Twenty years ago, the Vancouver music scene was filled with the alternative sounds of the angst filled nineties. You might have noticed that genre of music has made a huge comeback. It has never been a better time to be an indie band than the current age. All of that music is coming back into the mainstream, and it is great. We’ve come so far from the anti-synth days of the nineties and especially with artificial intelligence threatening the music world, people are turning their anger away from electronic instruments and towards generative AI.
Alan Cross is a local music historian here in British Columbia, if you recognize his name, he is a music columnist for Global News and host of The Ongoing History of Music. I had the great chance to produce an interview conducted with him, and it gave me so much insight into the music industry.
I was born rather late into the 2000’s and the music that came out during the years I have been alive has been mainly digital. Digital workspaces to build it, digital drums for the rhythm, midi piano notes, artificial sounds, etc. At one point, though, was a time where people treated digital instruments like drum machines as an enemy to music. There was a fear that these machines would replace the need for an actual drummer, or an actual pianist. These points were all brought up by Alan Cross and it was something I had never given much thought to.
I wonder what the big controversy was for you in music. Right now though we all live in a world where platforms like Suno are the enemy, so our synthesizers and drum machines are safe – for now.
Many artists who created music in the Indie genre are multi-instrumental solo acts. When you listen to an indie song, you’ll hear the complex layering of synthesizers, bass guitar, electric guitar, etc. For a single artist to perform their music live, they can utilize different techniques, but the source of their sound is often a digital machine. And I’m not talking about something to store the sound, I mean that the drums weren’t created on an actual kit, and they might not even own a synthesizer – it could just be midi notes played into a digital audio workspace.
The 90s are so back, but this time, we left the digital hatred behind.