Nikmis

[Dr. M]

Kind of like the boy who tries pathetically to rebuild his sandcastle after it's been washed away, even though the sand is completely saturated and won't mold.

Or the guy that still has his ex's cell phone number saved in his contacts.

[brianpeppers]

pink nikmis
http://nikmis.bandcamp.com/album/pink-nikmis

this is made with jeskola buzz, MFB Kraftzwerg, Roland SH-101, Casio CZ-3000, Cat Girl Synth 'Real Ring Mod', Blok Modular VSTI, 'Standard' VSTI by xoxos, and Jeskola Qsamo. So it's not completely analog, but mostly. Also, two of the synthesizers are vintage. So, I feel that I deserve all the analog synth street-cred that I can get.

[xoxos]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink

"In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s[12] or earlier.[13] An article in the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department in June 1918 said: "The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl."[14] From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red it was the more masculine and decided color, while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color, or related to the Virgin Mary.[15][16][17] Since the 1940s, the societal norm was inverted; pink became considered appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century.[18]"

nikmis is something to think about. i don't know what to think about nikmis. sometimes i am about to believe nikmis is compulsion*. at any rate, i enjoy what you do, your music is certainly among my foremost choices for entertainment, and you are kind to us.

*accordingly, i prefer to be kinder than this.

[Nikmis]

thank you very much, xoxos. I used standard vst and one of the other ones from your bundle on Ohso, Plika, and Framba

[xoxos]

i intended to refrain from posting, because i'm not proud of seeing my name as the latest poster for half the forums here.

"thoughts", such as they are..

i'm so glad he doesn't name them with numbers like other classical works

but the random words aren't much more memorable either

what about random phrases? too image leading? or maybe it's enough to remember the album names and accept that the random words will sink in, if i need to talk about your individual songs that much anyway :P

:P anywaay.. acknowledgement. i've been recommending your music a lot lately, for me i appreciate the vantage it creates on contemporary music/culture (eg. electronic, sequenced, which i obviously like, yet a lack of pervasive kick drums.. constantly recalling those few, delicate years of clubbing, where.. for me, even then, the music rarely needed a kick drum..)

[Nikmis]

well, the names do have meanings but nothing to do with the music... I guess I could name them like 'etude in f minor' but I am not really sure what an etude is. All those french and italian musical style names, I am not really making music like that. Its pseudo-classical, not really the same. just almost, so I can't use those words. So that leaves me with descriptive phrases but because the music is instrumental names would have to be arbitrary. "an autumn breeze" or something, that makes no sense. I don't want to number them, there is no progression. so random names it is.

here are the meanings of the names that I can remember, brace yourself
1. Raft 06:10 I farted, yes. Raft is an anagram of Fart.
2. April 03:21 Listen to this, its a bit like a march. March, April
3.Nishi 06:45 The day I started this, I went to work for a few hours at Ono-town Nishi (west) kindergarten
5.Sango 04:51 I was eating a Mango, but I already have a nikmis named Mango
7.Plika 05:26 This started off with plucking strings, it changed. Pluck, plicka
8.Qweird 06:05 This was made with a jeskola buzz machine Qsamo, Qweird
9.Framba 04:08 There is a bakery near here called Framboise. I think that means raspberry in French

[xoxos]

sigh.. alright, it's full-on glorify nikmis day.. :)

not classical music? so what kind of erudition do you have? am i mistaken that the other project on bandcamp (the "noisy pop") is also your work? you have some formal acquaintance with music theory, and likely are familiar with a body of classical music, or you happened upon the style fortuitously/punk rock stylee and stuck with it??

it's fairly alien to my ears - and perhaps interestingly, usually when an artist creates a body of work over duration, there's usually some overt transition between earlier and later pieces, and i haven't perceived that yet. the old pieces sound crafted with the same values and affinity that later pieces do. perhaps i'm not a good listener!

i am not sure there is much more i can say about your music without becoming particularly insipid!

[xoxos]

i'll add that you must have your own values for not calling it classical music. i'd expect that a majority of persons not overly weighted about genrefication would quite happily consider it as such.

[Dr. M]

Genres, now more than ever, are of course meaningless outside of Billboard charts world, so the question of whether or not Nikmis is "classical music" is pretty irrelevant. But here's my two cents anyway. When the average person says "classical music", they're referring to the Western tradition of art music that's progressed from the 1600s and earlier up through now, as opposed to modern "contemporary" "pop music", or any music that falls outside of that tradition. The line between those is constantly being blurred of course, but I'd says Nikmis definitely falls more on the "contemporary" "pop" side of it, for the basic, sole reason that his music is not written down or performed. The whole basis for the Western art music tradition is that it is notated in some form and given live performances. Nikmis makes synthesizer music strongly influenced by the textures, compositional techniques and harmonic progressions of Western art music made in centuries past, but it still isn't "classical music", it's simply instrumental electronic music, made by a contemporary musician who's perfectly satisfied recording things in his house and having that be it. What defines music best, I think, is not what's in it but how it was intended.

I've said to Nikmis in the past that I think it would be very cool for him to arrange something he wrote for live instruments, or just compose for them period, and if he did than at that point I might say he's writing "classical music". It's largely a matter of opinion though.

[Dr. M]

I mean I guess you could then say, "but in the last sixty years we've seen lots of modern classical composers making electronic music that exists solely on record", and I'd say then that a lot of those have been performed live, in some sense, and also, again, it's all a matter of intent. Those pieces were made by Western art music snobs for the Western art music crowd.

