The Crisis of Electronica

"Today electronic music is not merely uninteresting in itself; uninteresting and suspicious are the people who still continue to consider it worthy of attention. They inspire the same kind of concern as fans of techno-trance, black metal or flying saucers: they've been bewitched.
Long gone is the state of affairs where all decent musicians made electronic music, where only electronic music moved forward and developed, where only electronic music answered the spirit of the present day. Today, to make electronica means to accept your place as a narrow-minded defeatist accustomed to living in a ghetto.
It's noticeable that over the last year or two, talk about electronic music has petered out; musicians no longer have the energy to discuss or prove anything, to share some discoveries - say, to rejoice that they're still discovering 'previously unused sounds' for themselves or finding some new sources of inspiration (say, some obscure old Brazilian film music).
Electronica is made and released in silence. It seems that musicians are troubled only by the problem of getting their output published. And there's something naive about the desire to release music on prominent Western labels - as if that's the only way to bring the music to those who love and listen to it. In reality this sphere too is eaten away by inflation.
In the early '90s, when there were relatively few labels, for success it was enough to be noticed by some label; today, being noticed by some label means nothing at all. The label itself desperately wants someone to notice it.
In other words, releasing compact discs doesn't bring the music any closer to the listener at all; the label has to foist the recordings on the distributor, the distributor on the shop, and the shop on the buyer. That's why boxes of released compacts sit in various basements. One mustn't think there are some special, extremely progressive and cool consumers of electronic rhythms who are constantly short of them. It seems that listeners oriented solely toward electronica have barely survived; even names well known quite recently no longer arouse interest, and all the rest are simply ignored. That's why the musician ought to be interested not in how to release what he's already churned out, but rather in how to churn out something that will drop jaws. That is, the problem isn't in promotion, not in connections, not in famous names, not in how to fit into a system that barely functions... in general, this urge to fit into the scheme at all costs, to fall into line, to hit exactly the right sound, the right style, to make genuine fat hip-hop or true black or minimalist ethno-trance, to show that 'I'm just what you need!' - it's simply killing, I can't bear to watch it. The problem is something else - it's in the music, in how to break out of the circle of endlessly reproducing one and the same scheme.
But is that even possible?
Electronic music is a sphere of tastelessness and outright graphomania. Its place is not in fashionable clubs and not at futuristic festivals, but in museums of naive art. Part of the graphomaniac complex is the acute desire to immediately release one's output, but this acute desire isn't the most absurd and terrible thing in this complex.
Producing electronic music is like taking pictures with a point-and-shoot camera. Someone who's acquired a pocket camera hardly imagines that, if he snaps, say, little flowers in a park, he's already a landscape painter, an heir to Van Gogh and Bonnard, moving along a difficult path of creative development, 'discovering the new.' There's nothing to discuss here.
Not only should electronica not be released, but it would be better not to make it at all, and to generally stop making music, stop thinking that it's coming out well, that results can be achieved in it, that one can develop in it, 'find oneself' and so on. All of this is the self-justification of a graphomaniac.
In German there are two wonderful words that rarely surface in magazine music criticism, but constantly in conversations about music. These are überflüssig - excessive, superfluous, unnecessary, unjustified, that which one can perfectly well do without, whose existence in our world is in no way justified; and willkürlich - arbitrary, wilful, plucked out of thin air.
I don't have the courage to talk with a musician about how electronic music is a sphere of total graphomania, how it encourages graphomania and lives on graphomaniac energy. And what is there to say about it anyway?
One can try to talk about the boundaries that are invisibly present in the very method of making music on a personal computer. That is, about how computer programs, instead of giving the freedom and eternal bliss (which the graphomaniac dreams of), actually compel him to entirely predictable actions, driving him through a kind of tunnel: computer programs not only determine what kind of music will come out, but also shape the psychological type of the electronic musician.
To act as an expert on this range of questions, I asked the Cologne musician Felix Randomiz (F.X.Randomiz)".

What Andrei Gorokhov talked about with Felix, you'll find out in the next part of "The Crisis of Electronica." Stay tuned...