Re: (idm) Orbital

From laerm
Sent Sun, Oct 19th 1997, 20:41

On Sun, 19 Oct 1997, john/bergmayer wrote:

> This is quite an odd opinion you have.  AFX is my favorite because I find
> his music so emotional.  Listen to pancake lizard, hedphelym.  If you have
> i care, though, and can't feel it, we must have two very different
> psychologies.  I've always thought that surfing on sine waves was his
> coldest album.  It's also his most straight ahead.
i've always found afx's most "emotional/feeling" stuff to be his remixes
or pre-icbyd days. saw1 or _surfing..._ are my favourite afx albums
because of their emotion. i think i've listened to icbyd and rdj a total
of 6 times (i listen to the ventolin cd2 a lot, though, and i consider
boy/girl to be the best thing he's ever done)--they're just too goofy. i
appreciate the concept/ideology behind these, but the music is too
non-composed. i love _surfing..._. it's cold because that is the
feeling--dark afx is the best. his remixes, too: seefeel, mbm, nin,
curve...

> The exact examples you 2 bring up:  orbital, goldie- these are 2 examples
> I'd use to typify soulless music.  When your style sounds so much like
> anybody else's, at least to me, whatever gut the music has seems
> insincere.  They did what they think they're supposed to do to make a
> track with some feeling rather than just making the track and letting the
> feeling take care of itself.
well, comparing orbital and goldie is kind of a stretch. only because they
both sold well. that's the only connection they've got. sure, goldie
sounds like a lot of other junglists, but that's not the reason why i
dislike him. i like some who sound like goldie, too (no uturn et al). i
also like orbital, but unlike afx, i like the newer stuff much more. _in
sides_ is better than all three previous orbital albums combined, imho.
(this like saying that bach and beethoven aren't worth listening to
because they both sell really well and sound kind of alike.) and you like
afx because he's all experimental and schiz and all, right? y'know,
ventolin's got that annoying whiny sound and quoth is all wack and
klangy and yeah, it's experimental, you can tell in one listen because it
goes BRRKKT. well, orbital have a different type of experimentalism. it
requires more than one listen. like the liner notes to mbm's _subliminal
sandwich_ say, "play three times before listening". music non-obvious in
it's experimentalism (i.e. weird time signatures, sliding progressions,
microtonal scales) is often not given much attention by the unprepared
listener. he thinks "oh, i don't have time for this" because it's
qualities are not immediately appreciable. but i guarantee you that an
album complex, yet subtle, in its experimentation will age far slower than
one which hits you immediately. example: throbbing gristle doesn't excite
me nearly as much as the first time i heard it. but nurse with wound i
still appreciate and enjoy. now here's another big problem with
experimental music. experimental does not always equal good. i've dealt
with far too many people who refuse to listen to music merely because it's
is remotely "popular". they prefer to listen to experimental music because
they just have to be that cutting edge. if you asked 2 random people who
their favourite band is, and one says david bowie and one says merzbow,
who are you more likely to hang around with? the merzbow guy because, hey,
he likes merzbow, he's gotta be COOL. you think he doesn't know that you
think he's all weird and underground and interesting because he likes
merzbow? right. experimental music can be appreciated because it has good,
new, ideas, but that doesn't mean that's it's gonna age well.

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a disturbance in a system.                                            ####
laerm. @voicenet.com                                                  ####