I get a fair amount of questions from the students in my UEMP (Ultimate Electronic Music Production) course each year. Often these are questions about specific genres or production approaches or synths. This Fall, though, I got some bigger-picture ones, so why not share a couple of the answers here.

Q:  “Would it be possible to create another branch on the tree [of origins of electronic music] in our modern world of electronic music?”

A:  Technically and in theory everything is possible. Practically, quite difficult; it’s difficult to not be fundamentally influenced by what we already know. I believe a completely new, thick branch (directly growing out of the double-trunk of the Electronic Music Tree rooted in France and Germany) will / can only be grown by a non-musician artist, from another discipline, like painting, sculpture, dance or poetry. One could argue that Schaeffer, Stockhausen, etc. made significant progress thank to their not-purely-musical interests. The less someone is exposed to music, the more likely they won’t be influenced by the genres already out there (any existing “branches”), especially the 1950s-70s roots, and can think artistically but freely. The only time the origins of an entirely new direction in electronic music was not tied to the 70s and was a musical in its source (Jamaica), was Jungle (then Drum & Bass) in the early ’90s.  The unrelated components being in the right time and place and actually cross-influencing one another – such coincidental cultural collaborations are uncommon in today’s too-multinational world. Though, maybe we could still give a Model D and a zoom recorder to the indigenous tribes of the Amazon who live far away from modern civilizations, collaborate with them and see what comes out of it…

At the same time, a new smaller branch (a branch growing out of a large branch of the tree) might come from a musically-oriented (trained or not) person in a different musical environment (possibly not even electronic music). Again, the less they know about electronic music, the less likely they will be effected by what has existed before them, thus, the more likely they will create something uninfluenced by existing electronic music. Still, it’s likely that we will be able to trance the results back to one of the main trunks of the tree (i.e. GRM, BBC, JMJ, Kraftwek, Vangelis, Tomita, Eno, etc.).

Like I often say in the beginning of UEMP semesters: the technology to create something groundbreaking and original intentionally break has been in front of us, for many years. Powerful computers and more free plugins that one could explore in a lifetime are now in our pockets. Affordable technology to write the music of the future is reality, even for the average college student. But you have to fight the part of your DNA that always makes you create music similarly to the way you normally create and listen. Producing Musique concrète has the ability to take you very far from all that…  listen to your Musique concrète work a half year later and you might be surprised by what you had created. An inspiring point to start from.

Q: “If Kraftwerk hadn’t popped when they did, how does Julius believe things would have turned out, since he was exposed there?”
– and –
Q: If Kraftwerk never existed, where do you think electronic music would be today? Would it be at a previous point on the electronic music timeline or would it have gone in a completely different direction?

A: Well, I’m not that old to have been there… I was a small kid playing the piano in the 80s when Kraftwerk had been already around for a decade and well-known in Europe… so their influence on most everything-in-4/4 in electronic music was a done deal by then. But I’ll take a stab at hypothesizing about this fascinating proposition.

It is truly interesting to think about what would have happened to electronic music if Krafwerk’s Autobahn wouldn’t have received much attention, or hadn’t even been released… or if Ralf und Florian wouldn’t have met or even existed. Well, let’s break this down based on the components that Kraftwerk combined into a pioneering new direction in electronic music:

• The 4/4 time signature would have become popular in electronic music in some fashion anyway, since it was the middle ages’ 2/4 folk dance rhythms then the ’60s disco’s straightforward patterns that evolved into 4/4 dance-able rhythms – the point being dance-able – in other genres as well.
• Sequenced, quantized basslines and arps would have been sooner or later migrated from Jarre’s and Schultze’s kitchen to other, more rhythm-based genres. Kraftwerk was inspired by the persistent, “quantized” action of mechanical machines, but certainly not the only one who got inspiration from heavy industries.
• Vocoders were in use even before Kraftwerk, although without the band and its influence on others (e.g. YMO, Moroder), vocoders might have actually disappeared earlier.
• Minimalism in itself was around in painting, sculpture, architecture, film-making, etc. before the 1970s (let alone the concept of wabi-sabi from centuries before). Terry Riley was already active before Kraftwerk and other musical creators of the ’70s were also making very different type of music on minimalist principles (e.g. Brian Eno’s ambient).
• The idea of “robots” making music…  now this was a big one. It was big because this concept was able to connect the minimal aesthetic with most people, who were curious about the future. And when I say people, I mean nearly everyone – just think about all the major sci-fi movie franchises that originated in the 70s. Shortly after the Moon landing and with portable computers starting to appear, it was the perfect timing for everyone to entertain the idea “The Future is Now”.  Thank to people’s curiosity about robots and robot-like musicians, unlike “untouchable” high-artists and abstract minimalists, Kraftwerk was able to bring minimalism into the mainstream. This is the aspect without which I’m not sure if the band’s music would have had the same enormous influence on popular electronic music. And without that, the genres that later evolved (and still evolve) from Kraftwerk’s aesthetic (first and foremost techno and its derivatives) might exist only as minor, underground sub-genres these days.

Yellow Magic Orchestra was, self-admittedly, the Japanese version of the German robots. What if these gentle “robots” infused in jazz chords would have broken into the mainstream before Kraftwerk, and Dusseldorf would have only remained a national treasure?

