Music on youtube

[Andrew_TSKS]

It didn't start out that way. And I actually really like early Dillinger Escape Plan, I just never liked their onstage behavior, which seemed posed out to the max to me. But yeah, bands like Botch, Creation Is Crucifixion, Coalesce, Suicide Nation, even Every Time I Die and Converge, these are some of my favorite bands.

When I saw Converge open for Mastodon, I didn't get any sort of metalcore vibe at all. No choreography, that's for sure. Seemed pretty genuine, and they rocked the fuck out of the place...maybe more so than Mastodon.

Their sound has changed a lot over the years. They've been around since 1992, so 17 years, and only the singer and the guitarist are left from the original 5-piece lineup. On their more recent albums, they've gone towards more of a grind/thrash sound, whereas if you go back to their mid to late 90s era stuff, like "Petitioning The Empty Sky" or "When Forever Comes Crashing," there's much more of an obvious metalcore style. "Jane Doe" was their big transition album--first record with the current rhythm section, last record with the original second guitarist--and it has songs that are more grind-y right next to more metalcore-sounding songs. It's probably the record that best represents their entire career. But I definitely agree that they're not really metalcore anymore, especially since the metalcore genre and Converge as a band have been pretty much moving in opposite directions for the past 9 or 10 years.

[mixed cats]

Yeah, Drowningman is a great citation. A) they rule (ruled? I'm never sure at any given time whether that band is together or not), and B) Simon Brody (aforementioned singer/only constant member) is a certifiable nutcase. My friend Catie used to work with him at Interpunk and she told me a story about them going out to a work dinner and Simon sneaking a beer bong in under his shirt and suddenly bonging a beer right in the middle of the meal. Actually, I think he did it multiple times.

But yes, dudes like Simon or Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die or Jake Bannon of Converge behaved the way they did onstage because they were either crazy or total dicks or both. The bands these days have just watched it on DVDs and internet videos and decided it's a good outlet for their jock-like macho tendencies. And as to their inability to handle an actual confrontation, I couldn't agree more.

I got the impression that Simon Brody is kind of an evil fucker - not having met him or anything, but if his regular demeanor is even half as assholish as his stage persona, I would not want to know him.

ETID may have a little more self-awareness on it - they used to use shittydudes.net or something like that as their website. Har.

[Andrew_TSKS]

That's definitely true, re: ETID. I think Simon's less calculated but also a very intelligent person with a lot of demons.

This discussion reminds me that I need to write my long-awaited blog post about the Thoughts Of Ionesco documentary.

[kyle]

Rodrigo y Gabriela - Diablo Rojo

[Killdozersnakeboy]

Whoa! Fucking Doo Rag on French TV in '96!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZNqkZ6T4B8

[Andrew_TSKS]

During a Manchester street parade, a Caribbean-style steel-drum band plays a cover of "Transmission" by Joy Division. Imagine Ian Curtis singing over this, it's hilarious.

[Maaik]

This discussion reminds me that I need to write my long-awaited blog post about the Thoughts Of Ionesco documentary.

I've got their first album--what else should I get by them?

[Andrew_TSKS]

First album is the least representative. If you want a really good overview with several unreleased tracks, get "The Scar Is Our Watermark," which is a single-disc anthology paired with a DVD containing a documentary about the band. The DVD is well worth seeing and will give you a more conclusive overview of their work than I could fit in here. Alternately, you could get "For Detroit, From Addiction," their fourth and final album, which is their heaviest and most soul-baring work; or you could get their third album, "A Skin Historic," which features Derek Grant (now of Alkaline Trio) on drums and is their most jazz-influenced album. Even the second album, "And Then There Was Motion," is well worth hearing.

I guess get them in the order I listed them. Heh.

[merrittfan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWv8rPgknog

I wish it were a more proper mashup; as is, it's mostly just off-putting.

Still, it's amusing.

[kyle]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWv8rPgknog

I wish it were a more proper mashup; as is, it's mostly just off-putting.

Still, it's amusing.

I made it twelve seconds. That was not amusing.

[Ignatius]

Yeah that sucked pointlessly.

[Black Amnesia of Heaven]

Not necessarily music, but the new Mark Prindle video review is both hilarious and NSFW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-81V0fRtAo

[Killdozersnakeboy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHEZk6dSReI&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fhome.php&feature=player_embedded

John Cage - 4'33'' for large orchestra

[kyle]

Not to make the obvious, uninformed "Stupidest Thing Ever" argument that I'm sure has been made against 4'33" since it's "writing", but... that is the stupidest thing ever.

[donblood]

Uh, no it's not.  Pretentious, maybe, or navel-gazing, but absolutely not stupid.  Cage was at play with what a song actually is, and since that's not at all an easy thing to nail down (written score versus individual performance, the interpretations of the musicians, different versions of the same song, different recordings etc) it was an extremely fertile area for experimentation.

4'33" is a performance defined by exactly two things:  that there is at least one musician and one instrument present, and that it takes a certain amount of time (instrumentation and length being critical aspects of a "song").  Compare with As Slowly As Possible, where the song is completely different depending on the stamina of the performer (and audience), even though the score remains exactly the same.

