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.
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? _________________ http://jonnyleather.com
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?
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. _________________
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. _________________ http://jonnyleather.com
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...
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. _________________ "If I could just leave my body for a night.... FJSDKFJKAJFKFJKDSFDKSJF"
-Animal Collective
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