am i a fool for thinking post-rock is mostly lame, while loving most things that influenced it?

I think Simon wrote again about post-rock on his blissblog at some point. I believe he addressed how the Chicago school headed down a different path than he had hoped/though post-rock would go...

I think Simon wrote again about post-rock on his blissblog at some point. I believe he addressed how the Chicago school headed down a different path than he had hoped/thought post-rock would go...

I think Simon wrote again about post-rock on his blissblog at some point. I believe he addressed how the Chicago school headed down a different path than he had hoped/thought post-rock would go...

For the record I don't think it was the Mojo review of Bark Psychosis where I first used "post-rock", it was something earlier in Melody Maker, but can't recall what. The record should also note that although I genuinely believed I was coining the term, I discovered many years later it been floating around for over a decade--Morley used it, around the time he was hymning Haircut 100 and Altered Images, to describe something more Popist in spirit and more conceptual/cognitive than musicological, ie. a sort of total move beyond rockist assumptions, values and prejudices into some brand new kind of mental space. And I've even seen the word in the Rolling Stone Albums Guide, used to mean something roughly equivalent to "avant-rock" or "out-rock." But yeah, it was me that supplied this hitherto vague term with something approaching an ideology, and a specific referent. I'm amazed that the term has this half-life,and still gets used in record stores as a section heading, or in press-releases and e-mailouts. Lord knows, not a single band embraced the term or rallied to the post-rock banner at the time!

Here's also an essay of his from The Wire in 1994 that outlines his concept of the term, and who he think belongs to the nascent genre.

XPOSTS TO HPENCIL

I think I have this weird prejudice too.

The term was also used about a decade and a half before Reynolds to describe Pere Ubu, and Ze had a Lizzy Mercier Descloux review on their website from 1980 using the term as well.

And I'm with hstencil; I've never seen or heard Bardo Pond described as a post-rock band before this thread.

You don't have to justify it but also I don't really see why you'd think it was weird? You like what you like, others like what they like - who the hell knows why?

I am currently listening to a Nanci Griffith album - next up is Squarepusher. That's what's so great about music.

To be fair, they were the lead track on 'Monsters, Robots and Bug Men', which was Virgin's compilation of the whole postrock thing ca. 1996 (Stereolab, Long Fin Killie, Pram, Ui, Run On, Labradford etc) plus a load of bands that I think were being termed as 'space rock' at the time. So I guess the answer to the question would be Kevin Martin.

There's a quote about the Young Gods (whose live show was supposed to have inspired Ian Crause to sell his pedals and buy a sampler) and Disco Inferno, possibly apocryphal, to the effect that while the Young Gods sounded futurist, D.I. sounded like the FUTURE (actually, I think it may have been, "the vast, inconsolable vistas of the future"). That's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of post-rock, and even though that's a profoundly ambiguous and idiotic way to categorize bands, it seems like a better-- at least, more specific--way to describe the bands that fall within that circle than "using rock instruments for non-rock purposes" (a definition which establishes Emerson, Lake and Palmer as inarguable kings of the genre). Disco Inferno, Bark Psychosis, Main, and Seefeel certainly fit for me into that region; Slint, Tortoise, and Stereolab most certainly do not. That's only me, though.

So? That sounds about right.

Boy, that was a really parenthesis-heavy post. I can't quite remember what my point was.

Oh: just that it's only how I see it, and not any more or less valid than someone else's perception.

And I don't think it's unreasonable to exclude Tortoise from post-rock; it doesn't mean that they aren't fantastic--just I think their music doesn't attempt to break with the past like, say, the whole "isolationist" scene-of-dubious-legitimacy did.

I don't know; I'm rambling and digressing like a senile retiree.

Hooray!

post-rock is like prog without any of the fun/faux-mysticism!

i dunno, i like the "posthumous" slint EP, and stereolab, but not too much more from either camp.

As for the post-rock/prog connection, one of the reasons I got into prog rock around 95/96 or so is that those Chicago bands were all namechecking 70s British prog bands. If you took the vocals out of Gentle Giant their songs would fit perfectly on a Tortoise album. The connection between This Heat and Quiet Sun seems important here as well.