Customer Reviews

Clicks & Cuts 3

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Where did all this hip-hop come from? Any fan of the "Clicks + Cuts" series will be immediately struck by the pronounced hip-hop flavor of this release (heavy syncopation, R&B vocals in places, and beats thicker than an elephant's leg). I can imagine that many will object that this third installment is a crass commercialization of the glitch genre; but just maybe it is an evolution in form. You'll certainly never hear any of these tracks on your local Clear Channel "Urban" radio station, so the 'sellout' accusation seems misplaced. If you enjoyed the bracing severity of the first C+C release, you may feel let down by this one. Although I do enjoy hearing how the clicks + cuts aesthetic cross-pollinates and mutates with other genres (hip-hop and house are the two main reference points here), I have to admit I'm nostalic for the coldness of the first C+C.

The muse was in the mistakes. Then the mistakes became music. You could reduce the short history of minimal techno's infatuation with error-driven, "glitch" compositions to those two sentences. But in a field of electronic music where even progression is delineated at an accelerated, microscopic level, the past three years have not only seen the emergence of a nascent, often misconstrued, rhythmic unessentialism, but also the consequent flourishing of ideas and individual signatures. "Clicks & Cuts" was that emergence, and its successor was that rhizomatic flourishing. After all, who by now would mistake originators like Alva Noto or SND for anyone else? That said, "Clicks & Cuts 3" marks a maturation for many of the artists involved, a departure for some, an integration for others.

The concept of "clicks and cuts", as a template, as a purely phenomenological entity, has developed in truly Deleuzian fashion as a bastardized offspring of capitalist output. What began with Oval, during the last remaining trickles of the industrial age, as a post-structuralist product of mass production, has been integrated into the coalescence of a paradigm shift into the virtual age. Every system inevitably produces excess. Just as Einsturzende Neubauten and Throbbing Gristle once used industrial excess for creative ends, this generation of techno minimalists has found inspiration in the excess of a media-driven economic structure.

The essence of creativity operates within a paradox: it must occur outside a framework, but must also reflect upon the structure that excludes it. Clicks and cuts do just that: they are the sound of right now. This series document the evolution of creativity within the disposable, and in doing so may also create posterity out of sounds that were never meant to register in their original purpose.

The result may not be the ideal forum for the marketplace, rather it is the ideal forum for the excess of that marketplace. Outside economic rigidity exists artistry, and with economic scarcity comes virtual superfluity. These are precisely the parameters that now define clicking and cutting: an exploration of the space that exists between cultural aesthetic reductivism and the waste it produces.

The focus of this third installment of "Clicks & Cuts" is to highlight the range of creative possibilities within that space. And what possibilities they are! The caliber of quality and diversity presented here reflects these artists at their peaks. Whether it be agf or Rechenzentrum or Tim Hecker or Frank Bretschneider, the overarching consensus is that this collection of irrefutably necessary artists has come into its own. This is the sound of experimental maturity. These are the sounds that directly confront the transitional unease of modern society.

That said, the music of mistakes does not have to justify itself conceptually in order to be enjoyed. Perhaps the greatest achievement put forth by these contributors is that they've managed to marry high-brow experimentation with a primal urge for listening pleasure. Mille Plateaux Web Page.