Avant-garde/Experimental/Drone/Non-Music... The weirdest you've got

i definitely relate to that.

i mean not totally as i'm still a white dude who can pass in 'the noise scene' but the sense of being outside of that in a queer sense (still so much of diy music is masc gendered) and then not relating to or caring for the pop culture my gay friends consume like red bull is probably similar.

I'm happy to see the discussion blossomed without me, some really interesting posts made.

I will concede that the terms I used in the thread title can be/are quite misleading, especially when you're someone with a reasonable grasp of what those terms mean. I used them, though, knowing that they will draw in the right people, and I was tentative in the first place because I'm a lurker here. Sub-lurker, in fact.

Regarding weirdness in music, I agree with sarahell, its a convenient way of distinguishing between run-of-the-mill (which spans all forms of popular music) and that which disregards musical norms, either intentionally or not (I'm looking at you, The Shaggs). Again, its all contextual. The biggest problem to me is that often it feels contrived on the part of the artist. I'm not really interested in the arty shenanigans like massaman gai's first two links, they're too self-conscious; the eccentricity seems like a put on. This is why I prefer the likes of The Hafler Trio and Zoviet*France, whose early work, while largely different at the same time feels genuinely mysterious. Dislocation sounds like sandalwood? Try Kill The King or A Thirsty Fish!

All of that ties back into why I seek this stuff out in the first place. Music can get very dull once you wear out the classics, and I'm not shy about loving pop music, plenty of conventional reggae, funk and hip-hop etc. After a while though I need to cleanse my palate.

I should point out too that I stupidly left out 'glitch' from the title. Fucking love that shit.

I will say that I do find Negativland's "Death Sentences of the Polished and Structurally Weak" to be an extraordinary noise record. I'm not sure exactly what makes it so successful to my ears, but it's the sort of thing I could listen to for days.

Between the shots fired by matt at the regressive milquetoast predominance in weird music (the autistic spectrum prominence? DISCUSS) and those fired by the threadstarter at massaman gai, the thread is hotting up!

I would ask Panoptic Sweep to consider maybe why bands like Caroliner make the aesthetic choices that they do, beyond wanting to seem 'wacky' or 'special', though

that's not a "shot"!
kill the king / thirsty fish i know em well. too well. as weird as my athlete's foot. it's good audio entertainment, though.
love ZF. who doesn't? top guys.

ZF Top, that would be something.
everybody's crazy 'bout assault & mirage
misfits, loony tunes & cheap sunglasses

a convenient way of distinguishing between run-of-the-mill (which spans all forms of popular music) and that which disregards musical norms, either intentionally or not (I'm looking at you, The Shaggs). Again, its all contextual...Music can get very dull once you wear out the classics, and I'm not shy about loving pop music, plenty of conventional reggae, funk and hip-hop etc. After a while though I need to cleanse my palate

i think you kind of get there towards the end of that train of thought, but i'd reiterate something that i think matt was arguing: "weirdness" isn't just - maybe isn't even - a property inherent within a piece of music. the contextual is written thru with your personal history, and the ways the music comes to you, and the circumstances of its presentation, and sociocultural situations and a bunch of other contingencies. to identify certain kinds of experience as weird or avant-garde or experimental is only to place them into one of the possible contexts, and to momentarily exclude other possible experiences from that context.

for me if that means hearing a thing as qualitatively different, or listening differently, then i'd feel like i was losing something from the experience of encountering...sound, i guess. there's lots of great and beautiful and interesting stuff in this thread but fencing it away from other possibilities of experiencing music - except as a signposting or marketing exercise - is reductive. the Weird is everywhere, and Nowhere (baby) if you've got the desire for it

otm. What is weird or experimental is heavily dependent on context, personal tastes, the venue the performance takes place in, etc.

I've been to shows that promoted themselves as experimental and seen so many different kinds of performances and performers. Rock bands and people bowing cymbals. Field recordings and trans punk bands. People playing drumset and guitar at the same time, people running sewing machines through contact mics. Etc.

