Which Elements Draw You To Your Preferred Genres/Artists/Composers?

[innerspaceboy]

I'd love to hear about the elements that draw you to your preferred genres, artists, and composers. Members can feel free to chime in and recommend other artists/genres which embody similar principles to help our community discover new sounds - a social approach to Gnod/RYM/music-map/etc. And it's just interesting to see what it is specifically that appeals to our fellow forum mates about our favorite music.

I'll go first to kick things off.

My favorite genre is instrumental ambient/drone/post-minimalism. As such, I value soundworks which embrace and embody the creative principles Eno and Schmidt outlined in their Oblique Strategies oracular deck.

I value long-form works which initially appear static but attentive listening reveals gradually-shifting elements and subtle complexity. I listen actively and attentively for initial chronological surveys of an artist's catalog or the releases of a niche record label, as well as passively for 8-12-hour sleep meditation.

Just a few cards which illustrate this musical philosophy include:

"Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency."

"Don't break the silence."

"Emphasize the flaws."

"Honor thy error as a hidden intention."

"Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame."

"Repetition is a form of change."

"Shut the door and listen from outside."

"Use 'unqualified' people"

"Infinitesimal gradations."

"Listen in total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly."

and

"Into the impossible."

I endeavor to incorporate these lateral thinking principles into not just music, but in every action of my daily life. I find it freeing and empowering.

So what moves you about the music you listen to?

(Forgive me if there is a necrothread about this already - I didn't see one.)

[Trollheart]

My own first love has been prog rock (duh) and this began mostly with my experiences both of ELO and of Genesis. What I loved about the former was the way they melded classical music with rock/pop tropes - I had never heard that before - and the latter it was the intricate compositions, lyrical matter and the emotional impact the music had on me. Prior to buying my first albums (around 1980 I think, when I began working) all I had was what was on the radio, so to be able to hear music that was not formulaic pop was a real eye-opener (or perhaps I should say ear-opener) for me. I had no idea there existed songs over three or four minutes long, or that bands wrote music on subjects other than girls, booze, cars and keepin' on keepin' on. Prog rock led me along a somewhat meandering path to AOR, which I enjoy for its powerful keyboard work and choruses, even if a lot of it does sound the same, a "gateway" band here being Asia, leading me to the likes of Boston and Journey. Metal I had never had much time for, but got into after seeing Iron Maiden on the TV and buying The Number of the Beast, after which I was hooked. For someone who was into long, involved songs that lasted ten or even twenty minutes, the immediacy and sheer power of metal spoke to me as a young man, and fired something up in me. I was never anything you could seriously call a rebel, but I liked hearing about people who wanted to be, who exorted me to be (even if I had no intention of following that advice) and I think, again, it was all a sort of reaction to or backlash against the pap that was being churned out of the radio.

Overall, in a general sense then, what I look for in an artist, genre or even song:

Music that speaks to me, i.e., makes an emotional connection to me, whether through the lyric or simply through the music itself.

Music that doesn't talk down to me.

Lyrics that educate me or make me think.

Music that affects me to the effect that I remember it, and can often sing it (oh so badly) years or even decades later. Give me an Asia, Maiden, Marillion or any other album I used to listen to when younger and I can more than likely sing it all, including the music.

Music that other people aren't into or "don't get". There's a certain sense of superiority in knowing/thinking you appreciate music they don't, and that you're not just part of the flock following the latest trend.

Music that speaks to me pretty much immediately. There have been a few albums/artists I have taken time to appreciate, but generally speaking if I'm going to love something I have a good idea after the first listen. I don't really do "growers": if I don't like it first time then I'm unlikely to like it second, third or fourth time.

Music I can understand, and follow the melody of. I know there are plenty of what I would call amelodic genres - glitch, powerviolence, grindcore, zeuhl etc - out there, but overall if I can't enjoy it as melody, then I can't enjoy it. I also prefer to be able to understand, or at least make out the lyrics, though these days that's not as much a priority as it used to be (I used never to even consider listening to black metal, for instance, and now I can).

