Most avant-garde prog band?

Avant Garde is playing without rules, such as; basic song structure, traditional instruments, outside the confines of what is considered normal. Listen to David Torn's Best Laid Plans. That is Avant Garde. Totally outside the spectrum of the accepted norms of music.

I've purchased and listened to PLP's Gothic Impressions. It's totally Progressive Rock and very well done, no doubt. I like it. Takes me right to the theater, which is a great thing anytime music can transport you somewhere. But it's not essential in the sense that it changes your view of music or is creating something different.

The STAR system is debatable, we have, many times, over and over, ad naseum, pages and pages, continuously, for months...... Anyway. It's refined to a clear, concise definition (not) that still relies on the reviewers tastes. I'm in the process of updating previous reviews because I relied to heavily on MY tastes and not the strictures of what is ESSENTIAL. Had I not heard the '73-'74 version of King Crimson, many of my musical tastes COULD have been seriously stunted. Those three albums, Lark's Tongues, Starless, and Red, changed my musical outlook and interest. Digging backwards from there I discovered other bands/albums which further developed my musical interests.

Would PLP have existed if not for Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman? Probably not.

Did Par Lindh take his influence from KE and RW and create a beautiful recording? Yes, he did.

Is it Avant Garde? No.

If you have a strong stomache, listen to some Yoko Ono. That's Avant Garde, bro.

From Meriam Webster Online: an intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts especially in the arts.

My emphasis is on experimental, it's that nature which sets the avant garde musical approach outside the norm, thus experimental. A scale played in a assending or descending pattern is a norm, playing notes outside that scale could be experimental or avant garde, no?

PLP Gothic Imressions does not persue anything I hadn't heard before, so IMHO, not avant garde.

I'm done!!!!

Anyone else?

What about Dick's point? I hold that I may be wrong.

Maybe, ahhh possibly, sort of..... Nah!!!! I'm right. Gotta love that Dick though, a blooming encyclopedia, he is!!!!!  

I believe we need a definition of Avant Garde, because I  we could be naming bands for weeks as a blind man throw stones without any real direction:

Avant Garde Etymology: French, vanguard : an intelligentsia that develops new or experimental concepts especially in the arts

In this case Progressive Rock is an Avant Garde genre "per se". So are we asking which is the most progressive of all the progressive bands? Isn't this a pleonasm?

If we go to the classic definition that Danbo gave "Avant Garde is playing without rules" then we have a lot of choices:

King Crimson did everything, played a symphonic album, did more experimental music and even dared to set two power trios playing two different and tunes one against the other. Crimson after ITCOTKC is not my cup of tea, but I must recognize they are always ahead everybody else. They are a sub-genre by their own right and Fripp always did what he wanted without respecting any boundary.

From the most recent bands I would go with The Red Masque, they defy any classification, they are dark even creepy and love to include cacophonic passages where the listener looses the concept of reality.

Iván

moonchild wrote: Dick Heath wrote: Hammar wrote: Pink Floyd is not an avant BAND, but have made music I think can be considered avant. Parts of Ummagumma, Saucerful and Interstellar Overdrive??   Nothing like them when they started, so Floyd especially with Barrett, was most certainly avant garde in the mid 60's. I agree. For 60s rock music, Pink Floyd and The Beatles stretched the envelope. Remember those backward tape loops in Strawberry Fields?

Sorry guy but I can't consider at all the Pink Floyd and the Beatles as avant-garde...about tape loops, the revolutionary musician and composer Terry Riley used those kind of things before...

Seems Hendrix has some of these techniques as well. Also, how about the "b" side, of "they're coming to take me away", just the A-side backwards.

It's like saying there is nothing new under the sun.

The definition of avant-garde according to MS Encarta:

I'm not sure that danbo's definition "Avant Garde is playing without rules, such as; basic song structure, traditional instruments, outside the confines of what is considered normal." is the complete story. For example, a band could presumably be avant-garde even if its music has a basic song structure and uses traditional instruments.

And what is avant-garde today is not tomorrow. I tend to agree with Dick Heath: Early Floyd was avant-garde.