Hex over Spiderland - that's fighting talk to some people! The really interesting thing about those top four albums is that while they are all identifiable as Post Rock - they are all completely different. And it's far too long since I listened to Laughing Stock.
Hex over Spiderland - that's fighting talk to some people! The really interesting thing about those top four albums is that while they are all identifiable as Post Rock - they are all completely different. And it's far too long since I listened to Laughing Stock.
@djh couldn't agree more. For me, Slint's Spiderland is where it all seriously began for Post Rock
Hex over Spiderland - that's fighting talk to some people! The really interesting thing about those top four albums is that while they are all identifiable as Post Rock - they are all completely different. And it's far too long since I listened to Laughing Stock.
@djh couldn't agree more. For me, Slint's Spiderland is where it all seriously began for Post Rock
I have a friend who was pushing Spiderland at me for years (I missed it at the time) and I just didn't get it the first half dozen plays. It was one of those where I went back to it every 6 months until it clicked. Without starting that fight ;-) I loved Hex straight away - and Dustsucker. I think my Slint problem was that I was hearing too much Indie not enough Post if you catch my drift. Happy to enjoy both these days.
EDITED TO ADD
Of course between Hex and Codename: Dustsucker, Bark Psychosis main man Graham Sutton took a left turn and produced the drum and bass album Balance of the Force as Boymerang; which while different is mighty fine. Unless you only live to rock.
I would move From Bone to Satellite much, much higher in that list. And Under the Pipal Tree a little higher.
The Earth is Not A Cold Dead Place was my introduction to the (alleged) genre, and Mi Media Naranja was important too, though I came to love Fixed::Context more.
From gsybe! I would choose Lift Your Skinny Fists... over F# A# (Infinity) every time.
I definitely do not think of Stars of the Lid as post-rock. I have them filed under ambient.
What surprises me most though is how few of these albums I have or have listened to despite an eager and sizeable post-rock binge in the emusic days.
@germanprof funnily enough me too re only listening to the albums infrequently. The same applies to Math Rock and, with the exception of My Bloody Valentine, to Shoegaze.
More Eclipse Music / Bandcamp: - "Combining elements from classical, electronic and jazz, keyboard maestro Kari Ikonen and his long time ensemble Karikko have established themselves as true champions of art music and as one of the finest contemporary jazz bands in Finland. They are adored by critics and jazz fans alike. They have received multiple award nominations and won several awards.
Composer and pianist Kari Ikonen creates vivid imagery and haunting musical landscapes that are augmented by his team of virtuoso musicians." Eclipse Music
For people with a soft spot for musique concrète: Giuseppe Ielasi & Kassel Jaeger - Parallel / Grayscale Editions Mego
- “When you listen to a concert, for example for cello and orchestra, you are not pointing out each instant ‘this is a cello sound’, you listen to music. And it is the same with sound.” This is Christian Zanesi, artistic director of France’s INA GRM, making the argument for sound, as opposed to notes and scales and such, as a musical device. More specifically, he’s referring to our limited way of understanding musique concrète, the form of music the French studio is famous for. It’s about more than identifying what sound X used to be or how it was transformed, he’s suggesting. It’s about more than describing the physical characteristics of a sound or generating a catalogue of sonic ingredients on a particular recording. It’s about getting at musical relations. It’s an intellectual challenge as well as an intuitive one. It’s about us as listeners actively locating expressiveness.
It’s just this sort of challenge that Zanesi’s colleague at GRM, François Bonnet (working under his Kassel Jaeger moniker) and Giuseppe Ielasi lay down over these releases. Parallel / Greyscale is the debut recording of the duo’s collaborations, while Fernweh is Bonnet’s sixth solo release (and third on Ielasi’s own Senufo Editions). There are field recordings, laptop improvisations, analog devices from synthesizers to small motors, mechanically excited string instruments and more. But the music on these records is impossible to reduce to instruments or methods. The sources are too varied, and more crucially, the process is subsumed into the fabric so thoroughly that it ceases to matter.
Ielasi and Jaeger constructed Parallel / Greyscale from improvisations they conducted in Paris and Italy. So while the album might be improvised in its origins, it feels hermetic, sealed off from how we might normally understand a spontaneous performance. It mixes the evolutionary with the episodic, as Jaeger and Ielasi freely move between hives of microrhythms and inscrutable pulses to passages of extended, enveloping low frequencies. Transitions come gradually or emerge from fade-outs. Intention and accident are intertwined in the compositions. These are hybrids, in more ways than one, the constant push-and-pull between the flow of electronic and acoustic sounds producing a fascinating, hypnotic tension.
Fernweh follows the arc of Bonnet’s previous Senufo releases. There is the unceasing stream of sound, what some reviewers have called drone, but it is more about density and detail. Bonnet doesn’t use the pure tone of a string instrument or its chording ability. Instead, he zooms in on the feral buzz. Static becomes pointillist, an all-encompassing drizzle of texture. But more important than Bonnet’s acoustic/synthetic contrasts are how he highlights them. Background becomes foreground, jump cuts open up fissures in the compositions to new worlds, gradual overlays evoke a slow metamorphosis of sound.
