"So bad, it's good" vs "If it provokes a reaction, it must be worthwhile"

shifts in upper frequencies are like the aural equivalent of briget riley paintings ime, i'm thinking of toshimaru nakamura with that statement. "ventolin" is more high pressure drone crunch, agree that it's very cathartic. these kinds of dog latin livejournal threads are only fun for the zing cru shooting the shit aspect.

when i worked in an off licence my friend and i played Ventolin over the speakers in the shop during peak hour. that was a kind of guilty pleasure (or a guilty lol) in a way, just watching confused people shopping for wine on a Friday evening.

just spun "ventolin". lol, it's pretty accessible, imo. certainly not a brain drill on the level of new york eye and ear control or most merzbow. high-pitched whine did give the cats some bother.

It's that particular unceasing high-pitched drone/whine, though. It just feels physically painful in a way that New York Eye and Ear Control never does.

"sonically aggressive or just plain hard on the ears"

ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2014

different people find different sounds irritating

reactions provoked, did not find worthwhile

The cultural contexts that produced Europe vs. Van Halen need to be taken into account, I think. Europe (the band that did "The Final Countdown") were a Swedish band, therefore not singing/performing in their native language and consciously competing for a pan-European (and American) audience ("The Final Countdown" came from their third album, their first outside of Sweden, their first for Epic, and on which they worked with Journey's producer). Van Halen, meanwhile, were a self-contained unit basically immune to label pressures due to a fairly consistent track record of success - every one of their first six albums was done with the same producer, an album a year, bang bang bang. And yeah, Roth's persona was Hollywood/showbiz from top to bottom - he's a combination of Robert Plant and Jimmy Durante, in a way. (With a bit of Black Oak Arkansas's Jim Dandy Mangrum thrown in.)

flambo how do u feel about drane by autechre

Yes saer and I think a lot of that is down to what functions one ascribes to music - as a social lubricant, as a relaxing backdrop to passive activities or as a piece of art to be examined and drawn from. I think most music fans enjoy it on all three levels to varying degrees but I also know people who would prefer to see music as operating on just one of these levels.

there are a few of these 90s glitchy tracks with high pitched drones, ventolin is a bit of an extreme case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYBrEShzsLY

Yeah I always found that track hard to listen to.

and yet ventolin I get because the intention is very deliberate. It's very punk in that it's supposed to be confrontational. but I dont think thats what the Autechre track is going for.

[Yes saer and I think a lot of that is down to what functions one ascribes to music - as a social lubricant, as a relaxing backdrop to passive activities or as a piece of art to be examined and drawn from..

none of those, only to drown out the whirling tumult with genial sounds that contribute towards mental wellbeing

I picked "Ventolin" not because it was the most annoying track I could think of, but because it is getting constantly repped as "one of the great AFX tracks" and I've always been like really? that's when I turn that album off and switch back to SAW :/

"Drane" is awesome, one of my first and favourite Autechre tracks. Maybe my ears just aren't as sensitive to those frequencies? I dunno

Yeah, I also find "Drane" completely pleasant and pleasurable. I like high-pitched electronic sounds but there is something grating about the frequencies in "Ventolin".

Part of the appeal of ventolin is that it takes an annoying sound and turns it into something beautiful

I enjoy it much in the same way I enjoy guitar playing with a lot of feedback. Those high pitched sounds add some punchiness to the sound.

You take something unpleasant by itself in order to augment the appeal of something that would be blander otherwise.

Basically, it's the musical equivalent of sriracha sauce.

Ventolin was supposed to be an aural representation of what it's like to have an asthma attack, according to an Aphex interview I read a hundred years ago.

The opening post is a rather confusing unironic mashup of "guilty pleasures" and "do people really enjoy avant-garde music?" which are two of the oldest chestnuts there are on this board.

The question of "does it matter if pleasure is the sole intention of the music?" (answer = no) is and should be separate to "can music have merits that are largely unconnected to listening pleasure?" (answer = yes).

A lot of the 'confrontational' or 'difficult' music in this thread is not really interested in provoking a reaction purely for the sake of provoking a reaction. Later Schoenberg and Webern and earlier Boulez have systemic and compositional intentions and merits that do not really revolve around enjoyment for the listener, but they're not about making a dissonant noise purely for the sake of it either. I know next to nothing about jazz but my guess is that the same is true for Ornette Coleman and Coltrane. At the same time I find the music of Boulez or Berg considerably more moving and emotionally involving than Delius or Walton, I don't doubt that the love people have for the former set of composers is entirely genuine.

This breaks down a bit with newer musics, a lot of what is termed as "art-rock" is spiritually closer to Rihanna than it is to Stockhausen.

foghorn fenty is all about making dissonant noises for the sake of it

dog latin - can you stop thinking out loud so much man. You are young, a whole lifetime to shape these thoughts into something really substantial that we can all enjoy.

Matt - could you give an example or two?

Do I think I was pretending to like, for example, Borbetomagus all those years? No; I still like them, particularly live. But I don't feel the need to Brillo my ears as often as I once did.

Well well what a lack of commitment to the cause!!

How do people read the ILM Farrah Abraham love? The music seemed to me transcendentally inept, but people were evidently sincerely enjoying it.

As one of Farrah Abraham's strongest defenders here (I wrote this, though the sentence "Yes, I'm being sarcastic" was added by my editor out of fear/caution), I will say that my enjoyment of her music was 100% sincere, and that listening to it now, it's every bit as whacked and awesome as I remember.

that's how a lot of fans feel about The Room as well

i liked the farrah abraham album. sort of a cross between celebrity pop, vocal techno and outsider music. There was def an element of 'whoa, what the hell is this?'

Without having heard Farrah I thought it was interesting to compare with the love/hate for Laurel Halo's 'Quarantine' around the same time.

there's a correlation there, but they seem to be coming from opposite sides of a naive/deliberate spectrum. strange that there are sonic similarities though