Is your music better or worse than this?

[ghettosynth]

A slightly different direction for discussion.


http://www.xenochrony.org/

[chiefwuhog]

some of these are so funny,chip the black boy is awesome haha

[SODDI]

Norwegian Wood by The New World Electronic Chamber Orchestra

[SODDI]

And who could forget The Peanuts' (the teeny little girls from the Mothra movies) epic rendition of King Crimson's "Epitaph"?



I know, I've posted this before. So what.

[ghettosynth]

A slightly different direction for discussion.


http://www.xenochrony.org/

Yeah, so nobody commented, so I'll say more.

This site will choose three experimental performances at random from their curated selection. So it's nowhere near as random as just choosing videos from youtube, but, it's certainly not going to give you a predefined rhythmic or tonal structure.

There's more choice and structure in most dance music, even that created purely with loops. Surely in the sixties when artists were using this concept of "xenochrony" there was something to the notion of giving it a name. At that time technology essentially linked a "song" to its physical existence in the form of a tape. Today though, music that we create is generally already conveniently decomposed into its components. Our DAWs save the various tracks as separate files and often even link in tempo information. Bringing a performance from one "song" into another is hardly interesting in and of itself. In fact, it's the subject of much derision.

After all, isn't using a collection of loops essentially this "technique with a lofty name"? Aren't you simply bringing together different musicians who had no foreknowledge that they would one day play with each other?

Or, in fewer words, are mashups art, and if so, where is the talent? In relation to this thread then, is your music better or worse than a mashup?

[cron]

A slightly different direction for discussion.


http://www.xenochrony.org/

Yeah, so nobody commented, so I'll say more.

This site will choose three experimental performances at random from their curated selection. So it's nowhere near as random as just choosing videos from youtube, but, it's certainly not going to give you a predefined rhythmic or tonal structure.

There's more choice and structure in most dance music, even that created purely with loops. Surely in the sixties when artists were using this concept of "xenochrony" there was something to the notion of giving it a name. At that time technology essentially linked a "song" to its physical existence in the form of a tape. Today though, music that we create is generally already conveniently decomposed into its components. Our DAWs save the various tracks as separate files and often even link in tempo information. Bringing a performance from one "song" into another is hardly interesting in and of itself. In fact, it's the subject of much derision.

After all, isn't using a collection of loops essentially this "technique with a lofty name"? Aren't you simply bringing together different musicians who had no foreknowledge that they would one day play with each other?

Or, in fewer words, are mashups art, and if so, where is the talent? In relation to this thread then, is your music better or worse than a mashup?

Xenochrony is new on me. Reading around... Kinda reminds me of some of John Cage's work. There's a series of works by Cage delivered in lectures called Indeterminacy. In one performance, Cage reads a selection of stories while David Tudor plays piano and triggers electronic sounds in another room. Neither of them can hear the other. Each story is read in exactly one minute, giving Tudor and Cage a rough system in which they can broadly sync up, but not enough to create something fully structured.

I guess it's not strictly Xenochrony if each musician knows that they're contributing to a work though. I guess Zappa didn't see hip-hop and sampling coming. The sampler has essentially rendered Xenochrony an everyday technique in popular music.

I'll happily admit that I've often had two experimental tracks playing at once without noticing. Perhaps I've started a new album off and haven't stopped a Youtube video playing. I always clock it eventually, but even then I can't tell you exactly how. It's a creeping sense that something isn't right.

Again, not strictly Xenochrony as everyone knows they're contributing to something, but this internet work inspired by Terry Riley's In C demonstrates how chance and randomness can create music that is beautiful and accessible. http://www.inbflat.net/

Finally, is your music better or worse than this?

[jancivil]

Xenochrony is new on me. Reading around... Kinda reminds me of some of John Cage's work. There's a series of works by Cage delivered in lectures called Indeterminacy. In one performance, Cage reads a selection of stories while David Tudor plays piano and triggers electronic sounds in another room. Neither of them can hear the other. Each story is read in exactly one minute, giving Tudor and Cage a rough system in which they can broadly sync up, but not enough to create something fully structured.

I guess it's not strictly Xenochrony if each musician knows that they're contributing to a work though. I guess Zappa didn't see hip-hop and sampling coming. The sampler has essentially rendered Xenochrony an everyday technique in popular music.

I first encountered the term or the concept in 1979 via the liner notes on the Frank Zappa album Sheik Yerbouti, the track called Rubber Shirt isolates a performance by bass player Patrick O'Hearn and a performance by drummer Terry Bozzio and combines them.

