INTRO no. 12
by E*rock

In 1955 Hugh Le Caine spent months recoding his "Dripsody", a tape-manipulated composition made entirely from the sound of a single drop of water. You can find it on the Ohm compilation, (The Early Gurus of Electronic Music). Itís a very cool, beatless piece of small skittering plinking sounds that morph into echoing crescendos with a simple childlike sensibility. I enjoy the fact that itís made entirely from that one sound source, but also that itís still fun to listen to today.

Techniques like this are fairly common practice in electronic music today. ěDripsodyî could probably be reproduced with far greater complexity on your home computer in about 15 minutes (assuming you know what youíre doing), and then be overdubbed, mastered, sent off for reproduction, shared with others internationally, and promoted all on the same personal computer. This is even more of an extreme DIY aesthetic that drew my friends and I into the punk scene as kids. Sophisticated recording tools are readily available to the everyday schmo. An average iMac sitting in millions of homes around the world costs less than a decent guitar/amp setup and already has more power built in for producing music than the state-of-the-art recording setup that Hugh Le Caine had. Of course, ěDripsodyî is still interesting today, not because of itís technology but because someone had a good idea and developed it into a piece of music that transcends itís technology and time.

This issue of Thumb is dedicated to the new digital free thinkers, modern manipulators, electronic and concrete-pop composers that tend to fall between categories. They each record using different equipment, styles, and techniques, so it is not ěelectronic musicî that Iím interested in as much as Iím interested in people with new sounds and ideas, and developing styles that combines avant-garde technique with ideas of ěpopî listenability. Many of the artists interviewed here have combined enough acoustic instruments with electronic reconfigurations, that whether any particular sound is electronic or not is a no longer an issue.

Writing Thumb is (as always) a selfish endeavor in that Thumb is an excuse to talk to creative people that Iím interested in learning more about, or that I might not have been able to read about elsewhere, and to gain some insight into their music in their own words. This time it has lead to even more unexpected friendships and collaborations than it ever has before, and maybe you wonít get quite as much as I did out of these interactions, but Iím sure that there are those of you who will enjoy the ride nonetheless.

"Rock and Roll has always thrived on people, not necessarily willfully, throwing things into the mix, but sort of stumbling on things, crossing over, short circuits and miss-connections. The people who have the tight spandex pants on, and their hair just so, the guitar at the right angle, and the cigarette coming off the lip like this, arenít it at all. Because itís a facsimile of something that was previously rock and roll and doesnít necessarily make it rock and roll forever. Itís somebody in a bedroom somewhere doing something you haven't heard yet, with any luck."
-Elvis Costello