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Where can music realistically go?

Up it's own arse, if it's not careful...

Despite the industry finding ever more methods of manufacturing their own cash-cows, the rebels and the real music will always be out there. I think we will be in for another "wave" sometime soon.

So until then, there is a shitload of music to be discovered. In the last couple of years I have discovered post-rock, jazz, string quartets, African Soukouss, the Asian underground, a variety of North African traditional music, doing some re-discovering of punk, and buying a ton of other stuff that I liked anyway.

I'm having withdrawal symptoms - there's nothing in the post, on it's way to me. Mind you the Parliament / Funkadelic show from Dallas in '76 that I downloaded last night is sounding pretty good and is making me want to buy something from down that way..
 
Waves.

I'm still hanging on for the soon to arrive "Schaffelfeiber" wave, which has been promising to break out soon.

Hints appear in pop songs like Girls Aloud, Rachel Stevens and Kylie, but it has not quite got there yet.

I too have gone through spells of despairing about the state of new music, reference the toss that is in the charts but I still manage to find enough to keep me going.

In the last six months it has been Dominik Eulberg, Nathan Fake, Andreas Trentemoller, Mathew Jonson, 2 Dollar Egg and others on the minimal tech house wave that have perked up the interest.

There is a new wave of Drum'n'Bass coming out from the colonies, (USA, NZ, Austrailia etc) as they catch up with the source.

Also 4 - 6 CDs a month from Merzbow

Now, I would love to see a new Motorik wave come along - that hasn't been done for a while (O.K. apart from Electralane and Radio 5) (cue. Space Cadet to prove me wrong......)

DS

ITCC - 6 CDs of Poker Flat
 
Go way back and get some recordings of operas. Or anything at all composed by Beethoven.

Paul
 
perhaps most your musical buttons have all been pushed in a conventional sense. mine had been up until a few years ago. you gotta branch out and find some some music that's a bit more intersting.

ssb's zorn suggestion i'm sure is worth following
 
Thanks Ian I will see what that is like

I am all up for 'previous' recommendations, I guess the point of my post was how do new artists create something totally unique and new without sounding like what has gone before and without sounding like 'Ear Wax Control'

On that note I did get an album from Cuomo 'EJazz' that started out with promise but just went to shit.

Sigh.
 
garyi said:
I don't know mabye I am just personally in a musical wilderness but seriously where has popular music left to go?

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I don't think anyone can really know where music can go. But that's surely what makes music so exciting, it can go anywhere
 
Where do you guys see music going in the next decade, the 60s seemed to be broadly shit at the beginning (If Saturdays sounds of the sixties is to be believed) but already new (genuinly new) stuff was coming through, then the 70s seemed to see a lot of new stuff and a lot of general pap, the 80s well what ever you thought of the music, it was different a lot had never been heard before.

The 90s, now we are struggling, you have Oasis etc which sounded like the 70s i.e. to me new music now sounds like old music.

And 2000 and beyond, well it all sounds like old stuff now. All new elctronica I am buying sounds like old electronica I have, stuff that sounds differently hjazzy sounds like Zappa etc etc.
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I'm with you here, Gary. Just look at a review of a new pop record in any magazine. The music is nearly always explained with references to music that has been done before, with terms like "a mix of late Beatles with early Bowie and a twist of Curt Cobain". And if you listen to it, you HAVE heard it all before.

As you mention the early sixties (before Beatles) my vain hope is that pop music just is in a resess and that something fresh and new will come along and save it. But I doubt it.

JohanR
 
It's also easy to equate popular music with corporate popular music. What lies on the glossy surface is dull at the moment because dull sells. There are some occasions where more marginal music sells and then the corporate bandwagon signs up all and sundry only to drop them when the bubble bursts. More radical/ experimental / dissonant music just isn't pulling in the money at the moment. At times like this, the good stuff is below the surface.

Look at the top 50 albums in Wire for 2005.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/archive/charts/2005_Rewind.html

It's not all easy to listen to but it is mainly interesting. Books, Cocorosie, Animal Collective, Edan are all accessible and sound distinctive. Add in No neck Blues Band, Sunburnt Hand of the Man, Pelt. And if you want something that really doesn't sound like anything that you've heard before look up the Congotronics record. It's worth noting that little of the Wire list is from the UK where I feel the lure of the mainstream is stronger and maybe more young bands are shaping their music for more popular appeal.

FWIW: my fave mainstream record from the UK is Gorrilaz: Demon Days which is, to my ears, excactly what pop music should sound like. It has an intelligence, takes a few risks, sounds great over a shop system, has great tunes and blends all sorts of influences to make something that has a quite distincivtve voice. It also crosses generations - I picked it up on the nod from my kids. Beats any guitar band. And , as my son pointed out, imagine Noel Gallagher or Paul Weller making a record like this!

Kevin
 
What totally new music is there?
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Much of the interesting stuff for me at the moment is coming from the area of underground US folk, i.e. Devandra Barnhart, Joanna Newsome etc. There are albums here that I know I will still be playing in a decade or so. My other area of interest I guess is post rock, ok this genre has been around for just over a decade now but an album as beautiful as Sigur Ros’ Takk proves it is not dead. I’m also certain that in the past year Matthew Robinson will have purchased at least 97 oddball indie albums that I’ve never even heard of, and that of these around 34% will be excellent.

