Unimagined or Unexpected Music

I might call it the Gymnopedie phenomenon, where a collection of notes surprises you with its existence.

What music continues to seem revelatory and singular and apart from other musics?

Like when I first heard Albert Ayler the record surprised me with this, like, blowy avant garde Sanford & Son theme music/black national anthem or whatever. Or when I heard Gunther Schuller I felt glad that such a synthesis could be proved so compatible.

So this is for other musics, but particularly of the kind you would enjoy like you would a Bach prelude or one of your favorite Beatles songs. Music you just didn't conceive of, couldn't conceive of, but are very glad someone had the genius to.

(Not music you enjoy like you enjoy Julie Tippett or Anthony Braxton on piano or something, unless you really feel strongly about it.)

Like the Bach and Beatles of an alien planet with an entirely different cultural history? That kind of music is definitely what I'm most interested in. And then whatever tiers there are below, OK.

i sort of feel this way about frank zappa's HOT RATS album.

I am gonna listen to that like tonight or something.

(I got it - I don't mean I'm going to slsk it or whatever.)

Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams did this to me when i was a kid, still think of it as a touchstone/changing point for everything i understood music to be.

ooh id put the first eurythmics rec in this category too

i was trying to explain this to someone significantly younger than me, about how the eurythmics sounded like totally insane and alien, and i quickly realized that sweet dreams has kinda been relegated to the heard it a billion times so it has zero effect dirtpile for most people born in the latter 80s.

sweet dreams still does that to me when i hear it

Mutantes was like this for me when I first heard them at age sixteen.
Then Amps for Christ when I was nineteen. Who know low-fi/noise could be married so beautifully to folk balladry?

Who knew.

xxxp to jj i agree wrt a lot of 80's popular-but-sorta-arty-music. as a product of the early 80's, i can hear that stuff both ways, alien and weird and progressive, but also sorta dated and cheeze.

there's this illustrator and voice arist guy from japan called masumi hara, and he made three albums of new age folk infused synth pop in the 80s. i only started listening to him recently but it really feels like this alternate universe in which all traditional folk is made on emulators and korg M1s. taking these sounds that are cliche by now but arranging them in such an original way as to afford them a new sense of beauty and strangeness. but at the same time using a lot of weird clicky noises that shouldn't work in the context but are completely integral to the song as a whole. and all the songs are completely catchy and memorable and inhabit there own space. and his voice is amazing and unique, i actually thought it was an old lady singing until i was told otherwise.

The skronkings of John Coltrane immediately came to mind for me. Amazing.

xpost That sounds very interesting.

I was listening to some classical piece the other day - don't remember which - and at some point there was this use of a very brief moment of silence the like of which I had never heard before. The closest thing I can compare it to is if you were to take white noise and then edit out bits of it. I've thought about this before, the idea of subtractive music, or music of negation, but I haven't heard any.

But this piece's one moment with the silence wasn't quite like that anyway. It jolted me, though!

And then I've been thinking about composers - classical, jazz, dub? - who change how a listener perceives temporality. For instance, one composer who was using clusters or clouds of notes, and when you listened you didn't necessarily do so linearly, from one note to the next. The style of the music radically changed my style of listening, without really any learning curve!

I remember taking an Intro to Electronic Music class in college - when I was really into industrial (Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle, etc.) and when they played Xenakis, I was like, "What am I doing listening to Skinny Puppy?"

Hell yeah. When I first heard L'Legend D'Er or whatever it's called, I thought of it as 3-dimensional music, music you could almost touch. I kept imagining helices and cylinders and weird abstract musical shapes.

fuck, I have no idea what piece it was they played for us in that class ... I've got some Xenakis recordings, but I don't think I have one of that piece.

It's a full-length concrete piece. Still in print, I think. But I might be spelling it a bit wrong.

that could be it.

xpost It starts with really, really high frequencies that seem to be spaced logorithmically or something.

Then it sort of starts to sound like a giant clay tablet or some kind of stone rolling or sliding slowly in a gigantic sandpaper tumbler.

I dunno. I haven't heard it in a bit.

the one I was blown away by in college was fairly percussion heavy - or at least the sounds were in the range of drum sounds

fuck - this was 15 years ago - I might not even be able to remember if it was what I heard.

I don't think I've heard that. I've heard some of the "cloud" period. I've heard the black box recordings and other procedural electronic pieces on the LP/CD anthologies of electronic music from different periods. I have maybe one or two larger orchestral pieces I've spent no time with at all - maybe percussive heavy and I don't know? And then the Legende d'Er thing I mentioned.

it was probably a concrete piece ... it probably didn't actually have percussion on it. I like the percussion works a lot though.

First album I considered to be truly weird and didn't understand at all at the time, though it did fascinate me and made me come back to it regularly was Zoolook by Jean-Michel Jarre. The first side of the album can still bring back those feelings.

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTRTAFs2XGg

"Sweet Dreams" wasn't entirely epochal for that kind of music in the US pop charts. I remember "Cars" and "Pop Musik" blowing the doors off of what I thought music could be as a child. Then there was a noticeable retreat/retread in late 1980 through 1981 that's still apparent looking at Billboard comps: 1981 was a terrible year in the US charts compared to what immediately preceded and followed. For US listeners of a certain age and neophilia, "Sweet Dreams" was a delightful echo of earlier novelties.

i remember when i first heard royal trux (accelerator) and was like WHOA, and i also remember the first time being h1gh really made something sound amazing, SLATES by the fall.

circa '94 and hearing "rave" music in my friend's car (Radioactive Goldfish lol. even though it seemed so fresh to me, i remember him dismissing it as played out, as last year's or the year before's sound), then shortly after that, in other friend's car, hearing "jungle" (i remember hearing the name of the genre before the music itself, with all these fantastic ideas of what it would actually be like), then shortly after that, another friend's car, hearing hardcore rave music. totally turned me out.

mind you this was right after i first started smoking weed, so the impact was even more headfucking.