Because music is absolutley free of any stylistic contstraints now...

Plus the availability and affordbility of music technology nowadays allows even the "bedroom" composer to create with professional results.

And the ability to really, really create the soundscapes in your head with extreme resolution (48k, 96k, 192k!!!!!).

OK, first of all, I can see we're gonna need to hang a giant "De Gustibus" banner over the front door to this tribe right quick.

Right, then.

That out of the way, the next thing I have to say is: resolution schmesolution! there's still nothing in the digital domain that beats a nice spring reverb and some two-inch tape. The supposition that advanced technology improves the state of music is a dangerous lie told by guitar-store salesmen with "keyboard" neckties. I have seen the desk King Tubby mixed Augustus Pablo's "Rockers Uptown" on in person; it had four tracks, pots the size of your fist, and generally looked as if it had been hammered together by trolls rather than assembled by electrical engineers. Some of the best tracks I've heard lately were played on old 8-bit digital machinery. My point is that the tools aren't what make the music - music is what creative people make with the tools they have at hand.


I'm basically in agreement with dylan here, and I'll spell it out a step further: at any given moment, there's likely to be a great deal of crap music being put out, but also a certain amount of unarguably genius music - which is generally rarer and more difficult to find, but I think it's always going on somewhere. James Carr cutting Dan Penn's "Dark End of the Street" for Goldwax in 1966, Coltrane's "A Love Supreme, Minutemen "Double Nickles on the Dime", Autechre's "Amber". These and so many more are sort of unassailable moments of authenticity, originality, and sheer brilliance that simply can't be replaced or outdone.

When I appeared to embrace the statement "the best music ever made is coming out right now" I guess I took it in a different sense. I did not mean to suggest that music of today is necessarily *better* or more important than music of any earlier period - jeez, a quick sweep of the radio dial is all it takes to dispell that idea in a hurry. I understood it to mean something more like *some* of the best music ever made is coming right now. Put in this way, I mean it's almost tautological. As I said earlier, there's usually something important (or that will be important) going on somewhere, the tricky part is in uncovering it.

All that said, there does seem to me to be *something* more exciting going in the particular specialized realm of post-techno, ambient sorts of music in the last, say, two years, than had seemed to be happening since around 1998 or so before that. It seemed to me that from 98-02 there was a lot of fragmentation and experimentation - some of which was to the good, but most of which seemed to lack a clear direction or sense of purpose. And at this point, I'm not even saying that a single direction or purpose as such has returned to the stage exactly. But people don't sound as if they're thrashing about as much, struggling to find the groove. Acts like we've been talking about in this thread have got soul to spare.

This is all very difficult to express, but it's like the best acts right now have stopped fretting over fitting into this or that category, and are getting on with their own musical lives. People are beginning to find their own unique voices again, in this sort of leaderless and almost rudderless miriad microcultural landscape. They've gotten over the fetishizing of technological process as an end in itself, and the sounds of that period become just more material to sample, while its particular tools (the DSP and the glitch) are just another choice, among many available, one might take if necessary in order to *blow* more clearly and distinctly. I suppose I too am talking about melding the past with the present.

After having had a really hard time finding anything worth caring about in the whole "experimental electronica" bag, I mean I'm starting to get really *turned on* again by things I'm hearing. In that sense, the "best music ever" remark was just a neat bit of hyperbole for me to hang my enthusiasm on.