#10

I think you guys would really enjoy Olias!

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#11

The one time I saw them live, in the early 2000s, they played the entire Tales From Topographic Oceans suite.

My head exploded!

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#12

Let’s not forget Another Green World by Mr. Eno…

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#13

i heard this album a lot as a child. I went on with Yes as a teenager and liked that band because of how full of details and small modulations their music was, and how vivid it was (mostly Close to the edge,Fragile, Relayer, and their very first album too). I’m not sure how much of Roger Dean’s art is responsible for the strange world immersion effect the music has.

As for my own practice, i think of transmitting (existing or virtual) worlds, making them conflate, revealing details in them, but again my stance is i make radio not music. By “worlds” i mean the real, the imagined (composer’s mind), the perceived, the inner of the listener; plurals everywhere since each evolves in “time”.

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#14

The article reminds me of the punk backlash to prog rock. Overall it seems like the writer thinks that Daniel Lopatin is letting his success go to his head (Red Bull/Live Nation money doesn’t help)? Or maybe it’s too sci-fi for his tastes? I think Lopatin has always been about creating imagery, not just music.

I don’t see any inherent issues with trying to create an immersive experience for listeners/concert-goers, but maybe the sci-fi or fantasy elements can turn off people who want to confront other themes or issues with less escape?

#15

@analogue01 I skimmed this piece trying to find the point, but ended up closing the tab thinking something along these lines:

I probably should have read it more carefully. I’m sure there was something interesting in there, or you wouldn’t have shared it? Because, I sorta feel like I’m yukking your yum, and that wouldn’t be right at all.

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#16

That was an interesting article, dense enough that I’ll have to take a second run at it. The most interesting aspect of this discussion for me is manner in which music and language share the ability to be descriptive, but are profoundly different from from one another. They allow or guide the brain to create and build worlds (waxing a little matrixesque by citing Simulation & Simulcra). Stating the obvious Music, for me, evokes space and feeling in ways the writing doesn’t, but writing with its incredibly dense detail, can create literal spaces for the disassembly of a carburetor to The Lord of the Rings. Which, of course, makes me wonder what, “Music to guide the disassembly of a Carburetor” might sound like…

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#17

re:op i feel obligated to invoke coheed and cambria, a band that began as a comic book

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#18

The language in the TMT article doesn’t really do the ideas any service. I think of it like this (and maybe this isn’t what the article means, but whatever):

Speaking strictly about the western art music tradition, music in the late 19th century tends to always have narrative/metaphorical meaning, often cause it’s written for dance/theater/opera. The theoretical aesthetic high-point of this tendency is Wagner’s total-work-of-art, the synthesis of all art-forms, but also the complete immersion of all the viewers senses to the art work. I think we could easily call this “worldbuilding” and it’s no surprise that it coincides with the height of European colonialism: the literal building of one actual “world” over many.

After that you get various 20th c. avant-garde movements that resist “worlds,” narrative and theatricality. From Stravinsky insisting the music has no metaphorical meaning, to 4’33 making the music about the real world (the concert space, the actual audience) and not a fictional space, to music concrete insisting one listen to recorded sound without considering a referent. That all happens as European colonialism starts to collapse and we get the rise of American and Soviet superpowers.

Now we live in a postcolonial world where superpowers are collapsing and there is a proliferation of new artistic, political, social, personal identities and “worlds.” There is now also a firm tradition of anti-narrative avant-guardism and most “experimental” music these days seems to be interested in mixing ideas from that tradition with new narrative/theatrical marginal and alternative world-building.

I hope that makes sense.

To answer the OP: some of my fav worlds in music are made by bands like Kraftwerk, Drexciya, Devo, The Residents.

13 Likes
#19

I think Space Dimension Controller’s Welcome to Mikrosector-50 does an incredible job of creating a story and aworld, if a funky/campy one. Maybe a little more literal than most people are taking this question, but I’ve really enjoyed that album on those terms.

#21

I would be remiss not to mention one of my favorite prog bands and master world builders GONG…

Are there any other pothead pixies in here?

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#22

Hey @disquiet, here’s a Junto idea! :wink:

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#23

It does! I really appreciate that you took the time to explain.

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#24

Mentioned this a few weeks back in another thread, but this quality is one of my favorite things about Boards of Canada. The way they are able to weave together a sonic pallet with their choice of symbolism, subliminals, and art direction is incredibly narrative. Listening to Geogaddi or Tomorrow’s Harvest feels like all the components of a movie are injected into my brain for me to play with.

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#25

I love this idea, but take a slightly different angle on it. When I first encountered the phrase “illbient” it seemed to offer an all-encompassing guide to everything I loved about music: dub tempos and effect science, field recordings, ambient textures, turntablism, early electronics, raw hip-hop beats, sample manipulation, live instrumentation… and so much more. It was the essence of what I understood hip-hop to be: cherypicking the very best parts of all genres to weld them into a whole which celebrated the dust and grime embedded in the grooves of the recordings it plundered.

But then it never quite happened - not fully. Like so many things viewed from afar, illbient was an NYC thing that I would only touching distance. The very idea of it was intoxicating but the reality of it was never within my grasp.

When the end of the 90s bled into the start of the 00s something else happened, though. It was illbient made flesh but the focal point had slipped south hundreds and hundreds of miles, appearing in Miami. It wasn’t called illbient anymore; now it sported the somewhat incongruous title: intelligent dance music (labouring on the twin misconceptions that: dance music wasn’t intelligent and that this style of music somehow was).

From labels like Chocolate Industries, Schematic, Merck, Counterflow, Metatronix, Beta Bodega and others came not just a sound but a whole identity. A world.

Struggle Inc, La Mano Fria and others (including The Designers Republic, in my home of city of Sheffield, UK) provided the visual identity, but Graphic Havoc was the main one that summed it up for me. Borne of the same minds who had given me the best designed graffiti magazine ever made - 12oz Prophet - GHAVA (Graphic Havoc A Visual Agency) connected all the dots from graf and NYC (illbient roots…) to Chocolate Industries and my friend Edgar (Push Button Objects), his collaboration with Craze and his collaboration with (illbient touchstone) Liquid Sky producer DJ Ani for skate brand Zoo York.

All of this presented a world which tied more or less ALL my loves into one entity. Not just an album that created a world, but a whole movement - one that spread down the East coast of the US and beyond - connecting with Warp Records (then still partly in Sheffield, but on the verge of moving completely to London) and me.

Then, almost as soon as I’d begun to feel at home within this world, it splintered and was gone - leaving behind a feeling that it maybe never really existed, at least, not in the way it had appeared in my mind…

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#26

(Sorry if that took things off track - it’s just what the OP provoked in my mind)

#27

One of the things I love about Yes is how they can conjure up worlds without the trappings of a whole Tolkien-style mythos/history. In and around the lake, mountains come out of the sky, they stand there.

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#28

Yes, they do, they stand there!

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#29

Listening to that track while driving through a Rocky Mountains snowstorm after a night of… revelry… can be quite a euphoric experience.

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#30

I’m not sure if you’re describing this as the birth of IDM. Around 1995 I was on a mailing list called IDM where we discussed acts on labels like Warp, Rephlex, Clear, etc. If you haven’t, there’s another whole world to dig into there.

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