, run by Neurosis. Isis, with their dynamic, emotional and organic sound, would be the most important band of this second wave; alongside them were Pelican, who drew heavily on the vivid, imaginative post-rock of the Mogwai/Explosions In The Sky school. Then there's Jesu, the offspring of the Godflesh that once were: their music fuses those earlier sludge/industrial experiences with a distinctly shoegaze atmosphere, in a deep sonic ecstasy.
From these same areas came decidedly "borderline" proposals too, like Kayo Dot. An evolution of the former maudlin of the Well — the brilliant, hallucinated outfit led by Toby Driver — they weave oceanic depth and heavy distortion at will into their disorienting, kaleidoscopic sound, creating a melodic magma with very few precedents.
In parallel, Converge and their label Deathwish brought the metalcore phenomenon to the surface, propelling into the spotlight a whole current of musicians who sound just as heavy and metallic as they do furiously "hardcore." Rorschach is the key reference point, and it would be bands like Kiss It Goodbye, Converge, Botch, Coalesce and Cave-In who picked up that legacy, pushing the sound to extremes, cross-contaminating it, and ramping up its dizzying technicality. Until Dillinger Escape Plan, the hyped-up offspring of their contemporaries Botch's surgical fury, gave birth to so-called mathcore, which has repeatedly crossed paths with the "ordered chaos" of the neighboring math-rock and jazzcore explorations.
"Raise your skinny fists like antennas to heaven": the decade just gone opens with this silent cry, this gathering coming from some isolated point, hidden among the mountains beyond the 49th parallel. There's still something to discover in this desolate, trampled world, there are still frontiers looking out over unexplored territories, feelings like euphoria and joy still exist.
That this "call to arms" should come from Canada — with its immaculate expanses of untouched forest, its still-meager human outposts facing an inscrutable nature — hardly seems like some great revelation. What was surprising, though, was the incredible, unexpected musical flowering of a nation that, culturally speaking, had always lived somewhat in the shadows. Between the (post-)colonial interference of the Commonwealth and its more or less veiled subservience to the United States, it seemed unlikely that Canada could ever emerge as a driving force in music, let alone develop a distinctive, recognizable scene of its own.
As for the former, the 2004 release of the by-now-overexposed but unavoidable "Funeral" by Arcade Fire had a lot to do with it — a record that can stand as the blueprint for an entire movement, so precisely does it define its traits. It matters little, with hindsight, whether the band was more or less truly seminal: one way or another, the same fingerprints would later turn up in many Canadian bands. The theatrical, almost anguished emphasis of Win Butler's vocals, the choral imprint also expressed through large, unconventional lineups, the surges of baroque fury. A quest for the epic that would often translate into explicitly progressive structures (The Most Serene Republic, Sunset Rubdown, Islands).
It's an approach — that of prog — that fits perfectly with what lies at the heart of the Canadian experience: a volcanic, overflowing vitality and inventiveness. Even in the ever-shifting lineups, in the fluid intermingling of personalities, you can see the indescribable magma of what has happened and keeps happening in Canada's primordial soup: worth mentioning is Daniel Behar (aka Destroyer, already an influential member of New Pornographers), who joined forces with Spencer Krug (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes) and Carey Mercer (Frog Eyes, Blackout Beach) to form Swan Lake; or again, songwriters who take turns contributing to each other's albums (Barzin and Tony Dekker's Great Lake Swimmers). It becomes clear, then, why the worn-out cliché of the "mirror of the times" fits the Canadian music scene so well: sharing and the free exchange of ideas are no longer just the naive utopias of some deluded preachers.
A mixture of genres and musical expressions that has certainly not stayed confined to a scattered handful of enthusiasts, but has instead created outright fetish objects of alternative rock like Broken Social Scene. Whether or not Canada has actually built up this musical wealth over the years, it's undeniable that "being Canadian" is nowadays an intrinsic factor of appeal and recognizability for a band. Proof of this, at least in part, is the name of a leading American label (not Canadian at all), "Secretly Canadian", which plays on this aura of myth-making that surrounds everything coming from the Maple Leaf country. Speaking of Canadian labels, one cannot fail to mention Constellation, one of the reference labels for post-rock and beyond.
A decade has passed, and that commanding cry still seems to spread with unchanged force, even as the world of music grows ever more fragmented and blurred. But if the dominant musical tastes are turning, at least in part, towards bucolic, dreamy territories, then along come Rural Alberta Advantage and Woodpigeon, bards of simplicity and innocence. Which makes the Lampedusian adage ring truer than ever: "Everything must change so that everything can stay the same."
While music webzines and print magazines scramble to keep up with the times, there are spaces for music "criticism" that actually define the times themselves. The quotation marks are necessary, because the very architecture of these spaces runs counter to the vertical nature of the critic/reader relationship. In the age of peer to peer, music discussion and information also develop horizontally: the reciprocity of the user/user relationship replaces the disparity of expertise and authority that once made the reader dependent on the critic.
