Avantgarde/experimental fans among your friends/relatives etc.
 

Without going too much into details about which music should be considered avantgarde/experimental: Are you surrounded by many people (friends/relatives/significant others/colleagues/friendly mailmen) who like this stuff?

I am surrounded by a lot of smart and wonderful people, many of them love music, there are a two or three I can take with me to some weird concerts, but none of them are actively interested in such music and would seek it out themselves.
Also at such concerts most people are at best in their fifties and since I am in my late twenties we might have similar tastes, but I don’t think hanging out would be much fun.

What’s your situation?

My family hates experimental music for the most part. My closest friend and bandmates has very similar taste to mine and he's also my concert buddy. The rest of my friends just aren't into it.

Your point about concerts reminds me of when I saw Jandek. The crowd was made up of sad looking middle aged men and hipsters, pretty much what I expected.

A friend I might consider my closest, with whom I sometimes play, does generally "get" free improvisation, but whenever we improvise it tends to become soloing over a groove at some point. It's still fun, but...
Would love if there were more of us and we could start some kind of band.

Are there lots of such concerts in your vicinity?
I shouldn't complain, lots of musicians I like came to my town or somewehere near, but those concerts do seem to get rarer and rarer.
And there aren't even hipsters at ours. Most of the people seem to be free jazz fans from way back.
I wonder if the demographics are different in other countries or in bigger and more "cultural" cities.

Out of my social circle there are 4 or 5 of us that actively seek out experimental music and eagerly share it. Coming from a fairly small town there are literally maybe 3 active standalone music scenes here: the EDM/club scene, the punk scene, and the experimental electronic / breakcore scene. The experimental scene only exists among basement parties but the sets that are organized are usually enthusiastically and energetically supported by a very close circle of weirdos, which is great. Some of us have occasionally ventured into Vancouver to see larger experimental shows like Merzbow or larger breakcore line-ups but it's usually a lot tamer and generally feels a lot more self-conscious / tamed than tightly knit small town shows.

Damn... I want our town to have such a circle of weirdos. Or perhaps it does have one and they've been so underground I haven't found them yet...

Among my friends im one of the few who likes experimental bands, my best friend sorta has the same taste as me and likes experimental bands but we sometimes differ in taste with individual artists, exmpl he likes Tame impala and i don't.

Also neither of us knows alot about experimental groups because there is no music scene like that here so the experimental rock groups we've found so far are the ones we find over the net.
That's why idk alot of artists in this genre, i have no one arounds me who likes them and can recommend me a few.

that's actually one of the main reasons i joined this forum, to learn about other genres and different bands

May I ask which country you live in and whether yours is a big town?

Puerto Rico and idk, medium sized?

it's on the city though but around here almost everybody listens to Reggaeton and rap music not much else, the rocker kids mainly come from the rich areas but around where i live you barely see one.

i grew up in another city close to those kinda kids and they're the ones who introduced me to drugs and rock n roll.

Among my circle of friends and family, I'm the only one who enjoys any sort of experimental music. None of them appreciate even the most accessible psychedelia. For example, a friend once asked me what I listened to. I played him the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows". He said, "That can't be the Beatles, they made rock!" AARGH!

I live about an hour away from LA so there's a lot of stuff going on there.

That's exotic, if you don't mind me saying so.
Didn't think I'd say this, but I guess: God bless the rich kids, then.:)

Heh.
Let's not forget the stadium rock anthem Revolution 9.

And their drugs :)

I don't have friends, so I think that's a no?

Just kidding - I have two friends. One only listens to the Beatles, old white-people jazz, and cheesy '80s rap, and the other I guess has okay taste in older stuff but doesn't know a ton and is very into the Black Keys and Jack White. So still a no.

My mom hates music that's not classical or a female folk singer, and my dad has decent taste but doesn't listen to anything too out-there. My twin likes poppy "indie" stuff.

I have one friend that's big into some cool experimental stuff (powerelectronic, noise, grindcore to name a few) so he's good for recs there. Have friends that overlap in other ~non-experimental~ music tastes tho so it's all good. I rarely start convos on music anyways IRL. Most of my good friends likely have no idea what I listen to.

Same with me. I just stopped talking about music at some point, because you just seem like some snobbish hipster weirdo eventually and I don't like that.

I used to think it was my DUTY to turn my friends on to all the wonderful music I was discovering that they might not otherwise hear. Then I would be surprised and sometimes even a little hurt when they would just look at me like I'd had a brain aneurysm or just arrived from the planet Tralfamador. And I could not even win for losing. I'd finally find that friend who actually liked listening to the sound of someone banging on a can and screaming and I would proceed to alienate THEM with some Desi Arnaz or Carmen Miranda record. I was too eclectic for my own good!

I think it was at some point in my mid-30's when I just gave up and stopped trying to be a musical pied piper for my friends and family. Everyone I knew was listening to the Dave Matthews band (Yack!) and I was trying to turn them on to these grimy little Japanese garage bands I was digging. I just had to accept the fact that, musically, I was on my own.

I just play what I like now and damn the torpedoes and, funnily enough, now I get people asking me all the time - Hey what is that you're listening to?

It depends on how much time they spend with me. For example, my wife solely listened to a select subset of relatively tame metal genres when she met me, Goth Metal, Ambient, Melodic Death metal...

Now, her favorite groups are in the post-metal, experimental stuff, like Toby Driver and Maudlin of the Well, Kayo Dot.

She's even getting really into some Minimalist/Drone Musics, ala Theater of Eternal Music, and lately she's been expressing interest in listening to more spectral compositions. From Wolves in the Throne Room to Tristan Murail is a pretty good taste-expansion!

But no, I feel that most people, unless repeatedly exposed to things, will generally not become comfortable enough with them to enjoy them. If all you've ever heard is Country/Western, Blues Rock and Folk might be "out" enough to really get your weird senses tingling, and anything beyond that is just "noise."

It takes time for comfort to develop, allowing new exploration to be enjoyable. We're wee, sleekit, cowering, timorous beasties at heart.

A couple coworkers borrowed my MP3 player the other day to play in our back room, having forgotten both of theirs. They set it to play on Random. About 30 minutes later, they returned it saying something like, "Ummm, you can have this back; you're tastes are a bit, well, borderline insane?"

From their descriptions, I think it played some To Mera (Prog-metal), Ravi Shankar, and was starting in on Terry Riley's "In C". Poor, dubstep-listening kids, they had no idea what was in store for them...

The sad part is, none of that stuff is really out there...

I'd suggest being more weary of setting if you want to turn people on to experimental music. The back room at work is probably the last place on Earth suitable for experimental music. The best way to ease friends into weird music is to wait until they're high on something, in a comfortable setting, and go "Hey maaaaaaan, wanna hear something tripppppyyy?", that's when the gates to Valhalla really open and they're truly primed for the new Pharmakon album or Comus' First Utterance or Naked City's Torture Garden or whatever else you have up your nasty experimental sleeves. People generally don't let in weird **** unless their cultural walls have been torn down by something else first, like drugs, or a well made documentary on Netflix, or a well worded post on Music Banter, or a spiked drink....

I wasn't really trying to turn them on to anything. They asked for it, and I gave them the warning that "it would be Zack Music, not dubstep or country."

But, none of that stuff was particularly experimental, except the Terry Riley, but even that is pretty tame...

I just thought it was a slightly humorous, relatively relevant story to recount!:p:

Aye, I've had similar experiences. At work anything that isn't straight from radio is experimental, back in my retail days I put some laid back instrumental hip-hop on over the isle speakers and my coworkers thought even that was weird.

Wow. At least these guys aren't that bad, but, depending who's there, it's a pretty dubstep, 90's rock, country, early 2000's hard rock, celtic rock, or gangsta rap kind of crew.

Oh yes, and two of the guys are die-hard Nightwish fans. I didn't even realize there were male Nightwish fans. Or Nightwish fans at all, really...

I don't know many people who are into the some stuff I'm into that is more experimental, but that doesn't hinder me from listening to it anyway. Not everything you hear has to be shared I think.
(I don't mind going to concerts by myself haha)

My dad has always been pretty open minded coming to a lot of expiremental music he does not like drone, or noise though. It's where I got my initial interest in the genre.

Sadly, I am the only person here who enjoys that type of music, which is partly why I joined the forum.

Pfffft.

Well, originally it was my older brother who turned me onto the scene, but the farthest he ever really got was Death Grips. He'll still describe music as "weird" during a serious conversation and, while there's absolutely nothing wrong with liking pop, he'll keep casually saying some pop producer is a "master" when they keep rehashing the same stupid tinny accelerando for the obviously structured climax of every stupid song they write. :banghead: It's the Ke$ha guy, by the way (She kinda just sounds like classic rock with party themes by now... *shrug* not my thing).
But yeah, he's the kind of person who listens to things song-by-song instead of a larger context like albums or something, and sometimes I'll hear his playlist jump from ABBA to some track off Shaking the Habitual and it's really jarring. He's a really smart guy, but sometimes I want to sit down and talk about how analysis of music in the correct context is just as important as analysis of vulgar cinema...
Just listen to Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished already! It's not supposed to be pleasant, it doesn't cover pleasant themes! It's like complaining that Lars von Trier films aren't colorful enough...

