The pioneering d.i.y. electronics band Crash Course In Science once penned a catchy little ditty entitled “It Costs To Be Austere.” Whatever the band originally meant by this, the phrase does have an especially poignant resonance for those following the culture of electronic music, particularly as it has literally oscillated between extremes of minimalism and maximalism with a dizzying velocity. Within that culture, the “cost” incurred by the public fatigue with an aesthetics of minimalism has become noticeable in some very visible and audible ways. Generally, it should not be too surprising that minimal presentation would be countered, in many sectors of the arts, by an opposite cultural reaction: humans are infinitely restless and prone to rapid alterations in taste and lifestyle choices. In this case, though, a minimalist approach both owed its staying power to an argument that it was the “authentic” mode of production and presentation, and then again lost this grip on the imagination when an oversaturated electronic music scene demanded a different flavor of transitory authenticity. The resurgence of the modular analog synthesizer, for all else it entails, is an illustration of the the shape-shifting, and ultimately futile nature of ideals of authenticity.
First, a brief review of some recent history. By the late 1990s, accessibility to electronic music production and performance was greatly increased when laptop / notebook computers like the Apple G3 PowerBook gained enough processing power to stably run entire multi-tracking audio suites like Cubase VST, along with a host of tools for real-time audio manipulation. Such equipment also granted immediate opportunities for musical ideas to be sketched out and refined away from the confines of a home studio. As such, these devices would eventually come to prominence as the “lead” instrument in a number of electronic music sub-genres (especially on the more experimental margins). However, having noted all these positive developments, performers seemed to intuit from the beginning that a less engaged audience, irritated by the lack of ability to map a performer’s actions onto an audible result, was going to be the trade-off for an unequivocal breakthrough in the realm of practicality.
Audiences already familiar with performances involving a stark minimum of visual information (e.g. Samuel Beckett’s stage plays such as Not I or Krapp’s Last Tape) likely took no issue with these developments. But such viewers are in the minority, and there was always the nagging suspicion among non-specialists and for seekers after Dionysian intensity that “the performer [was] just checking his email while the music plays by itself,”[i] while there also exists some downright hilarious documentation of audience frustration with this opacity: to this end, I recommend tracking down a piece of audio vérité credited to the laptop-centric group Farmers’ Manual and titled “03.fm+3*anon.-sheffield-mic-1 98”[ii], wherein we can hear a bewildered, surreptitiously mic’ed audience member blurting “are they plugged in” and laughably commanding the FM trio to “make us sweat”. Maybe more indicative of the split between “laptopians” and those longing for something different is the following from synthesizer godfather Robert Moog:
On my products, [a waveform] is created by an actual electronic circuit, but you can also get it by counting tables of numbers. But if you ask the musicians who play the Minimoog Voyager, they’ll tell you about the feel you get from playing a real instrument. It’s an all-analog sound source, but with digital control for the areas where it’s needed, like adding memory capabilities. You just don’t get that kind of attachment to a laptop.”[iii]
As often happens when authenticity is the primary goal of a creative undertaking, the solution to these problems involved a re-assessment of a now idealized past. In this case, it meant returning to some of the original building blocks of electronic music synthesis: modular analog synthesizers. As the name implies, these are instruments in which each utility (e.g. low-frequency oscillators, envelopes, filters) is contained within its own module or electronic circuit, and these distinct components are joined together with “patch” connections in order to arrive at the final sonic output. Over time, the musical instrument business would eventually respond to market demand for fewer and fewer analog synthesizers to require this manual patching, and instead have internal connections already made, along with an intuitive controller (i.e. a piano-style keyboard) that would not perplex novices in the same way as a control interface wholly comprised of laboratory-style knobs and sliders. Nevertheless, these keyboard synthesizers continued to be modeled after a more or less standardized method of shaping and routing audio, and (though still idealized in their “vintage” variants) had already lost a good deal of the mystique that came with an instrument that beckoned to its users with promises of unparalleled agency and sonic distinction.
