Whether it be by popular musical artists, royalty free artists, on TV shows, themes, adverts etc. It doesn’t have to be an actual song but an instrumental.
For me it has to be an alternative media TV show called ‘On The Edge’ with an economist called Max Keiser. I don’t know if any dopers have hear of him but he’s what you would call a bit of a conspiracy theorist or maybe ‘fringe’ to be less derogatory.
His musical intro along with the animation pretty much says it all. I don’t think I’ve ever heard something similar in my entire life. I even thought of adding it as a ringtone but I don’t want to seem ‘attention seeking’. Despite how humorous it is, I have to say it’s very enjoyable.
Way too broad a question, It could be a tuba being rolled down a fire escape. Or it could be the whole repertoire of Paulo Conte.
In the 1950’s, Stan Kenton’s “City of Glass” was as odd as it could get, but to listen to it today, it would sound ordinary but dated. I’m old enough to remember Spike Jones who played music on any junkyard object that had resonance, and was popular and made a good living at it.
There are so many directions “odd” can go, I could easily submit immediately a dozen songs from my playlist. There are countries in the world whose entire domestic music industry turns out nothing but what would seem odd to the ears of the Sony tyranny forced upon the western listener. Like this, from Ethiopia:
The Most Unwanted Song by Komar & Melamid, perhaps the only song in the world which was scientifically designed to be as annoying as possible. I kinda like it.
I could submit dozens, perhaps hundreds of songs that most would find unlistenable and that most would not classify as “music”. I know people who cannot and would not listen to Phillip Glass, Glenn Branca, Heiner Goebbels, etc… because they don’t even think it’s music.
I am. I love those guys. I’ve always been a big fan of The Party Broke Up
I’ll skip the extended bouts of nothing but feedback (Lou Reed, Neil Young, Null, Boredoms, Melt-Banana, Merzbow, etc.; most people find it unlistenable) and offer a couple of things that people will not want to listen to again because they are so far out there that most would not consider them “music”:
I also have a couple of different recordings of pachinko parlors that are presented as music, but I can’t find any videos for them and I can’t be arsed to make one right now.
TL;DR (or listen): There’s lots of music out there that is so far off the beaten path that many wouldn’t affirm that it’s music in the first place. Stuff like this makes up a sizable portion of my sizable music collection.
Several years ago, I was awakened to Morning Edition doing an interview with Bruce Hornsby - and instead of playing piano-based pop music, he was singing along to some weird electronic stuff. To say the least, it was quite bizarre.
I’m into outsider music. At a certain point it’s impossible to say what’s “oddest” unless there’s another criterion to it. Noise and feedback isn’t odd to me anymore.
But I’m going to nominate Devo’s “Jocko Homo” as the strangest song to gain national currency/recognition on release. It was on the radio and SNL. I can remember not knowing how to take it at all.
Ezra Richardson’s Introitus Diabolus is one of the strangest songs/music pieces I’ve heard. I think it’s sort of like really repetitive classical/avant-garde music sung by a non-classical singer. It’s bizarre.
Rossini’s Comic Duet for Two Cats is wildly weird, but the provenance is suspect. It may have been a more ordinary duet, and the words replaced with meows by someone else.
Mozart’s “Lick my Ass” and Beethoven’s “Lupanzigh is an Ass” are worth noting.
Mozart’s A Musical Joke (divertimento for two horns and string quartet) is wild and weird, and, actually, quite pretty. The more you know about music, the funnier it is.
I have no idea where to go with this for my nomination. The song in the OP doesn’t sound terribly out there to me, and even the Locust songs above have structure and sounds I can latch on to. I’m not sure what I’d go with. Brian Ferneyhough’s String Quartet #6, maybe? But I do have to agree, “odd” in what way? The Ferneyhough still seems a bit “normal” to me as it does use typical Western orchestral instrumentation.
I don’t think anyone really knows how that happened - you had to sell quite a lot of records back then to get to #2. An 8 minute long, highly repetitive avant-garde piece. Perhaps it was a good shagging record.
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