New Musical Ideas
 

Many people ask the question "pretty much everything's been done in music, where do we expand?".

What measures have been taken to create new music ideas? One of the one's I've heard is the Thai Elephant Orchestra. It's a band entirely composed of elephants, and their stuff really isn't all that bad.

Is there anything left to make? Because it does seem that everything has already been done before. But I might be wrong of course as usual.

It just seems that genre's like Noise can be so extreme that it would be really difficult to do something new. Like, we have people walking into sewers and taking 15 minute samples of it, and going onto stage and performing it by holding a playing cassette player.

I see it like an alchemist. If there was a potion-maker that's tested every ingredient in the world, the only way to figure out how to make new ingredients is by mixing them together, but they're still just a mixed version of the original ingredients. Every once in a while, they can find a chemical reaction that works really well, and those would represent the Good Bands. But really, how many bands do you know that have absolutely no influence from other artists?

I think it would be interesting to hear music from a person that grew up as a musician, but never heard a single song in his/her life.

He would probably make armpit farts and call it music.
Noise yeeaeh!

haha, I was looking more towards the "grinding a rock against a camel" side :)

The next music genre = disco/experimental/blackmetal

ha, Post-indie Disco-core. I've seen "Undercore" once, I laughed.

I'm using my new genre to start a band called the Black Lollypops.
Who joins?

Sure, I'll make an insturment that produces distorted cat meows following a disco beat.

Futuroid
The actually emergent or unforeheard elements in music.
(Why not call this ‘modernist”? Well, Modernism is itself a style, a period-bound thing to the point where there is such a thing as retro-modernism… Not all futuroid things are going to manifest as stark/lacking ornament/bleak/brutal/abstract/functional/minimalist, i.e. the clichés of modernism…. For instance breakbeat science as it evolved turned into a kind of rhythmic baroque, and wildstyle graffiti, while futuroid and futuristic, was not Modernist in that style-defined sense of stark etc).

To map this onto the old Raymond Williams residual/emergent dichotomy, most musics that are any good or at all enjoyable or have any impact on the wider culture are going to involve a mixture of futuroid and traditional. A wholly Futuroid music would probably be as indigestible as Marinetti’s proposed Italo-Futurist replacement for pasta--a dish of perfumed sand.

Finally, “futuroid” is not solely a property of electronic music or computer-based music… To pick only the most consternating example, I would say that the style of guitar-playing developed by the Edge in the early days of U2 (“I Will Follow” to “With or Without You”) was as futuroid as anything done by most electropop artists at the time… furthermore that the futuroid in music can exist without any accompanying trappings of the futuristic either in sound or imagery

PS As I finish this I’m listening to the last track on 8-Bit Operators, an 8-bit tribute to the music of Kraftwerk… it's a version of “Man Machine” by gwEm and Counter Reset that is either live or simulated-live … the shaky-middle-class-English-voiced parody-MC calls out “alright Bagleys, how do you feel out there this evening… speak to me Bagleys [massive crowd cheer] …we want to say a big shout out to Kraftwerk and all the ravers in the world…” (Bagleys being this old British Rail depot turned dance venue near King's Cross which is
where in 93 I went to one of the first jungle-as-Jungle raves… and now I think about it, they had an old skool room even then…). But yeah, talk about retro-futurism! The music--sort of techo filtered through an indie-rock lo-fi amateurism and archness--is actually kinda like how I thought Nu Rave would sound. The track ends--“Easy my fellow junglist warriors, until the next time, gwEm and Counter Reset, out of here”--and I don’t know how to feel…

PPS and what do you know, in marvellous synchrony, Dorian Lynskey asks whatever happened to the future?



posted by Simon 12:50 PM

blimey, Battle of the Pazzes!

it's a bit like that period in the.... 14th Century was it?... when there were two Popes.

(because i gather the Voice is going to be doing P&J as per usual)

i know Matos wouldn't embark on this without the Dean's blessing; i wonder if he's going to ask him to do one of his epic surveys of the Year in Music*?

* a grim task indeed this year where everybody, but everybody i know--including matos himself, usually a poptimistic sort--seems to be agreed that twas verily the shitest, dullest, nothing-a-gwan year they can remember

how many modern bands do you think ask this exact question? music is what you make it and progression (NOT PROG) is always on the rise in many forms, new ideas surely spring up every single day so all of you should not worry. there will always be someone to fuck shit up and make it their own, guaranteed.

Yea, all people of the musical realms, The True Light of The White Album will point the way. Listen. Study. Replicate. Discard. Make Anew.

Forever and Ever,

me

P.S. You can moonlight with some VU as you please or your schedule permits. You can listen to Robert Johnson on holidays.

