what the hell is idm anyway?

[jopy]

Ambient also is never very clear to me. People will through a busy mid-tempo break over top a slowly rising-falling synth sound and call it ambient.

well, yes, people try to sneak all sorts of stuff into ambient, but i think that was an example of a genre that started from a specific person (brian eno) with a specific goal (music that melded into the environment so it was simulaneously there and not there).

of course, now someone can say (correctly) that erik satie did it first. because he did, of course. and then they could bring up a counterexample of borderline ambient. to which i would say, read wittgenstein's "philosophical remarks." not because it's relevant, but just because it's an equally tortured exercise in defining the undefinable that ultimately concludes that it's all a matter of semantics. still, for some of us, it's fun to toy with semantics.

did i mention that pretentiousness made me gag? because that last paragraph i wrote REALLY makes me gag.

[shamann]

did i mention that pretentiousness made me gag? because that last paragraph i wrote REALLY makes me gag.

This reminds me (in an off-topic way) of when I was in university.

I was on the board of a literary journal. People would submit their stuff, and we'd review it all to see what got in. Some genius had the idea that instead of merely sending a "No thank you" to those who didn't make the cut, because they were mostly students just learning to write, we should send them comments and criticism.

One guy submitted this short story written vaguely in the style of Poe or Lovecraft, really over-the-top anachronism, all purple prose. One of our comments in reply was that the writing style was pretentious. Later in speaking with the guy he says to me, "I took that as a compliment. All the writing I aspire to is pretentious. So I still don't see why I didn't make it in."