I admit: I don't know how to evaluate the quality of much new electronica/chillout/dubstep/EDM, etc.

[rasputin1963]

Lately I've been really trying to listen to much of the Electronica, Chillout, Dubstep, EDM that has come out within the last 10 years. I admit, I often don't know how to evaluate the quality of the track I'm listening to... because styles and criteria have changed so much.

 

For example, listen to this Chillout track created by a young contributor on the website LOOPERMAN. Wow. What do you make of it? My "old" self would've said: It's definitely "Minimalist", has no melody, no "sections" as such (beginning, middle, end), the lyrics are unintelligible, the claps and piano chords strike me as having been EQ'd too bright and loud. But again, i don't know how to critique it, as the "things wrong" with it just might be exactly what the artist wanted, and the whole result may indeed fulfill a meme that is current.

 

Yet there is something here. Even the oldtimers and Luddites among us-- and I'm 52 now-- will have to agree that there is something slightly fascinating about this weird record.

 

Give a listen. What say YOU?

 

ras

[Folder]

When I was in junior high school in the seventies I used to scan album credits to see if any synthesizers were used. I would even purchase albums based on the fact that I knew certain bands used synths.

 

I thought synthesizers made cool futuristic sounds and the people who played them were musical mad scientists. I would see pictures of these large contraptions with tons of wires and knobs and lights flashing like control panels in a space ship and think they looked like some thing out of a science fiction movie. I thought they had to be very expensive and assumed you had to be a genius to operate them.

 

I knew nothing about them but was fascinated by them. And I loved the sounds they made. I bought Dark Side of the Moon specifically for the "On the Run" section and would move the needle back to listen to it over and over again. If you had asked me then I would have definitely said I was into electronic music. A lot of the electronic oriented music from that time period is still very moving and beautiful to me.

 

Fast forward 40 years and I find most electronic music to be irritating. Not only that but the mystic that I has as a kid is completely gone. Most of the time when I hear EDM and electronic pop I picture some kid sitting in his mom's basement smoking pot with a dance beat pounding while he's scrolling thru thousands of his soft synth patches on his Dell laptop trying to find the one sound he thinks the hipsters haven't heard yet.

[nat whilk II]

The tune is nice enough in spite of the amateurish mixing. Pleasant, and there's a nice poignant feel to the vocal. But it's hardly cutting edge - this downtempo style has been around a good twenty years or more. Minimal feel, drum machine and synth bass doing most of the work with synth pad washes and a kittenish, soulful vocal - there's no end of that kind of material out there.

 

I know the feeling - things have been happening in the electronic music world and I lose touch, have no feel for the latest thing. So I dip back in and find a perfect Babel of bands and micro-genres and material that is hard to understand what the fuss is all about.

 

But with a little persistance, I always finds material that grabs me, so I just keep collecting along those lines and develop my own tastes that way. There's way too much material being put out, most of it of very marginal quality, to somehow keep up or get a feeling for Now. There is no "Now" now. It's way too easy to find yourself wandering forever among all the fragmentation and ephemerality.

 

One way to get a bit of a handle on things is to find a label that you tend to like and check out their releases on some sort of regular basis. I visit Ghostly International's website on a regular basis and find this and that. Having a bit of a gatekeeper/curator isn't such a bad thing.

 

Recentish downtempo/chill stuff I have taken to:

 

 

[YOUTUBE]X1cgYL2NBIM[/YOUTUBE]

 

(you need subs on this one)

[YOUTUBE]iSAs4DVdXew[/YOUTUBE]

 

 

[YOUTUBE]eE6b0F0AimQ[/YOUTUBE]

 

 

 

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

[blue2blue]

Lately I've been really trying to listen to much of the Electronica, Chillout, Dubstep, EDM that has come out within the last 10 years. I admit, I often don't know how to evaluate the quality of the track I'm listening to... because styles and criteria have changed so much.

