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[fish across face]

From an interview in this month's issue of UK mag The Word:  (quoted here)

"If you want to be avant garde you've got to do it in rock'n'roll...You've got to keep the energy. Avant garde as it was...that horse has bolted. Because there's Pharrell and Snoop and they're releasing the Dilla stuff now, basic rhythm tracks that are startling and clear, insulting to technology. It pisses me off that these boys got those ideas and not me. I listen to stuff like that and I'm sitting there stewing."

[Johnny C]

Did John Cale just call Pharrell avant-garde?

Does anyone else hear ominous galloping?

[David_Dovey]

I don't know man. That sentence reads to me like there was a whole section omitted in the middle which would clarify the whole mess. At least, I hope.

[fish across face]

Did John Cale just call Pharrell avant-garde?

He's not exactly alone in that regard.

[McTaggart]

Does anyone have a link to the full article that's from? I think I need a little more context.

[Misereatur]

Yes please.

[Johnny C]

I await the inevitable rap album with dread.

Was John Cale not involved with Dee Dee King?

Also, let me try this again:

Did John God Damn Cale, the man responsible for Nico's The Marble Index among others, just call Pharell, the guy responsible for Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful," avant-garde?

[fish across face]

I guess a key point is that things like 'The Marble Index' may have been the avant garde of their time, but they're old hat now. 

If you're making impenetrable, difficult maudlin stuff, 30 minute noise fests with scrapey laptop sounds, or assaulting a guitar with a screwdriver, you're not doing anything that hasn't been going on for at least 20 years. 

If you're someone like Joanna Newsom then, formally, you're not pushing musical vocab into new ground. 

This is not to say it is or isn't worthwhile music at all, nor whether it has an individual style, I'm just saying it's not pushing any boundaries. 

I do enjoy listening to 20-minutes of guitar pedal fuck around or amplified sounds of a mouse movement interfering with a sound card, but the notion that any of the stuff that gets called "new psych" or "freak folk" or "microsound" or "free improv" is the avant garde of contemporary music is as baffling to me as I guess Pharell et al being avant garde is to you.


I wrote out some of my feelings about the experimental qualities of pop when there was the last thread on pop music having gone to shit, but I just got threats of violence from KharBevNor.

http://forums.questionablecontent.net/index.php/topic,15227.msg466917.html#msg466917

[Valdemar]

I wasn't aware than anyone thought the whole D.I.Y psych-improv-drone-noise cabal was avant garde. Then again I do not think there exists much consensus on what constitutes avantgarde in the first place. Just earlier I was listening to Borbetomagus - Barbed Wire Maggots and I'd be inclined to call that avant garde but Peter Brötzmann did something similar, albeit less extreme, some 14 years before them. I usually end up worming around it by calling something experimental. Can anyone give me an example of accepted avant garde - are we talking minimalist stuff like John Cage and Alvin Lucier? I would think that by the time these avantgarde artists become household names, they are not the vanguard anymore because that probably means that someone has already ripped them off or created something even more forward-thinking. I think the same would apply to whatever Pharrell and his cronies are doing.

[Johnny C]

In summary can I please never read the phrase "death of rock" or anything similar in meaning to it again thank you goodnight.

[fish across face]

Um, did you accidentally post that in the wrong thread, Johnny?

From an interview in this month's issue of UK mag The Word:  (quoted here)

"If you want to be avant garde you've got to do it in rock'n'roll...You've got to keep the energy.

Anyway,

I usually end up worming around it by calling something experimental.

I think that's probably a good idea, because, yes, there's no consensus at all about what the hell avant garde entails.  I do think "experimental" gets used as a byword for "strange" rather than describing an artist who does things by trial and error, exploits accidents, and so on, which is a bit unfortunate...

Have you heard Die Like A Dog Quartet's 'Little Birds Have Fast Hearts'?  It's very quiet for Brotzmann, but I like it.

[Valdemar]

No I haven't. I'll have a look out for that one, thanks

Experimental can be misused but then again I don't think e.g. 'strange rock' works as a genre or does a better job of describing the music at hand. You seem to take experimental a bit more literal than I do though. I do think that if you classify something as experimental people will have a general idea of what to expect. And that's perhaps the problem because if it was truly experimental(or avant garde?)you wouldn't know what to expect. The real question I suppose is if experimental techniques become less experimental when they lose the charm of novelty. To call something experimental is also an easy way out and a fancy way of saying "'tis crazy shit!". It is a decent enough box but as with all attempts at genrifying music it has it's limitations.

[John Curtin]

I don't think the fact that people know what to expect when you say 'experimental' indicates that it's no longer experimental.  I think it has more to do with the fact that you reach a point where the more you fuck around with music the more it sounds like random noise.  There is a handy analogy to make (well, it's not an analogy really, since it is probably still part of the avant garde, right?) to extremely atonal or serialistic music - although you might write two pieces completely differently from different starting points using completely different methods, the brain generally can't discern the patterns written into it, and so they end up sounding more or less the same to the casual listener who doesn't follow it with a score.  Eventually you may as well cut to the chase and get a signal generator to create random white noise. 

Or, for an analogy to visual art, if you keep adding more and more colours to a painting, you will always generally end up with some horrible generic brown.  I guess, at least harmonically, if you keep adding notes you obviously lose the harmonic structure, and so from a certain point the brain is no longer able to discern anything besides a wash of noise; at this point everything sounds the same.  After a while it's not really surprising that people would prefer that the artist just stuck to using one colour at a time, because the pictures used to be a lot more interesting.

[Misereatur]

Eventually you may as well cut to the chase and get a signal generator to create random white noise. 

Actually people do that.

Buy anyway, I do agree with most of what youre saying. For example, Thomas Bonevalet's L'ocelle Mare is one of the most "expirimental" album I have ever heard and it's only one guy with an acoustic guitar (and sometimes Banjo and Harmonica). It basically sounds like folk guitar music ripped to shreds and then put back together the wrong way.
This album (and both albums by Bonevalet's band Cheval de Frise) to guitar based music is like the Second Viennese School composers to 20th century music.

You should all try to track those albums down.