Post a controversial music opinion

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

the resonars remixed their first album into mono in 2014. it's not bad but i haven't tried listening to it through my smartphone speakers.

Some phones play stereo in landscape (using the earpiece speaker). Anyway, I would think most smartphone listening involves headphones or car speakers.

most classic example of the emperor has no clothes:

Taylor Freakin Swift

My probably-not-controversial music opinion is that "emperor's new clothes' arguments are usually patronising nonsense.

[patronising nonsense] unfortunately for Taylor, and her lovely twelve-year-old fanbase, a lot of scientific research and objective reasoning went into that opinion [/patronising nonsense]

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0c/de/43/0cde43393ddfff46e8605ab514177113.jpg

The production on a lot of Bowie's Berlin-era output (and Scary Monsters) is absolutely horrible and ruins any semblance of what might have been good music. Station To Station (apart from 'Stay', which is all-time) is a sludgy, unlistenable mess

ouch

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

I think mid-period Ligeti and Ustvolskaya still operate within a Romantic paradigm according to which the Sublime names the experience of an ultimately finite, apathetic universe. Insofar as you can project anything you like unto cosmic neutrality, 'it' cannot be rendered as such, in and of itself, which is why disagreements as to its 'nature' are inevitable. What's interesting to me is that, of all the arts, music appears to be both the least and most ill-suited to representing this non-human indifference (hence the dissensus). Take Ligeti's Lux aeterna, for instance, or his Requiem, both of which bear titles that explicitly refer to Roman Catholicism, yet feature none of the holy consolation or human lamentation we've come to expect from the genre – its sounds are a lot more alien, a lot more 'other' than that. Likewise, Ustvolskaya draws upon Christian texts, especially in her late works, but they are set in such a way that solely the despair at there being no divinity to reach out to remains.

And yet… how much of this reading is derived from what we know about the two composers? Conversely, some of Messiaen's more terrifying ('awful' in the obsolete sense) moments or Ștefan Niculescu's final works inhabit a strikingly similar sound world. Niculescu, in particular, appends subtitles to his symphonies that subvert the notion of 'absolute music', so the 4th, Deisis and the 5th, Litanies, limpidly bid us to seek God in spite (or via?) a structural and harmonic language that your average deist would probably deem horrifying. Even its echoes of Eastern Orthodox plainchant are subjected to incremental distortions that Xenakis wouldn't have disavowed. So why not conceive of Ligeti's Requiem as the genre's theological nec plus ultra, i.e. the aptest at translating the Old Testament terror – most apparent in the 'Dies irae' – that the mass for the dead has always sought to make audible? What's to stop one from taking the 'Jesus Messiah, save us!' repeated throughout Ustvolskaya's 3rd at face value instead of as a stoic remark on its own impossibility? I am thus fascinated with the fact that these four composers (among many) heard such radically different intimations and inflections in sounds that, although hardly identical, can be said to have far more in common than what distinguishes them.

A final example: Mark Andre, a Helmut Lachenmann pupil, as well as a self-professed Lutheran intent on seeking the fragmentary traces he believes Christ left behind, writes music that sounds very much like that of his teacher, whose titles are never suggestive of overt religiosity. Post-Schoenbergian music lends itself quite easily to these misunderstandings, I think, and especially so-called 'absolute' music, which goes to show how difficult it is to guide the listener into accepting our annihilation to come in a theistic or atheistic way, respectively, without falling back on language. I don't think this renders musical intent null and void, by the way, just trickier still.

My apologies for the wall of text, it's just something I've been pondering of late. And thanks for the M. Hersch link – sounds (and looks) intriguing.

I have fond memories of Van Halen's "OU812," even if I haven't listened to it in decades.

pomenitul, that is an amazing post thank you!

You're articulating ideas and connections that I've felt intuitively but have been unable to adequately verbalize and you're doing so very well

Thank you very much, fgti!

pomenitul, I don't know anything about Ustvolskaya's music. There's a bunch of it on Spotify, though. Can you recommend any specific pieces (or even specific recordings, as I am a person who still buys physical music)? I'm more interested in large ensemble works than chamber music right now, generally (the opposite used to be true).

I didn't realize I was interrupting an ongoing smart discussion. Sorry for stinking up the place.

unperson, the Megadisc series with Oleg Malov is suitably austere, and was my introduction to her music. Earlier orchestral scores (the 1st symphony, the piano concerto), for all their eccentricities, tend to be conventional in that they exhibit a relatively maximalist understanding of the orchestra, so you can clearly hear the influence of Shostakovich (this goes both ways, incidentally, as his late style is very much informed by her first compositions). I'd suggest starting with symphonies 2-5, as long as you're willing to accept that 'symphony' is a bit of a misnomer here (the 4th, for instance, lasts approximately six minutes and features nothing but voice, trumpet, piano and tam-tam, but the 2nd and 3rd mostly match your criteria). If you want to go bigger (and assuming you're not familiar with her work), I also strongly recommend checking out Sofia Gubaidulina's sole symphony (only one recording, with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting, is freely available as far as I can tell) and, of course, the understung Ștefan Niculescu's, though physical copies of his music are almost impossible to locate.