I believe that without Kraftwerk, the precision and angular German-ness might be present only in a smaller proportion in electronic music. Four-on-the-floor wouldn’t automatically mean that it’s quantized kicks on downbeats, sequenced basslines wouldn’t be necessarily repeated as 1/8th or 1/16th notes or as octave-alternating straightforward sequences, bass lines wouldn’t predominantly have short decay and very short-release VCA envelopes – as they often do today. In other words, a higher proportion of electronic music would be less “tight”, and maybe more… …French.  Maybe softer, likely more textural, probably groovy and rhythmically varied yet easily dance-able genres would be the default “EDM”. That is, at least until 1990 and DnB in the U.K. and later in 2010 Skrillex bringing rhythm-based electronic music into the U.S. mainstream. (But wait, would DnB have been the same without the counter-culture role it had in Eurodance times? And, would Skrillex have made the same debut album in 2010 without the influence of Kraftwerk-and-techno on baby Sonny during the 1990s?  This is the paradox of synthception…  noone knows…  but likely, he’d be shredding metal today.)

In any case, while Germany’s influence was successfully pushed back in other areas during the 20th Century, they might have unknowingly won the long-term cultural influence on electronic music. (And Dusseldorf’s direction was relatable by many, far more than Berlin’s high art.) Their sharp character has influenced other areas as well; just think about cars. The passionate and adventurous Italians’ slogans are “Only those who dare, truly live – We are the Competition.” (Ferrari), and “Expect the Unexpected” (Lamborghini). Meanwhile, BMW’s slogan since WW2 has been “The Ultimate Driving Machine” (despite of this being a enormous lie). The automotive world could have been as graceful without the past 30 years’ German cars as the world of modern Japanese robots is without German robots in it.

I truly love the music of Kraftwerk and I’m glad that it got popular. Though looking at their influence today, maybe too popular?

An even more interesting conundrum is the role of counter-culture. Let’s say, if without Kraftwerk, electronic music would have evolved to be less quantized and less “raw” during the past 5 decades, would various types of non-electronic music have tried to counteract it less? With Disco Demolition Night never taking place, Afrika Bambaataa not having anything to steal, the Pet Shop Boys playing bass on bass guitar, and DJs having to know at least a little bit about harmonies, electronic music skeptics haters would have had to look for different targets… or just chill and make even more rock and pop. If a softer, more romantic form of electronic music had been the norm throughout the 1980s and ’90s, would have a different set of genres become more minimal, tight, quantized, aggressive by now? Or would we have reached the current aesthetic of block-y, rigid on/off notes in electronic music anyway, given the black-or-white binarity that’s already woven into so many areas of our overly-practical life today? This is as big of a philosophical question as you can expect to face when you hypothetically re-write the history of electronic music…  so I’d rather look for the answers from Nietzsche Descartes.

Did the covid pandemic help to produce more or better, fresher music?

Since the 2020 onset of the pandemic, I had to change aspects of my lifestyle and many plans — like most everyone else.  Although my 2020/21 music performances had to be canceled and I even moved my lectures online, I’ve had the opportunity to catch up on giving talks, interview and join panels during the past couple of years. The topics ranged from music production, sound synthesis, performance technology to the culture of music and sound, fan events, directions in film scoring and even representing my anti-AI principles at a prestigious audio panel for the Audio Engineering Society.

It’s great to talk at industry events and panels, but what I enjoy about “prosumer” audiences, up and coming music people, is their non-pretentious huger for knowledge and creatively interesting questions. A topic I spoke about for a small and intimate audience at the Silicon Valley Music Production Summit last year is a good example of how to avoid the same old formula questions and talk about some fresh ideas, uncensored by cultural expectations. Its high point was my compositional justification for considering a recent pop tune “better music” than one of Mozart’s well-known works.

Unlike the rest of the music-making community, I did not use the unexpectedly available home-bound time to “write a song a day”. I did not jump on fb/IG to offer music production workshops to the masses, even though, suddenly every other human with no real production experience became a “music producer” in 2020… Nor did I purchase production gear to upgrade my studio to “perfect my sound” during the downtime – apparently, everyone else did, as Sweetwater closed a year of record profits. I didn’t even finish my long-long due forgotten future: W2 album.

What I did instead was the opposite: I listened. let me explain.

“I had nothinig else to do under the lockdown, so I made tracks… lots of new tracks! I got many clicks so now I’m teaching other producers how to produce music… lots of it!”

Do we really need a few million new tracks every day?

It’s great that people now have very affordable tools to create music – the process should be certainly available for all to enjoy. But distributing all the “tracks” that most anyone now who knows how to use a computer can “produce” overnight, might not be what humanity needs. See, the problem is not the quantity, but the quality of the great majority of that huge quantity. Placing technology first and music second unsurprisingly results in very similar output from a diverse range of people, which usually lack authenticity and originality. I consider production mainly as packaging for musical ideas. Starting with the packaging (and even doing that mainly by copying the “experts” of packaging) will unlikely allow for injecting great content into the finished package after the fact. And, you know what tons of empty packaging is… trash. To me, this is a simple equation: quality and quantity are diametrically opposed concepts.

Lots of good music takes time

On top of the quantity issue, some things just take time; no pandemic can force us, at at least not directly, to be more productive at the same quality standards. I’m not questioning the production quality of a high-output “producer” (although with continuous production, dilution is bound to happen). Nor am I suggesting that good work has to take years. What I am suggesting is a balance between absorbing and expressing, like a good conversation. There must be some kind of emotional input in order for us to create an emotional output. The input can be a feeling, an event, a situation, whatever effects us. The output is what we express in our own voice, whether that be through music, painting or another art form. Processing too many emotions too quickly may simply not allow us to fully and deeply absorb them. Similarly, we can’t expect ourselves to create interesting content if we don’t have enough emotional input to begin with. Forcing this natural process of absorption-expression for the sake of higher productivity will inevitably produce more but shallower art.

I for sure would not be opposed to hearing fewer new releases but fresher, more original music. I well remember attending a platinum producers’ panel at a major audio convention. After talking about the old vs new in music production techniques for an hour, one of the more seasoned producers ended the panel with the rhetorical question: “But where is the music today!?”.

That was in 2012. Now, ten years later, the question is more relevant than ever.