Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
What is Loopy Pro? — Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.
Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
The Tragedy of Electronic Music
Future Sounds: The Story of Electronic Music From Stockhausen to Skrillex by David Stubbs Faber & Faber
David Stubbs’s new book, Future Sounds: The Story of Electronic Music From Stockhausen to Skrillex, depicts the electrification of music as a radical project—even a happily destructive one. The Italian Futurists, those haters of classicism and cheerleaders of fascism, invented one of the first noisemaking devices, with its creator Luigi Russolo writing he was “fed up” not only with Beethoven but with the quietude of nature itself. Brian Eno’s ambient works in the ’70s suggested sonic “subtraction” as remedy to more-is-more consumerism. The eyeliner and synth-pop of the early ’80s New Romantic scene offered a utopian vision: a “celebration of free play in a post-industrial world in which there was no work to be done,” Stubbs writes.
Today, though, the term electronic music has been rendered nearly redundant. What new song isn’t software-tweaked, synthesizer-fortified, or at least digitally transmitted? This fact might seem to mean that the revolution is won. But Stubbs isn’t triumphal. He thinks the potential of electric sound—ideological and aesthetic—has largely been squandered in the mainstream. As he dispiritedly surveys the recent pop charts, he writes, “There is no ridiculous, no sublime either, merely an efficient, faultlessly studio-conceived conveyance of tunes meticulously designed to converge on the predictable from the outset.” But though machines are often blamed for Chainsmokers-style blandness, “The problem is not the technology itself … It’s the conservatism and timidity and pragmatism of those using it.”
An idiosyncratic polemic as much as it is a history, Future Sounds will frustrate those looking for a technical timeline ticking through 808s and Ableton (to be fair, there is in fact a bare-bones timeline in the appendix). But regarding the art itself, the book’s a feast: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s clattering symphonies and Beyoncé’s mass-market confessionals alike get dissected and contextualized in poetic, acerbic fashion. A veteran U.K. rock critic, Stubbs isn’t shy about his own particular tastes and encounters (he devotes pages, for example, to describe worshipping Frank Zappa in high school but thinking him overrated in adulthood). The approach sometimes scans as blinkered or biased, but it dovetails remarkably well with his deeper argument about electronic music and humankind: At its best, as Stubbs writes when describing Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind, “machinery multiplies rather than destroys soul.”
That same conviction united many of the visionaries behind synthetic soundmaking’s evolution. “In their wildest dreams,” such pioneers “truly believed that electronic music could soundtrack, or even by some occult means be the source of, an expansion of mankind’s capabilities,” Stubbs writes. Pierre Schaeffer, the experimental composer, observed that through crying, laughing, groaning, and the like, “a lone man possesses considerably more than the 12 notes of the pitched voice”—a capability that the piano could not match but that an electronic machine could. Daphne Oram, the co-founder of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, suspected that physical healing could be accomplished through sound. Wonder used synthesizers to evoke sensations that, as a blind man, he felt were previously uncapturable.
Bound up in the bionic idealism was a social project: grasping toward a tomorrow of new freedoms. The book’s preface warps back to the sci-fi excitement of the year 1977, when Star Wars was playing in multiplexes and the Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer single “I Feel Love”—“pure, silver, shimmering, arcing, perfectly puttering hover-car brilliance,” Stubbs writes—was revolutionizing dance floors. Much as the Italian Futurists had agitated for a new canon in the early 20th century, and as the hippies’ rock ‘n’ roll drowned out their parents’ sing-alongs, electronic music helped turn an entire culture toward wondering what’s next. David Bowie, Kraftwerk, and others tried to answer the question with still-staggering inventiveness.
The tragedy, as Stubbs tells it, is that giddy anticipations of a paradigm shift ran up against the political regressions of the Reagan and Thatcher eras—and their accompanying oversaturated consumer culture. Even great breakthroughs got hijacked to dreary effect. “When the sampler became an affordable and ubiquitous piece of kit in the mid-1980s, it proved to be as enslaving as it was liberating,” he writes. “Rather than opening up multiple textural potentialities it degenerated into a box of tropes and tics and habits. The same stuttering effects, the same incredibly narrow pool of source material.”
At one point, he recalls a 1998 interview in which Suicide’s Alan Vega shook his head at the hipsters participating in the rock revival that closed the millennium. “For him, the 1960s and ’70s were a vivid, thick but distant memory, times from which you were supposed to catapult into the future,” Stubbs surmises. “These callow kids, with their guitar cases and faded post-Britpop retro cords, seemed bent on somehow wormholing back to those decades.” A trippy question is implied here. Who’s more retrograde: the pure nostalgists, or the kind who pine for the good old days of longing for the future?
