Also fake. Just because you can't come up with a real genre to encompass a bunch of weirdos doesn't mean you have to make a bull**** one.

Just like with progressive rock, experimental ended up also being a defined style (not all artists under the label of course, just like with prog). There needs to be a new term to avoid confusion. Perhaps "actually experimental" will work for a few years.

Disagree. Electroacoustic music just gets a lot of the spotlight.

I just mean to a degree. Enough to cause a bit of label confusion. Like how progressive rock often doesn't mean rock that aims to progress the genre of rock music, but rather tends to refer to bands that really, really like Genesis.

I've heard a fair amount of music labelled as avant garde or experimental that sounded far more familiar than it should for something that supposedly aims to work in uncharted territory.

There's plenty of artists to challenge my statements, of course. Avant garde/experimental just feels like an unearned label at times.

I think that it's incorrectly self-prescribed as well, but what you're describing is just the natural evolution of music. Certain sounds are experimental until they become defined genres. See: krautrock.

It's kind of hard to say when that happens though. Atonality is really an old concept by now. Trout Mask Replica is from the 60's, Schöenberg is ages ago, noise, vocal sample manipulation and formless tunelessness are old ideas by now. I guess what I'm wondering is how many avant garde and experimental artists making music now are truly forward looking. I'm absolutely not saying they're not there, of course.

You don't have to be forward looking to be experimental imo, that's what takes it to the level of avant-garde.

Formlessness and tunelessness are massive umbrellas though, aren't they? I'm certain that there's more to be explored there, as with form...fulness and tune...fulness.

Very little music is atonal btw since that means the entire absence of a key or mode, which makes a lot of very dissonant music "tonal" even though they aren't traditionally pleasant.

I get what you mean though. I even made a thread about it.

So experimental is unambitious avant-garde? :laughing:
But you're probably right.

There is, no doubt. But you can be predictable about it too.

But it's a sliding scale, right? The way I always understood it was, that if it's truly atonal, then it's serial music - since that system was devised exactly to avoid favoring of any particular tonality over another. So I guess atonal just means that there's not any particular key that's clearly dominant, even if one can argue for leanings in various directions.

I think that the experimental umbrella allows more to extrapolate on ideas. A group like Autechre might be pointing directly at Stockhausen for influence, but they're still pushing electronic music into different directions in timbre and perception.

More or less, but I think that once you slide the scale, you're starting to use the term incorrectly.