Many thanks to ghettosynth for pointing me here following a conversation in another thread. Quick version of that thread's conversation - I'm a huge believer that awful music can sincerely be great fun, of true worth, or just enormously interesting beyond mere comedy or ironic value. I've basically found my natural home here.
Here's my favourite cover version of all time. Absolutely nothing can touch it for sheer joie de vivre. The part where the vocalist cracks up laughing at a particularly mangled guitar riff around 1:27 in is just one of many wonderful moments. Whatever room I'm in becomes an instant rave when I play it, and it seems to be the only 'awful' track I love that other people see something in. Trust me, it's all downhill from here.
I would ask if your music is better or worse than this, but I think we all know the answer to that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oPhId9PQpo
Is your music better or worse than this?
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
I like the piece that you posted in the other thread, so did someone else that I played this for earlier today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qgXYvjVNvk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qgXYvjVNvk
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2010/03/t ... ssics.html
The Galactic Symposium were a group from Nottingham, UK formed "by mistake" in 1979. All five members were competent musicians, except they decided to disallow themselves from playing the instruments they could play competently for the 'symposium'. So, the semi-skilled punk rock guitarist became the slightly-better-than Shaggs drummer, etc. And they also chose to only slog through the most obvious hit songs of the era. During their short existence, the Galactic Symposium only released one single on Vague Records: covers of the Village People's 'YMCA' and Pink Floyd's 'Money'. However, they also recorded about 10 more tracks, all them obvious top-40 covers, but these did not see the light until more than two decades later; someone found a 'David Price & the Galactic Symposium' cassette at a 'car boot' sale and sent it over the Low Down Kids record label, who pressed 100 copies onto vinyl in 2005.
So, the Galactic Symposium sounds like a sort of annoying and unlistenable in-joke, right? All covers, drunk-sounding musicians, deliberately playing instruments they never played before. Well, maybe, except I keep listening to them since I managed to track down a copy of that cassette-sourced LP. And that YMCA single became a favorite of John Peel, who said that there "has seldom been a more joyous record" and that the sax player's solo on YMCA "remains one of the finest in recorded music'.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
My word, that parping noise in YMCA is a sax? I'd always assumed it was one of those squeezy horn/hooter type things you used to get on bicycles. That explains why it's rendered as a squeak (accompanied by audible "ahhh, shit") in the first lead-in to the chorus. I had thought it'd probably be difficult to play a squeezy horn wrong.
Anyway, was your first band better or worse than this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V3SA6YICQQ
Anyway, was your first band better or worse than this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V3SA6YICQQ
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
In my search for something called "archival electronica", yeah, I don't know, I found this, enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doq_Piq ... e=youtu.be
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doq_Piq ... e=youtu.be
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
Excellent stuff. I first heard about this guy through (the excellent) Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe. There are a few vids of the show on Youtube, and it's everything I hoped it would be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulGXKULw_pk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulGXKULw_pk
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
Fantastic! "David Liebe Hart's gone avant-trap" isn't a sentence I ever expected to utter.
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
I'm absolutely gobsmacked that a pop track from a pop artist with a pop budget can sound quite this amateurish. It's caught between a rock and a hard place. Not quite awful enough to be a fascinating Farrah Abrahamesque masterpiece, yet nowhere near competent enough not to stick out like a sore thumb. The music itself reminds me of the hyper-flat muzak you got when a TV station had shut down for the night (in the age before infomercials), while Yachty's vocal is all over the place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPtu2kcaa1M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPtu2kcaa1M
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
Goodness me. While I managed a total of about 20 seconds flicking through it, I admire her dedication as I expect that's genuinely difficult/painful to perform. Not something I'll be listening to in its entirety. Especially because my window is open.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 15517 posts since 13 Oct, 2009
Indeed! I find it interesting because I don't believe that it's outsider music, per se, and I think the distinction is an interesting avenue of discussion. This is a thing, apparently, it's called "danger music."cron wrote:Goodness me. While I managed a total of about 20 seconds flicking through it, I admire her dedication as I expect that's genuinely difficult/painful to perform. Not something I'll be listening to in its entirely. Especially because my window is open.
Last edited by ghettosynth on Sat Jun 17, 2017 3:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
From the Wiki article: " Takehisa Kosugi's composition Music for a Revolution directs the performer to gouge out one of his or her eyes five years from now." Blimey!
I wonder if calling it "music" was a pragmatic thing - a musical performance being the closest thing to the performer/audience setup required. A cursory read around makes it look like "performance art" (as a named discipline) was only just emerging at the same time so I doubt the term would have been familiar to anyone at that point.
La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 are perhaps in a similar boat - works categorised as music that look an awful lot like performance art. Sometimes conceptual performance art given the impossibility of performing many. Less call for eye-gouging though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositions_1960
I remember listening to an extremely quiet piece in a lecture when I was at university. The lecturer seemed quite downbeat about the playback, saying the ambient noise (in what most people would consider a silent room) masked almost everything despite the playback system being cranked far higher than it usually was. This work would probably have been literally silent if the audio file had been 16-bit, and I remember saying just how much trust the performer was asking of the audience during the subsequent conversation about it. It felt truly dangerous given the playback level required. I was nervous throughout, worrying that it could become 'danger music' at any second. There was so much headroom for dealing serious damage there.
Why it couldn't have been recorded at a much higher level with instructions to play it back very quietly (as Bernhard Günter does), I'm not sure. Perhaps some ideological/conceptual purity at play.
I wonder if calling it "music" was a pragmatic thing - a musical performance being the closest thing to the performer/audience setup required. A cursory read around makes it look like "performance art" (as a named discipline) was only just emerging at the same time so I doubt the term would have been familiar to anyone at that point.
La Monte Young's Compositions 1960 are perhaps in a similar boat - works categorised as music that look an awful lot like performance art. Sometimes conceptual performance art given the impossibility of performing many. Less call for eye-gouging though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositions_1960
I remember listening to an extremely quiet piece in a lecture when I was at university. The lecturer seemed quite downbeat about the playback, saying the ambient noise (in what most people would consider a silent room) masked almost everything despite the playback system being cranked far higher than it usually was. This work would probably have been literally silent if the audio file had been 16-bit, and I remember saying just how much trust the performer was asking of the audience during the subsequent conversation about it. It felt truly dangerous given the playback level required. I was nervous throughout, worrying that it could become 'danger music' at any second. There was so much headroom for dealing serious damage there.
Why it couldn't have been recorded at a much higher level with instructions to play it back very quietly (as Bernhard Günter does), I'm not sure. Perhaps some ideological/conceptual purity at play.
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- KVRAF
- 3477 posts since 27 Dec, 2002 from North East England
Ace blog here: http://worldsworstrecords.blogspot.co.uk/
Associated Soundcloud here (with a small selection of tracks, far more available on the blog): https://soundcloud.com/darryl-w-bullock/tracks
Associated Soundcloud here (with a small selection of tracks, far more available on the blog): https://soundcloud.com/darryl-w-bullock/tracks
