Best Ever Albums

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

ShadowColossi — Fri, 26 Feb 2016 02:34:12 GMT

Author: ShadowColossi

Posted: 02/26/2016 07:34

Satie wrote:

This is just factually incorrect. The term was coined a year before Loveless came out.

Huh, I actually had no idea, thanks for the info.

And I guess a more clear way of saying what I was trying to in my earlier post was that to me, it doesn't really seem like a genre at all more as something you throw on music you can't describe. It seems like a group of music that doesn't relate to each other as much as it relates to the idea of being unique.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 11:54:29 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/25/2016 16:54

meccalecca wrote:

How would you categorize an album that refuses to stick with a singular genre such as Disco Volante or Naked City? And when does genre-hopping stop being experimental?

I think experimental rock is a fine label here because it's the precedent already and any other categorization method would be very difficult to get everyone to change to. It's kind of like world music - it's a shit label that means basically nothing, but it's sometimes the best way to describe a specific eclectic album (if you're curious where I would potentially use world music, there's the occasional band that just sort of mixes in a bunch of random world musics with no real claim to being any particular one that I think it's a valid label for, even if I personally just zoom out to "Traditional Folk Music"). If you're asking for my personal categorization, I work from the most specific up. If something is just some form of rock, easy. If it's one or two forms of rock, I'll usually try to contain it in the smallest umbrella genre (post-punk, etc.). If it's something like Mr. Bungle, I see it as too obviously working in the rock "idiom" (there's no interfacing that free jazz musicians are going to have with Mr. Bungle's records) so I would label it rock myself. I do the same for Ween, despite the fact that they have Irish folk music for example. I think it's about being realistic about where the musicians come from, what lexicon they're adding to, etc. For another example, I'd use Sun City Girls. Despite their very expert incorporation of several Southeast Asian musics into their sound, they're at their heart, in my eyes, a rock band, so I label them rock. On RYM, I vote for experimental rock for both cases only in this current epoch as me and my comrades build the revolution to remove the word experimental from that website's genre hierarchy...

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

meccalecca — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 11:51:18 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 02/25/2016 16:51

benpaco wrote:

Honestly among me and my friends, Mr. Bungle is a genre. There's a guy in the band I'm in back home who adores Bungle and my brother has never been more freaked out by anything than he is by Bungle, so a lot of us constantly try to find anything even similar to him. There's songs we can find here or there, but Patton really got to be his own thing.

Well Zorn and Naked City kind of did it first. And as much credit as Patton gets, I think Trey Spruance deserves as much if not more recognition. His post-Bungle project Secret Chiefs 3 is in line with a lot of what was going on with Bungle.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

benpaco — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 11:47:06 GMT

Author: benpaco

Posted: 02/25/2016 16:47

meccalecca wrote:

I'll bring the example of Mr Bungle into the discussion, since they're an interesting band whose always been tagged as experimental. Mr Bungle's 2nd album Disco Volante simply doesn't fit into a singular genre. It's essentially a genre-hopping successor of Naked City, it's all over the place- from doom to Morricone to surf to drum and bass to thrash to pop to avant jazz. So it's generally labeled an experimental rock/metal album because there's no other way to categorize it.

How would you categorize an album that refuses to stick with a singular genre such as Disco Volante or Naked City? And when does genre-hopping stop being experimental?

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

meccalecca — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 11:18:15 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 02/25/2016 16:18

I'll bring the example of Mr Bungle into the discussion, since they're an interesting band whose always been tagged as experimental. Mr Bungle's 2nd album Disco Volante simply doesn't fit into a singular genre. It's essentially a genre-hopping successor of Naked City, it's all over the place- from doom to Morricone to surf to drum and bass to thrash to pop to avant jazz. So it's generally labeled an experimental rock/metal album because there's no other way to categorize it.

How would you categorize an album that refuses to stick with a singular genre such as Disco Volante or Naked City? And when does genre-hopping stop being experimental?

