The Black Midi Problem: What is the point of impossible music?
Do you remember your first encounter with Black Midi?
Everyone was either head over heels in love with the south London teen superstars, all of whom showed immense musical aptitude and knowledge of progressive rock, post-punk and jazz far beyond their years, or they were calling it an unlistenable mess, a true hodgepodge of ideas that felt like nothing but unfiltered carnage.
They were, to say the least, a divisive band, even from the start of their career, and remain so in their absence.
Those who didn’t appreciate what they were doing would liken it to all sorts of things, whether it be slamming your hands down on a keyboard and recording whatever sound comes out, or simply technically impressive musical masturbation that was all style and no substance. The thing is, by comparison to other genres of music, they’re incredibly listenable, not least the one that they derived their name from.
But what exactly is the genre, black MIDI, and why is it regularly cited as being ‘impossible music’ that goes far beyond showing virtuosity and instead descends into a test of how far you’re willing to subject your ears to complete obliteration? Yes, this can also be said for other extreme genres such as grindcore or power electronics, but these both consist of music that is played by real human beings, and therefore demonstrate something that is easily replicable. Black MIDI, on the other hand, is far from being achieved by human hands any time soon.
MIDI, for those unfamiliar with the term, stands for ‘Musical Instrument Digital Interface’, and is a means of communicating information from a digital instrument such as a keyboard into a computer, where that information is transposed onto either sheet music or a playback grid on a digital audio workstation (DAW).
The main purpose of this is simple; it allows us, as humans, to create music with greater ease in a digital world, and gives solo artists a means to make music with a variety of synthesised yet often realistic sounds that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to replicate on their own.
The thing is, it can also be used to create this ‘impossible music’, or black MIDI, so-called because the sheet music doesn’t look like your regular notes on a stave, but a mess of black dots engulfing a page. But what is it, exactly, that makes it impossible?
For starters, black MIDI can be made by one person in a DAW through meticulously inputting and transcribing where all of the notes would appear in a composition, but it certainly couldn’t be feasibly recreated by one person in real life. There’s nobody in the world able to smoothly play 24-note chords on a piano at once while moving up and down the keyboard with another hand at lightning speed, and there’s nobody in the world with a third, fourth or fifth hand able to do equally nimble finger gymnastics at the same time.
Sure, you could make the argument that you can get, say, a few other pianists to accompany a player and perform all of the constituent parts, but some of the aspects of the compositions, such as sections that are played at inhumanly fast tempos, wouldn’t be possible regardless of how many parts there are in a given ensemble dividing up the parts.
The entire point of the genre is to create stuff that doesn’t just border on the impossible or implausible, but completely throws any notion of being easily replicated out of the window. Does that make it any good if it’s beyond human capability, though?
Extreme harmony can only go so far before the amount of notes begins to turn dissonant, and not everything can harmonise at once, especially when you’ve got so many constituent parts being played at once. The extreme speed at which some instruments are programmed to play means they begin to stop sounding as they should and start sounding like jackhammers or power tools drilled into the skull.
It’s a showcase of the capabilities of music technology and still requires a decent amount of human input to compose, but is there really any point beyond that? It’s chaotic beyond the point where it’s actively pleasant to listen to and is equivalent to having a sonic seizure.
Considering that even the most powerful hardware struggles to keep up with the amount of processing required to even play black MIDI compositions back, we mere mortals have no chance of being able to recreate it. Suddenly, the band Black Midi sounds an awful lot more appealing to their critics.
