My most recent column for MusicRadar is an explainer on Quebec’s hottest microtonal prog-techno sensation.
My editor cut out my selection of comments from the YouTube video, so I include them here:
“Weird part starts at 0:00”
“I started to transcribe the tab of this for guitar but i started getting a metallic taste in my mouth and woke up in the middle of a corn field in 1947”
“This is the Future we were Primused”
“So glad my grandma’s cat recommended this to me in a dream”
“I looked up the sheet music for these tracks and they were written in wingdings”
“MOM, MY SLEEP PARALYSIS DEMONS ARE DOING FREE-FORM FUNK JAZZ AGAIN!!!”
“This feels like a trip to the 70’s … (The decade from 2970 to 2979)”
This band supports my belief that microtonality is poised to explode into the Anglo-American pop mainstream. You read it here first!
Nice selection.
And an interesting phenomenon.
In Quebec, some musicians perceive connections with L’Infonie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Infonie
(Situated in a key moment in Quebec’s history called the “Quiet Revolution”.)
Members of that 1969–1974 group have remained a part of Quebec’s “cultural landscape” since then.
The newer band comes from Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean. It’s a rather remarkable region as it’s both remote and culturally rich. Did some fieldwork in « SagLac » during the Pandemic and the regional cultural council’s director was joking that “half the members of Quebec’s artists’ union come from Saguenay… the other half comes from Lac-Saint-Jean”.
In terms of poly- and microtonality, it does sound like we’re reaching an important moment. #MusicTech might actually help us. With tools like MTS-ESP, supported by Surge XT. Hoping against hope, MIDI 2.0 might eventually make diverse tuning systems more readily available.
Personally, I’ve been ambivalent about Ableton’s idiosyncratic approach to classifying tuning systems, given its overemphasis on some musical traditions and its complete disregard for much of the World’s musical diversity. Yet it may motivate some musickers to experiment outside of 12TET.
As you sometimes remind us: though 12TET has been the dominant system for electronic devices (including tuners), few musical performances adhere strictly to that standard outside of purely electronic music. Though it’s rather close, it’s not really how people tune a piano or a guitar, the dominant instruments in Eurocentric music. It’s obviously not the tuning used when singing. Bowed and blown instruments don’t adhere to 12TET either. Despite many ways to tune samples, there’s little guarantee that they’ll fit in twelve-tone equal temperament. Even vintage synths often deviate from 12TET across the range.
In that sense, most music is “microtonal”.
Of course, there’s a whole set of tuning systems out there which use mathematical constructs to build “synthetic tunings”. There’s a lot happening in the Xenharmonic niche.
A few years ago I assigned my theory students to create a piece of music using any tuning system except 12-TET, and recommended a whole suite of free apps, plugins and web tools to help them do it. Some of the results were wonderful.