Love or Hate?

Justthefacts · 06-25-2015, 01:43 PM

@Trollheart

How is this honestly your first foray into Radiohead? How prominent they are and stuff, I'd at least think you would've heard some of their records years ago.

The Batlord · 06-25-2015, 01:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Machine

That's not my fav Radiohead album, but it's definately a really good one. When recs open back up I'll have to give you another Radiohead to listen to.

In Rainbows FTW. The more dancable their **** is, the happier they make me. In Rainbows is just hypnotic sometimes.

One of the best hipster rock songs ever TBH. Mostly because of Thom's vocals though.

Trollheart · 06-25-2015, 01:51 PM

Title: String Quartet in Four Parts
Artiste: John Cage
Genre: Avant-Garde
Familiarity: Zero

Track 1(Hate) Fairly staid and boring I have to say. I never quite realised how uninteresting violins and cellos can be without anything else to back them. Sending me to sleep.
Track 2(Hate) Bit more atmospheric, a little more to it. Still slow and generally tedious though. Seventeen minutes of this!

Track 3(Hate) And now forty-****ing-two minutes of this! Frownland, why do you hate me? I think I'd rather listen to Beefheart. Seriously. I get the impression here of that suspense music they use when someone is walking slowly up a flight of stairs, anticipating something horrible at the top. But it must be a very long flight of stairs, cos this goes pretty much the same for the forty-two minutes it runs for. I can feel my will to live slowly draining away...
Track 4(Hate) Nothing could save this album now!

End result: I don't think I've been so mind-numbingly bored in a very long time. Never again!

So, Love or Hate? What do yaz think? A Hate, obviously.

Chances of a full review:0/10

Trollheart · 06-25-2015, 01:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Justthefacts

@Trollheart

How is this honestly your first foray into Radiohead? How prominent they are and stuff, I'd at least think you would've heard some of their records years ago.

I've already explained what my approach to music was before, and why. I'm not going into it again. You're talking to the only person on the planet who never has heard Gnarls Barkley.

YorkeDaddy · 06-25-2015, 01:53 PM

@ the Cage review:

Trollheart · 06-25-2015, 01:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Machine

When it opens back up why not.

I'll tell you why not. I'm not taking tons of recs for the same artiste. I want to listen to different stuff. I may make a new rule....

**Frownland** · 06-25-2015, 01:54 PM

Damn, after taking to that Sylvian album so well I thought you'd love that bit of chamber music. Oh well.

grindy · 06-25-2015, 01:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trollheart

I've already explained what my approach to music was before, and why. I'm not going into it again. You're talking to the only person on the planet who never has heard Gnarls Barkley.

I've not only never heard Gnarls Barkley, I never even heard about him or them.

Trollheart · 06-25-2015, 01:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frownland

Damn, after taking to that Sylvian album so well I thought you'd love that bit of chamber music. Oh well.

No, Sylvian was cool, but this is just bloody the same all the way through mostly. It just ground me down. Actually, chamber music is one of the few modes of classical music I find very hard to enjoy. That, and opera.

Quote:

Originally Posted by grindy

I've not only never heard Gnarls Barkley, I never even heard about him or them.

Hermano!

**Frownland** · 06-25-2015, 02:03 PM

It changes on some tracks but it's very subtle. Here's some general information on the abum from wiki, which I think is pretty necessary when you're listening to a Cage piece.

Quote:

Cage began writing the quartet in 1949 in Paris. Prior to beginning to work on the piece, he told his parents that he wanted to compose a work which would praise silence without actually using it; after completing the first movement he was so fascinated with the new way to work that he wrote in a letter: "This piece is like the opening of another door; the possibilities implied are unlimited."[1] The piece was completed in 1950 in New York City and dedicated to Lou Harrison. It was premièred on August 12 the same year at the Black Mountain College.

The String Quartet in Four Parts is based partly on the Indian view of the seasons, in which the four seasons—spring, summer, autumn and winter—are associated each with a particular force–those of creation, preservation, destruction and quiescense. The parts and their corresponding seasons are as follows:

Quietly Flowing Along – Summer
Slowly Rocking – Autumn
Nearly Stationary – Winter
Quodlibet – Spring
The general quietness and flatness of sound in the quartet may be an expression of tranquility, the uniting emotion of the nine permanent emotions of the Rasa aesthetic, which Cage explored earlier in Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. Another aspect of composition which Cage used earlier was the use of counterpoint: the third movement uses a canon for a single melodic line, which repeats itself going backward, in a slightly rhythmically altered form, to the beginning. Cage composed canons from his earliest works, such as the Three Easy Pieces of 1933 and Solo with obbligato accompaniment of two voices in canon of 1934.

To compose the quartet Cage used a new technique, which consisted of dealing with fixed sonorities, or chords. He called those 'gamuts', and each gamut was created independently of all others. After producing a fixed amount of gamuts, scored for each player in an unchanging way, a succession of them could be used to create a melody with harmonic background. Because at any particular point a gamut would be selected only for containing the note necessary for the melody, the resulting harmony would serve no purpose and any sense of progression, which was alien to Cage, would be eliminated. Since 1946 Cage's interest was in composing music to "sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences", rather than music to express feelings and ideas, and he would later give up control over music altogether by using chance operations, but already in the String Quartet in Four Parts "the inclusion of traditional harmonies was a matter of taste, from which a conscious control was absent."

This composition and a lost early string quartet from 1936 are the only quartets Cage wrote that were explicitly labelled as such. Only three more works were composed for the same ensemble: Thirty pieces for String Quartet of 1983, Music for Four of 1987–88 and Four of 1989.

06-25-2015, 01:51 PM	#1003 (permalink)
Trollheart Born to be mild Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: 404 Not Found Posts: 26,970	Title: String Quartet in Four Parts Artiste: John Cage Genre: Avant-Garde Familiarity: Zero Track 1(Hate) Fairly staid and boring I have to say. I never quite realised how uninteresting violins and cellos can be without anything else to back them. Sending me to sleep. Track 2(Hate) Bit more atmospheric, a little more to it. Still slow and generally tedious though. Seventeen minutes of this! Track 3(Hate) And now forty-**ing-two minutes of this! Frownland, why do you hate me? I think I'd rather listen to Beefheart. Seriously. I get the impression here of that suspense music they use when someone is walking slowly up a flight of stairs, anticipating something horrible at the top. But it must be a very long flight of stairs, cos this goes pretty much the same for the forty-two minutes it runs for. I can feel my will to live slowly draining away... Track 4(Hate) Nothing could save this album now! End result: I don't think I've been so mind-numbingly bored in a very long time. Never again! So, Love or Hate? What do yaz think? A Hate, obviously. Chances of a full review:*0/10 __________________ Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018*

06-25-2015, 01:54 PM	#1007 (permalink)
Frownland SOPHIE FOREVER Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: East of the Southern North American West Posts: 35,548	Damn, after taking to that Sylvian album so well I thought you'd love that bit of chamber music. Oh well. __________________ Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth. d e a f b o x