A classic "Xenochrony" piece would be "Rubber Shirt", which is a song on the Sheik Yerbouti album. It takes a drum set part that was added to a song at one tempo. The drummer was instructed to play along with this one particular thing in a certain time signature, eleven-four, and that drum set part was extracted like a little piece of DNA from that master tape and put over here into this little cubicle. And then the bass part, which was designed to play along with another song at another speed, another rate in another time signature, four-four, that was removed from that master tape and put over here, and then the two were sandwiched together. And so the musical result is the result of two musicians, who were never in the same room at the same time, playing at two different rates in two different moods for two different purposes, when blended together, yielding a third result which is musical and synchronizes in a strange way. That's Xenochrony. And I've done that on a number of tracks.
- from Bob Marshall interview with FZ

On the liner notes FZ writes 'The sensitive interplay [you hear] never actually happened."
Another instance is in the Frank Zappa tight arranger thread, where Persona Non Grata, a guitar solo thing over a slow 3/4 vamp he opened shows with frequently over a couple of tours, 1978, 1979 was extrapolated and placed over a different rhythm, in 4 so the way it scans is now quite different.

When do you think Frank Zappa lived, Cron? He actually has actor Michael Rapaport doing beat box 'black-acting white guy' schtick on Civilization Phaze 3. Which features an extensive use of samples in compositions some of which date back to 1986, which FZ talks about how they would change over time according to "new samples coming on-line" for the Synclavier.

I believe those liner notes is where the term was coined. Anyway, not exactly synonymous with 'chaotic'. It takes 'Xeno', 'outside of' or 'foreign to' and sticks in on 'chrony', time. If what you do is not in more than one time by intent it probably doesn't fit the term.

On the Bus takes a solo from Inca Roads and plants it on a much faster beat. Posthumously 'Occam's Razor' came out, a fantastic recording out of The Vault. seems like only a couple years ago.
Funnily enough the theme is Toto Hold The Line. So if I hear that in Walgreen's it gives me a buzz by proxy.

[ghettosynth]

The sampler has essentially rendered Xenochrony an everyday technique in popular music.

Exactly, and here I'm not particularly interested in the exact intent behind the meaning was because it's not used in that way strictly by xenochrony.org.

I'll happily admit that I've often had two experimental tracks playing at once without noticing. Perhaps I've started a new album off and haven't stopped a Youtube video playing. I always clock it eventually, but even then I can't tell you exactly how. It's a creeping sense that something isn't right.

So you're arguing that there is some skill in preventing that sense? Is it any different from a sense of bad playing? Eno exploits randomness and in reading about how he works it's not so much about eliminating any particular note in time when he's mixing/composing, rather, it's about shaping the distributions.

Is this wrong, or right, or just quaint?

[morelia]

I liked that one. No, seriously, I did.

[SODDI]

A slightly different direction for discussion.

http://www.xenochrony.org/

Yeah, so nobody commented, so I'll say more.

This site will choose three experimental performances at random from their curated selection. So it's nowhere near as random as just choosing videos from youtube, but, it's certainly not going to give you a predefined rhythmic or tonal structure.

There's more choice and structure in most dance music, even that created purely with loops. Surely in the sixties when artists were using this concept of "xenochrony" there was something to the notion of giving it a name.

To me it seems like that old surrealist/dadaist drawing game "Exquisite Corpse" - you fold a piece of paper in three, one artist starts drawing on the first panel, hands it over to the second artist who draws his panel without seeing the first panel and then the third artist gets his panel and without seeing either the first or second panels finishes the drawing, then the paper is unfolded and you have the complete "Exquisite Corpse" - a drawing by three artists.

I don't think it can work in music the same way, and I suspect that any form of the game (and it is important to think of it as a game), adapted to a musical format, would be best played with an intimate grouping of like-minded individuals, not a blank-faced website. A soiree, if you would.

[ghettosynth]

A slightly different direction for discussion.

http://www.xenochrony.org/

Yeah, so nobody commented, so I'll say more.

This site will choose three experimental performances at random from their curated selection. So it's nowhere near as random as just choosing videos from youtube, but, it's certainly not going to give you a predefined rhythmic or tonal structure.

There's more choice and structure in most dance music, even that created purely with loops. Surely in the sixties when artists were using this concept of "xenochrony" there was something to the notion of giving it a name.

