Inspiring Sounds

I'm not sure why, but I've sort of abandoned the original purpose of this blog for more of a mix series style blog. Well I like to make mixes, and I'll continue to do so, but I'd like to get back to updating this blog with more spur of the moment thoughts, rants, and raves about newly discovered releases worth mentioning and so on.

With so much music out there and a constantly growing library, it's easy to come to these moments of bleh, as I like to call them. Times when everything just sounds uninspired, unoriginal, inauthentic...in other words: boring. Often it's more about my mindstate then it is about the state of music being made, but while I'm on that I would like to say some things about the music world these days.

Let's face it, the world is being flooded by music. Too much music. Most of it sucks. Sometimes an artist comes up with a sound that is unique and it's exciting for a short while....then everyone tries to copy that sound and live off the temporary success of this "new sound". The truth is, these days there is just so much music being made that no "new sound" can stay new for more than just a few weeks. Music technology makes it easy for beginners to duplicate the sound of their favorite new artists, and soon everything just sounds watered down, and completely removed from any sort of authentic creative meaning. So the revelation for me in all of this is to embrace with more caution the "new" and to focus more on the authentic.

I recently came to the discovery of an artist who has been around for quite a while now: Move D. I had heard the work he'd done with Benjamin Brunn called "Songs From The Beehive" a little while back, and while I enjoyed a few of the tracks at the time, I didn't really detect anything too special about it. The tracks were too long and repetitive to remain memorable individually, and yet the album as a whole was not cohesive enough to be a memorable listen from start to finish. That is what I thought of it at the time. I came back to Move D recently because I kept hearing the name from bloggers who I respect like those at mnml ssgs. So I youtubed him, and came across the massive amount of work he's done with Pete Namlook, another person whose work I've only been mildly impressed by. The youtube clip I heard was promising, I was instantly intrigued.

Now I've heard almost everything Move D / Namlook have released together, and I feel like they have really taken me out of a period of disinterested music listening. I'm looking forward to seeking out more of this sort of thoughtful ambient avant-techno/whateverthefuck sound. It reminds me of what Steve Roach might sound like if he grew up in the techno era instead of the hippy era. There are times when it gets kind of new-agey, and borders on corny, but it always seems to stay interesting through it all. It sounds familiar and strange at the same time. Last year they released "The Evolution Of Move D • Namlook", a CD that compresses all of their collaborations together into one continous mix. It's an excellent introduction to their work. Here is a sample of what they sound like together: