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Maybe I just don't listen to this kind of music enough but this is really hitting the spot right now.

In your home I'm cloned I'm on your headphones
I love it when you

Spoiler:

I love when you find new music and it opens a whole world of shit. I’ve always seen the name Horse Lords floating around but I never really gave it a chance until a few weeks ago. This band and their member Max Eilbacher make some incredible avant-garde music. Horse Lords is like Tuareg, captain Beefheart, and maybe in line with Battles but more psychedelic. Max by himself makes computer generated music that works with AI and modular synths that he built. It’s outstanding music no matter where you start with either.

Horse lords


Max Eilbacher

I really have not been able to keep up contemporary music since graduating college. I don't really read music blogs anymore so keeping up with new releases is basically impossible. Also, I don't actually want to listen to fifteen derivate indie rock albums before finally latching onto something that is actually interesting. At the end of each year, I will usually just go through the big year-end lists to get a sense of what is going on.

All of my music listening these past few months has been focused on classic albums from 1970s. I went back through P4K and FACT Mag's list of the top 100 albums. Right now, I am listening to Davis' On the Corner, which fucking rips. I find these albums to be incredibly immersive, which probably has something do with the fact that they were produced with the album format in mind. I have gone through another big Eno phase recently.

The last frontier for me would be to start listening to twentieth-century composition. There is some obvious crossover here with the jazz greats, especially Davis. Alex Ross' book, The Rest Is Noise, has always appealed to me. Never found the time for it though.

Just check Bandcamp every once in a while, find an album cover, or artist, that catches your eye, and roll. A joint.  

Give these five albums a go if you’ve never listened.

Harold Budd - Pavillion of Dreams (I happen to be listening to it at the moment)
Oval - Ovidono
Merzbow - Merzbeat
AR Kane - i
Isotope 217 - The Unstable Molecule

Listen to Bitchin Bajas

This post probably belongs in the Thought Dump thread but to tie back into WP’s post, I was thinking yesterday I don’t know what kind of music I enjoy at this point.

I listen to a bunch of new stuff, some older stuff I’ve never explored or older stuff I’ve listened to dozens of times but can no longer say what niche is my preferred.

I have listened to Paris 1919 twice this week and thought, “Yes I love this and will still love it when I’m 75 as much as I do in this moment.”

Nick wrote:This post probably belongs in the Thought Dump thread but to tie back into WP’s post, I was thinking yesterday I don’t know what kind of music I enjoy at this point.

I listen to a bunch of new stuff, some older stuff I’ve never explored or older stuff I’ve listened to dozens of times but can no longer say what niche is my preferred.

I have listened to Paris 1919 twice this week and thought, “Yes I love this and will still love it when I’m 75 as much as I do in this moment.”

As soon as I read “Paris 1919” I had this thought and was like, “fuck I hate that I have to Google this now cause I feel like I should know what it is, and I hope it ends up being something like whatever “the 1975” is and not like some classic Velvet Underground thing,” and then the Google result popped up with “John Cale” and my heart just sank. I’m losing my edge.

I no longer "know" anything about music at all

Isn’t some music meant to be disposable? It’s the central tenet of Pop Art and yet Pop Music seems to stick with us for far longer than the mass produced  ‘party favor’ aspect of the products Pop art invoked. Do you want your house to sound like the radio or like an art exhibit? Maybe I’ll revisit Paris when I cut my lawn this morning. It’s a nice town but I was there in 1999 not 1919. It was a book you say?

Look at this post as Burroughsesqu cut up and it’ll make more sense.

Nick wrote:I don’t know what kind of music I enjoy at this point. I listen to a bunch of new stuff, some older stuff I’ve never explored or older stuff I’ve listened to dozens of times but can no longer say what niche is my preferred.

I have been "struggling" with this for a while. As a teenager, I did go to a lot of concerns. As someone who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, I was distantly connected to the whole P4K cultural milieu. But my overriding engagement with music has always been mediated by digital platforms, which lend themselves to eclecticism rather than any coherent sub-culture formation. We are exposed to so much content that navigating your way through actually becomes impossible. Also, as a non-musician, my engagement with music is very different. I do not understand (or particularly care) about the technical aspects. I would struggle to explain the difference between a melody and harmony.

Basically, I think of my interest in music as the exploration of colliding and expanding galaxies of composed sound. That probably sounds very dumb and pretentious. It makes more sense to think about with concrete examples.

This week, for example, I was listening to Miles Davis' Get Up With It . The first song is one of the most interesting jazz recordings that I'd ever heard. Truly absorbing. I started reading about the album and discovered that Eno was really inspired by the sound as he was pioneering ambient music in the late 1970s. And in that way, you start to uncover this really interesting bridge between the spontaneous composition of avant-garde jazz artists and the ambient soundscapes of Eno. At that same time though, I became completely infatuated with this recent Boiler Room mix from Fred Again.. Very different but equally gripping and absorbing. I have come to find that Eno literally mentored him and they recorded electronic symphonies together, which informs the way he DJs. And now the bridge extends out to left-wing electronic/dance music. And the most rewarding part, is that all of this makes you re-think Brian Eno's musical output. You can listen to his old records again with a new appreciation and you start to notice different aspects of his sound.

The problem with digital platforms these days, which has ruined the old Sound Opinions way of engaging with music, is that everything is curated by algorithms. Spotify has turned everyone into very passive listeners. This means that even the average person has a much wider palette than ever before but they are often unable to talk about what really interests them. I do not think the present-day Internet is capable of producing a Paves, for example.

A somewhat related problem is that we are still in a really weird cultural space where new platforms of music production, distribution, and consumption have fundamentally reshaped popular culture. But at the same time, it has not really produced anything that innovative in the mainstream. Only at the weird margins.

I don’t think enjoying music as you do is dumb or pretentious. People consume art subjectively and unless you’re knocking another’s opinion of said art, I don’t see how it’s pretentious.

Music is art and at its core all art is meant to elicit some emotional response, whether large or small. Also, consuming the same art multiple times even if you don’t ‘get’ it is important. I think you have to train your brain to move away from a lot of the conventional shit that we grow up with and sometimes it requires a bit of ‘brainwashing’ but in a positive way. Finally, I don’t think you have to understand the artist intention to enjoy the art on your own terms. That’s part of the subjectivity. I think those heady artist explanations keep individuals who might otherwise enjoy the thing away because it’s meant for ‘smart people’. I hate this! There should be no limits on who can consume what art for whatever reason.

The pandemic made me revisit a lot of the early sound art that influenced me during my college years. It was a sort of finding my roots moment. For the longest time I tried to enjoy stuff that I knew I wouldn’t precisely because of the cultural impact. Arcade Fire is a perfect example of this, I’ve never liked them but I’ve heard all of their albums. That shouldn’t be. Over the last 20 years I’ve wasted so much time with shit so I could fit in or something and it’s just silly. I like what I like and while I would like it very much if others liked it, I recognize that some things aren’t for everyone. Merzbow is a perfect example of this. I find his music to be cleansing and psychedelic, although harsh. It took me a VERY long time to get here. Like WP, finding out that Merzbow considered his music psychedelic and also that he was big in the sado masochism scene was an aha moment. Rather than just viewing it as a harsh noise wall, I tried to view it through the lens or torturous ecstasy. Pain as pleasure, pain as pure primal humanity. It was almost like the curtain had dropped and what had always sounded cruelly torturous now had hot pink edges around the black mass perimeter.

Whether you read this or not I still think of all of us that remain here as elite art consumers.

BGwaves wrote:Also, consuming the same art multiple times even if you don’t ‘get’ it is important. I think you have to train your brain to move away from a lot of the conventional shit that we grow up with and sometimes it requires a bit of ‘brainwashing’ but in a positive way.

Absolutely. But this is something that has become almost socially unacceptable. Once you reach a certain age (and this also depends a bit on socio-economic/class position), society becomes very intolerant towards the idea of indulgence. The idea of cultivating a certain sensibility or aesthetic through endless hours of unproductive engagement with something that you really love is borderline deviant to most people. I would have a hard time admitting to most irl acquaintances that I might sit down with an album like four or five times (across several months) and not even really enjoy it.

BGwaves wrote:Rather than just viewing it as a harsh noise wall, I tried to view it through the lens or torturous ecstasy. Pain as pleasure, pain as pure primal humanity. It was almost like the curtain had dropped and what had always sounded cruelly torturous now had hot pink edges around the black mass perimeter.

This is just really well written

Thanks!

On the recommendation front, you should give the two FLY or DIE albums a go and the new Anteloper album in honor of jamie branch.

I am listening to FLY or DIE live. It’s very good. Jesus, we lost a real talent way too young.

https://intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/fly-or-die-live

Jim O’Rourke - I’m Happy, And I’m Singing, And A 1,2,3,4

Sun Ra - Atlantis

Not everyone likes this one but I think side A is some of the loosest stoner jamming ive ever heard and Side B is a side long cosmos jam, the kind that made him famous. Good stuff if you want some free jazz more on the lighter side.

I have been listening to the first album from Black Country, New Road pretty much non-stop for the past week. Despite a few obnoxious lyrical flourishes that have already not aged well ("LEAVE KANYE OUT OF THIS!") I really enjoy everything single part of this album.

Not a huge fan of the follow up but can appreciate and see what others like about it.

Less so but still somewhat regularly playing some Black Midi too. These kids can play.

That new Garden record is pretty good. Kinda reminds of like early to mid Swans.

This is in the Billboard Top 100 for some reason

Not quite what I thought this band was supposed to sound like but then again I am currently listening through the world's worst computer speakers.

The Nicholas Britell score to the new Disney "Star Wars" -franchise "Andor" is pretty cool, reminds of Boards of Canada with more modern soundtracking sensibilities.

Everything Merges With The Night is a top 20 Brian Eno song, right?