 

For example, listen to this Chillout track created by a young contributor on the website LOOPERMAN. Wow. What do you make of it? My "old" self would've said: It's definitely "Minimalist", has no melody, no "sections" as such (beginning, middle, end), the lyrics are unintelligible, the claps and piano chords strike me as having been EQ'd too bright and loud. But again, i don't know how to critique it, as the "things wrong" with it just might be exactly what the artist wanted, and the whole result may indeed fulfill a meme that is current.

 

Yet there is something here. Even the oldtimers and Luddites among us-- and I'm 52 now-- will have to agree that there is something slightly fascinating about this weird record.

 

Give a listen. What say YOU?

 

ras

 

I can quite easily see Folder's imagined kid-in-basement putting this together from a loop library.

 

Soundwise, it sounded pretty thin on my NS10's (with my customary everyday, fairly aggressive smile curve dialed in from my more or less complementary Yamaha Natural Sound amp's passive EQ control set to about '4' -- where '10' puts a -30 dB dip into the curve -- but which is set to be roughly in 'balance' vis a vis my flat-run Event 20/20 bas). When I switched over to the Events, I found out where all the bass was -- but even with the events, which are only down 3 dB at 37 Hz, some bass notes were just way down there, barely registering as the fundamental sunk down to the low 30s or high 20s.

 

The vocal drops sounded way over-familiar -- a bad sign now that I barely ever listen to electronica/downtempo. Maybe that's because I've now heard the track a few times and they just repeat, but, you know, whatever.

 

TBH, this very much sounds like it could be from about '98 or '99. As in... last century.

 

 

Now, specifics out of the way, let me say that I feel as at sea listening to contemporary electronica as you seem to. Still, when I do listen, much of it sounds very cookie-cutter, very uninspired and very uninspiring. There are a handful of 'new' elements since the last century when I was, indeed, pretty involved, but not many... the same canned vocal drops and (especially) vocal tuning that drove me away are still well in play. There are some borrowed elements from trap music in some stuff but, really, I just don't feel like there's been much of any progress in the music in the dozen or so years I've been out of the loop. Horrible pun intended.

 

 

I'm going to have to come back in a while and listen to Nat's tracks. I'm listening to the first of them and it's got an interesting vibe. I guess, really, it mostly sounds distinctive because of the heavy use of the breathing/vocal sample -- which walks right up to the edge of driving me nuts (I had a live electronica loop act in the 90s, loops make me claustrophobic now)... but I DO really like the Bowie-ese 'bum-de-bum-de-bum-bum...' chant part. I am a sucker for that stuff...

 

[MikeRivers]

Music is for enjoyment. If you don't enjoy what you're hearing, or if you have to work too hard to find some "good" in it, then it's OK for it not to be your cup of tea. I like songs with words that are clear and make sense, and tunes I can dance to or at least tap my foot to, even if it's in time signatures that read like a set of socket wrenches.

 

Unless I'm trying to learn a tune, I never work very hard at listening to music. If it just doesn't grab me, I'll let it play through. If it annoys me, I'll listen to something else or go take a walk (without earphones, thank you).

 

I understand that some people enjoy being challenged by music and I have no problem with that. It's just not my thing. I do my deep thinking about other things and let music entertain me and not suck me in.

[nat whilk II]

I figure there are two basic reasons I don't take to some something musically. The first is that it just doesn't meet the internal criteria that I've developed over time by listening, study, and some thought.

 

The second is that I just can't hear it because it's doing something too far outside of my expectations, so I "hear" it in a manner analogous to the cow watching a passing train - that is with full perception and near-zero understanding. (Look Elsie, another Big Noise Thing!)

 

My inner critieria I judge to be always too narrow. If I just follow it all the time, I don't get outside some constricted circle of experience. I might proudly call this circle "my taste" but I could just as well call it my lack of taste, in that everything outside the circle is excluded.

