Conceptual music

The Lounge General Discussion
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Is there a concept behind your music that ties it all together? If so what is it and how did you come to it?

(As an example someone like Oneohtrix point never comes to mind, where memory and loss is a background concept.)

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130bpm

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I didn’t know that. Did he say that about his music?

I have concepts for albums or a series of tracks. It’s more about different styles of music or setups than an actual theoretical concept. But i might have the idea of making tracks that sound like alien music or imaginary underwater cities or something.

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Not at all. Music making for me is and always has been just vibe. If it feels/sounds good, I do it.

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I’m paraphrasing heavily but themes along those lines. Listen to his red bull music academy lecture and he goes into it there.

Also underwater cities reminds me of Drexciya! Another amazing conceptual artist

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Oh yeah, Drexciya is a great example of conceptual music.

I saw that RB lecture years ago. Might watch it again.

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All of my instrumental pieces are based on some subconscious concept that I have uncovered upon deeper reflection after the writing and recording process, and even after providing them with a song title. :cool: The ex post story-telling seems like a necessary part of the music’s birth process given the absence of lyrics. Amazingly, both the stories and the concepts woven into the pieces have been pretty simple and consistent, as if they had been around all the time since their beginning - hence the use of the word subconscious.

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Somewhat to mostly? Conceptually, I consider much (though not all) of the audio I create to fall along the lines of an abstract form of audio journaling through the heavy use of mostly self created samples.

What I create is mostly without an audience other than myself and my brain waves in mind. As such I tend to frame everything using a semi personal language, self preferred structures and my own understood idiosyncrasies; and when played back to myself at a later date, despite the lack of overt clarity and despite the presence of a variety of train wrecks, I can generally recall what issues I was wrangling with that day as well as my general mood, emotions, state of mind, philosophy, etc, that were in my head during that time.

Of course, there is always a figurative devil and angel on each shoulder tossing in all forms of critique, peanut gallery commentary, adult in the room and encouragement while I undergo this process. These guard rail me or self censor me depending on the moment, but I can also usually recall those debates during playback. Sometimes those elements actually make it into the final result.

I can also tell when I am intentionally trying to be counter to my mood or technical bias of the day. E.G. Perhaps my mood was entirely negative and I tried to fake being cheerful and “fun” because I just decided that would be the healthy thing to do that day (i.e. “be positive, that’ll help! I will simplify! That’s the ticket!”); I will often discover later that those pieces include areas of self sabotage that clearly undermined my effort. (Roll the tape please!)

Over time, I have learned that I also have many subconscious idiosyncrasies that seem to consistently appear during certain situations. I can generally tell how much I had going on in my head by by examining how much audio/tracks/fx are crammed into a given piece. For example, if the end piece is entirely blown out and tracks overwhelmingly bleed into one another, I can most often recall something along the lines of “oh, yeah, that was the day that q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,and z were going on in my life and head during that session.” These pieces will demonstrate a lack of discipline and a disregard of the finer elements of craftsmanship in order to highlight collisions and volume that present myself as simply staying head above water. This seems to occur a lot I guess. (Ha!)

Which also makes it a learning process. How can I streamline these thoughts, and capture them more simply without repeatedly gravitating towards volatility? Is that a crutch? Is there an alternative way to present that same atmosphere with more clarity and discipline? Would that be a different message or the same message presented differently? Or maybe should I lean even further into the chaos and mine for more disaster and introduce more mayhem? How would I do that?

It’s always a developing process.

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I tend to focus mainly on the experience, and while I’ll deliberately experiment with a mood, it’s more akin to changing the color of the room lighting rather than true conceptualization as I’m not incorporating any external ethos, bias or real influence that seeks to align the output with or prove any specific concept.

I guess it’s conceptual in that it’s not just four on the floor or defined by any genre, but I would call it more like experimental tonal (as opposed to experimental atonal) rather than conceptual and I think it might feel a bit disingenuous to claim that something is conceptual just because it is not clearly defined.

One of my favorite conceptual pieces of all time and all genres is Aceyalone’s 1998 album A Book of Human Language. It really set the standard for what an introspective but often omniscient, conceptual, philosophical effort in hip hop can be. Another one is the Deltron 3030 album. Beyond just influential the entire premise is highly conceptual and probably could be considered a heavy but perhaps unintentional crossover with the first Gorillaz album.


I was always a big fan of The Who and I think that they were very concept driven for their entire post-mod career, even beyond the Pinball Wizard rock opera. I also used to really like the Smashing Pumpkins who I know are a bit polarizing, but I think that the early stuff is really good and that the Mellon Collie and the infinite sadness album which might have been the last interesting album they put out, was very conceptual in nature.

