Musical Chaos: What do you get out of it?

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

Do you like some music which you genuinely consider to be chaotic, or is it more a matter of liking music which is conventionally considered chaotic, but music in which you nevertheless find some sort of order?

How is one chaos different from another? (Well, the sounds involved, for one thing.)

If you like chaos in music (at least some of the time), what is the attraction?

(If anyone asks me what the attraction of order is, I'm not sure I'll be able to answer, but I might try.)

If you listen, often enough, do you always end up hearing order? (Already asked by John Cage and Brian Eno, and others I'm sure. "Everything happens in order: one thing after another. Therefore, everything is ordered.")

― Al Andalous, Monday, 8 September 2003 18:56 (twenty-one years ago)

I like music with some degree of disorder (but since you can listen to it again and again, as on a record, it becomes another type of order so i agree with the quote above).

And therefore I don't think anything that i listen to is really chaotic. there is a structure, it may be 'unique' but i think its there.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Monday, 8 September 2003 20:47 (twenty-one years ago)

I like it when it makes me feel dizzy and confused and lost. It's a loss of perspective re: wheer the tune's goign that I liek makes me feel open to possibilities, maybe. Dunno. But yes, i do liek it.

― Nick Southall (Nick Southall), Monday, 8 September 2003 21:01 (twenty-one years ago)

I like music that's chaotic like a waterfall, if that makes sense. Same reason I like looking at waterfalls.

― Mark (MarkR), Monday, 8 September 2003 21:11 (twenty-one years ago)

i dabble in free jazz and Drumm/Florian-type noise assult, but the bulk of my chaos listening revolves around hardcore bands like Daughters, Jerome's Dream, Hassan I Sabbah, Usurp Synapse, Orchid, and even parts of stuff like Blood Brothers, Khayembii Communique, and Antioch Arrow. To me, the appeal of these bands comes from the live performance, or even just the envisionment of the live performance. it's about throwing yourself into an oncoming traffic of noise and rocking out like fuck all, maybe cathartically, but maybe not. it's obviously a fun type of music to play, and that enthusiasm carries over into it being a fun and rewarding type of music to listen to.

― colin mcelligatt, Monday, 8 September 2003 22:11 (twenty-one years ago)

I wonder if someone can fine-tune (or un-tune) my question, because I think this is a potentially interesting question. (Not to dismiss the responses I've gotten, but I was hoping for more of them.)

("Sure, sure, everything's potentially interesting.")

― Al Andalous (Al Andalous), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 00:01 (twenty-one years ago)

ok, i'll try.

i already spoke to the appeal-- it's fun, it gets you involved and makes you enthusastic (hardcore at least).

and yeah, being a drummer myself, even in the craziest of this stuff i can hear order in the drums and the bass, even in the screaming. but it's buried a bit, you just have to kind of let it rattle your skull around a bit to hear it. you can feel it in the stops and starts and in the ennunciation.

once again, this is just about hardcore. being the dilettante that i am with electronic forms of noise, i can't speak to that-- i mainly just listen to it because it sounds so cool in its insanity. but i'd love to hear an expertish opinion.

― colin mcelligatt, Tuesday, 9 September 2003 03:28 (twenty-one years ago)

Many moments of musical chaos can invoke certain feelings very effectively - paranoia/fear/terror type vibes, overwhelmedness, these moments can clearly reflect some more frantic or beyond-your-control life-events very effectively. It can sooth, it can pump yr adrenaline.

― nickalicious (nickalicious), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 03:39 (twenty-one years ago)

Cuz I have no attention span and if I hear the same thing 2 or 3 times I lose interest. Of course, if it's repeated 1000 times then I like it.

― dave q, Tuesday, 9 September 2003 08:23 (twenty-one years ago)

I studied minimalism in high school and was fascinated with people like Cage and Terry Riley with their overlapping tapeloop noise work, I like that stuff, but its a sort of detactched liking - like I am looking AT it, not being IN the music. Looking for the patterns in the dissaray - like op art or something to use a visual analogy.

Something like Mogwai's "My Father My King" on the other hand (would it count as chaos or noise?) I adore, especially live - just being swallowed up in this PHYSICAL wall of sounds all over the place, being both enveloped by them but picking out individual sounds too.

― Trayce (trayce), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 08:33 (twenty-one years ago)

I don't do, say, think, feel, or experience much that recurs predictably in a mechanical, metronomically precise fashion. I sure as hell am not going to inflect mechanical regularity on myself for pleasure or in the search for transcendence.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 08:38 (twenty-one years ago)

Isnt that the appeal of something like trance though (is that the kind of thing you mean Colin?). It is so alien, so structured, so non-humanistic, that to listen to it is to experience something very "other". Plus theres the whole shamanistic trance thing to repetetive twiddly diddly sounds...not that I'm saying I care much for a lot of that stuff either.

― Trayce (trayce), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 08:49 (twenty-one years ago)

Take something like indian classical or minimalism. It seems ordered but there are all this subtle shifts in tempo, key, and improvisation going on in the former...things going on underneath that provide an enjoyable contrast to the repetition, these are things that i like as well.