Rateyourmusic.com is emblematic of this shift. A site built by enthusiasts, who enter data, ratings and classifications, creating a giant database of musical information and judgments. A network with no precise center, with no official guidelines, but built instead on nodes of equal importance: users' personal pages. Each of these is the gateway to a different musical universe, made up of ratings, lists, comments and, as per the 2.0 handbook, "friends" and "favorites".
As inherently solipsistic as it may be (my page, my ratings, my opinions), the Rateyourmusic model gives rise to relationships of trust: "music friends" are chosen not so much through personal acquaintance as through shared taste and mutual esteem.
No user really sees the same site, because each one filters its data through the lens of their own friends. What would otherwise be an unnavigable jungle of data, lists and numbers thus takes on the familiar contours of a neighborhood. And it's precisely when this sense of locality disappears that the site shows its limits: average ratings, overall charts, automatic genre classifications prove consistently unreliable (if not downright indecipherable). They attempt to turn into a universally valid whole something that only makes sense as a sum of parts, to be embraced or ignored according to one's own needs.
A tornado that will sweep away, once and for all, a music criticism unsuited to the times, or just another music social network feeding an obsessive binge of listening? Without doubt, it's a crucial step in tearing down the barrier between critics and enthusiasts. A site full, yes, of sloppy listeners obsessed with the "rating", but also of people who are wells of precise information and spot-on recommendations. Which is to say: a "criticism" that limits itself to providing data and suggesting new listens has its days numbered.
Rateyourmusic is, in the end, the internet-age evolution of conversations between enthusiasts in record shops. What it lacks is sharpness, clarity, the capacity for reflection — both long-range and short-range. It's in this territory that tomorrow's criticism can find fertile ground. If it manages to react, pairing useful, well-grounded interpretive frameworks with the functionalities of 2.0: streaming, appeal, versatility, horizontality, speed.
It all started in the Eighties. First the sharper, more dignified side of it: while hordes of new-new-wavers were following in the footsteps of Joy Division, Pil and Talking Heads, people started digging up the most unlikely post-punk bands. English critic-guru Simon Reynolds did his part, coming out in 2005 with "Rip It Up and Start Again" (published here, inevitably, as "Post-punk"). So far so good. Early Scritti Politti gets dusted off, people remember that Devo really were a great band... But these were already known facts, just momentarily bracketed off by post-rock aphasia.
Then, though, something changes. People start arguing that synth-pop, up until the day before the fake, superficial genre par excellence, maybe wasn't so disposable after all. The underlying idea wasn't bad, it's whispered. Someone dares suggest it should be rediscovered. There are exceptions, of course — where aren't there exceptions? Okay, there was Den Harrow, but the underlying idea was excellent. Looking closer, these "exceptions" aren't even that numerous! Duran Duran sort of recall King Crimson, early Talk Talk are better than the later ones, personally I've always liked A Flock Of Seagulls... Do you know Kajagoogoo?
And that's how it went. We "rehabilitated" all of them: even Alphaville. Even Den Harrow.
And then? And then we didn't stop there. In fact, just as the emboldened Eighties veterans were finishing off converting the (few) remaining post-rockers to the new synth-pop faith, the more advanced fringe of the four-on-the-floor crowd found new territory to plunder in the worst of mainstream pop. To look good in front of their peers, showing off that I Am Less Of A Snob Than You. Nelly Furtado, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake start appearing in the columns of even the most serious-minded music magazines. Behind them are great production and great producers, they try to explain to us. Some agree, some just take it on trust. For most people, though, this means only one thing: the barn doors are open.
So the cattle run loose. Any old fool now feels entitled to flaunt the skeletons in their closet. I like "Roses Are Red" by Aqua. I like Blink-182. Both terrible: I like "Roses Are Red" AND Blink — I've got the poster in my room.
It's a game of one-upmanship, and whoever fires the biggest shot wins. For a while it's fun, but once Sabrina Salerno gets rehabilitated, nothing shocks anyone anymore. And so someone backtracks, saying this anti-snobbery is worse than the old snobbery. It's a trend like any other, and he never fell for it (maybe that's even true). But the damage is done, there's no going back now. Because we've all heard the die-hard darkwaver confess that he's got the 45 of "Maracaibo" in his room and (worse still!) still spins it every now and then.
So what? So nothing, the decade closes just like that, with no resolution. No new (old) idols, no lasting canonizations. These days people can't even agree on the past for more than two days straight. And yet something remains: that everyone is free to listen to whatever they like, that potentially anything goes (be it indie, underground or crass mainstream), that music is beautiful, and so is Alizée's backside.
There's something peculiar about talking of millennia ending and millennia beginning for a music like techno, which since its birth has always had a privileged relationship with the concept of time, and especially with the future, so powerfully symbolized by that 2 in front of the other three digits.