Not once have I seen anybody refuse to perform or attend because the definition of experimental was being misused. Experimental shows by their nature seem to be more open to letting the audience and artist explore those and expand definitions free of genre snobbery. None of these musicians really discussed what was experimental by pointing at what was not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5ekZuhtdjk

This is a friend who makes sound by applying bones and crystals to unamplified acoustic guitar.

sound at a basic level is not fucking strange.

good point.. you could go further and say that any sort of grouping/organization, or presentation of sounds is not "fucking strange," from the perspective of the creator.. it could be called a natural act. but, like, when discussing music (say, with your parents), making distinctions etc.. "weird" is not an entirely useless adjective. of course you can explain further.. calling it 'sound art', or making analogies to visual art/sculpture etc. again, "context" seems to be the key word here.

otm. I like 'sound art', i like 'noise' too, it's simple and one word. One person's treasure is another person's trash.

The most successful experimental sound art is uncomfortable. I think there is a point at many experimental shows where my mind takes me to the place of, were I to hear this on the street or in a store over the PA, I would think it would just some jerk being an indulgent and annoying person. That's when sound art becomes noise. Again it is all about context; at a sound art show, anything you hear is sound art.

There is something inherently indulgent about experimental music. Perhaps we have been conditioned against it. Hearing a pop song you have heard a million times makes you feel good. Hearing someone make something up (esp in front of you hence live experimental performance is most potent) can be uncomfortable and transgressive experience in a capitalist system where the methods of production/creation are wholly abstracted and consumption is driven by alienation.

The 12 tone system, and patriarchal ancient music industry, through mass production and censorship of non-standard tones/emotions/musicians, has alienated us from the act of creation. Necro marketing, abusive management, creative exploitation, all demons of the entertainment industry since the dawn of time, further shape the sound that experimental sound art is trying to escape.

Experimental music is a more open playing field, open to more non-traditional experiences. Alternative experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnNVfsOQRP0

sound at a basic level is not fucking strange.

beg 2 differ

Feel like you can pick the weirdest thing ever right now and it will be on a car commercial in 10 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me09HjhMU2I

1st 20 seconds custom-made to sell Mazdas.

Not once have I seen anybody refuse to perform or attend because the definition of experimental was being misused.

there are plenty of people that are turned off from shows marketed as "experimental" because the term doesn't really describe what the music sounds like, and also that it implies what Laurie Anderson famously termed "difficult listening hour," rather than something enjoyable. And in terms of musicians, and the music itself, there are plenty of musicians that make what gets lumped under the experimental category that say, "when i play my music for an audience, i am not experimenting, i know exactly what i'm doing."

Are they going to "refuse" to perform? No, but they will complain or maybe just keep their dissatisfaction to themselves.

Experimental implies something about method and approach to music, which could very well not be the case -- it could be done in a conventional way and just end up sounding "different".

But the primary function of these terms is communicative. If to most people, the term "experimental" means something more inclusive like:

so many different kinds of performances and performers. Rock bands and people bowing cymbals. Field recordings and trans punk bands. People playing drumset and guitar at the same time, people running sewing machines through contact mics. Etc.

then what I'm really talking about is a minor thing

but I also feel like lumping everything under the "experimental" category ghettoizes it a bit. Why not call the rock band, a rock band, the field recordings, ambient, the sewing machines through contact mics, industrial? Especially if what they are doing is within these more descriptive genres.

To be clear, I'm talking from the perspective of someone who has worked in marketing/promotion for music in this vein for about 15 years.

Good point. Traditional genre descriptors serve as a useful reference point, and casting anything as experimental can dilute the meaning.

But once we label everything and take them out of the pile of 'experimental', what is left?

i think it's a good descriptor for plenty of things -- and in terms of the examples in my post, it would depend on what the music sounds like, how the musicians make it, and how they want to describe the music they make. you can have an "experimental rock band" that might be best described as "experimental" or one that gets called that because their music is "a bit different"

worth noting here that varese vehemently denied that has music was "experimental" insofar as he got all of the experimenting out of the way before he did the actual composing.

none of the words we use for genres are really accurate, of course. if we have "progressive" music which progresses nothing we can certainly have "experimental" music which isn't.

my issue with listening to or making sounds like these is that you're setting the bar pretty high by taking away melody. there's noise that appeals to me on a visceral level but it's a small subset of the noise that's out there. it's hard to explain or justify the rationale or appeal for sound without melody, like taking a typewriter and using it to draw pictures on a piece of paper using only the letter "b". sure it's artistically valid, but it's also willfully perverse in a way that sticks the person doing it in a niche.

