ILM Listening Chamber 7

5 seconds in: Cool riff. Hope the voice is as good. 10 seconds in: (reads rest of discussion) Instrumental? FEH! 15 seconds in: Hey, cool beat. 45 seconds in: This is damn good stuff. Hey, if you're going to do guitar wankery, it might as well be INTERESTING wankery rather than being a guitarist who may as well be touching themselves rather than their guitar when they play... it even seems to have some kind of song structure!

By the way, I'm very much enjoying listening to these tracks, and am looking forward to being turned on to some good music I've never heard before. Please don't stop.

By the way, if you want ME to stop hinting, please (all future Chamber submitees) erase ALL information from the MP3. That includes the file name AND any MP3 title tags - you know, the "file info" you can check out in Winamp. Keep my ass (and the rest of me) in the dark, if possible.

It's really well put together, but I guess I just don't understand what sort of reaction the listener is meant to have ...

I am asking because I know you make music and I am curious what you think. When I interviewed Jan St. Werner from Mouse on Mars, I asked him a similar question and he seemed apalled at the idea that music is created with specific emotional reactions in mind. I think he thought it was manipulative and fascist, or something. Don't mean to hijack the chamber, here, feel free to email me personlly if you like.

And I don't see how you can say this file is just the same as any other wanking. Far better than your average wanker -- that sounds like faint praise, but I think I like certain forms of guitar showmanship better than most here. Dammit, I _like_ guitar solos.

I know, it's a tricky thing to say -- and when I find myself saying, I tend to want to reserve judgement on the track. Because I really mean that as a personal admission, and not entirely a judgement on the track itself.

But to clarify, what I mean is actually quite simplistic. When I hear, let's say, a funk track, I have some idea of the general thread of reaction that's trying to be established: a funky shake-your-ass vibe, usually. When I hear a chirpy indie-rock track, I know how I'm meant to be enjoying it. When I hear a big shouty emo anthem, I know -- again, in the most general sense -- the sort of tumultuous emotional thread it's meant to tug on. And if I'm driving in my car listening to Snoop, I know pretty precisely how the track is trying to make me feel about that.

But with this track -- and again, this may be a personal failing on my part -- I have no reaction, and more importantly I'm not sure how the genre intends me to react. Am I supposed to feel like it "rocks," for lack of a better word? I don't. Am I supposed to feel lulled or transported by it? I don't. And that goes on, for every general reaction to music I'm currently aware of: this is one of those rare tracks that I listen to and just hear a guitar playing and some beats going by, and they just seem there, without evoking anything in particular or making me feel any way in particular. It seems very well-played and very well put-together, as I noted, but I really don't know to what effect.

But like I said, I am completely willing to believe that this has more to do with me than the music, as this is precisely the sort of playing that I have never, never understood. What might help me, in this instance, would be seeing a performance, and getting a bit more of a sense of how the performer seems to interpret the material -- whether he's making squinched-face "look at me wail" faces or swaying gently back and forth or wearing that studied, I Am Concentrating look. Sounds silly, but that's really as lost as I am with regard to how I'm meant to enjoy this stuff.

That said, I'm all for the argument that people's emotional reactions to music are personal and not scripted or enforced by the musician. But that's only in the most subjective and specific senses. We shouldn't doubt that when Mouse on Mars throw a house beat under a track, they're expecting a tap-your-foot, nod-your-head, dig-the- groove kind of reaction ... and there's no doubt that when Metallica rams through some power chords, they expect you to feel some powerful rockin' going on. With this track, well ... like I said, I don't feel much, and I sort of wish I knew what the artist felt, or how he expected people would feel.

("You people" = those buggin' about track identities before the preordained 7 day waiting period has passed, Mik e.)

But not here. This is way too processed-trebly-slick, for starters, and the canned drums just aren't especially interesting to me at all. It's in 5/4, sure, but a sizeable proportion of Rush's music is in odd meters, and Rush is terrible. I like guitar-wank in small doses (and in my world, guitar-wank means Scott Henderson and Al DiMeola, not Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix), but while the production is too flashy/slick, the guitar work is too basic! And the guitar sound is really lacking in soul -- it sounds very digital and very canned. If I'm going to listen to this kind of guitar sound, and if I'm not going to get real funk or soul, then I want fast improvised solos, the virtuosity and awe-inspiringness of which are usually the only redeeming value of music like this. But simple patterns + cheesy sound = boring. If you're going to play big-dick music, show me your big dick, right? But this track never delivers the big dick.

It sounds like a pair of Berklee graduates with big hair, in a studio somewhere in SoCal or Miami, making music for an ESPN promo spot about skateboarding, and using a roomful of 1995-vintage digital effects processors. This is the kind of music that failed fusion musicians (with little taste) play.

Really? I guess I must have a different experience, having been saturated with seemingly omnipresent jazz-fusion as a budding teenage jazz musician.

If anyone here knows "Smooth as Ice" by Fashio (Fascio?), I think I've kind of heard this guitar sound there, too...

BLASPHEMY.

;-)

I do like "Tom Sawyer" and "YYZ" (especially as played -- sort of -- by Primus). Just not the rest of what I've heard.

The result is that the track has the same organic feel to it as your bog-standard techno track, which I assume was the intention. In itself, that is quite interesting. And had it been played out over 6 or 7 minutes like your average Orbital or Photek track (very Photek- ish beats at start BTW), with a few more variations, this could have been a success. The fact that it isn't is perhaps due to not enough ambition than too much.

I may say a bit more when the answer and explanation appears (I have no idea who this is or who the person twice-mentioned above already is), but that'll do for now.

It's not Satriani, by the way.