Bt - These Hopeful Machines
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Music CD Cover
Artist: BtEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2010-02-02
Music Label: Nettwerk Records
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Suddenly
- The Emergency
- Every Other Way
- The Light in Things
- Rose of Jericho
- Forget Me
- A Million Stars
- Love Can Kill You
- Always
- Le Nocturne de Lumière
- The Unbreakable
- The Ghost In You
Free Music Notes for These Hopeful Machines
Free Music Review: ...we are just now witnessing the unveiling...
Hit: 5 Stars
These Hopeful Machines heralds a new benchmark for quality and sophistication in commercially-viable electronic music. BT, perhaps more so than any popular artist I can think of, consistently produces music that is excellent in every regard. The standard of quality he maintains; the level of his artistry is remarkable. The amount of work he puts into each project is immense, and his dedication is beyond admirable. Every album he has released possesses a distinct identity, and every subsequent album evolves substantially from its predecessor while maintaining stylistic cohesion. BT's music is instantly recognizable as his. I can think of few other artists in the genre that own their music so strongly. He maintains his distinct style in spite of, or perhaps because of the diversity of his musical influences, which have become more apparent with each album. His music is not a patchwork of other artists' ideas, or if it is, then a single piece of that patchwork is microscopic. I'm making a lot of generalizations in what is supposed to be a review of a single record, not an analysis of a career. But I make these comments because they are relevant to this particular album. I think you need to be familiar with his previous work to understand just how brilliant this new album is, though familiarity is not a prerequisite for appreciation. These Hopeful Machines (hereafter referred to as THM) feels like a culmination. It seems as if all of his previous work was developmental, and we are just now witnessing the unveiling, the flowering of his potential (note the album cover). I'm not implying that all his previous work is underdeveloped. Rather, that in the light of this new work, his previous albums are essential developmental stages. They have a strong interconnectedness: a sequential progression of composition, artistic identity and production technique.
Regarding the product itself: the production is flawless. The mixing is outstanding, and I am referring here to the multi-track mix to stereo, not the continuous mix from one song to the next, though that too is exceptional. The quality of this mix rivals the best professionally produced pop and rock recordings. Each sound occupies its own space within the soundstage and every sound is highly resolved. The sense of space in the mix, of depth, is very well-defined, and objects are acutely formed. The sound layering is solidly maintained by the greatly considered level-balancing. Overlapping sounds never compete with each other, at least not in any unintentional way: a common result of clumsy engineering. The mix will often be comprised of a multitude of layers and elements resulting in a full and complex sonic environment, yet nothing ever seems superfluous. Acoustic and electronic sounds mingle with ease, blurring the boundary between the two. As should be expected in the best electronic music, everything is absolutely deliberate.
BT's technical proficiency matches his compositional expertise, and you can't really talk about one without discussing the other. The mixing and sound editing, the production, is as much a part of BT's composition as the sequence of notes. It wouldn't be a BT record without those stutter-edits, and they are frequently yet judiciously employed with preposterous skill. Not that this isn't the case with his previous albums, but I find the stutter-edit breakdown sections of THM to be highly melodic despite their bewilderingly complex rhythms. Ever since Movement in Still Life we have heard music trying to emulate those edits, but no one does it like BT.
Music, at its core, is a manipulation of time. BT takes a short sound, a brief moment of time, be it a vocal snippet or a percussive strike, and cuts it up into as many pieces as the limits of human perception will allow, or his artistic expression desires. Then he arranges those tiny segments in a variety of patterns and sequences for us to perceive that brief moment of time in abstract and unexpected ways. It's like a microscope for the ear (and ultimately your perception of time). While you are listening to these stutter-edit passages it's as though you are being held, but never quite frozen within a narrow span of time. He moves you back and forth and focuses in and out, revealing intricacies of that captured moment that can't be otherwise perceived. And then sometimes, after we've witnessed this moment from a satisfying variety of temporal angles and directions, he will slow time down by decreasing the length of the edits and increasing the number of edits per second into a crescendo of time and sound. A stunning example of this is the incredible build and peak in `The Emergency', assembled from a sample of the word "you" in the line, "Today, is the day, that I love you." The crescendo peaks as we have reached the moment of maximum perceptible resolution for that brief captured period. "You" has splintered and warped beyond recognition. Tension reaches a zenith and just before he releases the hold there is a quick flurry of glitches as though a computer is being snagged at the tail-end of reboot. Finally, mercifully (and I mean that in the best possible way), time resumes the established pace, we reenter the atmosphere and come beautifully crashing back into the song.
BT will usually have multiple edit tracks playing simultaneously (it probably would not be inaccurate to label every track an edit track, but I am referring to the tracks dedicated to the stutter-edits). They skitter and cross over each other, dancing in playful, counterpoint rhythms as they leap across the stereo field. The pan automation/sequencing in THM is spectacular. The edit samples are often jumping and morphing so quickly that your brain doesn't have time to fully analyze their configuration before it has changed. Thus you are chasing after the sounds and their micro-patterns, appreciating them after they have left. These patterns are sometimes so rapid they hover on the verge of perceptibility, but BT keeps them from ever becoming just incomprehensible noise. This is where his skill as a composer compliments his technical acumen. His musical intuition has the last word. These marvels of programming are never there just to awe you. They always have a compositional purpose, obeying BT's advanced musical logic.
