When an artist is part of the electronic music scene, a genre
better geared for the studio, it can be tough to make live shows
more interesting than simply standing behind a laptop playing
pre-recorded music.
But Captain Ahab, aka third-year theater student and former
Daily Bruin designer Jonathan Snipes, has found a way to engage his
audiences. On stage he’ll belt out a cover of Avril
Lavigne’s “Sk8er Boi,” sing a heartfelt ode to
his crashed hard drive, or simply settle for running around and
screaming like a maniac.
Snipe’s music is pure pop electro that is meant to be
funny and ironic. The tunes are often pretty and catchy, with
little of the harsh, distorted sounds more commonly associated with
the Intelligent Dance Music scene. Robots are a recurring theme in
his songs, as he tries to both embrace and make fun of pop
music.
Snipes is part of a growing trend of electronic artists trying
to stay away from traditional IDM to keep their roots in pop and
hip hop. The new sounds show that people have grown weary of
’90s indulgence in complicated sounds and special effects,
and are now more interested in the songwriting aspect of the music
than the wonders of the technology.
“Most of the other kids I know who are just getting their
records out, they’re not making IDM anymore,” Snipes
said. “It’s like everyone went nuts with the technology
for a little while with computers, and now we’re starting to
use it more in moderation. I think it’s more interesting (now
that we’re) becoming more interested in songwriting than
crazy noises.”
The rise of so many new artists is due to the easy access and
affordability of computers and software that drive the music. Plus,
when drawing in the factor of people pirating illegal software, any
person has the ability to sit in his or her room and use the same
software that Aphex Twin has. And though Snipes has a new record
coming out soon on the London label Irritant Records, he owes much
of his success and fan base to Internet music sites.
“The internet music scene is something that’s new
over the past few years, and I came out of that,” Snipes
said. “A lot of people are distributing music online now and
that sort of started with mp3.com. Now electronicscene.com seems to
be the place where people convene and how most people find out
about music.”
And though people tend to first get interested in electronic
music through the rave scene, electro offers a more sophisticated
genre of electronic music that people tend to grow into.
“With the beginning of a small rave scene in America, you
get a lot of kids who will do that for a while and then will move
on to more interesting electronic music,” Snipes said,
“I don’t know how I feel about that because it feels
like this is nerdy armchair music and now everybody is listening to
it in clubs.”
After growing up on folk and classical music, it was the
distorted sounds and the experimental techno of groups like Aphex
Twin and Orbital that first got Snipes interested in electronic
music.
“I love classical music, but to me the interesting thing
about electronic music is it feels the possibilities to create a
sound are almost limitless. Any sound you can imagine, you can
either create or find or somehow invent. If you’re playing an
acoustic instrument it pretty much just makes one noise, but with a
synthesizer you can completely restructure the sound that it makes,
depending on the machine,” Snipes said.
Yet the response of computer savvy American audiences, who are
more accustomed to going to rock concerts, is perhaps an
uncertainty of what to make of the shifting beats and pop sounds in
the live arena.
“No one in this scene in Los Angeles dances, which is
weird,” Snipes said. “The sort of stuff I make is
really dance-y, but no one dances except at really small shows
where everybody goes crazy and is really drunk. And, it’s
true that when people like Aphex Twin and people from England come
to Los Angeles and do shows, without fail at some point they will
say, “˜Why aren’t you people dancing? You’re just
standing there looking at me like it’s some sort of rock
show.'”
“Maybe the people here in the scene are a little more
pretentious,” Snipes added. “It’s a response to a
scene that was created in England by actual music people as opposed
to computer people. And now we’re all computer people and
we’re uncomfortable dancing.”