idm vs. ambient

--Alban deCongee wrote:
"Whar in tarnation do this music come from, any dang how?"

You find a dusty jar on a shelf and think "What's in here?" So you open it (just because you can) and then...

While both are based in electronic sound manipulation and generation, and both are the direct descendants of the early musical experimentalists like LaMonte Young, Edgard Varese, John Cage, and so on, "IDM" and "Ambient" are antagonistic in many ways if you think about it. Very generally speaking for the sake of brevity; although tucked off together in the shady back of the garden, and having some common ancestry, they are completely different plants. IDM grows primarily directly out of the fragrant manure of the earliest and still continuing European folk traditions. It is easy to see that strong danceable rhythms then and now is the key ingredient. Ambient is grown primarily in the hothouse nourished by that blue crystalline product mixed with purified water which is the music of the fairly recent European Art Song and the Romantic style of Western Classical Music. Ambient music and its doppleganger "experimental" music are often informed by scholarly reference and literary aspirations, and usually rely on a high level of musical training, technique and theory - big-headed conceptual with no dancing allowed. IDM conversely, is often created with more universal intentions, is usually lacking the literary ambitions and conceptual artiness, and generally places less emphasis on theory. Ambient does not necessarily refer at all to continuing Western folk traditions or regular rhythms. IDM on the other hand, relies heavily on "danceable" rhythms and nearly always refers to aspects of "Pop", or widely-understood and shared mass-media culture to create meaning. Although of course there are blurred boundaries everywhere, and the rule is one of exception; these are the gross differences between two related but distinct musics. They shared some relatives (music has always had many potential fathers contributing seeds to its makeup) but they were raised by their mothers in different places in different circumstances. One went to work and was outgoing in nature, and the other went to school and is more introspective.

As an aside, and only slightly OT; perhaps no one in history has done more to bridge all these styles and schools of thought than George Martin, the classically trained producer of the Beatles from Sgt. Pepper on. He combined classical arrangement and instrumentation from the art song tradition with Pop music from the folk tradition and used electronic manipulation on the resulting melange to come up very fresh, popular and influential. Wasn't a pioneer in theory or technique, he wasn't the most beautiful of the angels, he was never more than workmanlike and unassuming, and he didn't sing in that lovely McCartney voice, but over time in his unobtrusive work, he has had the most impact. He, like Eno and a few others was in the right spot at the right time - at the converging point of different strains of aesthetic approaches. To paraphrase Dali: He provided the right kind of honey, for the right kind of fly, at exactly the right time.

And then there are the other earlier actual pioneers/theoreticians who are directly responsible for the music we enjoy today. Debussy, Satie, Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, Erwin Schulhoff, and many others. Without them we might all be rictus-grinning and line dancing to very loud bluegrass, seven-movement, two-hour polkas; and evolved Dixieland and Big Band would be the music of the criminal and labor class. (Hmmm, wait a minute! That sounds very close to what we actually have now, in spite of everything). I wonder though, when I "listen/think" to Webern or Schoenberg, if the world would have been better off with less intellect and more dancing... Or is the more conceptual music the necessary refuge inevitably created for those of us that lack the rhythm to dance and/or refuse to march?

European folk traditions - the vast boiling cauldron of "whatchagot stew" - a violent melange - is most of our cultural heritage - it is "who we are" yesterday and today. It is what we call popular culture or "Pop" - music, dance and costumes. Popular is a "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" sort of concept: Is it good-selling because its Popular? Or called Popular because it good-sellling? Is it widely distributed entertainment because its Popular? Or vice versa? Is it popular because the product is by, and for the common folk? Or vice versa?

Often popular music is what you might call "natural" music like blues or bluegrass. Oftentimes too, it is utilitarian like marching music, or it rises out of the religous/superstitious impulses that we all fall prey to en masse and results in chorale or gospel musics. It is the musics of the real lives of people.

Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) is mostly informed by elements common in pop music and secondarily by components common in art music. Simple as that. Pop a boil, end the infection, live to see another day! Or not? IDM at its best, reverses the ratio of pop and art. However when it goes too far, its no longer IDM! So it walks a fine line.

Ambient and experimental electronic, in contrast to pop and IDM, grows out of the music of the educated, elite, leisure class of Europe. These people were able to devote a good deal of time to education in music, pondering the warps and the wefts of sound, and to the gaudification of their musical fripperies. Idle hands... So we can call it "art music", as in "artificial" as opposed to natural or utilitarian or simple entertainment. It is unnatural and not useful and inhuman. It is the music of the spheres, and music of the abstract, and the ineffable, and the platitudes, obliqueness, and esoteric and obscure reference. And attractive as strychnine-cut heroin. You know the price, but you know you must have what it does...