For techno, the millennia closed/opened with the legendary "Jaguar" by DJ Rolando, the summa, synthesis and perhaps epitaph of a whole way of conceiving the genre: the most dreamlike Detroit strain, the spatial and utopian one, that of Underground Resistance but also of the entire second wave. Of course, this brand of techno has remained central and has survived through the numerous compilations released over the decade, first and foremost the epic of Mad Mike Banks, told through the double compilation "A Hi-Tech Jazz Compilation" credited to Galaxy 2 Galaxy. Nor were tributes to the founding fathers lacking, with the striking Atkins-centred compilation released for the twentieth anniversary of his Metroplex label, the reissue of the now-impossible-to-find "Innovator" by Derrick May, and the recent release of a splendid remix collection by Kevin Saunderson, which pairs nicely with the production compilation released back in '96 ("Faces & Phases"). Reissues of crucial records never before released on CD also arrived, such as Robert Hood's "Minimal Nation".
Meanwhile, though, techno kept moving, and it's been a controversial evolution, especially viewed from today's vantage point. If we like, we can say the new techno millennium truly began with the deadly kiss of Plastikman, a deadly kiss called "Closer" (2003). This was the final refinement of the sound "created" with "Consumed" back in '98. It's the minimal sound, the paring down to the bare essentials of techno's defining elements, which remains a bone-dry, skeletal representation (funereal?) of itself. A music that's pitch-black yet glittering, venomous, seductive in its emptiness brimming with pathos, like the pauses in Jimi Hendrix's solos.
The guardian spirit behind these changes, especially in Europe, became Ricardo Villalobos, the Chilean producer based in Berlin. So far, so good. His early singles and the two albums "Alcachofa" and "Thé au harem d'Archimède" were excellent, the fruit of a highly personal, distinctive vision of techno, yet well rooted in its own time and, why not, its own scene. Their success with critics and audiences alike, however, ended up fueling what would become an extremely long wave, the true European dance phenomenon of the noughties. In a short span of time, minimal took hold of countless dancefloors across the continent, triggering a relentless de-funking of whatever funk remained in techno. Aided by a latent shortage of ideas after the electroclash wave that had done so much good for leading German labels like DJ Hell's International Deejay Gigolo and Ellen Allien's BPitch Control, the minimal sound took over productions across all of Europe. But trivialized by inevitable imitations, worn out by a success that seemed inexhaustible for a long time even though the creativity of its key figures had run dry a while back, minimal became an extremely arid genre, tedious to listen to and essentially devoid of ideas.
Today it's probably becoming clear that a few steps back are necessary, even welcome. Minimal is retreating to the margins, with historic labels like M_nus now based in Italy, and Villalobos himself engaged in a laborious retreat. New names and ideas (new/old, since techno is a music that relies heavily on recycling) are looking toward the future. There's a thriving Northern European scene, ranging from the pop of Röyksopp to the cosmic voyages of Lindstrøm, via Prins Thomas and the reborn Gus Gus, one that revives italo and euro-disco tropes, mixing them with the insights of the masters or the European rave experience of the early 90s (speaking of which: have you noticed how that era has come back into fashion in recent years?). In the Netherlands, Dubstep and techno cross paths magnificently (Martyn, 2562, Newworldaquarium, but keep an eye too on England's Shackleton). There are genre-crossbreeds from the club world more or less traceable back to techno but still waiting to be classified, assessed and understood: the new French scene, Boys Noize, Crookers and many others. Ever-lively labels like Kompakt hold firm and still manage to surprise us. There are rigorous yet wildly inventive producers like Cobblestone Jazz, who go back to updating the second-Detroit strain of techno discourse. And back at the scene of the crime come artists straddling house and techno, like Omar S, who in 2009 put together a mix of his own tracks for the Fabric series, shining a light on a vein that deserves the utmost attention going forward too. Yes, the future... After all, isn't that what we're always talking about?
The decade's mainstream pop splits into two main currents: the white one and the black one. The white one, that saccharine and pandering girl-band pop brought to its peak by "Baby One More Time", which launched Britney Spears into the star-system, we all know well. The black current, that of new r'n'b or "urban" as some call it, was the true protagonist of 2000s pop, taking over the charts and forcibly importing contemporary African-American culture into Europe, making hip-hop less forbidding and, by decade's end, getting its hands dirty with European dance. Artists who had previously done pop in a completely different way (Gwen Stefani, Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake, and Spears herself), or those who had long disowned their r'n'b past (Madonna), all "converted" to this sound, or if you prefer, to this "trend". Urban is a genre that has given its best on the single format rather than over the length of an album, since these tend to be long, over-produced, sprawling records, an apotheosis of cross-collaborations, features and samples, to the point that pinning down authorship of the tracks and songwriting credit becomes a real challenge: it's the final product, the fashionable single, the collaboration of the moment that matters more than the name printed on the cover (often just a pretty face and a sexy body serving as the vehicle). So, we'll focus here in particular on the producers who defined the sound as we know it today: aggressive, plasticky, hypnotic, strongly erotic, at times baroque, but certainly floor-filling.
