Artists who moved from experimental realms towards the mainstream

Inspired by this thread

Simple Minds are what I always think of - the distance from Reel To Real Cacophony to "Don't You Forget About Me" is unbelievable.

Penderecki.

scritti politti

Einstürzende Neubauten, arguably. Not that their most recent stuff is mainstream in the normal sense but it is compared to their earlier records

Jim O'Rourke
David Grubbs
Sonic Youth

Genesis

Animal Collective

Human League

http://www.self-titledmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/1123787998_16af8d3f24.jpg

spk (and especially graeme revell with his hollywood soundtracks)

Franco Battiato

He started off in the mainstream in the 60s?

Chumbawamba

Cornelius Cardew

Ennio Morricone
Sally Timms
Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs

his every successive release leaps all over the place with regards to genre and approach. no way has he moved in any particular direction.

Severed Heads, Cabaret Voltaire.

anagram, plenty of other ppl listed on this thread have moved between different 'genres and approaches' - o'rourke continues to makes 'experimental' and 'pop' albs, just to name one example, so i dunno why you're being so fucken picky abt r youngs (and there's still a big diff between 'Advent' and 'Ultrahits').

Weezer for betraying their punk roots

only because I know Youngs' work but not O'Rourke's, or a lot of the other people named here.

besides, the thread (like the other one) is about ppl who are basically moving in one direction, which I don't think Youngs is. you get the feeling he could make another advent any time.

xp

I'd make the same point about Sonic Youth - they've had periods of bzzzrtKLANG followed by periods of mainstream pandering followed by more DNNNNzpppWOM followed by...

you couldn't call the first few REM albums experimental exactly (although sometimes they sound that way to me) but REM still exemplify this drift towards the centre for me

respectfully disagree on REM - in the context of what their peers were doing REM were always centerists

best example I can think of on this is jazz guy Bob James who went from ESP-disk experimental in the 60s to slick (and oft-sampled) fusion in the 70s

^^^^
Two Jazz Stanleys - Cowell and Turrentine.

Also Miles? in and out and then back in......

Caetano Veloso
Vangelis/Demis Roussos

respectfully disagree on REM - in the context of what their peers were doing REM were always centerists

respectfully disagreeing back at you – obv it's all relative but Murmur and Reckoning still sound deliciously strange and unsettling to me

Completely bloody obvious, but Pink Floyd.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ how could we all forget :(

velvet underground, kind of

George Rochberg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nA5_KRt5m0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xf9_JYLQvA

Movement in this direction is probably fairly common in visual art and film. Even with my limited knowledge of the former, Warhol and Dali immediately come to mind; in film, there must be numerous directors who qualify. (Lynch, relatively speaking, but I'm sure there are much better examples.)

Does going from "In The Air Tonight" to "Sussudio" count?

Sufjan
Ted Leo

Marianne Nowottney, sort of. Her "sell-out" album is still weird as hell, but she was obviously trying to go mainstream. I think.

smog, silver jews. going from cacaphony to euphony may not be quite the same thing though.

Cocteau Twins!

metalica of course

Arthur Russell

Steve Miller.

From Sailor to Fly like an Eagle is a distance....

http://sleevage.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/andrew_wk_cover_500.jpg

fuck yes, dude does not want to be

is that Andrew WK?

Yes. He was an experimental noise guy before deciding to make an ironic pop album.

yeah, i know he was in Wolf Eyes, i just didn't recognize that picture

Was never in Wolf Eyes.

Split Enz

most of the artists i listen(ed) to fits to this thread description.

You make it sound like this is some sort of default career path, which I don't think is true at all. certainly no more so than the other way around.

it's not a default, it's just lots of the bands i like.
more accurate to say: went from moderate experimental towards the mainstream - though not necessary arriving there fully.

the pointers showed him the way eh?

I think that thing with "more or less work" on the part of the listener is what we mean by that other too frequently abused term: "accessible". But this is something a lot easier to describe the qualities of: a tempo suitable for dancing, a melody which is catchy/easy to remember, a rhythm where you don't have to concentrate to find the downbeat.

But "more accessible" / less work for listeners is not a guarantee that something will be popular (though I suspect this is the kind of thing people mean when they say "pop").

