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
"Rain Falls in Grey" by Radio Massacre International. One of the many outstanding albums that @Brighternow introduced us to, on the discussion "Prog Rock on Bandcamp" - and, of course, so did @Germanprof.
Hoping this doesn’t topple over any chess pieces but it seems like brighter is still among the living. The “tribute” thing made me wonder??? Brighter - can you confirm you are alive/growing/plotting???
No. I was original to this board under brittleblood. I’ve been absent for roughly 10 years and wanted to revisit - my memory is quite leaky but I know brighter was good spirited, knowledgeable and open.
No. I was original to this board under brittleblood. I’ve been absent for roughly 10 years and wanted to revisit - my memory is quite leaky but I know brighter was good spirited, knowledgeable and open.
No. I was original to this board under brittleblood. I’ve been absent for roughly 10 years and wanted to revisit - my memory is quite leaky but I know brighter was good spirited, knowledgeable and open.
Good to see you back. Brighternow disappeared and we put some effort into tracking down news until someone who knew him confirmed that he had died.
- "Comprised of three balanced examples of his Continuous Music on solo piano, Three Solo Pieces serves as perhaps the best introduction the Ukrainian-Canadian composer Lubomyr Melnyk yet available. Marginal Invitation is a subdued work with a deeply rooted melodic sensibility that is rich in overtones, while Corrosions on the Surface of Life exhibits a dissonant fury of patterned note play. The final, side-length meditation Cloud Passade No. 3 is a chordal work in free-time which functions equally well as furniture music and a meditative exploration of pure light.
Three Solo Pieces is the first set of new Lubomyr Melnyk recordings produced by Unseen Worlds and his first release for the label since the 2007 reissue of his debut album KMH: Piano Music in the Continuous Mode (1979). Following that reissue, efforts were shifted from record projects to introducing Melnyks still-thriving Continuous Music to audiences with a set of memorable and well-received concerts in Seattle and New York in 2009. Since his popular rediscovery through a variety of releases on Unseen Worlds, his own and other labels, as well as being hosted all over the world for concerts, Lubomyr Melnyk has successfully risen from obscurity and emerged as a welcome new entry in the history of contemporary classical music, as well as a vital performer for the 21st Century." Unseen Worlds November 2013 - Emusic
- first there came Franz Lizst ..... then came LUBOMYR -
No. I was original to this board under brittleblood. I’ve been absent for roughly 10 years and wanted to revisit - my memory is quite leaky but I know brighter was good spirited, knowledgeable and open.
Welcome back! I sometimes look back on posts from long ago and will wonder whatever became of some of the early members.
Kind of amazing how long this little site has been around.
Welcome back! I sometimes look back on posts from long ago and will wonder whatever became of some of the early members.
I agree Jonahpwll. I know I am here less than I used to be, but I reckon I've been here for around 15 years, maybe more. But lives change. I was still working when i joined, and I remember, when working from home, looking to see what people in the US had been playing/saying during our night time! I'm still playing as much music, but away from my computer so don't sign in so regularly
This Danish band originated in Roskilde towards the ending of 1968 playing and utilizing a somewhat bizarre and sarcastic approach to both
music making as well as stage antics. Kristian POMMER was the instigator
of the group while at the same time handling keys, vocals and the
guitar. Circling around crazy thematics and a wonderful sense of
theatrics, POMMER handed over to Denmark what ZAPPA did to the English
speaking world: fun music revolving around blues rock, jazz and
psychedelia. Denmark was a hotbed for both psychedelic music as well as
jazz, yet it was down to a couple of groups such as BURNIN RED IVANHOE
and SECRET OYSTER all of which were headed by saxophonist extraordinaire
Karsten VOGEL and dear ol DR. DOPO JAM. Nobody would take the
sporadic shifts, avantgarde tendencies and cut up experimentations as
far as this band though.
Helping out in the original cast were
Poul "Skak" SNITKER on flute and trumpet, Lars RASMUSSEN on electric
guitar, Sten UGLEBJERG on percussion and something as wonderfully zany
as a washtub and last but not least Sten OLSEN wielding an earthy and
infinitely bouncy bass.
In September 1969 the band went through
some changes as UGLEBJERG was replaced with not one but two drummers in
Niels "Vejmand" CHRISTENSEN and Bent CLAUSEN. Olsen?s spot was handed
over to a guy named Jesper HINDØ who was just as versatile as his
predecessor. This edition of the band continued to experiment and build
on the overt zany and eclectic sound ? only to yet again in 1972
rearrange the line up, now with the add on of trombone and saxophone.
Kristian POMMER additionally handed over the vocal bits to singer Lars
BISGÅRD.