Produced by hip-hop guru Dr. Dre, "Family Affair" is the track that turned Mary J Blige from hip-hop icon into a popstar without costing her the support and esteem of fans and fellow artists, several of whom would go on to follow in her footsteps. Blige's influence as the perfect crossbreed of pop and hip-hop proves fundamental for a quartet that started out as just another girl-band but became the number one name in urban music: Destiny's Child. "Survivor" and "Independent Woman Pt. 1" are among the decade's best-selling singles, and effectively redefine the image of women in pop: from romantic lolita to sexy queen, a strong and self-assured street goddess, for whom flaunted sensuality becomes an actual lifestyle (just think of the lyrics of "Bootylicious"). But Destiny's Child are really just a pretext to skilfully launch, after numerous line-up changes and forced reunions (although "Lose My Breath", again produced by trusty Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins, still had some spark left), the solo career of Beyoncé, destined to become the most successful popstar of the decade, powered by irresistible tracks like "Crazy In Love" and "Single Ladies" (behind the desk this time is The-Dream, a producer on the rise after the success of Rihanna's "Umbrella") and by her marriage to the (extremely wealthy) rapper and Def Jam Records boss, Jay Z.
If Beyoncé is the scene's leading female name, the leading male one is without doubt Timbaland, paradoxically not a singer, not a cover-star, but the producer who defined the coordinates of the urban sound, between pulsing technological beats and bhangra influences, becoming its most sought-after name, the go-to guy for a "guaranteed hit". From his early, acclaimed successes with Missy Elliott, always in the name of sonic extravagance but growing steadily less hip-hop, and Aaliyah (whose promising career would be cut short only by her untimely death), to his multi-million-dollar productions for Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado (his commercial peaks), all the way to unexpected super-collaborations with Bjork, Duran Duran, Madonna and Chris Cornell, Timbaland would come to play the same role Nile Rodgers had held in the 80s, dominating the scene while forever teetering on the edge of media overexposure.
There's another group that helped spread and develop the genre, namely Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo's Neptunes (whose "live transposition" takes the form of N*E*R*D), who emerged in the 90s but rose to prominence at the dawn of the following decade thanks to their spare beats, funky echoes, crossover instincts, and collaborations with artists with major mainstream pull: the supremely sensual Kelis, the charismatic Gwen Stefani on the run from No Doubt, Spears and Timberlake themselves, both in need of a more adult look far removed from their teen image, and finally a rapper, Snoop Dogg, curious to try his hand at pop. Their golden run at the top of the charts lasted perhaps less long than Timbaland's, but the Neptunes name still guarantees quality (within the urban field), and production requests keep pouring in regardless (Common, Madonna and Shakira).
What will urban become in the near future? Convinced that Rihanna is just a B-list Beyoncé, we turn our gaze instead to a charismatic former producer who has recently stepped into the spotlight: Kanye West. Singles like "Flashing Lights" and "Heartless" (from his latest masterpiece album, "808's & Heartbreak") go beyond the conventions of hip-hop, fusing urban for the first time with dance and European synths, effectively legitimizing the use of autotune (the vocal-tuning device used in production, responsible for the famous "robotic" vocal effect heard in nearly every urban song).
If the defining trait of the decade is the crisis of the record industry, brought on by a sheer collapse in sales, the most surprising statistic isn't the rise in legal downloads (predictable, and in any case insufficient to offset the losses) but rather the revival of the vinyl format. Vinyl sales have in fact climbed steadily in recent years, reaching an incredible +50% in 2009, topping a million copies sold in the US alone. For the oldest recording format in the world, it's a huge comeback.
But why this phenomenon? Absurdly enough, it may well be the already-mentioned mp3 player itself that caused it. Vinyl is the exact opposite of the mp3. Where one is tiny, portable, easy to get hold of and effortless to listen to, the other is bulky, delicate, hard to play and absolutely not portable. The truth is that while the mp3 dethroned the CD thanks to its greater flexibility and portability, it never managed to fill a crucial void in the listener's heart: the void of the fetish, the product, the physical object. An mp3 is nothing but a string of zeros and ones, but vinyl is far more than a piece of plastic: it's a design object that carries the whole history of music with it. Who, holding the vinyl of their favourite album, can resist picking it up, if only to admire the cover art? Sadly for the CD, that little square symbol behind the clear plastic never did justice to the artwork, which is an integral part of the album as a product (not to mention inner sleeves, photos, lyrics, gatefold sleeves, picture discs and so on...).
Granted, it's hard to find a music lover today without an mp3 player, but vinyl is the perfect complement to it: it's the ideal object to satisfy both a need for sound quality and, above all, an emotional void. Beyond these factors, there's a third one that vinyl junkies tend to hide out of pride: not only is vinyl cool, it's also rare, it's also exclusive. To play it you need to buy the right equipment, it costs more than a CD, it takes up space and time — in short, listening to vinyl isn't for everyone. Owning it, then, lets you feel a bit special, a bit cooler than everyone else, a bit more of a music lover than everyone else. The best-selling vinyl of the decade is Radiohead's "In Rainbows", and now there isn't a band around that doesn't also release its new album on 33 rpm. The fetish for the black disc, however snobbish it might look to some, also reflects the value certain people place on the music they listen to. Not monetary value, but quality time. In a world of file-sharing, mp3 blogs, iPods, hard drives crammed with mp3s we've never actually listened to, musical bulimia and disposable fast-food singles, vinyl remains firmly anchored to its concentric grooves.
