The Syndicate

MovingPictures07 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2018 6:19 pm Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica / 2011 / [Experimental Electronic] [Ambient] [Plunderphonics] / 10 tracks / 40:57 / Available on Youtube and Spotify

v good album

Daniel Lopatin is up there with Aphex Twin and Burial in terms of influence over the music i like most.

Dataplex is such a tactile album if you listen with headphones, it's like someone is literally tapping on them at points. I like to think of it as a brain massage.

dataplex is probably a 4/5 imo, i should relisten. i think the first time i heard him it was because someone used one of his pieces in a skate vid that was posted to reddit.

MovingPictures07 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2017 1:20 am Submission: MovingPictures07 - Ryoji Ikeda - dataplex / 2005 / Microsound / 20 tracks / 55:31 / YouTube and Spotify

This one should be interesting.

I may have to make a comeback for this one.

As an aside, I used to not be much of a fan of Cosmogramma, but last time I listened I liked it more than I remembered having before.

Comus is an old favorite, so I don't really wanna get into rating it, but I will say it was the standard by which I measured all other acid folk. Very few bands compared, despite my long searches through the internet (well, mostly Lizzy's searches to be fair). I am always so much more appreciative of folk rock/prog that has more folk than rock. I will give a shout out though to Lindsay Cooper and her participation in the band, who was the bassoonist on the many albums featured in MP's avy.

I haven't posted here in ages, so my grand reentrance will be suggesting an album, I hope I get a chance to listen to some of the backlog soon.

noise/hip-hop, image is a link to the album on bandcamp

Epignosis wrote: ↑Fri Apr 21, 2017 10:35 am I regard this as the difference between, say, Thomas Cole and Jackson Pollock. Anyone can make something that resembles a Pollock piece. Good luck trying to create something that looks like "The Voyage of Life" unless you are truly that talented.

I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you that I love Pollock.

Ricochet wrote: ↑Wed Apr 19, 2017 5:56 pm >album review goes here<

I will just respond to the album by agreeing with this. I thought it was interesting he was trying something somewhat different, and I thought it interesting he took (to my ears anyway) some cues from the likes of BT on "The Veldt", but overall I was unimpressed and would say "benign" about sums it up. I am a bit more lenient than Rico is as far as beeps and bloops go, though.

nutella wrote:My high school orchestra director drilled into me the opinion that the only correct definition of music is "organized sound," which I think is better articulated by AP's description of intention. So I tend to be pretty generous about what I consider music, and this album is still close to the borderline for me but I definitely see intention and skill in the organization/production/juxtaposition of the various sounds. I do agree with G that there are definitely some parts that feel more musical than others, but overall I recognize/appreciate it as a work of art (and again I find it interesting on a more anthropological level as well). As for rating I think I'll go with a 2 out of 5.

I have heard that definition, yeah. I figure 1) "organize" as a word has some baggage, and 2) they are more or less synonymous since organization would be the result of intent, regardless of what that organization or purposeful lack of it happens to be.

Here is something I was thinking of yesterday: Grouper's (Grouper is the solo project of Liz Harris, her work is generally described with terms like dream pop, ambient, and experimental) album Ruins was recorded while staying at a house by herself in Portugal. She used a simple recording setup to do this, using only I think a 4-track, mic, and piano. At one point the power had been off due to a storm taking it out, and during the recording of the song "Labyrinth" it comes back on, causing the microwave to beep as it came on and it was captured on the 4-track. It's a gentle piano piece, ostensibly written before recorded, and yet the final recording includes that beep. Is the beep musical? It must be there intentionally, because she chose to keep that take and put it on the final album. But she also had no knowledge it would end up there beforehand. If she performed the piece live, would the beep be included? Or in that case would the incidental sounds of the room it is played in take its place? Do those sounds always take that place? Is the recorded piece of music a separate piece of art from the composition itself, and is the composition different still from future performances? And so on.

Personally, for me the debate over what is music and what's not, and more largely what's art and what's not, often comes down to some idea of intention. I have no formal training in either music or philosophy, so I have to say things in general and unwieldy ways like that, but is a basic aspect for me. Intention is the difference between hearing a beautiful songbird in the forest, and recording it intentionally, or reproducing its song on a recorder. Intention is the difference between time, wind, and water creating a natural arch, and a sculptor painstakingly chiseling one. For me a fundamental aspect of art is the "experience", not moored to any particular set of rules, or preset by the artist's personal intended interpretation, or any such thing. Rather, I think the personal subjective experience, reaction, relation, interpretation, etc. of a piece is the most important.

This of course means that the usual "science" of a particular medium can be, or seem to be, entirely absent in a piece of art. Introducing some sense of randomness, indeterminacy, etc. with no "ordinary" sense of melody, rhythm, etc. It opens up a lot of ambiguity, yes, but just because something is art doesn't mean you have to like it. Or, in the reverse, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is not art.

Musique concrete, as has been stated by Rico, is a genre that starts "concretely", that is to say, through concrete sources such as recordings. This is meant to set it apart from "abstract music" that is given birth in an abstract space, something a person will come up with and make concrete, rather than the opposite. These recordings are then used in various ways, they are cut up, layered, distorted, and so on, in ways the producer sees fit. Last year, a somewhat popular album that seemed to feature glitchy electronic music for the most part was made entirely from recordings of a washing machine.
So, as you can see, not all musique concrete as a technique/genre in itself sounds like this album. That said, many musique concrete artists such as Rossetto do tend to make music that might also or otherwise qualify as drone, noise, ambient, or sound collage.