There is a whole lot of thinking that went into these pieces, and honestly if you don't appreciate that, you should probably stay away from most modern visual art as well.

[donblood]

That was my ham-fisted interpretation, having never read anything about the piece.  I made my own assumptions.  I was wrong:

They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.

Fortunately you're still wrong too.

[donblood]

It is these sounds, unpredictable and unintentional, that are to be regarded as constituting the music in this piece. The piece remains controversial to this day, and is seen as challenging the very definition of music.

[coldforge]

Next time leave it to those of us who took Experimental Music at a highly respected liberal arts college, buddy.

John Cage: He was a queer, too!

[donblood]

Nah, I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to read anything I want into a work of art.  But then I learned my pomo at a state school.

[Thermofusion]

And now someone who's performed it will weigh in!

Here's another thing some people aren't aware of: John Cage, God bless him, in addition to being universally regarded as a sweet, sweet man, had a famously childlike sense of humor about himself, his work, and the somewhat oppressive musical world his particular aesthetic emerged from. Critiques like kyle's seem to come from misinformed reactionary stance against, I don't know, 'hoity-toity modern music', perhaps. And while I have no doubt Cage was making an aesthetic point with 4'33", an important component in my appreciation of the piece is viewing it through the lens of Cage's sense of humor and humility, which, to me, renders 4'33" as unpretentious and honest a listening experience as any.

Also, while probably nobody will find this very funny, I have a 4'33"-related Art School Story:

Sometime in my sophomore year, a couple of us were reading about the whole MIT "hacking" tradition and decided to start conducting some (admittedly pretty lame) covert pranks. One of the better ones was our fake Perf Hour program--Perf Hour was our school's version of a music school staple--weekly or semi-weekly, semi-private chamber music concerts featuring student string quartets or soloists doing a movement from a concerto with an accompanist, etc. Attendance was mandatory for the whole school.

Anyway, we came up with a fake program for Perf Hour, made it look as identical as possible to the actual program layout as we could, then convinced the student secretary in charge of printing and distributing the actual programs to change that week's program with the fake one. Perf Hour rolls around and she hands out a couple of hundred copies of this ridiculous fake program, featuring some geeky musical in-jokes...among other things, a violin trio performing "Enter Sandman" and a "transcription" (har har) of 4'33" for solo triangle:



This caused a lot of pre-Perf Hour chatter in the hall, lots of laughs, whatever. Of course, the actual performance were the usual mix of chamber pieces and student soloists, and those went on per usual. Everything quieted down,  the show went on, our anti-climactic moment of glory was over.

Then, toward the end of whatever random chamber piece was being performed, in that awkward interstitial space between movements where typically one remains dead silent unless letting loose a saved-up cough or squirming in a creaky chair, some dude suddenly, loudly, belts out into the clinically quiet concert hall, "OFF TO NEVAH NEVAH LAAAAND" in a dead-on James Hetfield growl. Whole place exploded in fits. Likely a "you had to be there" kinda thing.

[Andrew_TSKS]

Not to make the obvious, uninformed "Stupidest Thing Ever" argument that I'm sure has been made against 4'33" since it's "writing", but... that is the stupidest thing ever.

I'm with the people above me, even though I don't like their tone, for the most part. 4'33" is actually really smart. The new Black Eyed Peas single is way WAY stupider.

[cue Babar to defend the new Black Eyed Peas single...]

P.S. Thermo, I find that story hilarious.

[Babar]

[cue Babar to defend the new Black Eyed Peas single...]

hell naw! that song sucks, "I Gotta Feeling" that is. Not that "Boom Boom Pow" isn't immensely stupid as well.

[alex]

4'33" is a performance defined by exactly two things:  that there is at least one musician and one instrument present, and that it takes a certain amount of time

He's actually done transcriptions for much longer length and no instruments at all:

I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece, transcriptions, that is, for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have had published. At one performance, I passed the first movement by attempting the identification of a mushroom which remained unidentified. The second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium. The expressivity of this movement was not only dramatic but unusually sad from my point of view, for the animals were frightened simply because I was a human being. The third movement was a return to the theme of the first, but with all those profound, so-well-known alterations of world feeling associated by German tradition with the A-B-A.
(from 'Music Lovers' Field Companion', in Silence. Lectures and Writing by John Cage

which I guess backs up Thermo's statement about his sense of humour. Been a while since I read it, but I thought that book was a pretty great read. And as far as I recall, he touches upon all of the aspects contained in donblood's various interpretations, actually.

(I too enjoyed that story, by the way!)

edit to correct a typo in the citation

[Maaik]

Not necessarily music, but the new Mark Prindle video review is both hilarious and NSFW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-81V0fRtAo

I didn't want to let this pass without comment.  I love Mark Prindle's reviews and I had no idea he was doing videos now.  Hilarity!

[donblood]

I'm with the people above me, even though I don't like their tone, for the most part.

You call an important piece of music "the stupidest thing ever" without argument or justification, you ask to be smacked around.