Why is digital music so goddam conservative?

Here's something that puzzles me. Thanks to technology, for a few hundred quid anyone who feels like it can buy recording equipment that would have astounded the top musicians and producers forty years ago. Unlimited tracks and sound-manipulation are there for the asking. You are not restricted by your ability to master an instrument or the arduous business of getting several musicians to play in unison. You're not even restricted by how many fingers you have. Any sound you can think of, you can produce. Any combination of sounds you can think of, you can produce. Any sound you can record can then be manipulated in a near infinity of ways. All you need is time and imagination. So how come the music created with this unprecedented technological freedom is so arse-achingly predictable?

I'm not really talking about mainstream pop here. That trots along more or less as it has done since the late fifties: producing reasonably catchy songs that have an emotional hook and are good for young people to dance to. There are more sequencers, synths and auto-tuning than there used to be, but those are just decorations on a relatively fixed underlying structure. We shouldn't fall into the trap of criticising pop for failing at something it's not even trying to do. With “alternative” music-makers, however, it's a different story. Those guys are supposed to be pushing boundaries, tearing up the rule book, and so on. Yet what do we find? You've got electronic dance music which sounds almost indistinguishable from stuff made twenty years ago; rap music, which is actually less inventive than it used to be thanks to legal restrictions on sampling; retro-rockers and neo-folkies unconvincingly trying to make a virtue out of being derivative; and the ambient crowd producing lush, abstract soundscapes which say nothing and are meant to be heard rather than listened to.

OK, I'm being harsh. All of the above styles have their good points, and a lot of talented people are trying hard to produce interesting music. But, to return to my initial point, doesn't it all seem a bit conventional and unimaginative given the radical freedom at our fingertips? Where are the guys recording stuff that makes you shout “What the fuck is THAT”? For decades we had them, but they seem to have disappeared at the precise moment when production methods have never been more in their favour (and maybe that's no coincidence).

Actually, although I'm puzzled by the failure of alternative rock to live up to the potential of its own technology, I'm probably even more puzzled by the failure of classical music. After all, classical composers have a veritable tradition of pushing boundaries and tearing up the rule book. For most of the 20^th century that's virtually all they did. And their experiments in electronic music predate those of rock by at least a decade – or by fifty years if you include the pianola as an early type of midi device. You would have thought that a gifted composer who had studied Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Varèse and Stockhausen (as well as Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) would be gloriously well-placed to produce something astounding. And yet it simply hasn't happened. At most, there are a few composers who incorporate the odd technological adornment into their work as a nod to the fact that it's no longer 1935. When it comes to exploring digital possibilities, contemporary classical music shows an incredibly depressing lack of ambition.

Part of the reason, I think, is that classical music has never really embraced the idea of the studio as a compositional tool. Its focus remains resolutely fixed on what musicians can produce on the spot, and the studio is only there to capture their performances. And actually there's something laudable about that; it helps retain a social, organic aspect to music which is easily lost when it's just one person in a studio (or bedroom) endlessly fiddling with loops and compression filters. Nevertheless, you'd have thought there might have been at least one composer willing to step outside the performance-centred orthodoxy and spend a year or so creating an amazing recording that couldn't possibly be reproduced live in the concert hall. But you'd be wrong.

Well, here I am moaning about other people not doing what they ought to. Why don't I give it a go myself, since I seem to think it's so easy? And that's what I intend to do, although I don't think it will be easy at all. Technology has opened up possibilities, but converting that into a worthwhile actuality is never a simple matter. For one thing, the very inventions that seem to help us can also work against us. They offer the prospect of previously impossible creations, but they also make it almost irresistibly easy to produce shallow variations of the past. That's certainly something I've found with my own attempts at home recording. Why struggle to be original when it's so simple to churn out an endless stream of charming pastiches? I've been down that road, and although I'm quite proud of some of the things I produced (you can hear some here), it's time to say enough is enough. It's time to explore – to genuinely explore. It's time to refuse to settle. Let's be honest: it's probable that I won't be up to the task, that the result will be unlistenable rubbish. But that's still better than the alternative.