What the heck is "Lowercase" music?

Music Scene Chat
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I have a Noiiz subscription and there is now a genre option called “Lowercase”…what the heck did I miss out on lol?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowercase_(music)

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2

Enhance the inaudible frequencies via eq boosting to get artifacts and then using those sounds with artifacts to make music???

Idk…lol

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I was going to say that background unliscensable trash you hear in coffee joints, but that’s muzak.

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I was certain it would be some kind of super generic coffee house electronica–like something where a folk band could play next and it’d be cool.

@bfk yea man lol… I guess it has gotten to the point where music has to go to weird extremes. That’s why I’ve just gone backwards and am just focusing on fun, disposable dance music. I’ve done the academia thing where we sit around and stroke our…beards…and drink brandy and respond with “hrm…” while looking thoughtful and defending shit that is interesting in theory/the abstract but boring as shit in practice.

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5

I was actually thinking of doing this with a pitch stretched loop. Just take a normal 4/4 loop of dance music, then timestretch it to a few different registers, and then put that into a sampler with pitch stretching and play all the various parts of that as the song.

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6

I’ve not used a completed song in this way, but I’ll chop and pitch backing percussion loops in this way or something like it at least. I love the sound. I’d love to hear what you come up with using a piece of an finished, full song. I guess I’ve also chopped tiny bits out of 3-4 songs, chopped, pitched and sequenced them.

7

Lower a case of beer into your body before you can enjoy it?

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8

It’s been around awhile. I’m a fan of Steve Roden’s work (who sort of pioneered it) - basically amplifying quiet/inaudible field recordings into a decent sonic range and playing with it a bit. Minimal ambient stuff, certainly not to everyone’s taste, firmly in the musique concrere “art for art’s sake” category.

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9

graduate school has left a lingering distaste in me for that kind of thing, generally speaking : )

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10

Lowercase seemed cool to me at one point in time (I don’t know, 10 years ago maybe) because it was kind of the less-altered field recording genre that seemed really unique and different from just noise or musique concrete (even though I’m aware this is probably also the basis for musique concrete, just not explicitly being amplified versions of quiet sounds).

At this point though, I don’t really like any of it anymore. Field recordings and found sounds are better placed in the context of actual music as far as I’m concerned, although I’m still thankful for the ability to deep dive into microgenres like this to begin with. The fact that it exists at all is pretty compelling still.

And to contradict this entirely, I’m finding loads of great lowercase and field recording playlists on Spotify which sound amazing to me again. I guess it comes in waves.

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11

Someone on reddit told me that he considers this to be LOWERCASE:

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This, and im all for it.