Post a controversial music opinion

Arguably this Eno quote can be applied to many other types of music that are not typically classed as ambient - thousands of bars all over the world play house, hip-hop, rock or jazz that functions as background/mood music just as well as it works for active listening.

For me, good ambient erases the particulars of the now and encourages the empty mind.

@ Siegbran

I remember a specific turning point around 1998 when suddenly the world was celebrating what I then called “lobby music”— stuff like Air, Moby, and that song that’s just a drum loop and “I want you to get together / put your hands together one time” (St. Germain?)

It bore no commonality with what was called ambient music back then but served the same function, and until it became the sound of hotel lobbies and car commercials, I remember it sounding to listeners and writers alike like “the best music in the world”— the only Moby cynics I knew in 1998/1999 were hardcore kids and art-school people who listened exclusively to Flying Lizards

But by 2000, this style of music was lobby music. I think generally the antecedent was SAW 1/2 and The Orb I guess

Can it be that what you called lobby music was called 'lounge music' for a lot of other people? St. Germain fits that bill.

Arguably this Eno quote can be applied to many other types of music that are not typically classed as ambient - thousands of bars all over the world play house, hip-hop, rock or jazz that functions as background/mood music just as well as it works for active listening.

This is what I was getting at upthread: the idea of 'furniture music' was radical when Satie came up with it in the pre-recording era. At this point, music is used as passive background material in every grocery store, coffee shop, bar, department store, party, etc, and Aerosmith is as or more likely to be used in this way as 76:14.

it would be interesting to read a history of pop (or even rock) that focused on the emergence of this music's "functionality" in public spaces and how that changed the music itself. Like, was the functionality of "Born To Be Wild" e.g. always there, just waiting for a world to adapt to its function? Or has popular music adapted to the functions of the world?

people who can only listen really intensively are not good listeners or reliable judges

the only Moby cynics I knew in 1998/1999 were hardcore kids and art-school people who listened exclusively to Flying Lizards

It's funny, I knew a lot of hardcore kids who loved Moby! I think it was the sxe / veganism connection or something.

Where do you slot Cafe del Mar comps in here? I feel like that kinda stuff (ie comps called, like, "Chill Ibiza" and stuff) had the opposite trajectory of what you are talking about, in that it seemed like that stuff (which was ubiquitous in the mid nineties) was specifically designed as hotel lobby music initially, and only later became hip Balaeric catnip (via guys like Mark Barrott, etc, who iirc also kinda pioneered the whole 'chill music in hotels' thing)

Also, where do the KLF fit into all this? I feel like Chill Out is sui generis in a lot of ways (and still sounds really unique to me). Would you call that ambient? I mean, if it is, is it the first (only?) ambient "concept album?"

Arguably, even Music for Airports was a 'concept album'.

The Moby hype was real, but there was already trip-hop and indeed balearic before him, 60s lounge jazz/bossa before that, and chillwave after him that functioned exactly the same way.

I think this application for music was always there, the old trope of the unflappable piano player tucked away in the corner of the bar is older than steam. It's more that Eno, Satie et al explicitly pointed it out and intellectualize it.

I like that comparison

Preceding "albums", much of Satie's work served this exact thesis too

My wife wants music on most of the time, including when reading, writing, or editing. Otoh I prefer silence when I'm reading, writing, or editing.

I can just barely tolerate ambient or instrumental music in these situations, but if the music has words I will listen to them, and I can't focus on more than one stream of words at a time. So if we're working on the same room we need background music that occupies a very narrow range - interesting enough for her but not so interesting that I start listening actively.

Yeah, I can't focus mentally on something else when listening to music with lyrics. It's somewhat better when the lyrics are in a language I don't speak, but not ideal. I need stuff with beats though, pure ambient makes me fall asleep.

Funny, I remember Moby being a punching bag from Day 1

it would be interesting to read a history of pop (or even rock) that focused on the emergence of this music's "functionality" in public spaces and how that changed the music itself. Like, was the functionality of "Born To Be Wild" e.g. always there, just waiting for a world to adapt to its function? Or has popular music adapted to the functions of the world?

― droit au butt (Euler)

Joseph Lanza's Elevator Music gets into some aspects of this topic although the analysis needs to be updated to our moment where anything goes as background music. But among it's other revelations, that book at least plots out how Beautiful Music/Muzak was conceived of, then evolved into Easy Listening which later evolved into Lite FM/Adult Contemporary. Seems to me that from this final point it was inevitable that rock and hip hop etc would eventually become acceptable in the public sphere. Part of it is that first the pre-rock generation had to die out.