[innerspaceboy]

A thoughtful and insightful response, @Trollheart. And I expected no less! Thank you for contributing! I hope people find this thread interesting and engaging. I try.

[Lexi Darling]

Music that speaks to me pretty much immediately. There have been a few albums/artists I have taken time to appreciate, but generally speaking if I'm going to love something I have a good idea after the first listen. I don't really do "growers": if I don't like it first time then I'm unlikely to like it second, third or fourth time.

I can understand that. The way I see it, things have to grow on me naturally at their own pace. I feel like if I'm destined to enjoy something I don't immediately like, it will grow on me without me having to push myself. My brain can't treat the process as a chore, it has to be something I revisit because something about it intrigues me and sticks in my head enough to inspire a relisten.

As for the main question of the thread, I feel like I definitely naturally gravitate to a few recurring genres and elements as my musical 'home base'. I don't think my areas of particular musical interest are very wide-ranging honestly, I'm a gal who knows what she likes, to paraphrase a certain TH-beloved artist, hehe. All of this is of course not a comment on any kind of objective quality of the music, just my personal taste.

I really enjoy music with rich, diverse and colorful sound textures. Instrumental, atmospheric or freeform music tends to lend itself well to this for me. I really love music that is unrestrained by reliance on elements meant to center attention around them above all else, such as front-and-center pop song style lead vocals or a loud, prominent four-on-the-floor dance beat. I of course enjoy lots of music with those elements and I recognize their importance to their respective genres, but my brain is generally tickled in a unique way by music where my focus is not drawn in so singularly to elements like those.

I also tend to gravitate toward lush, high fidelity production in most cases. I like being able to pick out each sound as its own discernable element. Maybe that's the audio engineering student in me talking. I feel like I have a baseline threshold of recording/production quality that might be higher than some, which may be one reason why genres that are lo-fi by design like 90s black metal don't usually do much for me. I understand the love of raw production, but for me I perceive rawness as something that comes across more in the urgency and intensity of the performance than the way something was recorded. It can depend though. I find rock music and other loud, distorted or percussive styles are ones that I almost always prefer with more hi-fi production, but quieter stuff with an intimate sense of place can really benefit from lower fidelity recording, like a 90s dungeon synth cassette.

I love a good, rich, melodic singing voice. I have less patience for lead melody vocals that take large amounts of liberties with staying in tune or focus too much on sounding idiosyncratic at the expense of me being able to actually follow the melody. From stuff like theatrical diva style vocals with crazy runs to flat talk-singing, it's not something confined to any one genre/style for me. I love techniques like rapping and screaming as their own things, but if you're going to draw my ear by singing melodically, I prefer the primary focus to be on conveying the melody as well as possible.

I have a lot more thoughts so I will post more on this later. Thanks for the inspiring thread idea, @innerspaceboy !

[innerspaceboy]

Thanks so much, @Lexi Darling!

One remark you made resonated directly with a thought-piece I wrote about my musical interests years ago. Forgive me if I've posted this before. You said, "I also tend to gravitate toward lush, high fidelity production in most cases. I like being able to pick out each sound as its own discernable element." That reminded me of my reflections on minimalism where I wrote this:

Perhaps the most revealing thing about me is the artistic/musical period with which I align myself - the post-minimalist modern classical movement. It is a pendulumic reactionary counterpoint to the mathematical elegance of minimalism, balancing its cerebral "music as a gradual process" precision with elements of natural, organic gentleness and expressiveness.

These works are thoughtful, highly contemplative, and provide a spectacular sonic environ for introspection. There is a graceful and cultivated intimacy to the music which speaks to me on a very personal level. These mature soundscapes evoke consideration, empathy, and place an emphasis on subtle and refined characteristics which are exquisitely beautiful when someone has the patience to embrace them but which tragically go unnoticed in the accelerated world of instant gratification.

Each of these musical properties resonates directly with my own character and values. I am this music.

I particularly enjoy minimalist music - compositions which employ static harmony, quasi-geometric transformational linearity and repetition, gradual additive or permutational processes, phase-shifting, and static instrumentation. I am captivated by the metamusical properties which are revealed as a result of strictly carried-out processes. Many of these recordings explore non-Western concepts like pure tuning, (e.g. pure frequency ratios and resonant intervals outside the 12-pitch piano scale), unmetered melodies like those of Carnatic ragas, and drones.

As Roland Barthes describes, "...it is each sound one after the next that I listen to, not in syntagmatic extension, but in it's raw and as though vertical signifying: by deconstructing itself, listening is externalized, it compels the subject to renounce his 'inwardness.'"

I'm always interested in exploring new sounds and don't limit myself to any closed set of styles. As John Cage wisely said:

"The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason."

I also tried my hand at crafting a handy infographic - a Fruchterman-Reingold graph depicting the web-like interrelationships between my 60 favorite sub and micro-genres, (as I do so adore metadata).

It effectively sums up my musical interests.

[innerspaceboy]

Here's a photo I took of my Oblique Strategies deck, as it's so instrumental in my daily life. (I also have the Android app.)

[Trollheart]

@innerspaceboy : you probably know these guys, but if not, I just listened to this now and I think it might have those elements you said you like.

Nyrlathotep 3/3 - A Cryo Chamber Collaboration

[innerspaceboy]

Ah, thank you @Trollheart. A fine suggestion but permit me to clarify - the album you shared is categorized as "Dark Ambient," along the lines of Boris & Sunn O)))'s collaborations like the Altar LP, (minus the percussion of course). While I do enjoy a bit of that, I would gravitate more toward the peaceful, (albeit decidedly ominous) "tribal dark ambient" like Robert Rich's 7-hour Somnium DVD and its sequel, the 15-hour Perpetual: A Somnium Continuum Blu-ray.

I tend to prefer sparse Icelandic tone poems to cryptic and gothic Swedish Dark Ambient music. The former gently immerses the listener in a soundbath of serenity, while the latter consumes one's soul.

But I appreciate the recommendation!

[Trollheart]

Sure, I get it. So you wouldn't be a Frownland-inspired listening to three separate photocopier machines make 1000 copies of the same document each, while fourteen toasters all go off at one-second intervals to each other, and a window cleaner outside the office plays a ukulele made of four alley cats. Got it. 

PS Cage, keep your hands off my idea! I will sue.

[tristan_geoff]

My favorite style changes fairly often but through thick and thin for years industrial has been THAT bitch!

What draws me to industrial music immediately is the sounds therein, I feel like I must have been dropped pretty hard as a kid or something because I am soooo drawn to "unappealing" sounds, harsh textures, and otherwise unsettling sound design.  I love that the genre as a whole critiques the post-industrial world we have inherited, and along with less pointed generalized satire there are some highlights of the genre that say some pretty profound things about the world we live in and how bleak modern life is past the surface comforts we enjoy.  We have to ignore the suffering in order to function along with the status quo, and that has been the goal of industrial music since inception, to call out these fallacies and subvert expectations of people, of actions, of sound, what is art?  What is performance?  Where is the line drawn?  All questions that industrial aims to tackle.

Of course, this being said the genre is quite vast, and while those characteristics I enjoy from a plethora of different subtypes of it's sound, I really enjoy also how these same motifs are often applied to dance music.  At first thru EBM and lately Deconstructed Club, I really fuck with dance music that has the hard steel edge of industrial music applied to it.  I love them because they're exciting!  New each time!  With industrial music there really seems to be no end to it's influence and cross-pollination.  Since the 70s, even much of pop music has been informed by industrial music, with certain 80s synthpop hits having that as the backbone, and hell even artists that were collaborating with industrial artists like Marc Almond of Soft Cell working with Coil.  The 90s saw the sounds become mainstream thru industrial rock, and while I find some of the less adventurous artists residing in this period I do see the worth in how that spread the knowledge of the genre to people who wouldn't otherwise have been exposed.

