audiofelch
Active member
yeah, that was a raw show.. dont think he got any sort of soundcheck. wrecked that shitty pa.. it was so distorted. it was great!
Rock Music - let's be honest
- Thread starter Sick Boy
- Start date
Lidell's been releasing for 10 yrs, if he wants to make a soul album then why not? Thing is about him, he's got the voice to do it, and the talent, and the depth. It may not be to your particular taste, but the whole 'must be modern, it's too safe, must be futurist' blah blah begins to sound a lot like that hipster "rejector" mode of listening . . . I know nothing about Jools Holland . . . Lidell's live set is still amazing, and he generates the entire thing from a small rig, can do the soul thing but spends a lot of time just going way way way the fuck out there, I saw him the night before his nyc warp/bleep gig this fall, he was playing to a tiny crowd of maybe 35 kids in the middle of nowhere in upstate new york, and he absolutely played his ass off from start to finish and went waaaaay out into dark, dissonant, sine-wave beatbox looping mayhem repeatedly . . . the guy is extraordinarily talented, has proven himself time and again within different musical forms . . . in any case, here is a photo i took of the rig he used at the upstate show last october . . . EDIT: couldn't get photo link to work properly, pfft)
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Haha yer, cos I was really into retro soul 10 minutes ago, wasn't I (before being pushed to the "rejector" seat)? He can do what the fuck he likes, of course, however "Multiply" was ersatz to the nth degree, his voice is good, (functional) but not up there with the greats (ie within the frame of "authenticity" its so-so). It was a dull album, you could perhaps attempt to reclaim it as some kind of plastic soul thing, but even then its a weak argument indeed, he didn't seem to be doing anything of note with it... the praise it got was substantially based on his former output (ie- if that album had come from anyone else it would have got a real roasting as irrelevant fodder on a Jamie Cullum kind of scale). I'm entirely uninterested in "talent".
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@gek: I try to pull off lines like "I'm entirely uninterested in "talent"" and people just roll their eyes 
.
re: Battles, I just found out they're playing in my town (t.o.) in May, so Sick Boy you should check'em out and see that it's not all gone to shit.
As for live sampling, I've done it (in a non-rock setting) with Max/MSP, and created some awesome havoc. I was playing saaxophone with one Max rig, and my friend was playing trumpet with another. We each used both of our instruments as inputs into a bevy of noise making machines... it was great fun for us and hopefully the audience too. (We were both so nervous that it'd all crash that we both forgot to record it, of course). My friend had also taken apart a simple computer game controller with two gyroscopic motion sensors and taped it to his horn, so the slightest tilt of the trumpet could control whatever he wanted, which certainly added some more interest for the audience who might otherwise have been a little confused as to where all that sound was coming from.
.re: Battles, I just found out they're playing in my town (t.o.) in May, so Sick Boy you should check'em out and see that it's not all gone to shit.
As for live sampling, I've done it (in a non-rock setting) with Max/MSP, and created some awesome havoc. I was playing saaxophone with one Max rig, and my friend was playing trumpet with another. We each used both of our instruments as inputs into a bevy of noise making machines... it was great fun for us and hopefully the audience too. (We were both so nervous that it'd all crash that we both forgot to record it, of course). My friend had also taken apart a simple computer game controller with two gyroscopic motion sensors and taped it to his horn, so the slightest tilt of the trumpet could control whatever he wanted, which certainly added some more interest for the audience who might otherwise have been a little confused as to where all that sound was coming from.
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i could make this thread about hip hop. this is simplifying things obv but i think threads like this are just what happens when anyone listens to one particular genre for a long time - its almost inevitable that at some point youre going to think that things have gone downhill and other genres start to seem much more exciting. its like hank shocklee who said that he thought there was nothing new that could really be achieved in hip hop anymore, but lots of people just said he was out of touch...
FWIW i dont think you can evaluate rock with the same criteria as grime or dubstep or whatever - rock isnt about sonic innovation, its about songwriting isnt it? so its about melodies, good hooks, structure, etc etc. not about production or interesting new sonic properties (although of course you could argue those were priorities too in the 60s/70s etc). those are its constraints and id think the way you judge it is within those sef imposed limits.
FWIW i dont think you can evaluate rock with the same criteria as grime or dubstep or whatever - rock isnt about sonic innovation, its about songwriting isnt it? so its about melodies, good hooks, structure, etc etc. not about production or interesting new sonic properties (although of course you could argue those were priorities too in the 60s/70s etc). those are its constraints and id think the way you judge it is within those sef imposed limits.