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 10:39:51 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/25/2016 15:39

ShadowColossi wrote:

I always thought of experimental music simply as music that goes outside the bounds of genre classification. If you can throw it into a group of similar music and label it all as, say, "punk rock" and no one would bat an eye, you have non-experimental music. Take the music from, say "Strawberry Jam" by Animal Collective, and you can't necessarily throw it in with anything else in a playlist under a specific tag. It's unique in it's own way- doesn't fit in with pop, or a lot of electronic music, or anything like that. So people throw the "experimental" tag on it because it's the first of it's kind, and until people start mocking that sound, it can't really be grouped with a genre.

Strawberry Jam and Animal Collective's other poppier albums might be unique in their sonic density, and no one else has really done "The Animal Collective Sound, Var. 2" (that is, their post-ST sound) exactly the same as they have, but I think it's pretty straightforward that Animal Collective have stayed largely at the cutting edge of neo-psychedelic music (largely because the only other people making the music spend so much time emulating the Beatles or Pink Floyd despite the fact that they really should be pulling an AnCo and trying to cash in on the public's woeful ignorance of the magic of early Mercury Rev). I think it would be a real shame to say that just because they've stabbed at it in a more electronics and synths-heavy way (despite the similar approach to effects and sound design that neo-psychedelic bands take with pedals and other forms of processing) that we would pluck Animal Collective out of space and time and call them "experimental." I like meccalecca's solution of describing them as experimental, rather than labeling them as such. That way, we get across that they have a unique, perhaps vanguard sound, but we also identify the traditions they pull from, the scene they occupy, and have a basis for sonic comparison for people who want more like Animal Collective. I would argue that despite AnCo fans' pretense that they're an incredibly experimental and opaque band (not after HCtI, definitely, debatably before) that the average person who enjoys Strawberry Jam will get more out of digging into Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips than they will from digging into Scott Walker or other rock-adjacent "experimental" music.

ShadowColossi wrote:

When Loveless first came out, it would've been called experimental, but later people threw "shoegaze" on it. So it's really to me just the label people throw on music that can't really be labelled as anything like music before it.

This is just factually incorrect. The term was coined a year before Loveless came out. But let's assume you were right about it not being called shoegaze. There were several other bands doing similar things - making big walls of sound with lots of distortion and effects pedals. I agree with the underlying notion here that MBV did it best and Loveless is like "the" shoegaze album, but it was made alongside several contemporaries, and contemporaries who made it just as big as MBV at that. Do you think it would be more useful to label an entire new scene "experimental," or would it be more useful to make a genre label for them? Or, if they hadn't, do the differences between shoegaze and neo-psychedelia go to such an extent for you that you would object several bands over two decades being called neo-psychedelia on the technicality of them doing it in a more dense and heavy way?

This probably gets to the heart of why genre labels in general are sticky, but I think this kind of post, no offense to you, demonstrates the dangers of letting "experimental" be a catch-all genre tag - it makes it where we don't investigate further, dig deeper, analyze more specifically, to create the possibility of new genre tags and new modes of categorization at the drop of the slightest technical shift or length extension that a rock band does. We get this overly bloated and useless genre label, experimental, and then a bunch of incredibly specific little tiny ones to put bands back into to avoid offending anyone's notion of experimental music.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

benpaco — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 10:09:39 GMT

Author: benpaco

Posted: 02/25/2016 15:09

ShadowColossi wrote:

If you can throw it into a group of similar music and label it all as, say, "punk rock" and no one would bat an eye, you have non-experimental music.