P.S.S. John Coltrane is permitted on Christmas day. You can listen to whatever you want on New Year's Day.

Seriously... Oldies are the new wave of music. Noise has been done, and for the most part it's boring as fuck. When you try to deliberately push music to the next frontier, you end up setting it back. When you do what you want, and don't think about some bigger picture, you are the future of music - no matter what it sounds like.

How about 50's psychedellic pop-rock?

Music Music. Really top instrumental shit, like Pet Sounds without the words.

I agree with Nature Scene, you can only TRY so to make something new and
and unprecedented so much, then it becomes thought out and unoriginal.

lets just give up then and play some mozart.

A band where everything played is just harmonics.

This topic annoys me. Thinking about music in terms of its 'avant-garde-ness' is ridiculous, and unhelpful. Music is, predominantly, an organic social event/ process, not something that's contrived. For me, the most interesting 'far-out' stuff, aesthetically as well as intelectually, at the moment, is spectralism, but even that's clearly a dead-end of sticking more and more intervals into an octave (cf Radelescu) and the 'man-machine' synthesis promised by futurism (near the begining of the last century). It's more important that people continue to be creative, and do things that interest them than it is for people to contrive a 'new' music. Most musicians, nearly all musicians, are too stupid to contrive something genuinely new. That doesn't mean that they can't do something good. For instance - the Ramones. Idiots, but great tunes.

My brain hurts already.

This is a little arrogant, don't you think? I'd like to know who has ever been so creative that they've come up with something entirely new? There is nothing completely original. Even the most creative and "smartest" of artists appropriates from past and current work by others. It's not a matter of not being "smart" enough, unless you mean in the sense that none of us ever attains cosmic, all-knowing intelligence.

Ivor Darreg was the last "super original" composer I was exposed to (someone along the lines of people like Harry Partch et al, who really made up a new system and had to make custom instruments to be able to make their compositions a reality), and even he seemed mostly obsessed with the concept of microtones. Great stuff, but I still listen to "unoriginal" rock and folk music a great deal more often. I'm really more concerned about sincerity and tasteful execution than anything. A nice amalgamation of disparate influences can be cool too, but not being "totally original" is a far cry from being blatantly and transparently derivative.
Hell, occasionally even derivative can hold my interest if it's pulled off with enough chutzpah. Case in point: The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

People from the past:
There was brilliant article about 'Stoopid'(as opposed to 'Stupid') music on The Wire a while ago.It said it better than all of you combined in one post.

I find "derivative" works far more interesting than any supposed attempt to be completely "new." How an artist derives from other sources, traditions, and makes it their own can result in fascinating work, I think. The magic is in the details of the hybrid.

Well, at least speaking for myself, that's just because I'm obvious and lazy. Obviously.

And I would hope a professional writer paid to write for The Wire would nail it better than a common simpleton like me.

I don't know, I don't think I know any musicians I know, or know of, are ever going to pull out something that is entirely original, or brilliantly innovative. The point is more that to be a musician, mostly, involves a suspension of the intellect. Like Drone says, it's more interesting to hear something sincere, or exciting, or in my case, big gay shiny fraudulent pop than it is to hear someone being 'clever' with their music.

A suspension of the intellect. This is silly psuedo-intellectual bullshit. Seriously, where do you get this stuff?

He's not the one who works for a University, you know.

Look, dude, I've apologised, I was out of line in that other thread, I'm genuinely sorry and didn't intend to hurt your feelings. If you're going to pursue this line though, I'm not going to be entirely happy myself. If you don't agree with my opinions, fine. That's wonderful, my opinions aren't terribly important. But 'pseudo-intellectual bullshit' is not a terribly nice thing to say. I know what I'm talking about. You don't have to agree, but to call me 'pseudo-intellectual' is just name-calling and unecessary mud-slinging.

I think all Glice was trying to say is that there are very few Throbbing Gristle/Devo/Sonic Youth-level "original" acts that are likely to crop up at any given time, because most musicians either have no originality or aren't interested in creating a brand new art form, and just want to rock out.

I think the phrase "suspension of intellect" is pretty apt when speaking of enjoying the music of bands like The Stooges or Blue Cheer, both of whom I love. That Randy Holden solo LP is pretty "stoopid," but it's also one of the most perfect heavy rock LPs I have ever heard. Not one second of wasted space on the whole thing.

Too bad, or at least he'd have an excuse, like I do! :)

I think the phrase is assuming a lot! That's all.

Ha!
I just meant I should think you'd be used to this sort of thing.

^ Oh, yes. Believe me, I am. Maybe that's why my b.s. meter might be a little senstive.