'undersung' rather than 'understung', of course. He committed no unforgivable crimes against bees in his lifetime.

The production on a lot of Bowie's Berlin-era output (and Scary Monsters) is absolutely horrible and ruins any semblance of what might have been good music. Station To Station (apart from 'Stay', which is all-time) is a sludgy, unlistenable mess

― Scritti Vanilli - The Word Girl You Know It's True (dog latin), Monday, October 15, 2018 8:25 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

noooooooooo

I goddamn love early Ustvolskaya

And the "sludgy" production of Berlin-era Bowie (which I would myself describe as "brittle") is part of its appeal. "Station To Station" (the song) sounded like oh no David what are you doing on first listen and is now my favourite Bowie track by a long shot

I was at a friend's house once and they put on Station to Station, dropping the needle about 1 minute into the first track, they said they always did this. Maybe I should take this to the 'irrationally angry' thread.

Nothing irrational about such anger tbf.

Saying someone is otm is just a way to wax your own ego and say "i feel the same, therefore you are right" - is it not?

Seems unfairly cynical

Haha - Ross, you say "___ OTM" on here all the time!

Ross otm, Moodles otm, morrisp otm

unregistered otm

when I otm people it usually amounts to "I agree with your long, well-considered, articulate post, and I would have written it myself if I weren't such a lazy, thick-headed failure of a writer". it's egotistical in the sense that I'm praising my own viewpoint but humble in the sense that I'm acknowledging my inability to contribute anything meaningful to the conversation beyond "uh yeah, what they said"

tl;dr LBI otm

I'll take Donald Fagen The Nightfly over Gaucho or Aja any day.

Women (band) blatantly combined idiosyncratic qualities of Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Wire, and Sebadoh's music on Public Strain... and it did so successfully. it's one of the finest albums of the decade.

MBV's self-titled 'comeback' album is a lame pastiche of My Bloody Valentine's music. It (its release / existence) doesn't warrant all of the hype and reverence it's received.

I'll take Donald Fagen The Nightfly over Gaucho or Aja any day.

― kornrulez6969,

No offense, but not controversial? Most critics averred this at the time.

MBV's self-titled 'comeback' album is a lame pastiche of My Bloody Valentine's music. It (its release / existence) doesn't warrant all of the hype and reverence it's received.

the one that blows my mind is "in another way"

not totally music, but my controversial opinion is that bob dylan deserved his nobel prize

Nightfly over Aja, Gaucho.... No offense, but not controversial? Most critics averred this at the time.

Yes but not anymore and certainly not on ILM where Gaucho is practically fetishized

but my controversial opinion is that bob dylan deserved his nobel prize

The only Pink Floyd era worth a stuff is the Waters era. The Barrett- and Gilmour-led eras are disposable.

Hm I have heard Division Bell playing twice in public places over the past couple weeks and was blown away by how much more space there might be in my life for that music today, compared to when I poo-poo'd it as a teenager

100% agree. Pink Floyd weren't shit until they shoved Barrett out the door (and it still took them a couple of years to have more than one or two good songs max per album), and without Waters they were nothing.

I say that as someone who bought Momentary Lapse of Reason as a 16-year-old and enjoyed it quite a bit. I even saw them live on that tour.

unperson: are you agreeing with my post, or with fgti's? My controversial opinion is that Pink Floyd under Barrett were shit.

I agree with anagram, not fgti. I liked Momentary Lapse when I was a child, but don't like it anymore, and I never liked anything pre-Meddle.

ah, I see – you're saying "weren't shit" to mean "weren't any good", whereas I thought you meant it as "weren't terrible"

Controversial opinion: shit may be good

pharoah sanders karma is pretty good but not that good

I've never enjoyed Pharoah as a leader but that's not especially controversial

Agree that Floyd was better post-Syd, not so sure about the rest. I love The Division Bell

Karma is nowhere near Sanders' best album. His stuff from 1971-72 is when he was really in his glory. But really, everything he did for Impulse!, and Izipho Zam (which was on Strata-East) is essential in its own way.

Women (band) blatantly combined idiosyncratic qualities of Sonic Youth, Velvet Underground, Wire, and Sebadoh's music on Public Strain... and it did so successfully. it's one of the finest albums of the decade.

I gotta listen to this!

good album, way more interesting than the records they've gone on to make in Preoccupations

They sound sort of like a (much) mellower Abe Vigoda