Electronica "triumphs" in TV commercials and as interstitial music, 1999

ELECTRONICA GOES STRAIGHT TO UBIQUITY

New York Times, June 6th, 1999

by Simon Reynolds

The usual trajectory for  a new form of pop music is a journey from underground sound  to mainstream omnipresence, followed by ignominious banalization as the style filters into television commercials and background music. That's what happened with grunge--in 1991, after a decade brewing in the indie-rock margins, the sound exploded into the pop charts with bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Within a year, grunge's fuzzed-up guitars were soundtracking TV commercials like the Subaru Impresa advertisement  that featured a scruffy  slacker hailing  the car as "just like punk rock."

Two years ago, electronica--a media and record industry buzzword

for a disparate array of  electronic dance music genres--was hyped as the new grunge. Despite the success of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, it never quite became the next big thing. Instead, electronica has done something unprecedented--it's skipped the pop hegemony stage and gone straight from underground noise to ubiquitous mood music. Radio and MTV generally shun electronica, but you can hear its clattery beats and screeching synth-riffs in countless TV commercials for products as non-subcultural as Mastercard, BMW, Call AT&T, LA Looks hairgel, Smint breath-fresheners, Skechers sneakers, GMC Sonoma, and even the US Army. You can hear it in TV trailers for Hollywood movies or used to get the viewer's pulse racing on the Bravo channel and programs like ABC News.

Sounds associated with an underground subculture and linked to the recreational use of  drugs like Ecstasy and LSD are diffusing into the mainstream of American life in the form of "quotidian music"--a term some cultural studies academics use to describe music that you hear but don't consciously listen to. All of which begs the question: if advertising agencies and their clients aren't worried about alienating their target audience with this abrasively unfamiliar and weirdly abstract music, why are radio and MTV so nervous about programming electronica?

 If your only window to the pop world was TV commercials, you might think

Fatboy Slim is as big as the Beatles. In the real world, this English DJ/producer's sleeper album You've Come A Long Way, Baby has finally edged into the Billboard Top Forty after a seven month long, agonisingly slow build. But in TV-land,  Fatboy Slim--real name, Norman Cook--is King. Six tracks from You've Come A Long Way and two from  its predecessor Better Living Through Chemistry are featured in TV commercials for brand names like Nike Air Jordan, Surge, Adidas, and Oldsmobile, or in TV trailers for Hollywood movies like Cruel Intentions, Office Space, and

Ten Things I Hate About You. The song "Gangster Tripping" appears on the soundtrack of Go, while "The Rockafeller Skank" was the backdrop for a crucial scene in the

smash hit She's All That. New commercials featuring Fatboy music seem

to be airing every week--a recent addition is the Gap.Kids ad that uses Norman Cook's

remix of Cornershop's "Brimful of Asha".



        

It's hard to think of  another musician who's so relatively unknown and yet so sonically ubiquitous. In addition, countless commercials imitate the Fatboy Slim sound, a blend of uptempo hip hop breakbeats and squelchy techno riffs that Mr. Cook pioneered alongside The Chemical Brothers. Sometimes the imitators are actual artists whose music has been licensed,  like The Crystal Method (whose single "Busy Child" was used in a Gap commercial over a year ago). And sometimes the Fatboy soundalike tracks are commissioned from companies that specialise in composing  for
commercials.

 Hired to rejuvenate the public image of Oldsmobile, the agency Leo Burnett procured an original slice of electronica from the music house Ash Spencer to use in its spot for the Allero car. But the agency secured the rights to use Fatboy Slim's "Right Here, Right Now" for its Superbowl commercials promoting the entire Oldsmobile line

Compared with many other styles of electronica, big beat is relatively accessible--it's peppy,  crammed with hooks, and its riffs often have a rock'n'roll feel. But you can hear full-on underground rave sounds in TV commercials too--the twisting, convulsive rhythms of jungle, the futuristic burbles of acid techno. One of the most sonically adventurous spots of  recent months is the Philips recordable CD player commercial created  by the agency Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer. The spot is set in a rave environment, with clubbers dancing to formulaic techno, until an individualist called Leon  plays his own music (U.K. dance producer

Talvin Singh's hybrid of jungle and Indian bhangra) and does a weird-but-graceful dance, which the crowd immediately imitates.