When you listen to it, you have to watch over it like a child. It forces you to concentrate on the music, to flip the side after twenty minutes. The ritual of spinning, the hiss of the needle on the platter, isn't a mere affectation — it's still a deeply symbolic gesture, a reminder that music can indeed be flexible, portable and background noise, but can also be powerful enough on its own to fill a room, and a whole mind.
Weird means bizarre, unusual, off-kilter; free, of course, means free, in the sense of reckless and informal. It's clear these are more like directives than actual genres or styles, and over the course of the 2000s they were applied to almost every form (idiomatic or otherwise) of music at large, but above all to whatever was already born "different" and flawed. Broadly folk-based material (to be understood in a very wide sense) was probably the most heavily plundered by the new music of the decade, which nonetheless drew, more or less openly, on past experiences: the more ethnically-inflected strains of psychedelia (Third Ear Band above all), the darkest and most esoteric folk (see a little-known band like Comus, who suddenly become essential listening, but also, more tangentially, the esoteric folk of Current 93 and Death in June) and the inescapable kraut Germany of the '70s.
So long reiterations of acoustic moaning, loose electric expansions in the background, ecstatic flowing vocals, slowed-down tribal rhythms, floating electronic seasoning and similar delights are the main ingredients of early-millennium "free-folk", variously enriched with other elements: from the heavy doses of blues moods and jazz deconstructions of Jackie-O' Motherfucker to the ritualistic shadows of No Neck Blues Band, all the way to the lysergic desolation of pioneers Charalambides, the unsettling phantasmagoria of Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice, the diluted, rustic psych-rock of Matt Valentine, the explosion of colour and unchecked madness of Sunburned Hand Of The Man, not to mention the great return to the fingerpicking of John Fahey's Takoma school (from the orthodoxy of the late Jack Rose to the mystical-psychedelic explorations of Six Organs of Admittance) and the Finnish galaxy split between refined acoustic-minimalist embroidery (Islaja, Es, Kejo...) and aberrant ultra-freak japes (Kemiälliset Ystävät, Paavoharju, Tomutonttu...), with the odd dark maximalist deviation (Avarus). From these shores it's then an easy step to drone-music tout-court, albeit tinged with an irregular, improvisational approach, more (Skaters) or less (Double Leopards) primitivist, historically harking back to the work of English underground collectives of the '90s such as Skullflower and Vibracathedral Orchestra (but also American acts like Pelt).
We deliberately left out, among the forerunners, experiences of absolute otherness from the '80s such as Sun City Girls and Caroliner Rainbow, as well as the records from the seminal Nurse With Wound List, since their work, although often rooted in ethno-folk, is better suited to defining the aesthetic traits of the "weird" or "wyrd" label, largely overlapping with what we've called "merda music". The pursuit of programmatic strangeness (also, and preferably, translatable into raw slabs of glittering ethnic pop, see the work of the Sublime Frequencies label) becomes gospel, and inevitably means digging up marginal, forgotten experiences from the past (see the catalogues of labels like Locust, Qbico, Ultra Eczema, De Stijl, Psf, Paradigm, but also Trunk's library music or the more serious Alga Marghen — see under Anton Bruhin — right up to the comeback of unlikely figureheads like Dredd Foole and Michael Yonkers, not to mention countless free-jazz oddballs).
From the rehabilitation/exhumation of these bygone experiences a virus was born in America capable of spawning true "monsters" like the utterly deranged impro-freak junk heap of Fat Worm Of Error (and Chris Cooper's projects in general), the progressive degradation of the female "moan wave" canon (the dream-pop velvet of Grouper, the psychic wreckage of Circuit des Yeux, but also the lo-fi goth rebirth of Zola Jesus), the Californian redefinition of psychedelic perdition (the re-visionary epic of Not Not Fun & similar productions) or the worst festering sores of midwest-noise, starting with the labels and side projects of Wolf Eyes members through to the localist productions on Tasty Soil (free-form noise), Brokenresearch (avant-impro) or Night People (tapes of assorted psych-noise alchemy). In truth, though, it's an internationalism that moves easily from Finland to the Belgium of the already-mentioned Ultra Eczema, to the Britain of the historic Chocolate Monk (but today also Attic and Golden Lab) and the mailorder outfit Volcanic Tongue, all the way to New Zealand, Australia, France and even Mexico, not forgetting the Italy of acts like 8mm, Palustre, etc.
By the end of the decade, the experiences that perhaps most lucidly sum up the many audacious sonic explorations of the recent past can be traced (we'll venture to say) to the work of bands like Volcano The Bear and Peeesseye, acts that boast a stylistic evolution that's unique, self-aware and irreducible to any "school" whatsoever, steering steadily through choppy seas of assorted musical recklessness, with their course set on a destination that's thankfully hard to pin down in advance.
