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

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.

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.

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).