Commercials like the Philips CD player spot show that, despite its

failure to conquer the mainstream, electronica has won an ideological victory. The youth of America may actually be moshing to funk-metal bands like Korn or dancing to ska and swing revivalists, but rave culture has somehow managed to establish itself as

*the* signifier of "youth today".  Yet electronica in commercials is less a generational marker like hip hop and grunge were in their day, and more a reflection of the tastes of the advertising industry, which contains a high quotient of hipsters and is largely based in cities where club culture has a strong presence, such as New York, Los Angeles, and London. "In the advertising world, creative teams are afforded a tremendous amount of leeway," says "So the music ideas tend to come from the ground up."

There are also technical reasons why electronica is increasingly the creative director's first choice. "The pacing of ads today is so frantic that techno works really well with it",  says Anthony Vagnoni, editor-at-large of trade mag Advertising Age. "The composited images, saturated colors, bizarre camera angles, and scrolling of text down the screen--that kind of imagery overload lends itself to a futuristic music treatment like electronica."  Modern dance music works for video editors

for precisely the same reason it works for DJs--the tracks are designed for cut and mix. "The density of rhythmic activity and the highly nuanced sonic layers provide wonderful cut-points for video editors," says Rick Lyon, a composer who's scored commercials for some of America's major agencies. .

Although Sixties and Seventies classic rock and Nineties alternative are still used in commercials, electronica has advantages over rock. It's energetic  yet usually devoid of  the distracting sonic foreground of a lead singer. "If you compare a band like Korn with Fatboy Slim, both are very  youth-orientated," says Robert Kaplan, the Messner music supervisor responsible for the Philips CD-player commercial. "But Korn comes with a lot of  baggage -- it's very angry, sonically, vocally and lyrically. Whereas Fatboy Slim doesn't stand for anything." In this view, it's the meaningless-ness of dance music (or at least, the absence of an overt meaning intentionally inserted by its creator) that lends itself to background usages of all kinds.

      
Yet for radio and MTV, it's precisely this impersonality--the absence of a charismatic persona--that makes electronica tracks problematic. "Modern rock" radio stations have generally found that only the most rock-flavored electronic tracks--those featuring song-like structures or vocal hooks--seem to prosper. Listeners connect with a voice and a lyric. In 1997, MTV was briefly enthused by electronica's "next big thing" candidacy--the channel programed videos by The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Orbital and Underworld, and started Amp, a late night show dedicated to more experimental electronic music. But last year MTV abruptly ceased its flirtation with techno. Today, electronica videos are almost never played, while Amp has been relegated to a graveyard slot on Sunday nights between 2-AM and 4-AM.    MTV's reluctance to play electronica videos is offset by the channel's paradoxical partiality for using techno, drum 'n' bass, and big beat in the background, as the soundtrack to docu-drama soap operas like Road Rules and The Real World, and as "interstitital music"--the sonic element of the  graphically bold interludes and animated logos that act as punctuation between shows. 

Is this use of electronica as aural wallpaper by MTV and other channels like Bravo contributing to the banalisation of this once alien music? Maybe. Are advertisers expropriating and debasing an underground sound that matters deeply to its cult audience? For sure. But it's also possible that by subliminally infiltrating this music into people's living rooms and lives, and in the process familiarizing listeners to strange new timbres and rhythmic idioms, advertisers are actually preparing the ground for a future pop breakthrough of electronic music. In the mean time, the commercials are helping to sell the music as well as the intended products. "I get listeners phoning in and saying 'can you play the song in that Volkswagen commercial?'", says Aaron Axelson, music director of San Francisco's electronica-friendly modern rock station KITS. So in addition to the fee that the group in question--The Orb--were paid for the use of their track "Little Fluffy Clouds" in the TV spot, the band can thank Volkswagen for some extra sales. Maybe the commercial-ization of electronica isn't such a bad thing after all.....