I will confess, as the owner of a smattering of modules, that the modular rig does make good on at least some of these promises: it provides nearly endless variations in tone color and sonic output, and holds out the possibility that innovatively customizing and reconfiguring individual modules will contribute to a unique authorial voice for the user (though countless guides on the subject counsel that, ultimately, and correctly, “the user’s imagination and originality are what will set him or her apart from other synthesizer users”)[iv]. They are great fun, potentially therapeutic, and encourage counter-intuitive solutions to problems along with the constructive alteration of one’s holistic approach to other aspects of quotidian existence. For these reasons, the modular can be rightfully, sincerely admired as an advancement in creative technology. However, it is also a sort of fulcrum point for claims about authenticity within musical subculture, and one that lays bare a few of the irreconcilable contradictions within the hardcore “idealized authenticity” stance (along with the ultimate pointlessness of the same).
The modular rig’s assumption of having a superior purchase on “reality,” via its increased tactility and increased independence of action granted to its users, neatly ticks one of the main boxes of this familiar moral code, along with the dictate that devices’ functional failings are to be interpreted as spiritual advantages: for example, enthusiasts will often mention how factors such as fluctuation in temperature will cause the oscillators in these machines to drift out of tune, or how their analog circuitry otherwise offers a degree of resistance to standardization even when such would be desirable. “Fighting with” the equipment and being frustrated with it is posited as a benefit, making this process one more illustration of the authentic-ist creed laid out by Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet: “We know little, but that we must hold fast to what is difficult is a certainty that will never forsake us […] that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it.”[v] For most users these inconveniences are just an acceptable trade-off in exchange for the benefits already described, for the authenticity-centered thinker they are the proof of something more profound and eternally resonating (i.e. these thinkers’ advanced ability to discern and dictate the best possible version of reality).
At this point we need to set the time machine controls for the heart of the 1970s, as we can find an amusing and glaring irony in the music culture of the time. You see, it was once the very unwieldy nature of the modular rig that emblematized the values of a former “inauthentic” culture, namely that of the Progressive Rock combos castigated for their overwrought pomposity, technicality and impossible high cost of entry, which presentation clashed with that of the “authentic,” organically devised, do-it-yourself culture of punk rock. There are few images that show a clearer contrast between the two cultures than that of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s synthesizer overlord Keith Emerson lording over a bewildering spray of patch cables shooting forth from huge menacing bays of knobs, all the while waving around a customized ribbon controller like some sort of magic weapon. It was, the punks would have argued, a bloated, excessive feature-ism used more to dominate than to communicate, and paradoxically the punks’ emphasis on a more economical form of communication ended up, in their reckoning, making their output more powerful. Contrary to some incomplete re-tellings of this cultural battle, though, the punk / d.i.y. factions never disdained so-called “electronics” outright, rather they tended towards tools more in keeping with the practicalities of a less-is-more ideal, like the compact Korg MS-20 monophonic synthesizer.
The 21st-century reassessment of the modular rig as something organic and communal rather than exclusive and domineering is telling, as it highlights the temporal limits of distinct visions of authenticity. “Ideals”, if they are worth maintaining at all, should not be as easily mutable as this and should have a remarkable resilience in the face of changing circumstances. If one has a problem with, say, denying access to the global majority who cannot afford to fashion a setup from boutique synthesizer modules each costing $500 or more (a price for which an increasing number of respectable keyboard synthesizers can be bought), this indignation should not be so easily rationalized away by the discovery of a newer authentic mode of expression.
There are also reasons to be skeptical that a return to feature-ism will do anything to solve the problems of communication already noted above; i.e. that it will really do anything more than provide another way for the ideal of authenticity to manifest itself. For one, I am doubtful that the “communal” aspect of live electronic music presentation has been exponentially improved: the amount of visual feedback that audiences receive has increased somewhat, but not shockingly so, since the time that countless artists have transitioned from a laptop-based performance to one dominated by modular synthesizers. I’ve played concerts using both small modular arrangements and the hated “laptop-and-a-mixer” setup, and in both situations have been insulted or asked when the “music was going to start” by scoffing midwits who surely thought they were the first to come up with such a lethal zinger. In the context of the high-energy rock performances which music performers seemingly aspire to, theatrical gestures are still expected to emphasize emotional shifts in the sonic output, and audiences for such performances had already been chuckling for decades about the comparatively static appearance of keyboard players that seemed to be (recalling another favorite put-down overheard at a show) “working at a deli counter.” While this is not true 100% of the time, an instrument with the complexity of a large modular system requires that the user focus on relatively small control adjustments rather than theatrical gestures: without these controls being in clear sight of the audience (or even in cases where they are fully visible), there is still a good degree of opacity as to what on-stage activity is producing what sound, so this “problem” remains unresolved.