I would say it's more complex than that. This is clearly punk music

Link

but does that make it not experimental? Cuz I don't think so.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

ShadowColossi — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 01:54:32 GMT

Author: ShadowColossi

Posted: 02/25/2016 06:54

I always thought of experimental music simply as music that goes outside the bounds of genre classification. If you can throw it into a group of similar music and label it all as, say, "punk rock" and no one would bat an eye, you have non-experimental music. Take the music from, say "Strawberry Jam" by Animal Collective, and you can't necessarily throw it in with anything else in a playlist under a specific tag. It's unique in it's own way- doesn't fit in with pop, or a lot of electronic music, or anything like that. So people throw the "experimental" tag on it because it's the first of it's kind, and until people start mocking that sound, it can't really be grouped with a genre. When Loveless first came out, it would've been called experimental, but later people threw "shoegaze" on it. So it's really to me just the label people throw on music that can't really be labelled as anything like music before it.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

boyd94 — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 17:22:01 GMT

Author: boyd94

Posted: 02/23/2016 22:22

Tap wrote:

Link

Like what would I say here, Fluxus? People won't know what that means tho.

Watching this makes me feel like Mark Corrigan in Rainbow Rhythms. Peep Show fans will get the reference.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

SquishypuffDave — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 17:14:38 GMT

Author: SquishypuffDave

Posted: 02/23/2016 22:14

My overly-literal idea of experimental music would be something along the lines of aleatoric or process music where the artist doesn't know exactly what they're going to get. Obviously this applies to all music to some extent, and there's also the counterargument that an artist could have a really clear vision and use experimental methods to achieve it so I dunno.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 15:09:49 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/23/2016 20:09

Tap wrote:

Like what would I say here, Fluxus? People won't know what that means tho.

They would likely learn if you labeled it such, though. People don't just "know" the difference between black and death metal when they first hear the labels, but they can choose to learn because classification is actually done. But I get what you're saying, and there is a point where genre classification is going to bend to the pressure of needing longer-form explanation. I think the problem is more with listeners expecting genre tags to tell them anything substantial about music.

Also, if I liked Radiohead for being "experimental" and then went on to Swans because they're "experimental" and then listened to Captain Beefheart because he's "experimental" and then checked out Ornette Coleman because he's "experimental" and then ended up on Wolf Vostell because he's "experimental" I'd be completely fucking confused about what kind of sounds I was really supposed to be expecting from the label "experimental" and would stop using it.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Tap — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 14:51:40 GMT

Author: Tap

Posted: 02/23/2016 19:51

Kool Keith Sweat wrote:

If you need a trashcan for 'unclassifiable' music, you can use post rock or similar terms.

Link

Like what would I say here, Fluxus? People won't know what that means tho.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

meccalecca — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 14:37:40 GMT

Author: meccalecca

Posted: 02/23/2016 19:37

Great post Keith

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 12:36:35 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/23/2016 17:36

I don't think I use the term experimental often, if at all, but opt for avant-garde when speaking to people about music (which could be a problem right there), but there is a lot of music I'm very comfortable with calling avant-garde or experimental. I think both terms are used to recognize that the music they are applied to is straddling, bending, breaking, or otherwise manipulating boundaries in music (not the kind you all were discussing in the last thread, but cultural "rules" about structure, timbre, tonality, etc.). I think people can loosely identify tiers of boundary manipulation too, e.g. early Earth welding Black Sabbath and La Monte Young is ~experimental, but synthesizing genres is not a new concept or feat and would not be considered as boundary-breaking as something like Derek Bailey creating a new language of guitar timbre and tonality (or tonality in jazz, or in general). (Not to say that a great synthesis of genres is not impressive or amazing to behold, e.g. Robert Johnson, John Fahey, Tortoise). So, I think it would be justified to label the music that is manipulating but not breaking musical boundaries as experimental, maybe with notes of 'heavy' or 'light' experimentation depending on what they're doing, and to label the music that is breaking boundaries in music as avant-garde, it is literally on the vanguard of experimentation. This is all within the context of musical history, and nothing to do with the musician pushing their own boundaries. Otherwise, we might have the term experimental applied to a group like Surfer Blood that is 'experimenting' with something other than power chords. Beyond that problem, we have to think about who determines whether music is experimental or not (I believe it's a third-party listener) and what they're drawing that term from (it's probably musical history, not the musician's intentions), which would discount any credibility the musician has in coining her music experimental or not. That last bit is particularly shaky because no doubt an avant-garde musician is at least somewhat aware that they're making avant-garde art, but I believe it requires confirmation from outside the musician -- and this is a point of further discussion in this thread. One question that I had while writing this is "does John Coltrane & Don Cherry's The Avant-Garde deserve to actually call itself avant-garde?"