Ultimately, this obsession with the peripheral, marginal and gradual is what the two releases share. This is secretive music. It obscures its origins and hides its logic. The title Fernweh becomes a mission statement for both releases, a way of listening, of experiencing the music. The word means “wanderlust” in German, and it gets as close as any verbal form to what this music invokes. You have to wander about inside it, determine its idiosyncratic logic and come up with your own geography for it. It’s why the transitions are so crucial. These moments alert you to the essential instability of these pieces. Instead of contrast between sounds we hear as organic and biological and sounds we hear as synthetic, we hear a continuum. One system illuminates another." Matthew Wuethrich @ Dusted Magzine - http://www.kasseljaeger.com/
Thanks once again to @Brighternow from October 2012 "The Expanding Universe is the classic 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The album is reissued here for the first time in a massively expanded two-CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased. Some of the already well-know works included in this set are "Patchwork", the complete "Appalachian Grove" series, and "Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds", which was included on the golden record launched on board the Voyager spacecraft. The pieces comprising The Expanding Universe combine slowly evolving textures with the emotional richness of intricate counterpoint, harmony, and complex rhythms (John Fahey and J. S. Bach are both cited as major influences in the original cover's notes), all built of electronic sounds. These works, often grouped with those of Terry Riley, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, differ in their much shorter, clear forms. Composed and realized between 1974 and 1977 on the GROOVE system developed by Max Mathews and F.R. Moore at Bell Laboratories, the pieces on this album were far ahead of their time both in musical content and in how they were made. Each of the included works broke new ground, pioneering completely new methods of live interaction with computer-based logic - ways of creating music that are now reaching the heights of their popularity with Ableton Live, Max/MSP and other interactive music software entering mainstream music production."
Laurie Spiegelwas born in Chicago (September 20, 1945) where in her teens she played guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and through them cultivated a devout philosophy of amateur music making. After receiving a degree in the social sciences, she returned to music. Having taught herself notation, she studied classic guitar and composition privately in London with John W. Duarte, then baroque and renaissance lute at Julliard, and composition with Jacob Druckman (who later took her as an assistant) and Vincent Persichetti. She also names Michael Czajkowski, Hall Overton, Max Mathews, and Emmanuel Ghent as important teachers. Having worked with analog synthesizers since 1969, she sought out the greater compositional control which digital computers could provide and wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs from 1973-79. She later founded New York University's Computer Music Studio, and became famous in rock music circles for her music software for personal computers, especially MusicMouse. The Expanding UniverseUnseen Worlds An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic MusicLaurie Spiegel & Don Christensen / Fourth A-Chronology 1937-2005 – Donnie And Laurie / Patchwork
Comments
https://emusers.net/forum/discussion/comment/35654#Comment_35654
https://emusers.net/forum/discussion/comment/36344#Comment_36344
John Bischoff
Lovely Little Records ubu.com
Next Tone, Please Surface
Aperture archive.org Audio Combine
Bischoff, Brown And Perkis Bitplicity
– Transit: Live Electronic Music
The 30 best post-rock albums of all time
1. Bark Psychosis - Hex
2. Slint - Spiderland
3. Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die
4. Talk Talk - Laughing Stock
Talking of Mogwai (see my 24 Hours From Tulsa post) reminded me of @Brighternow's love of Post Rock
Hex over Spiderland - that's fighting talk to some people! The really interesting thing about those top four albums is that while they are all identifiable as Post Rock - they are all completely different. And it's far too long since I listened to Laughing Stock.
Brighternow September 2013More Eclipse Music / Bandcamp:
Kari Ikonen- "Combining elements from classical, electronic and jazz, keyboard maestro Kari Ikonen and his long time ensemble Karikko have established themselves as true champions of art music and as one of the finest contemporary jazz bands in Finland. They are adored by critics and jazz fans alike. They have received multiple award nominations and won several awards.
Composer and pianist Kari Ikonen creates vivid imagery and haunting musical landscapes that are augmented by his team of virtuoso musicians."
Eclipse Music
& Karikko – Oceanophonic & Karikko – The Helsinski Suite
w/Ra-Kalam Bob Moses, Louis Sclavis Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions
& Mathias Eick) - Ikonostasis
Thanks!!
Giuseppe Ielasi & Kassel Jaeger - Parallel / Grayscale
Editions Mego
- “When you listen to a concert, for example for cello and orchestra, you are not pointing out each instant ‘this is a cello sound’, you listen to music. And it is the same with sound.” This is Christian Zanesi, artistic director of France’s INA GRM, making the argument for sound, as opposed to notes and scales and such, as a musical device. More specifically, he’s referring to our limited way of understanding musique concrète, the form of music the French studio is famous for. It’s about more than identifying what sound X used to be or how it was transformed, he’s suggesting. It’s about more than describing the physical characteristics of a sound or generating a catalogue of sonic ingredients on a particular recording. It’s about getting at musical relations. It’s an intellectual challenge as well as an intuitive one. It’s about us as listeners actively locating expressiveness.