Happily, though, Stubbs’s elegies for lost potential are buttressed with tributes to the true innovators. Some of his judgment calls are straightforward (yes, Beastie Boys created greatness with the same methods that enabled the schmaltz of Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You”) while others are argument starters. Devilishly, after devoting paragraphs to rehabilitating the much-mocked Gary Numan, he expresses mystification at synth-pop’s most enduring mascot, Depeche Mode: “They felt like the sort of group that if they did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent them.” The general criteria by which he seems to be scoring is about an artist’s orientation towards history. Are they venturing forward? Are they smartly reconstituting the past? Or are they just killing time?
His verdict on how those questions apply to today’s electronic musicians is a confusingly mixed one. “The twenty-first century is not, thus far, the age of Big Things,” he writes. Its “music aspires not to achieve some new alchemy of sound, fresh, youthful purpose and progress—the ‘wake-up call’—but instead embraces fragmentation, decay, disintegration, breakdown, the submerged and dormant past.” It’s easy to see how this observation fits with the likes of Burial, the U.K. dubstep god whose compositions feel like shadowy séances for dead ravers. But it’s not clear how it squares with Stubbs’s investigation into bludgeoning festival EDM, nor with his assertion that the newer generation isn’t “looking wistfully over its shoulder” and have created a “culture in which, like smartphone upgrades, all that really counts is the last few months or so.”
Future Sounds might have arrived at a more coherent appraisal of the present had it given better consideration to hip-hop, the engine of pop’s innovation for some time now. Rap’s early, sample-heavy days are discussed as “a sort of African American revenge, a form of plundering and looting after years, decades of black musicians being routinely ripped off,” and the aughts beatmaker J Dilla gets a nice section. But there’s no treatment of, say, Kanye West, whose 2013 salvo Yeezus was an extreme showcase of electronic power—and an employment of historical sampling for futuristic ends. The fertile soil of bedroom beat-making enabled in the past few years by SoundCloud isn’t tilled either.
The New York Times has been running a fascinating video series showing the songwriting process behind recent trending hits, and for a confirmation of Stubbs’s sadder points on what electronic music’s ubiquity has wrought, there’s the explainer on Zedd and Maren Morris’s “The Middle”: a factory-precise piece of pap assembled via text message. But there’s also the video about Sheck Wes’s “Mo Bamba,” a viral rap track made by young unknowns screwing around on analogue synths. The results are, contrary to Stubbs’s verdict on the recent radio landscape, ridiculous, sublime, and far from faultless, thereby offending slick hacks like Zedd. The dichotomy is a reminder that if electronic tools can create stultifying order, they can also upend it—less through sweeping revolutions than through the small rebellions of lives lived creatively, assisted by machines.
Comments
"Much as the Italian Futurists had agitated for a new canon in the early 20th century, and as the hippies’ rock ‘n’ roll drowned out their parents’ sing-alongs, electronic music helped turn an entire culture toward wondering what’s next."
The hippies were there first. Gong, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Krautrockers like Faust, Ash Ra Tempel etc. etc. were doing things with synths way before the rest. When Hawkwind got going with the arp's and noise generators it was pretty much the beginning of electronic dance.
"he expresses mystification at synth-pop’s most enduring mascot, Depeche Mode: “They felt like the sort of group that if they did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent them."
They were originally a guitar band. They had the opportunity of a gig at a local club's electronic night, so got the synths in. The rest is history. They're a pop band basically, though Vince Clarke loved his krautrock (see above).
Thanks for the link. On my xmas list.
oh dear!! better to spend the several hours it would take to read these careerist googlings actaully listening to some vaguely radical music... and much much better to put the cash the book costs back into the music ecosystem... where it is sorely needed..
A nice push, for making innovative music from innovative instruments, but I've met too many bitter old rockers to want to drudge through another scathing appraisal.
Rather than read this - go off and make some innovative music!
Yawn, an over blown assessment which is boring to read from an author who it seems has watched rather than experienced the music and movements he’s commenting on.
Edit: just a worthless cranky early morning rant
Funny, every generation think they are the most historically significant.
From religious zealots to radical protestors, they feel the coming apocalypse or governing climate is at a critical juncture. I think as humans it is natural to feel the greatest sense of weight to what we experience in our own lives.
This is why being intellectually curious as WELL AS intellectually honest is crucial. Not just for this music discussion but history in general.
