I realized I know absolutely nothing about electronic music

Keep tracking down new music that turns you on lopez by all means, for that way lies proper musical nirvana. But more importantly revel in that which you really love and roll about it in like some audophiliac pig in shit, rather than trying to 'know' too much about stuff that you don't even give a fuck about

  On 7/26/2011 at 5:25 PM, keltoi said:

i've no interest in knowing everything there is to know about electronic music. i know what i like and i like what i know.

If you can adopt this attitude then you'll enjoy music a whole lot more.

  On 7/27/2011 at 3:05 AM, kaini said:

i recently discovered nomeansno. they are fucking amazing.

Indeed they are sir. Nice to realise that more people here appreciate them than I first realised.

I either read up fairly diligently about an album before listening to it, or buy/download it without hardly knowing anything about it. The former provides fairly consistent results, the latter exposes me to things I otherwise would never have listened to.

Very cool thread.

I have realized after years of pain and confusion that it's unlikely that you are going to know everything about even the smallest genre ever and it's connections because the pit is bottomless. It is truly an abyss. The best I can possibly aspire to is to find a few exciting countries to explore in my own, real world, rather slow time. Then you become a ruthless curator for what really drives you and hope that your friends, a serious magazine or people in the virtual world, will tell you about good stuff that might slip off your radar.

Look what Alain Badiou says about this

  Quote

First, not to be obsessed with formal novelty. I think it’s a great question today because the desire for novelty is the desire of new forms, an infinite desire for new form. The obsession of new forms, the artistic obsession with novelty, of critique, of representation and so on, is really not a critical position about capitalism because capitalism itself is the obsession of novelty and the perpetual renovation of forms. You have a computer, but the following year it’s not the true computer, you need a new one. You have a car, but the coming year it’s an old car, something like an old thing and so on. So, it’s a necessity for us to see that the complete obsession with new forms is not really a critical position about the world as it is. It’s a possibility that the real desire, which is subversive desire, is the desire of eternity. The desire for something which is a stability, something which is art, something which is closed in-itself. I don’t think it’s quite like that, but it’s a possibility because the perpetual modification of forms is not really a critical position, so the desire of new forms is certainly something important in art, but the desire for the stability of forms is also something important. And, I think we have to examine the question today.

branching from one artist to another is fortuitous

unfortunately I only kind of skimmed the topic, but what I do is to try and discover new (new to me at least) music all the time, and listen through all of it at least once, and if I like it, I'll look into more about the person who made it, and if I like them & their other work, I'll buy everything they've made that I can afford, and listen to it fucking tons. Basically, the way I see it is, this gives me a brief knowledge of many types of music so I have a wider perspective, I give back to those who I care about and educate myself on their music, and for those who I care less about, they do not lose money from me trying out their music, so it's a win win all around for me. I'm not saying it's the ultimate by any means, but it works for me.

  On 7/30/2011 at 5:14 AM, Caretstik said:

  On 7/26/2011 at 5:25 PM, keltoi said:

i've no interest in knowing everything there is to know about electronic music. i know what i like and i like what i know.

 

If you can adopt this attitude then you'll enjoy music a whole lot more.

For me it's more like; I like what I like and I know why I like it and could enthuse about this in great detail to the point where it seems like maybe I don't like electronic music after all. Or, I like so little that I wonder what it is about what I do like that makes it good. I couldn't face listening to loads of new music I find just passable, I'd have to go back to my regular fix to be able to do it, which sort of defeats the point of listening to new music, which is to find a new kind of wow. I want something that will really grab hold of my attention and melt my brain with its energy and beauty and emotion. I honestly don't know a lot of electronic music to be energetic.