An interesting thing brought up earlier in this thread is whether or not something retains its status as experimental or avant-garde as time passes, e.g. if a piece experimented, does it remain experimental after other musicians retread that experimentation. I'm inclined to say yes, because the listener that deemed that music experimental or avant-garde likely did so in a historical context, and things don't lose their place in history because someone else does them later. Ulysses S. Grant doesn't lose his place in history as creating the first US national park because Theodore Roosevelt created the next few more; Albert Ayler doesn't lose his place in history for creating a new language of timbre and tonality for the tenor saxophone because Derek Bailey furthered the free logic of that language with guitar. If someone in conversation doubts you for saying some music is experimental, I doubt think either party would lose ground by that person switching to was experimental, provided both parties recognize it manipulated or broke boundaries.

Another thing that I've noticed in this thread is people using experimental as a genre term. I think this is inappropriate. Whereas a genre can signify a set of similar piece mechanics or similar sounds or even musicians from a geographic region, experimentation refers to manipulating the over-arching mechanics (piece structure, tonality, timbre, etc.) of music; a rock musician and a jazz musician can both be experimental while remaining exclusive to their genres, and a free jazz musician can be experimental or not. If you need a trashcan for 'unclassifiable' music, you can use post rock or similar terms.

Just some thoughts that have some loose ends and might even conflict with each other, but regardless I'm glad these threads have returned to the forums and I'm glad to take part in a few of them.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Norman Bates — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 02:20:37 GMT

Author: Norman Bates

Posted: 02/23/2016 07:20

TannerVHalv wrote:

both a lot of popular music and avant-garde music on their chart

These are not contradictory terms for me. In fact, one might argue that one of the things that interest me most is when the 'avant-garde' infects 'popular' music.

TannerVHalv wrote:

have any explanation they can give to me as to how they compare the two for their charts?

I don't know, which gives me the most pleasure? Ultimately, the goal of music listening is not making charts (and this is from someone who has one for each year + 15 odd custom charts running atm) ; it's pleasure, whatever its form (having fun, pondering 'clever' things, beer-crying, whatever).

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

FlorianJones — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 20:11:12 GMT

Author: FlorianJones

Posted: 02/23/2016 01:11

Satie wrote:

Okay, but the best music has conceptual baggage that is in the service of a particular listening experience. This might be a nature of how we conceive of music listening experiences. I focus on recorded music because that's what I can listen to at my computer in headphones, catalog and rank on BEA. Yeah, conceptual recordings exist, so if you're talking about those, no, I don't think it's particularly advantageous or practical to compare, say, The Gerogerigegege's Art Is Over or some of these releases intended to break turntables next to pieces of recorded music. I assume you mean more where the music itself is conceptual. I think 4'33"'s the main thing you're beating around the bush on here, and I'll be the first to say that it works much better as concept than as listening experience. I think in the interceding decades, many artists, including Cage, pulled back from this extreme to use musical accompaniment and recording curation to amplify and accentuate specific parts of the recording and/or listening environment, and those pieces are the ones that I find most tantalizing. I have no problem saying that most instances of me channeling a listen to my environment through the ritual of pressing play on a 4 minute and 33 second long silent mp3 that I happen to have on my laptop tagged as John Cage's 4'33", a ritual I've undertaken like three times, is a mediocre listening experience. On the other hand, Manfred Werder's intensely minimal music that utilizes what some might call egregious silences has produced incredibly vibrant, enjoyable listening experiences. Even when the guide is something as small as a little cricket chirp electronic signal pushed by Antoine Beuger in performance of Ein(e) Ausführende(r), it can dramatically influence my perception of my environment, and I rank that among my favorite listening experiences to undertake. I don't rank pieces of music criticism as among my favorite works of musical art, and they change my perception of music a lot. Cage has plenty of musically and conceptually successful pieces worthy of my time, and I'm comfortable saying 4'33" isn't among them just because it was the most extreme and forthright artistic gesture to herald a lot of the breakthroughs I've enjoyed for the past half century. But I also don't rank music based on "The Objective Truth" that other people claim they can ascertain. To those people, I say good luck, and I also ask why they have so many damned Beatles records in their Overalls but no classical.

