Truly radical music
 

I've been exploring all sorts of genres pretty intensely since 2009, so at this point, I feel like nothing is shocking anymore. I've heard it all. Any level of noise, atonality, grunting, pummeling, abrasive screeching or avant garde off-meter glass breaking is not going to seem like anything weird to me, so here's the question:

Is there anything left out there that will sound truly transgressive or shocking to me or any other fairly experienced music listener? Anything actually surprising?

I'm not looking for good music; I'm finding plenty of that. I'm only wondering if there's anything out there that's actually going to sound radical to my ears.

So far, the only thing I still find even remotely challenging to listen anymore to is Diamanda Galas.

I don't think any music is "challenging" as such. If something fits that category It's probably "challenging to get through because I don't like it", as opposed to being difficult to understand.

On my phone so CBA finding something that could fit the bill for the thread but I will return.

Have you heard free improv like AMM?

I also never found Galas very challenging the.

Merzbow?

Try really long ambient is you wanna challenge yourself into questioning why you wasted an hour listening to the same thing loop 500 times with a few slight deviations.

I checked out AMM and it struck me as sitting somewhere between ambient/musique concrete and free jazz. Not my thing by any means, but nothing I heard struck me as weird or hard to get through either. That kind of thing feels familiar enough to me by now.

Galas admittedly used to feel more difficult for me but there's still a part of my brain that feels a bit weird about listening to it. It definitely pushes some buttons in my mind:




Yeah I've heard them before. The noise itself is very been there, done that for me in a sense. If there's anything I find really difficult about it it's only in terms of enduring it for a length of time. I'm listening to the album Pulse Demon right now and... it's definitely not something I'd ever put on other than to test my open mindedness and ability to sit through abrasive noise. There's enough noise in city life that I have no real use for this kind of thing. I feel like that in terms of distorted noise, there is nowhere left to go. We've already had stuff that virtually just sounds like white noise and screeching for years now. Where do you go from there?

I hate repetition, so that would probably drive me up the wall real fast :laughing:

@Batlord

I wasn't really thinking about lyrics, but yeah, I can't listen to music that goes against my principles so directly or really openly dumb lyrics. By the way, those two songs sound nearly identical.

@Frownland

The autotuned voice and that annoying klaxon sound is the thing that's offensive to my ears here, but the music is otherwise not that bad, really.

First thing that popped into my head tbh. I do wonder what the percentage split of substance abuse and mental illness was in the making of that album.