  On 7/29/2011 at 9:11 AM, verticalhold said:

Nonsense follows

 

feel out of touch with the "current state" of music, instead an attraction to things in the range of acid jazz / trip-hop / downtempo - obviously music that's fallen out of favour these days, with the power-drill glitch wobble and subsubsub bass music. Brian Eno is a good fall back .. Krautrock, and some ambient. I'm stuck in a "cleansing" ritual Stars of the Lid and SAWII. put-off by the idea of a synth as an umbrella all-purpose instrument, used to fill the gaps in song-writing. or if this fails yelp-yelp vocals can also work. There's a lot of quirky shit. (Hypnogogic Pop?). Clark's Totems Flare is a good embodiment of what I find so distressing about a lot of new music. the timbre and palette of records. kitchen sinks.

yes, this basically. apart from minimal techno/deep house i'm terrible out of touch with the new releases. especially with so-called "experimental music" (which is obviously, more or often than not, as standardized as the "normal" music), which i feel has become a bit stale apart from the odd gems here and there. trying to sound "obscure" just for the sake of it, or at least that's what it feels like, without delivering emotion, atmosphere, message.

the classics and rediscovering them is where it's really at for me at the moment, be it jazz, ambient, electronic, psychedelic rock.... records you can listen to 50 times and still learn from and get experience.

well d-lo (dr lopez) lots of people i feel like to pretend to they know more then they know for real. for an example theres some albums which big sound problems like clipping (not just loud wars you really heard the clip sound) or sounding like there made from 128 mp3s (and looking like it to in the spectrum) and i search the web and no 1 acknowleges this problems just giveing RAVE REVIEWS even though they all and there moms love to go on about sound quality vinyl turn tables audophile speaker mp3 wire cable compression bitrate etc! i just fear this worlds full of big ol pozers

what im saying it to take anyone who acts they know more then u with a grain of salt and anyone how acts like they know less with a grain of pepper

  On 8/1/2011 at 5:18 AM, sup said:

what im saying it to take anyone who acts they know more then u with a grain of salt and anyone how acts like they know less with a grain of pepper

∞ nü age knowledge ™ ∞

Bought this because the album cover was so good:

very happy with the purchase.

Bought this because I love bpitch control, and i only really know about them because i like modeselektor, apparat and telefon tel aviv, I dont exactly know the whole record label or anything.

Which led me to really love Paul Kalkbrenner so I saw Berlin Calling and now I feel really motivated to go find more berlin / german electronica and explore that scene more. So now I have some kraftwerk and I want to get some Can because I heard a track a while ago that I really fucking liked but never followed through on.

seriously just go to a store you like and spend like $13 on something from the "new this week" rack. keep the album on your desk until you feel so guilty that youve only listened to it once that you force yourself to listen again and eventually start to notice that 1 track that gets you hooked, then that opens a whole new musical avenue for you.

don't torrent 10 albums by ricardo villalobos just because you like "dexter" or you won't ever get into any of it. Instead just get Alcachofa, the album it's on, and slowly start to pick it up.

btw dexter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0i1Szq6GM8

aw yeah.

Also, listen to music in as many different ways as you can. In a car, on a bus, on a train in the rain in a house with a mouse. youtube is awesome for seeing whats popular, finding new / related material quickly, haphazardly, stumbling on new things. spotify is now available for free in the US so use that to stream new albums or use an artists website. make a last.fm account and find stuff that way. let your friends make you playlists of whatever bs they listen to even if you judge them hard for it and maybe youll actually like a bit of it and that will open new doors too. if you have money and like physical media get a cheap turntable and buy like 2 records. i got my first tunrtable 2 years ago and bought LA by flying lotus because i kept hearing his name and because, again, the album art was fucking awesome. listened to that album a hundred times without ever reading a review and love the shit out of it.

don't get overwhelmed by the amount of music thats out there or try to listen to all of it. just listen to what you like, keep going down that path but keep a healthy musical diet by occasionally making time and listening to stuff you're not yet super into. if you get stuck and bored of music in general (happens) then take a break from music and dont feel bad that youre not "learning" or consuming more shit, just relax and get into non music for a while.

but if you really want to listen to more music then you gotta stay up late at night with a million tabs open in your browser so you can see what the last 5 hours of music discovering has looked like. id say quality over quantity (deep appreciation of a few albums vs shallow understanding of many) is generally better but you can definitely do both (know a lot of music well) if you just sacrifice sleep.

/rant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1IJiAXjj7k

again