does that mean that doing anything that might confound anybody's expectations is "willfully perverse"?

cos tbh "DJing a club night and sticking Mahler's 8th on" might be willfully perverse but "playing experimental music at an event advertised as featuring experimental music" feels v. much not perverse

Saw a show once by a group named Sister Circuit they just got on stage and didn't make any noise for 10-15 minutes. People got really upset at them.

people got really upset at the trite and hackneyed nature of their artistic statement

it's too bad mark s took down his piece "the rise and sprawl of horrible noise", i'd link to it if i could

here it is ...

https://web.archive.org/web/20121210140744/http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/noise1.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20080505204102/http://web.pitas.com/tashpile/noise2.html

is that a line from the Adverts' Gary Gilmore's Eyes? I think I've heard it differently all these years.

yes it is ... mark s said of it "one of the greatest lines evah in a popsong" on this very board 14 years ago

anyway it's been i think 13 years since i first read the article and i've yet to read anything quite as good on the topic

thanks for this! thread delivers

v much enjoyed skimming that & will try to read it in full tomorrow, thanks

noodle: perversion is nothing to do with "audience expectations". if gerald malanga does his whip dance at an s&m club for a crowd that's into that sort of thing, he's still being perverse!

But perverse isn't an on-off switch, it's as changeable and subjective as everything else under discussion - at an experimental show, you may as easily from moment to moment be having an experience of sublimity, of being purely challenged, or feeling pride in spotting the reference, or feeling thrill at enjoying (or ostensibly "enjoying") something that would be a trial to most people. What might have seemed perverse, and your whole point of fascination, when you're 18 can be another lineage, another exercise in box-checking, when you're 38. Or it can unexpectedly dial right back into that feeling of the perverse!

The question of who is acting and who is represented can be a huge part of it, which I think mattresslessness' and sarahell's posts speak to - that notion that experimental music is also a social space apart seems to be an invitation for some spectacular exercises in privilege, posturing, and hateful wastes of other people's time (and money) that just reproduce the larger inequalities and ways of thinking. I guess I keep coming back because there can also be moments that rewrite your thoughts of what a person can be in the world - I'm thinking of the past year, watching Olivia Block, one of those shows that starts out good and gets better in retrospect, the way that she picked up and manipulated her array of objects, which in turn echoed in the objects in the sound field. The result for me wasn't just viscerally good music, wasn't just well-executed and interesting; it also spoke somehow of another approach to everyday life, how a body engages with technology, and (not to assign this motive to Block, only describing where her performance got me) also had me reexamining habitually gendered thinking on my part about sound and performance.

Finding a place where you can have an encounter like that is weirdness too...in a lot of ways, speaking just for myself, experimental music is more a way to re-enchant, or repudiate, or estrange the everyday world, rather than a good unto itself. Music does not at all have to be experimental by anyone's definition for that to happen - but having that notion of "progressiveness" coming pre-attached to it helps me see it that way.

Anyway, great thread - thanks all for stone-souping it into being.

Has there been a mention of Valerio Tricoli's 'Miseri Lakes' album yet? That is a very unusual experience, especially on headphones late at night. Quietly nightmarish. All these acoustic knocks and scrapes and whispers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Il09x3jHA

worth noting here that varese vehemently denied that has music was "experimental" insofar as he got all of the experimenting out of the way before he did the actual composing.

none of the words we use for genres are really accurate, of course. if we have "progressive" music which progresses nothing we can certainly have "experimental" music which isn't.

Mark Fell was recently quoted in the Wire saying he preferred the term 'unusual music' as opposed to 'experimental music', which is a better descriptor.

cosign on TLASILA, natch, gotta love em. Tom is a mensch.

