floaty = avant-garde

What's up with it? Some critics only have four modes of praise: balls- out rock / beautiful songcraft / insightful lyrics / boundary- pushing. You need to hit two of these buttons to be a 'classic'. They wuv the Wilco album but they can't go mad on the balls-out rock or the lyrics so they talk up the boundary-pushing stuff to compliment the beautiful songcraft. Bingo!

"(All reviews of microhouse do this too!)"

It's half the point though. Sex and detail, sex and detail...

Good bands or peformers that experiment never do so because they want people to think they are smart or different. Seems like that is a tag sometimes placed on bands that like to mess about by people who dislike experimentation because it rubs against ideas of "acceptable popular music structures (be it melody or rhythm, etc)." Then again, if you are doing something not pop, you sort of automatically are transgressive (though, what is transgressive is always changing as what is experimental or avant garde is slowly absorbed by the Pop Overground). It's all the just the flip of prejudices tossed by the underground towards the overground and vice versa -- a snake that will always bites its tail.

one last thought: on wanting to be "different" -- isnt that one of the perogatives of youth (not that it is successful) to desire to shatter the Orthodoxy or at least set oneself apart from it? Its part of establishing one's identity (even if, ironically, many times one ends up just like other members of a subculture).

http://www.thamesfestival.org/events/events_6.html

example: this has always been my gripe with '97-'00 attempts by thee dead c and their gang -- having established a genuine boundary-pushing sound earlier, they then had to live up to the hype, which is hard for anyone anyway-- so they alligned themselves with "improvised" and already-established but different avant-garde music by others, cashing in via name-dropping/confusion, coincidentally-shared distribution and some very unfortunate transparent nepotistic journalism -- this alligned them with others' boundaries they had no hope in hell of making

whether foolish, deliberate, whatever, it disgusted me, an avant-garde enthusiast, that this band, _from_ _my_ _own_ _country_ with it's own magnificent indigenous pedigree, were "passing-off" themselves and their special buddies using this marketing approach -- if they had just said "we're a [rock, ?] band" or even "we're interesting" it would have been OK, but no, they had to allign themselves and mythologise into some part of 20th century music that they themselves decided they belonged to

no -- those new zealand "port people" are just kidding, just having a joke about the scene they "[don't even want to be included in]" -- they live in my back yard so to me this is just an example of this sort of "promotion" that i have witnessed first-hand -- no, i'm just kidding, we're all new zealanders so we're all very cool, especially to each other -- but yes, everybody agrees they're nice guys -- again, just an example from my backyard -- sorry, i don't wish to upset anyone but "non-provincials" do wonder why criticism of local events is so many sacred sheep

it reminded me of Frank Zappa, who initially alligned himself most deliberately with Stravinsky and Varese, but he just copied them, and not being regent or anything more than an operator and having left avant-garde/Varese continuum fans cold, abandoned that angle around the time the first mothers got sick of him