And the opposite of that isn't "experimental"; it's "abstract".

abstract has too many connotations re: visual art for me to use that term vis a vis the kind of music we are talking about.

But this is something a lot easier to describe the qualities of: a tempo suitable for dancing, a melody which is catchy/easy to remember, a rhythm where you don't have to concentrate to find the downbeat.

But "more accessible" / less work for listeners is not a guarantee that something will be popular (though I suspect this is the kind of thing people mean when they say "pop").

exactly!

i've talked to and interviewed a lot of singers and songwriters who were aiming for the mainstream market, signed to major labels who expected them to sell records, and when i've asked them about their craft they've couched their aims in the universality dominique mentions - wanting to share themselves with people rather than just making art personal to them. so a lot of the time this will involve working with songwriters and producers with a track record in the current market; for songwriters, tweaking songs that might have been inspired by something personal to strike a balance between keeping the heart and details of the song, and making it relatable to anyone; and, obviously, constructing a song with radio in mind wrt catchy melodies etc. not all of these went on to be especially popular.

what it doesn't have much to do with is specific sonic palette - eg right now the sounds of choice for such artists are precisely the sounds that, 5-10 years ago, would have definitely not been chosen.

Plenty of musicians whose work gets described as "experimental" don't like the term because they'll argue, "it's not an experiment, I know what I'm doing."

Yes but isn't that taking the term too literally? If the musician has got a technique together -- a way of putting music together -- that is pretty novel, they may know what they are doing and how to deploy it. That doesn't stop it being the result of a series of experiments on themselves and the type of music they are working on - its deployment leads to different results, even if the technique used is 'the same'.

yes but you can say about pop music!

Mostly agree, wasn't saying you couldn't - just isolating and thinking about those musician args.

finding the best catch-all descriptor is a real challenge! often I just settle for "weird"

Its interesting how the thread went to a couple of jazz players -- obv thinking about popular and experimental is quite different from jazz musicians like Miles and Herbie who are thinking about how to appeal to more people as their music doesn't automatically code as pop, and certainly isn't selling in pop numbers.

Ayler and Sun Ra, too. The latter didn't even have any hang-ups and yet his disco album is just a curio in his discography. The Herbie anecodote makes him sound cynical/applying fairly cynical principles -- until you listen to the records as he pulls it off. xp = lol yeah I don't partic like "weird", so yes a challenge.

So following on from that you could say pop is an experiment and a set of techniques that large enough numbers of people have chosen to buy into. Experimental is another set of tech that most have chosen to avoid. Or aren't able to engage, for a number of other reasons.

x person/artist make his niche (whether that sells millions or next to nothing), then for a variety of reasons decide to change the techniques they use.

but again, "experimental" so strongly refers to process, and the differentiation would be about product.

idk, "pop" does code as a set of processes that change over time. Jazz was pop in the 40s, hip-hop takes the place of pop now.

i think we are defining "process" differently.

Yeah, that is not "process" that is fashion - and fashion is fundamentally stochastic (unless you are Simon Reynolds and actually bought that weird myth of "progression" within culture that was imported from the Sciences and crudely jammed into culture, which is cyclical). What changes over time are the signifiers of "fashionable". Are wide ties or skinny ties "in" right now. Fortunately no one ever tries to argue that skinny ties are more "advanced" than wide ties, they are just popular at different moments in the fashion cycle.

I think I actually really like "abstract" as a descriptor (not as a genre, but as a descriptor) than "experimental" *because* of the parallels with the visual arts.

Also because "abstract" has far less of a value-judgement attached than something like "weird" (the value judgement of "weird" depends on who you are; but also what is considered "weird" depends on who you are and the context of what is expected. I have told this story a hundred times, in the glory days of Poptimism, I remember sitting in a basement with the "weird" crowd listening to amplified mains hum for an hour, thinking "this isn't actually that weird a sound. And after an hour, it's actually kinda boring" then going into from there to a brightly lit shop where they were playing Missy Elliott and thinking "WTF, this *sounds* 1000x more *weird* than anything going on in that avante-basement!")