 

Nothing for me is cooler than having some music or other art bloom upon my understanding after years of incomprehension. OMG, I'll say, I never got that until now. I hope to be able to say that from time to time up to the very end of my time.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

 

[UstadKhanAli]

It's really this easy.

 

If you enjoy music I like, it's in really great taste.

 

If you enjoy music that I can't stand, it's in really poor taste.

 

There. If I can be of service in any other way, please let me know.

[blue2blue]

The criterion is pretty much the same as any music: If it grabs you emotionally and you want to hear it again' date=' it's good! [/quote']

 

Music is for enjoyment. If you don't enjoy what you're hearing, or if you have to work too hard to find some "good" in it, then it's OK for it not to be your cup of tea. I like songs with words that are clear and make sense, and tunes I can dance to or at least tap my foot to, even if it's in time signatures that read like a set of socket wrenches.

 

Unless I'm trying to learn a tune, I never work very hard at listening to music. If it just doesn't grab me, I'll let it play through. If it annoys me, I'll listen to something else or go take a walk (without earphones, thank you).

 

I understand that some people enjoy being challenged by music and I have no problem with that. It's just not my thing. I do my deep thinking about other things and let music entertain me and not suck me in.

 

I definitely appreciate the notion that one doesn't need to justify the music one enjoys; if you enjoy it, you enjoy it, it is, for you, in that time and place, good music. (This, of course, does not apply to late night drunken dorm room discussions about favorite bands. That discussion is sport, itself, not a discussion of aesthetics. It's a backed off game of the dozens, substituting one's favorite band for one's mother. And, yes, I loved to play it. )

 

 

That said, I might never have got past the doo wop I loved as a kid (and still love) had I not started pushing my boundaries.

 

I'm not sure precisely how old I was when I saw Disney's original Fantasia, but it put it in my head that there was something to this classical music stuff. Before that, I just knew it as the province of my dad's old 78 rpm albums that -- after an unfortunate incident (who knew a child stepping on a shellac record could crack it in half?!?) -- I was forbidden from getting into. As with my dad's guns, being forbidden didn't stop me; fortunately, I didn't break any more records and my dad didn't sell all his old 78's like he did with his guns the second time I got in them. (I also got sent to a gun-safety class and I -- or others -- may well be alive today because of it. I was a right little idiot about guns before it, having 'learned' about guns from TV. 'Oh, he'll be OK, he only got shot in the leg. Gee, sure is a whole lot of blood, though...')

 

Similarly, when my beloved twist (finally, a dance even a child could do) was pushed rudely out of the way by the flood of discotheque dances that followed, and surf guitar music was pushed off the radio by treacly beach teen pop -- and then, ugh, the can't-sing-straight Brit Invasion -- I turned to FM radio (I was 12) where I discovered folk music (among others, the old John Davis folk show that would later end up on Pacifica stations), jazz, and -- whoa -- classical music that didn't sound like it was a bunch of mosquitos under a blanket (like on the one AM classical station as it sounded over my own AM transistor radio. It was about this time that my fascination with walkie talkies shifted to hi fi and audio (for one thing I had a falling out with my best friend when he shot a bird with a BB gun and I saw it lying wounded, gasping for air and I just saw white and roundhouse punched him [he was a year older] -- so no one to talk to on my kit-built walkies).

 

 

Anyhow, I went through a similar thing when I was 15 turning 16 and got intrigued by the emerging non-radio pop of capital R Rock... a lot of it, the acid rock stuff, was a lot like the electric blues I heard on FM mixed with folk and also with what struck me as surf-style electric guitar leads.

 

It took more than a minute to find my way in the new-to-me milieu (this would be '66-'67), where my (less than entirely respected) peers already seemed well-versed. But I quickly realized that most of them only knew the current top hits. And, while the 60s charts were arguably dotted with some real standouts, it was still mostly the province of treacly love songs ("Honey") and insufferably moronic novelty tunes ("Yummy, Yummy, Yummy (I Got Love in My Tummy)"). So I had to dig. Happily, I had a few friends (and one cousin) who were happy to turn me on to stuff like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Yardbirds, and such.