In 2005, three twenty-somethings created a site where anyone can upload a video and put it online, sharing it with the world via a simple link. Within a few months they become the biggest video-hosting site in the world. A year later Google buys the company, and they become millionaires. Good for them, but, thinking about it, they're not the only ones to get rich. YouTube will become an indispensable tool for both artists and listeners alike. In just 5 years, most musicians have their own YouTube channel with official videos, and thousands of emerging bands upload video clips to YouTube that they could never afford to air on television.
YouTube, moreover, integrates perfectly with the decade's other major invention (for music), Myspace. This revolutionary thing, streaming, establishes itself as the primary vehicle for promoting music, effectively turning YouTube into an on-demand radio station.
But YouTube's gift to music fans is even greater than that. With its worldwide user base, YouTube becomes a vast (and free) archive of bootlegs of every kind: from Anna Oxa's performance at Sanremo '78 to John Cage's one and only Italian performance, via that Roxy Music clip that, if you were lucky, aired once on VideoMusic at 2 in the morning. Thanks to contributions from fans all over the world, YouTube is currently the most powerful music search engine around, despite its copyright issues.
Naturally, YouTube is also yet another way to trade mp3s, as shown by the hundreds of related little programs like YouTube Downloader or YouTube Podcaster, but the path YouTube suggests isn't that of downloading, but rather of online streaming. Now that broadband is widespread everywhere, more than a few people, watching YouTube's success, think this is the future of music. It's no coincidence that only after the YouTube phenomenon did the most sophisticated and successful web radios emerge, like Last.fm and Pandora, not to mention sites like StreamDrag, which runs entirely on YouTube's musical resources.
Sure, YouTube's massive success comes from the fact that people care more about watching a video online whenever they feel like it, rather than owning it on a shelf or on a hard drive. Some argue that, when it comes to music, this kind of detachment isn't quite so easy (that "someone" is called Apple Corporation, and it makes millions selling for 99 cents the very same song that's available for free in streaming on YouTube). Sure enough, if we ever end up consuming music via streaming in the future, it will once again be YouTube's fault/doing.
Z, because we've reached the end, both of the decade in question and of our ABC. A decade that began quietly, with no apparent novelties: everything seemed to be rehashing the styles and trends of the previous years. That's how it looked with post-rock, which was mutating into something else with Mogwai, GYBE!, Explosions In The Sky, but without drawing too much attention. Nor were the first stirrings of indietronica easily distinguishable from the usual IDM abstraction, or the post-punk spleen revival from yet another metamorphosis of alt-rock. In the mainstream, meanwhile, grunge's heirs kept dominating, and the new wave of teen idols like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera didn't seem all that far removed from the old one. And while some were starting to picture the "consequences of the internet's spread" on the music world, few had any real idea of what those would be, beyond science fiction.
And yet here we are, reading (or writing) this piece while doing things that were utterly impossible ten years ago. We listen to a song playing in the background via streaming, we wander through blogs hunting for the most obscure Azerbaijani delights, we check online for the low-cost flight to Primavera Sound. These past ten years have changed the face of music. And not only because of technology and its impact on musical techniques: the dominant moods have shifted too. The Nineties mix of decadence and joie de vivre, swagger and calculation, has given way, depending on the scene, to a renewed intimism, a dandy-pimp-king-of-the-street aesthetic, a cult of ultrakitsch, of the crude, the clumsy, of the most inscrutable spiritual depths... and so on and so forth, because the Noughties were made up of "scenes" that lasted all of two days and niches with a single listener: it's unthinkable to sum up such a jumble in a measly little list.
Or in the twenty-three entries of this "enriched" ABC. A device born out of playfulness, deliberately fragmentary, unbalanced, incomplete (there's no Coldplay! And I'll say more: until the very last minute, there wasn't even a Z). A device we hope will entertain you, first and foremost, and help you retrace (rediscover?) ten years that were as chaotic as they come, but at least as thrilling.
Contributors: Alberto Asquini (G), Marco Bercella (N), Alessandro Biancalana (G), Mattia Braida (D), Simone Coacci (A), Andrea De Franco (P), Claudio Fabretti (O), Stefano Fiori (U), Nicola Minucci (H, T), Lorenzo Righetto (F, Q), Veronica Rosi (B, E, U, V, Y), Federico Savini (M, W), Marco Sgrignoli (C, I, L, R, S, Z).
Cover image by Gabriele Brombin.