For those who argue that the modular analog system permits its users to reclaim a feeling of “agency” via the act of deciding what specific modules they need in ‘x’ configuration to achieve ‘y’ result, and then either collecting them together or building them from scratch, there are ways to reclaim that agency and combine that with the sort of authenticity conferred on an user for having a “minimal” presentation. Applications approximating modular synthesis such as Audulus and Audio Mulch have existed for years now on all portable computing devices, and at a fraction of the price: given a certain degree of mathematical acumen and/or coding skill, there are even some free options (e.g. Miller Puckette’s PureData visual programming language). Can it be that the modular-minded creator who ports all of this functionality onto a small digital device is doubly authentic for acting in the psychologically independent, do-it-yourself manner while also refusing the inauthenticity of needless visual ornamentation and feature-ist theatrics? Such arguments can of course be made, but the existence of such arguments, and the waste of resources involved in formulating decisive and universally convincing “pro” and “con” positions, must again prompt us to ask whether this debate is truly valuable for the advancement of creativity, or merely useful for the hierarchical formation and maintenance of aesthetic elites.
If the “counter-minimalist” authenticity of the modular analog rig is indeed the projector of this aesthetic elite’s values, then – in this author’s humble, subjective opinion – we are going to need better elites. It has to just be admitted that modern “modular” music is no less prone to conformist and derivative variants than any other musical genre. It can be immediately identifiable as what it is, and in the end represents no more of a quantum leap in technical or aesthetic novelty than the overwhelming majority of similarly clichéd “computer music” with its disdained technical hermeticism and supposed disrespect for the audience-performer communion. Of course, being derivative is not in itself a sign of worthlessness, particularly as much meaningful but non-pioneering work is done untainted by the “anxiety of influence” or done in the spirit of the medieval craftsman (i.e. work is to be done for the love of it). Nevertheless, this situation is another unfortunate proof of the assertion that creative enterprises motivated primarily by authenticity lead not so much to an independent “true self” but rather to an emulation of some other tastemaker or socially manipulative entity. This becomes doubly poignant when considering the emphasis the ideal of authenticity places on achieving originality (again, something often achieved at the expense of quality, and without the realization that many so-called original innovations were simply unpleasant or incoherent actions discarded and left for someone else to claim as their own).
There are already plentiful murmurings about “analog fatigue” among electronic music enthusiasts, and every reason to believe that this will be discarded in due time for another transitory marker of idealized authenticity. Shoehorning this sort of belief into the creative and occasionally spiritual realm is, with this trend as any other, a dead end that will quickly accelerate the fatigue process among those who are not concerned with using creativity as a marker of advanced moral status. Better to simply ignore the appeals to the “true” way of doing things (along with related concepts of audio “fidelity”, etc.) and remain focused on the most genuinely transcendent aspects of art: in this case, the limitless communicative, expressive dynamic nature of sound itself.
[i] https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/serial-port-a-brief-history-of-laptop-music/.
[ii] Released 2003 on the OR label’s OR MD COMP. not since re-pressed.
[iii] Robert Moog in conversation with Mark Jenkins in Jenkins, M. (2007). Analog Synthesizers: understanding, Performing, Buying. Oxford / Burlington, MA: Focal Press.
[iv] Jenkins (2007).
[v] Rilke, R.M. (2011). Letters to a Young Poet & The Letter from the Young Worker. Trans. / Ed. Charlie Louth. London / New York: Penguin Classics.