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

Sanpaku, that recording of contact mic'ed telegraph wires is really nice (so far), thanks!

I really dig the Sounds To Soothe A Nervous Robot compilation, featuring some bands on the outer, more experimental fringes of the Elephant 6 collective. Black Swan Network (an Olivia Tremor Control side project featured on the comp) also put out an album of ambient nightmare music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfWGgKzXTS4

Anyway, here's my second go. Welcome to Thighpaulsandra! He's pretty much the best musician. His shit manages to be both fucking weird and fucking amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiCjEY6jKuU

(The best track, Lycraland, isn't on Youtube unfortunately, but it is on Spotify)

His work with Coil also counts, obv

This is the end of all things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3ceW4bimyA

No, this is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJpfhuYby2E

lol classic troll thread

"gimme your weirdest stuff"

"I tried to listen to this - it gave me a headache! one star"

give this one star and i reckon it's FP time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M32PxeWrTFA

great post liam fennell btw, just needed youtube links to be complete but i suppose i might do a bit of searching myself

OK, thanks for the responses all.

I really liked that Alan Lamb track, never heard of him before. Those aeolian waves never fail to draw me in.

Midnight by Pandit Pran Nath, enjoying this so far. Thank you soulseek.

Thighpaulsandra was pretty interesting, really that rhythmic part around halfway, the whole thing morphed quite pleasantly.

Diamanda Galas- now this is intense, I'll definitely keep that one as a secret weapon!

Here's a couple to keep the ball rolling:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mQ8zRZOlrk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQIBtbsX32Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TgFdw_WeS0

"non-music..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7jVqpAbCf4

I used to ask people for recommendations for the weirdest music imaginable. Then somebody recommended me a record by the band "To Live and Shave in LA". That cured me.

― rushomancy, Monday, July 13, 2015 4:17 AM (9 hours ago)

To Live and Shave in LA are brilliant.

aw man, it would be so incredibly easy and satisfying to troll this thread, but everyone's been so well-behaved.

Browning Mummery is possibly relevant to threadstarter's interests:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhgn010ilpU

Mount Vernon Astral Temple - London Praises Its Ancient Gods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w-vWmeAkLs

Bonnie Dobson - For the Love of Him

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5QOU53AE7g

(better turn your headphones down because this shit will fuck you up)

(sorry)

might as well just use this nebulous thread for stuff i like i guess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaHJsL6PBWU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO8HrG2h9pA

(better turn your headphones down because this shit will fuck you up)

― stoomcursus rockisme (unregistered), Monday, July 13, 2015 9:01 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you asshole! this is no way prepared me. fucking tinnitus central. also i think i don't want to turn the light out tonight

sarahell: i'm sure they are and i just didn't get them. possibly if i listened to them today i'd understand them utterly. all i know is that they made me flee back to the safety of "renaldo and the loaf play struve and sneff".

oops, I broke imago :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZTD-t57GRQ

xxp - no shame in Renaldo and the Loaf either

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abl4BrsMeEU

sorry!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abl4BrsMeEU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRYyQ3sSYBQ

http://cosmicjams.blogspot.com/2009/03/graham-lambkin-salmon-run-cd.html

"gimme your weirdest stuff"

"I tried to listen to this - it gave me a headache! one star"

― Trap Queenius (wins), Monday, July 13, 2015 4:24 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

feel this response is fair enough when a thread responder has the gall to post his own shit

caroliner, michael prime and browning mummery my main takeaways from this thread so far fwiw, all for very different reasons

hooray for caroliner

my favorite ballad of theirs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ms7NeWzRK0

recent free-jazz vintage live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2KfBKoTmkY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6mLNO74O4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Tf_mRZWEc

Milton, have you heard the impression he does of you? Apparently it is "hilarious"

It's a shame he's such a racist shit

i really agree with massaman gai that weirdness is often a false flag. people who promote / frame their or others' music that way are pandering to some degree. that being said some of the oddest music i remember hearing was the mnemonics / biota. that was years ago though and now i might be kind of nonplussed, idk, i'm a dilettante wrt avant music. it was probably also due to learning they were like real people from colorado but tbh i can't remember if that made their music seem more or less strange. you know what's still pretty weird to me is gamelan music. eirdness isn't a genre it's totally contextual imo...

why are so many avant garde iconoclasts regressive milquetoasts when it comes to the rest of life? the main reason i've moved away from a lot of that kind of music tbh. straight white men with heaps of self importance if not backwards beliefs, not the most inspiring thing. kind of boring. maybe everyone is kind of boring when you come down to it.

when i think of 'weird' music, i'm thinking of shit that's fucking strange.. not from a position of marketing or designing a determined aesthetic or whatever.

not trying to be overly phatic but one of the big reasons i stick around ilm is people like milton parker crutis and others who are knowledgeable in this area while also coming across as decent people.

xp fucking strange is a response to marketing though and becomes marketing itself, made worse because of its lack of awareness and hypocrisy. sound at a basic level is not fucking strange. what would be truly strange is doing away with this very specific form of market positioning-as-sense novelty altogether...

weirdness is often a false flag. people who promote / frame their or others' music that way are pandering to some degree.