 

As this twig was so bent, then I so grew... my fascination with synths started even before my return to rock (and, of course, synths arrived in rock for the most part after I did) but it spread to keyboards in general, and that led me to the progressive camp, even as I still passionately loved the acid rock I'd etched my teeth on. I quickly tired of the bombastic excesses of stuff like ELP, but was happy to dig a little deeper and find outfits like Family (and, yeah, I had a soft spot for Yes, around the Fragile period -- Bruford and Squire! Now that was a capital R rock rhythm section) and Can but also highly ironic bands like 70s era Sparks. Meanwhile I was slaking other musical cravings with aggressive prog/fusion' like Mahavishnu Orchestra.

 

But the radio stuff -- including on what still laughingly tried to call itself 'underground' FM -- was getting as annoyingly banal as AM had been in the 60s. By the middle of the 70s, I was really, really ready for something new... I guess I was legion, because I soon saw signs of a musical and cultural sea change around me.

 

I'd already cut off my near waist-length hair back in '73 -- because when I went to see Traffic, one of my then-favorite bands, as I waited (and waited) to get into the venue (Santa Monica Civic, as I recall it), I kept looking around at all my fellow longhairs, and at least half of them appeared to be not just losers but first class AH's. To this day I can't figure out why they would be into a smart band like Traffic, but WTF, eh?

 

And the next day I got the number of a haircutter about 40 miles away. (He made me look like Wolfman Jack, I thought I'd be getting some nice, hip, layered thing but he charged me an extraordinary amount to make me look like a 50s low rider who'd just unleashed a half can of Aquanet on his tsunami of a pompadour. I washed it all out immediately, of course, but the die was cast and I moved forward 'into the 80s' as we liked to say in the second half of the 70s.)

 

Believe me, by the mid-80s, I was shaking my head at the irony* of it all as I drove around listening to treacly new wave synth pop on what passed for the 'modern rock' station in town.

 

That was about the time I stopped listening to commercial radio altogether. I'd been engineering about half a decade and had spent a lot of time working on what everyone had hoped would be a big breakthrough EP (it did well for its genre, got fair local college and some commercial play, sold at least 25k copies [which didn't seem like much in those days, even for local indie product, but, I guess, was respectable, all in all) but we realized that the barrier to further success was payola, plain and simple, spelled out to us by no less than the MD on the aforementioned 'modern rock' station.

 

After that, I relied on word of mouth, indie mags, recommendations from a few friendly, tuned-in record store guys. In the late 90s, as the online music scene started becoming practical, I took to that instantly and began listening to a wide swathe of indie rock, downtempo and other electronica. I'd had a love/hate thing with synth since the 80s -- I loved synths on one hand but hated a lot of the music being made with them on the other. Getting away from commercial radio was enormously freeing and expanded my horizons considerably.

 

For the last decade, of course, I've been delighted to have an increasingly broad universe of music, new and old, at my fingertips via streaming. It's meant a huge blossom of freedom to explore all the music I had wanted to check out in the past or thought about buying but couldn't afford to. (I have 1200 LPs, 500+ CDs, 200 singles + 78's.)

 

And I do still end up pushing myself to try to expand my horizons and tastes.

 

But these days, I somewhat ironically* find myself having to push hardest to get myself to listen to top of the pops, trying to figure out why the hell anyone wants to listen to some of that crap.

 

But I have faith. I can figure it out. Or die trying.

 

 

*Yeah, I know -- but they changed the dictionary. Live with it. I'm trying to...

 

__________________

 

 

PS... Oh wait... I was so fascinated by my intriguing life story that I forgot to address the topic of the thread... LOL

 

Working across genres as a free-lance engineer and producer as I once did, I put in a fair amount of off-the-job thinking time to what makes different genres and sub-genres tick -- and how to come to some sort of aesthetic understanding and contextualization of music I don't necessarily bond with.

