The Major Touchstones on the Music of the 00s: The Producers

The role of the music producer is analogous to that of the film director; he oversees the many elements that enter into a composition and attempts to conjure from the players involved whatever is necessary to render an artistic work of compelling depth and penetrative vision. There are usually two tendencies that music producers have with regards to this process, there are the Steve Albinis – those that allow raw unfiltered nature to dictate the work; and there are the Phil Spectors, whose artistic personality is the barometer upon which the reputation of the music hinges. In the 00s, the latter method had the most influence on modern musicians. Atmosphere and texture reigned supreme whether you were talking about the melodramatic bombast of a Coldplay or U2, the slick transgressive sheen of Lady Gaga or La Roux, or the broken hauntology of Burial, Broadcast or Radiohead.

Here is my short list for the most influential producers of the past that influenced the music of the 00s.

Brian Eno

Brian Eno as a musical entity is difficult to neatly place into precise taxonomic categories. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, and record maven; his imprint upon modern music is akin to Kraftwerk’s – it is a discursive line that intersects in and out of the most unlikely places. As a young English art-school student he embraced the work of minimal composers and painters of the 70′s – an inspiration that has followed him through most of his career – and one in which the seeds of his aesthetic can be properly traced back to. His early experiments with sound manipulation, tape loops, and avant-garde structures began when he joined Roxy Music; a prog-tinged glam group who brought him on as keyboardist even though he had had no prior formal musical education.

As an apprentice with Roxy Music the nature of his artistic genius revealed itself as an infinite curiosity in musical texture(s); a curiosity that eschewed formalism and was striking in its subtlety and digressive quality. His focus on texture and abstract form was not a new invention in modern music – he was coming on the heels of the great minimalist compositions of Stockhausen, Terry Riley and Delia Derbyshire- but it was his ability to extrapolate these ideas from the minimalists and apply them to a popular music template that has made him one of the most prescient and influential music producers of our time.

After his departure with Roxy Music over artistic differences with Brian Ferry, he went on to compose a suite of solo records that blurred the lines between art-pop, prog rock and minimal composition. These records allowed Eno’s vision to flourish – and today remain as enduring and vital pieces of sonic construction.

The Bowie era triptych along with Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain and Another Green World have paved the way for many production and composition techniques that have become common parlance for engineers and producers.

“Music For Airports” – a piece that Eno conceived while he was stuck in a German airport that would function as a soothing mechanism for weary travelers – is a work that not only inspired and presaged electronic ambient and new age music as such – but whose application of ambiance is felt on some of the most cardinal records of the decade.

Atmosphere, ambiance, and an unrelenting focus became dominant aesthetic features of modern music whether you were referring to hauntology or Lady Gaga; and Eno’s lurking shadow continues to be a haunting force in such developments. Radiohead, Daft Punk, Sigur Ros, The Knife, Lcd Soundsystem, Deerhunter, Burial, Interpol, Air, Joy Orbison – all of these artists in some way connect to Eno’s oeuvre whether explicitly or implicitly. Such a list could go on ad infinitum – an apex of music production as a modus operandi of prescience.

Phil Spector

Positing that atmosphere or texture as a production aesthetic dominated the discourse of music in the last decade necessitates that one note the innovator of such a tendency: Phil Spector. The creator of the “wall of sound” has proven himself to be a critical touchstone in production with interesting results. He was a major influence to the excesses of the 70s in the mainstream sense (Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd) an era in which maximalism in sound reigned supreme.

Conceptually, there is a splintering in the discourse with regards to maximalism vs minimalism as a feature of music production. Punk in the 70′s and early 80′s could not or would not use Spector’s techniques and there are a few reasons why. One was purely economic; to achieve the “wall of sound” required lots of times doing over-dubs, repeated takes, and extra time in a moneyed recording studio, a luxury which punks simply could not afford.

Two was political and cultural; from punk’s point of view the excess of the 70s had made popular music primarily a commodity – and less so an artform with redeeming social and artistic value. After the implosion of 60s ideals, the 70s produced an era in which capitalistic indulgence was at full tilt in the music industry – and according to punk principles – rendered music sterile by paralyzing its ability to speak to society’s ills or aspirations. Lastly, was aesthetics: punk favored minimalism, one of the main reasons why punk was punk was due to its stripped down approach. The only ingredients necessary were 3 chords, guitar, bass, drums, vocals and passion; passion as a substitute for whatever maximalism was wishing to achieve through its sophisticated “classical” approach to popular music.

This all leads to the late 90s and 00s, and to the rise of cheap software in the production of music. Now, one could create a veritable “wall of sound” or at the very least the simulation of one through layering voices, samples, instruments and field recordings infinitely if one wished. The cultural and economic reasons for disdaining maximalism lost their raison d’etre within the indie music scene (the logical extension of the punk scene) now that one could create an affordable virtual studio. And that’s exactly what happened.

Independent music in the late 90s and through the last decade took Spector’s mantle of maximalism and deployed it in in a variety of contexts and applications: Elephant Six Collective, the underground Chicago scene which includes Tortoise, Jim O’Rourke, and the Drag City label, and two of the most influential records of the 90s “Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane over the Sea” and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.

