I admire this more than I like it

A Love Supreme seems like a token name-drop album for people who've never really listened to any other John Coltrane albums.
You seem like a guy who makes a lot of assumptions

― reggae mike love (polyphonic)

fair enough. how do you rate ALS in comparison to other Coltrane-led albums?

Pussy Riot

good one

agree on dj sprinkles

Can

sonic youth

cosign sonic youth and punk in general too

mattresslessness nothing you say about DJ Sprinkles is wrong but Midtown 120 Blues is still one of the albums I find myself going back to most consistently over the past almost a decade now.

weirdly enough kind of blue took me a long time when i was 18 while mingus was just like *pow*

― bicyclescope (mattresslessness), Thursday, 28 January 2016 23:55 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yep! I'd always recommend Mingus Ah,Um or The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady over either of these for someone who is interested in getting into jazz. So much more fun. I love Kind of Blue but I had to listen to a few other things first before it really clicked.

co-sign Can and Sonic Youth. Both are bands I like the idea of, and hope to one day become some sort of fan but every time I put them on I just lose patience

Co-sign on DJ Sprinkles and most definitely on Scott Walker. More recently: Suzanne Sundfor (and the song she did with M83 >> anything on her solo album).

To me the "admire more than like" applies to Terre Thaemlitz' ambient/experimental/conceptual records released under that name, but not to the material she's done as DJ Sprinkles, which is fairly typical minimal house music, albeit with a political edge. TBH, I'm surprised people would find it difficult or unfunky.

some of the sprinkles records are great, some aren't, this is good. The problem comes from putting all an artists records in one box and then putting a label on that box, this artist is X. when the artist is charismatic or important the playing of the record becomes subconsciously more of a duty, of emotional labour. The good records should be able to cast off this overcoat and skip freely but some become ground down with this weight of importance until silence is prefereable (which it so often is)

Pet Sounds. Obviously influential and I appreciate the harmonies, baroque counterpoints and whatnot, but I mostly hear it as limp Christmas music.

R.E.M.

Nick Cave

Jim O' Rourke

Serge Gainsbourg

Esquivel

I hate the framing of this thread because posting personal examples would seem like an admission of defeat.. "i can only admire this artist, i will never like them". that's just me, though.

van dyke parks

oh guys i mean my opinion of ms sprinkles changes often depending on what i'm listening to lol

all of the things you mention in the "admire" half of your post are reason enough to love her but I love the music too, esp the ambient stuff. However I agree with "probably the correct configuration" cause I doubt thaemlitz gives a shit about being loved

i feel like there are a lot of awkward things colliding in her rhythms on occasion and the sustained ecosystem of funkiness i am always after is not achieved but i also think she's interested in doing different things than that sonically, and she consistently achieves those things, and sometimes i really feel them, esp. on midtown 120 blues which is still a favorite. n.b. ballroom crashes don't do much for me either so ymmv. and tuomas, i would be surprised if you could pass a basic reading comprehension test, as i never said i found it difficult and neither did anyone else.

what do you think of her remix of the adultnapper track?

it's very hardcore homo deep house thug which is a good thing imo. like i picture just the baddest bitches in the world grooving to it on an underlit dancefloor. i'd probably lose it a little if i heard it in a club, i'm sure the bass would sound divine. but i'm not totally sure about the build-up of layers and how they match, it's a little too messy and busy for me somehow like it feels less than the sum of its parts. but some of those parts sure are fantastic...

too much going on in the hi-hat / snare range i think. it's not articulated in a way that hits me directly, which i mean could be a reason to admire it too. lots of mid-treble. there's something anemic and busy about it at the same time.

fair enough. how do you rate ALS in comparison to other Coltrane-led albums?

I mean... certainly in the top half, wouldn't you say? I can't say I've ever thought about which Coltrane albums are "the best" or "my favorite" but I go back to Love Supreme a lot and my opinion of it hasn't diminished at all.

a love supreme is a magnificent record and even if you've listened to every goddman coltrane recording you would be a fool not to rate it among his best work, the fuck do i care if jazz dabblers only pick up that one and no others

(sorry polyphonic that was not directed at you at all even though the posting sequence looks like, i don't meant to call you a fool!)

i'd probably lose it a little if i heard it in a club, i'm sure the bass would sound divine.

Fabric soundsystem:)

The question of aspiration and its relationship to taste is really interesting. There was a period in my late teens/early twenties where most of what I listened to was jazz and classical, but then I turned back to rock and pop music. I bought a number of complete opera sets that I haven't played in several years, and now I have practically no desire to listen to them at all (I started to have the perception that the culture that values that form is moribund, though you could read it more favorably as carrying on a tradition, or talk about vital if obscure new works).

I do think there's something fundamentally valuable about being a "good listener," but the real desire to engage with music that is radically difficult (especially in the improvisational vein) left me at some point in my twenties. By contrast, it seems there's a common trajectory is for people to start taking up, say, jazz around that time, maybe because they no longer identify with the fantasies (or realities) inscribed in pop music, and seek after something that engages them on a more overtly intellectual level. Despite having worked through a fair amount of Adorno at this point, though, I'm comfortable admitting that I still turn to music largely for affective reasons (though I also like to relate the feelings to a sense of history — my own and that of the music, the culture that produced it, etc.). This could still change, though!

I mean... certainly in the top half, wouldn't you say? I can't say I've ever thought about which Coltrane albums are "the best" or "my favorite" but I go back to Love Supreme a lot and my opinion of it hasn't diminished at all.

yeah, it's impossible to rank the music.. my mistake for implying that. it was my entry point, and it sort of put me off of his music until i got older, heard "India" and a live recording of "My Favorite Things", etc. i'm still a n00b. it's that most every conversation i've been a part of (on the topic of Coltrane jazz) invariably leads to somebody proclaiming it the end-all be-all of John Coltrane music, or all jazz music (as well as the conversation), which is disappointing.