Best when your sober
Sober is bestest.
strange that someone with the intelligence to talk competently about music (sil, i mean) would find such things as ‘doom metal’ pleasant. i truly cannot understand how he could like something like the sample he posted. i could understand how someone much simpler and less intelligent than sil might like it, but not this guy. i think what’s happening is, that darker element such music attempts to display is expressed so crudely in such form that the darker element becomes simplified to the point that an elaboration of melody isn’t required for it to be effective. it is, so to speak, genuinely ugly… not a caricature of the ugly. but in being so, there can be no depth or distance traversed. that dark element deserves to be developed better because it is as important, if not more, than those elements characterized by the anatomy of faster tempo, the major scales, the general lack of conflict between tones.
to give an example of what i consider an excellent development of a particular idea of the darker variety which is difficult to produce well with music, go to 4:57 of this song. there are structural reasons why there is a very strong ‘unsettling’ feeling there. but you’d not be able to capture that in a simpler form. that is to say, fripp’s elaboration (the diminished scaling) produces very tense tonal conflicts that do not get resolved. that lack of resolution is one of the key structural elements in the anatomy of that ‘darker element’. but to do it, and do it well, there must be a greater compositional range as the medium.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVb2tnFN5AA[/youtube]
but ‘doom metal’, on the other hand (and i don’t mean all of it), isn’t going to create an area in which several conflicts can be created; it sits lazily and flatly on what is most base and most ugly. there is nothing sinister in it, no amount of real madness or distress. it is so ugly that any hint of existential dread we might feel is robbed of its right to be properly developed thematically, and remains simply noise.
you know, everything is just wrong there, and that’s why it so perfectly right. the identifiable back beat which remains stable but in a strange meter, the little percussive wood instruments chattering and arguing behind the drums, the nervous, indecisive bass figures and open ended lines, the blistering speed of the maddening notes of fripp’s impossible scales… all this shit is in complete turmoil with itself and is brilliantly done.
you are absolutely disturbed. that’s the point. but listen to the whole song. you’ll hear nothing like it.
This is a funny thread to me!
Music brings out all kinds of shit in people!
I liked all your songs btw (even silhouette’s elevator music)
As far as Angelina Jordan is concerned, you can tell from multiple videos what she CAN do! And from this, you know that she doesn’t oversing - if anything, she holds back
Cardi B is the best singer in the world. Case closed.
Just another guy who contradicts to send a sexual signal to get laid. pfft. Seen billions of you mr. r
yawns. Boring
When you join the adults in a few billion years, you’ll be greeted with open arms.
You do realize you’ll have to regret all those rapes you’re doing? Right?
See you on the flip side.
You’re the rapist. Not me. I get consent when I bang.
Missa Solemnis
He is forgiven. At least in a black mass.
I wouldn’t say jazz is melodic. Or maybe it is, and I simply don’t understand what the word “melodic” means, but in that case, I’d say it’s melodic in a very bad way. As you say, jazz is for the most part a random mess of notes. Does that mess count as a melody? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I don’t like its variation in pitch.
Personally, I don’t see the point of music that is neither melodic nor rhythmic. Lyrics are a nice touch but they aren’t necessary. Music that is entirely about lyrics (e.g. rap) doesn’t interest me. Ideally, music should contain all of the three: melody, rhythm and lyrics. Alternatively, it should possess melody and rhythm. Alternatively, it should be melodic (w/o lyrics). Alternatively, it should by rhythmic (w/o lyrics.) Purely lyrical music and music that doesn’t have any of the three doesn’t interest me.
The value of jazz, as I see it, lies entirely in its rhythm. Sonicbloom’s Time Out is interesting entirely thanks to its rhythm (there is little to no melody.) That’s the same value you can find in experimental techno such as Aphex Twin’s Meltphace 6 and electronic dance music in general. Funk, some “progressive” rock and some “progressive” metal also revolve around the same thing.
To wish eternal torment for the one you envy. That’s some poisonous shit ecman… lower even than the blue bottled priest.
You know if it weren’t for that fact that your celibacy, whether voluntary or not, is such an insipid triviality and hardly deserving of any attention, one might be able to say there’s some substance to any of it. But its so obviously the impotent envy of an antisocial personality disorder thats causing it, one just dismisses it as nonsense they ought not respond to.
Holy shit you could almost be a character in a steely dan song.
autotune
You guys are funny.
Let me lay some shit on you!
There are two reasons I don’t have sex:
1.) viewtopic.php?p=2768740#p2768740
You guys are so fucking horny you don’t give a fuck.
2.) I’m actually hyper-sexual. I will fuck any woman that crawls on this earth! I get crushes on every woman. When they chose someone else, instead of me or them AND me, it broke my heart. That “raw” feeling From heartbreak is the worst pain in existence, but I endured for decades with this feeling, it’s like a mother losing a child… and then I realized that if I slept with all the women who wanted to sleep with me, I’d be causing that same heartbreak to someone else, and it’d make me a hypocrite.
Reason one: I don’t want to be a rapist
Reason two: I don’t want to be a hypocrite
Work that shit out amongst each other!
I can nerd over music pretty well (e.g. this post), I started piano 30 years ago, taught myself guitar 20 years ago, and I’m a sucker for all the theory stuff - yet I still respond to minimalism far more than something like what you linked. Musically I figure King Crimson are pretty untouchable so I can hardly speak ill of them, I’m just not a fan of the frantic “on edge” kinda feel. I guess there’s a little darkness in there after an opening 3 minutes of not much more than percussion: we have some doomy chromatic guitar followed by some Black Sabbathy guitar riffing, which repeats before that 4:57 section you pointed out: a ton of diminished 5ths over what would be some standard pentatonic sounding bassline if it weren’t for the irregular meter. Then it goes into what sounds like full-on improvisational mayhem for a minute and a half, followed by a quiet slow violin section for a while with lots of chromatics, which eventually opens up a little, then not much happens with a bit more violin. It closes with still more violin melding back into the revisited frantic theme back into some more heaviness for a short while, and then it fades out again.
Maybe I’m too familiar and desensitised by dissonance that a little bit of it just doesn’t do much for me. It feels like the intentions of the piece were just to make a bit of edgy art, and I guess they succeeded. Inversely to your comparison with doom metal, I feel like no real depth or distance was traversed by KC. I’d probably feel differently if I was the same age as I am now back when they were making that kinda stuff, I dunno.
I feel so much more darkness from the trudging bleakness of that Tyranny song. To me it sounds like the depths of physical and emotional immobility that I remember from my much younger years when I was depressed. It’s not laziness, but it is flat and it is ugly. It’s a torrent of overwhelmingly oppressive forces dragging you down into yourself and to block out the world, infatigably driving into your mind a singular nihilistic truth that there is no other way than the only thought on your mind. To me it feels like a far more eroded state of mind than merely feeling frantic, unsettled and unresolved - “bothered” by your distress, but instead completely sapped of energy beyond all motivation to do anything at all but stare into an abyss. There is intentionally “no development” of the dark element, and the simplified crudeness is just fidelity to the experience being portrayed. That seems like true madness and distress, which feels sinister at the time. The “existential dread we might feel is robbed of its right to be properly developed” is exactly what they’re going for, because that’s how it feels.
So sympathy in heartbreak is the basis of your philosophy?
Silhouette wrote: “So sympathy in heartbreak is the basis of your philosophy?”
One of them. One is not more important than the other.
The “subtle rape” thing doesn’t sit well with me at all.
“I will fuck any woman that crawls on this earf”
ew
That was so well written it should be in a magazine dude. I’m stepping down and appointing you as the new active rock analyst and journalist of ILP.
I agree, Silhouette did a great job with that post.
Perhaps the right word is technically. They may be technically untouchable (I can’t tell because I know nothing about playing instruments.) I prefer to reserve the word “music” for the actual music (rather than the manner in which it was created or performed.) As you said something similar yourself earlier, musicians are supposed to make music (something one can listen to) rather than merely play instruments for the sake of it. So one can speak against them no problem.
King Crimson’s piece is almost entirely about complex rhythms and nothing else, and when music is almost entirely about rhythm, it can barely evoke any kind of feeling. It becomes too noisy to discern any kind of feeling. So I wouldn’t say that King Crimson’s piece feels dark and/or sinister. It’s just a brainfuck. And as I said in a previous post, this can be fun, and it is fun, but it’s never as fun as proper music.
^^^ unbelievable.
I’ll deal with you later, Andy.
“For Fripp it (KC’s music) graphically represented the descent of spirit into form, encapsulating the notion of something very precious and delicate held within matter.”