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

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

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).