Progressive Electronic: Determining proggy-ness

The.Crimson.King wrote: ^ excellent  Very interesting her comment how the keyboard "hijacked" electronic music and took it down a different path.  The book I mentioned takes you back to a time when Moog decided to add a keyboard and it created this Buchla vs Moog conceptual war.  Moog obviously won on the commercial front since subsequent synth manufacturers overwhelmingly took his keyboard as a controller approach and it became the standard...yet Buchla won the hearts and minds of academics and non-commercial composers not wanting to be limited to 12 note per octave tuning.  It's also my understanding that the Buchla somehow incorporated probability theory into it's mode of operation, meaning it didn't just play a sequence it was told, but could change parameters based on various conditional settings (I've never even seen one so don't know the specifics).  I believe Suzanne mentions she'd turn her Buchla 200 on at night and let it run for hours...in the morning it would be playing something completely different than when she left it  Anyway, a fascinating time to learn about especially since Keith and prog were at the forefront of bringing synth to the world.

moshkito wrote: Go back and listen to the soundtrack for FORBIDDEN PLANET and look at the year. Go back and listen to George Harrison's Lectronic Music ... and then go back and listen to the early pioneers, like BEAVER & KRAUSE and many others from the 50's and early 60's ...

I've done several "progressive electronic" releases and basically, I don't know what the term is. I just play music. 

Try this for size. 

https://brotherhoodofthemachine.bandcamp.com/album/the-golden-voyage-to-samarkand

Naglefar wrote: I'll listen to certain album, none I'll explicitly mention, and say to myself "man that sounds pretty damn progressive, it's all over the place!" and then find it has a 3.12 rating.  Now I know these are all opinions and everyone has different tastes, but it still surprises me sometimes to see stuff I think is progressive and has a sub-par rating.

The Buchla Source of Uncertainty was merely a random note generator. It's a small part of any Buchla system, but you wouldn't find Bob Moog issuing something like that, no siree. You can still, incidentally, get Buchla 266e modules should you want one. https://buchla.com/266e-source-of-uncertainty/

Probably the modern equivalent is the Eurorack format Turing Machine. https://musicthing.co.uk/pages/turing.html - I was briefly thinking about building a Turing Machine plus all the expander modules as part of my modular synth - I still toy with the idea, but there are are other ways of producing random and semi random voltages (and hence sequences). 

However. I don't think the Source of Uncertainty module played any real role in producing music which was either "east or west coast" or "progressive". It was merely a tool. Back in the 60's, it might have been news that someone had got an (old and primitive) synth to play random notes, it's certainly not now. 

Modular synths used to be rare beasties. Moog only made about 300, and that covers the smaller systems as well. There are probably 5,000+ in the world today - incidentally, no one knows how many but Doepfer, the largest module maker in the world, has had about 30,000 modules sold in 20+ years. The problem now is that modular synths are (relatively) affordable and are hence being bought by kids with beards who spend $20k on a collection of knobs which make car siren noises - they then label themselves as "progressive" or "experimental" musicians. The forums are full of them. It might have been novel in the 1970's but is really just noise, now. 

"Progressive electronic" is just a marketing term. I'd class it as "progressive music using electronic instruments". If it sounds musically complex and skillful, musically interesting and uses electronic instruments in the main, there's your definition. 

Also worthy of note. Modular synths are actually just a tiny part of the electronic music iceberg. If you're talking about 1977/8 to about 1996, you'll be hard pressed to hear one on a record. There are a few exceptions but generally, it's not about modular synths. Normalised analogue, perhaps. 

Edited by Davesax1965 - December 07 2018 at 09:26

verslibre wrote: ... Unbelievable. Harrison cited humility in the form of what we call nowadays a "humblebrag," but his swipe of all the music demo'd for him a continent away — while also dropping "trust me, I'm a Beatle" — is arrogance personified.

I'm a huge electronic fan and have been for decades.

Edited by ProfPanglos - June 01 2019 at 00:43

I think if you have a strong background in prog and then you listen to something like stratosfear by Tangerine Dream then you will understand the connection or maybe also some of Vangelis' stuff. I would say the proggy element in electronic would be about the atmospheres(especially mellotron or string synths but not necessarily)rather than guitars(which may or may not be used)rather than complexity although there could be some of that too.

Edited by AFlowerKingCrimson - June 02 2019 at 14:18