Obligatory Music Poasting Thread

[Guest]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqds0B_meys
The video is also key

[Guest]

The unofficial Anthem of the Venetian Republic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhMhFK71bVk

[Guest]

[anthony]

Any Gardenheads here?

[JohnTrent]

Any Gardenheads here?

Haven't looked too closely into them but I remember enjoying what songs people would send my way. The link to the side project sounded good as well

---

Haven't posted in this thread before. Will include a few links:










EDIT: A bonus simply because it crossed my mind.

[Albicacore]

Any Gardenheads here?

They make music that feels like going to the SoCal Renaissance Faire.

[JohnTrent]

Two tracks from Touhou Eurobeat Volume 12.

[august]

[JohnTrent]

Been listening to Chu Ishikawa's contributions to Tetsuo: The Iron Man.













What always strikes me about Ishikawa's music is how vital it is. Compare this to the 1979 release of Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, specifically the track Six Six Sixties. The instrumentation is at first biting, but after the first sixteen seconds, there's a sort of decrescendo in energy. Your ears adjust to it because it remains at a constant. This is further complicated with the voice, which is monotone and cannot heighten what's already there. Alan Vega had to howl on the track Frankie Teardrop (Suicide, 1977), something absent in the case of Throbbing Gristle two years later. There's a tendency in industrial music, especially from the late '70s to mid-'80s to prefer the minimal, and prefer a funereal pace. Think of Nurse with Wound, or the Das Schaben track from Einstürzende Neubauten:







I would like to say first that I have no problem with either Einstürzende Neubauten or Nurse With Wound. But consider how someone like Ishikawa and the two groups have little to do with each other. The post hoc genre term of "dark ambient" attempts to solve this issue, but doesn't present a satisfying enough category. Later in the same year of 1989, Godflesh would release Streetcleaner, slower than the two Ishikawa tracks I linked, but nonetheless connected. I will share two anecdotes, first in relation to Streetcleaner and second in relation to Ishikawa.

"You look at Streetcleaner which is, I think, still one of the most nihilistic albums ever made. You look at the frame of mind I had then -- I was fairly young when we made that record, 19 or so when we wrote most of that material -- and there is a pure nihilism in there. Totally anti-everything. I couldn't come to terms with anything. It was all a struggle, and I just wanted to lash out at every target I possibly could." - Justin Broadrick, head of Godflesh.
[Source]

The tape in question was of an industrial noise outfit called Zeitlich Vergelter, led by a young musician named Chu Ishikawa whose musical influences included German noise bands Einsturzende Neubauten and DAF, British punk, and new wave groups such as Joy Division. A meeting between director and composer was quickly arranged. Ishikawa remembers his first meeting with Tsukamoto: " He showed me some clips from the film and asked if I would be interested in doing the music for it. I said yes immediately. I had never made music for a film before and it was more Tsukamoto's character, his way of speaking, his eyes and his whole personality that appealed to me than the film itself. He seemed an interesting person to work with. I said yes without thinking about whether or not I was able to make music for a film...

"Tsukamoto asked me to make the music only using the sound of metal. That was his only direction for me and since it was the first time I worked with him I took his words literally. Of course it's extremely difficult to make music with only the sound of beating metal and I quickly realised it was almost impossible. I decided to just follow my own instincts and gradually I figured that Tsukamoto's directions probably weren't meant literally, but more that he wanted the music to sound like it was made with metal."

[Source is Tom Mes' Iron Man: The Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto]

Both were young and still new to their scenes, and were willing to experiment. Ishikawa never made music for a film before, and had to figure out his own way of making something workable for Tsukamoto, and Justin Broadrick was a 19 year old using drum machines for Streetcleaner because he wasn't even able to drum. It was their youth and their willingness to experiment with the unknown that made something special. It's interesting to compare how the sound manifested in Japan and in England, where Chu's music has an ambitious and almost triumphant mood, and Streetcleaner having a misanthropic, defeating mood. In the Western setting, it appears that the only vital appetite is destruction, energeticness found only in the hostile.

[JohnTrent]

I found an artist in the Biophon record label, which mostly centers around ambient music. Usually it is the case that the only artist released under the label is Biosphere. There are only a few releases by other artists, one of them being Tom Opdahl's album Black Smoker, released in 2001. For a long time, Black Smoker was his only released work.








What's fascinated me about this album is that it sounds like a soundtrack for a movie that doesn't exist. I would wager that multiple songs were created in the same session: similar noises and techniques used in different tracks, which is part of the reason it resembles a soundtrack — a familiar repetition to the listener as the same atmosphere is broached. I wouldn't consider Opdahl's work to be dark ambient, but it draws close. From the 4:00 minute point and onward, the Anthropomorphism track sounds like something you'd hear in a 2000s horror game or a dark sci-fi movie.

It was while writing this that I found he released a new album at the beginning of the year. I will share this song since I have not listened to anything else in the tracklist.

[Guest]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2qLD9c3Gq4
Untrue, Cross, Replica, Eccojams and MLFAW all came out in a 5 year span and then we never had any good electronic albums after that. Strange...

[JohnTrent]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2qLD9c3Gq4
Untrue, Cross, Replica, Eccojams and MLFAW all came out in a 5 year span and then we never had any good electronic albums after that. Strange...

It might have to do with the sort of person who finds themselves involved with electronic music (for lack of a better term). If you look through the biographical information of Aphex Twin, OPN, and the Boards of Canada brothers, they all started out experimenting with sounds. They were more than a little indifferent to music theory and that type of education because their experimentation occurred at a young age, with new technology at their fingertips. When it comes to Autechre, they were into graffiti first before making music, then they messed around with equipment. For pretty much their entire career, Autechre is tinkering with whatever tech they have. All of it, in my opinion, had to do with the technology first and music second: how can you manipulate sounds, how can you do something cool with the analog tech you have? OPN was making noise music and into the noise scene before+around the same time he made Eccojams, not a coincidence. It was back in the days when I used to make noise and dark ambient (the less said the better) where I appreciated albums like Eccojams most.