DANCE MUSIC OVERLOAD:  Sonicnet column #1 

Sonicnet, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

There's a  record store in downtown Manhattan that always strikes me as some kind of metaphor for the state of dance music. The store is choked with vinyl, chock-a-block. The wall-racks are so densely layered with 12 inch singles, the records overlap so  you can only see a narrow strip of each sleeve's right side---the artist name and track titles are concealed,  you can't just scan the walls to find what you want, you have to peer up close at the price label, where the store has helpfully printed the information in tiny type. The record bins are so tightly crammed you can barely extract the discs from their sections, sleeves are torn and vinyl scuffed. Underneath the shelves, there's an overflow of back stock extending so far out into the aisles that customers have to put a foot up on top of the vinyl sprawl just to get near the bins or the listening decks. And at every deck, there's a tense-looking, sweaty kid in headphones with a fat stack of new tunes, skipping through the tracks with the stylus and trying to make judgement calls based on four seconds of intro/four seconds of groove/four seconds of breakdown, all in the desperate attempt to keep up with dance culture's Niagaran torrent of product.

This record  store is just about the only one  left in New York that still tries to stock every kind of

dance-floor oriented music, all the myriad subgenres of house, techno, trance, drum and bass, and breakbeat. (Its one concession to sanity: skimping on experimental electronica and CDs). Others Manhattan stores have narrowed their focus to just hard techno, or just deep house, or just jungle. But precisely because of  this particular store's  valiant attempt to encompass all the tributaries of the post-rave delta, it's getting harder to use the place, so overcrowded is it with records and customers trying to get at them. And that's where the metaphor bit comes in, because this mirrors the increasingly challenging nature of  attempting to navigate the electronic dance music universe, with its bewildering profusion of styles and its hyper-productivity.

Ten years ago, when rave first started to take off in North America, it was still physically possible to monitor the best output of every subgenre--a full time job, sure, but do-able if you were dedicated and determined. There weren't that many scenes to check, after all--everything was under the umbrella of house music back then, even techno. Today, it would take  all your time and energy to stay on top of  drum & bass, or minimal techno,  or garage, or any single genre---such is the high turnover of releases,  the vast number of independent labels and self-released records. This double whammy of stylistic splintering combined with ever-increasing volume of releases is the reason why people increasingly get on a  narrowcast track and become obsessed with just one kind of  music. Take trance, for instance.  Until a few years ago I'd always thought it was a homogenous and basically unified genre, but  all of sudden, that same Manhattan store  had an entire wall of trance divided up into a myriad micro-genres. Then I met this English psychedelic trance DJ and, curious whether she checked out stuff outside the psy-trance ghetto, asked what she thought of  hardtrance warrior Commander Tom, progressive trance god Paul Oakenfold, and others. She just looked blank.  Clearly, to be on top of your shit as a psy-trance DJ, you have to have tunnel vision focus.

Diagnosing the dance vinyl glut, it's tempting to bandy around phrases like "cultural overproduction" or "excess of access." But it's not like the do-it-yourself boom  is generating mountains of mediocrity that are snowcapped with one percent brilliance. No, the problem is there's too much good stuff out there-- well-made, intelligently conceived, tastefully executed, and pretty deserving of your attention. The same cheap music-making technology that causes the do-it-yourself phenomenon to  keep on mushrooming  is also allowing people to make studio-quality records at home.  An unexpected side effect of all this abundance, though, is a sort of optical illusion--the landmark records don't stand out so starkly against the plains of lameness. It also means it's harder for producers to make money, with average sales of a good (i.e. not a huge anthem) 12 inch in most genres hovering between 1000 and 2000 (and that's globally). Many producers only make tracks to boost their profile as DJs (which is where you can actually make some dough).

               

As  demanding as it is for consumers faced with dance music overload, there's no turning back the clock -- the DIY genie is out of the bottle.  Ultimately, do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself, both as  ideal  and as practice, has been fantastic for music. It just means that you have to abandon the notion of keeping tabs on all the good stuff from across the genrescape, accept that you're going to miss great records. One aspect of the DJ's job--and almost a justification for the fat fees these guys charge-- is their processing function: sifting through the pretty-decent stuff and finding the nuggets of genius, stringing the pearls together as a stellar set or slamming mix-CD. Well, that's how it's supposed to work anyway.

Meanwhile, the last time I went to that store, the over-stuffed-racks were almost falling of the walls. I'm waiting to read about the first record retail catastrophe: Aspiring Disc Jockey Crushed By Vinyl. 