Ride the wave of great music
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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by VARIOUS ARTISTS, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Discography
A - Anticon/Abstract hip hop
Aesop Rock - Float (2000)
Clouddead – Clouddead (2001)
Prefuse 73 - Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives (2001)
Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein (2001)
Antipop Consortium - Arrhythmia (2002)
Alias - The Other Side Of The Looking Glass (2002)
Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues (2003)
Subtle - A New White (2003)
El-P - Fantastic Damage (2003)
The Weather – The Weather (2003)
Sole - Selling Live Water (2003)
Sixtoo - Chewing On Glass & Other Miracles Cure (2004)
Busdriver - Cosmic Cleavage (2004)
Dälek - Absence (2004)
Why? - Elephant Eyelash (2005)
D - Dubstep
Aa. Vv. - Dubstep Allstars vol. 1-6
Aa. Vv. - Soundboy's Gravestone Gets Desecrated by Vandals (2008)
Aa. Vv. - Soundboy's Punishment (2007)
Aa. Vv. - 5: Five Years of Hyperdub (2009)
Ammunition and Blackdown Presents: The Roots of El-B (2009)
Boxcutter - Oneiric (2006)
Burial - Burial (2006)
Burial - Untrue (2007) 
Flying Lotus - Los Angeles (2008)
Joker - Kapsize (12" 2007)
Kode9 and the Spaceape - Memories of the Future (2006)
Skream - Skream! (2006)
Skream/Benga - The Judgement (12" 2003)
Shackleton - Three EPs (2009)
Vex'd - Degenerate (2005)
Virus Syndicate - The Work Related Illness (2005)
E - Electroclash
Vive La Fête - Nuit Blanche (2003)
Fisherspooner - #1 (2001)
ADULT. - Resuscitation (2001)
Ladytron - 604 (2001)
Goldfrapp - Black Cherry (2003)
Alter Ego - Transphormer (2004)
Felix Da Housecat - Devin Dazzle & The Neon Fever (2004)
My Robot Friend - Hot Action! (2004)
Miss Kittin & The Hacker - Intimités EP (1999)
Vive La Fête - 10 Ans De Fête - Best Of (2008)
F - Folksingers
Andrew Bird – The Mysterious Production Of Eggs (2005)
Bonnie "Prince" Billy – The Letting Go (2006)
Current 93 – Black Ships Ate The Sky (2006)
Bright Eyes – Fevers And Mirrors (2000)
Espers – Espers (2004)
Imaad Wasif – Imaad Wasif (2006)
M Ward – Transfiguration Of Vincent (2003)
Marissa Nadler – The Saga Of Mayflower May (2005)
Matt Elliott – Drinking Songs (2005)
Micah P. Hinson – Micah P. Hinson And The Gospel Of Progress (2004)
The Mountain Goats – Tallahassee (2002)
Noah And The Whale – The First Days Of Spring (2009)
Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy (2005)
Sharron Kraus – The Fox's Wedding (2008)
Shearwater – Rook (2008)
Songs:Ohia – Didn't It Rain (2002)
The Tallest Man On Earth – Shallow Grave (2008)
Video:
Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (live)
Iron And Wine – Naked As We Came
The Leisure Society – A Matter Of Time (live)
Owen – The Sad Waltzes Of Pietro Crespi
Sun Kill Moon – Lost Verses (live)
Vic Chestnutt – I Flirted With You All My Life
G - Glitch
Fennesz – Endless Summer (2001)
Alva Noto – Transform (2001)
Notwist – Neon Golden (2002)
Mum – Finally We Are No One (2002)
The Books – The Lemon Of Pink (2003)
Matmos – The Civil War (2003)
Takamasa & Noriko – 28 (2005)
Keiichiro Shibuya – Atak000 (2005)
Piana - Ephemeral (2005)
Mitchell Akiyama - Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep (2005)
Gutevolk – Twinkle (2005)
Tunng - Comments Of The Inner Chorus (2006)
SND – Atavism (2009)
H - House
Ten albums not to be missed:
Daft Punk – Discovery (2001)
Derrick L. Carter – Squaredancing in a Roundhouse (2002)
Dubtribe Sound System – Baggage (2003)
Quentin Harris – No Politics (2006)
Armand Van Helden – Ghettoblaster (2007)
Dennis Ferrer – The World As I See It (2007)
Timmy Regisford – Africa Calling (2007)
DJ Sprinkles – Midtown 120 Blues (2008)
Robert Owens – Night-Time Stories (2008)
Johnny Dangerous – Problem #13 (2009)
And then go ahead and tell me no great house compilations came out this decade:
AA.VV. – Can You Jack? Chicago Acid & Experimental House 1985-1995 (2005)
Alan Braxe – The Upper Cuts (2005)
Armando – Trax Classix (2005)
Basement Boys – Anthology (2006)
Farley "Jackmaster" Funk – Trax Classix (2005)
Frankie Knuckles – Frankie Knuckles Presents His Greatest Hits From Trax (2004)
Global Communication – 76:14 Reissue + CD Bonus (2005)
Kerri Chandler – The Kerri Chandler Collection (2008)
Masters At Work – The Tenth Anniversary Collection Part One 1990-1995 (2000)
Todd Terry – The Todd Terry Trilogy: Past, Present & Future (2005)
I - Italy
"Alternative":
Roy Paci & Aretuska - Tuttapposto (2003)
CapaRezza - Habemus Capa (2006)
Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio - Sona (2006)
Indie.it:
Mariposa - Portobello Illusioni (2000)
Perturbazione - In circolo (2002)
Amari - Gamera (2003)
Baustelle - La moda del lento (2003)
Maisie - Morte a 33 giri (2005)
Offlaga disco pax - Socialismo tascabile (2005)
Insidious sounds:
Zu - Igneo (2002)
La quiete - La fine non è la fine (2004)
Ephel Duath - Pain necessary to know (2005)
Å - Å (2006)
Morkobot - MoStRo (2006)
Giuseppe Ielasi - Aix (2009)
Beats:
Jolly music - Jolly Bar (2000)
Raiders of the lost arp - 4 (2004)
Touane - Figura (2007)
Dusty kid - A raver's diary (2009)
+ Bonus:
Vinicio Capossela - Canzoni a manovella (2000)
Port-Royal - Flares (2004)
Ardecore - Ardecore (2005)
Ianva - Disobbedisco! (2006)
Yugen - Labirinto d'acqua (2006)
Uochi Toki - Libro audio (2009)
N - New new wave
Rock waves:
Interpol – Turn On The Bright Lights (2001)
Strokes – Is This It? (2001)
Ratpure – Echoes (2003)
Arcade Fire – Funeral (2004)
Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand (2004)
Two Lone Swordsmen - From The Double Gone Chapel (2004)
Bloc Party – Silent Alarm (2005)
White Lies – To Lose My Life (2009)
Synth waves:
Ladytron – 604 (2001)
Zoot Woman – Living In A Magazine (2001)
Lcd Soundsystem – Lcd Soundsystem (2005)
Royksopp – The Understanding (2005)
Junior Boys – So This Is Goodbye (2006)
Hot Chip – The Warning (2006)
Late Of The Pier - Fantasy Black Channel (2008)
Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours (2008)
Art waves:
El Guapo – Super System (2001)
Xiu Xiu – Knife Play (2002)
Liars - They Were Wrong So We Drowned (2004)
P - Post-metal
Boris - Flood (2000)
Converge - Jane Doe (2001)
Maudlin of the Well - Leaving Your Body Map (2001)
Tool - Lateralus (2001)
Today Is the Day - Sadness Will Prevail (2002)
Kayo Dot - Choirs of the Eye (2003)
Khanate - Things Viral (2003)
Pelican - Australasia (2003)
Isis - Panopticon (2004)
Orthrelm - OV (2005)
Battle of Mice - A Day of Nights (2006)
Jesu - Silver EP (2006)
Minsk - The Ritual Fires of Abandonment (2007)
John Zorn - Six Litanies for Heliogabalus (2007)
Sunn O))) - Monoliths & Dimensions (2009)
Back in time:
Earth - Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version (1993)
Neurosis - Through Silver in Blood (1996)
Today Is the Day - Temple of the Morning Star (1997)
Painkiller - Collected Works (1998)
Botch - We Are the Romans (1999)
The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity (1999)
Q - Quebec
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven (2000)
Broken Social Scene – You Forgot It In People (2002)
Arcade Fire – Funeral (2004)
Great Lake Swimmers – Bodies And Minds (2005)
The New Pornographers – Twin Cinema (2005)
Destroyer – Destroyer's Rubies (2006)
Sunset Rubdown – Dragonslayer (2009)
Woodpigeon – Treasure Library Canada (2009)
Video:
Destroyer - Bay Of Pigs
Islands – Swans (Life After Death)
Wolf Parade – Modern World
Great Lake Swimmers – Let's Trade Skins (live)
The Rural Alberta Advantage – Edmonton (Radio Session)
T - Techno
What we're talking about:
DJ Rolando – Jaguar (2000)
Thomas Brinkmann – Klick (2000)
Plastikman – Closer (2003)
Ricardo Villalobos – Alcachofa (2003)
Cobblestone Jazz – 23 Seconds (2007)
The Field – From Here We Go Sublime (2007)
Lindström – Where You Go I Go Too (2008)
Gus Gus – 24/7 (2009)
Omar S – Fabric 45 (2009)
Shackleton – Three EPs (2009)
Back To The Future:
AA.VV. – Cabinet Classics (1994-1998) & Cabinet Unreleased Classics (1994-2005) (2006)
Basic Channel – BCD-2 (2008)
Carl Craig – Sessions (2008)
Derrick May – Innovator (1997, reissued in 2008)
Galaxy 2 Galaxy – A Hi-Tech Jazz Compilation (2005)
Hell – Größenwahn 1992-2005 (2005)
Juan Atkins – 20 Years Metroplex: 1985-2005 (2005)
LTJ Bukem – Producer 01 (2000)
Robert Hood – Minimal Nation (1994, reissued in 2009)
X-102 – Rediscovers The Rings Of Saturn (2008)
U - Urban
Recommended tracks:
Destiny's Chils - Bootylicious (2001)
Aaliyah - We Need A Resolution (2001)
Missy Elliott - One Minute Man (2001)
Britney Spears - Boys (2002)
Justin Timberlake - Senorita (2002)
Kelis - Milkshake (2003)
Snoop Dogg - Drop It Like It's Hot (2004)
N.E.R.D. - She Wants To Move (2004)
Gwen Stefani - Hollaback Girl (2004)
Nelly Furtado - Maneater (2006)
Justin Timberlake - Lovestoned (2006)
Rihanna - Umbrella (2007)
Madonna - 4 Minutes (2008)
Beyonce - Single Ladies (2008)
Kanye West - Heartless (2008)
Latest features
original design & development by
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
redesign by
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta