What got you into avant-garde and experimental music?
 

This might not be the case for all of us, but there was a time (at least for me) when I first started listening to music a few years ago around the age of 11 or 12, where I listened to stuff that sounds nothing like what I listen to now. There was a time when I thought bands like New Found Glory and Green Day were the ****. So, when did you guys begin to listen to music that pushes boundaries and the like? Are there any particular bands that introduced you to this kind of music?

For me, It was kind of a slow translation. I listened to bands that people at my school liked for a short time. Then came of time where for some reason I only listened to alot of ska music (mostly reel big fish and the like), mostly because what alot of ska artists did was different from the usual alternative and pop rock that everybody at my school listened too. I always wanted to hear something different and original. I also got into bands like The Strokes.

Later I gradually began to get into more "hardcore" bands, mostly because of their aggresive, noisey style and once again, because they were different from the stuff that I heard on the radio.

I really began to love Dillinger Escape Plan. After listening to them and bands like them for a while, I eventually came across the band's collaboration project with Mike Patton, which I really liked. This led me to Mr. Bungle. After listening to a few of their songs, I instantly was amazed and loved their music and brought all of their albums. I listened to them almost religiously (I remember listening to their 3 cd's all the way through about 3-4 times during the long car rides while me and my family were in california on vacation). The individual solo projects from the band introduced me to Fantomas, Secret chiefs 3, ect. which introduced me to musicians like John Zorn, Boredoms, ect.

So...thats my story.

Pink Floyd=Tool=Mr.Bungle=Frank Zappa=Sleepytime Gorilla Museum=Residents=Acid Mothers Temple=Magma=Ruins=John Zorn=John Cage=Captain Beefheart=Univers Zero=Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music=Brainticket=Trist

My story is one big ****ing equation....
Yep, Turn on, Tune In, Drop out.

Alot of people's will probably be like that, one band leads to another. I got into basically ever normal genre of music before I got into the more experimental stuff. Before I got into Mr. Bungle and all, I listened to rock, metal, jazz, rap, ska, ect. Now, I listen to experimental rock, experimental metal, experimental jazz, experimental rap, experimental this, experimental that, ect.

for me it was the last time i went to college. it was also 1998. the internet was still developing and peer to peer file sharing required knowledge of ftp and irc clients. music television still primarily played videos, late night music tv actually featured legitimate underground exposure.

i still remember being in the lounge of my dorm and catching aphex twin's 'come to daddy' video on what was called 'RU receiving' on late night muchmusic. about two weeks later i caught squarepusher's 'come on my selector' on a random program in the middle of a sunday afternoon.

thankfully sites like oth.net were around to allow people to try getting random mp3s through a browser.

i fondly remember milking some irc channels during the summer break just before napster really took off at the start of our 2nd year. so i guess it's not really a specific musician or group per se but time and place for me.

oh yeah, and brave new waves. it was a late night CBC radio2 program that ran for about 20 years before being canned / replaced with radio3 a few years ago.

the need to go beyond punk rock

I don't think anything in particular got me into "avant-garde". In some cases, it has become a sound, but more often than not, it's the experience of going through something different that keeps me interested.

Boredom i think. Must of been about a year and a half ago now, i was beginning to find what i was listening to at the time quite tedious, the conventional song structure, time changes and instrumentation wasnt doing it for me anymore. I have since rediscovered, to an extent, my love for the more conventional, but ive maintained my new found love for avantgarde and all things experimental too, so its all good.

Like a couple other people have said, it wasn't one thing for me. For as long as I can remember I've always sought out unique and interesting music. The more time goes by, the more familiar I have become with a wider and wider array of styles so my search for unique and interesting music kind of inevitably leads me to stuff that's considered "experimental" in one way or another.

I'm not even sure what the first experimental album I ever got would be. Maybe Gub by Pigface.

I'd say it was interest on my part to go beyond metal and rock music, but as we all know that can come in so many more forms. I think it's because a few of the earlier albums I bought had avante-garde elements and I just wanted to investigate that particular aspect of music further.

If you are into a bit of prog then you can sometimes have more of an inclination for Avant Garde artists but I will admit that MB has helped developed my exploration of the genre.

Sonic Youth.

People kept telling me the music I made was strange. I still don't think what I was doing at that time was odd by most standards, although some of what I've done since might be... Anyway, you get told you're a freak enough times, you go looking for some other ones. I found stuff WAY more outside than anything I'd ever conceived of, though often along similar logical lines, and then in turn I was influenced by that music to get perhaps legitimately stranger in my own sounds. Or maybe not. I like to write a good rocknroll song, and I also like to make a bunch of weird noise. Or both at once.

Pink Floyd + Radiohead + Sigur Ros

It was around 1997.

Can had just released their Sacrilege remix album & Primal Scream had just put out Vanishing Point. Melody Maker got Holger Czukay & Bobby Gillespie to interview each other which raised my interest enough for me to rush out & buy Tago Mago. I loved what I heard & never looked back.

I got into Tanya Tagaq after hearing her on the Bjork album Medulla, then heard Mike Patton on Tagaq's new album and wow! I don't know how many times I've heard the MB albums in the last month, too many to count. Love all of Patton's other stuff too.

The internet is what opened the door for me...I guess that my entry points would be: Genesis, King Crimson, and Zappa. After this, I started listening to Gentle Giant, Yes, Camel, etc. After that, it got kind of out of hand: Magma, Brand X, Hatfield and the North, Weather Report, Bill Bruford, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Can, Neu!, etc.

Exploring the Mike Patton catalogue.

Captain Beefheart's sense of humor. At first I ultimately hated his music and found no real way to get into TMR, then I watched a Beefheart interview and loved the guy instantly. If I had the chance to meet Beefheart but had to give a toe, I'd surely do it.

It started with Jazz

This was high school days (1991-ish) when me and a friend started going through his parents' records. We found Miles Davis. At first it was Kind of Blue, then Filles de Kilimanjaro, Sketches of Spain, and then the electric stuff (namely Bitches Brew). Eventually, I had listened to Ornette Coleman's 'Free Jazz' album enough times that it sounded like written music to me - I could anticipate every note and change.

Then came college. While I was still into the standard 'alt-rock', British Pop and Punk from my high school days, the Jazz got more and more important and then I realized that rock bands were doing the same thing. I'm not talking Sonic Youth and such (although Thurston Moore's recommendations were always a great resource), rather, I wanted improvised rock music made the way Miles and Ornette made music. After I discovered Skullflower, I went through a period where I didn't want to hear anything that had a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure and the less vocals the better. This led to all kinds of math rock and the like while I continued to gobble improvised jazz and a handful of other composers like John Cage. Eventually I wanted to hear some nice and easy music again and I returned to the independent rock scenes of the 90s with a much keener ear for avant-garde.

Engine, your story is somewhat similar to mine. I discovered Mr. Bungle and hated it, but still wanted to listen to it again for some reason until I eventually loved it. After that came a long period of me only listening to avant-garde bands. I guess you could say I was kind of pretentious about it, I still don't like how I limited myself soley to experimental music. But I think I was just so surprised by there being so much more to music then I thought before. As of about half of a year ago, though, I expanded my tastes to pretty much all other forms of music. Experimental music still makes up a large part of my tastes though.

No reason to denigrate yourself for your having your own opinions. Of course you should avoid being a prick about it but there's nothing pretentious about wanting to hear only what you want to hear when you want to hear it. I went years without giving good bands the chance they deserved because I couldn't stand their general sound. But there's time to hear it all.

Hint:
Mah smile is shtuck, iii cannot go back t' yer frownlaand.

I guess I listened to Pink Floyd, Zappa, and Capt. Beefheart and went from there. After listening to a whole bunch of bland alternative and metal for a while, I got really tired of it all and went looking for more of the few truly unique and interesting albums I had. Sonic Youth, Four Tet, and early Flaming Lips were some of the first, and at some point I just really got into noise. I geuss there wasn't really a specific point where I decided to look for more experimental stuff. But, joining MB didn't hurt.

My boyfriend listens to alot of avant garde, experimental and just..alot of music many people probably haven't heard of and then I started to get into it.

Yeah, so by that equation, Pink Floyd=Captain Beefheart, I don't think that's what you're trying to say, so yeah. I'm a math major and that bothers me.

Anyway, for me it started out I guess with Pink Floyd, if you count that. Honestly it's not a genre I've deeply explored. I moved on to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, and more recently Beefheart. Also Coltrane and Ornette Coleman if that counts.

for me it went a little something like this.

Buck 65>Tricky>Massive Attack>paranormal attack>People Under the Stairs>Siditious

First I got into alternative/new metal, then Sonic Youth, Tool, A Perfect Circle, then lots of jazz and blues, then Lustmord, Atrium Carceri, Alva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Desiderii Marginis. And here we are.

I think the album that caught my curiousity and subsequent love for avante garde was probably The VU & Nico. I bought it on a whim from HMV when i was 15 thinking it'd sound like the Beatles. By the time Venus in Furs came on i had to turn it off because my sister was ridiculing me so much. Needless to say i've given her ears a battering over the years following that fateful eve.

