Aphex Twin horizontal music/

when i was a teenager i liked horizontal music. layers existed in order to provide a framework for a catchy verse or a solo. there were verses and choruses but it had to go somewhere. then i heard the orb and aphex twin's selected ambient works 85-92. this was different music, it was vertical. it relied on stacking layers on top of each other. it didn't have to go anywhere melodically, it achieved the desired effect in a different way.

but then i discovered jazz, maybe the most horizontal music of all. i became obsessed with the way coltrane would explore a mode or scale, sculpting realms of possibility using sheets of sound - this was different to the earlier horizontal music, which often just took a good idea and repeated it in a dumb sort of way until the musician was tired of playing it, and the listener was tired of hearing it. i would later rediscover the power in this, because people like om or sunn o))) realised it was powerful, in its own way.

a lot of time passed and i heard a lot of music - i liked vertical things (eno's ambient 1-4, maybe the most vertical things), and horizontal things - if you think about it, all rap is very pure horizontal music. what's odd is i can only think of a handful of things that are both horizontal and vertical in nature simultaneously, and most of them are considered 'difficult'. early philip glass, maybe the fall or my life in the bush of ghosts? i dunno.

do you prefer horizontal music or vertical music? i would imagine a slight preference towards vertical cos it's an electronic music forum.

i think I like both... just depends...

There was nothing vertical about Ambient 1. There were at most 3 or 4 layers of sparse content, nothing special.

yeah, but most tracks don't have a huge amount of melodic progression.

they just stack up some loops and set an atmosphere and it's really nice, maybe there's a vocal sample you can half-hear, but like a lot of electronic music it's sort of a sustained moody thing rather than steve vai beginning an epic wank in D# mixolydian and spurting in a fingertapped G major arpeggio with a flattened sixth.

(u r doin it wrong)

This is an interesting topic, Kaini, but I have no desire to respond.

  kaini said:

yeah, but most tracks don't have a huge amount of melodic progression.

But they last for like a decade so they're horizontal. They're just akin to the Utah salt flats instead of, say, Yosemite.

i think maybe we have clashing interpretations of the concept

take, say, the second track off konigsforst by GAS. completely vertical music

straight off, we have two things, a loopy kick drum and a drone

then, pretty soon, a little phrase comes in - same key as the drone

it's the same chord for about 9:30 so when it does change it feel huge

now let's take 'cygnus X-1' by rush as a counterexample

the intro is composed of alternating bars of 4/4, 5/4 and 6/4

then there's a major-key traditional hard rock section

then there's a classical-influenced section, using lots of diminished scales

then there's a section blending all of the above, leading toward a dramatic climax

GAS and rush, rush and GAS.

Music is neither horizontal or vertical. It's omnidirectional.

I have a different interpretation of horizontal and vertical, but it still involves layers.

Examples of vertical music:

The Orb - Orblivion

Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral

Future Sound of London - Lifeforms

You can listen to these albums for years and you'll still occasionally notice a sound or melody or rhythm in the background you never consciously noticed before.

Horizontal... to me is mostly a time thing, the duration of the music, but isn't mutually exclusive from being vertical. But if music is heavily layered, that's what counts more for me. Tangerine Dream sometimes wrote elaborate tracks that were both heavily vertical and very horizontal by these standards. Brian Eno's Neroli is the most horizontal thing ever made in the universe, god damn

does not compute

i thought this was going to be trackers vs. multitrack

Is the "I thought this thread was going to be about . . ." meme a WATMM™ creation?

I think what kaini is really trying to get at is the whole idea of the difference between eastern music and western.

Horizontal music (western) being music that has a perceived goal within the piece of music. It's the whole resolution of chords and feeling that music has 'accomplished' something, if you get what I mean.

Vertical music (eastern) being music that just is, which I think he was trying to say SAWII was trying to do. Like, the music is there, and it just sit there and, well, is. Imagine the Tao of music.

I have to say I'd lean more towards western, but I appreciate and listen to both.

I posit that all recorded music is horizontal as it must necessarily be heard sequentially over a set period of time. (poorly worded)

edit; I suppose that just makes it linear, though, not horizontal

you're such a westerner.

wow you're really overthinking music. "horizontal" and "vertical"? what?

You say that as if music is simple.

no, but it isn't as contrived or tedious as terms like "horizontal" or "vertical" would make it out to be. i understand that there are differences, in terms of theory, between a piece by coltrane and a piece by, say, U2, but it's sort of ridiculous to try and quantify it like this.

Yeah I agree with zaph. A guy with a guitar, singing, can make a great song.

  zaphod said:

no, but it isn't as contrived or tedious as terms like "horizontal" or "vertical" would make it out to be. i understand that there are differences, in terms of theory, between a piece by coltrane and a piece by, say, U2, but it's sort of ridiculous to try and quantify it like this.

I don't understand why you're saying that creating vocabulary to describe different forms of music is tedious. It's how people get ideas across to each other. Why bother having this entire forum or any discussion about it if "music is music" like you're trying to say in some other thread?

  Mr Salads said:

Yeah I agree with zaph. A guy with a guitar, singing, can make a great song.

Not really sure anyone said that wasn't a possibility.

  Quote

you can't do that in horizontal mode.

well it's tedious because i don't even really understand what the op is trying to communicate to me. the language is contrived and doesn't really make sense. "sculpting realms of possibility", "sheets of sound". that's nice, but what does it mean?

kaini: i don't think jazz can be classified as horizontal. IT has both horizontal and vertical layers. Harmonic structure and melodic progression.

Also to the new guy talking about eastern music, I can only assume you're talking about Indian music, as most far eastern music is very much linear.

  zaphod said:

well it's tedious because i don't even really understand what the op is trying to communicate to me. the language is contrived and doesn't really make sense. "sculpting realms of possibility", "sheets of sound". that's nice, but what does it mean?

Well yeah, "sculpting realms of possibility", "sheets of sound" is kind of just poor writing, but you can't really fault the OP for not really knowing how to say what he's trying to say. Well you can, but you may come across as an ass.

I for one thought that even though the lack of vocabulary made it a little amorphous that it was at least something intelligible.

  chenGOD said:

kaini: i don't think jazz can be classified as horizontal. IT has both horizontal and vertical layers. Harmonic structure and melodic progression.

 

Also to the new guy talking about eastern music, I can only assume you're talking about Indian music, as most far eastern music is very much linear.

Yeah, Indian music is what I had in mind. I kinda thought that there were some other areas over there that had some of those kind of tendencies. Could be wrong!

  Deslouriers said:

I for one thought that even though the lack of vocabulary made it a little amorphous that it was at least something intelligible.

then it just got more muddled as opinions piled on.