And I do think that abstraction is much closer to the technique - when someone plays me avant-jazz and tells me "Oh, he's playing ~around~ the melody, you've got to listen for the notes he ~doesn't~ play!" - that is exactly the process of abstraction in a visual design that has been heavily abstracted so what you are looking at is the things that have not been depicted. Removing expected elements, adding them, distorting them, altering them, streamlining them, deliberately breaking them - you can do this to the expected visual elements of a painting, or you can do them to the expected musical elements of a piece of music - taking abstracting approaches to melody, beat, rhythm, texture, tone, etc.

Also, for me it's distance from the art world - that "abstract" versus "representational" to me is just wholly a design choice. Different approaches, different meanings, different associations and semiotics, which hopefully trigger different reactions in a viewer. I have not spent 30 years of my life being told that "Abstract" was nobler, bolder, better and more true while "Representational" was bad, low class, "for girls" and contaminated with commercial concerns. (I'm SURE it happens. I just haven't had to listen to it.) They are, to me, just approaches to mix and match, impulses to balance. While this talk of the apples and oranges false dichotomy of "experimental" versus "mainstream" comes with so much baggage that I can't ignore.

Yes, happy to accept I have a diff defn of "process". "Pop" has its own set of a weirdness and abstractions too, both fields of endeavour have a lot more back-and-forth...its all v fluid to me.

Similarly fashions are underplayed in experimental contexts as much as they are overplayed in a popular context. Herbie could be said to be following the crowd and fashion of the day, as Sun Ra and Miles did (his hip-hop alb)

Ultimately, an hour of amplified hum followed by Missy Elliott is an ideal radio station.

I think I like "Unusual" music . It's not perfect but people know what is meant by that.

You might as well be saying "non-canonical".

Your "usual" might be a mix of Stone Roses and Primal Scream, with a swagger of Oasis, for example.

Right. It's not watertight. Are Talking Heads 'unusual'? To some people. To others they are very usual.

In Asda a genial sound or feeling is unusual, whereas here in the glen its almost de rigueur

branwell's last post is great, had never thought of abstract vis-a-vis painting technique like that!

"usual" and "unusual" surely only ever work in context? what does "unusual" mean in a vacuum?

I want an opposite of the 'flag post' function. 'Flag post because it is AWESOME' or something. Specifically for BraNMwell's last one.

This is something I've been absentmindedly thinking about lately but in clumsy, half-hearted terms because job & life are so busy at the moment that proper theoretical thought re: music (or anything that's not work) is tricky; this thread is pretty much what I would like to engage with properly if I had time.

I guess music (and music discussion) doesn't exist in a vacuum. do we need a single word to describe experimental/avant-garde/abstract/unusual music. is it semantically important, or can we tailor it to the situation. if I made weird bloopy noises on a bunch of soldered equipment, I'd happily describe it as 'unusual music' to a colleague for example. 'abstract' works in some cases, but is black metal necessarily abstract? is prog abstract? would I be comfortable calling my music 'avant garde' if all I was doing was putting a twist on well-ploughed punk rock furrows?

Terminological differences are tricky, because some people see word choices as incidental, almost inconsequential, and others see them as urgent and key. Generally those who see them as inconsequential aren't suffering directly from their misuse though! I couched my vague thinkings in terms of 'experimental' and 'mainstream/pop' because they were the first things that came to mind.

Surely you can call it whatever you like? I prefer unpleasant

What are your top 10 unpleasant records of 2015?

Oh no, you wont get me with that again! One year of that is definitely enough

<3 u saer

Can't say I really like "abstract" or "unusual" either -- for the former it was coined to describe painting techniques that are derived from the 50s, kinda old hat now. And then the way Greenberg theorised around abstract was annoying when I first came across it (also how he deployed "kitsch" for a lot of things that were outside of it (iirc, been a long time))

feel like Bowie wins this with his arc from Berlin era experimental-ism almost straight into radio ready 80s pop

Heaven knows he didn't have any hits in the early 70s with Space Oddity, or what was that weird inaccessible album with no hits at all, oh Ziggy Star-something and maybe some space insects were involved? All too weird and uncommercial for words, that totally non-mainstream stuff there.

