Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
You know what? Wow. And I thought that guys making a point about not wasting yourself and not fucking around, would be at worst annoying but never that hardcore.
BTW here's the linky.
JHM was actually referring to people who don't consider Death Grips etc. to be "real hip-hop". In those peoples' defense, just because hip-hop can be mixed with almost anything doesn't mean it often is. So you end up with a subset that rejects any form of hip-hop that uses beats that aren't funk- or jazz-derived.
Death Grips' beats tend to be derived from a mixture of punk, noise music, and metal. Also sometimes weird interpolations of old Salt-n-Pepa songs.
because embeds here suck.
> definition of "conservative"
lol
I take it as related to my postings, amirite?
No, just the conversation here about what the term means.
@Lazuli: I was really more referencing Dälek and Cannibal Ox, but Death Grips are probably a more appropriate example given their total rejection of anything resembling genre convention or sanity.
Oh, also Gonjasufi and Techno Animal. Forgetting those is just careless of me.
Because a day of terrible AKB48 news just doesn't end.
This...still makes me think Miichan is depressed/manic.
This is kind of nice, but I can't be sure if it's sincere or they're saving face.
Though this is still not as bad as the Rina and her sister thing.
Well, when I'm sleep deprived, I just find everything more amusing while going through a sort of mild desperation feeling? And Queen perfectly fits that with their over the top badass songs about having a good time and being immortal
That makes sense.
I think I just like my sleep deprivation music more on the sympathetic side of the equation. The Gerbils, Fantômas, The Cure circa Pornography, This Heat, Nurse With Wound, early Cabaret Voltaire, PiL circa Flowers Of Romance—tense, wacky, trippy music with a strong aura of melancholy and dread. Then I feel less alone, I guess, more in tune with the reality of my situation. It's like listening to scary music in the dark when I'm feeling kind of morose, or dancing badly to Of Montreal and Lightning Bolt when I need a pick-me-up.
Cannibal Ox are pretty widely considered hip-hop. They're generally considered to have fallen off after their first album, but that's neither here nor there. Dalek aren't well known enough for most people to have an opinion on them.
Anyone who'd reject Gonjasufi as hip-hop has a very narrow vision of the genre, and I do not know any of Techno Animal's music offhand, so I cannot comment there.
Miichan is on the mainstream news (Well, Aljazeera at least).
Oh, and the BBC. (Now everyone else!)
Though they're reporting "She was forced to shave her head as an apology." instead of "She was demoted as punishment and shaved her head of her own accord."...
Aljazeera is mainstream news.
Also, what.
They really didn't do much of anything after their first album. I mean, individually, sure, but as a group they've basically been silent for at least seven years. It's a bit hard to say that a group (well, duo) has fallen off in quality when they simply haven't done anything of note.
But that aside, I suppose that I exaggerate. I enjoy abrasive, strange hip-hop with sophisticated, idiosyncratic production and offbeat vocal delivery (where that is applicable). "Traditional" and "straightforward" aren't necessarily bad qualities, but I like music in this particular genre to be a little overwhelming, be it that through aggression or ecstasy. I want to feel it, you know? I want to be directly engaged. Songs like the final two on Dälek's From the Filthy Tongues of Gods and Griots speak my language in a way that a lot of music from other genres and most of the music in that genre doesn't.
But that's what I seek in music at large: To feel resonance in some respect.
Cannibal Ox actually did release another album (Return of The Ox) but it was a live recording and was not well recieved. None of this diminishes that "Iron Galaxy" is one of the best songs ever made, in any genre, but it has honestly seemed like Vast and Vordul have no particular interest in trying to top Cold Vein.
A proper follow up to The Cold Vein is allegedly in the works, but no one really seems to have high hopes for it.
Also, I don't honestly get the general abrasion fascination that many experimental music aficionados seem to have, but that's just my opinion.
It's not about the abrasiveness itself, and I feel like saying it's mere "abrasion fetishism" is more than a little reductive and insulting. It's just that truly overwhelming or disconcerting music tends to have some element of harshness to it. You are equating a feature or a tool with the whole appeal.
Mere abrasion is boring. I could listen to fifty minutes of unchanging, screaming white noise, but I wouldn't, because it would bore me. That's why I don't listen to The Haters or Slogun: Their work is abrasive, but not in an interesting way. Abrasion is, again, a quality rather than an attraction.
Sure, there are people that like stuff simply because it's frightening to the neighbours, but I don't. I like music that makes me feel something, or at least makes me think. Sometimes it's noise, sometimes it's hip-hop, sometimes it's rock or pop or minimal techno or old-school ambient or who the hell cares. It's all music, and I love it.
hence the edit.
Hmm...