Let me also include, I am and have been working on both a book and screenplay dealing with the house and electronic music world through my generation and lifetime. It is mainly auto-biographical with a variety of psychological, sociological, cultural, and musical sub categories.
I will say this, Skillrex represents the beginning or end.
In reality, Skillrex was a pioneer for the downfall of the traditional nightclub or location for the music lover to more the "festival mindset".
The fact of the size and circumstances diminished the intimacy of the DJ/artist and crowd or fans.
This is represented in the music. The music then headed in a direction for this set of "DJ/Artists" that needed to sonically compensate for the severing of the eye to eye contact bond previously the norm.
Hence, the use of super frequencies and manipulation that work on neuron-receptors pleasurably married to the mob mentality. A sort of sonic future take on the mosh pits of early grunge and hardcore mini venues across America.
The other element that has changed so many aspect of electronic music is the internet. Cyber newness and sharing has allowed for marketing, both organic and corporate to take hold of the scene in a way never imagined.
With all this, it would be impossible to not include the drugs. Yes. The drugs, types, and qualities available also impact the music and behavior. I think the music is a perfect representation of the shift in many of these things.
I did something weeks ago and got a lot of it.
I watched all 3 Decline of Western Civilization Movies.
So interesting to watch the social and cultural shifts and how the music and fans are affected.
In a rush....sorry for typos....etc
Nice catch!
I have yet to look at the book, but there is something quite compelling to this point IMO: ´The tragedy, as Stubbs tells it, is that giddy anticipation of a paradigm shift ran up against the political regressions of the Reagan and Thatcher eras—and their accompanying oversaturated consumer culture. Even great breakthroughs got hijacked to dreary effect. “When the sampler became an affordable and ubiquitous piece of kit in the mid-1980s, it proved to be as enslaving as it was liberating,” he writes. “Rather than opening up multiple textural potentialities it degenerated into a box of tropes and tics and habits. The same stuttering effects, the same incredibly narrow pool of source material.”´
As is, the point risks confusing (a) the democratization of access to electronic music tools/instruments with (b) what happened to the radical ideals of music pioneers once their music is mined for scrap parts by the 80s music industry. The thing is, I’m not sure (B) has that much to do with (A).
Arguably, minimalist music of the 60s has been just as severely co-opted and plundered by mass market/consumer culture music as radical electronic music. Heck, Philip Glass himself scored many period defining soundtracks. (Film more generally has co-opted more radical music than we can name.) More deeply, one of the biproducts of minimalist music was to prove without a doubt that repetition can make almost any sound pattern become recognizable and familiar. (I don’t mean to say that was the point of minimalist music. More like a side effect.) Catchy doesn’t need conventional harmony and melody. Noise and dissonance can become catchy if the context allows us to discern and memorize the pattern.
IMO the Skrillex effect owes more to that insight than to radical electronic music. (I mean, the way they rely on making unfamiliar sounds become memorable doesn’t require electronic instruments. Sounds and textures that are just as wild can be produced with acoustic instruments.)
Like I said, I haven’t read the book, but that way of looking at what happened to radical electronic music risks being oblivious to the fact that the real story might not have as much to do with radical electronic music specifically, but instead with the way 80s consumer culture plundered radical aesthetics across the board, and not just in music..
Still, seems to be putting its finger on an important cluster of issues, and I’m actually curious to read it..
Geez man, fascinating to read this. Thanks for sharing. Cannot wait to hear more about your life outside of this forum.
One of the more thoughtful posts.
Welcome to The Mannerist Age
just better to make some music now rather than discuss the past or speculate the future.
@[Deleted User] TBH I’d better make some music than spend time on this forum at all. (I don’t have enough time to make music to begin with..) 🤭 So I’m with you most of the way.
But what’s happening to music is an important aspect of what’s happening and what might to culture more generally. We wouldn’t be ourselves without culture: the broader stake what’s at stake is us.. I think it’s important to think about who we have become and who we might become, especially if we don’t just want to roll over and let what we have made decide for us..
“When the sampler became an affordable and ubiquitous piece of kit in the mid-1980s, it proved to be as enslaving as it was liberating,” he writes. “Rather than opening up multiple textural potentialities it degenerated into a box of tropes and tics and habits. The same stuttering effects, the same incredibly narrow pool of source material.”´
you see... this is where his shallow overview of music, or possibly his unadventurous taste undermines anything he might have to say..
he’s so ‘overground’ when he should have been ‘wombling free’
A conversation (as with any cultural critique) worth having by those who want to have it...
well we should definitely listen to the past and allow ourselves a few speculations about the future.. but yr right that the music is in the ‘doing’ however much prep, experiment or pondering you precede it with..
i love it when , in the early 70’s they tried to re-ignite science fiction as an experimental form and ditch the old idiotic connotations by calling it speculative fiction.. would be nice to have a ‘speculative music’ category in the record shop.
yes, i thought it was funny when all the taxi drivers where up in arms about Uber recently ..
music makers have been being rinsed out by the internet since 2001 .. Taxi Drivers have had 16 to 17 years to get their head out of the sand.. numpties!