I like the idea that someone could focus on and make conceptual instrumental music beyond just being defined by the sounds that were used. Like, renaissance fair music or island themed music, those are pretty much just genres so to put out an album in that style is of questionable merit for things conceptual in nature, but it’s really a fine line because Weird Al Yankovic is highly conceptual if you are not ironclad in what you define as a concept.

I think that like any other art, there’s a ton of merit in exploring consistent themes but that it’s probably not the reason that I engage in music making activities and so maybe I’m on the other side of it where I just make what interests me which is probably why I’m less adherent to genre tropes.

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There is but when I try and put it into words and read it back it always sounds pretentious and wanky so I end up saying it’s music that’s bit trippy and stuff

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I also
often feel the same way.

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There’s often a concept being my music, sometimes it’s overt, other times it’s covert. I don’t expect anyone listening to recognise or understand it though. That’d be pretentious wankery.

The concepts & themes vary from release to release. For instance, on my Soundcloud it’s mostly SP Forums battle beats, the last three were:

Yeah all that leads to a sketchy, inconsistent appearance but whatever, it results in me using my imagination more when I make music.

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Perhaps, the subconscious part reflects my lack of knowledge and experience when it comes to translating the “non-musical” or abstract concepts into musical decisions already at writing stage.

Obviously, there are so many dimensions and parameters to experiment with in music. To know how each of them maps into the “real” world and to consciously be able to draw on this knowledge while writing is certainly a skill worth pursuing, even if not necessarily relevant for writing good music.

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Jovian planets, moons and occasionally other extraterrestrial landscape features.
Think Photek’s “Rings of Saturn”, but don’t stop there.

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…long before the classic album saw it’s dawn, i started to shorten that format to ep’s, which is nothing but a sort of mini album, just without the need of too many tracks at once but still with the capabilty to carry along some sort of album concept…since the concept album, a cohesive collection of tracks that follow a certain overall idea/concept/curation are what makes the whole game a great one and an artform on it’s own in first place…

so yesh, never ever i produced any collection of tracks that did not have their very own and specific conceptional frame to their very own…
from a dedicated title that is not matching one of the included tracks, some sort of headline that carries and concludes the whole package on some metalevel, a specific track order all the way to a dedicated and conceptional cover art work that reflects on the overall idea that includes all the content to end up with a result that has more to offer than just the sum of it’s single parts…

and to find/have/come up with a certain concept that frames all the content to come is essential to me to even get the wohle thing started…
dunno how this hits me each time and again, but that’s part of the art, i guess…

end of the day, u gotto trust the process…if u have a certain headline up front, it’s always a miracle how all things fall in place along the way, find their purpose and start making sense, even if that sense might be just in ur head…but it’s that metalevel souce that makes the difference…

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Yeah for sure, a lot of my stuff is conceptual in an abstract sense.

I made a dungeon synth album for a jam last year that followed a strict narrative, and that was really fun to do but is an outlier from my more usual output.

A lot of my music comes out of the exploration of a process or idea which has some conceptual underpinnings, such as my new drone stuff which came out of the idea of taking an existing sound source which I have no control over and cutting it away and warping it down to some sort of essence in an attempt to evoke a feeling of place.

Sometimes though, it’s just me making some bangers.

I find processes and concepts really fruitful ways to explore ideas, but if what I want to do in the moment parts ways with the process or concept I started with, I’ll happily wave bon voyage and go somewhere else.

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His original technique(Onehotrix). was to take a loop on a Juno and endlessly loop it with different time measures so it would slowly disintegrate. Hence the Memory and Loss analogy.

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For those interested in other works about concepts surrounding memory and loss, The Caretaker’s “Everywhere at the End of Time” uses ballroom music samples that degrade over time to invoke the various stages of Alzheimers. Given its length (multiple albums) and topic, it is not really something you listen to in one go. It’s a pretty heavy piece of work. (If I recall, each album was released over a period of time to also invoke the time that passes and the disease progresses)

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I do it a project at a time.
But I feel like even a vague concept is interesting.
Either as a source of inspiration (but I usually naturally ban control from my creative process while improvising), or when assembling pieces ang giving them a coherence (this is a way for me to give some skeleton to the whole piece).

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if there’s a concept behind what I do it’s very simple, I make music that I’d like to hear when tripping, slow, repetitive, weird, mostly atonal, not really chasing a pattern rather a feeling of “I’d love to be somewhere in the forest with a nice system two tabs and wish for it to end”

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