Introduction
 

Hello, everyone!

Wandered into your site recently after having it recommended to me, and so far I am impressed with the range and regularity of activity at the forum. Consider it my new music discussion home on the Internet. Already I've felt a warm welcome and hope to contribute in every way I can as well as growing and learning from some of the established regulars here.

Welcome aboard, I'm a newbie too :thumb:

The taste in music here is really diverse.

Welcome aboard! I have to admit, I'm pretty curious who recommended us to you.

Welcome to MB!

What if it was Franco?

You seem promising. Welcome. Tell us about your music interests.

I was actually browsing a music board and someone posted a link to you guys there and I clicked it shortly before it was taken down. Dunno who the poster was, unfortunately.

Thank you! I pretty much grab my music from all sorts of resources and will listen to anything anyone has to show me, but I'm most interested in free jazz, modern classical, EAI/onkyo (just getting started with this one, but it's quickly taken over my nighttime listening sessions), and drone/ambient stuff, with a good dash of poptimism to round out my cheery afternoons and things. I've listened through most of the rock canon and used to be a HUGE Scaruffi follower, and before that had a Pitchfork phase, so I pretty much know my way around that stuff, and then I've worked on and off on the hip hop canon. Metal and country are the only big genres I haven't systematically sat down at one point to try to "get" but I have personal favorites (Top 100 stuff) from both genres.

Nice! It's always great to see new people on here who are knowledgeable and able to talk intelligently about music. And I'm very curious to hear more about EAI/onkyo as I know very little about it.

That is an excellent resume. Certainly more well rounded than mine. You're gonna go far.

I've just waded through most of the big names (AMM, Taku Sugimoto's wide-ranging collaborations with every musician in Japan, the lowercase movement that I'm not sure if it's associated [Beuger, Ullmann, etc.]) and found a couple second-tier popularity acts that I'm into (Dieb13 and stuff) so we can explore together!

Basically, for those who don't know about the genre, EAI/Onkyo is generally the West's/Japanese (respectively) approach to expanding on John Cage's ideas about silences and "what is music." (This is really reductionist, but lemme get there!) EAI got started with AMM (and a couple of Cage's own compositions, I'm told), and Keith Rowe continues to be very prominent in the genre. He uses prepared guitars (guitars laid down and tweaked a bit to produce very different sounds) primarily. It sorta has roots in free jazz and is all about improvisations and interactions between performers. It needs to be heard to be understood, really. Here's an example of EAI:



They typically will use things like blenders and appliances and things sort of like Fluxus did with their indeterminancy pieces. It's sort of a synthesis of all the hip cool avant garde 20th Century movements, really. As for Onkyo, it is a lot more pre-disposed to using silence (though the line between the genres ends up being primarily geographic just because they switch off what are supposedly their respective aesthetics quite often) and sustained notes. One of the main people there is Taku Sugimoto, who plucks strings with varying intensities and at random durations. Again, this is a genre built on improvisations, so the idea here is to be put in a trance, highly anticipatory for each note, while each note sort of lingers on and blends into the next one. Definitely for a specific mood! Here's an example of the kind of guitar style I'm talking about:



For people who are interested, this is the primary resource I use.

Thanks a lot!

Aw man, where's Jack Pat? He'd mess himself right about now.