delia gonzalez & gavin russom - the days of mars

So, can we talk about the Black Meteoric Star album here, then?

I can't get over how much I love this. It is full of wub. The whole thing is just made of wub. There's more wub on this record than on a Spacemen 3 b-side, that's how much wub there is. It kind of purrs and hums like a giant kitten. A giant space kitten. Flicking in and out of intergalactic phase.

This is just dronerock, 100% and it makes me full of wub.

ok so there are droney guitars but i think '100% dronerock' is misleading. sounds like burbly acid-house to me, above all else.

i really didn't want to engage w/you again but seriously waht other 'dronerock' out there sounds even remotely like this? maybe some of the bands on DC?

^^^and the droney guitars aren't even really on the album, just that petar dundov remix iirc

1) why do you think that the term "dronerock" is somehow bad?

2) who said anything about guitars (much of Sonic Boom's solo work, as E.A.R. and others is purely synth based)

3) oh wait, you're not engaging with me. Forget I said any of this.

by these standards, thousands of nu-disco, acid house, space disco etc records are all 100% dronerock, no? They have similarities (repetition, spaciness, droniness). Don't even mention all the neo-krautrock going on in the cosmic/beardo disco scenes, that's the real dronerock these days!

he said as Emperor Machine's Roller Daddy came on the iPod.

i love drone rock! i said 'misleading' not 'bad'

we must be listening to different EAR records. the ones i have are pretty much beatless (and filled with guitar drone). sonic boom i could understand, but i always think of that stuff as sprawling and experimental, whereas black meteoric star seems to reign in that experimentation and structure it as something far more house-y.

the reason i didn't want to engage again was because i've noticed we pretty much always have differing opinions (even when we like the same stuff) and didn't want more pointless arguing. but i wanted to know where u were coming from, and now i'm starting to, so yeh

and dan selzer as usual otm

also when i say sonic boom solo stuff is 'sprawling and experimental' i think i just mean that it feels improvised

it's droney, but it's not really rock, is it?

i'm listening to old spectrum albums again for the first time in ages tho so no harm, no foul

Hey, it's OK. Different people can engage with the same music for different reasons.

The synths reminded me a lot of Forever Alien, the sort of pulsing, throbbing drones with slithering phase all over them. It also reminded me a bit of the Koner Experiment, but I haven't listened to that in years, so maybe it's my mind playing tricks on me.

I'm not familiar with vast swathes of dance music - to my ears, it sounds closest to early Orbital and maybe Sabres of Paradise (but that could just be because that's the dance music I like.) That remix you sent sounded just like Sabres of Paradise to me, especially the tone of the guitar. But then again, the synths also remind me of the synths on the first Duran Duran album, specifically the wub + phase aspect of them.

I mean the texture and the feel of the music, rather than "it sounds exactly like X" - it's obviously hugely influenced by krautrock, but specifically the end of krautrock that disappears into drone rather than the funky Can-like end.

And yeah, a *lot* of the dance music I've heard recently (Lindstrom, The Field, etc.) does sound like 100% dronerock to me. But then again, yeah, emphasis on the drone, rather than the rock. A lot of this stuff would seriously not go amiss with the Terrastock crowd.

But I could be focusing on different things, because I don't tend to listen to beats at all, I mainly listen to textures.

(I can't get my head around the current genres of dance music - this record was in the house section at Phonica, which was the last place I'd put it. But then again, I don't know what any of these things mean. To my ears, "Balearic" just means "we put some bongos on it" while "cosmic" means "we whacked a lot of phase on it and ran it through the sweep coloursound on our DJM-800" and god knows what "nu-disco" means at all.)

to me black meteoric star sounds like reggae but that might be b/c i listen to textures, not beats

to me black meteoric star sounds like reggae but that might be b/c i listen to textures, not beats am hella stoned right now

wtf is 'wub'

wub = love, i think

seriously though interesting kate brings up the koner experiment, i was just thinking about listening to that last night (listened to phenomena 256 instead, which sounds nothing like dance music to me, except maybe a completely amorphous, beatless version of lindstrom and prins thomas)

like if you dissolved L&PT II in a vat of bubbling acid it might sound like phenomena 256

i think it would probably sound like this:

"pssssssssss"

it would sound like "assssssssssssspie"

been trying to figure out the wub thing also. i don' think it means 'love'

wub is the mating call of the Caspa.

The textures sound nothing like reggae. Reggae is much more about heavy reverb and slap echo and analogue delay. This is about phase and oscillation.

Wub is... there's a technical term for it that my former keyboard player used to use (she used to get it really nicely from an MS-10) but I always just use wub coz it's onomatopoeic. It's a kind of fast oscillation that gives the same feeling as a tremolo, but with frequency oscillation, rather than volume. It's all over that MBS record, all over Forever Alien, but also in a lot of 80s synth pop and the Kraftwerk-ish end of krautrock.

