Today's artist feature is BT (Brian Transeau, not Bachman-Turner before they hit Overdrive.)
I'll start out by mentioning that I don't listen to much techno, and that is where this artist hangs his hat.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the club scene on occasion. I'll even listen to Pendulum, Celldweller, a handful of others.
But as a rule, I'm not that interested. Most techno, to me, lacks enough layering. It tends to blend dynamics until they are unrecognizable.
So why am I reviewing a techno artist?
Frankly, the guy is musically impressive. All of my aforementioned complaints about techno are largely absent from his music - and anything he collaborates on. He's got a very unique ability to use melody to make repeated lyrics less boring, and that impresses me. Normally repeated lines annoy the piss out of me.
Aside from that, let's see...
You've heard the BT Stutter Edit. You don't know it, but you have. It is rampant all over electronic music, rap, even bits and pieces of rock. It has the nice feature of being exactly what it sounds like - a stutter in the music, usually to create a secondary rhythm. You'll notice it has BT in front of it - that would be because he invented it.
The guy also wanted to put the sound of rain (among other things) into a beat pattern.
This would involve editing on the nanosecond level - which, at the time, didn't exist. So of course he gave up until technology caught up to his imagination (*coughJamesCameroncough*)
No. He wrote a program that allowed him to do exactly what he wanted, and then made it available for others to use. Nano-editing. Heh.
About my only serious complaint is that he has this habit of exploring the fringes of techno...that is to say he has some very weird sounds from time to time. I don't fault him for that - that's how you discover awesome things. I just don't always like the results.
So on to the sound. Most of the music I listen to from BT has a sort of hybrid techno-rock sound that I enjoy. I'm not sure what to compare it to, aside from a lighter sort of Celldweller - and that is neither completely accurate nor all that useful for the average music connoisseur.
Thus, I'll simply tell you which tracks to look up on YouTube and give a video link to sum it all up.
Circles, Somnambulist (Simply Being Loved), Suddenly, Forget Me, Love Can Kill You, Dreaming
Also, since I've mentioned Celldweller twice now, his remix of Suddenly is pretty epic as well.
I'll tack on that BT as done some work with Tiesto...Break My Fall comes to mind, and there is another that escapes me at the moment.
That leaves us with the video link:
- C
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