I suppose it comes down to the fact that, when used properly, dissonance and noise have a certain power to them, particularly when contrasted with softer sounds. Take the quiet introspective passages and roaring guitar crescendos of Mogwai's "Like Herod"; or the alternation between the raspy, tense verses and violently pulsating choruses of Pan Sonic's "Rähinä I".
Alternately, there is also something very zen about consistently loud, dissonant, noisy work. If the ears are from the outset overwhelmed, the mind must reconfigure itself and accept the volume of sound as a baseline, as if it were silence, and take in each variation, lull and peak as something new and exciting. The aforementioned "Rähinä" does this with the noise blast in the intro, but Merzbow's later material is probably a better example. After you get used to the sheer mass of the sound, the details emerge, and it's really dazzling.
There's also, however childish, a certain element of... separation, I guess. People who make weird music are generally weird people that like weird things, and there is a certain sneaky pleasure in alienating people with "normal" tastes by shocking them with extreme tactics. Whether this comes in the form of maximalism (walls of sound, constant change), minimalism (drones, extremely slow builds), or both (glacial torrents of noise, punctualism) depends on the performer and their mindset, but it's still a thing, consciously or not.
I suppose.
It's just that the experimental music I tend to like isn't so beat-you-over-the-head-with-my-weird. The Caretaker (side project of a musician who usually does fit the former description) is a good example of something more subtle. The legendary Disintegration Loops also come to mind.
It might just be because I have sensitive ears, but I don't really like loud, sustained noise.
Quiet weirdness is nice, too. I like a lot of experimental ambient and minimalist music. Mirror come to mind, as do LaMonte Young, John Cage, Nocturnal Emissions and Björk. But on that note, I don't really think that abrasive and dissonant textures are necessarily incompatible with calm or even delicate music. Lustmord's whole career is founded upon making music that's soft and terrifying at the same time; ditto Christoph Heemann and COH.
Well when I say abrasive I mean "painfully loud", I'm not sure if we're operating off the same definition here.
Also if you haven't heard Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World you should fix that.
I mean abrasive as in "noisy and/or dissonant in a jarring way." Volume increases abrasiveness, but a basic sound may be abrasive in its own right. A good example is that wheedling mic feedback that makes up the core of Prurient's "Roman Shower": The track is mostly pretty quiet and spare, but the sound itself is jarring because of its high pitch and general unmusicality.
So, yeah, different definitions that overlap.
I will look into that Caretaker album. Always on the lookout for good new experimental music to listen to.
Fun fact: John Cage was the first person to formally apply the term "experimental" to his music because he thought that the term "avant-garde" was too aggressive/futurist to describe the kind of music that he made. He also wanted to distance himself from the classical music "vanguard" of the time, which was dominated by highly dogmatic total serialists like Boulez and Babbitt. It's an interesting legacy, and a surprisingly political one.
So, I think I've said before that I dislike the way Spanish sounds, but I guess that's more just spoken Spanish, as opposed to sung Spanish, because sung Spanish is beautiful.
^^ I would also think that it would depend on the dialect and era. Castilian, Mexican, and Argentinian Spanish are practically different languages (to name major examples), and Lorca's Spanish is not the Spanish of Marquez. It's not so extreme as English in that way, and certainly not like Chinese (which is really a language family), but there is a great deal of diversity.
To give you some little examples: In parts of Southern Spain, me llamo Ignacio de Rivera would be pronounced something like "me (L)YAH-moh eeg-NAH-thee-oh thay dee-WEH-da;" in some parts of Argentina, it would be more like "me SHAH-muh ig-NUH-see-yuh de ree-FEH-uh." I exaggerate a little, but believe me: The differences are big.
I wouldn't say they were different languages. Like, I can see what you mean about accents and affectations, but I don't think they're any more different than, say, the differences in pronunciation between British English and American English.
British and American accents can be pretty extreme in their differences, depending upon the area, as can the various dialects of English spoken around the globe. South African English, for instance, uses some really quirky grammatical constructions due to the Dutch influence. But my basic point was that, sonically speaking, two different varieties of Spanish might sound entirely different, so making generalities about the language at large is a bit unfair. It's not like, say, Friulian or Haida, were there are so few people that variations are moot; it's an international language, and incredibly diverse.
In other words: Spanish is a much cooler language than a lot of people give it credit for.
I'm aware. But what I'm trying to get at is that if you knew Spanish, you could still talk to an Argentinian, a Chilean and a Mexican just the same. Sure, you'd have issues with slang and pronunciation, but the syntax of the languages as well as most of the vocabulary to an overwhelming majority would be similar.
If you think American English and British English are the same language you've never spoken to someone from Newcastle.