Xenakis made much the same point about ‘aleatoric music or sound works’
it’s only unpredictable the first time around... a big side effect of recorded music as opposed to live events.
Skrillex and EDM are largely a US phenomenon. And clubs have largely been a marginal thing in the US - as has electronic dance music since disco. So I'm not sure that Skrillex really killed anything. I can't imagine that the gay men who frequent the clubs of New York and Chicago are suddenly going to start hanging out at festivals.
I'm not saying things are necessarily better in Europe (Trance... uggh), but they are at least different.
Underground electronic music seems pretty healthy. Lots of experimental stuff (particularly in weird sampling and modular), club music keeps evolving (footwork, Afro-portuguese music, Brazil - plus Techno, post-dub-step). I mean sure, nobody's making any money, but I don't remember them making any money in the 80s or 90s either.
@pauly Thanks for the summary/critique. Some interesting thought provocing points.
Shrillex is a bit too popular for me, I do see it as clever but not inteligent. I see Burial as the opposite! Im not correct though. Skill vs knowledge oversimplifies it. Shrillex comes from a youtube fanbase, his tutes will show you how he does his tricks. Burial’s production videos indicate to me their is no huge study behind the music. But thats probably the case with Aphex Twin also. But these guys are awesome but secretive, not showing their real creative process. The critics are harsh and those accomplished medium (not hi) art ‘artists’ use parody to protect themselves.
I would like to try and combine some krautrock, burial with some of shrillex’s card tricks. Ambitious
The greatest tragedy I would say happened with Facebook, suddenly everyone wanted a following of their own and stopped living their lives but rather tried to live up to some kind of idealised persona and every other internet site bought into that same social networking format of sharing and liking and following as nauseum. Once something gets pushed down the feed it’s deemed forgotten and worthless. Hence with music and everything culturally artistic, to be recognised one needs to be prolific and in doing so, some of the creativity is lost to the need for time efficiency and adherence to what’s trending. And as consumers we got more choices than we wanted and so whatever was most spectacular, Skrillex or some of the other more recent shocking kinds of artists, were at least able to capture and temporarily hold our attention.
Mainstream isn't radical enough? Ummm... Let me check the dictionary.
Ave Xenakis! Historically, it has to be much more accurate to associate this lesson about unpredictability with music recording technology than with any specific movement as I did above. (TBH my whole point above was driven by the kind of considerations people like Adorno were already raising before the second world war about the transformation of cultural products once reproduction technology and the media industry turns them into mass market goods.) I made the (inaccurate/misleading) leap of pointing to minimalist music specifically because they are an example of a massive source of influence over much of more popular electronic music (to this day) whose influence has nothing to do with their use of electronic vs acoustic instruments.
indeedy... and then there is the flipside to that from the gertrude stein point of view, that there is no such thing as repetition, every repeat gains different weight and context according to where it is in the sequence, listeners attention etc etc ..
speculative fiction covered a lot of what we are going through more than half a century ago..
john sladeks hilarious The Reproductive System.. and my all time fave “hits the nail on the head” short story by Thomas Disch: Now Is Forever. I can’t help feeling that one describes everything we are suffering ( or enjoying ) now and the difference between those that are born into it and those that were born earlier and can’t quite fathom that the old status’s are wiped out when old terms of value are discarded..
Jaron Lanier paraphrased it nicely “ if culture is removed from capitalism whilst capitalism still exists.. culture will become a slum. “
he’s about 30 years late with that warning.. and I guess , often , slums are where some of the most interesting things happen..
so where to now Columbus?
Interesting, but no thanks. "A veteran UK rock critic" isn't going to be my go to on electronic music. Nor does that description mention any/more pioneers that didn't fit the premise. Electronic music is a HUGE, broad, genre.
you’ll have to lard it out to about 35 thousand words though... if you want the publishing advance
It's like fractal poetry.
All I know is I am getting too old to sail. Just this morning, jamming in Beet Raker, I drifted off into a fine Mike Post / Robert Fripp reverie and to quote Michael Stipe "...I feel fine". (PS. I suck at genuine intellectual discourse and 'The Dead Quote Olympics')
😂