 

But that is a very uphill endeavor for someone like me, someone with very distinct tastes -- sometimes tastes that even I don't understand.

 

 

For instance, I listen to a lot of new roots/Americana/neo-folk. Some of it I bond with instantly. Other stuff, not so much. Sometimes I can't put my finger on why.

 

With an act like the Mumfords, it was instant gag reflex -- and not to hard for me to enumerate the ways they diverge from what I like.

 

But with something like the Punch Brothers, it's much harder to figure out just why I can't seem to warm up to them. They're good players, seem like nice guys, the main dude has got the nod from no less than Garrison Keillor to be the new host of PHC, no auto-tune ; on paper I should love these guys. So why do I have to push myself to even put them on? Should I keep trying?

 

I'm tempted to ask Mike R what he thinks of the Punch Brothers...

[UstadKhanAli]

I'm grateful for Aquarius Records, where you can hear amazing stuff online and read these cool reviews. http://www.aquariusrecords.org/

 

I'm grateful for college radio.

 

And I'm grateful for Spotify, YouTube, and other online stuff that make it possible to hear all this amazing stuff and explore different kinds of music.

[nat whilk II]

But with something like the Punch Brothers, it's much harder to figure out just why I can't seem to warm up to them. They're good players, seem like nice guys, the main dude has got the nod from no less than Garrison Keillor to be the new host of PHC, no auto-tune ; on paper I should love these guys. So why do I have to push myself to even put them on? Should I keep trying?

 

Same thing here - I've spun their material a good dozen times, and I never remember any of it a month later, just doesn't stick.

 

Their chops are to die for, and they are not just show-offs. But I keep coming up against what strikes me as a meandering, hookless tendency, a sort of melodrama in the lyrics, and a sort of extremely detailed formlessness....hard to put my finger on.

 

But since they are working a very unusual mix of influences, I feel like I should try again later - I may be trying too hard or just not hearing what they do because they don't fit any of my templates.

 

I always felt somewhat the same way about the Dave Matthews Band. Totally my demographic, but....they never move the needle for me.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

 

 

[MikeRivers]

I'm tempted to ask Mike R what he thinks of the Punch Brothers...

 

If you were to ask, I'd tell you that they work too hard at making music that only they and people with like minds can understand. I can listen to about 3 minutes and say "Man, thouse guys can sure pick" and in the next minute I'd realize that I couldn't remember what the melody was, because it keeps changing.

 

I wouldn't buy a recording of the Punch Brothers, but when I hear one of their tunes on the radio, I don't turn it off, but I don't tune my brain into it either.

 

Dawg music - The David Grisman Quintet - started that detailed composition style of string band music back in the late 1970s. I once asked someone at mandolin camp who was leading a workshop going through one of those tunes how people learn to play them. She said "Oh, there's lots of transcriptions on the Internet. Nobody plays this from memory." Well, Grisman did, but he was playing with a band that knew the structure, the chord progression (which was often quite complex) and could improvise like the good jazz musicians that they were. It worked pretty well.

 

What I'm finding, in my dotterage, and reverting here to the roots of that music, is that many of the young old time string bands (I'm not talking about Dawg any more) who are playing older music miss the subtlty of slightly different takes on the tune each time through - if you're paying attention, you realize that the fiddle didn't play the same notes as the last time through the tune, but you always know what the melody is. Many of this generation's players of this kind of music just play the tune the same way over and over and over, maybe playing an octave lower occasionally. It makes me wonder how they know when to end - and the answer is when the fiddler sticks his foot out.

 

Then there's the other extreme - new old time musicians who seek out or compose "crooked" tunes - those that have extra beats or extra measures and aren't "square." Those sound like mistakes to me, and I'm pretty sure that if there's an "origianl" version, the player was just daydreaming when he stuck on that extra phrase now and then, and the modern player caught on to that mistake and plays it every time as if, if it were written at all, it was written that way.

