/fa/ - Fashion

>>6306610
Every type of instrumental evokes a mood, or perhaps a time and place. This is especially apparent in a lot of sample-heavy instrumental hip hop. Specific beats are like compact caricatures of entire musical styles. Consider the Beastie Boys' "Flute Loop", and how the simple repeated arpeggio implies effortless cool by virtue of its sonic quality and the cultural symbols it evokes.
If music is a way of evoking moods and places, then techno refines this mentality to its logical zenith, twisting samples into inhuman shapes, exploring mental spaces that haven't been seen or realized yet while using sounds that have never been heard before. It's avant-garde in that sense, or at least it was. It really fell prey to its own repetition and the sad fact that a vision of the future is a static thing which rapidly accrues patina until it becomes absurd.
There's still a lot of great techno out there, but it's coming from a new wave of producers, and the introduction of computers and VST's has really changed the landscape. Whether or not it's for the better is open to debate. I personally believe there's still so much that we haven't done with those old machines.

For reference, "Flute Loop" by the Beastie Boys:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLFlW3UaQuU