Burial is a little different since his older brother had exposed him to rave culture, but even then, you still see a part of the solitary experimenter in him. Here's some excerpts from a Burial interview so you'll see what I mean:

Burial: I’ve never been to a festival. Never been to a rave in a field. Never been to a big warehouse, never been to an illegal party, just clubs and playing tunes indoors or whatever. I heard about it, dreamed about it. My brother might bring back these records that seemed really adult to me and I couldn’t believe I had ‘em. It was like when you first saw Terminator or Alien when you're only little. I’d get a rush from it, I was hearing this other world...

Burial: I don’t know if it [the spirit of rave culture] exists any more at all. No mobile phones back then. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out. Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren’t running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away from them. In club culture, it all became like super-clubs, magazines, trance, commercialized. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs. It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that point. That era is gone, now there's less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. You can't hide, the media clocks everything.

Whenever he describes how others were involved with the rave scene, it's always from an observational perspective. He is somewhat detached from it but longs for the experience. There's another part where he mentions how he used vocals because that was the only element that made his production "feel right". It's almost exclusively because it reminds him of the songs he used to listen to, it's what justifies his work in his eyes. Weirdly enough he does this with rain sounds, because he thinks there's a "lameness" to his tunes.

Burial: ...I like Blade Runner but I’m only obsessed with one scene in it, the bit where he’s sitting at those cafes in the rain. I love rain, like being out in it. Sometimes you just go out in the cold, there’s a light in the rain, and you’ve got this little haven, and you’re hanging round like a moth – I love moths too and that’s why I love that scene.

Interviewer: Is there a connection between crackle and rain?

Burial: Yeah. But I partly use the rain to cover up the lameness of my tunes.

Interviewer: It’s a bit like when they put on the mist on [the PlayStation game] Silent Hill because they didn’t have the memory power to render a fully-realised environment.

Burial: Oh, really? Dark. I like Silent Hill. If you hide sounds in the mist. It’s like a veil across the far wall of the tune.

Interviewer: That’s really important. It’s like the euphoric things are all the more euphoric because they are hidden by a veil, rather than being directly heard.

"Lameness", as if he's cutting corners, but that is practically impossible in music (especially here since the introduction of rain is a new element that utterly changes the atmosphere of the track). I didn't want to stress that he used Audacity, because everyone already harps on that in the first place, but he wants you to think throughout this interview of certain sound limitations. I think it mostly has to do with the conflict between solitary experimenting and the culture he wants to invoke through his music. He's occupying a space of his own and doesn't realize it — I mean that the guy lists Playstation games as an inspiration, him sampling weapon and ammo pick-ups sound effects for his music. That, plus the rain detail, shows he is not just trying to imitate past dance music. It's something else.

If I had to guess why the torch hasn't been passed, it's because those who would normally experiment are forced into a rat-race where hip hop is the primary goal. Most who torrents FL or Ableton or ProTools or whatever DAW comes handy are looking to eventually rise to stardom. It's easier to learn how to make a beat (ugh) based upon the endless instructions found on YouTube than to spend years experimenting alone without a single bit of assistance. Everything fits into a formula, everything is directed to a single end. There are still people out there who fit the mold of good electronic artists, but they might be stuck in Bandcamp obscurity or corrupted by outside forces (uncreative artists or uncreative trends in their sphere). We might see a resurgence of electronic music soon though, I can't imagine everything can stay like this forever.

[Guest]

If I had to guess why the torch hasn't been passed, it's because those who would normally experiment are forced into a rat-race where hip hop is the primary goal.

I think this is probably true; you look at someone like Clams Casino, who advanced Burial's study of the human voice as instrument heavily, but for some reason subordinates himself to retarded drunken nigger Lil B, and you see a fallen angel. It's unfortunate, since electronic music is probably the one genre that could still be advanced upon, and essentially anyone who has the talents to do so either falls into the niggerhole of rap beats or the trannyhole of "PC Music" (AG Cook has a few defendable songs, but not nearly enough, and everyone else on that label should have their skulls bludgeoned into mush).

[Handi]

Ed Rush, Optical - Wormhole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt0I6LrbhLM

[Guest]

Probably my favorite symphony. Schumann's Symphony No.4, Karl Bohm as Conductor. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIttAXLwR3s

[a system is failing]

Lionroar.gif

[august]

Shostakovich isn't really emblematic of a late-Romantic Russian sound, but the airiness reminds me much of some Rachmaninoff, even Scriabin. Very good, to me... though I'm merely a dilettante.

[Muskox]

Shostakovich isn't really emblematic of a late-Romantic Russian sound, but the airiness reminds me much of some Rachmaninoff, even Scriabin. Very good, to me... though I'm merely a dilettante.

I like Shosty a lot. It's annoying how every work of his has been picked apart to argue that such and such phrase or motif represents a secret revolt against the Soviet government, which was of course obvious to everyone listening except the party members. It's similar to how people write about Furtwängler.



Here's the famous recording of Furtwängler conducting Beethoven's Ninth for Hitler's birthday. Goebbels is in the audience.

[august]

Here's the famous recording of Furtwängler conducting Beethoven's Ninth for Hitler's birthday. Goebbels is in the audience.

This is great. Thanks for sharing. The finale has obviously always spoken for itself, justly so... but the adagio too really is something wonderful, especially in this recording.

[Virtue]

Another one by Furtwängler, this time conducting Wagner.

Also share your favorite compositions form Bach, I've been enjoying his music a lot recently.