Jwaffer's Grey Area

So, this blog’s first post appears in light of a discussion I was having with a friend this week about our approaches to composition.  We both trained as classical/western notated composers, but it is a training that I have significantly moved away from, toward beatmaking and a more abstracted pop practice.  I have as many issues with the world of classical contemporary composition as I have with the world of contemporary improvisation and other allegedly radical practices that position themselves as counter to what they perceive as more traditionalist/conservative music-making.  Classic FM is a particularly turgid bastion of self-satisfied conservative bullshit, but then so is Radio 3, which relegates the most left-field of its output (which is generally the more accessible pickings of “experimental” (yuk) practice ) to extremely late slots at night – novelty freak shows – but at least they have those shows.  In fact, Radio 3 could probably convince you that Nitin Sawhney was the vanguard of “experimental music”, but the problem is, he probably is, and I have a feeling that the people who own Sawhney records are the people who own the Nu-Jazz wankfunk of 4hero and Quantic Soul Orchestra, or the soul-sucking-deadness of the Gotan Project.  Of course what I’m really doing here is exposing my qualms with a certain brand of Guardian-reading London-centric middle-classness, where a need to appear to embrace or try and identify with the multiculturalism of the city is met by Sawhney and his cohorts who provide the appropriate stonewashed cultural signifiers in the form of this particular monstrosity, where we follow (yet another) pretty girl in a big red dress as she smugly fannies around affluent London neighbourhoods, singing a song so bland that my face melts off every time I hear it.  It is so fucking safe that it makes me consider slipping some hideous airborne poison into the air conditioning system at Waitrose.  But no, I wouldn’t do that, I like Waitrose.

Anyhow, aside from this, something that has been frustrating me recently (but which might be remedied by my friend Helen’s decision to make me a certain mixtape) is why young composers (of my generation, aged 20s-30s) continue write pieces of music that seem to serve as nostalgic artifacts, or as homages to, a high modernist aesthetic.  The most radical compositions I tend to encounter (particularly in universities and festivals) are pieces that loudly declare an open-endedness in certain passages; the incorporation of improvisatory elements, which of course, is something as old as notated composition itself, but tends to feel a little bit like a token gesture.  But that’s not really what bothers me, what bothers me is a strange, and continuing aspiration to a musical aesthetic (in notated music) that was dominant thirty years before most of us were born.  In a highly mediated western society, whereby quickening technological developments have heavily influenced aesthetic ones, I am always surprised that young people produce works such as these, and perhaps this is particularly because I feel I have been unable to ignore the huge influence of club and dance culture upon my listening histories, the pervasiveness of a groove, if even an unstable groove, of rhythm and repetition, of loops, of beats.  (Sorry, this is impressively scrappy…)  I always feel that there is a tendency toward a rather heavy-handed abstraction that betrays a very specific academic repression of the body, and even of joy.