[inspired by this oral history of Liquid Sky, NYC techno record store / rave-wear boutique, and sudden fit of nostalgia for the dance record stores I frequented in the 90s and early 2000s - Breakbeat Science, Sonic Groove, Satellite, and one on 14th between 3rd and 2nd whose name escapes me (Drop?).

The scene was so healthy that it could afford to specialise and fragment - there was even on dedicated just to psychedelic trance, run by a couple of Israeli expatriates

What was interesting to me about these stores was that they were cultural hubs - not just places to buy music, but to pick up flyers for raves and clubs, to buy clothing (especially early on most of the store also had a boutique section to ensure sufficient revenue stream), or just hang out. 

Satellite was the overcrowded store described in this piece - and funnily enough about a year after I wrote it, it moved to much larger premises further down Bowery, on the other side of Houston, where all the catering business equipment stores used to be. The new premises were dimly lit, roomy, great wide aisles, and lots and lots of turntables. Clearly the owners had realised it was at the point of utter dsyfunction in the old poky premises. Unfortunately the bottom fell out of the dance vinyl business, and they had closed down by the mid-2000s. But not before winning an "award" from Village Voice -

• 2001 Best Electronic Music Store With a Really High Volume of Patrons Wearing Phat Pants and Baseball Caps and Wielding Glo-Sticks - 2001

]

BoC

Boards of Canada

The Campfire Headphase

Warp Records

The Observer Music Monthly, September 17th 2005


by Simon Reynolds

Reach a certain age and you notice a peculiar thing happening: your thoughts frequently get interrupted by nonsequitur memory images, seemingly insignificant but disconcertingly vivid. It’s as if your overstuffed brain is calling up ancient files with a view to deleting for space. Boards of Canada offers a more benign version of this temps perdu recovery process. Somehow the Scottish duo’s signature sounds--those glistening melody-trails and misty-around-the-edges textures--trigger buried memories. I’d almost say that listening to Boards of Canada is a form of therapy, except that the emotions stirred up are too plangent--painful beauty, sweet sorrow--to deserve a term that now has such glib feel-good associations.

BoC have ploughed this “memory-work” terrain on their previous two albums, the home-listening electronica landmark Music Has A Right To Children (1998) and its only-slightly-less-fabulous sequel Geogaddi (2002). The Campfire Headphase pursues the same effect but with slightly different means. For the first time the group have incorporated acoustic and electric instruments, like guitars, alongside their customary array of vintage analog synths and digital samples. So they’re no longer making electronic music but an unclassifiable hybrid. Occasionally the new hues don’t seem as idiosyncratic as their patented faded-Super8-film synth tones, but then again, there’s a thin line between developing your own vocabulary and coining your own set of clichés, and we should probably applaud BoC's attempt to extend their palette. If the gorgeous mind-ripples of “Satellite Anthem” and the dewy-eyed dreamwalk of “’84 Pontiac Dream” represent classic BoC almost to the point of redundancy, “Dayvan Cowboy” steps off the group’s beaten path. The track risks bombast with its stirring strings and crashing cymbal rolls (which dazzle the ear, as if the sticks are splashing into a pool of mercury) but stays just the right side of overblown. 

Blurring the boundaries between rock and techno is a smart move,  because BoC have always made music that deserved to appeal beyond the electronic audience. You can imagine fans of My Bloody Valentine/Cocteau Twins-style dreampop falling head over heels for Headphase, or devotees of the Cure and Radiohead wallowing into its exquisitely textured melancholy. BoC can also be seen as heirs to the psychedelic tradition, grandchildren of Syd Barrett and the Incredible String Band. The connection comes through not just in the duo's obsession with childhood or their frankly goofy song titles, but also in the stereophonic delirium of their production. On the “Oscar See Through Red Eye” and “Slow This Bird,” sounds pan back and forth across the speakers, the drift and swirl making you melt into a voluptuous disorientation. 

