how do YOU go about appreciating difficult music?
 

So, as a fan of typically difficult music, I thought I'd make this thread.

For starters, I find that it's easier to wrap my head around a piece of music after a few listens. It becomes easier once I start to recognise patterns that I never noticed were there.

What about you?

What is difficult music? I'm not sure I quite understand.

Something that's a bit harder to appreciate. The opposite of pop songs. Things like free jazz, noise, drone, even classical.

I used to have trouble with it, but after two years of concerted listening, I feel like I can dive into pretty much any type of music now and find something about it that I either like or can appreciate (not the same things). I guess it's like whiskey--that first shots you do when you're young burn like hell, but as an older man, you find you've acquired a taste for it.

Definitely. The more experience you have with something, the easier it is, even if its just passively listening to something.

On the flip side, just like people who can never (or are not inclined to) develop a taste for alcohol, so there are those who have no interest in cultivating musical tastes beyond what they naturally like. Which is fine. The most important thing for me is not to slip into snobbery. ;)

I totally agree with that, no one should be forced to like something.

Or ridiculed because they don't share our rarefied taste in under-appreciated music.

I've grown accustomed to what most people would call difficult music, but if I listen to something new in a bad mood or when I'm sick, it can be hard to get into. Billy Woods and LaMonte Young are good examples of this (Billy Woods isn't all that difficult, but I was new to hip hop at the time so it was for me). I usually try to return to it in those cases but often times I know on first listen.

That's interesting - do you still have any kind of trouble with those artists? Does the first impression from when you were less experienced effect your appreciation of a piece today?

Not really, Billy Woods is my favourite hip hop artist now and I love Young.

I donno I can usually tell if im going to like something off one listen, no matter what kind of music it is. Even if its not something I feel like at that moment, theres usually something pulling me back (if I figure ill end up liking it).

I feel the same way a lot of the time, but certain albums just need a while to sink in.

If a lot of people I respect like a musician I don't like I try to figure out what's keeping me from enjoying it. It isn't usually dissonant, atonal, or noise music that I find difficult. Often it's pop music that has no appeal to me but obviously appeals to millions. In those cases, instead of being a curmudgeon I try to appreciate what it is these people like.

Sometimes music is like literature. It takes a some effort sometimes but if it's important to you it should be worth it.

I fund that growing up around someone who loves almost all music equally was important for me to be able to easily like artists like Can, Swans, DG, Whitehouse, and White Suns, as much as bands like Radiohead, Flaming Lips, and Wilco. Really to all my friends a lot of what I play gets shut out immediately.

I save challenging albums for personal listening and classics for hanging out with the crew. Typically I'll save an album that I know will be a lot to take in for long highway drives, headphoned train rides into the city, or morning walks. That way I know I won't be distracted by other things and I can fully soak it in.

I do the same in school I'll usually just throw on something poppies that I don't have to listen to as a whole.

Most forms of extreme music have a trickle down effect towards mainstream music where it becomes more palatable for mass consumption.

I find in most cases I'm already building myself up a tolerance level towards it without even being aware of it by listening to more mainstream derivatives of that music and slowly working my way back to it's source the more accustomed I become to it.

For me, everything started with the Beach Boys. Then I discovered the Beatles, and got into psych through some of their weirder material. Building up the tolerance is the trick. It's at the point now where while I don't regularly listen to any far out, Frownland-type stuff, I've gotten used to it so that the unfamiliarity alone doesn't turn me off.

I force myself to because it's step 4 How to Be Edgy and Revolutionary As a Teenager: 6 Steps

I find progressive rock a little easier to absorb when I'm drunk because my mind is just slow enough to appreciate all the details without being overloaded by mental visions of colors and textures.

:rofl:

^It's funny because it's true.

Haha, that's pretty great.

Generally I'll sit back and really try to piece an album together, rather than treat it like songs to enjoy. Then once I get what it's saying I dissect instrumentation and how they convey what's being said, including vocals and even lyrics as instrumentation. Once I appreciate that, for whatever reason it sounds better to me. Of course stuff can also just sound cool, but I'm talking about, like, the Mount Eerie album or something, where it's infinitely better than its already cool self once you completely understand.

I also have to be edgy and revolutionary.

Interesting topic.

I usually find it *easier* to appreciate "difficult" (which I interpret to mean complex) music than I do simple music. The more stuff that is going on in a musical piece, the more I am going to be drawn into it and pay attention to what's going on.

I would just listen to what you want to listen to. I can get into some fairly experimental stuff but it's never been something I've actively -tried- to do. The older I got, the more 'out there' my music tastes became. If a few years ago you told me I would be listening to ambient music, I might have been skeptical. I think what really got me into experimental music was experimental pop -- artists like Bjork, Karin Dreijer, synthpop, art pop, trip hop, artists like Goldfrapp, who prided themselves on hyper accessibility but simultaneously have an experimental edge (circa Felt Mountain). Over time it just becomes natural. I've never really had to try to enjoy experimental music. It was a very steady and natural transition. I can intellectualize and conceptualize music as much as I want to but at the end of the day it boils down to what the music makes me innately feel.

I guess if you wanted to make a point to engage in experimental music, I would start with something you are at least somewhat familiar with, like if you are really into Hip Hop, I would suggest CLPNNG by Clipping because they blend elements of experimental, electronic, and noise with very cliche Hip Hop motifs.

It's funny because I am not in any conceivable way a fan of mainstream pop so this strategy didn't really apply to me. I was already heavily interested in experimental music. I think my introduction to anything even remotely alternative pop was Speak for Yourself by Imogen Heap. That album kind of blew my mind in a way I didn't think pop music could because it's such a contradiction.

