minimalism

The term minimalism is commonly misunderstood, and often maligned. In its truest sense, minimalism was an art movement, a form of architecture, and then finally a form of music, specifically Classical or art music. Recently this label has also been applied to electronica as well, and many questions seem to arise from the use of this term, which probably needs some clarification.

The best way to think of minimalism in the broadest sense, is as a series of concepts or ideas. Ideas drive many things, and in creative endeavors, ideas become design principles, guides or even sometimes arbitrary rule sets used to steer the process. The Mies Van Der Rohe quote “less is more” gets thrown around, and did stem from the Bauhaus architecture and design movement so it is legitimately part of the true definition of minimalism, but it is possibly not clear enough to those who do not intuitively understand it at face value. Another way to say this is “doing the more with less”, as in create the most function from the least amount of form. I like to use the term “Occam’s Razor” which fundamentally means “economy of means” or what we could all just call plain simple.

My personal interest in minimalism started in college, but probably really started long before I had a name for it. Even as a small child, I was always attracted to the straightest lines, the least adorned furniture, and the boxiest houses, so when I majored in music in college, I did a recital with some friends who put together a small chamber orchestra, and we performed Terry Riley’s minimalist classic “In C” at an in school recital that we did for own artistic gratification as it was not connected to any of our curriculum. I particularly liked how it seemed to unite artist and audience in the same trance like state. It was really Philip Glass who drew me in first, when I heard Einstein on the Beach, and that was the thread that led me back to Riley. I quickly realized once I had a name for my attraction, I found it everywhere in Bauhaus architecture, Rothko paintings, the poetry of  William Carlos Williams, in Apple products, and minimal computing initiatives that emphasize the most functionality with the least amount of code bloat, and Ableton Live is a great emboditment of this ideal, when most music DAW software requires gigs of storage to install the binaries, the full Ableton Live 7 installer (not the suite) was barely over 100MB, and runs very efficiently on most hardware.

In electronic music, long before the advent of the genres minimal or minimal techno, acid was the music that sounded minimal to me. In acid, the instrument selection was a very limited pallette of the now infamous xoxboxes (the vintage Roland gear with a zero in the middle hence the “x0x” ala the SH-101, MC-202, TB-303, TR-606, TR-808 & TR-909 as the most coveted x0xboxes) and the beats were spare, and musical arrangement very repetitious, and it seemed that most of the time the only change was the cutoff and resonance parameters on the Roland TB303. Repetition on this level, either drives people nuts, or immerses them. The reason for the latter response is related to a phenomenon known as photic and auditory driving. Repetition is the core principle behind meditation or hypnosis, and it is at the heart of many religious practices East and West, as indigenous tribal drumming, gregorian chant, plainsong or mantra meld into a singularity that in the end is simply part of our human nature, connecting back to the cycles of the cosmos. The movement of techtonic plates in the ground, the rotation fo the earth, the movement of the moon around the earth, the earth around the sun, our solar system in our galaxy revolving around a supermassive blackhole, our galaxy cluster around an even larger blackhole ad infinitum are forms of cosmic repetition that change very little over time. Precession of the equinoxes is a way to refer to the slight wobble of the earth’s axis over time that takes approximately 26,000 years to complete one revolution, while the earth rotates on that same axis every 24 hours all the while. In this sense repetition is changing because what appears to be completely static is actually always modified in a nearly imperceptible way. Minimalism is in fact very close to nature for this reason. Minimalism is not a car driving from point A to point B, but more like a fountain with a color cycling light that stays the same while the light subtly morphs over time. DJ Spooky wrote a book called Rhythm Science which I was lucky enough to have him autograph my copy at a lecture appearance at USF, which at its core refers to music in the broadest John Cage sense of being any sound, and sound is just vibration, and all vibration has a frequency, and with modern science just about any frequency of any thing can be measured, and if it can be measured than it can be used artistically, as a direct or indirect point of reference for a musical work.  When we allow ourselves to become immersed in minimalism, as in all the previous examples, we first learn the repetitious loop, then we listen for the subtle changes, be it automated reverb, or filter sweeps or whatever, and the repetition becomes like the hypnotists proverbial swinging pocket watch, and we tune into the slowly changing dimension, and we can disconnect from our surroundings and drift off into ourselves, allowing us to feel the upwelling of our unconscious as if we were meditating, so that the minimalist music becomes an active form of meditation. In design and architecture, the simplicity of the environment, allows us to focus on ourselves amidst the uncluttered serentiy, in poetry we become reflective of our true self, and so in the end, minimalism encourages us to be truly human.