I’ve been really stuck on this idea, ever since coming back from Renn Fayre, Reed College’s grand festival of assorted psychedelic insanity, of the “music of the future”… Cheesy as it may sound, this latest generation requires something that expresses the world they’ve grown up in.  The strange and psychotic music I heard at Reed College which I must assume is the sharpest of cutting edge… too hip for Greeners like me to have heard of, too hip to find on CD or on Amazon at all… but I bet if you looked around raves in Portland, you’d find it.  When it comes down to it, new scenes and styles must always begin with a small ‘incrowd’.

Styles of old became one…  mashup, psy-trance, IDM, dub.  Top 40 tracks were remixed into oblivion.  Techno songs now are even more buried under piles of automations than they were in the days of say, Simon Posford’s “Twisted” (under the “Hallucinogen” name).  The beats… heavy as hell, but often refreshingly far from a familiar 4 on the floor thump.  Autechre’s off time, staggering, drunken, asymmetrical beats have been digested by the public.  These beats no longer sound random to people.  They are now viewed as danceable, or will be in a couple years.  In a couple years they could be on MTV.  Maybe they already are.  From what I’ve recently seen / heard of the mainstream, they’re getting there.

It seems as if granular synthesis is on its way to ruling the world, too.  It certainly makes for grimy, grinding baselines.  Powerful for the same reason as a grinding, thick electric guitar tone ala Electric Wizard… all that’s left is a loud BUZZ.

After I left, it took a little while to adjust to the relative sanity and slow pace of the electronic music in my collection.  A few truly forward thinking albums stayed great…  Soisong’s  brand new “xAj3z” is still blowing me away, I’ll write about that one soon.  The aforementioned Hallucinogen disk, “Twisted”.  The Orb’s “U.F.Orb”.  I really feel now, though, how high the standards are, how great the things people are making out there right now truly are.  They’ll go on utilizing all the newest technology to make the trippiest, craziest things imaginable no matter what I’m doing.  We can be left behind, or not.