What do Muddy Waters, the Velvet Underground, Love, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Wall of Voodoo, Black Flag, the Talking Heads, Morphine, Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine, Royal Trux, Ben Folds Five, Animal Collective, Toro y Moi and Death Grips all have in common? They innovated or are innovating. They did or do things differently than their musical predecessors, and we continue to reap the aural benefits.

Indie music currently offers a few camps of homogenization and some outliers and continuous innovators, but none so prevalent as those names on the list— besides, of course, those on the list still making music. Where do we go from here musically? More importantly, where have we not gone yet?

While modern music is often criticized as derivative and not technically demanding, critics of the type to claim such things fail to consider the difficulty of generating completely original material in a world so saturated by strangeness. Strangeness has been, for basically all of history, the surest marker of originality. If specific creative material of any sort is at first strange to the observer or individual interacting with it, the material marks some type of innovative shift, however small, in the contemporary methods of creation as they relate to that particular artifact.

All of this is not to say that original material is not being created; on the contrary, music is far stranger and undergoing far more rapid shifts in this decade than any previous one, save perhaps the 1960s. Unlike the ’60s though, no new instruments and chordal structures are being introduced into the scene. The ’60s saw the birth of synthesized music, the sitar in Western music, trivial guitar tuning, psychedelic modal melodies and drones and a myriad of analog effects. But since the late ’80s, people have simply built upon the innovations already present within the music scene to create more complex and iterative music-producing machines, such as computers, synthesizers, Omnichords and vocoders.

So, back to the original questions. We must be headed somewhere that involves musical elements that have not yet been tweaked to their fullest potential. To me, that screams rhythm. Sure, bop and subsequent modal jazz has been pushing the frontiers of rhythm since the ’50s, but most musicians stopped screwing with rhythm extensively in the ’90s after prog rock had burnt itself out and Tool and Dream Theater were the obnoxious guys at the party still taking shots at 7 a.m. when the more reasonable people had to get up and go to work.

Music has to go in some direction of intense rhythm shifting within songs; not simple time signature changes, but like abrupt, complete shifts in beat patterns, tempos and beat counts that are tighter than a Yes album and as smooth and relevant as the tracks on Miles Davis’ “Evil Live.”

What about instrumentation? I predict that musicians will incorporate more tribal instruments and song structures into their work. Simon Posford and Raja Ram, who together comprise the psytrance duo Shpongle, have already begun using tribal instrument patches and beats into their songs.

However, musicians are bound to eventually translate the hypnotic, mesmeric tones created by such patches to actual instruments, pairing this atypical instrumentation with the aforementioned rhythm shifting to create an intense breed of music yet unheard by human ears.