Chart pop is in the best place it has been for decades IMHO; people are picking up guitars and doing it for themselves in quite a raw and exiting way. Ok, on close inspection much does sound remarkably derivative of that which existed 25 years before and this genre is a hell of a long way off producing something as good as say Unknown Pleasures or Entertainment, but even so it is chart music - this is hugely better than the Simon Cowell / Louis Walsh karaoke / boy band shit of a year or two ago. There appears to be a strong reaction against the manufactured mainstream, and this has to be a good thing. I’m hoping that what we are seeing now is a melting pot for something truly original to emerge over the next year or so.

I firmly agree with SSB that the only reason ever to think that music is stagnant or dead is laziness. There is always something good to listen to, and there always has been. I’m unquestionably out of touch these days – being a second hand record dealer I recycle old music, what I find is by nature never current. I buy my stock vinyl purely on condition and price, so I frequently buy stuff I’ve never heard or even heard of. I then play it and If I like it I keep it - I am a random music buyer.

If I really wanted to know what was happening I’d start reading things like Pitchfork and The Wire magazine (subscribe to it as reviews of things you have never heard of are of limited use, subscribers get a monthly CD). As it is I’ll find today’s music in five years time in a bargain bin.

Tony.

PS The easiest rule is simply to buy anything you see on Blue Note, Impulse or Riverside recorded between 1950 and 1967!
 
Tony L said:
PS The easiest rule is simply to buy anything you see on Blue Note, Impulse or Riverside recorded between 1950 and 1967!
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And everything on Ocora and Wergo.
 
And there I was trying to be a bit serious for once. That'll teach me.
 
A big shout out for The Wire from me too. A lot of pretentious shite, as usual, but it dares touch the genuinely new sometimes and is very comprehensive.

The Electric Masada album previously spoken of by Ian is in the autochanger in my car right now and there's some great stuff.

I also found some good stuff on the JMT label. Most of it sounded well recorded and some genuinely new takes on "jazz" type themes.

There's plenty of new stuff out there, sourcing it is sometimes more of a challenge now that all the major stores only stock bases on hype and historic volume sales data.

My personal recommendation is Hammell on Trial, a man, his guitar and some attitude. Tough Love is a good starting point, Choochtown is a fave. He's a Bill Hicks fan, so he can't be bad.

Mark
 
One band I have recently got into is The Kingsbury Manx. Type 'em in on pandora and see what comes out. I think they are the best thing I've heard for ages.
 
garyi said:
Help me out here, what can I get into which is new
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Ever tried 'classical'? Given your tastes in Electronica, Zappa and so on, I wouldn't start with the usual suspects, but rather go for twentieth century stuff like Stravinsky, Berg, Messiaen or Boulez instead. If they do anything for you, then work backwards.
 
I saw Marc Ribot was mentioned after Sideshowbob mentioned Electric Masada.

Well. If those two (I've still to get MoM) were not proof enough that new music is alive and well thank you very much...

B0009298UW.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg


then this is the decisive gotcha for me. A 60-minute epiphany.

PS I have to agree with SSB. Excessive Floyd dependence will lead to dumpy-musical-tastes. Mentioning Madonna is teetering on the knife edge of madness. The other side'll have you listening exclusively to classical and buying equipment with wooden cheeks if this carries on.

EDIT: Mixing It and Late Junction are good -- have a notebook ready. "Themed" Internet Radio isn't the best model for this. The human element is best... going out to live gigs/DJs/sessions helps (difficult I know right now as wife is preggers) as does speaking to record shop sellers. I used to spend a regular £100-a-month at Soho Ambient/Worm Interface (now gone) in Soho. The woman there quickly got a feel for what worked for me (most stuff) and what doesn't (very little) and they'd get stuff for me. Got me into a lot of new music. Listening to what gets other people excited is best.

Huge shifts in a nights playlist is like detox -- play one extreme style to the next rather than linear playlists and after a while you start to get out of a "one kind of music" rut.
 
have a look at fence records some brilliant artists on there books
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In particular, King Creosote, another fine Fifer...

Gary, why don't you make an effort to understand and appreciate some music that you've previously found wasn't to your taste? For instance, maybe you don't like country - but you might find something worthwhile in the work of say, late Johnny Cash, Lyle Lovett or Ricky Lee Jones. Perhaps you don't like folk, but check out some early Fairport Convention or Pentangle or even Planxty. Maybe avant-garde modern classical bewilders you, but you might find something in the bizarre world of Conlon Nancarrow or Stockhausen. Going a bit farther afield, why not check out some of the more eclectic Asian musical forms - Indian music, with its forays into alternative musical scales - or even Arabic for that matter. Then, of course, you like Zappa - have you ever followed the natural bridge from his polyrhythmic work to Eastern music? You might like to check that out.

All possibilities, and some you'll find challenging, some you'll hate, others you might just take to...

There is a world of music out there, and it's there for the taking...
 
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