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.

I guess there's another question that's obvious to ask here: If you're going to be avant-garde in 2017, where do you go? Cage, atonality, noise, serial music... it's all been done decades ago. A lot of what is called avant-garde doesn't really sound like anything new at this point.

I thought it was just a meme?

What's wrong with the lyrics? :confused:

Full album my dude. And it's glorious.

I wrote that in a dumb way. I meant that the stuff you posted was too daft for my tastes, lyrically, but it reminded me of Nazi punk, which I would find lyrically offensive. Should have made that clearer. That's what happens when you write with multiple thoughts in your head at one time.

Oh joy, just what I need.

There's a reason for that.

Kind of a paradox though. If we could see it coming, would it really be avant-garde?

"Homosexual! Up your ass!"

Poetry.


That's true I guess, but without exactly knowing all that much about the genre (if it can even be called that), I'd expect it to be in a bit of the same spot as progressive is. Expected to move forwards, but really relying more on established conventions at this point.

Nah it wouldn't be avant garde in that instance. It'd be demoted to experimental music, at least based on the way I separate the two terms.

Avant-garde is kind of a difficult criteria to fulfill. Being ahead of everything else and truly pushing at the boundaries of what music even is. At this point, noise, disharmony, lack of structure, sampling, etc... it's all accepted - whether liked or not - as valid means of music production. Avant-garde took the battle, but now most battles are perhaps won.

Experimental is maybe just everything that used to be avant-garde, but is still weird enough that most don't bother listening to it. You can still play around with serialism in 2017 and get weird looks from most people, but it can't be called avant-garde by a long shot.

So avant-garde really has to be something boundary pushing and new, while experimental just needs to play around with the least popular/least understood musical approaches, so to speak.

Not sure if that's even close to how you see it?

I don't know about truly radical but I've never been able to get through Coltrane's Interstellar Space. Somehow it just induces a level of anxiety in me that I can't push through.

?

I guess the bar was set too high to begin with. Something that is subjectively difficult for whatever reason should count as a good suggestion. I'll give it a listen and see how it hits me.

Replace the vocals with actual screaming monkeys and it would have started to be really difficult. The music is harmless enough, but the vocal passages are annoying as hell.

Can't find on youtube anymore.

https://nahstuff.bandcamp.com/album/...orks-2011-2015

Can't post actual link because it censors swearing but look for the song 'Want Part 1 (Light as ****)

Oh wait, here.

Stick this in your pipe and smoke it.

You win the thread. That **** was the most annoying thing I've ever heard.

This one was funny more than anything. I feel bad as I got the sense that the singer was really meaning it very sincerely.
Don't think I'm ready for whatever that was yet.

I'll never be ready for that **** in Batlord's post, ever.

You should try listening to the whole album.

I'm not sure what that would accomplish.

I love that album and rec'd it to Batty in the Torture Chamber, so he had to.
He even kinda appreciated it, although he was obviously annoyed.

When you eventually realize that the five guys are probably improvising the whole album during a live performance then it becomes kind of impressive just how much they can explore the human voice nonstop for an hour or whatever.

Impressive, but hard to listen to. Like opera.

Shaz for "Most mainstream taste 2017".

On this forum, possibly.

Nah, i'm mostly just busting your balls.

You really dropped the Mic.

I think I really do have fairly mainstream tastes compared to members in here, though.

For the last month I've been mostly listening to singer-songwriter records and pretty easy going vocal jazz. Plus some borderline adult-contemporary music like Carly Simon and Julia Fordham.

I'm quite familiar with all sorts of other genres, but do I listen to noise, ambient, progressive rock, experimental, free jazz, or other weird things like that on a regular basis? Unlike seemingly everyone else in here, nope.

If you think that's mainstream then you haven't talked to a young person in quite a long time, which is obviously preferable.

There's got to be something that can be called mainstream among the 35+ crowd.

But yeah ok, I never listen to trap or The Weekend or Jay Z or whatever else teens listen to these days.

You've got dad tastes.

I'm strangely cool with that.

Not a classic rock fan, so not completely stereotypical dad tastes.