Hollow Earth
Tuesday, June 16
Simon Reynolds on Dilla in The Guardian
A great piece on Dilla!
I had been waiting to mobilise my pet theory about Wonky for a while - but gave SR the opportunity to post first. Anyway it looks like I must have been *way* too nerdy and indulged in ridikulous Techno-Babble in our exchange. My (largely unsubstantiated, by this stage only disputed) theory is that Wonky is a cross-generic phenomenon owing to the influence of the new wave of Soft Synth Controllers. Things like this and this.
(The Science Bit)
Those sounds in wonky - where the bass-line rolls up and down in pitch - or for instance where the sound of the synth doesn't hold a straight melody, but in fact goes all, well, wonky - that's only been possible with the new hardware interfaces for soft synths. Those kind of sounds would have been an absolute nightmare to programme - but now you just launch your soft synth from within your DAW - make sure your Novation Zero is plugged in (or whichever bit of kit you're using as a controller) and then the knobs and the sliders automatically control the parameters and the DAW records your hand gestures.
I know for a fact that Flying Lotus is all about his Novation Controller (I interviewed him for a monster article on The Control Surface and Virtualisation in the imminent Loops). I suspect Zomby's more recent stuff is using similar techniques, even if he's using a controller to manipulate samples (as opposed to a Soft Synth) from within a PC. It's the new face of electronic music and a weird flashback to how the control surface of the TB-303 was an escape route from the struggle of programming FM synthesis for DJ Pierre et al.
posted by Matthew Ingram # 16:19 
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