This theory feels a bit too convenient, but yeah I can see the narrative of 1930/40s jazz sliding into lounge jazz/easy listeningg, 60s boomer rock morphing into AOR, Gen X trading their NWA for mumble rap today.

there's an easy listening aspect to a lot of the music I favor, I like music with zero edges when I'm just chilling out. Balearic tends toward this direction. An album like The Sea and Cake - Oui is my ideal, it just breezes over you.

xp The narrative you describe is one dimension, and those developments have happened, but what I was pulling from the Joseph Lanza book was this other narrative - that background music has always existed as a parallel counterpart to foreground music, but that what we consider acceptable as background music has evolved

That sounds so interesting

Yeah my own held opinion is that background/foreground and/or any other functionality of music (ambient included) is less derived from any general parameters (no snares i.e.) and is better discussed by taking a holistic view of the music’s perceived thesis and compositional aspects, and the personal conclusions that one derives from repeated use of the music

I posted this elsewhere but it took me many years to form the opinion that the most “challenging” serial music was not challenging at all, but had a different use: it is best used by overworked musicians as aural respite from too much immersion in “tonal” idioms. The hard-math approach to its composition actually provoked in the listener a similar neural response as Mozart, Palestrina, or other attempts toward “perfect” music. A subsequent observation is the our ears, today, are so overtired by constant musical stimulus that, well, basically, stuff like Boulez and Stockhausen is due for a comeback

stuff like Boulez and Stockhausen is due for a comeback

Never out of fashion in my house.

Ya I got Hymnen on vinyl and was chopping veg and frying onions while listening to it after a long day of working on some bullshit and it was a transcendental experience

Cecil Tylor's music is mostly unlistenable

what's fucking right with you ?

Some of the best music is unlistenable.

Cecil Taylor is not only God, but better than just about every pumped up "genius" of the entire 20th century!

^^
probably doing it wrong, in every sense!

I like to think that, sooner or later, we all end up craving something other than conventional sounds and structures. But these other styles occasionally require a fair amount of acclimatisation. And yes, it really is worth it.

Out of curiosity, is this more or less 'unlistenable' than Cecil Taylor?

Doesn't seem to have worked. Here's the URL: https://vimeo.com/49655738

The whole "I don't get anything out of this so it must be bullshit" thing is not good

the ustwolskaja was ok but it was no "winnsboro cotton mill blues" imo

"free jazz is just a bunch of unlistenable noise" is not a controversial opinion but a tedious one, also imo

The Diarrhea song should be in the Library of Congress

Ustvolskaya >>> Rzewski (possibly a controversial opinion). Hideous black holes bereft of hope are my jam. Late Liszt utterly eclipses early Liszt for the exact same reason.

"free jazz is just a bunch of unlistenable noise" is not a controversial opinion but a tedious one, also imo

I said nothing about free jazz and enjoy Ayler and Ornette (the latter being one of my all time favorite artists) as well as David S Ware, Brotzmann, etc

I just can't deal with atonal / dissonant piano, I guess. Come to think of it, I don't love Shipp in this mode, ether, or Dave Burrell, et al

In fact, Ornette's decision to (mostly) never work with a piano is one of the many things that made him a genius imo

Here’s a controversial opinion (not mine!) from an interview I read last night, with Mike Johnson of Thinking Plague:

It seems that for so many people now, music is just a background thing. It needs to keep a certain part of their brain busy, so they have it going in their ear buds as background all the time and it’s on shuffle, and they don’t really care what it is. And they listen to MP3s; they don’t care about high fidelity. They don’t care about really in-depth audio detail. It’s much less about what’s going on with the notes. It’s just a little hook melody and this over-processed drum groove and some pitch-corrected vocal parts.

The last three Suede albums are as good as the first three.

xxp
for me you can trash Shipp, but Dave Burrell ..nooo! His jelly Roll Morton alb isn't atonal/dissonant ftr, and rather lovely!

I dislike almost all solo piano music. The piano on its own bores me pretty quickly.

MAYBE some Saint-Saens piano stuff.

^^
not controversial, just ILM!

for me you can trash Shipp, but Dave Burrell ..nooo! His jelly Roll Morton alb isn't atonal/dissonant ftr, and rather lovely!