To actually talk about the album itself and rate it, for me, my listening is a lot similar to Rico's. There are a few parts that reminded me of the more ambient parts of GY!BE, in terms of the way it sounded. As a relative beginner to the genre, the first track "this is a recorder" is a really good introduction to the genre and what it's about, thanks to Rossetto leaving in (or, I should say rather, intentionally putting in) her explanations to passersby. For me it is really what I am looking for many of the times I seek out musique concrete; beautiful use of recorded sounds to create ambiance with the pre-existing sounds combined with the distortion of such to create some new ones, to create compositions that are not just giving a sense of narrative or theme or emotion or any other "reason" for a musical piece, but one that incorporates the "concrete" aspect of the recordings. As Rico already pointed out, this was done in this case in part by using recordings of what seems to be more or less straightforward clips of conversations caught on tape.

I think i'd give it a solid 7/10, and to be generous, round that up to a 4/5 stars on the Ricosystem.

Ricochet wrote:One of the most hard-ass and hard-core reviews I follow on RYM (mostly anything besides atonal contemporary music and Morrissey is banished to the Land of Suck) expresses his rating system in philosphers and whisky.

5.0 foucault / laphroaig
4.5 adorno / lagavulin
4.0 levi-strauss / ardbeg
3.5 freud / talisker
3.0 bourdieu / macallan
2.5 zizek / balvenie
2.0 popper / highland park
1.5 bauman / glenmorangie
1.0 habermas / caol ila
0.5 baudrillard / glenfiddich

>zizek is 2.5
>baudrillard is .5
ok

I'm going to be honest and say I voted APP in part because I need a reason to push myself to dig through that stuff again.

JaggedJimmyJay wrote:This was a lot of fun though and it kept me engaged. The highlight track "fire" that everyone is familiar with is additionally entertaining for me now, because I had been considering submitting a hip hop album for this thread that samples that track without realizing the connection.

INTO THE FLAME
INTO THE FIRE

Yeah i suggested it because it's on Bandcamp, which as far as I know isn't a problem but if it is I know one that is on the tube of Us

I submit Vanessa Rossetto's Whole Stories, because y'all need some musique concrete in your lives and I want to hear Rico talk about it.

I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE
LORD OF TH- wait, wrong song

I'll try to think of a submission today.

Ricochet wrote:

A Person wrote:The sameness of every track, the sameness of the vocal performance of every track, the sameness of basically remaking The Drift, etc is the biggest let down of the album for me too. I quit listening halfway through the long track because it was apparent that he was just going to keep doing the same thing over and over. Still, nice voice I guess.

You must abhore ambient music, then.

you got me there

The sameness of every track, the sameness of the vocal performance of every track, the sameness of basically remaking The Drift, etc is the biggest let down of the album for me too. I quit listening halfway through the long track because it was apparent that he was just going to keep doing the same thing over and over. Still, nice voice I guess.

Ricochet wrote:

A Person wrote: They remind me of Gira's latest output, so cringeworthy that they make me embarrassed for him.

ur le grumpy

But I'd agree, the lyrics are the least I concern myself with on Swans' '10s trilogy - The Glowing Man had especially uber edgy and hard to believe ones, probably in light of accusations against Gira that probably happen to be true.

But com'on, Swans' level of creativity and concept on this trilogy has been Philip Glass on dark ritual steroids level. And I'm saying this liking them.

Those accusations that are most likely true are why I haven't listened since. If Gira kicks the bucket i might be persuaded to try again, though.

Ricochet wrote:

Spoiler: show

Personally I agree on the subjective or more phenomenological aspect of listening to a piece of music being more important than the contextualized aspect of a piece of music.

S~V~S wrote:OK, listening to the first track which I rather like. This surprises me somewhat since INH and I seem to have few tastes in common. At first I misheard the lyrics (I thought he was saying, "While *fucking* feathers..." but once I realized he was saying "plucking" it worked better for me since I stopped worrying about WTF he was talking about, was it random, did it have meaning? Once I realized it was not totally random, I could settle in to the music.

The second track came on. At first, I did not like it as much since there was less aggressive music, and the vocals were on top, but the barking drew me in.

I could live without the organic sounds, they are somewhat distracting from his voice, lol.

They remind me of Gira's latest output, so cringeworthy that they make me embarrassed for him.

I gave him another try and have to say I give it a 2/5 on the Rico Scale. Is it really experimental to do the same song over and over?

I have to admit I've only tried listening to Scott Walker('s The Drift) once and got bored before I even finished.

nutella wrote:I think by OM they mean of Montreal, lol


and fwiw I hadn't heard of Crowded House until this thread

They mean Om the experimental doom metal band formed by members of Sleep.

Ricochet wrote:For your eyes only

Spoiler: show

Beautiful. I like how you differentiated yourself from Fantano by not having terrible opinions on everything and actually knowing what you are talking about.

As for the review, I felt the same way. I felt like they could do more with less, although they weren't doing anything "wrong" necessarily. The vox were fairly strong imo. I was reminded too of Colin Meloy (with less of, well, whatever it is Colin Meloy has (he has a lot of it)).

Epignosis wrote:First of all, the lead vocalist is clearly a male. I don't understand how anyone thought otherwise.

Seriously. It was clear as day.

MovingPictures07 wrote:Okay, I lied; I will say one thing before finishing the album:

Not sure where the vocals criticism is coming from. I mean, they're not mindblowing or even amazing, but I think they sound just fine alongside the music. I'm digging it.

I only listened to about a 3rd of it last night but I agree, they seem like decent indie style vocals.

WHICH
IS
BETTER
YES OR GENESIS?
I NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED
TO KNOW

JaggedJimmyJay wrote:I'm pretty sure a long time ago there was a regular on the RYM boards with "Walter" in his username who would insist that music made after 1989 was all bad. Same reference I guess? Or maybe the same person?

Anyway, that's complete nonsense.

He did have a RYM account, so I'm sure you mean the same person.