 

Bah, humbug! I say.

 

 

 

 

[rasputin1963]

Blue, you are so funny. .png' alt='16x16_man-very-happy.png.58f4fc7892e8041ddc6575c8d5db3ad6.png' alt='very-happy'>.png'>

 

When I got a real Fender-Rhodes in 1976, I used to run it through a pedal phase-shifter/flanger. It was all too cool and novel to me. This used to drive all the adults crazy, and I was told in no uncertain terms that these FX were to be used very sparingly. Also, my Dad always insisted that, when I sat down to the keys, I play a REAL SONG, in its entirety. Beginning, middle, end. He thought it the height of amateurishness to twiddle about with only two chords or one melodic snippet played outside of a full song structure.

 

Now I hear the young'uns doing exactly those things that would've gotten me a tongue-lashing in my youth: a song of constant phase-shifting, or a two-chord ostinato, or a single bar of melody played ad inf., or a musical motif that doesn't "go" anywhere appreciable, etc. [Lyrics teacher extraordinaire Sheila Davis said a song must always have a "payoff"... a sort of reckoning or moment-of-truth near the end of it that climaxed and drove home the whole song's intent and meaning. You know, like Vicki Lawrence admitting that SHE was the one who'd shot Andy Warlow and her own brother's cheap wife. Or like Kenny Rogers reminding you that sometimes you have to fight to be a man. Or The Buoys finally insinuating what might've happened to Timothy. Nowadays most pop songs do NOT have a "payoff" at all.]

 

This partly accounts for some of my modern uncertainty... When Lou Reed plays a two-chord ostinato in "Walk On The Wild Side", he is suggesting that maybe the milieu of the song is a dopey urban heroin nod that hasn't the strength to muster a third chord; but today, the one-bar ostinato is presented with no especial metaphor... it just... IS.

[nat whilk II]

 

 

Dawg music - The David Grisman Quintet - started that detailed composition style of string band music back in the late 1970s. I once asked someone at mandolin camp who was leading a workshop going through one of those tunes how people learn to play them. She said "Oh, there's lots of transcriptions on the Internet. Nobody plays this from memory." Well, Grisman did, but he was playing with a band that knew the structure, the chord progression (which was often quite complex) and could improvise like the good jazz musicians that they were. It worked pretty well.

 

I saw Grisman perform at the old Armadillo Headquarters in Austin around '77 or so. I was intrigued - they were terrific musicians - but those guys wore me out playing long, long improv sections. Not that much dynamic range in a mandolin...not as bad as a five minute harpsichord jam, but the audible subtlety morphed into felt monotony after forty-five minutes or so into a much longer set. Guess I was brought up on too much whiz-bang from electric guitar players.

 

nat whilk ii

[MikeRivers]

"Don't bore us. Get to the chorus."

 

Remember there was this other band that was mighty popular around that time that was known for their long improvisations, making a song with 3 minutes worth of words into a 25-minute song that they sung the words to at first, jammed and jammed, and then sung the words at the end to remind you of what song they were playing. The Dreadful Greats or something like that.

 

The Grisman-Garcia acoustic album was OK, but there were a hundred coffee house bands that did the same songs better. But they didn't get paid as well.

 

[blue2blue]

Blue' date=' you are so funny. [img']http://www.harmonycentral.com/forum/core/images/smilies/16x16_smiley-.png[/img]

 

When I got a real Fender-Rhodes in 1976, I used to run it through a pedal phase-shifter/flanger. It was all too cool and novel to me. This used to drive all the adults crazy, and I was told in no uncertain terms that these FX were to be used very sparingly. Also, my Dad always insisted that, when I sat down to the keys, I play a REAL SONG, in its entirety. Beginning, middle, end. He thought it the height of amateurishness to twiddle about with only two chords or one melodic snippet played outside of a full song structure.

