My Genre, My Revelation

A brief look at my history with genre.

 

My family has always supported musical originality. My parents enrolled my sister and me in extracurricular activities such as the violin, playing the guitar, ballet, and singing to cultivate our innate gift. My mother may have been living vicariously via us, since she was tone-deaf and tone dumb. In music, growth is the process of communicating a musical concept during a composition or improv performance. From a basic riff or instrument's sound characteristic, a concept evolves and blossoms organically in my experience. This becomes the process of moulding it into my personality, values, and desired creative path. The last topic I may explore is the capacity to generate or use unique and distinctive concepts and sounds in my work. This skill is often associated with a lack of distinct genre and a greater emphasis on experimentalism in the music business. Every musician grows in at least one music genre, which is a conventional classification that defines musical works as belonging to a common tradition or set of norms. As an artist and composer, I must analyse many aspects of my life, musical genres, memories, and sounds to choose the kind of music I want to create and the emotions and sentiments it will evoke in my audience.

 

            Above all things, I must emphasise the value of my choir teacher's influence on my study of music. She encouraged me to pursue further education and maintain my skill. My mother however spent most of her school years attempting to sing in tune as a hobby but was informed she was the first student her respected music instructor was unable to teach to hold a key. My mother and father were always fans of music that was deemed to be hard, nasty, or hallucinogenic. When I was young, we listened to albums and saw Pink Floyd's The Brick in The Wall Movie to see how heavy metal, punk, and alternative bands respond to music. Until a certain point, these are my first recollections of long hair, black and loose clothing, and rough voices. I was captivated while watching it because I felt it to be a contrast to the days, we observed the characteristics of Top of the Pops 2, there was just something else that was more important: the sound design.

 

            Consequently, throughout my adolescence I pursued my own route and rebelled slightly via the use of more harsh vocal sounds prevalent in various genres popular with my age group at the time. I used to see the ferocity and sharpness of the vocal shape as an outlet for pent-up emotions and a departure from what was deemed normal. I fell in love with Metalcore and post-hardcore because of their combination of singing and shouting. Moreover, I like the music's narratives because I find them more relevant and emotionally stirring. Due to the presence of bands just like Slipknot and its association with occult worship stereotypes, my classmates considered my musical preferences to be both unexpected and controversial when I exposed them. In order to maintain a feeling of irony within their rebellious sound, bands have only subsequently adopted and used this in a mocking fashion.

 

            During this revelation of my musical preferences, I began to experience a divide in my music creation. As I progressed through college to study music technology, I realised that I was motivated to reconnect with what first captivated me to music, it's creation and modification to create new and developing sounds. Looking at my parents' favourite bands, as well as my own favourite musicians, I started to notice they had one thing in common: the growth of synthesis and subsequent sound manipulation, which enticed us to hear more than simply the instruments performed. This prompted me to veer more into electronic and distorted sounds, which I felt to be vital to a new distinct aspect of myself and artistic development.

 

            I find myself outside of genre with this more experimental aspect of my projects. As I continue to discover more about my history and attempt to connect with my past. I now want to work within a more ancestral tone, coupled with the fact that it has been embraced by fans of metal and such subgenres. There’s something about tribal music and the world of ancient beats. In an interview Maria stated “It’s a heartbeat, and the heartbeat is common to every single human being… It speaks to people, no matter what their identity or their culture.” (Everly. 2021.Metal Hammer) I use this to employ perhaps the most genetic historical tones in conjunction with more of a hyper-futuristic atmosphere in an effort to better link my past and future.

           Fuelled by the affective contagion engendered by this aesthetic play, vaporwave’s subculture exemplifies the online genesis of a (second plane) music-ally imagined community (Born & Haworth. 2018. Oxford University Press). Using the ever-changing environment of the vaporwave genre to zero in on the nostalgic notion of what I imagined the future to look like via media consumption as a young person in the 1990s. I adopt the somewhat fractured and disconnected reality of its realism in order to reconnect with an earlier feeling of existence, before the heartbeat of civilization was bound by the pulse of electrical current, rather than to be nostalgic. As I continue to investigate how these aspects interact, I find myself borrowing elements from other synthesizer-based genres evocative of IDM music (Intelligent Dance Music). Its asymmetric and glitched textures provide a bizarre quality to what we consider to be normal in the present day.

 

            It’s impossible to tap your foot along. In contrast, in the song “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads, a consistent predictable beat is immediately evident at the beginning of the song, first introduced in the guitar bass and then in the drumset and cymbals. In “Psycho Killer,” it’s incredibly easy for listeners to nod their head to the steady beat; in “The City,” it’s incredibly difficult for listeners to grasp the underlying beat since there is no static meter (Wang, 2014, Breakfast Serial Literary Journal). Consequently, my dualism and complexity inside my own music composition endure. While I continue to investigate my function within this genre, I still aim to produce, perform, and listen to the complicated and loud music of my youth. The concept of writing songs to which you can sing along or tap your foot, while keeping the sound new and ever-changing, is the driving force behind my enjoyment of music.

 

            I think that Nirvana and their songs were shocking and terrified the world's stage, because of the heavy sound and controversial lyrics. Nirvana and Cobain were seen to express both psychotic ‘rage’ and extreme victimhood and abjection. The psychosis of this rage was in its ‘meaninglessness’ (Bannister 2006, p. 146). Polly is recognised as one of Nirvana's heaviest tracks. There is simply Curt's voice, an acoustic guitar, and occasionally a cymbal crash. The lyrics include the song's hidden meaning; Nirvana was so startling to create such a track because it disclosed a rapist's perspective. In the metal scene, it is not unusual to deviate from the typical narrative structure of a song, like in this instance, by writing from the viewpoint of anyone who might commit a heinous crime, to the philosophy of an occult organisation in worshipping a demonic figure. These assertions are extensions of the rebellious and punk approaches from which metal derives its origins. Not seldom, the premise of such a narrative contains an underlying criticism on contemporary society. As a method to highlight feminism and the right of women to be who they want and not feel oppressed by males "unable to control themselves," Polly uses this as the underlying theme.

 

            This year at UEL, I have been experimenting with new techniques to construct and produce compositions within my two musical forms. Whether it's new digital audio workstations (DAWs) that make it simpler for my post-genre experimental side to compose and sample music, I'm always on the lookout for ways to improve my post-genre(esque). How can I advance my experience and wisdom of music and its relationship to humanity? Or, in a more refined sense, experiment with instrumentation and recording methods, which I plan to use during my professional career in this field. I see keeping things distinct in order to concentrate on the life pathways I intend to pursue.

 

Works Cited

Bannister, Matthew. 2006. White boys, white noise masculinities and 1980s Indie guitar rock Aldershot: Ashgate

Born, Georgina & Haworth, Christopher. 2018. Microsound to vaporwave: Internet-mediated musics, Online Methods, and Genre. Oxford University Press

Everley, Dave. 2021. Human bones, pagan rituals and ancient armies: inside the cult of Heilung. Metal Hammer

Wang, Angel. 2014. Mad for Mathcore: Appreciating a Subgenre of Heavy Metal Rock Music. Breakfast Serial Literary Journal

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