sus

Well-known member
Now that I am reading the thread I see I have pulled a Corpsey and unwittingly repeated things already stated
 
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sus

Well-known member
Metaphors can be abstract, and link disparate things but we have plenty of abstract categories, that isn't special. The good the righteous the beautiful all very abstract
 

sus

Well-known member
This stuff is all over Tolkien too. Mists and storms, mountains and barrens, overgrown woods you're fighting through step by step. He makes a big deal about getting up on vistas and seeing the lay of the land, versus the grounds eye view perspective of the trail in a forest. Far sighted shortsighted. Day night. It's all about visibility—can you see the landscape, the obstacles and affordances, can you see other organisms who you might come into interaction with, are they dangerous do they look friendly can they see you
 

sus

Well-known member
Will the environment help you maintain homeostasis or will it suck your heat out of you, will it drain your fat reserves

The deepest of primitive assessments of the environment we live in. The kind of pre-mammalian brain stuff on which all our fancy cognition and language is built
 

sus

Well-known member
Can you see the stars overheard do you know which way is North or is your entire body plunged into the stress of uncertainty
 

sus

Well-known member
arpeggiated, MIDI grid movement <------> free movement

rigid sounds <------> malleable sounds

frozen <------> hyperkinetic

discrete chord structures <------> blended textural harmony
I like these but in the literal landscape / environment metaphorical system I would frame them as

Gridded vs open (Nomadic vs striated, urban vs rural, canyon vs meadow)

Solid vs fluid vs gaseous

Later in the post you start using words like scifi environment and lush where I feel like you've slipped out of formal land into environmental metaphor
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
Later in the post you start using words like scifi environment and lush where I feel like you've slipped out of formal land into environmental metaphor
lush is a funny word. fans of electronic music (in the aphexian vein) tend to use it not in the sense of a forest, but more to describe beautiful synth pads and the like. but you're probably right that there is still an environment metaphor implied in that usage. the sci fi environment comment has to do with this whole notion of audio animation, which as noted seems to have a formal aspect. but i think that term has caused some confusion due to not having ever been rigorously defined before, and it's perhaps easiest just to drop it for now. tbh you may have been expecting a higher standard of conceptual rigor from this thread than was originally intended. i thought this was going to be a very laid back thread, sharing discoveries without much arguing, but it hasn't entirely turned out that way.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Sven tells me he’s very proud of gabba because it’s a uniquely Dutch music. He says he likes ‘relaxing gabba, the kind they’re playing tonight’. This strikes me as bizarre, considering that most people, most techno fans even, would be driven screaming out the door within minutes.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Atmospheric black metal (also known as ambient black metal, or ABM) is a subgenre of black metal known for its significant influence from ambient music. Atmospheric black metal is characterized by its focus on creating dark or happy atmospheres, "dreamy" or ethereal textures, long songs, and lyrics generally about nature.
Prominent bands to play in the genre include Drudkh, Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Summoning. The genre is believed to have been pioneered by Burzum in the early 90s with the album Filosofem, which was the first black metal record to feature dark ambient influences. Since then, atmospheric black metal has gone on to include bands incorporating other styles into their music, such as Celtic or folk metal (Saor, Winterfylleth), medieval music (Summoning, Caladan Brood), and space themes (Astral Path).
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
This stuff is all over Tolkien too. Mists and storms, mountains and barrens, overgrown woods you're fighting through step by step. He makes a big deal about getting up on vistas and seeing the lay of the land, versus the grounds eye view perspective of the trail in a forest. Far sighted shortsighted. Day night. It's all about visibility—can you see the landscape, the obstacles and affordances, can you see other organisms who you might come into interaction with, are they dangerous do they look friendly can they see you
that reminds me, my favorite part of this tolkien article (you and @Corpsey have both posted it before) is its description of what tolkien called "glamour":
Tolkien, Shippey writes in The Road to Middle Earth, loved above all things in literature a quality he calls ‘glamour’, ‘that shimmer of suggestion that never became clear sight but always hints at something deeper further on’, a quality he found in Beowulf in particular. While composing his fiction he would deliberately pile up fragmented layers to give the appearance of age, depth, variant versions, mystery, that he so loved in the broken texts he studied by day.

you can actually get a similar effect in music (a type of music which i very very famously termed "palimpsestscape") where it's as though there are ghostly memories built into the experience. the music doesn't sound like it's from the past, it sounds like it contains fragments of the past.

i've noticed that a lot of ambient records coming out these days will try to weave some kind of folk music influence into what's otherwise very shiny modern-sounding music. maybe a lot of people are hungry for tolkien-esque glamour these days?

this of course connects well with your notion of visibility: there's a sense of some great, storied, barely visible past exerting its pressure on the atmosphere.
 

sus

Well-known member
i think woops is some kind of musical abstract expressionist. he's aware of evocative/representative qualities but he's just decided they're utterly banal, that they're not what really matters. it's a very radical stance and is like the exact inversion of my and luka's perspective. which makes it very weird that we all tend to be such kindred spirits aesthetically.
I would love to hear a spirited defense of this view. Can ya treat us @woops
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
two legendary figures in recent music history, both born and raised in france, have famously held that view: pierre schaeffer and woops
 
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sus

Well-known member
that reminds me, my favorite part of this tolkien article (you and @Corpsey have both posted it before) is its description of what tolkien called "glamour":


you can actually get a similar effect in music (a type of music which i very very famously termed "palimpsestscape") where it's as though there are ghostly memories built into the experience. the music doesn't sound like it's from the past, it sounds like it contains fragments of the past.

i've noticed that a lot of ambient records coming out these days will try to weave some kind of folk music influence into what's otherwise very shiny modern-sounding music. maybe a lot of people are hungry for tolkien-esque glamour these days?

this of course connects well with your notion of visibility: there's a sense of some great, storied, barely visible past exerting its pressure on the atmosphere.
Yes that's very good I recall that excellent coinage.

Haunted. Spirits. Fossil record.

Lossy information. Trace, print, text— ghostly outline, translucent outlone. The ambiguity of referent creating mystery the sensation of meaning. Things feel more banal the more clearly they're stated
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I don't think it's quite the same thing but I listened to some of the atmospheric jungle I used to worship recently and I remembered the (i'll use this word for now) sublimity of that atmosphere, which no doubt could be dismissed as pompous or portentous or whatever, and how that in itself was something I was after back in those days – not just fun, not just intensity, but something transcendent-seeming, something cavernous and mysterious.

This was the last thing I listened to that reminded me of this former interest of mine


The spaciousness of the sound (from the reverb) – and this one is quite on the nose as far as this effect is concerned, being called "prophecy".
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Don't want to derail but


This is another example – where the Biblical quotation can be read as just a pretentious insert by breakage that has nothing to do with the music, really, but can also impart a sense that there is something going on here beyond 'mere' sound, that there is a meaning to those sounds which can't quite be grasped. 'Glamour' – even if it's false, especially if it's false.
 
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