 

Now I hear the young'uns doing exactly those things that would've gotten me a tongue-lashing in my youth: a song of constant phase-shifting, or a two-chord ostinato, or a single bar of melody played ad inf., or a musical motif that doesn't "go" anywhere appreciable, etc. [Lyrics teacher extraordinaire Sheila Davis said a song must always have a "payoff"... a sort of reckoning or moment-of-truth near the end of it that climaxed and drove home the whole song's intent and meaning. You know, like Vicki Lawrence admitting that SHE was the one who'd shot Andy Warlow and her own brother's cheap wife. Or like Kenny Rogers reminding you that sometimes you have to fight to be a man. Or The Buoys finally insinuating what might've happened to Timothy. Nowadays most pop songs do NOT have a "payoff" at all.]

 

This partly accounts for some of my modern uncertainty... When Lou Reed plays a two-chord ostinato in "Walk On The Wild Side", he is suggesting that maybe the milieu of the song is a dopey urban heroin nod that hasn't the strength to muster a third chord; but today, the one-bar ostinato is presented with no especial metaphor... it just... IS.

 

You think of a 43 year old song with swing syncopation, a Raelettes-like female back-up chorus, and a walking stand-up bass line as modern -- and I'm funny?

 

 

 

Thanks to everyone on feedback on the Punch brothers. I really was thinking it was just me. One of my 3DW pals (actually an old synth teacher from the 80s, er, he's 7 or 8 years younger than me, so not that old ) keeps hyping them to me (he's a big fan of Grisman and Garcia, too, actually) and then there was the Prarie Home Companion host thing...

 

Now that I know others feel so similarly, I feel more in the mainstream. Well, not the mainstream...

[MikeRivers]

 

Thanks to everyone on feedback on the Punch brothers. I really was thinking it was just me. One of my 3DW pals keeps hyping them to me (he's a big fan of Grisman and Garcia, too, actually) and then there was the Prarie Home Companion host thing...

 

Not that it has anything to do with this topic, but is a member of the Punch Brothers going to be the new host of Prairie Home Companion after Garrison retires next year? I didn't think any of them were funny enough or laid back enough to fill his shoes.

 

 

 

[blue2blue]

Indeedy. Chris Thile is slated to fill Keillor's well-worn moccasins.

 

A Prairie Home Replacement

Can Chris Thile—or anyone else—ever take Garrison Keillor's place?

[Folder]

 

[YOUTUBE]X1cgYL2NBIM[/YOUTUBE]

 

(you need subs on this one)

[YOUTUBE]iSAs4DVdXew[/YOUTUBE]

 

 

[YOUTUBE]eE6b0F0AimQ[/YOUTUBE]

 

 

 

I don't know what I would have thought about these tracks if I was hearing them for the first time as a high school kid in the seventies but hearing them now they do nothing for me.

 

But this one still gives me the warm fuzzies:

 

[video=youtube;NVeHtDHogLg]

[MikeRivers]

Indeedy. Chris Thile is slated to fill Keillor's well-worn moccasins.

 

I'm not a dedicated PHC listener, but sometimes when I'm in the car and it's on (I usually keep the radio tuned to the NPR station) I'll keep listening. I side with those who listen for the patter and stories and find the music enjoyable. I wouldn't go out of my way to listen to a show because I heard that a musician or band that I like was going to be on.

 

I think that under Thile's reign, it might go more in the direction of Mountain Stage, which would be a good thing if he kept it closer to roots music and left the alt-country and weepysingersongwriter soloists accompanied by the house band to other shows.

 

We'll see, I guess.

 

 

[nat whilk II]

What's the use of trying to find some easy segue from Garrison Keillor, anyway? No one could "be like him" in any sense except unintentional parody. But we'll see what they come up with....see if they maintain the potpourri-around-the-radio vibe or not. There are lots of great storytellers around - it might even be refreshing to have a broader base of talent to draw upon even as great as Keillor has been.

 

nat whilk ii

[blue2blue]

Agreed!