And especially now, we see so many artists informed directly by the post-club movement making pop songs utilizing similar sidereal sound design.  Without industrial music I would have a lot less luck relating to the modern world and myself.

[innerspaceboy]

Sure, I get it. So you wouldn't be a Frownland-inspired listening to three separate photocopier machines make 1000 copies of the same document each, while fourteen toasters all go off at one-second intervals to each other, and a window cleaner outside the office plays a ukulele made of four alley cats. Got it. 

PS Cage, keep your hands off my idea! I will sue.

I love your proposed example, TH! Let me state that I do have a soft spot for select milestones of harsh industrial noise recordings, even if only for the historical significance of the works. Three immediate examples come to mind -

The first is the notorious Extreme Noise Terror performance of "3AM Eternal" with The KLF at the Brit Awards, 12th of February 1992. The performance ended with Drummond firing machine gun blanks into the audience, and an announcement: "The KLF have now left the music industry."

Also noteworthy is La Monte Young's Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. (1960)

But perhaps the most infamous work of this nature is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (1975). I understand that it was simply intended as giving the finger to the record label, but it's still a mesmerizing sonic work of noise.

Humorously, this calls to mind a memory of a dear old friend who mocks my musical taste affectionately.

I once posted my latest musical musings about Morton Subotnick's A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur and the works it inspired by Conrad Schnitzler. He promptly jumped in with what is the most magniloquent (and frankly hilarious) mockery of my hipsterdom ever conceived.

He said:

OH YEAH?! Well, today I was listening to the ironic musings of a tibetan monk on the subjects of war, peace, and rocketships. These were recorded in 1589, but were accidentally recorded in reverse. Oops! Super rare, only 2 in existence. My copy, and one for her Maj herself, the Queen of England. We compared copies once during a vodka party, and mine was clearly superior, since the monk had signed my copy with rat's blood that he had obtained during an expedition to Venezuela to recapture a downed spy drone for the US government.

The album itself is titled "Toaster wishes and Snuffalupagus rants", which frankly, a leaps and bounds ahead of his first album, "ASFDGHSDHFDGASFG CXVVCX DG FHS SDSR". I have yet to break the code. Music was shite though.

The first thirty-seven 6-hour long tracks are extra special if listened to with your head submerged in a vat of week-old champagne. Only real fans know that though, so, don't spread it around, eh?

The 38th track is composed by OH DAMN IT ISB, WHY CAN'T YOU TALK ABOUT MUSIC WITH WORDS THE REST OF US USE, YOU FRIGGIN METAHIPSTER.

I love you man...

[Saulaac]

Interesting thread ISB, because it makes me think of the relationship between "funk" and "industrial". Since joining MB and SCD you guys have posted lots of industrial and post-industrial tracks and whilst I didn't listen to them all, I've heard and read enough to become enthusiatic about it. I am a bit of jazz funk person, and there seem to be some similarities.
For ex. industrial seems to have an enormous amount of layers and mini-harmonies. But I find it hard to work out them out. Funk can also throw out a lot of layers and syncopation. There are probably different instruments involved, but when I get around to doing my thesis I'll try to qualify the hypothesis that industrial and jazz funk are in fact quite closely aligned.   

[Trollheart]

Hah! I love it ISB! Your mate clearly has my kind of sense of humour. Just, you know, better. Actually, I did listen to Metal Machine Music, and loved it, to the chagrin of most people on MB who had proposed it as an album I would hate. I think Frown still believes I was lying, but I wasn't: I found it hypnotic and mesmerising, certainly not what I was expecting. Now Merzbow, on the other hand, you can keep.