Here's a quick music topic

[FuSoYa]

I was wondering if you guys tend to notice the following: in later 20th century music with the arrival of electronics, and even moreso today, you have a lot of music being made that sounds awesome, but something about a lot of it doesn't sit right with me. That is, you have music that sounds really new and different timbrally but not tonically. For example, I was just listening to this A Silver Mt. Zion song called "Angels" - and the sounds that they made this song/piece with are really cool and lend a lot to I guess what the idea of the piece is. However, the pitches and whatnot are really standard minor stuff.. I mean if you were to play "Angels" on piano there wouldn't be anything remarkable about it at all.

My question is this: Are new timbres a substitute for original tonic structures, and if so, do you think they will continue to be so for a long time or will it get old fast? It already has gotten kind of old for me.

 

[VangelicSurgeon]

I think they have been since at least the mid sixties.

 

[avi]

I think it's really hard for most people to break out of the standard western tonality. there are plenty of exceptions of course, but I don't think that any of it has really hit the indie-rock world yet.

new timbres may be a step towards 'new' musicality, but I agree that it doesn't really seem to change much. Most of those atmospheric bands that everyone seems to jock these days just kinda bore me. there's tons of potential there methinks.

 

[FalseTodd]

I think it will die out before *too* long I hope, as the new sounds become assimilated into the general vocabulary. I'm also hoping that happens with computer-generated graphics - which all too frequently are used to emulate photographic or photo-realistic images, instead of finding their own voice.

Of course there are counterexamples, but I think they pale in comparison to the slew of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and the like.


A good analogy can be found in photography itself, (art photography anyhow) which went through a looooong period of emulating the soft-focus and other qualities of painting before finding its own mode through the work of Ansel Adams and the f64 group.

 

[ChromeLife]

At least in my own experience timbral changes are easier focus on because it doesnt require much theory type stuff to work with. It is much easier for me to write something fairly standard, then poke through alot of processors, or change a sample until it sounds sort of profound. I'm not try to degrade it or anything because I love doing it, but at the same time it seems a bit of the poor mans way to experiment.

 

[JSP]

Exotic timbral palettes don't impress me, unless used as material for interesting music structures. I dig Nurse With Wound, for example, and it's layered and well balanced and all... But to use the spooky new sounds just like salt, or simply to display "new" sound vocabularies without actually doing something worthy with them... it's kind of cheap.

I suspect timbres are easier to focus on because our hearing might be instinctually accustomed to discern between natural threat/safety signals from the environment, as opposed to hearing complex and abstract things such as melody. (Tranquil birdsongs vs sabretooth tiger roaring etc). That might be the reason why mediocre dark ambient or new psychedelia bands work so well for some arty/indie music fans, who don't have a good ear for musical structure, but enjoy being hypnotized by odd shifting sound environments. I'm not sure.

 

[avi]

just curious, do any of you dudes listen to minimalist glitchy stuff like Pan Sonic and the like?

 

[Russell]

Isn't the track called "13 Angels standing guard round the side of yr bed"?

Great tune! Unfortunately I'm at work, so I don't have time to write more of an in-depth reply than that

 

[avi]

randomly stumbled across today on my daily web-trawl:
http://www.windworld.com/emi/
'Experimental Musical Instruments Magazine'