Have you all been on ILX for this long and not realised that people can actually listen to different aspects of music, and find different aspects of the same thing appealing? I mean, maybe it's because I've been a musician for so long, that I tend to deconstruct the individual sound that make up things. You can take that sound and stick a drum machine under it, and it's "italo" or whatever, take that sound and put a motorik beat under it, and it's krautrock, or just leave the beats off and it's drone. It's the synths I'm listening to, not the arrangement.

I'm listening to Where You Go I Go Too right now, and this sounds almost identical to Reich's Music For 18 Musicians with bits of disco guitar and stuff drizzled over the top. Music For 18 Musicians is almost pure drone - without the rock. But I think you're letting the "rock" part of the phrase mislead you.

obviously we all find different aspects of things appealing, but there is so much more going on than the 'drone' aspect of things that it's worth noting. it's interesting that you have contextualized it as such but i don't agree at all, esp when you make claims that things are '100% pure unfiltered drone/dronerock' etc.

when i think of 'pure' drone i think of stuff like eliane radigue and lamonte young, so you're reallllllly losing me when you claim that 'music for 18 musicians' is 'almost pure drone'

also i am def not a musician at all

I just clearly don't have as rigid definitions of genre as you do. ::shrugs:: I'm not going to fight about it.

I can hear elements of one style of music, inside a piece of music written in another style, because I can separate out what different instruments are doing a lot more clearly than a non-musician, I suspect.

i think the american beauty soundtrack sounds more like music for 18 musicians than 'where you go i go too' does

black meteor star sounds like dirty-ass legowelt to me which is obviously a very good thing. comparisons to drone or dronerock or whatever is completely wacky, "the days of mars" i can see though

Where You Go I Go Too has a synth line from Supernature and sounds like Giorgio Moroder. Not really sure why anyone would call it "dronerock", whatever that is meant to signify, instead of disco.

I can hear elements of one style of music, inside a piece of music written in another style, because I can separate out what different instruments are doing a lot more clearly than a non-musician, I suspect.

― Violent In Design (Masonic Boom), Monday, June 29, 2009 3:05 PM (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.soulstrut.com/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ehhzu7.gif

i can definitely see why someone would say BSM has more in common with dronerock than disco or house. i don't think it really has as much to do with being a musician as with how you like to contextualize what you listen to.

if we're talking dronerock = harmonia and stuff like that, ok

that's how i interpreted it

to me dronerock = les rallizes denudes, VUs, tony conrad + faust, etc.

but i do have such rigid definitions after all

more sweet sweet dronerock here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9aVCRIau6s

is this drone(rock)?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQl4IiljvMI

cause to me it sounds like loop or something with a 4/4 beat

are those supposed to sound like BSM?

BMS*

I think BMS sounds far closer to the "Adonai Elohim" than Harmonia but I'm being an ass so I'll stop.

need to hear this record so I can have a contrarian opinion about it

i still think it sounds more like acid house than dronerock, but i was just sayin i can see where she was comin from.

I think my issue whenever Kate starts talking about dronerock in relation to dance music is that the elements she's referring to are common to vast swathes of techno. Perhaps some of the current crop of producers wear their dronerock/Krautrock influences on their sleeves more, but there's always been, if not cross-pollination, then a shared or similar approach to music, partly because they have some of their roots in the same places. I think one reason why saying "this is just dronerock" rubs people up the wrong way is because it isn't giving enough credit to techno.

All the Black Meteoric Star stuff I've heard sounds fantastic by the way. Sound is huge, would love to see it live.

I mean, we're talking about two genres that are built on texture, repetition and build. Of course they're going to have elements in common because the artists in question are adopting similar processes, albeit with different gear and instrumentation.

I ordered the BMS album tonight based almost entirely on the praise in this thread. It had better be good... (Honestly though, I do really like the Delia/Gavin stuff from the past few years so not too worried.)

Another reason people might be getting rubbed the wrong way is that it sounds like dronerock is being used to (rhetorically) legitimatize techno/house/minimalism etc. (it just sounds like that, whether that's what's being said, I can't and won't say. I'm getting is "what's drone rock is good, and what's good is drone rock" and while you can hear anything in anything if you want, that logic loses a lot of meaning without boundaries of what drone rock is to begin with. It's also kind of selective, too, I hear Jeff mills as much as Neu in Music for 18 Musicians for instance.

And people may not agree with me here either, but drone rock or drone rockness isn't an inherently good thing, either.

Matt DC and EDB OTM; you put into words the thoughts my asshole brain is incapable of expressing.