well, there's some backwards guitar work, and the accompanying forwards guitar work. i'd actually like to post to castles made of sand, but it's not available on youtube, apparently. nor is merman. ugh. but, it's not just that. i grew up listening to and learning how to play hendrix, so i very quickly fall back into the old pentatonics when left to my own devices...
as for the song. umm.
(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed)
obligatory influential on post.
i'm pushing it a little. this was released the same week as i did the track. but, yield got some pretty heavy play from me, and there's a kind of pearl jam flavour to the track, so it's fair. if i was going to pick a pearl jam track most similar to try and denote the flavour in it, it would be this one rather than something on vitalogy, even if the latter is technically more accurate.
these lyrics are awesome. as a lyricist, vedder is frustrating. but, the tunes he clicks on can be pretty inspiring. i've always dug that beatnik beach bum pothead ocean mysticism.
(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed)
obligatory influential on post.
there's really a wide variety of key/goettel productions [and no doubt lpd productions, although i'm less familiar with their work] that make creative use of time reversal, but i'm pulling this one out because i know i was listening to it a lot at the time, and it's kind of conceptually relevant.
(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is evil and must be destroyed)
deathtokoalas
obligatory influential post.
well, it was actually the ry30 that is the influence; this was right at about the same time as i was just getting into autechre, and the fact that i was already familiar with the ry30 is perhaps a part of the reason i was more easily able to delve into autechre than a lot of other techno. autechre would gradually become a larger influence after 1998, but i was only just getting into them when the track was being recorded. what i'm getting at is that i'm kind of trying to downplay the actual artistic influence; it's more like i had this machine, and i was looking for examples of people that wrote music with tools like it (i didn't realize at the time that autechre were literally using an ry30, themselves). i'd then take some of those ideas and try and port them to the punk songs i was re-recording.
the result is pretty weird. i suspect most people would find something unsettling, perhaps even frightening, at the idea of autechre remixing punk rock. but, it's kind of what i was aiming for. sort of. it's mildly revisionist, but it gets the idea across.
this disc would grow into one of my favourite techno discs, and deserves the acclaim it gets. years later, jim thirlwell would use the term "ethnic music for future cultures that do not yet exist" to describe some of his own music, but i think it's a pretty striking analysis of this. whether the stories of gear stolen as looting during riots are true or not, i think the claims of musical illiteracy are accurate and i think that's a part of the reason that so much of their work has this kind of dark, celtic tonality. i think that's an under explored slant in trying to get your ahead around the abstraction. it's as tied to the island's distant past as much as it is to it's present, or future. there's a digital tribalism to it that is very idiosyncratically british.
(relevant track: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed, thug culture, confused, wish, nope, ignorance is bliss, anything with a drum machine, really, which is most of the stuff after 1998)
Antonio Schacht
I am not sure who you are, this is an interesting comment
deathtokoalas
i'm running through years of old recordings in real time on my youtube channel. i started in late 1996 about a year and a half ago, and have worked my way up to 1998. that means i'll get around to 2015 some time around the year 2032. i wasn't sure how to approach uploading 17 years of music, and decided this was the most comprehensive way, even if it takes forever. and, it allows me to present myself in terms of how i developed.
i do these "obligatory influentials" whenever i completed a new track, 17 years ago.
i guess it made more sense when google+ was cross-linked to youtube.
Fuck /mu/ Brutallity ends
That's why i saw you on SDRE's Diary and Weezer's Pinkerton. I'm listening to all kinds of music since 2010, and I think the the six thousand albums I listened aren't enough.
deathtokoalas
that would have been lp2 for the obligatory influential post; didn't get as much into diary. and i think i've cited the blue album, but wouldn't really cite pinkerton. i would have been commenting on those records in my music critic's hat :)
i mean, i try to put a synopsis of the disc in, too, so i'm not just spamming.
Fuck /mu/ Brutallity ends
Have you listened to Amon Tobin's 1997 album?
deathtokoalas
no, he's a bit of a black hole for me. i've always found him a little too conventional, but it's not like i've spent a lot of time listening, either. you have to keep in mind that i'm coming at this from an industrial/noise perspective, so i'm interpreting autechre through the filter of acts like coil and skinny puppy. i mostly restricted my delves into 90s electronic music to the warp records spectrum, just because it was really the only stuff that i could find that was really only techno in an aesthetic sense.
i'd put amon tobin in a list of stuff that includes dj shadow, daft punk, chemical brothers - it's just too close to dancefloor techno, and not experimental enough to hold my interest. but i again need to temper that with the caveat that i've only really scratched the surface of it.
Fuck /mu/ Brutallity ends
Your comments are pretty interesting. It's like talking with a music critic who knows what he's talking about. I never saw Amon Tobin like that, and maybe I need to stop listening to mainstream hardcore punk and focus on more stuff that I missed and it's the wide electronic/experimental genre.
deathtokoalas
the warp stuff was really always head and shoulders above, and they all had their idiosyncratic slants that could separate them out: autechre with the experimental parts, aphex with a kind of chamber music approach, squarepusher with the insane jazz leanings, plaid with the lush ambience. i really haven't heard much since that isn't in some way just a rehashing of what was really an explosion of creativity in the mid-to-late 90s.
regarding north america, skinny puppy morphed into a band called download that released two remarkable records, but they're quite noisy. most of the 90s stuff on the subconscious communications label is worth exploring. there was some interesting stuff on invisible records, but it's a lower signal-to-noise. dead voices on air jumps out immediately.
when you get out of the warp sphere and these kind of remnant strains of industrial music, though, you start getting bigger influences from hip-hop, from house music, from pop music. it becomes more oriented for dance parties and less oriented for headphone listening. that's what made the warp stuff so refreshing: it was really absolute listening music. even the ninja tune stuff is mostly party-focused. that's fine, it has it's role and everything, but it sounds a lot more dated by nature of what it is and is, frankly, just a lot less serious by nature of what it is, too.
obligatory influential post.
i don't want to say it was conscious, but it's almost a remix. you can it hear in the song structure, the way the chords cycle around and then in the collapse in the middle (i'm trying to avoid using the term "breakdown"). you listen to something so often, it just sort of assimilates itself, and you don't realize you're doing it; that's the truth with this. the second half of nevermind was always really just one song, because i always listened to it in transit.
but, i've always like these kinds of longwinded chord progressions that take a nice trip around the world before they get back to the cadence. i'm in absolute solidarity with ludwig, here; fuck you, amadeus.
(relevant tracks: if god somehow does exist, it is sadistic and must be destroyed)
i'm throwing a challenge out there. i'd do it, but i've got other things to do.
somebody needs to notate this record (and the green record; it won't work for pinkerton, or the later material) with a scorewriter with the aim of using baroque instrumentation: organ, bass, lute, harpsichord, cello, trumpet, some horns in the background. you need to make sure you get the vocal melodies & harmonies down. maybe have a little fun with the bass, but i don't think it'll be necessary to modify it much to get the effect i'm thinking.
i think it might provide a little more appreciation for how well written this record is.
