Manifesto for a new Formalism
Eighteen theses on making electronic (dance) music in 2024
For some reason I was feeling like starting off the new year with a manifesto. So here we are: eighteen theses on making electronic (dance) music in 2024. Some of these are prescriptive, some more questioning, others might feel slightly cryptic, but to me that's all part of the fun! If any of these seem preposterous to you, feel free to let me know, but also don't take them too seriously. These are just some thoughts that happened to jump from my brain onto the page at this moment. I dubbed it manifesto for a new formalism because a lot of these thoughts revolve around a concept of form. I hope you might come across a thought you find useful here!
After over half a century, electronic music production is no longer a young person's game. Those at the forefront of their respective genre or sound tend to have accumulated a significant repertoire of skills and techniques that they acquired over years of practice.1
Broadly analogous to how scientific progress works, this is because the more we already know and have, the harder it becomes to conduct further research, especially for a single person.
As such, the classic image of the lone genius bedroom producer is probably an outdated one. It might be more productive to think of electronic music making as a communal scientific research program.2
Most electronic music production content on the internet, while certainly serving a purpose, is not research.3 For inspiration, it might be instead worth studying electronic music’s ancient pre-history: the early 1950s and 1960s electronic music studios that were much closer to collaborative scientific research laboratories than today’s bedroom project studios are.
While electronic music technology has proliferated since the 50s and 60s, at the end of the day, there are only so many ways in which one can manipulate a harmonic series. There's a good chance there will never be a major revolution in synthesis technology again. Not because of a lack of human creativity, but because of the very limits of physics.
The yet unexplored frontiers of electronic music making are not blocked by technological, but technical hurdles. It is a problem of musical technique, and not technology.
Technology answers to technique. Every device and piece of gear has secrets that can be unveiled with the right technique.
After more than thirty years of making music with computers, we still do not know the DAW and its secrets.4
The DAW is the most secretive of all music-making devices because it is also the most omnipresent and limitless.
The radical promise of the DAW is what Deleuze and Guattari (borrowing from Boulez) call generalized chromaticism: the continuous, non-linear modulation of all possible musical and sonic parameters.
Modulation and rhythm are electronic music's transcendental5 in the word's technical philosophical sense: a pure structure that conditions the possibility for other things to emerge. Modulation and rhythm are themselves not audible, but make possible and structure what sounds.
These conditioning structures give way to a track’s form. In electronic music, we tend to rarely think about form under its proper name, but everything we do is related to form.6
What we commonly call “genres” are also forms. Why does techno sound like techno and house like house and jungle like jungle? Because each has their unique formal structures that condition how a track within that genre-form might sound and function.
In electronic (dance) music, form is intrinsically related to function. Form functions, it needs to function. Making form function is one of our primary tasks when making electronic music.
Form functions only insofar as it is embodied as actual, real sound. Sound always needs to sound in a hyper-specific manner to make the track's form function. That is why swapping out a kick halfway through the process rarely works — the track’s formal structures and the hyper-specific timbre of the kick are reciprocally interlinked.7
Because a form can only ever function hyper-specifically, it will naturally impose a limit on our possible choices. Many paths will simply not work, they are foreclosed by the form that we chose for this track.
One of the basic lessons of Immanuel Kant's practical philosophy is that real freedom means living according to a self-imposed framework of rules. This also applies to electronic music in the age of the DAW. Form is a thick set of voluntary rules. We know very well that working within a DAW without some kind of self-imposed framework does not work. Despite a theoretically infinite amount of possibilities, we will get lost and lose our practical freedom to create.
We can only be free to create in the age of the DAW — and fulfill its promise of a generalized chromaticism — if we come to know form, that is, the framework of self-imposed rules that we are voluntarily working in. That is our collective research project.
Footnotes
Of course there will be exceptions, but I think this trend holds in general. Just compare the average age of successful, boundary-pushing producers in the 90s to today.
Brian Eno has long been making a similar argument with his notion of “scenius”.
Practical advice like learning how to sidechain a bassline to a kick, or EQ a vocal is useful, but it doesn’t really delve into the formal and structural why behind these decisions, how that why came to be and how that why could be different.
If we knew the DAW, wouldn’t our music sound radically different compared to what pre-DAW music sounded like?
Philosophical note (1): “Transcendental” here being much closer to Deleuze’s conception of the transcendental than Kant’s.
Philosophical note (2): I here mean “form” as a common language equivalent of what Deleuze calls “idea” in Difference & Repetition, rather than in the classic Aristotelian sense.
What I’m trying to say here is that form is not some immaterial stuff floating about, but deeply integrated into the actual sound of a track. Sound design and engineering are not distant to form, but highly intertwined with it.