Horizon's 'Confinis'
Possibly the most out-there System Focus yet, this one looks at recently-emerged fandoms and the way they practice their fandom through music-making online (click here to read). It looks at Pokémon, Adventure Time, Minecraft, Homestuck and My Little Pony. There's some really unusual stuff in this one..
One of the major drivers of underground music culture is sincerity. The underground seeks musicians for whom making music is an art and a passion, rather than a performance or a get-rich-quick scheme. You might have heard a lot about 'The New Sincerity' or 'post-irony,' ideas dating back to the 1980s which have been applied to music with a notable level of (usually positive) emotion and innocent frankness. But the search for sincerity goes back as far as its perceived opposites in, say, industrial capitalism go—back to the Romantics and beyond. That's not to say that all underground music culture is sincere. Irony and satire are arguably stronger than ever as the underground re-engages with hi-tech modernity, shunning the ubiquitous, twee, and now almost empty sincerities of the indie aesthetic. But to find music today made from pure positive passion alone, try an online DIY music almost completely outside the remit of the hip underground sites: the music of fandom...
Fandom music, especially by the most popular musicians, is very well made. It doesn't tend towards the minimalism and primitivism in some areas of the underground, where too much effort and ability—especially on non-vintage equipment—can get a bit uncool. (But even when it isn't well made in the traditional sense, it's interesting for its surprising results.) In the same vein, fandom music tends to be complex—it often uses the best and broadest tools available to contemporary musicians, and likes to draw on many different instruments, harmonies and forms in the course of a song or album, rather than just deploying a few riffs or loops. And if variety itself can be a characteristic, it's definitely a characteristic of fandom music, which manifests in any and all genres, some which don't even seem to be genres. One of the most tangible qualities of fandom music, however, is linked to its sincerity—it explores a level of emotional or sentimental expression that more cynical listeners would consider kitsch...
Lethe Wept on Fortissimo Hall
The tracks by Pengosolvent
are quite unlike anything else—contemporary orchestral VGM squashed
imaginatively into a jovial, frenetic and slightly disturbing blur. Try
the crazy "Breaktime Over," the highly cute "Enamored Regard" (below), or the proper creepy ghost-type "Paved With Good Intentions" (belated happy Halloween)...
But with a game as rich as Minecraft, there's also music within
it too, and this is where things get really interesting. The game has
'note blocks,' which can be directed to play a certain pitch and change
timbre depending on what material they're on top of. There's also a form
of electrical wiring that can activate the blocks remotely (using a
switch) and in sequence, setting off the notes like a pack of dominoes.
Thus by placing several note blocks in the right configuration and
activating them through the wires, players can create music boxes that
can play certain tunes, even polyphonically. Here's a tutorial
on how it's done. To really get a polyphonic tune playing for its full
length, players have to create vast structures several stories high and
almost a kilometer in length, that witnesses can move around inside as
the music plays. Then they upload the videos to YouTube. This is music
and architecture as the very same thing...
The largest musical instruments in the virtual world
One of the most visually striking fandoms online is Homestuck,
an epic webcomic about some teens who inadvertently bring about the end
of the world, and then get involved with these bizarre troll-like beings
that are perfect to dress up as. But don't take it from me—there's a fan song to introduce you to it all... The weirdly great-looking official Homestuck Bandcamp page
compiles the soundtrack (made by fans) music and more, and it tends to
subtly evade genre, skipping through all kinds of sound worlds,
seemingly guided more by emotion (and whatever's going on with those
trolls) than form. I've been oddly mesmerized by Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year Older and the cosmically soppy Song of Skaia.
Artwork for 'Firefly Cloud' from Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year Older
The fandom has a hefty contingent of Bandcamp customers whose pony
avatars can be seen lining up on the pages of the most popular albums.
But the music only rarely reflects the child-like aesthetic of the show,
often bringing out the darker, more romantic connotations of characters
and its stories. Alongside sometimes Friedrich-like digital paintings
of the relevant ponies, pony musicians regularly put weighty, grand,
maximalist and very technically accomplished music.
There's punk rock, happy club sounds, ambient electronic, funky song-writing, hardcore, soft rock, epic orchestral, and metal. One of the most popular artists is Eurobeat Brony, who has three volumes of hyperactive 'Super Ponybeat.' Another is TAPS, who has an ear for glitchy vocal science deriving from samples of the show: ponies fractured and suspended in enormous spaces...
Feather's In My Mind
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