I think from punk, hardcore, ska, and grunge I just started to find things like Mr. Bungle, Melvins, Sonic Youth, Flaming Lips, Lightning Bolt, The Locust. Discoveries keep happening, tastes keep expanding.

My first brush in with anything that I would really consider experimental was with Ulver. They were such an eye opening band for me, and began me on a path that has lead to my current tastes in music.

some kid shoved his headphones in my ear and all i heard was a drone and it sounded a tad weird. it was velvet underground -venus in furs and it got me into avant garde. i started to search the internet for more and now i like to explore sonic sounds =3

Jazz was always in our home, from Bird to Coltrane...so I was a jazzer early on. One day on a local underground .college station, I accidentally taped Frank Zappa"s St.Alphonso Pancake Breakfast. It was the most fun in music I had in a while. The metric twists and turns in the song was just so different than listening to Count Basie and such. I absolutely wore that cassette out.

Buying Zappa's music and reading Zappa interviews, I discovered Eric Dolphy and Monk. Then Stravinsky. Then on to Messiaen. Then Sun Ra's Myth Science Orchestra. Then Stockhausen. Then Hindemith. Then on to Aaron Copeland.

Today, I listen to everything. Mos Def, Q-tip (hip hop)....Laraaji, Harold Budd, Steve Roach (ambient)....Henry Cow, Univers Zero, 5uu's, Unexpected, U-Totem (avant-rock)...The Delphonics, The Temptations (Motown).....Indian and Arabic music,,,,and the aforementioned classical music.

It's good to see others with expanded ears beyond the normal pre-packaged pop music. Im scrolling thru pages here to pick up on some artists I might have missed.

For me it was probably Edgard Varese. A friend of mine put "Poem Electronique" on his turntable one day and said "listen to this." It sounded so strange and funny to me, I'd never heard anything quite like it.

My mind has been slightly warped ever since.

But in a good way!

For me their was this creepy old guy who lived downstairs from me. He was a good friend of my mom and was renting out the place from us, i called him sergeant ****head. At the time I liked what everyone else liked at school, until he gave me a copy of Massive Attack's Protection, which is still one of my favorite cd's. After that it went in this order portishead, tricky, Verdi, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Mad Professor, Kode 9, burial, Captain Beefheart, African Head Charge, Howard Shore, Miles Davis, and so on. I manly get my music nowadays from either the sergeant still or The Wire. Everyone i know at school thinks i have a weird taste in music and as for experimental stuff I just find what i can on the internet or in the Wire.

Butthole Surfers. 9 hours and 15 albums later, i'd found my home.

Mostly Zappa, 60s psych and many headaches.

Well, I actually came to MB listening to basically mainstream stuff and looking to expand in the most violent and explosive manner possible. I think the most experimental band I listened to at the time was The Mars Volta, but still can't get through any full album aside from Frances The Mute. To be fair I haven't spun it in over half a year so I wouldn't know what I think of it now.

I kept going, and the first stuff I found hard to get into was Animal Collective, AIR, Tears For Fears, Neutral Milk Hotel, etc. Somehow after I went through a small stage with those bands I moved to PJ Harvey, that was a leap I think. From There Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits. It was around here I found The VU, which after I spun it enough to love got me much more accepting of distortion.

From this point on there were tons of good bands. I think some leaps were Ornette Coleman, Otis Redding, Slint, King Crimson, Frank Zappa, The Moody Blues, John Cale, A Tribe Called Quest. Anyway, in this sense MB has done wonders for me even though I'm not really into avant - garde. I like Blonde Redhead, The Book Of Knots, a little Captain Beefheart, Ornette Coleman, The Bad Plus. It's not a bad a start I think but I have a long way to go on my journey.

of Montreal essentially introduced me to the more 'avant-garde' scene of music.

zappa for me after him I tried to find more and here I am.

Sonic Youth opened for me the whole world of this experimental and avantgarde side of music. The first album I've listened to was "Evol". I had never heard anything like that before and it remained my favourite SY album. But when I got to "Confusion Is Sex" is when I started searching for that kind of weird, twisted and above all creative music. Eventually I discovered Swans "Holy Money" and "Filth". Whoa, nothing had prepared me for that. I was hooked. I found out about Einsturzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle and then about kraut-rock.

On the other side, I was listening to My Bloody Valentine and Spacemen 3 and that kind of prepared me for post-rock. It was in the late 90's and there were a few radio shows that aired what was a fairly new 'genre' for me, called post-rock. It was at the same time I was discovering kraut-rock, so naturally I was in the phase of some minimal, repetitive and hypnotic music.