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 09:50 (twenty-one years ago)

I think that's right, Trayce -- the appeal of machine music is its inorganic unnaturalness, and my original statement was too absolute -- there is a real appeal to that sort of stuff. I guess I'm just objecting to something I see behind the question -- that the chaotic in music is somehow weird and unnatural. As if, say, Scooter really could be the soundtrack of our lives.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 11:02 (twenty-one years ago)

My new age answer: all chaos all the time = I can't stay with it for long. Chaos mixed in with structure, or especially a steady undercurrent of chaos within structure is usually what I go for. I think an example of the second would be something like Boredoms circa Super Ae and VCN.

― dleone (dleone), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 11:35 (twenty-one years ago)

so you don't boogie woogie with 'persepolis' or 'gruppen' dleone?

(actually I'd love to hear what paul in santa cruz has to say here)

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 11:55 (twenty-one years ago)

I think Gruppen is complete genius, but then I don't hear that as "chaos". Haven't really read up on Stockhausen's intents for that, but if it's completely formless then someone should write up an essay on making "listenable chaos" (see also quiet improv like on Erstwhile or onkyo) - there is maybe, as has been hinted in this thread, an inherent relationship between chaotic music and ambient music. (I'm also not usually down with music that works entirely in "ambience", though there are exceptions.)

― dleone (dleone), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 12:12 (twenty-one years ago)

I like order better when it's informed by chaos.

― Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 12:33 (twenty-one years ago)

''there is maybe, as has been hinted in this thread, an inherent relationship between chaotic music and ambient music''

heh, after watching MIMEO on friday evening then i might have to agree with you.

''I think Gruppen is complete genius, but then I don't hear that as "chaos".''

I was half-joking (that's why i put the boogie woogie in there) abt this: I hear gruppen as a disordered piece (my first post on this thread).

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 12:51 (twenty-one years ago)

I guess I'm just objecting to something I see behind the question -- that the chaotic in music is somehow weird and unnatural.

To some extent, yes, even though I like some music that others would call chaotic, and definitely don't necessarily mind music that contains a mix of both elements (although I do often find myself saying things like "This early Kraftwerk track/this Ground-Zero album sets up a nice groove and then ruins it with silly interruptions"), I do think that historically music has stuck to a more recognizable order of some sort than what some noise/free jazz/avant-garde types of music offer, and it does seem a little anomalous. For me, my attraction to the most chaotic sounding sub-genres of music has largely been a temporary thing, a fascination with seeing what the most extreme possibilities are. Now that the initial fascination has worn off, I don't get much pleasure (or anything else) out of it.

― Al Andalous, Tuesday, 9 September 2003 16:19 (twenty-one years ago)

The free improv group I play in once opened up for a "traditional" jazz ensemble--the keyboardist came up to me after the show and said,
wringing his hands, "Your music made me want to kill! Ha!" This guy qouted "Pop Goes The Weasel" at least once during each and every solo
that evening.

Is intense/noisy/non-idiomatic music=violent music? Like most any other art, I guess you get out of it what you want. I like high pitched sounds, complex signals, etc. Puts me at ease, sometimes unable to remember the performance at all--never haughty, conceited, or in a murderous mood, never angry at the audience(2-3 friends, a couple curious strangers), just there to experiment, hoping something is understood and appreciated. Or something. I guess.

No more coffee. I have to go.

― Stephen Boyle (SBoyle), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 16:36 (twenty-one years ago)

al; to my ears those interruptions (especially as deployed by GZ) are precisely timed, down to the split-second, often compositionally in post-production (especially on Revolutionary Pekanese Opera. 'those were the days' on Plays Standards, every time the song disintegrates into freeform, they're in total control, knowing the exact moment that the music needs to come completely apart.

― jl (Jon L), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 18:02 (twenty-one years ago)

The toughest part of chaos is coming BACK from it, and making it mean something; that's control. Drummer Dave King is a master of this in his groups, I think. You think everything has spun off the tracks and then BAM.

― Jordan (Jordan), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 18:12 (twenty-one years ago)

jl, what you describe sounds a lot like post-Love Supreme Coltrane (esp Ascension), wherein the music was "free", but structured. Above, this is the first kind of "chaos" I was talking about, wherein the piece is of a form, but the performances are free in sections (or even as a whole). GZ seems very much in the later-Coltrane/Ayler/Sanders lineage, but pulled off as a generally "rock" experience. I mean, for that alone, they should be given major props.

― dleone (dleone), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 19:01 (twenty-one years ago)

that coltrane period was their pinnacle, I'm still catching up to that music even as a listener. the GZ stuff is additionally impressive for achieving many of the same results with a group of 12 people. even during the moments of freeform, every single player has their own space in the mix/spectrum completely carved out; it's not chaos, no one's actually stepping on each other, they're all listening. and then somehow they all come together on the one. even on the unedited live record, they do this. somehow.

― jl (Jon L), Tuesday, 9 September 2003 19:20 (twenty-one years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.