How much is experimental music actually experimental nowadays?

The Lounge General Discussion
#51

I would say, definitely yes … and there will be more. Maybe some of them are not as “new”, as I think, but at least they are different from the most often used approaches or they may be new combinations of techniques.

Just let’s look to all those west-coast style approaches to form sound that have been shown for eurorack and are keeping up to come. If somebody comes up with a new kind of VCO, or effect, be it analogue or digital, we might get exactly those new tools to experiment with …

Two examples here:

There is an interesting plug-in available since last week, or so, called Mushroom generator (by Soundmote)


It seems to be an interesting “combination” of techniques to form and shape waveforms, which is different from the usual single wave-shapers, wave-folders etc… I have played with it for some hours … and … yes … there is something “different” and “interesting”.

Or let’s check out machines like the Lyra-8 by Soma Laboratory. Created by a guy with a kind of philosophical approach to organic …


We have only to give those techniques a try. The Lyra-8 is so unconventional IMO that I guess that everybody trying to play it, will come up with new ideas …

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#52

I think NI Form is really interesting and quite unique. Also Iris or Alchemy.

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#53

Also if we take NI-Reaktor or Reaktor-Blocks … :smiley:

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#54

for sure. and eurorack is full of innovative modules. some with synthesis types hardly ever seen in hardware before. all under cv control.

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#56

This is my favorit performance of experimental music.

:wink:

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#57

:laughing:

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#58

I tend to describe the music I make as experimental, but I think that’s mainly because:

  1. a lot of the music I most enjoy listening to is abstract or experimental music.
  2. I have no understanding of music theory, scales, chords, rhythms or anything like that! Therefore what I’m doing is very much experimenting.

I tend to look at this question the other way round… I often wonder whether all music is experimental? It’s all a process of trial and error, finding out what works, what doesn’t and sometimes happy accidents end up becoming part of your sound.

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#59

There is a decent chance that anything I think of experimenting with - synthesis, effects, OP-1 tape manipulation - which is modeled on old school tape manipulation - granular synth manipulation of samples, other sample mangling approaches, etc - has already been done by somebody else.

I don’t see a problem with that, though, because there’s still plenty of room to explore, as opposed to the increasingly well-worn road of, say, rock guitar; where one hears the same blues-rock licks and riffs ad infinitum.

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#60

when does music stop being experimental? let’s say all of the process (trial and error, troubleshooting, serendipitous results) occurs before it’s refined and presented to an audience (as a product, performance, etc.)

a band playing a live performance, for instance. the music is really ‘out there’ - oddly-structured (is there a structure?), with a novel array of instrumentation and techniques honed, or practiced, to play the instruments in unorthodox ways (no-input mixer, for example) …but the players are familiar with the behavior of their tools, they know what sounds will occur by affecting/exciting/manipulating the instrument in certain ways. it’s extremely strange, esoteric-sounding music, but it’s really well-rehearsed, and determined - the results are no longer indeterminate, or experimental (maybe they’re testing it on the audience, to gauge a response) - but it’s likely that this super weird, even “avant garde” music will get lumped in with the “experimental” genre-umbrella anyway, by lazy nincompoops. sorry if this point has already been addressed.

edit: this all was addressed in the first post. I’m an idiot.

#61

Yes, this whole discussion very much depends on what the definition of “experimental” means to you. I’d probably lump a lot more of the interesting music I listen to under the umbrella experimental than someone else would.

#62

We could also consider - and I think this this is not a wrong description - most of the musicians play intstruments and make music in a way, which has been defined by others before and they are also educated in some quite traditional way. There is not much experimenting expected nor stimulated. Why …

A teacher will teach us how to approach a keyboard, a guitar or any other instrument. This will be combined with playing compositions created by masters of the particular genre or again teachers. Later most musicians will continue, particularly if making money from music, playing compositions of others or creating compositions, which are made according to the rules of a particular genre. Let’s only look for this at all those traditional scoring techniques used for creating film music, or the many musicians, which use a similar setup and create music in a particular genre.

Experiments are always in risk of beeing not accepted by the audience, because most of us have expectations. If those are not satisfied, we say “good bye”, at the least.

IMO to break free of those traditions, fulfills the criterium of beeing “experimental”. The backside is, if the experimental stuff get’s enough love, it will be traditional too, after a while :wink:

#63

Anything that staves off the avalanche of landfill house/techno is fine for me. Fail gloriously - don’t fail trying to make music that sounds like Aphex Twin but simply isn’t as good.

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#64

At least we can try

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#65

As long as my Vital Weekly newsletter still arrives in my mailbox every Tuesday experimental music is alive and well. This thread reminds me that I should really listen to their podcasts a lot more.

#66

I’ve been off traveling and missed this thread and need to go through and read in more detail. But a couple of things spring to mind:

First, listening to a new podcast by Andrew McKenzie (The Hafler Trio) wherein he interviews various people in this field, it was in either the first (Jon Mueller) or second (Mark Fell) interview where they brought up an old quote where someone said “all music is experimental music!” (possibly in relation to John Fothergill’s short-lived ‘Experimental Records’ label?). Which I think is true enough.

And they finally gave me a term that I liked - “unusual music”. It feels easier to explain to strangers on a train that I do “unusual music” and then explaining a bit of what that means to me at the moment. I never felt comfortable with the ‘experimental’ label but it felt like the best thing around for much of the time (esp. when early influences were folks like Experimental Audio Research, etc).

I’m not off discovering a new form of synthesis. I’m no IRCAM nor Radiophonic Workshop nor EMS nor San Francisco Tape Music Center. I just like stuff along those lines and continue to make my own shitty version of that stuff (and æ and etc) to occasionally try and quiet my burning brain. I’m no more of an experimenter than the next guy.

But I will say - my gods, do conventional instruments bore me. I have a really deep hatred of the electric guitar right now. When I start even thinking about certain instruments I think of them as “ugh, so boring!”.

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#67

I took piano lessons in the 80’s from a pretty progressive teacher. One day he brought in his old analog synth: a Steiner-Parker Synthacon (made locally here in Utah!) and had it hooked up to an oscilloscope. So many knobs! It was my first time seeing anything like this. It made a hell of an impression on my young mind. I wanted to do that ‘perform in lab coats with oscilloscopes on the stage’ thing for years, even though the only music my dumb young brain could imagine doing was really bad pop music. The vision stuck and eventually my tastes would wander much closer to that vision!

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#68

I’ve always wanted an oscilloscope, thanks for the reminder!

My fantasy keeps going to where I have big fuzzy knobs and dials everywhere that control things…
Like a big steering wheel from an old ship covered in neon green velvet that controls my tempo, and ropes and things hanging from the ceiling that I pull to engage effects! Stuff like that…

I also plan on having a plant as member of the band, that reads people’s minds.
If you hook a lie detector machine to a plant next to a person, it will give the same results as if attached to the person. The energy is plotted on the graph, but can be easily converted to change an oscillators frequency or other synth parameters. So eventually I would like to have one join the band on stage mid gig for an interlude, reading the band and audiences minds as the band members evolve their playing to play along…
Hopefully eventually the band and the audience learns what to think and feel in order for the plant to lead the band to the most harmonious music… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Your setups [ 10k Archive]
#69

Several years too late, but Avante Garde cavemen :laughing:

Also Open Mike seems like the best bandmate

#70

Do people like Loopop use software for an oscillocope or do they have a hardware standalone. I wouldn’t mind having one to mess around with?

#71

I saw him once use the oscilloscope in VCV. My assumption was, to read external gear, he was using an expert sleepers es-8.