BY ALTUĞ KARAKURT (EE/II)
altug.karakurt@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Unfortunately, due to confusion in scheduling, I will have to postpone the Kadebostany concert review to the next column. In this column, I will review the recent Kiasmos concert in Istanbul and discuss the things that this concert made me think about.
Kiasmos is an Icelandic experimental techno/electronic music duo. This band is a side project for both members: modern-classical music pioneer Olafur Arnalds and electropop musician Janus Rasmussen. Unlike the majority of musicians working in their genre, Kiasmos makes progressive, minimalistic and atmospheric music. As a big fan of Arnalds’s solo albums and minimalist atmospheric music in general, this approach of theirs is what made the concert appealing to me.
When I arrived at the concert venue, I found that a Turkish band called Ah! Kosmos was opening for them. Their musical spectrum falls into an area close to that of Kiasmos. In fact, even the digital instruments the two bands used during their performances were quite similar, but there was nonetheless a huge difference between them, and that’s what I want to discuss here.
Ah! Kosmos consisted of a live visual artist, a guitarist and a multi-instrumentalist, who made pretty much all of the music. Unfortunately, I did not find their part of the concert very satisfying. First of all, the visual performance was really out of sync with the audio. Even though they had a person on stage who was responsible solely for that aspect of the production, the outcome was very unsatisfying. At the beginning of the concert, the song structures seemed progressive and interesting, but for some reason that I couldn’t determine, the sound was weak. Unfortunately, later on, the song structures started to repeat each other, and I realized that the compositions were very formulaic, with all following pretty much the same pattern. Layering slow bass beats, fast-paced, repetitive drum machine tracks, slow, reverbed guitar arpeggios and a couple of harmonized synthesizers on top of each other does not sound very creative after dozens of repetitions.
Afterwards, Kiasmos took the stage, and the moment they started playing, I realized what the problem with Ah! Kosmos was. Kiasmos’s sound was fantastic; all of the sound tracks were arranged in such a way that they were both distinctly audible and also harmonious and continuous as a whole. In addition, the sound levels of the various speakers were modified to obtain uniform audition throughout the venue. The sense of the spatial distances of the sound sources and the volume of the layers were successfully imposed on the recordings, which made the duo’s atmospheric music in fact a unified whole.
These thoughts led to a more general observation that I had been unconsciously developing for some time. Digital instruments are only tools, and not so different from non-digital instruments in terms of functionality. Without creative musical ideas or compositional skills, these tools are useless. However, as far as I have observed, there is a very common misunderstanding that computers or computer-based systems can make up for lack of musicianship and can make anything sound good. No matter how complex their internal components are, these devices are basic mediums that provide a set of audio signals for artists to use in order to express themselves. They unfortunately cannot create miracles without any interesting content to represent, regardless of the performer’s expertise in using them. Although the instruments seem to sound very clean and rich, synthesized music based on mediocre musical ideas actually sounds hollow and artificial.
Thus, proficiency in the utilization of these tools is not very different from proficiency in creating the instrumentation of a composition for non-digital instruments. Being good at using a digital music tool only makes someone a good performer of the digital compositions of others and is unrelated to the quality of that person’s songwriting skills. I want to emphasize this distinction, because only a few years ago, I was also confusing the two concepts. When I realized that I wasn’t really talented as a pianist or guitarist and that I also didn’t have sufficient background in music theory, I tried really hard to use digital tools to make up for my lack of skill and knowledge. These efforts ended up wasting a lot of time without resulting in any valuable end product. I realized that digital audio tools are very deceptive in terms of the difficulty of their use, and contrary to what is commonly thought, the artistic requirements for coming up with a meaningful and valuable product by means of digital tools aren’t any less stringent than for those for doing the same with non-digital instruments.
To wrap up this discussion, I would like to point out the two main conclusions that I arrived at. First of all, the tendency to dismiss computer-related music and value only music produced with non-digital instruments is quite common, especially in the metal music community. Here, I would like re-emphasize the fact that digital tools are not very different from other instruments. They do not generate music; they only provide a different medium in which to express creativity. I don’t think digitally produced music is any less “real,” or is artificial. Secondly, making music is an artistic process whose difficulty depends very little on the production environment. The choice of musical tools only determines the possible ways in which artists can express their ideas; the tools themselves do not really compensate for any artistic inadequacies.