Moving away from silence as conceptual mechanism, there are plenty of other conceptual mechanisms that are interesting on their own and are executed beautifully. I can identify Feldman pieces I enjoy and (rare) Feldman pieces that I don't based on how well they execute the concepts he has at work in his music. I can find "intellectual" appreciation of conceptual material, sure, but the music is first and foremost always, however strictly or loosely defined music is, and I think a lot of avant-garde music creates immense emotional reactions same as any other music and in most cases much better. I get bored by a lot of popular music within a few minutes, but I can sit with rapt attention listening to most EAI music.

Thanks for that, it answers what I was wondering pretty well, and yeah, 4'33" is a great example of the kind of stuff I was referring to in my previous post.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 20:03:15 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/23/2016 01:03

TannerVHalv wrote:

Some artists aren't trying to make music that necessarily sounds good, but rather challenges our notions of music, and does something never done before. I think we can appreciate that work even if it isn't conventionally pleasant listening.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

FlorianJones — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 19:50:27 GMT

Author: FlorianJones

Posted: 02/23/2016 00:50

Satie wrote:

all of my evaluation of music has to do with this obscure and scientifically rigorous criterion called "how good it sounds to me.".

I guess I should have been a little clearer. What I'm saying is that I really enjoy both avant-garde and popular music, but I get very different types of enjoyment out of the two, and I don't know how to compare those different forms of enjoyment. To try and put it in totally non-musical terms, I love Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain." it is probably one of the most important artworks of the 20th century and it was huge in the deconstruction of traditional notions of art. I don't really want to look at it all day though, I don't get a ton of joy from looking at it, it is just a urinal. On the other hand, I could sit in front of a Rothko painting and look at it all day. His pieces have a lot of great emotion to them. Therefore the joy I get from these two pieces is super different, and so while I love them both, I really have no way to compare them.

Maybe you already answered that too by saying "how good it sounds to me." but in saying that do you mean that you never rank anything based on the quality of conceptual notions behind a piece of music, and you only analyze the sound? Only evaluating based on sound works fine for some music, but it can be very reductive and unfair at times. It would be like me evaluating art only on how much I want to look at it, which would be a great disservice to Duchamp. Back to the topic at hand of experimental music, I think this area is where we most have to look at conceptual qualities as well as sonic ones. Some artists aren't trying to make music that necessarily sounds good, but rather challenges our notions of music, and does something never done before. I think we can appreciate that work even if it isn't conventionally pleasant listening.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 19:05:52 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/23/2016 00:05

Applerill wrote:

(Also, if these Point of Discussion threads have proven anything to us, it's that defining words is a lot harder than you'd think)

Sure, but coining them has the benefit of being able to spend time articulating what you mean (at the very least to yourself) by a new phrase before just using it. But, shumperknickels. Do as you bunknonk.

Re: Point of Discussion: "Experimental" Music

benpaco — Mon, 22 Feb 2016 19:01:13 GMT

Author: benpaco

Posted: 02/23/2016 00:01

Satie wrote:

all of my evaluation of music has to do with this obscure and scientifically rigorous criterion called "how good it sounds to me."

My ratings are about 54% enjoyment, 17% personal impact, 14% replayability, 12% mood based, and 8 percent trying to fit in.

Also charlie if it's as problem you could just avoid that, yeah? There was a femtosecond in middle school that friends and I started referring to things we liked as "chickety china" in reference to an inside joke, but it took us probably less than a day to realize that using words that only have meaning to a small group, then having to clarify, is far less rewarding than just calling something "good" or "bad".