Boards Of Canada

Geogaddi

(Warp)

Uncut, 2002

by Simon Reynolds

There's long been a strain of electronic music that's not fixated on the future but obsessed with the past--specifically, childhood.  You can hear it in the naive melodic refrains and spangly-tingly music-box/ice-cream van chimes of early Aphex and Mouse On Mars, or, more recently, on  recent albums by Fennesz, Tagaki Masakatsu, and Nobukazu Takemura, with their evocations of endless summer and bucolic bliss. Boards of Canada didn't invent this "idyllictronica" genre but they definitely codified it on their 1998 debut Music Has the Right To Children--from its title and  cover imagery of faded family holiday snaps to its quaint synth-tones (redolent of the perky-yet-wistful electronic interludes heard between mid-morning TV For Schools programmes). Even the group's name is a reference to the Canadian educational films they saw in secondary school.

"In A Beautiful Place Out In The Country"---the title track of the EP  they released in 2000 as a stop-gap stop for their devoted cult until the long-awaited second album--featured children's laughter and a rapturously  vocoderized entreaty to the listener:  "join a religious community and live out in a beautiful place out in the country."  Yet the music made by duo Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison--who actually live in a kind of artist's commune in the  unspoilt wilds of Scotland--isn't actually that idyllic: at least, not in a pure unalloyed way. There's something unnerving, at times downright creepy,  about BOC's ability to unlock the listener's memories.

There's been times when I've had something close to out-of-body experiences while listening to BOC, carried away by an involuntary flood of images that are emotionally neutral yet charged with significance. A sort of mysticism of the mundane and municipal: reveries of concrete walkways and playgrounds with fresh rain on the swings, allotments and spinneys, canal-side recreation areas wreathed with morning fog, housing estates with identical backgardens and young mums pegging wet windflapped sheets on the clothing lines, clouds skidding across a cold blue winter sky. I'm never sure if these my own buried early childhood memories from the late Sixties, or just false memories--either dreamed or absorbed from 1970s episodes of Play For Today.  Sometiems an even more uncanny possibility suggests itself: what I'm seeing on the screen of my mind's eye are actually other people's memories, as if BOC could somehow tune into the memories of complete strangers the way Scanner samples mobile phone conversations.

Arriving almost four years after the debut, Geogaddi is basically more of the same only more so. The artwork offers kaleidoscope images of rosy-cheeked seven year old girls, and the teetering-off-pitch synths sound even more like washed-out Super-8 films. The only really new aspects this time round are the increased intricacy of the production (some of the tracks are so densely infolded they're like mille-feuille pastry) and a more pronounced fondness for the human voice. This can range from clearly decipherable soundbites (like the snippets of nature documentary voice-over on "Dandelion") to drastically treated vocals (on "Gyroscope", the sample's so distorted and compressed it's like the little girl trapped inside the TV in Poltergeist)  to vocoder-like FX (the ecstatic android plainsong on "Music Is Math"). There's even shades of  White Beatles in "a is to B as b is to c"'s collage of  shortwave and backwards-run vocals.

Ironically, the best stuff here--shatteringly poignant tracks like "1969", "The Beach At Redpoint", "Sunshine Recorder"--is  BOC sticking to their exquisite formula: crumbly smudges of textures and miasmic melody-lines  drifting like memory-gas over breakbeat rhythms that are like slowed-down jungle (processed to sound ultra-tactile, but stoically trudging like a elderly shire horse).  Geogaddi's few departures sometimes stray into gnarly Autechre-like abstruseness. Successful steps outside their own norm include  "Julie and Candy" (which  sounds like Loveless if Kevin Shields had tried to achieve the sound in his head armed only with a recorder and a toy piano) and "Alpha and Omega" (which recalls Holger Czukay's "Persian Love' with its Indian flute-motif, tinny ripples of tabla, and shortwave noises). Another unusual track is "The Devil Is In The Details," which sonically embodies the title with its ominous micro-sonic intricacies and hallucinatory texural vividness:  crinkly percussion possibly sampled from spashing water, a vocal noise like a muezzin miaouw, and a foreboding synth-motif I can only describe as "glinky".

Then again, the idea of development and progress may be not just irrelevant to Boards of Canada but somehow dissonant with their very essence. Recalling Proust and Nabokov's doomed project of retrieving "lost time", BOC's seem obsessed with uncovering "the past inside the present" (a sample on "Music Is Math"). As troubling as it is therapeutic, the music of Boards of Canada  seems to reach back into your own prehistory and part the mists of time. Somewhere inside that fog of frayed and faded memory lurks a beautiful and terrible secret.