In the 00s, most scenes within rock and underground dance music continued the trend of maximalism, and with software dropping in cost more genres jumped on board. All the folk, rock, noise, indie, and sub-scenes that sprouted in the 00s – (the Siltbreeze catalog, Not Not Fun, Drag City, Thrill Jockey) added harmonicas, flutes, harps, samples, extra vocalists, harpsichords, theremins, and any other instrument that would augment ” atmosphere,” “fullness,” and “complexity” to their sound. It is interesting to see how even though many of these artists would consider themselves “punk” in spirit (the rejection of commercial values in their art), in aesthetic approach they are closer to Fleetwood Mac and Phil Spector than to the Sex Pistols.

Maximalism added another wrinkle in history with regards to the perception of genres that were once considered vulgar in music cognoscneti circles. Black metal whether it was from Northern California or Scandinavia became something to listen to, talk about, read about – and something to be influenced by. Drone and its application affected groups within metal and its cousins – doom and stoner rock respectively, but also became part and parcel of hypnagogic pop, dance music, and traditional indie rock. Who would have thought that the very sub-cultures that snobbily raised their noses at maximalism would now wholeheartedly bring the aesthetic into focus ?

Rick Rubin

Rick Rubin is a force of nature. Responsible for some of the most landmark recordings in hip-hop and rock history, he has been dubbed one of the greatest music producers of all time with Time Magazine calling him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Considering that this piece is on production influence, Rubin deserves the throne that represents the commercial side of music. Some of his achievements really need no commentary; LL Cool J, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Slayer, all of their critically acclaimed 80s work, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Geto Boys, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Petty, Danzig, Johnny Cash, their loved 90s work, all guided by the hand and ear of Rick Rubin.

His production aesthetic favors the minimal side of the sonic spectrum and in this regard he is at cross purposes with much of the underground and middle ground records of the 00s. Rubin was the king lion for the large gated guitar sound of the major commercial rock bands of the 00s, the compressed drums, little to no orchestration, and stripped down vocals with minor effects. His work does not sanction the European intellectualism and avant-gardist tendencies of Eno or Plank,  and as such one can look at his approach as staunchly American in import, a mixture of the blues, punk and metal.

Some artists in the 00s that are indebted to the Rubin-esque approach are : Jay Z, System of A Down, Weezer, Audioslave, Mars Volta, Lil Jon, Red Hot Chili Peppers, all major acts and all released influential records in the 00s. This mixture of rap and rock has proven to be critically and commercially effective for Rubin, with that in mind, I find his influence to have been the most pernicious for commercial music and thus is my least favorite of the producers that I have listed so far. In spite of his work being commercially successful in the 00s, his approach spawned some truly execrable music, rap-rock ala Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit, commercial jam-rock courtesy of Dave Matthews, post grunge rock, all are part and parcel of the Rubin oeuvre and aesthetic and according to my ears should disappear from the face of this earth.

Conny Plank

It is likely that you have not heard the name Conny Plank but you probably have heard his productions or influence on production. Conny is the krautrock shaman, a man responsible for some of the most critical kraut records and by extension his influence has made its way to the musical totems of the last decade. If this article had been written about the 90s, his name would probably not had made this list but as it stands kraut-rock is one of the genres whose value to musical artists has had a decisive influence both on the commercial and underground scale of things.

Before Martin Hannett, before Brian Eno, Conny was blazing trails as a music producer. He produced Kraftwerk’s early records and on this achievement alone he has cemented himself into the annals of sonic history. His production credits are nothing short of staggering; Neu, Holger Czukay (Can), Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, Eurythmics, Harmonia, Moebius and Roedelius.

His work was punctuated by ribbons of delay, odd tape loops, an enhanced dramatism in the treatment of vocals, the splicing of industrial sounds and percussion, and in many ways borrowed the techniques of Lee Scratch Perry and King Tubby. It is a truism that dub has influenced production and the ‘sound’ of recordings in a myriad of contexts and Conny was one of the first producers to recognize their genius and apply it.

Eno’s approach with David Bowie and the Berlin Trilogy is directly attributable to Conny’s work with Neu and Cluster. If you listen to Heroes, a decisive record for Eno and Bowie, it could have easily been Conny who produced it. His unwillingness to play to the dominant techniques of music production in terms of drums also had a definitive effect on the music production of the last decade. At a time when many producers were treating drum sounds from a studio perspective – highly compressed and somewhat muted- Conny favored a live drum sound with lots of echo, delay and reverb, an approach that influenced the work of Martin Hannett with Joy Division, and behind Factory Record’s production aesthetic in and of itself.

Artists taken in by the Plank approach in the last decade would include any that were influenced by Brian Eno. LCD Soundsystem, Tv on the Radio, Animal Collective, Radiohead, just to name the larger groups, but on the smaller scale most of the work that came out of Scandinavia; Todd Terje, Prins Thomas, Lindstrom, Studio, and on the nu-disco/balearic side of things it was Mountain of One, DJ Harvey, Sorcerer, Hatchback, and Windsurf amongst others. In terms of dubstep, electro and minimalism, Plank is all over those records whether you are referring to Pantha Du Prince, Zomby, Air, Daft Punk, or Kode 9.

In sum, Plank’s influenced worked his way into 00s production whether you favored minimalism or maximalism in your approach, a rare feat indeed. On the minimal spectrum, it was his innovation in terms of using clanging drums, accentuating space between sounds, and using looped snippets of vocals or noises from industrial sources ala Cluster that seep into the records of 00s. A good example of a Plank-ean record would be Liars ” Drums not Dead”, an album that uses every Conny trick in the book, and is an iconic representation of how maximalism and minimalism can commingle into one artistic statement.

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