Fishing for thoughts on dense music

[vurt]

i feel a twat when im onstage alone

If you're doing that then there's at least one other person on stage, no?

im old greg...

[Sendy]

I think dense and open are both beautiful. One problem I have are the "minimal ethicists" who seem to think that minimal music is somehow superior, harder and better for you in every way. I tend away from minimalism as a general trend, and identify somewhat with the "horror vacui" (fear of empty space) common in a lot of outsider art. Worship of minimalism to me smacks of Western materialism and the banal fashion and commercial art world... Oh wow, look at that blue square with a black outline... it's PROFOUND! That would be four thousand pounds please I'm more Kandinsky than Mondrian. Or the super stripped down shop fronts in clothes shops. Chaos feels more human, more flawed and somehow less pretentious (though others feel the opposite is true).

A lot of music I like seems to employ something very minimal, contrasted with something almost excessively complex, for example a drone combined with intricate glitchy beats. The details that flash by act like 'greebles' on a spaceship - they provide a sense of scale which feeds into the vastness of the minimal pad.

[whyterabbyt]

i feel a twat when im onstage alone

If you're doing that then there's at least one other person on stage, no?

not necessarily.

[The_Hidden_Goose]

Yeah I must admit that despite my recent slight stripping down trend, my idea of a comfortable living space and ideal environment is probably the opposite. I don't plan on being a musical Mondrian squares painting. Well I hope not. I'll deserve all the scorn people can muster if I do!

I see these home-building programs on telly where the results are spartan, sterile and white with tiny bits of shining chrome here and there and think they might as well go and live in a hospital.

...

I think I want to wash my eyes out with vinegar after that, whyterabbyt!

[Sendy]

Yeah, property is a good way of thinking about it. I tend to like pokey houses with lots of levels and angles, kept slightly messily. Shows signs of human habitation

Wanting to strip out the useless parts of your music is of course essential. I've often erred on the side of putting way too much in, in the past, so I've been trying to transmute that extra stuff into subtle layering that gently supports the feeling of the music as opposed to dozens of unruly raw elements running wild.

[vurt]

Shows signs of human habitation

my current gf goes mad at me for having a home that looks lived in. to the point that last night she asked "when did you last clean this kettle?" wtf?

[foosnark]

I like dense music, if it speaks to me. I like sparse music, if it speaks to me.

I like playing with the contrast between them sometimes, too -- whether in the time domain (moving from sparse to dense and/or dense to sparse) or the frequency domain (leaving some ranges empty or near-empty while others are very busy).

[The_Hidden_Goose]

Depends vurt....if your kettle has green tendrils growing out the top, she might have a point!

[The_Hidden_Goose]

I used to have a housemate who was so happy living in filth, he once punched through the glass bit on the front door when he lost his key (drunk of course), then proceeded to bleed all through the hall, into the kitchen, then all up the bannister up 3 flights to the top level. I visited my folks for the weekend and it was still there when I got back, and he was snoring in a blood-soaked bed. He'd been up and about, replaced the glass in the door but ignored all the blood and gore everywhere. Looked like Charles Manson had been over for a visit and someone pissed him off.

Even dirty hippies like me have their limits

[vurt]

my kettle is fine!

i mop my floors every couple of day, hoover my stairs once a week.
shes just mental on cleanliness. was doing the dishes while i was cooking, id put a knife down after slicing mushrooms put them in the pan, go to pick the knife up to slice the garlic and shes took it to wash it

[Frantz]

This is a subject close to my heart. I make an effort to "reduce" my music to its essentials. I try to remove extraneous parts and shorten sections as much as possible. The result doesn't have to sound minimal. What's left sounds bigger because the remaining parts have all the space and weight they need.

Coming up with lots of ideas is important but then you also need to be an editor and decide which ideas make the grade and which belong on the cutting room floor. I hear a lot of stuff in the Music Cafe which lacks an editor. 2 or 3 great ideas which get lost behind a jumble of 3 or 4 so so ideas. Pieces which would be enjoyable for 3-4 minutes get stretched out for twice as long.

[ontol]

2 or 3 great ideas which get lost behind a jumble of 3 or 4 so so ideas. Pieces which would be enjoyable for 3-4 minutes get stretched out for twice as long.

Stop exposing my recording secrets.

[jancivil]

regarding dense vs minimal : both have their place, life would be somewhat boring if it was all one or the other. i tend towards music that works in its given scope, as mentioned above mbv would probably sound a little off if it was just an acoustic guitar and donovan would sound off as a wall of sound.

do what thou will shall be the whole of the law

Yep.

[rp314]

Is it possible to answer this without getting into the messy realm of aesthetics? It's mostly very personal and seemingly intuitive, but for some reason (perhaps having to do with the notion that we are always learning and 'becoming'), thinking of and analyzing such things can be often quite useful.

First of all, what's dense and what's simple? Are Debussy's piano Preludes simple? In the harmonic sense, for example, they might be considered quite the opposite although a good number of them IMO would not necessarily fit the description of 'dense'. So, shouldn't there be more categories?

That said, my crude rule about the subjective and 'objective' aspects to this tends to be: try as much as possible to be disciplined when making music (IOW, try to keep it simple) but as a listener and student don't shy away from that which appears to be complicated, dense, messy, etc. There's much to be discovered and enjoyed therein.

In the end for me the general judgments regarding a piece of music are in good part stylistic but from what I've observed over time those who are too concerned with the style or genre of the music they make tend too often to veer towards mediocrity which I think most of us wish to avoid.

[The_Hidden_Goose]

Stop exposing my recording secrets.

I confess to using that trick in the past too.

There's perhaps only one of my old 8+ minute tracks that didn't essentially repeat and rinse. The only one I wouldn't cut back (if I ever went back to old stuff, which I don't) was one that slowly morphed and changed in time to become somethng else by the end.

I can listen to longform drone stuff like that, or old vinyl side-long electronic pieces that keep moving, even if the odd motif resurfaces here and there.

I'm a bit disillusioned with some stuff that seems unnecessarily long though - a lot of dub-tech seems that way to me. I remember loving it when I first came across it. Then a bunch of records and labels came out with the same sound with very little to distinguish between them and I though, well okay. And then a couple of years on and that same stuff still gets put out and I'm thinking "This again!".

Although I can listen to derivative stuff in other types, so maybe it's just that sound I'm bored of specifically.