 

Although, if he was still alive... maybe Charlie Weaver?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Arquette#Charley_Weaver

[Hard Truth]

Here's how to judge music or any other type of art :

1. Does the piece successfully achieve its goal-if its dance music does it make you want to dance? If it's a sad song does it convey the sadness? If it's an intellectual type of music is it thought provoking and stimulating?

2. Is the piece innovative, original or different?

3. Does the piece display exceptional skill or intellectual ability? That skill could be in the complexity or elegance of the composition, the technical and musical ability in the playing, the quality of the sound design, the quality of the lyrics and/or the quality of the recording.

4. Does the piece and/or the performance have exceptional emotional power, personality, energy, charisma, intensity, musicality honesty? This is the quality that many great performers bring to the music that separates them from others who are equally skilled, it is their ability to bring their character, and level of intensity and commitment to the music.

 

Post-rock genres require a whole new way of listening to music. Melody and harmonic structure are relatively unimportant. The musician's technical abilities and personality are almost irrelevant. The important quality is the artist's ability to develop interesting sonic textures by or combining and layering found, played and synthesized sounds, rhythms and music. However, it is not surprising that using time-tested compositional techniques to balance continuity with variety is still effective. Every genre of music demands a different set of criteria for judging quality and most people won't go to the trouble to try. I make a point of investigating new music and trying to get an understanding, but quite often my first reaction to something truly innovative is negative. Since 98% of everything is crap it takes a while to find the good stuff.

[Hard Truth]

Now, I'll apply my criteria to an example song, James Brown's Super Bad. I chose this song because many people who tend to judge music strictly on the level of skill or the intellectual content will judge it as being 'bad" and/or inconsequential even though many others acknowledge it as a classic in its genre.

 

1. Does the piece successfully achieve its goal? Yes, it is a dance song that is extremely danceable. It succeeds in conveying the singer/writer's state of mind and physical exuberance.

 

2. Is the piece innovative, original or different? Yes, the rhythm is unique and in a new style created by the artist. Also, the avant garde/free jazz alto sax solo was very unusual for a dance song at that time and paved the way for the further exploration of the combination of jazz, free improv and funk rhythms by artists like Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, the Contortions and many others.

 

3. Does the piece display exceptional skill or intellectual ability? That skill could be in the complexity or elegance of the composition, the technical and musical ability in the playing, the quality of the sound design, the quality of the lyrics and/or the quality of the recording.

Yes, the rhythm are notably precise and tight, the changes and stops are flawless, the horn parts perfect, and the sax solo is hot.

 

4. Does the piece and/or the performance have exceptional emotional power, personality, energy, charisma, intensity, musicality honesty? This is the quality that many great performers bring to the music that separates them from others who are equally skilled, it is their ability to bring their character, and level of intensity and commitment to the music. Yes, James' vocal performance and the music are powerful, energetic and intense.

 

The song is judged to be great.

[rasputin1963]

Thank you, Hard Truth. This is indeed the kind of "brass tacks" discussions that help me the most. One can always pull the camera back into broad perspective and simply say, "If you like it, it's good." Yet I like to discuss these nuances of aesthetic thought that you have proffered. The only time I can ever turn off my intellect during music listening is if I am very drunk or stoned or some combination thereof, but if I am at all lucid, I start thinking about these subtle criteria.

[Hard Truth]

The problem with "If you like it, it's good." is that you are likely to miss out on good music that you could enjoy with more familiarity.

 

I like to take on the challenge of checking out new or unfamiliar (to me) genres. If I get a recommendation for that genre from a trusted source I'll put in a bit more effort by listening a few times before giving up on a genre or artist. Actually, since at least 1% of every genre is good, I don't hate any genres. However some of the narrowest electonica subgenres don't appeal to me at all, while others subgenres do.

 

By the way, as far as electronica/dance etc go, I'm hearing the freshest and most creatively crafted sounds from Trap Music artists. [video=youtube;_nWRC7_yxAE]