Terrapin_Station

Which isn't necessarily a negative thing. Trolling folks has a long tradition in the arts, not just in music, and I think it has some value. For example, think of Marcel Duchamp.

An obvious musical choice is John Cage, but let's focus on more recent examples.

My nominee is Xiu Xiu/Jamie Stewart.

Stewart has done things like releasing albums consisting solely of sounds made by vibrators (well, though electronically processed at times), which is Kling Klang, and albums comprised entirely of field recordings he made in Peru, which is Tired of Your World... Peru. (Neither of these seem to have any tracks on YouTube, unfortunately.)

He's also done things like "Fortune Teller," which is 21 minutes of him simply saying "Yes," "No," "Perhaps," and "Maybe" over and over, with no processing, no significant variation in any musical sense, etc.:


Even on "normal" Xiu Xiu albums, where Xiu Xiu is functioning more like a(n experimental indie/pop) group, Stewart seems to do quite a few things in the vein of trolling.

Or take Stewart's Nina Simone tribute album, Nina, where he sings every song in what seems to be a caricature/parody of his already highly unusual voice:



Again, I don't at all think that artistic trolling is necessarily a bad thing. After all, I'm very pro experimentalism, weirdness, etc., and I like people doing it with a sense of humor or mischievousness, too. I like Xiu Xiu quite a bit overall, even if they'd not be among my top couple hundred artists (I consider myself a fan of well over a thousand artists). And out of all of his trolling, I only think that "Fortune Teller" is garbage. It's really the only thing Stewart has done so far that I don't think has any aesthetic merit at all.

But I think that musical trolling is relatively unusual. Maybe unfortunately so. So who is an example or two (limit yourself to a couple to give other folks an opportunity, too, if you don't mind) of more recent artists that you believe are at least sometimes trolling us?