To me it seems like that old surrealist/dadaist drawing game "Exquisite Corpse" - you fold a piece of paper in three, one artist starts drawing on the first panel, hands it over to the second artist who draws his panel without seeing the first panel and then the third artist gets his panel and without seeing either the first or second panels finishes the drawing, then the paper is unfolded and you have the complete "Exquisite Corpse" - a drawing by three artists.

I don't think it can work in music the same way, and I suspect that any form of the game (and it is important to think of it as a game), adapted to a musical format, would be best played with an intimate grouping of like-minded individuals, not a blank-faced website. A soiree, if you would.

First, interesting, thanks. Second, I'm not so sure that I agree with you for several reasons. First, the website isn't really blank faced, the selections that are chosen from at random are curated.

However, second, and I think that this is the more interesting aspect, we can view the "parts" of a piece as selections from a population of parts. What you think is careful selection may not be in the mind of the listener. To them, there is some chance that there isn't much difference from a random selection. Of course, this is more true as we move away from normative forms.

[ghettosynth]

Building a career on broken dreams...



I had a similar thought recently about how much material is recorded and forgotten, or is never even remembered by much of anyone beyond the creator.

Much of hip hop and related genres was built on this idea of bringing together pieces that were never intended to be played together.

Not exactly built on broken dreams, but, it's probably more famous than any of the bits used to create it.



Here's how you make a hit record

[ghettosynth]

Here's something a little different. It's not bad, in fact, it's pretty excellent, but, is it really "great" techno? I'm not convinced. If he wasn't playing this live, I don't really think that the audio alone would keep my attention. That's just my take though, I'm pretty judgey about techno. In any case, it's certainly not bad by any means and it's cool as shit, but, does the method matter, or the performance, or just the outcome? Is your techno better or worse than this? If it's worse, how does it make you feel that he does things the hard way? Does this inspire you?

[cron]

Thanks for the correction Jancivil. I'd assumed Xenochrony predated hip-hop, but 1979 puts us pretty much on a level with hip-hop's emergence (and indeed only a scant few years before semi-affordable sampling). Great to get your perspective as our resident Zappa expert.

does the method matter, or the performance, or just the outcome?

I've actually butted up against these issues with this exact guy.

I'm involved with a DIY initiative called The Dead Albatross Music Prize, originally started due to dissatisfaction with The Mercury Prize, and as of two years ago fully 'its own thing' rather than an explicit Mercury alternative (with shortlist announced the same day, awards show the same night etc).

Graham Dunning's album "Auxon" was in the shortlist for last year's award, and we really did have to think about what would happen when the judging panel got their hands on it. How would this hold up without the methodology underpinning it? Is it the music or the whole conceptual package that we're shortlisting here? While it's always been more about drawing attention to a collection of obscure music we love rather than the final results, we did think it might go somewhat unappreciated without that context. Every record nominated always gets a full-length show made about it in the run-up to the ceremony, but most people are just going to listen to the record rather than checking out a show about it.

On a more personal level, I was huuugely into methodology when I was a serious, intense young man in his early-20s. My big thing was tracks made entirely from a single sample or object, that particular avenue reaching its peak/nadir when I made a miniature entirely from a 5-millisecond click hand-drawn in a wave editor ( https://archive.org/download/KieronJohnson/Pop.mp3 ). I also had countless little inflexible quirks around my working method - things like having a 100% audio workflow when sequencing, with no real-time elements at all. If I was using plug-ins, I'd have a separate DAW open, record whatever I needed live while recording to disk, then import it into the main DAW. While most of the tracks I made in that period do stand up well without knowing the methodology IMO, I felt strongly that they lost something without it at the time.

Although I'm much more relaxed these days, there are a lot of things that are kind of hangovers from that time. I still do most of my sound processing in non-real-time environments like CDP, and there are certain types of music I won't make because I just don't find the methodology satisfying. Certain strains of experimental music - music which sounds experimental but is actually about as experimental as having a shit in terms of how familiar I am with the methodology and how easy I find it to produce.

The last fully formed, non-sketch thing I made fully within my 'non-experimental single-source comfort zone' was probably the track No I. Sonically it's likely one of the best things I've done, but the whole thing took around 3 or 4 hours, including processing all the material ready to be dropped into the sequencer, because I'm so utterly familiar with that methodology. It just isn't satisfying any more. All the other experimental stuff on my Soundcloud is something unexpected that 'popped out' during a process rather than something 'fully' composed-through, and while they may hardly be called fully formed, at least they're genuinely experimental. https://soundcloud.com/charityqueen/no-i

[cron]

Anyway, that post ended up being a bit too serious. I'll let Silvatra redress matters.