BT's musical logic, his songwriting theory, is unassailable. This feat is especially impressive considering the general complexity of the songs. These are pop songs (with the possible exceptions of Rose of Jericho and Le Nocturne de Lumière, the closest any tracks come to pure progressive trance, though even they have melodic refrains that recur similarly to the primary melody of a pop song), yet they are long, running from around five minutes to over twelve minutes in length. Even the longest songs preserve their core pop structure throughout. Everything is expanded (what might be an 8-measure bridge in a pop song becomes a minute-plus trance interlude) and thoroughly explored, yet the rules are not broken. Verse, chorus, bridge, intro and outro, key changes, etc- all of these pop song components can be identified and occur exactly when they should. The brilliance of this cannot be overstated. BT has always demonstrated masterful understanding of pop song composition, and it is certainly one reason why he has broad appeal. Even still he doesn't neglect the trance crowd. His credibility within the club/dance scene will undoubtedly continue. And while you can't please everyone, BT comes close, and most impressively, never seems to be compromising in the process.
An interesting mix of guest vocalists is on display in THM, along with BT himself, whose voice has matured nicely. This is an album designed to feature vocals, and if you don't like vocal-based trance then you probably won't enjoy THM. There are instrumental intermissions and the compositionally exquisite instrumental tracks `Rose of Jericho' and `Le Nocturne de Lumière' (of all songs in THM, Nocturne feels most like something from This Binary Universe). The rest of the time we are asked to engage with the human voice. Additionally there are a lot of male vocals, especially on the more somber `B side', which could further put off some. Still, I think BT has struck a fine balance between male and female vocal tracks, and gives plenty of breather with the instrumental sections. A preponderance of one sex in vocal trance can be wearisome, and while the vocals in a couple of THM's songs venture into slightly eccentric territory, I don't feel the album ever comes close to derailing because of it. The `B-Side' of THM is initially less accessible and features Rob Dickinson in two tracks. Though the B-Side is the "comedown" side of the two, it still has plenty of triumphant energy, Dickinson's tracks being among the more powerful. The B-Side is nicely grounded by the impossibly delicate, angelic voice of Kirsty Hawkshaw in the epic opening track, A Million Stars. All the vocals in THM possess plenty of charismatic personality. Nobody sounds like Mr. or Ms. Generic Trance Vocalist. That may be the ultimate artistic success of THM, and what keeps it consistently riveting throughout its entire play time.
I can understand if someone would not enjoy this album because the core intent, the message or philosophy, doesn't resonate with them. Maybe you don't believe in love, or you only think of love as something clinical and biological. You are decided that all love songs are artificial sentimentality. That is a valid perspective and it could make it difficult to fully enjoy this album. I find the unabashed emotion of These Hopeful Machines to be refreshing, when so much of electronic music (and for me this is not a negative thing) is very rigid and sterile, striving only for sensory stimulation and hypnotization. This is not to say that BT's music isn't designed to effect a hypnotic state in the mind of the listener- hardly. His music functions on an extremely refined mathematical, indeed scientific level. And that makes it all the more incredible that he is able to convey deeply personal feelings, and engage the listener so intimately. Perhaps it speaks to a fundamental truth of the structure of the human mind. Even if every aspect of our existence is physical, that does not invalidate emotion or lessen its worth. THM addresses our intellectual and primal aspects simultaneously. It is an absurdly ambitious creation, but BT's talent makes it possible.
The appetite for entertainment has become increasingly voracious in our fledgling Information Age. It's rare that an album comes along that demands multiple listens. There is so much else clamoring for your attention, it seems nearly impossible to avoid distraction. Yet here BT has crafted something that cannot be denied, something that commands attention and implores analysis and promises to fully reveal itself only after you have invested substantial time and effort. I know I certainly haven't perceived its entirety, though I've listened to it many times uninterrupted. Is it ridiculous to describe an album in this way? Probably, but with THM it seems appropriate. It encourages you and invites you to discover. It is warm and welcoming and at the same time vast nearly beyond description. It is mysterious and often I feel like I am catching ephemeral hints of concepts I will never understand. I wonder if BT himself has a total conscious understanding of what he has created, if he is not possessed by a creative force, and when he has completed his work if he sits back and marvels at it incredulously.
Don't think the lack of specific criticism in this review is due to blind fanaticism on my part, that I automatically assume everything BT does is great. No, the lack of criticism is really because I do not find anything negative about the album to criticize. This is a great album, and if you have the slightest interest in electronic music you should check it out. If you like it, buy it. Let's support the artists that help make life more interesting, so that they will thrive and continue to entertain, challenge and thrill us for as long as they wish- doubly so for electronic music which is woefully underappreciated.
Long Live the Beats,
Mind Layer
These Hopeful Machines Poster
With his latest two-hour, double-disc opus, These Hopeful Machines, BT definitively weaves both the technical prowess and compositional mastery that reminds us all why he's the composer that all other composers and producers study. As with previous albums, These Hopeful Machines is rife with vocal collaborations that expose BT's influences and bend them toward his unique perceptions of song structure and sonic parity. Many tracks feature his signature stutter edits created by his own Breaktweaker software. By consistently balancing creative and memorable songwriting, sonic innovation and the latest technology for a cutting-edge yet organic sound, BT has become one of the most revolutionary artists and sought after producers on the scene.Dance & DJ Music CDs
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