@Brighternow introduced us to two somewhat obscure early 70s bands, Electric Sandwich (ES) and Matching Mole (MM). My thinking is that their s/t albums are their best in both cases.
@Brighternow
introduced us to two somewhat obscure early 70s bands, Electric
Sandwich (ES) and Matching Mole (MM). My thinking is that their s/t
albums are their best in both cases.
I had to have a bit of a laugh at the thought Matching Mole were "somewhat obscure" in terms of what gets posted on this list sometimes. Very interesting band though, two great albums and the opener of their first record O Caroline still breaks me up every time I hear it.
I think one of "special" aspects of our little group here is that many of us don't spend a whole lot of time in the past - on occasion, yes, but I think we're mostly in search of new(ish) releases and so these older, maybe lesser known bands may be things we grew up with, but will only sometimes post here. Both Matching Mole and the Electric Sandwich album got a lot of play at my house (and a bit on the radio shows too) and it's nice to have the reminders so as to bring them out again for a fresh listen.
That is a good point and also what may be old news to one person can be something new to another listener. I must admit to being roughly 50/50 with new and old music because of this exact point. I do like a good chuckle though.
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)
Described as a "A must have!" by @Brighternow
https://emusers.net/forum/discussion/1853/prog-rock-on-bandcamp/p1
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/rain-falls-in-grey
Thankeeeee
Cheers.
Brighternow January 2014 edited January 2014
WOW !
Thanks to @Brighternow for the introduction!- "Comprised of three balanced examples of his Continuous Music on solo piano, Three Solo Pieces serves as perhaps the best introduction the Ukrainian-Canadian composer Lubomyr Melnyk yet available. Marginal Invitation is a subdued work with a deeply rooted melodic sensibility that is rich in overtones, while Corrosions on the Surface of Life exhibits a dissonant fury of patterned note play. The final, side-length meditation Cloud Passade No. 3 is a chordal work in free-time which functions equally well as furniture music and a meditative exploration of pure light.
Three Solo Pieces is the first set of new Lubomyr Melnyk recordings produced by Unseen Worlds and his first release for the label since the 2007 reissue of his debut album KMH: Piano Music in the Continuous Mode (1979). Following that reissue, efforts were shifted from record projects to introducing Melnyks still-thriving Continuous Music to audiences with a set of memorable and well-received concerts in Seattle and New York in 2009. Since his popular rediscovery through a variety of releases on Unseen Worlds, his own and other labels, as well as being hosted all over the world for concerts, Lubomyr Melnyk has successfully risen from obscurity and emerged as a welcome new entry in the history of contemporary classical music, as well as a vital performer for the 21st Century."
Unseen Worlds November 2013 - Emusic
Lubomyr Melnyk
Ukrainian composer and pianist, born in Munich. While living in Paris, he pioneered a new technique of piano playing, based on extremely rapid and complex note-series. Because of his technique, he is the fastest pianist in the world, sustaining speeds of over 19.5 notes per second in each hand, he also holds the record for most number of notes played in one hour with 93,650 individual notes. This was documented in Sweden, in 1989.
Three Solo Pieces James Blackshaw + Lubomyr Melnyk – The Watchers
Corollaries Evertina
Rivers And Streams The Dreamers Ever Leave You
- The Lauren Harris Ballet Music
Fallen Trees
- Lars Rasmussen / lead guitar, violin
- Kristian Pommer / rhythm guitar, piano, Moog, vocals, composer & arranger (excl. 6)
- Anders Gaardmand / tenor & soprano saxophones, flute
- Poul "Skak" Snitker / trumpet, flute, bass, composer & arranger (6)
- Vagn Hansen / bass
- Niels "Vejmand" Christensen / drums
- Bent Clausen / drums, vibraphone
Helping out in the original cast were Poul "Skak" SNITKER on flute and trumpet, Lars RASMUSSEN on electric guitar, Sten UGLEBJERG on percussion and something as wonderfully zany as a washtub and last but not least Sten OLSEN wielding an earthy and infinitely bouncy bass.
In September 1969 the band went through some changes as UGLEBJERG was replaced with not one but two drummers in Niels "Vejmand" CHRISTENSEN and Bent CLAUSEN. Olsen?s spot was handed over to a guy named Jesper HINDØ who was just as versatile as his predecessor. This edition of the band continued to experiment and build on the overt zany and eclectic sound ? only to yet again in 1972 rearrange the line up, now with the add on of trombone and saxophone. Kristian POMMER additionally handed over the vocal bits to singer Lars BISGÅRD.
ETA: Matching Mole is Soft Machine translated to french: "Machine Mol" and then "translated" back to english.