How much is experimental music actually experimental nowadays?

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.

2 Likes

At least we can try

2 Likes

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.

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!”.

1 Like

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!

1 Like

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:

1 Like

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

Also Open Mike seems like the best bandmate

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?

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