Share music (or soundscapes) you care for, which push the boundaries of convention.
Share: it’s great if you can include a YouTube link or some such so we can experience it directly, but that’s not necessary. What is important, whether or not there’s a link, is that you say a little bit about how it pushes the boundaries, and why you personally care for it.
Pushing boundaries: the original idea for this thread was that the particular musical scale that is dominating at the moment is somewhat arbitrary, as are the particular frequencies of its notes, and I imagine there are other musical conventions that are accepted at face value but which are equally arbitrarily entrenched.
I’m sure brilliant musicians have explored outside these boundaries, and brilliant dopers have explored their works. But although I’d like to see some of that, I also don’t want to strictly limit it to that if you have music that pushes the boundaries in other ways.
What I’m not looking for is pure noise, or anti-music:
Care for: you should like the piece, or at least some aspect of it. If it has to be a difficult piece, describe what is of value or interest to you and why. Or note at which time point it has a good part.
And yes, this is a selfish post. I’m not a musician, so I won’t be able to contribute to the technical boundary pushing because I don’t know enough about it. I will try to find some pieces that push boundaries in other ways though, since that doesn’t require background knowledge.
Pretty much anything by Harry Partch. His music can only be played on instruments that he invented. I heard a concert of his stuff a few years ago and afterwards they let the audience come down on stage and look at the instruments.
Yat-Kha pushed the boundaries for what’s usual in rock vocals by using traditional Tuvan throat singing vocals, which is a bit beyond even Metal’s “cookie monster” techniques - Coming Buddha and Love Will Tear Us Apart.
This is a piece by Matt Schickele called “The Splits”. Extraordinarily, each player plays only half of a string instrument, creating an interesting soundscape. The music is witty, playful, structured, and fiercely intelligent.
I am very interested to see how a piece like that goes down here. I really do admire this piece greatly.
The people who started using bits of electrical contraptions as instruments are usually fairly interesting, if not likeable, and certainly not danceable. Here’s Edgar Varese’s Poem Electronique, which I do quite like - YouTube . The Orb, for example, certainly were aware of this.
Gentle Giant stated proudly on the inner sleeve of their second album Acquiring the Taste (1971):
[snip]“It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary music at the risk of being very unpopular. We have recorded each composition with the one thought - that it should be unique, adventurous and fascinating.” [snip]
Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire’s theme to Dr Who is worth mentioning. It’s one of the first pieces of electronic music, and was created at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Nothing as sophisticated as a Synthesizer existed in 1963. Each note had to be recorded seperately. Hundreds of pieces of tape were spliced together to make the final composition.
My favorite is Glenn Branca’s Symphony #1. Here’s the first movement. The other movements are in the related links. It’s an orchestra of guitars, drums, trumpets, saxophones, french horns, and trash cans. Half of the fun is listening to both the first and fourth movements build, and I still get parts of the third movement stuck in my head. It’s a symphony that spends a lot of time morphing in the middle but the beginning and the end both explode.
I came to him through Sonic Youth, who have two members in the orchestra in that recording, and have put out quite a bit of challenging music themselves over the years. They’re still my favorite rock band after about 25 years. But their music is never as big and sweeping as Branca’s first symphony, IMHO.
On edit, I couldn’t resist linking to the fourth movement.
Soft Machine did a lot of combining jazz and rock and just about everything else. Their album Third was called the best rock album of all time by The Village Voice when it came out. Ignoring the hyperbole, it’s still a towering achievement in progressive rock/jazz/you name it. The Softs were extremely influential (Gentle Giant, for one, were followers), though never commercially successful.
Third consists of four long tracks (making it the best bargain on iTunes):
Facelift
Slightly All the Time
Moon in June
Out-Bloody-Rageous
Mr. Bungle. Jumping frantically from genre to genre in a seemingly random and disjointed way, but somehow still a cohesive composition, whole. Genius. An acquired taste perhaps, but still genius.
Some of their stuff is based on conventional rules & structure. But most of it will rack your brain. Particularly their older stuff. Like Meet the Residents, Not Available, Eskimo, and Mark of the Mole.