Help Me with my dissertation, please!

[Dunwho]

Hey man, in the same boat as you concerning dissertations on UW at the moment.

If you want my two cents, and I am simply writing this from my own point of view without any specific, trained knowledge of musical composition, and/or electronic/dance music composition...so feel free to ignore this......

the idea of defining "variations" as referring to a composition in Rez/Cowgirl or any UW song for that matter is i think the wrong direction and missing the point in terms of how UW work musically and how electronic music composition has developed over the last 40 years.

Dance music developed and thrived on the principle of the loop as developed by experimental artists like John Cage and in new technologies like the sampler or loop machines, through Disco into house, acid, techno and onwards.. obviously UW becoming involved in this process in the early 90s.

UW songs are configurations of loops that are pre-composed individually and exist independently of each other. These loops create the songs as a whole but there is no obligation at any point to have one specific loop occur at a specific point in the song.. that is to say that as long as each loop exists at some point in the song, the song - even though constructed differently - is essentially the same as any other.

However if the song has an extra or new loop included in the composition... such as a new synth line or a different drum beat... or if the song is missing a loop such as in TMO you would often not have the spoken word interlude at the mid point of the song... then the song IS different and is not made up of the same amount of parts as another variation.

Furthermore there is the added and unpredictable element of Karls Vocals and Guitar playing. He may or may not sing the whole song for Rez/Cowgirl, as heard in the Rotterdam show 29-01-08 .... or he may end the song with a few lines from Skyscraper or River of Bass... or as heard at one of the Japanese festivals he may sing some Rolling Stones and U2 lyrics... and then the guitar may be involved in a completely improvised fashion.

This variance of composition means that as the Bang pointed out, every performance they have ever done of the song is pretty much individual and unique...

So what I am trying to suggest is that instead of looking at the variations of Rez/Cowgirl in terms of how it sounds or how it is constructed temporally, really the only way to do it is to identify the individual elements/loops that have been added to or taken away from the songs over the years and whether they occur in the recording/performance. And you can do this by taking the studio versions of Rez and Cowgirl as your control and identifying the individual loops in there first then working outwards.


I wish you the best of luck with what you are doing of course and I hope you can make a copy of your dissertation available to us to read when you are done.. It should be real interesting.