If anyone asked me prior to today, I would have told them that the music industry lacks the one thing that it thrives on - unique creativity. Why not just creativity? Because anyone can be creative by morphing other peoples’ work into their own. Not that that’s a bad thing. In fact, I relish in hearing renditions of songs originally performed by one artist and done by another. Unique creativity, in my mind, is something entirely different. The few surviving souls that possess unique creativity hide amongst pretenders and never-will-be’s and rarely show face, unless they are sampled by someone famous. It seems to me that artists with uinique creativity have no outlet to popularize their music. Last.fm changed my whole perspective on this concept.
Their answer? Architeq. Because I can not currently sum up what this man does on my own, I will let him speak for himself.
I make music exclusively with old analogue synths, modulation units, tape echos and spring reverbs all pushed and pulled into something I can eventually call a ‘tune’ on a computer. I don’t sample… If someone hears a snare roll in one of my tunes I want them to be able to know its an Architeq roll.
Claiming Dundee as his home base, Architeq is the true embodiment of uniqe creativity. He has no concern for conventional song compsition. Pushing aside such standard songwriting essentials such as tempo, key and structure, the man known to his friends as Sam Annand embodies the term originality. First introduced to me through an iTunes sampler offered to me because I am a fan of “Apple Students” on Facebook, I didn’t even give Architeq a first listen. In all honesty, unless I am already a fan of the artist, I don’t listen to those songs that are given to me at no cost from iTunes. I have always seen free playlists from iTunes as a way for record execs to cleverly market their artists to impressional teenagers who have nothing better to do than stalk Facebook. And to further my honesty, my iTunes library’s choice to play the “Fugleance Emotronical” remix of his song “Birds of Prey” was completely random and on accident.
I rarely trust re-mixes. All too often are remixes slower and less interestring than the real thing. However, one listen to this remix and I was begging for more. Rather, I was begging to hear the original. Well…I got what I wanted. And then I saw this. Another version of the same song done with the addition of a live drummer. If anything, this adds to the unique originality of Architeq. If nothing else, it’s a comment on the drummer’s ability to play along to a song with no set tempo or time signature.
An artist so original, the way I would normally describe or critique an artist seems irrelevant. In fact, there isn’t a single piece of Architeq that I can critique. Instead, I will let his music speak for him.