It’s just this sort of challenge that Zanesi’s colleague at GRM, François Bonnet (working under his Kassel Jaeger moniker) and Giuseppe Ielasi lay down over these releases. Parallel / Greyscale is the debut recording of the duo’s collaborations, while Fernweh is Bonnet’s sixth solo release (and third on Ielasi’s own Senufo Editions). There are field recordings, laptop improvisations, analog devices from synthesizers to small motors, mechanically excited string instruments and more. But the music on these records is impossible to reduce to instruments or methods. The sources are too varied, and more crucially, the process is subsumed into the fabric so thoroughly that it ceases to matter.
Ielasi and Jaeger constructed Parallel / Greyscale from improvisations they conducted in Paris and Italy. So while the album might be improvised in its origins, it feels hermetic, sealed off from how we might normally understand a spontaneous performance. It mixes the evolutionary with the episodic, as Jaeger and Ielasi freely move between hives of microrhythms and inscrutable pulses to passages of extended, enveloping low frequencies. Transitions come gradually or emerge from fade-outs. Intention and accident are intertwined in the compositions. These are hybrids, in more ways than one, the constant push-and-pull between the flow of electronic and acoustic sounds producing a fascinating, hypnotic tension.
Fernweh follows the arc of Bonnet’s previous Senufo releases. There is the unceasing stream of sound, what some reviewers have called drone, but it is more about density and detail. Bonnet doesn’t use the pure tone of a string instrument or its chording ability. Instead, he zooms in on the feral buzz. Static becomes pointillist, an all-encompassing drizzle of texture. But more important than Bonnet’s acoustic/synthetic contrasts are how he highlights them. Background becomes foreground, jump cuts open up fissures in the compositions to new worlds, gradual overlays evoke a slow metamorphosis of sound.
Ultimately, this obsession with the peripheral, marginal and gradual is what the two releases share. This is secretive music. It obscures its origins and hides its logic. The title Fernweh becomes a mission statement for both releases, a way of listening, of experiencing the music. The word means “wanderlust” in German, and it gets as close as any verbal form to what this music invokes. You have to wander about inside it, determine its idiosyncratic logic and come up with your own geography for it. It’s why the transitions are so crucial. These moments alert you to the essential instability of these pieces. Instead of contrast between sounds we hear as organic and biological and sounds we hear as synthetic, we hear a continuum. One system illuminates another."
Matthew Wuethrich @ Dusted Magzine - http://www.kasseljaeger.com/
Kassel Jaeger Thanks!!
Deltas Giuseppe Ielasi, Kassel Jaeger – Parallel / Grayscale
Toxic Cosmopolitanism Kassel Jaeger/Stephan Mathieu/Akira Rabelais
- Zauberberg
Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, James Rushford Onden 隱佃
- Pale Calling
Aster Kassel Jaeger, Jim O'Rourke – Wakes On Cerulean
Kassel Jaeger & Jim O'Rourke and opens and closes this Free sampler!!
– In Cobalt Aura Sleeps
"The Expanding Universe is the classic 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The album is reissued here for the first time in a massively expanded two-CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased. Some of the already well-know works included in this set are "Patchwork", the complete "Appalachian Grove" series, and "Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds", which was included on the golden record launched on board the Voyager spacecraft. The pieces comprising The Expanding Universe combine slowly evolving textures with the emotional richness of intricate counterpoint, harmony, and complex rhythms (John Fahey and J. S. Bach are both cited as major influences in the original cover's notes), all built of electronic sounds. These works, often grouped with those of Terry Riley, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, differ in their much shorter, clear forms. Composed and realized between 1974 and 1977 on the GROOVE system developed by Max Mathews and F.R. Moore at Bell Laboratories, the pieces on this album were far ahead of their time both in musical content and in how they were made. Each of the included works broke new ground, pioneering completely new methods of live interaction with computer-based logic - ways of creating music that are now reaching the heights of their popularity with Ableton Live, Max/MSP and other interactive music software entering mainstream music production."
Laurie Spiegel was born in Chicago (September 20, 1945) where in her teens she played guitar, banjo, and mandolin, and through them cultivated a devout philosophy of amateur music making. After receiving a degree in the social sciences, she returned to music. Having taught herself notation, she studied classic guitar and composition privately in London with John W. Duarte, then baroque and renaissance lute at Julliard, and composition with Jacob Druckman (who later took her as an assistant) and Vincent Persichetti. She also names Michael Czajkowski, Hall Overton, Max Mathews, and Emmanuel Ghent as important teachers. Having worked with analog synthesizers since 1969, she sought out the greater compositional control which digital computers could provide and wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs from 1973-79. She later founded New York University's Computer Music Studio, and became famous in rock music circles for her music software for personal computers, especially MusicMouse.
The Expanding Universe Unseen Worlds
An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music Laurie Spiegel & Don Christensen
/ Fourth A-Chronology 1937-2005 – Donnie And Laurie / Patchwork
Don Christensen- (James White & The Blacks,
The Contortions, The Raybeats)