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nomadologist
Guest
you definitely could, gumdrops. i agree. as you get older the novelty of a lot of experiences wears off, and in my experience, this doesn't just happen with pop culture due to capitalism and its ever-multiplying object cathexes, either. i used to go into throngs of ecstasy reading Blanchot and Perec and Kleist and Joyce and Hamsun and any cannonically great literature I could get my hands on. now that i've read most of what's out there, those moments are much fewer and farther between.
shudder: you play jazz sax? you're a drummer, too, or am i making that up?
shudder: you play jazz sax? you're a drummer, too, or am i making that up?
!!
so you've read most of gadda, broch, huysmans, gogol, bely, svevo, pirandello, gaddis, oe, tanizaki, pavic, o'brien, coover, bachmann, celine, gombrowicz, witkiewicz etc etc?
there's a vast amount of stuff within or on the periphery of the canon of 19th/20th century novels alone, i feel i've hardly touched a lot of this
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nomadologist
Guest
not all of it, but i have less leisure time for reading, too (at least, print books.) the sheer jolt that is experiencing "greatness" during adolescence is so tied up in that particular stage of psychosexual development it seems obvious to me, looking back, that it won't be the same for me now that sexuality is not so radically *at stake* as it was. neither is the accumulation of objects w/r/t my "identity."
actually just bought "confessions of zeno" on amazon, looks good! who is "witkiewicz"? gombowicz? oe?
maybe we should start a new book recommendations thread...
actually just bought "confessions of zeno" on amazon, looks good! who is "witkiewicz"? gombowicz? oe?
maybe we should start a new book recommendations thread...
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nomadologist
Guest
i had a slight tendency that way myself, but mostly aimed at any i saw as "pedestrian" rather than the peripheral curios at the margins of "modern" literature...that stuff was golden...
the thing about consumer identity i'm not so sure about, that comes across as a preoccupation in a lot of your posts! maybe as you get older it changes, or becomes more a process of negative definition
wrt modernist literature in english speaking countries, the interesting stuff is completely absent other than from maybe postgrad literature programs and the canon is very boring
wrt modernist literature in english speaking countries, the interesting stuff is completely absent other than from maybe postgrad literature programs and the canon is very boring
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nomadologist
Guest
hmm, it comes up a lot because everyone here is always talking about "hipsters"! i think. and because adolescence as a developmental stage is always about the rift from the family unit, riding off into the sunset of adulthood. also, you're probably still a little more polymorphously perverse before you're fully "genital", right? maybe that's it...
i've always hated most american literature, and that alone is enough to qualify me as an insufferable snob round these parts. i'm always about negative definition, right? that's why i'm always getting accused of being such a spoilsport here, because i tend to criticise rather than eulogize.
i've always hated most american literature, and that alone is enough to qualify me as an insufferable snob round these parts. i'm always about negative definition, right? that's why i'm always getting accused of being such a spoilsport here, because i tend to criticise rather than eulogize.
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making it up, unfortunately. I *wish* I were. Looks like so much fun!
I play classical piano (since I was really young, was once good, kinda outta practice but still decent), jazz sax (badly now, very much out of practice), guitar (i.e. I can play pop songs, work 'em out, etc., but don't play too often), and compuuuuuuter.
You? (and I'm confused. are you in a band, or is your boyfriend? or both? in the same one?
)
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nomadologist
Guest
both in the same one
only our singer moved back to LA. we might all move to montreal soon. for now we're going to work by sending stuff back and forth! whee. on top of full-time work and full-time school this should leave me just about no time to sleep, ever.
only our singer moved back to LA. we might all move to montreal soon. for now we're going to work by sending stuff back and forth! whee. on top of full-time work and full-time school this should leave me just about no time to sleep, ever.
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nomadologist
Guest
keyboards, protools, reason, etc., i'd like to learn bass, but my fingers are too precise from the classical violin/piano. frets are cheating! and those huge strings are hard on my fingertips.
Finally a point made that is still sort of on topic.
I never said that I thought I could evaluate rock with the same criteria I do as the genres I listen to -- in fact, I'm very against that concept. Instead, I started this thread admitting that I have no way of being able to fully appreciate newer rock music since my criteria in what makes "good music" for me are differently formatted, and my only real taste in rock music is what resonated with me when I was a child.
I think it is very important that people try not to attempt to be all-knowing of all genres of music. It will only ever result in being truly informed of a few cultures, and condescending of the rest.
I started this thread purely to start a discussion of rock music from the rockist's perspective, so I could get an idea of how they felt about their own music culture presently.
Bass is one of the most enjoyable instruments its possible to play (obviously dependant on the kind of music you play, but anything outside of dullard root-note following is immensely satisfying....)! Within a few months yr fingers will be so callused as to make no difference
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nomadologist
Guest
Yeah, I've just got to bite the bullet and work up a callus. I have fairly small hands, too, so that doesn't help...
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