― calzino, Sunday, October 14, 2018 12:49 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would listen to this. My total experience with Burrell is his two albums as a leader on BYG

I dislike almost all solo piano music. The piano on its own bores me pretty quickly.

I like solo piano; it's piano trios that mostly bore the fuck out of me. I'm always waiting for the horn player(s) to show up. Shipp's trio work is exceptional, as is Taylor's, and I enjoy both. But 90 percent of the piano trio albums I get sent, I never listen to.

I don't have a controversial opinion about one of my favourite-ever composers Ustvolskaya
But I think Cecil Taylor and Rzewski had boats that were pointing in somewhat the same direction
And Ustvolskaya's boat was pointing in a different direction, somewhat the same direction as Ligeti when he was writing for piano

In the vein of Ustvolskaya/Ligeti and their solo piano work-- which I think is different from the other composers/musicians mentioned-- because the work is about discipline, not freedom-- it's about work, not play-- aero turned me on a few years ago to Michael Hersch, whose "Vanishing Pavilions" is some of the most awesome solo piano stuff (in this particular vein of spectacular disciplined dissonance):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-YKjiBsiow

I wish I had an elegant way of describing how this kind of music makes me feel, and what I feel that it is for. A lot of religious and quasi-religious absolute music seems designed to inspire a state of "grace" while contemplating the idea of a benevolent supreme being. Ustvolskaya/Ligeti/et al. is music that aims for the same effect, but more designed to inspire a state of acceptance and well-being when contemplating the idea that 'god' is merely time, and matter, and energy, and it is not benevolent, but is uncaring and spinning around us, and that in embracing the terror that such a realization can instil within us, one can achieve a similar but non-theistic state of "grace", one that accesses an acceptance of the annihilation that awaits us all as individuals and as a society

thinking plague are cool and "high fidelity" is a fetish

I've never heard Thinking Plague. That guy's argument has been made almost verbatim by about 500,000 other people, many of whom are or have been convinced that a download service that sells ultra-high-fidelity tracks will be the salvation of the music industry, while the counterpoint argument - "What about transistor radios, man? Those sounded like dogshit!" - is guaranteed to pop up as the second or third comment.

Back in the 90s, I used to hate buying ultra-clean, super-well-produced modern jazz albums on labels like Telarc or Verve, because they didn't have the fuzzy human dudes-in-a-room intimacy of classic Blue Note or Prestige titles. Even the somewhat crunchy digital reissues - the "Original Jazz Classics" CDs and the like - of those two- or four-track recordings still sounded better to me than music recorded in pristine new studios with total instrumental separation. They still do.

I also think people should start mixing pop records in mono again, because they'll sound better coming out of a smartphone that way.

I like his description of pop music as “just a little hook melody and this over-processed drum groove and some pitch-corrected vocal parts.”

the piano sonata (wasn't previously familiar with ustvolskaya) reminded me a little too much of carl ruggles, who's not a composer i find congenial. i could be reading him wrong but "sun-treader" in particular sounds to me like an exercise in just making the ugliest chords imaginable. i don't find beauty or meaning in that. it sounds to me like wallowing.

i wouldn't say i "accept" terror and annihilation, as such - more compartmentalize it, place it out of scope. certain sorts of music bring those things back into scope for me, and i don't avoid them entirely but i don't enjoy such works and limit my exposure to them.

i'm digging the hersch, though.

Telarc, wow...I remember for a period of time they were a label a lot of blues guys gravitated towards as well and even as a teenager I recognized how antiseptic the sound was. I think maybe Junior Wells had an album out w/them and it was both well-performed and stripped of all grit and life.

I've never heard Thinking Plague. That guy's argument has been made almost verbatim by about 500,000 other people, many of whom are or have been convinced that a download service that sells ultra-high-fidelity tracks will be the salvation of the music industry, while the counterpoint argument - "What about transistor radios, man? Those sounded like dogshit!" - is guaranteed to pop up as the second or third comment.

― grawlix (unperson)

the early stuff is pretty good avant-prog. "in this life" in particular is a classic. as time has gone on i've found johnson's work to be increasingly bleak and nihilistic (he's strongly concerned with the environment), and as such it's more of that music i limit my exposure to. i'm sure what's going on with the notes is really cool, though.

I also think people should start mixing pop records in mono again, because they'll sound better coming out of a smartphone that way.

― grawlix (unperson), Sunday, October 14, 2018 1:39 PM (eighteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm