Experimental genre-progressive music

[Ex-User (9086)]

I did listen to Sevish a bit more. This is probably my favourite track so far

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This is one of the most mundane tracks he's got If you look at the tuning it's a 14 equal temperament (denoted as 14-ET or 14 EDO), so evenly spaced tones. Chromatic scale has 12, so it isn't that big of a strain on the ears. A quick rule is that depending on the tuning, the more tones in the notes the spicier it gets (in practice it depends on the frequency difference between what you're familiar with and what's introduced). The two 22 EDO songs I mentioned earlier are a good entry point for ear training and losing the habituation to the chromatic scale.

I recommended Sevish because he makes electronic music so he fits in that thread as far as experimentalism goes.

I wholly disagree that he makes "quirky dance music" though . Listen to this for example:

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These are some terrific soundscapes and he's certainly capable of things other than dance music. Part of why it sounds relatively normal is because I noticed that he's using a standard drum kit, his percussion isn't tuned to match his microtonal tunings (percussion rarely is tuned anyway), so it sounds like the run of the mill drums in other music. Another big part is that he's clearly making some effort to pick the most familiar and good sounding sets of phrases and sounds, he's making choices that sound familiar to him and us and that are still rooted in normal chromatic scale, he wants the composition to work as much as it can under these aberrant constraints. They could certainly say "fuck it" and create a hellish noise soup that would bring headaches and diarrhea rather quickly , but they choose not to.

This is my favorite I think, because he manages to do experimental things with enough finesse that it doesn't sound too experimental and he's got polyrhythms, synthetic risers, bubbles, dynamics, pauses, familiar piano phrases that slowly fade out of tune and so on. It all works and builds a cool energy and is something I can listen to every day in the background, but also something to explore if I focus on it to pick out its intricacy.

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It isn't that difficult to start making music and making microtonal music poorly or pressing random notes with a microtonal scale only conceals one's inadequacy and inability to create interesting phrases, scenes or ideas that the listener can understand or make their own.

The disadvantage of improv or unstructured music is that it may turn out to be random or something that only makes sense to the maker of said music and if there's not enough compositional effort put into contextualizing improvized music then it starts sounding like a sonic "stream of consciousness" or a random blast of emotions.

I'm certainly not a fan of inheriting melancholic or aggressive emotional or draining energy states from others, so if I hear emotions or themes that I'm not interested in then I generally stop it from affecting me. In this way a structured piece of music is like a contract. It promises a certain codified set of experiences within the norms known from the genre or the artist and then it delivers and hopefully surpasses these norms in satisfying but not hellish ways.

A few other issues, that sometimes arise, with experimental or heavily improvised music are that:
1. The listener can't participate in it with as much ease. Can I tap along to the beat of 3/4 over 5/11 over triplets of my hypothetical Zappa's favorite? Can I sing along to the crazy saxophone licks in jazz? This limits my personal enjoyment of the music and it requires a lot more knowledge to be able to pick up an instrument and jam along with it.
2. It isolates the audience. People are going to be fans of different elements of Zappa's songs, but they can't easily communicate what they like about it without analyzing it. And such music makes little effort to make itself easy to understand or conceptualize. People will end up enjoying it in solitude, but they won't be able to straightforwardly explain why they like it to others and thus they won't grow the audience.
3. Certainly some of the beauty of improvisation lies in experiencing it "in the moment". But why then do people have their favorite recordings of jazz sessions or improvisations that they choose to listen to, on repeat, over others? There's definitely skill involved and personal preference that makes some improvisations more familiar and more popular among the listeners. Once they're recorded, improvisations are also encased in a structure or familiarity and understanding, a subjective set of norms that each person uses to pick out the best ones.

If I am completely familiar with Zappa's black page, as I am, it no longer is an improvisation, assuming it ever was. I know what comes next and what to expect, it has now become a template, a structure that I know how to follow from memory. The difference of that structure compared to a piano sonata is only in the expected contents and how many unique instances of said structure that I can find.

 

[birdsnestfern]

frank zappa experimentals:

RUTH UNDERWOOD: A MOTHER OF INVENTION

An integral part of Frank Zappa’s band the Mothers of Invention, Ruth Underwood stayed mostly in the background on stage and in the studio, filling the sound with her indispensable contributions on marimba, harp, xylophone,

pleasekillme.com

 

[Puffy]

You're probably right that the Sevish piece I highlighted isn't the most sophisticated. I think it's probably in part because electronic music doesn't appeal to me as much as acoustic (I'm appreciating it more over time) so I've probably gravitated to it as an entry point. Ironic given what we're discussing I know Happy to give these other pieces a deeper listen.

On your critique of improvisation, I'll try to clarify what I mean when I say it's the ideal for me.

People listen to recordings but it isn't really possible to listen to improvised music in any other way except live. Improv is really about the live experience. Frank Zappa isn't alive anymore, so I can only listen to recordings. If Frank Zappa were alive he's only in my location on limited occasions and I have to pay a lot of money to attend. I love music and like to listen to new things so I listen to recordings.

However, to address your points by way of example my favourite musical experiences are certain kinds of live experiences that I'd say are different in category than this. On Sunday a group of around 30 of us light a fire around sunset and we play improvised music until sunrise with people dipping in and out. We have people playing percussion, guitars, wind instruments, string instruments, and some people layer rapping or chanting or simpler forms of percussion. Some people dance.

1) There's entire community participation. There's no separation between artist and listener; the music is the co-creation of the community. It helps facilitate closer bonds and feeling of connection between people. You feel more connected to the community as you're a part of the sound that's being made.
2) It's entirely improvised but still easy enough and a lot of fun to participate in. People with more musical chops lead on the more complex stuff and people with less contribute in different ways, e.g. holding a simple base rhythm.
3) You can still accomplish complex rhythmic and polyrhythmic stuff despite this that's pretty danceable. Just listen to things like traditional African drumming which involve a lot of improvisation (these players are obviously way better than us lol):

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I don't know how to express it, being a part of a continually changing dynamic of sounds like this just captures something about what it is to be alive.

Experimental music like Zappa, etc, tbh is more of a personal preference for me when I'm listening on my own at home. I don't believe it's objectively better or worse than other kinds of music. It's different to this in that it's often about individual pioneering efforts rather than community participation and so I agree it's guilty of what you're critiquing. But I hope this demonstrates that improvisation can still do these things you're highlighting.

 

[Puffy]

frank zappa experimentals:

RUTH UNDERWOOD: A MOTHER OF INVENTION

An integral part of Frank Zappa’s band the Mothers of Invention, Ruth Underwood stayed mostly in the background on stage and in the studio, filling the sound with her indispensable contributions on marimba, harp, xylophone,

pleasekillme.com

Yeah, she's a beast.

Spoiler

 

[Puffy]

Maybe more on topic, what is experimental music? Were the first nu-metal bands fusing metal and hip-hop experimental? Are jazz fusion bands not experimental if they're just following the formulae set by pioneers like Miles Davis? If someone takes a pop formulae like these and starts singing surreal and arcane lyrics over it is that experimental?

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One way of seeing it is that there are occasional pioneers who experiment and create a trend that then gradually becomes derivative and exhausted as other's start picking it up. For example, if your micro-tonal music became normal, maybe the pioneers like Sevish would be considered experimental but the derivative acts to follow might not be.

From this definition as I understand it, experimental music isn't necessarily inaccessible. Or it might even at first have been inaccessible but aged and became accessible over time. When I say I listen to experimental music a lot of it is pretty accessible.

There's a fine balance to be struck between being avant-garde and being able to package a new sound in a way that reaches a big audience. As Robert Downey Jr said in Tropic Thunder, "never go full retard." Like, for me personally, when I listen to a lot of John Cage I just feel like he's full retard. Like the first time I saw this as soon as she started elbowing the piano I lost it in hysterics because of how wanky it is:

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At the same time I probably like stuff like Beefheart that other's think is wanky and I don't know how to define why I think one piece is wanky and the other isn't. But yeah, agreed, listening to far out avant-garde stuff some of the time is cool but exhausting all of the time.

 

[BurnedOut]

OP, if you want to see real progressivism in music tangibly, try listening to Indian Classical music. The music has survived hundreds of years because of certain properties -

"A raga or raag (IAST: rāga; also raaga or ragam; literally 'coloring', 'tingeing', 'dyeing'[1][2]) is a melodic framework for improvisation akin to a melodic mode in Indian classical music.[3] The rāga is a unique and central feature of the classical Indian music tradition, and as a result has no direct translation to concepts in classical European music.[4][5] Each rāga is an array of melodic structures with musical motifs, considered in the Indian tradition to have the ability to "colour the mind" and affect the emotions of the audience."


"One of the characteristics of a raga performance is that it starts out extremely slow, gradually gathers pace, and reaches rapid tempos toward the end. But faster segments of a raga performance are not just sped-up versions of the slow segments. The structure of the melody is different at different tempos."

The beauty of ragas is that it does not pay heed to the science of music but to the emotive aspect of it. Many musics across the world which are not western delve in microtonalities much more than western music. This has interesting implications. Indian classical music has 22 notes in total in contast to the 12 of WM. That simply makes ICM naturally complex.
Now that you have a brief idea of what raga is, let me tell you about the role of improvisation -

"Most performances begin with free improvisation and then move on to structured improvisation around a composition with tabla accompaniment. The free improvisation part of a performance is called alap, meaning "prelude," while the structured improvisation part is called bandish, or gat in the case of instrumental music, meaning "composition."

What we saw in the above section was the alap (free improvisation). It involved freely exploring the melody of a raga without a composition or tabla accompaniment. During this type of improvisation, the challenge is to keep the music focused so that it will hold the audience's attention, because without a composition or a rhythm cycle to return to at regular intervals, it is very easy for the music to drift aimlessly and become confusing.

Improvising around a composition (structured improvisation) takes care of that problem to some extent, but it presents a different set of challenges. A composition has a set melody and is designed to fit into a specific rhythm cycle (taal). When you improvise around it, you have to make sure to come back to the composition once in a while, at the correct beat in the rhythm cycle. The main challenge here is to train your brain to do two different things simultaneously – improvise melody while paying close attention to the rhythm cycle.

As with free improvisation, structured improvisation also takes place in different tempos. In the case of vocal performances, both free and structured improvisation can also be performed using a variety of vocalization styles – sol-fa syllables (sargam), the vowel sound ā (akar), words of the composition (bol), and wordless syllables (nom-tom)."

How does it relate to progressivism? The truth is that ICM learners learn improvisation at the very beginning. They have far more attuned ears than an average guitarist or pianist. Therefore, their gurus encourage them to create their own music as soon as they are done with ear training and theory. Their homework consist of part learning, part improvisation. Improvisation is what leads to progressivism in music because you enter a flow state and may create unique sounds.

 

[BurnedOut]

Let me contrast this with the kind 'progressivism' I have encountered. I can vouch for 3 genres in which I have lots of experience in listening and to some extent, playing - electronica, prog rock and prog metal.

The first has cliched music tempos and beats with more attention to ambience. With computers, you can create endless numbers of unique sounds but at the end, the overall melody matters which is largely lacking in many of electronica music. The scales used are harmonic minor, melodic minor, jazz, blues, Phyrigian with dom5th in extreme cases. In the average case, the melody does not shift out of the 12 notes and it is pretty predicatable and unsurprising.

Math rock and prog rock do not focus on melody and timbre in my experience in the average case. The focus is on technality and yes, it is awesome to listen to but there is no emotion to the playing. Listen to CHON and then listen to ICM. The unusual time signatures really don't add too much to the overrall timbre of the music and again, the average math rock does not venture out of 12 notes. This is in contrast to the kind of progressive music bands like Radiohead, Pink Floyd, DT, etc. The matured prog rock bands have a solid emphasis on tonality and emotiveness of the music but the average math rock/prog rock band is too stuck in the cliches of the past. There are some gems - The Strokes, The Libertines, Nirvana, etc but these bands do not have a progeny that encompasses the same timbre.

Prog metal scene is largely technical. Djent is a given and so are downtuned guitars. The weird time signatures and downtuned riffs get boring after a while because it is not that difficult to play djent. (i practise using Drop C and it still sounds good) This does not mean that all prog metal bands are gaudy because there are some - Animals As Leaders, Polyphia, etc who are genuine trailblazers but their legacy is largely questionable because Master Of Puppets and Arrivinf Somewhere But Not Here still blows G.O.A.T of the water in all aspects of music - technicality, composition and most importantly timbre.

This is rather a huge topic that I'd freely discuss with a musician but this post is intended for a larger audience. Feel free to pick arguments with me, I will be genuinely happy to engage in them

 

[BurnedOut]

It may cause misunderstandings that the scales I mentioned for 'extreme cases' are called 'predictable and unsurprising'. I have practised using these scales.

The thing is that the beauty of defacing the Pythagorean assumption of music, there is a lot of fun that can be had with tones within tones - microtones. These are nearly audible notes that influence the direction and feel of a particular context - such as there is a 'pleasant shock' and a 'devastating shock'. Consider the usage of adverbs on adjectives, that's all.

Let me give you the example of the Melodic minor scale. The real beauty of the scale, for me, lies in the major seventh for the minor third. There is a beautifully melancholic dissonance. Consider the notes of A Melodic Minor while playing a rock ballad:

Hadoblado plays A and then slides to C by taking a half note on A and 1 quarter note on sliding and another on C in a 4/4 beat. In the next iteration of the same octave, He bends G# to A for 3/4 time after bending B till C for 1/4.

What a beautiful melancholy it sounds in contrast to an otherwise neutral-sounding G to A in the overrused Dorian and Aelion

 

[Puffy]

The fabled double triple post - a first in forum history

 

[BurnedOut]

So i did not read the earlier post because I was busy going guns blazing with my opinions. So what I am trying to see are is that music's quality needs a set of attitudes, however, truly good music cuts across genres and are accessible despite their complexity and unusuality. The public wants good music and is eagerly waiting for it.

People's appreciation of the music is irrelevant of their overall attitudes and it largely depends on what the artists provide. There are universal listeners of ICM and WCM and other Classical Music and tell me if preferences count for very good music that survives exctinction?

They don't. If you feel a personal attachment to your music that is not at all liked by someone else, the fault lies in the music.

We humans are much smarter than we seem while consuming cognition-heavy stuff. Our analytical ability has been improving in leaps and bounds. Trust me, the fault lies in the music you are listening to.

 

[BurnedOut]

fabled double triple post

I don't get you?

 

[Puffy]

fabled double triple post

I don't get you?

Don’t mean anything by it - as in we both posted 3 times in a row.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

@Puffy @BurnedOut I love it . I was aware of the Indian Shruti 22-tone system, mentioned it in another thread. Can you recommend some classical Indian experimentalists to listen to?

I really love the idea that ragas are improvised but also have written and unwritten rules. If I understand it properly then people are trained to perform ragas from childhood by raga gurus / raga masters so it's a whole music school that needs a lot of preparation. I listened to some Anoushka Shankar and a few other things that I can't remember. I'd like to explore this domain more. My exploration of Indian music was limited by the fact that I couldn't find good references to top tier music and had to wade through a magnitude of religious chanting, tabla drumming and wailing that didn't sound inspired.

I'll reply in more detail when time permits.
Microtonal piano piece. It's amazing, recommended.

Spoiler

 

[Puffy]

@Glaerhaidh I like this piano piece a lot. Not wanky at all, it's very cool.

 

[Hadoblado]

I've probably talked about these guys before but it's lonely having superior taste in music and having nobody to talk to about it.

There are two bands I've been listening to for a year+ that provide a near-religious experience every time I listen. I don't even bother listening to anything else anymore.

The first is Zeal and Ardor (African-American spiritual + black metal) who larp about an alternate timeline in which slaves looked to satanism rather than embracing Christianity.

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The second is Igorrr (creative sound engineer) who genre bends with support from some fantastic musicians.

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It'll probably pass, I've had preferred bands before, but not that eclipsed my entire music library so thoroughly.

 

[Puffy]

Yeah I had a similar experience in lockdown after discovering Dan Barrett's music (main projects listed below). Pretty much all I listened to and he's now among my favourite artists.

I'd consider his music experimental in that he fuses a lot of genres into his own style. It's a combination of post-punk, industrial, shoegaze, dark wave, black metal, black folk, black ambient and so on.

I can just relate to the sound a lot in terms of where I am atm and have found a lot of comfort in it.

Spoiler: Have a Nice Life

Spoiler: Nahvalr

Spoiler: Giles Corey

Spoiler: Black Wing

I'll give a listen to your suggestions and others in the thread too, cheers!

 

[birdsnestfern]