Also, although Greenberg may have coined the term "abstract expressionism" I don't think he can take credit for the process of abstraction, which got going somewhere in the second half of the 19th Century? My memory is foggy too but I'm p sure the process started happening in western art around the time of colonialism and exposure of western artists to much older non-representational styles of art in non-western cultures.

I think of all (or most) music as abstract, or non-imitative, although I don't think it's necessarily a worse descriptor for 'weird' music than 'experimental', which ive always felt is misused unless youre talking about say aleatoric john cage stuff, or electroacoustic circuit-bending squawks and squeals, or max/msp generative music.

Fair enough Branwell although because you were looking at this after mentioning free jazz (and Pollock provides the cover for Coleman's Free Jazz)..

yh the language of artistic abstraction is definitely well under formation in the mid-nineteenth century, a clear trajectory of aestheticism as an increasing interest in formal qualities such that in the later years someone like walter pater can claim that the other arts should aspire to music's formal purity. then i think greenberg takes that so far that no one (including himself) quite knows how to do anything interesting with it any more

so in that respect i'm agreed that pretty much every term available to us carries too much baggage

What is being abstracted is not "representation" which is a visual arts thing mostly, but, like I said, the formal elements of music - melody, beat, tone, texture, timbre, rhythm, that kind of thing.

You guys seem able to describe the music you mean perfectly well by describing its qualities or aspects. It's like you just want the shorthand of a word like "experimental" but unfortunately that word already means something else.

(Still trying to think what I consider an "experimental" approach to be the opposite of. Perhaps the opposite of "formulaic" but that word has a pejorative connotation I don't agree with. Formulas offer excellent constraints to sharpen creativity!)

(xp interestingly [maybe it isn't actually interesting] schaeffer used the term 'abstract music' to mean the opposite of 'concrete music', i.e. music that instead of dealing with sound dealt with abstract principles, like functional harmony or the series)

that is p interesting imo

Feldman doesn't use that terminology as far as i know but drew the same dichotomy and was fiercely anti "abstraction" in that sense

yeah i like the feldman bit where he talks about how his music is like mondrian's paintings, but not in the usual understanding, rather that what from a distance appears as formal clarity is with closer inspection much more smeared, messy, and imprecise

oh good, other people bringing up the stuff I was thinking about re: abstract: Greenberg and the CIA-funded AbEx bro-down of the 50s, Schaeffer and concrete, etc.

I think a lot of what gets lumped in the experimental category could be considered "abstract" but a lot isn't. Going back to the abstract vs. representational analogy with visual art, there is representational art that isn't abstract but isn't "classically pleasing," and this also has a musical corollary

i haven't read this whole revive and i think this was addressed to some extent by branwell and others but my personal take is i feel like the problem with thinking of music in terms of "mainstream" and "experimental" is that these distinctions are 100% about a history of economics that sort of comes "after the fact" of creative work, at least for recorded music, maybe it was a little different before, idk. i mean people and the work they do are not uninfluenced by economic history but it would be a shame to only read that dimension into how someone's work changes or stays the same over time. also, as a metric, it tends to reinforce the hierarchies in separate camps because it takes as its baseline a measure of power, pitting the cultural capital of "experimental" against the market power of "mainstream". we are what we measure, so imagining different or more open-ended ways of making sense of creative work is important as a rejoinder to these kinds of hard and stupid schoolboy lines. i mean sorry for the gender shot but i believe boys who do this incessantly are imbalanced and need to open their hearts so the rest of us don't have to suffer so much.

wot?

oh it's the king of derps

fuck off derp-a-lerp

claim your rights as a man and only post in the men's rights thread from here on out.

Was that with or without fedora?

i don't care, take whatever you need

i agree with you to some extent, but there are formal styles/aesthetics of music that are liked by large numbers of people and there are those that aren't. And as most of us have noted (esp. Branwell) the specifics do change over time, but it isn't just an economic issue or a structural means of dissemination issue. Granted, there are countless musicians making music that stylistic resembles that which is liked by large numbers of people to no acclaim, and maybe it would be more useful to think in terms of a .... spectrum of popularity, but Pop is a style that overlaps with, but isn't the same as "what is popular"