dagnammit, in an attempt to counter to my primary impulse to be a grouchy naysayer, i spent ages typing out a "helpful"& "friendly" list of stuff not yet mentioned above & then closed the freakin window before posting. nnng!
y'all know jandek's free-depressive folk-blues, anyhow. most of you prob also aware of the awesome music and supreme rug pull after so many years of it, that this was:maze of the phantom.
also this thread from the dim and distant, in which i recommend all the same stuff i always do like a broken record: Most trepanningly psychedelic lp?
i'll see if i can summon the zeal to reconstruct my unposted post.
there was something to do w/ thomas köner, who some spod had posted on the youtubes:
DAIKAN
last track from KAAMOS
some ruminations about the excellence of farmers manual, pxp, reminiscences of heated discussions in These Records, running the oskar sala myspace site a hundred years ago.
i love the rinkydink dressage/fine procelain classical baggage that interferes with my expectations of flat/just notes, subharmonics, ringmodulations & radiophonic echoes in this
& pauline's roots, just because. i think the bernard parmegiani 12 cd set is an infinitely more rewarding listen than the pauline set, though. that would depend on my personal preferences.
and if you dig schlocky psychoacoustic shockers, nobody quite touches dave phillips.
you need to get xyzzzz in here to type sth about henri chopin.
i think i lamented that the excellent monotract CDs on ecstatic peace are always remaindered at pennies (although that does mean i can also afford to eat), and advised people to get involved with franco battiato if they hadn't already.
there's also ubuweb, which is a smashing resource, lots of free (sometimes lo-res, but, hey! free!) mp3s of roland kayn, c.spencer yeh etc to be grabbed. some smashing beckett radio plays also.
i'll leave it there for now. things to do. bye bye for now.

bye

my latest noise performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STW9YsjnWlk

i've had hundreds of people who fit this thread's bill play at my store but i think jeff might be my fave. you should definitely check out noise nomads tapes and records. i don't know how many times he's played at my place, but i think this was the loudest. room-changing, molecule-smashing loud.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-woo46kDNc

not sure what other thread to post this in, but i had a tidbit>question and a question

tidbit > question: i was reading through part of michael nyman's book on Experimental Music from 1974 (after reading that jim o'rourke was super into as a kid) a few months ago, and it was interesting to see his distinctions between experimental and avant-garde music. experimental music has an unpredictable element, in its performance or as a feature of processes, the changing nature of the outcome is the point - "the experimental composer is interested not in the uniqueness of permanence but in the uniqueness of the moment...By contrast the avant-garde composer wants to freeze the moment, to make its uniqueness unnatural, a jealously guarded possession." that's a useful distinction for me, at least, because for a long time i made the mistake of conflating the two into a more general category of "weird". anyway, just wanted to throw that out there because i wondered if nyman's definition of experimental / distinctions with avant-garde are still seen as foundational knowledge or if his take on things was superseded at some point.

question: what is the difference between musique concréte and acousmatic music?

sounds like a pretty wack definition of avant-garde

yeah, he definitely seems to favor the experimental, but that's only a small part of his description of avant-garde, which he breaks down into composition, performance, listening, etc

that's kind of why i wanted to check in here and see if he's seen as an influential writer on this stuff or if his shit is whack.

He's definitely influential, I mean, he's Michael Nyman, but in terms of musicians and composers, there really isn't much in the way of universal agreement about the definitions of these terms. And at this point, there is also the problem that what was "avant-garde" in the 1960s and 1970s is still being done and copied/adapted but is it actually "avant-garde" 40+ years later? Definition and category-wise, at this point in time, you end up having to separate the novelty and boundary-pushing aspect of avant-garde composition from the aesthetics and techniques of the historical avant-garde.

I think more non-academic musicians tend to say "experimental" over "avant-garde" because the latter sounds academic and pretentious? Neither are particular descriptive in terms of aesthetics though ... sorry, I spent almost 2 decades thinking about this from a booking and marketing perspective so I'm probably rambling and wasting space

fwiw, one of the musicians/composers I worked with a lot (who uh, played with Jim O'Rourke at various points in their youths) disliked being categorized as "experimental" because he wasn't experimenting in his music -- he knew what he wanted it to do and sound like. So he kinda agreed w/Nyman's definitions in that.

i don't think genre terms in general have much taxonomic value, especially as they aim to draw more and more precise distinctions, so that "thinking about this from a booking and marketing perspective" is probably one of the least wasteful ways of thinking about them

xp
no way, you're not rambling at all! i dabble in this stuff but rarely get in deep, so it's good to hear from someone who knows a lot more!

i guess that regardless of whether his idea of experimental lines up with anyone else's, i do appreciate his efforts. it's something new for me to think about when listening to some kinds of music - which parts of the music are planned, and which are left to chance or more open-ended in some way.

to me definitions like Nyman's up there are meaningful mostly for what they tell you about Nyman's relationship to his work, not what they tell you about music or art as fields