Corriente y raro

Wierd es un sello de Nueva York especializado en música ochentosa y oscura hecha por grupos de ahora que usan, atención, sólo sintetizadores analógicos. Aquí un fragmento del ensayo que acompañó su compilación de hace un par de años, The Analogue Synthesizer in 2008:

"the late 1970s gave rise to a number of affordable, buildable analogue signal generating devices/synthesizers which gave the user basic building blocks of sound. the amorphous flow of current coming from a wall socket is shaped, contoured, enveloped, and spun into a manifold matrix of tones, overtones, microtones, noises, modulations, rings, and pulses making the process itself apparent to the listener. the musician is directly in touch with this electric current, manipulating and interacting with this most elemental organic force. the frailty of these machines, the near-impossibility of ever creating the same sound twice, and the risk that at any moment everything may come undone reflects the inherent humanity that pilots them. an irony becomes apparent: that the very electric current which powers the abstracting technologies of our day also has the potential to defy abstraction. this potential is most elegantly realized with the analogue synthesizer

"as opposed to the mediated 'virtual ' relationship presented by the computer, the analogue synthesizer reintroduces the musician's direct one-to-one relationship with the tensile and acoustic properties of their instrument (the guitar's strings, the drummer's stretched skins, the torqued curves and lengths of the trumpet). it has its own physics and properties. with the basic source elements of sound assembly, it possesses a physical symmetry that allows one to touch and to direct it as if it were a vehicle. to add on and take away from, to process externally and to improvise, to affirm the continuing need for humanness, for the actual body and mind to continue existing in the world.

"below the surface of our seemingly post-everything present, a new form of resistance to the abstraction of human life and music has been building. in the past five years through small pockets of activity in the us and europe, the analogue synthesizer has come to function as a kind of folk instrument of humanist resistance to a virtual 'soft synth' world of 'click and drag' dematerialized abstraction."

The Wire los incluyó en un artículo especial sobre música hecha ahora que, de alguna manera, tiene su mirada puesta en el pasado (me pregunto si también incluirían a Ghostbox). Léelo aquí, parte 1 y parte 2.