As someone who does this, it's mostly self-deprecating -- it's acknowledging that this isn't music that sounds like popular music. For me, it's also an impatience and dissatisfaction with micro-genres when it comes to things that don't tidily fit into one or the other, or I will say "a night of weird music," if I am promoting a show with music from more than one subgenre. The terms, avant-garde and experimental, have certain connotations, and if I'm making/discussing/promoting music that I feel those connotations are appropriate to describe, then I will use them, but I see too many (granted we are not talking about real large numbers here) people using "avant-garde" and "experimental" as neutral descriptors for things that aren't those things, and that the musicians involved wouldn't necessarily describe their music as such.

That makes sense. As someone who doesnt face the reality of putting on events related to this music i hadnt considered that perspective.

It's admirable that you are though, you must think a lot about what these terms mean in different contexts.

straight white men with heaps of self importance if not backwards beliefs, not the most inspiring thing. kind of boring. maybe everyone is kind of boring when you come down to it.

it's funny because a while ago (a year ago, i think), a facebook friend who is a queer female experimental musician posted about how the friends that share her cultural identity and political beliefs tend not to be into the kind of music she makes, whereas most of the friends that are into the same music are all less enlightened straight white men.

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.

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

i think it also has anthropological value -- in that he is likely making that distinction because it is one that came up culturally

oh yeah, it's not only personal and idiosyncratic, it's about the cultural currents he's engaging in when he says it?

someone who is more academically engaged than I would be able to answer that definitively -- but I believe so, based on general cultural currents in other disciplines, etc

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

"any sound, whether it is natural or manipulated, may be described as acousmatic if the cause of the sound remains unseen."
________________________________________________________

https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/homage-to-dick-raaijmakers

(something to listen to?)

Check out the hip lingo on this 7" i got the other day. https://imgur.com/a/hWPYu4j

https://imgur.com/a/hWPYu4j

https://emojipedia-us.s3.dualstack.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/thumbs/160/emoji-one/104/thumbs-up-sign_1f44d.png

I'm so good at this internet stuff. Can you get to the pic?

Followed the link, cool blurb daddio

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

I don't know what acousmatic music is tbh.

As for musique concréte, I did start reading Pierre Schaeffer's "In Search of a Concrete Music" this year but gave up when he started straying into gobbledygook territory.

title track here
https://cful.bandcamp.com/album/dire-wolves-paradisiacal-mind

and
this which has more tracks on the cdr version
https://cardinalfuzz.bigcartel.com/product/the-shooting-guns-nosferatu-live-score-cardinal-fuzz-sam-giles-gatefold-cdr-edition

>musique concréte and acousmatic

both terms are French and come from Studio GRM, coined in different decades by different directors. concréte was Schaeffer's hardline manifesto focused specifically on manipulated recordings, and in some ways took an oppositional stance to WDR's emphasis on synthesized purely electronic music and the control and 'authorship' entailed therein (i.e. no self-respecting composer should allow appropriated pre-authored sounds and call that a composition). by the 60's most composers were helping themselves equally to the techniques of both schools, so under Ferrari & then Bayle's stewardship of the GRM 'acousmatic' was a way of underlining the core concepts of concréte & reduced listening - the aesthetic appreciation of fixed recorded sounds entirely apart from the events that produced them - while letting composers also help themselves to oscillators alongside their squeaky door cut-up. think Parmegiani, as happy close-micing a fireplace as he is playing Coupigny synth. late 60's also saw Bayle introduce the Acousmonium, i.e. concerts of tape works, diffused using dozens to hundreds of speakers placed throughout the room; live performance is in the mixing, the spatial movement of the sounds through the room, rather than in 'live' sound generation.

'acousmatic' is maybe a slightly tweaky rebranding that never caught on as deeply as the original manifesto but it's a way of emphasizing the continuities in the work that follows on from Schaeffer

thank you, the way you put that makes a lot of sense!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipUoRpVK32s&t=177s

this is not a bad explanation either

I get Nyman's definition.

I've always taken-away from "experimental" the meaning that "some of this performance will consist of very deliberate fucking around with unpredictable results"-- not the same as improvisation, but rather the opposite-- the composer/performer will engage in a process that allows for an unpredictable outcome, a controlled loss-of-control.

As for "avant-garde" I just relate it to the traditional pre-20th c. version of what I think it means. The composition will deliberately subvert the notion of composition in order to make an oblique statement and/or commentary on the nature of composition itself (and society etc.)

Improvised - musicians have meticulously trained themselves to be able to make shit up on the spot and make it great and do so in controlled environments with well-tuned instruments.

Experimental - bored of improvising, musicians will subvert their training by performing improvised music while running through an area deemed unsafe, due to radioactivity

Avant-Garde - I carry the corpse of the now-deceased musician to the concert hall and dump it on the stage while whistling "Figaro" and take a bow to wild applause

My understanding mirrors fgti's. 'Experimental' loosely implies the scientific method, whereas 'avant-garde' is a bellicose, combative stance, whether aesthetic or political (oftentimes both).