The Most Challenging Prog You've Ever Heard - Progressive Rock Music Forum

Henry Plainview wrote:

m not much of a visual art guy, so I'm not qualified or interested in arguing about paintings, but why can you safely say that Fontana has as much merit as farting? I will surely agree that Caravaggio better at painting, but how do you know what other people get out of Cut? Something doesn't have to be representative to have meaning. I enjoy some of the work of Millares because of the raw emotion expressed, but I don't get anything out of Picasso's cubism or Piet Mondrian or Brancusi. It's difficult to talk about modern art without getting pretentious and handwaving about subjectivity, because a lot of modern art is quite pretentious, but I'm not willing to call Picasso a fraud just because I'm not a fan.

I don't think I called Fontana a fraud or even Yoshihide. You can either love or hate modern art, that's beyond the point, but what you CAN'T do is go to a baroque painting forum, willingly stir the pot by naming Fontana in a topic about inaccessible baroque paintings and then feel offended when someone points at you that what you named doesn't make sense.

Similarly, what I am discussing here is the relatedness to progressive rock of a guy like Yoshihide. Sometimes I think people forgets that we are talking about ROCK here and rock, while challenging and open-minded as progressive can be, has its rules. I think Aphex Twin has done some beautiful and experimental sh*t but what's the point of naming him here? But hey, there's people calling Radiohead progressive so I think I'll stop here before you go ahead and tell me why Consume Red is progressive rock and someone starts wondering why Aphex Twin is not on PA.

My example of farting in a cd was quite inappropriate, I'll give you that, but it was not intended to mean avant-garde is bad -which is probably what triggered you- but only that it is so off the charts if compared to prog it is like someone farting in a cd (or recording car noises, for what matters) and wanting to call it music.

What I meant is that, considering we are talking about progressive rock, there is a limit as to how inaccessible a piece of music can be and that limit is the format of the rock song that, even if distorted, convoluted or mixed up, still has to be observed. And honestly, that's not the case of Consume Red. It IS condescendent naming him. It's like

going to pop fans and telling them how much more intelligent Gentle Giant is. Of course it is, it's made to be so by definition. Just like avant-garde is made to be inaccessible.

Henry Plainview wrote:

Hahaha, oh god, you [sic]ed me on a typo. Since you bothered to look up the spelling of Yoshihide, I don't know if you listened to anything from those two works, but let me be more clear, since I shouldn't have been acting like anybody else is familiar with those albums. Consume Red is not just the sample, they play a bunch of things over top of it and around it, and it's undoubtedly prog because it morphs into a kind of noise rock thing. Cathode is not prog rock because it doesn't rock, and there's more people doing things than just Sachiko M playing sine waves but how could you question its status as music? Aren't sine waves music? Comfortably Numb is an odd choice for your Caravaggio to my modern abstraction, but I would definitely not say that Pink Floyd has more inherent meaning than Cathode. I know lots of people on the internet who love Sachiko M and Otomo and hate pretty much all rock music.

I actually *knew* Yoshihide (again you are being condescendent) and I happen to have listened to Consume Red thank you, and I know it's not just the sample. Still, I can't see how it can be defined as progressive rock. It's some sort of a convoluted free jazz-meets-industrial noisy thing. And I put the accent on the word "thing". Not every strange and convoluted lenghty piece of music played with instruments is actually progressive.

You like it, you don't, I like it, I don't, that's not the point. My point is, it doesn't belong to this forum. You are asked to name inaccessible prog rock, not obscure avant-garde, industrial-noise artists. You can't name something that is so inaccessible to the point that there's no way of recognizing it as a song, because we are talking about progressive rock here and progressive rock is still rock and is still about songs. That's why free jazz is free jazz and progressive rock is progressive rock, for example.

Well I appreciate your awknowledgement that it's art. ;-) I agree that it's expanding your point of view of what is and is not music, and I certainly understand why people don't like it (as I said, I'm not much of a fan either), but I would disagree that its primary meaning is extra-musical. For that to be the case, it would have be something pretentious like a piece titled "The American Dream" and the actual track is silent or is just the sound of shopping carts on linoleum. I would even be willing to accept playing a version of God Bless America with every note wrong as being primarily extra-musical. Cathode stands on its own, regardless of your reference points or enjoyment.

Ok I understand what you mean. Point taken. Still, when I say "extra-musical" I don't necessarily mean it that way, I mean its meaning (sorry Tongue

) is that of going BEYOND the boundaries of what is normally considered music, surpassing the limits imposed by the structure of the song in order to arrive somewhere else.

It's musically bad to you. And even to me because I don't like repetition! The fundamental problem in the endless fight between normal people and fans of avant-garde music (which I concede that we are sometimes guilty of perpetuating) is that people who are willing to fight about it claim that because they don't like it, there's nothing there. I'm not willing to say that, even if repetition drives me insane. I already talked about Yoshihide's relation to prog, and I don't know why you just called me an Otomo fanboy, I didn't even spell his name right...

What I honestly CANNOT understand, and what ultimately is the reason I replied to your post in the first place, is why people who listen to different stuff feel the need to INCLUDE what they listen to into the progressive genre at all costs. I am not saying there's nothing there, I am saying it is NOT progressive rock and there's no reason in talking about it here. My opinion on it doesn't matter. If asked, I might go so far to say that it musically makes little to no sense. My two cents on that of course, another progger might find it lovely but still it doesn't make it progressive. Anyway I am pretty much interested in fighting on avant-garde as I am in joining a discussion about who's better between Depeche Mode (that btw I find brilliant) and Yes here on PA. What's the point?

You are right, YOU want to start a fight when you name avant-garde artists with condescension in a progressive rock forum. It seems you want to come out smarter by naming something that is inaccessible and obscure even for prog rock fans and then, when someone rightfully replies it doesn't make sense by prog standards, you start with your rant on how it's only our opinion and how meaningful it is and so on. I ask you, do we need all this and what's its point if not that of you wanting to win a public debate that has no reason to exist in the first place?

Edited by Camel666 - June 23 2010 at 12:44