Yeah he's the only person I know who has any roots in the avantgarde , and he certainly gets the ideas, he just applies them more to film and lets music be surface-level entertainment.
Other than that, I guess I can listen to Person Pitch in the car cause my dad likes Panda's voice and it never gets "too weird," and sometimes if I catchmy mom in th right mood I can talk my way through Mount Eerie or the Glow pt2 and explain it in a way she seems to appreciate. But I want to play Ples Upiru in the car! Why can't people be more accepting of the surface-level entertainment garnered by playing a violin with a chair leg and screeching along? (Iva's my current obsession. That trip-hop album with Yokoto was... unexpected and amazing)

Blather blather rant rant self deprecating joke about being pretentious

My darling hates experimental music, but she's the most intelligent human being I've ever encountered. So, liking avant garde etc has nothing to do with intelligence, in my opinion.

Yeah, It's just where you apply it. Or how.

I know that my mom loves Diamanda Galas

Definitely agree with this sentiment. Same with the fact that you don't have to be on drugs to like experimental music. Though, I think both of those things can certainly make it more likely to point you in that direction.

I have a very hard time with this. And I WISH my bandmates were into the music I'm into! I met a couple of people that I can go to concerts with, but even they don't like some of the more abstract music that I choose to listen to. I've gone to see Sigur Ros and Radiohead with these people, but they would never think about attending a Pere Ubu concert with me! My singer sent me a copy of Trout Mask Replica last year saying, "listen to this horrible thing! It gives me nightmares." I listened to it for fun, and a year later, I'm obsessed with anything Beefheart. I think my family (wife and three little kids) think I've lost my mind. But it is fun when my oldest (7 yr old) runs around saying, "Fast and Bulbous!" :)

Loving experimental music is a lonely endeavor.

My ex introduced me to The Knife but I'm generally the most experimental oriented person in my group of friends. All of them can at least appreciate it though.

My brother and my mom can both be pretty open-minded, but I don't think they have a lot of active interest in experimental music. My dad was usually the one trying to get me to listen to stuff more left of field. I'm pretty sure my first exposure to space music was at his insistence, since I got put to bed to NPR's Hearts of Space show when I was little. He was also the first person to introduce me to Harry Partch. He beat my college professors by several years.

Family:

My mother refuses to listen to anything outside of the christian radio or any music that does not glorify god. She believes that if it doesn't praise god that it's satanic and goes against the purpose of music. I've tried showing her standard music she'd like such as Sufjan Stevens or something and she isn't having that ****. I did get her to listen to some instrumental 2nd/3rd wave post-rock though, that was cool. Not exactly experimental, of course.

My father listens mainly to classic rock/christian radio and holds the same beliefs as my mother to an extent. The best I could get him to listen to and enjoy was Beach House. We like a lot of the same older stuff though, so that's cool.

My sisters both listen to radio country/pop/rap.

Friends:

One of my internet friends introduces me to a lot of experimental stuff and we both like pretty much anything we find and share. We also sometimes make crazy experimental music from the depths of hell. That's the only person I can think of among friends/relatives who listens to experimental music.

I have other friends that enjoy some of the same music as I do but are not as open-minded.

My parents are the opposite of open-minded. They're scared to listen to any nonchristian music because they believe it's just satan's way of corrupting your mind. I find it funny that I somehow managed to develop a taste in anything growing up around that (and still being within it.)

I can thank the internet for my musical journey. That much is obvious.

Update: sister now likes Pere Ubu. She's on her way to not hating Beefheart anymore.

I can honestly say that not a single person I know has a similiar taste in music - I need to know more people:(. my sister said that henry cow sounds like a cat scratching chalk.
sure, some of my friends like prog like crimson and genesis, but not one likes sleepytime or residents or avat-jazz in general.

Wow. I saw Galas live with my ex-wife back in the mid-90s, but my Mom... she isn't going to listen to anything harder than the Beach Boys...

All of my friends like underground music. I would be hard pressed to think of someone I know that doesn't like The Residents.

I have the chance to study electro-acoutic music so a lot of my friends are interested in this kind of music. However, most of the people I met in music school are more interested in jazz or romantic music. I think that it is representative of the population.