It's a pretty obvious indie / electronica (lol what even is electronica) pop album. It has all of the pop cliches -- all of the ornaments and the hooks and I remember listening to it and enjoying it and then I heard Hide and Seek and it pretty much changed everything me.

I was watching an interview with Grimes once where she described minimal music as the anti pop, because it's just completely bare. There aren't any tricks. There's nothing to hide behind. It's just bare. Every sound is immediately heard. She went on to explain that she was terrified of minimal music, that it was the hardest music she could imagine making because there is nothing to hide behind.

That's why Hide and Seek is so amazing. It begs one to wonder what really is experimental, and what should be considered experimental? To me, Hide and Seek is one of the most experimental works of art in contemporary music because it completely deconstructed her entire formula. It's a ****ing pop album and then halfway through she turns around and completely forgoes nearly every pop cliche. There weren't any tricks. It was just pure pain, completely unadulterated musical perfection, complete emotion, and it's so unbelievably genius to me because of the contrast. If you're in a room and everyone is screaming as loud as they can, another scream is insignificant, but you know what is completely moving? Someone sitting silently. Contrast, to me, is the ultimate experiment.

If you take a noise album and it's 100% noise, is that really experimental? No, it's expected. It becomes normality. It becomes "pop". For Imogen to forego her entire pop aesthetic to make one of the most ethereal, beautiful things I have ever heard, the only song I can safely say is 100% perfect -- that's experimental to me. That is so brave and so courageous. Maybe I'm over thinking it, but that is easily one of the bravest things I've ever seen in art. And it charted really well because people felt it. That song is so famous because it's so unequivocally heartbreakingly beautiful.

When The Knife made Shaking the Habitual... THAT is experimental. They were so terrified of becoming parodies of themselves, of being predictable, that they dropped every single shred of their aesthetic, of what they perceived music to be. How many times have you seen a synthpop / dance pop duo make a dark ambient / drone album? But it was still undeniably The Knife. Probably the most amazing album I've ever heard.

Wow I rambled. What were we even talking about tbh

Interestingly enough, I never really listen with patterns or forms immediately in mind. If I hear something I like, my ear latches onto it. What that thing might be is very... broad. I have a tendency to play genre roulette when I'm listening to music because my expectations of how melody, harmony, and rhythm/meter work together are fluid. Whether or not something is challenging to listen to depends on how you choose to listen to something.

For instance, comparing two figures like Bach and Merzbow, one of the two is typically considered "easy listening." The other, not so much. You have a cultural context that makes Bach's music far easier to digest than Merzbow's. And yet it's extremely misleading to paint Bach with the brush of "easy listening" when you have works of his like The Musical Offering that pretty solidly demonstrate that Bach is anything but easy.

Obviously Bach and Merzbow are two extremely disparate musicians, but the point is that music is only "easy" or "difficult" because of relative exposure and familiarity. Western music hinges on a combination of melody and harmony, whereas rhythm and meter tend to be very simplistic and/or static. To many Western ears, as soon as you remove traditional notions of melody and harmony from the equation, music will tend to move into the realm of impenetrability. When you understand that limit and shift around it, it starts to blur and fade. Or at least, that was the case for me.

depends on my mood, really. the first time I heard anthony braxton I was pretty shaken up, but the second time it was amzing. the same goes for caspar brotzman...

The instrumental production or beat will catch me as difficult in a sense that I will listen to it numerous times over to hear different ways or sounds that carry the song. One of my favorite bands to pull this would be PortisHead.

-m

I have been listening to a lot of experimental German music from the 70s. I won't use the term "Krautrock", as 1. The groups/artists don't like that term and 2. Because the groups that are usually banded together under that label are so diverse and I really don't like most of them.

But stuff like Cluster, Neu, Harmonia, Conrad Schnitzler, I love. Often, there isn't a beat or anything to hold onto right through a track.
So what I tend to do, is just enjoy it in the moment.
I just focus on the sounds as they happen and just listen.
I then find that I return to certain tracks and they become my favourites.

Those guys wanted to work so outside what Anglo or American music was doing, that the norms were rejected.
So, it can be challenging trying to listen to this experimental stuff having grown up on guitar riffs that circle around a steady beat and bassline.
I find it thrilling.

Why not use the term Krautrock tho? I am confused, I mean like it's actually a genre of music, and who gives a rip if the bands don't like the term. It's how people easily identify the music, for others, or themselves. It's not saying that their music is bad, or what have you.


As for me, I love off the wall stuff, and or obscure stuff, and if something is an assault on my ears at first, I'll usually skip the track and find one that is more accessible to my ear. Once that happens and I have determined if the band is worth their salt, I usually come back to the track and hope there is something there that can catch my ear, be it a single note, vocals or whatever and the just listen to it over and over until I can find it's redeeming qualities. I have only run across one album that I can't get into after this method.

For the same reason people don't call Rush "Honky Prog".

Isn't all prog pretty much honky prog though?

You know, it just might be a thing.

It is not a genre of music.
It is a term that groups together bands and artists from Germany who started around the late 60s and early 70s. But certainly not a genre.
Kraftwerk don't sound like Faust. Can don't sound like Cluster.

As for the bands not liking it, it's insulting. Imagine how French musicians would feel about the term Frog Rock.
Although, admittedly, it does sound kind of cool, now that I mention it!!

I've always called it Honky Prog. Or the music of Trollhearts people.

I'll be calling french progressive rock "frog rock" from now on, it's a legitimate abbreviation as well.

Frog is a French Canadian thing though. Gotta have some Canuck to be a frog.

Je suis offended.