Words from Id Lab.

music

take me away from here I need some colour and some pop music

Who is Id Lab? 

I am Id Lab, or Hugh Spiller to my friends. My twenty-first birthday was on the twenty-first day of the twenty-first century, which must have some mystical significance. I started off my musical career playing bass in a Bristol grunge / punk band called Fringe, though my conversion to electronic music was already underway. To my bandmates’ concern, I was listening to Orb, Chemical Brothers and Orbital as well as the obligatory Pixies, Nirvana and R.E.M. We split up, I got myself a tone module and a sampler, and the music you hear here is the result. I became Id Lab in December 1999, for my debut solo gig. The first album, Invective, is a compilation of tracks recorded in 1999 and 2000.

I also make ambient music under the name Bubble Chamber Orchestra, and guitar-based songs as Tyto Alba.

With what?

I know many of the people who read this sort of thing are music makers themselves. So for your information, I currently run a PC-based setup, with Sonar and a collection of free or cheap software. Favourite toys include Granulab and SimSynth. Hardware includes two analogue synths - a Kork EX-800 and a Teisco 607. I have a Yamaha SU-700 sampler, which is underused since I got a decent PC, but still good for live work. I also use a Roland MC-500 sequencer and a Yamaha SU-10 live. I have a Behringer 602 mixer, and Valve Composer compressor. I play an Aria bass guitar, and borrow guitars, drums, amps and such as necessary. I have a box of guitar effects, microphones and other useful things. However, some of the tracks you might hear were made on much less equipment. 790 Fun(k), for example, was made entirely on a Yamaha PSS-790, a cheesy 80s home keyboard, sequenced using a 486 PC running Cakewalk 3. Several of Invective's tracks were made using only the SU-700. And A Whiter Shade of Noisewas recorded straight to tape with no digital devices whatsoever.
 

What's it all about?

'...Pop reflects a lot of what is happening today... pop musicians try to respond to the desire for kicks... so they fall back on very banal and militaristic music... Militaristic, because it is based on this periodic beat, which makes people march without knowing. And so they become uniform. I am very sensitive to this because that was exactly the way the Nazis tuned in the whole population with marching music on the radio, and whether it's marching music, pop, or even a rock beat, I don't like it.' -Karlheinz Stockhausen

Popular music conforms to certain rules: rhythm, tonality, timbre and structure are controlled by the desire to make music that will enter the charts and inoffensively fill airtime. We are surrounded by conservative music, and it affects us. Melodies and rhythms correspond to patterns of brain activity. Pop, in its musical conformity, is a force for social conformity. Listening to music that breaks the rules encourages thinking that breaks the rules. So, for the sake of your own creativity, your own freedom of thought, seek out the sounds you've never heard before. 

The regular beat is not in itself bad. The point I take from Stockhausen is that it unifies people, makes them move in step, and this is a form of control. The way in which this control is used can be good or bad. The Nazi government used it to unite people in hatred and in war. These days, our governments are weak compared to the multinational corporations, and those corporations are the forces controlling our culture. When a club DJ plays popular dance music, when a local radio station provides background sound in the workplace, the dancers or the workers are fed messages which support this situation. Those messages, primarily, are the following:

- Personal, sexual love is the most important thing in your life.

- Money, and the possessions it can buy, are highly desirable.

- You are happy and free as long as you listen to this music.

These messages discourage independent thought on major, universal issues, stressing instead personal, selfish fulfilment.

The increasing sexual content of pop lyrics fulfils two functions: first, it attracts customers by stimulating the most universal interest. Secondly, it makes the songs seem risqué, as if they are somehow fooling the censors. This makes people feel that pop music is radical, and that they are somehow rebellious in listening to it. That is, that this music promotes freedom, and listening to it is a form of freedom. However, the kind of liberty it encourages is limited to the right to (hetero)sexual expression, the right to earn and to spend, and the right to enjoy music. These are the fundamentals of the consumer culture pop music promotes. Issues such as world politics and the environment are deprecated; and alternative, non-consumerist ways of life are completely left out of the pop world view.

This exclusion of alternatives extends to the language of pop music. Like Orwell's Newspeak, this language makes it impossible to say things that are not in accord with its principles. Any kind of banality about love is acceptable, but it is very difficult to write a pop song about third world debt or the destruction of the rainforests.

The medium of sound is fundamentally different from those media used in visual arts; the most important difference is that we can close our eyes, but not our ears. As a result of this handicap, we are bombarded with music we have not chosen to hear - in shops, on the radio, on TV soundtracks, and so on. It is this insidiousness of sound that makes it the perfect medium for mass marketing and mass control.

The music we call folk is an older form of popular music. A form that was not commercialised, that was able to carry a political message as easily as a sexual one, and a music that represented true freedom. It is unfashionable now for those reasons. Punk rock was, and still is in its uncommercialised forms, a folk music. Various types of electronic music have been called 'the new punk', and although there are fundamental differences, the independent electronica of today shares the low-budget ethos and uncompromising individuality of that movement.

You may ask, how can music be political without political lyrics? The music presented on this site is almost entirely without vocals. But the lack of a lyrical focal point allows and encourages true mental freedom; the music is open to many more interpretations, and is consequently more thought-provoking, than vocal music. It refuses to be bound by conventions of 4/4 time and the chromatic scale, following them only at times, and then emphatically by choice. It avoids the comfortable clichés of pop, rock, house and so on, making its own individual path. The first step towards effecting positive change is to encourage new ways of thinking, and the music we listen to influences our thought patterns. This music is intended to stimulate new patterns. In other words, this is music to free your mind.

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