academic giggling

[finneco]

I have to do a presentation for my 20th century music analysis class. I am always on a mission to validate music outside of the usual canon, and I want a reason to make my class look at spectrographs (usually presented as colour indicated intensity maps of the frequency spectrum over time) instead of scores. So what can I do that will make full and

Comments

[shade_42]

I think of all the times you turned your nose up at music I enjoyed, now I find you getting into Richard D. James... An artist I've been a big fan of since at least 2000. I don't remember when I started, but I do recall that it was in hopes of finding more Aphex Twin that I broke down and start downloading mp3s off Napster.

I wonder if that means my musical tastes have evolved? More likely this is just an isolated occurance. That being said, Heroes is a great remix.

[finneco]

*sigh* will you ever forgive my pretentious posturings at age thirteen? One key probably in my appreciation of your musical preferences way back when was exposure. We couldn't communicate constructively around it because I was listening without having learned the language or, more importantly, the syntax and could not undrsetand what the music said to you. To be generous, it was kind of like talking about Goethe's poetry in terms of it's sound without understanding german, and labeling it all as "gutteral, with spittle".

I don't think I've ever been condescending about your interest in Richard D. James, or other IDM artists, and I have been listening to him for years. It is from music in that genre that I have been developing theories of attention control, which I will probably get into more formally once I have the time to experiment a little on my own.

Finn

[shade_42]

It's not my fault, you have so few flaws that the only way I can tease you is by harkening back to the rashness of your youth. (^-^)

On a final note (or blip, thud, crunch or whatever), while I too got into calling a certain range of music IDM, it seems most of the artists lumped in that catagory dislike the term, with some justification: calling your own music intelligent, thus implying other music is 'stupid' is pretty pretentious. Certainly more so than many artists would want to admit to outloud.

Having just criticized your musical genre nomenclature I now feel sufficiently 'hipster-arrogant' to justify reading pages and pages of QC and Pitchfork archives while taking up coffee again or finding PBR in Japan. If only I had a T-shirt with something ironic written on it...

[finneco]

*ARG*
Sorry, this genere classification issue is a pet peeve of mine. For the record, artists, particularly those that are more experimental, don't like being classified. Atonality? Loathed. Minimalism? intolerable. Impressionism? scoffed.

Believe me, I know that Aphex Twin has objected to being refered to as an IDM artist, but genres are developed for the rest of the world, not for the artists' benefit, and while their perspective can be insightful, please stop treating their opinions as definitive else many of these very interesting (and hard to advocate for) genres would break into single pieces. Remember, if your job is to make something new out of an old art, what you notice is the change from the norm, but for anyone to understand that adjustment, they have to be able to recognize the things that are more typical as well. So the listners are in a better position to define genres by commonalities than the artists. Call it what you like, but as long as I know what I mean when I use the term IDM, we don't have a problem.

Finn