Atonal Rock

Other than that, your best option is probably James Blood Ulmer.

what's dissonant? (this is a genuine q as I know almost no music theory).

dissonance
n 1: the auditory experience of sound that lacks musical quality; sound that is a disagreeable auditory experience; "modern music is just noise to me" [syn: noise, racket] 2: disagreeable sounds [ant: harmony]
Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University

atonal
adj : (music) characterized by avoidance of traditional Western tonality [syn: unkeyed] [ant: tonal]
Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University

What? The Shaggs are totally tonal.

The 5UUs, yes, good call.

Though actually, the accompaniment is usually pretty tonal even when he's playing out, so never mind.

I don't know if I'd call Jandek atonal -- he's more microtonal (except on the tracks where he plays something like straight blues guitar). I haven't heard his solo piano performance from The Beginning, though -- what's that like?

according to webster's: (above)

wow, worst definition of dissonance ever. sund4r shoulda wrote that entry instead!
gross oversimplification: think of dissonance as the harmonic spice that you add to agreeably bland consonance to make it interesting. (but extremes of all Marmite or all Hallmark can be great too)

I think it's problematic to try to define dissonance post-Stravinsky, let alone in an age where people grow up listening to Sonic Youth, Nirvanna, death metal, etc. Atonal has a much more fixed, technical definition, whereas "dissonance" is a floating concept.

I feel like in casual conversation atonal is to describe the direction a piece of music is moving in, and dissonance describes any given moment in a piece that applies.

Well that's not just casually true. "Dissonance" can happen at any moment in a piece or throughout. "Atonal" can only describe at very least a passage of a piece, because you can't really discern a tonal center or lack of one from a single moment.

Right. I only meant casually because I always figure the technical definition in music theory has a more specific meaning than I perceive. I play it safe because I'm too lazy to cite my sources.

i thought an 'atonal' piece couldn't really be 'dissonant' at any particular moment in a meaningful sense

sund4r said that upthread. I think you could argue it both ways -- you could define "dissonance" in context of a piece, like if you're playing Cmaj, Gmaj, Cmaj, repeating and suddenly it an F# minor chord it will sound "dissonant" in context. sund4r is saying that once you lose that underlying sense of tonality, nothing is truly "dissonant" -- sort of like no up in space, I guess. But I think most people hearing atonal music would find most of it extremely dissonant.

huh! sorry, i only looked at the post-revive stuff. he does a better job of making the point than i do.

i would quite like to understand the neurological/acoustic basis behind all this stuff. i sometimes wonder whether the strands of dissonance in 'arty' pop music (to speak v v broadly descending from the velvet underground and with sonic youth as most obvious / 'canonical' modern examplars) are something to do with selective breeding for tone-deafness. this point brought to you by i am listening to the velvet underground and nico right now and remembering not really processing how screechy john cale is meant to come across on 'venus in furs' as a kid.

i think there's a thread where we talk about the gorguts record which is meant to be atonal. i don't know tho.

I seem to remember reading that there's evidence that OOH people's ears get accustomed to "dissonant" sounds to the point that they no longer find them dissonant, but also that there are some limits to this process? There's a lot of research on this, neurological and otherwise, but I don't know a lot about it.

aren't there pretty strict music theory definitions of what constitutes consonance and dissonance? I do think it is interesting whether or not our hearing has changed and affected our perception of dissonance.

The neuro-acoustic basis of all of this is the harmonic series (picture the E string on a guitar: the harmonic series is the set of notes you can play on that string without actually pressing it down onto the frets)

sarah: it's something that's evolved quite a lot historically, i am sure hurting is more qualified to answer than i am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_the_dissonance

The harmonic series is derived from mathematical divisions of a string and I don't think there's neurological evidence for that being somehow more "natural" to the ear than other systems.

thomp, yeah. Dissonance is a shifting concept, it doesn't really have a "precise" definition in music theory. It was once thought to, but that's been debunked.