Yet More Music Library Cleaning

The de-sucking of my iTunes music library continues, with the latest round eschewing a fair bit of the self-styled “experimental” music that has quickly become plentiful and dull. When the clicks-n-cuts in “Lucky You,” the Deftones’ contribution to the ‘Matrix: Reloaded’ soundtrack, are more engaging than those coming out of definitive genre stable Mille Plateaux, something’s changed, and it’s not exclusively my personal taste.

Most experimental music sounds utterly interchangeable to me these days, largely because of the myriad clones that crop up seemingly instantly when a fresh sound or style hits the record bins. Digital distribution and easily replicatable software trickery makes such audio impostoring that much simpler, though certainly no different than the Xeroxed hitmakers in the big-money pop music world. In either case the end result is a market flooded with derivative music, but in the odd little niche that danes to call itself “experimental,” derivation should be frowned upon at the very least. Sadly, labels like the aforementioned Mille Plateaux find a niche, exploit, and saturate, largely out of financial necessity. It would be nice to see labels turn away the hangers-on and instead move forward, investigating new sounds. That’s what experimental music is supposed to be about, after all.