experimental horse music

as a genre this pisses on any music evah obv, but i have no idea what it might be: CAN YOU TELL ME? (i want a scociology and an esthetix, not just poxy song names) (poxy song names are ok also tho)

horse music that is experimental, or music by/for experimental horses?

(mark s: that's what I want YOU to tell ME jeff)

heroin = horse = house?

There is also the Horse Hospital round Bloomsbury way...

Do horse bands all come from from the same stable? Thrill Jockey, maybe? I been searching for my mane line...

If I'd have got here earlier, I could have made a joke about Jockey Slut would be able to point you in the right direction. But that's been made somewhat redundant now, damnit.

Coil Horse Rotovator is obviously the most experimental horse related album. It's my favorite anyway.

Michael Murphy's "Wildfire" is unexperimental horse music.

Do horse bands all come from from the same stable? Thrill Jockey, maybe?

Drag City mostly. They all come from Louisville.

Of course, no discussion is complete without mention of Labradford's A Stable Reference.

yeah, load of old pont innit.

PONY, fuckit.

PPROOFREAD YR 1-LINERS

oh man

John Cale-era Velvet Underground?

Manowar!!

The Ass Ponys trying breakbeat?

A one-trick pony trying something new?

Dirty Three - Horse Stories

"crazy horses" were the osmonds at their most exerimental

Some horse songs: The Horse (Booker T & the MGs), Doin' The Mustang (Don Bryant), Like A Young Colt (Johnny Cash), Pony Time (Chubby Checker), Four Horsemen (Clash), King Horse or Pony Street or Rocking Horse Road (Elvis Costello), Pony Ride (De La Soul), That Mule (Bo Diddley), Mule Skinner Blues (Lonnie Donegan), Freedom For The Stallion or Ride Your Pony (Lee Dorsey), Me & My Mule (Champion Jack Dupree), All The King's Horses (Aretha Franklin), Black Horse (Gastr Del Sol), Saddled The Cow & Milked The Horse (Rosco Gordon), Flop- Eared Mule (Holy Modal Rounders), Two White Horses (John Lee Hooker), Black Horse Blues (Blind Lemon Jefferson), (Blame It) On The Pony Express (Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon), Hey Hot Stuff (Geddup On My Pony) (Lolita Storm), Wild Horses (Rolling Stones), Don't Test/Wu Stallion (Suga Bang Bang), Satisfaction Pony (T. Rex), Funky Mule (Ike & Tina Turner), Get Behind The Mule or Pony (Tom Waits), Mustang (Link Wray).

I think that lot makes the genre style and boundaries pretty clear...

Wow. You put an awful lot of effort into that.

Of all the musical developments of 2002, experimental horse music must certainly be the most surprising, both in the explosiveness of its emergence and in its astonishing diversity of microgenres which seemed to gallop already fully-formed, cantering and snorting, into a pop music landscape that was gasping desperately for an underdog to root for.

If for several years the pop had been a car—Timbaland starting and stopping like a Jetta trying to get crosstown, "Le Car" defining the state of the retro-electric art, and a general agreement with Gary Numan that your music can be your bubble against the harshness of a loud and unpredictable world—it has, in some (hind)quarters at least, become covered in thick hair. On the question of whether music ought to be hermetically self-sufficient, experimental horse music whispers "neigh".

What is it?
Not the predictability of the gas pedal for experimental horse music. If a foundational premise can be said to exist here, it would have to be the almost enforced variability of tempo. Groups like Handsome Cab were among the first to work the idea of extreme tempo variation into the entire framework of a song. "Handful of Smeg", perhaps the first experimental horse music proper, begins restlessly, fiddlingly, before swinging into a functional trot. Here the organ swells, the chime of the guitars begin to ring out in anticipation of the long journey to come (songs rarely run below the 15 minute mark, with an exception that I'll get to later), and Frankie Dettori begins the same wordless tone-poem that has come to constitute the majority of experimental horse vocals. At the show I saw, the kids were already smacking each other's asses in anticipation of "the gallop" which almost always comes when you least expect it, with an undulating fierceness that is as soft as it is powerful. Curiously, the music almost seems to slow down at this point—though it has gotten much faster, the clip-hop glitches of the insistent coconuts are overwhelmed by a raw thunderous boom, which carries away all microbeats into a whole-note din of thudding brutality.

Who listens?
Though the experimental horse music scene was at first was predictably twee—no more notebooks covered in saddles, please!—the actual albums' uncompromising experimentation and, well, horsiness, began to inspire other approaches.

Perhaps the most influential of the second-wave recordings was Alan Strang's "Cut Me Some Slack" EP, a defiant blast of clattery yelps and dystopian nihilism whose cover seemingly overnight turned our youth into leather-jodphur-wearing street toughs looking for any nag they could find. Polite requests for conversation at the dinner-table are now, at least in this writer's household, ritually greeted with a sarcastic baring of teeth. Which, while quite rude, was at least better than the short-lived fad of stamping one's feet when annoyed and dropping a pile of shit onto the floor.

Who Cares?
Despite (or because of) experimental horse music's raw sensibility, it has inspired an outpouring of articles from the academy. But this isn't where the kids are. They're down in the basement listening to the new Alan Strang and tacking burlap to themselves, galloping triumphantly in their minds towards a brutally rural dystopia of angst and sore thighs, whipping themselves further away from the pain of this over-technologized world, towards—and perhaps they scarcely realize it—a place where all horses are free to roam as they please, a place where sweaty hair is not an issue, a place where long odds are the best.

Mark: bugger all effort, actually - little more than the typing time. I have all my music in a fab database, you see.

Tracer: fantastic!

thank you martin :) yet the writer I was pretending to be still doesn't "get it"

What about experimental elephant music? The Thai Elephant Orchestra, perhaps?

Tracer: Brillant, simply brillant.

gangsta gangsta how do you do it

the stable of artists on labels like Finish Line and Winner's Circle put out stripped-down 7-inches with more than 10 songs apiece on them; they cram the entire narrative of typical experimental horse music into a lathery 2-minute workout. Sometimes 1:59. purists scoff - "music for 3-year-olds" they say

*brrrraaaack*

Experimental Horse Music is so hackneyed now!

Patti Smith - Horses owns. this. thread. ;-)

agree w/kate, it was better when it was ealinged