Post-produktive Musik – Neue Soundästhetiken durch post-produktives Mastering und Vinylcut

Abstract: Post-Produced Music – New Sound Aesthetics by Mastering and Vinylcut

Since the last few years one can listen to a new sound on vinyl records, especially with bass related club music. Records from genres like (Dirty) Grime, (Post) Dubstep, Trap, Juke, BlipHop, Future Bass and Drum & Bass but as well in Sound Art show a new kind of deepness, spatiality and presence in sound, never heard before.

This phenomenon has to do with achievements in mastering and vinyl cut, created by mastering engineers, which rather tend to be mastering artists, developing signature sounds and emphasizing the creative part of mastering. These sounds, often perceived like kinetic soundscapes or sonic sculptures, show the new relevance of post-production in music, parallel to the new relevance of post-production in film, where more and more filmic elements are pushed to post-production.

Three signature mastering engineers and their aesthetic will be considered: Rashad Becker, Taylor Dupree, and Matt Colton. Along with the new role of post-production a new aesthetic is rising, an aesthetic of “fucked up”, as mastering engineer Matt Colton puts it: “maybe it sounding wrong is better than it sounding right”.

The paper will give insight into new developments in the field of high end music production, relating them to cultural developments (extinction of club culture), economic developments (the music market and its rules and restrictions) and questioning if these vinyl productions are a new kind of “museum of (club) sound”.

Text (auf Deutsch) zum Download: Post-produktive Musik_Lund
Gestaltung: Arne Teubel, die kommune
Veröffentlicht: 29. Juni 2018

Der Text wurde entwickelt für das Research Symposium “The Future Sound of Pop Music”, Universität der Künste, Bern, 30. November – 02. Dezember 2017, und anschließend weiterentwickelt für Mirella Brandi x Muepetmo, Set Up To Fail, „Post-Produced Music—Recent Developments in Mastering and Vinylcut“, Centro da Terra, Sao Paulo, 25. März 2018, sowie für die “Play Session – Lecture: Let’s do it in the post – Entwicklungen in der Post-Produktion am Beispiel post-produktiver Musik (Mastering und Vinylcut)”, DHBW Ravensburg, Studiengang Mediendesign, 08. Mai 2018.