NEW WORLD MUSIC

Hear what thou wilst shall be the law of a new music, free from the emotional pest of the unified corporate entertainment and the sociological dramatrauma, functional and without the cloudy brew of mercantile romance. Instead of the helpless singing of speechless singers in a calculated arrangement, an adventurespace on a simple, but effective structure: The "music lover's " hell is the active listener's heaven. Everybody creates his own song structure, a (constant) beat and acoustic fuel for the journey are given. (An ostensible diversification of entertainment produces a paradoxical bringing into line, monotony produces variety - listening to always the same, you end up listening to something different. This effect becomes apparent in experiments with the phenomena of "Wechselworte" as well. The wonderful world of the return as a flashback.

In 1963 Robert Moog presented his first synthesizer and ten years later the sound of these new instruments was heard all over the place. The fascination for the dehumanized poetry of machine music extended from pop music to classical avant-garde. Among the many musicians that at the time experimented with the new possibilities, a German Kraftwerk influenced the style of avant-garde techno-pop and established an opposite pole to the dominance of Anglo-American music production. Twenty years later the costs for electronic music productions had decreased to such an extent that everybody could afford it. The underground sound became more and more electronic and a wide scene participated in the discovery of new sound worlds, partly under the heading of "Industrial Music".
Synchronized analogous sound generators allow for complex modulations of wave forms like transposed bird voices. An adventure into sound space beyond the conventional notations of bars and points. Tonal or atonal - it makes no difference. (These instruments of the early times of electronic music are still in high esteem thirty years later.)
Ubiquitous personal computers facilitate a decentralized "sequencing unlimited" and the repetitively woven sound patterns announce the twilight of the gods of the classical song structure. Interlinked and digital sound modules controlled by microcomputers enable us to have a big orchestra on the tip of your fingers and the term "House Music" gets a new meaning. Soundsamplers are generally available and a culture of the Found Sound and the acoustic quotation, hardly within the limits of copyright, arise. What has to be said, has been said - so let us sample. So D-movie characters and charismatics, comic figures and native choirs, musical history and acoustic trash come together in-house searching for the perfect beat. All sounds of the world are waiting to be digitized. Orchestras, signals, media-output, animal voices or tape-voice-research - it's just a soundbyte!

(How many LP's have been published where only one turn was worth listening to. Give me a break! If only a short sequence of intensity was achieved, why the rest? )
Smart pioneers fixed the pick-up arm, scratched the records or snipped the tapes. Everybody samples everybody and the partly self-referential complex matrix of in- and outputs is the sight of living chaos. Beats, breaks and sound-effects race around the globe in the free data exchange of the urban/ industrial zones and melt the musical impulses of this planet into a intercultural " World Music". The borderlines between "black" and "white" music, folk and avant-garde, serious and entertainment start to dissolve. Global production "made to fade" - the trancenational hypermix.

Sampling united in the global village dataflow and intercontinental re-sampling create fractal patterns of songs in songs. Just like a self-devouring centipede made from round slices of black plastic, a global song is developing with conservative persistence and a virtually alchemical ecclecticism (solve et coagula corpus solis), a worldwide and simultaneous celebration of a beat without beginning or end. The acoustic space is expanded to the subbass and the overtones, the "audible" range is stretched to inaudibility. The percussive sixteenth notes and the basskick seem like a traveler's guide to the private traffic of the inner world and the message is yourself. The message is so simple that the political relevance is overlooked: Enjoy yourself!

To say, this is fleeing from reality is naive, which reality are we speaking of anyway? (Immaterial tourism ecologywise is certainly much less harmful than normal holidays.) Impulse yourself, beats per minute! A society of endogene doublebind-depression, exposed to science, art, sports, publicity and politics cannot do justice to time at any time. Forget the concepts of advanced culture and subculture, of underground and state opera, here comes hyperculture!

New technologies cause movement - as sound and vision. New media and post-industrial data transfer are the means of subversive neurostimulation in the techno-shamanism of the global village underground. Cold war is over - here comes Code war! Data partisans and media pirates create autonomous zones in the information war and battle for the permanent redefinition of logoculture.
Signal Noise-Bodybeats and the "song of the brains" become virtual conference rooms of a laughing minority. Soundbyte hackers, cybernautes and digital televisionaries of the information age follow the red thread of practical utopias to the sound of a synthetic "New World Music". With the ideology-free radicality of an urban party in honor of the "deus ex machina" aesthetics burns down to synastethics.

That's entertainment.