[xoxos]

it's classical music because the emphasis is on pitched and metered content.

and, moreover, because it goes deedle dee. like classical music ;)

i don't think i've heard the phrase "art music" used outside of this thread before.

[Nikmis]

pop music is "commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs"

classical music big definiton is "Serious or conventional music following long-established principles rather than a folk, jazz, or popular tradition."

I am in the middle, so its like pseudo-classical. Its not pop because I don't write songs and I don't write in song format. Its more like classical but I don't follow the long-established principles directly, because I don't know them perfectly.

I don't think it has anything to do with notation. You are wrong about that, Dr. M. But you are right about genres not being as defined in reailty as they are in people's heads. This is big definition classical, the only difference is that I am writing for synthesizer, specifically. I am not writing for orchestra and then just using a synthesizer as a temporary recording until (a lot of student composers do that).

Art music is medieval music, baroque, classical, romantic era, modern experimental stuff. It is anything where the focus is "serious" and "implying advanced structural and theoretical considerations". My music is not classical art musics. its just some kind of bobo art music.

I think it likes a sliding scale between pop music, art music, and folk music. folk music being like traditional common people music, not like bob dylan folk music. the original kinds of music. hoedowns and bagpipes and african drumming, that sort of thing. popular music is for the most part a recent invention that is halfway in between and then there is serious music that tries too hard, like nikmis

take jazz for example. some of it is definitly just pop music with some syncopation. but some of it is very serious complex stuff, its own variety of art music.

here is my rough and probably very innacurate map of how I think it is
http://i.imgur.com/mbEIh.png

[Jono]

Its more like classical but I don't follow the long-established principles directly, because I don't know them perfectly.

This is what I assumed you meant when you said it was "pseudo-classical," only I never really wanted to say it myself, because it was an assumption. I guess you could say your style comes from emulating the sound of classical music without studying too deeply the (sometimes) intense concepts behind classical music composition? Is that pretty accurate?

[Nikmis]

yes, I think so, not that I am trying to emulate them completely. I just listened to a lot of that music. And from being in orchestras in high school and university. I just want to make music that is melodically and harmonically expressive, and not based on chord progressions that repeat in a song fashion. with that in mind, and with my sense of what sounds good based on influences of music I have listened to over the years, I make nikmis.

thanks fer askin'!!

[Dr. M]

I don't think it has anything to do with notation. You are wrong about that, Dr. M. But you are right about genres not being as defined in reailty as they are in people's heads. This is big definition classical, the only difference is that I am writing for synthesizer, specifically. I am not writing for orchestra and then just using a synthesizer as a temporary recording until (a lot of student composers do that).

We're basically in agreement, and this is of course nit-picky, but I think you'd have a pretty hard time arguing notation has NOTHING to do with it, when Western classical music is completely based in notation (beginning after the dark ages) whereas pop music is basically never notated before it's recorded. Notation on one side and the absence of notation on the other is a very common thread running through both.

As you said, pop music is a relatively recent invention. In most cases, it exists primarily on record. The performer may get to tour around and a relatively small percentage of people might get to hear them sing their stuff live, but the music itself, for most people, is the recording. This is the opposite of traditional classical music, which exists in notation and live performance, and then maybe gets recorded later. So, to me, notation has a lot to do with it. And given this definition, it's easy to see why Nikmis is pop.

I guess our disagreement is just that you're using "big definition classical" and I'm using "slightly smaller, more arbitrary definition" classical.

But, we are in agreement that the best definition of all exists in our minds, and if you did hypothetically intend your music to be "classical", it would be hard to argue with you. If you did though, in this hypothetical situation, I bet you any money you'd be writing for live instruments or trying to get your own little synth orchestra together to perform live in an attempt to "legitimize" yourself. There's another distinction, wanting to feel like part of the establishment versus not giving a f*ck. Your highest aspiration might be getting signed to a label, not being hired to teach at Julliard.

[Nikmis]

lack of notation is not what makes something pop. notation was just a way to record music so others could play it. what about the improvisation that was intended in a lot of baroque scores?

classical/baroque/all the rest composers notated so that orchestras could play their compositions. I jeskola buzz so that synthesizers can play my compositions. Pop musicians write songs and play instruments to record songs. I think the real definition is in the actual forms of music. I don't write songs, or chord progressions like a pop song. Those are great, just not what I do. When I write a nikmis I almost always stick to the basic sonata format because thats the only one I really know how to do

So I think pseudo-classical really sticks pretty well.

[Nikmis]

[quote="xoxos"] am i mistaken that the other project on bandcamp (the "noisy pop") is also your work?[/quote]
wait, what? What are you talking about?
also, I don't have a deviantart page

[xoxos]

i got that ;)

after d/ling one of your albums, there was a recommended project that was ~noisy pop music, with a male and female singer who sounded a bit like your wife?? ~complex phrasing and structure, but vaguely alt synthpop arrangements.

iirc the recommendation had some statement like "this is not like nikmis"

[Nikmis]

I recommended this one via the download
http://nudephotosofcelebrities.bandcamp ... /sine-wave

Thats not my music, I don't know the guy

[xoxos]

that's it :) the inference was based on the timbre of the female vocals (of which i only had a vague impression) and the maturity of the compositions.