Progressive Electronic: Determining proggy-ness

I'll listen to certain album, none I'll explicitly mention, and say to myself "man that sounds pretty damn progressive, it's all over the place!" and then find it has a 3.12 rating. 

Now I know these are all opinions and everyone has different tastes, but it still surprises me sometimes to see stuff I think is progressive and has a sub-par rating.

Please don't think of this as a rant, because it's not. Just an observation. Maybe I'm just a jackass (probably).

Feel free to elaborate. Discuss. Critique. Flame.

Suzanne Ciani.

I just found this on youtube yesterday 

It's a good question.   Electronic is or was by nature progressive, adopted by rock artists, and before you knew it . . .

It's a good question. There have been many "prog: progressive rock genre with certain characteristics" vs. "truly progressive music" discussions here, and "progressive electronics" probably sits uncomfortably between the two. According to its characteristics, sound, absence of rock instruments, it can be quite different from what one could call "mainstream progressive rock", even more so than much avantgarde/RIO. That it is even listed here is a testimony to the fact that, despite some claims of the opposite, "prog" as covered here is open to quite some innovation and progression even if it ultimately leads away from the rock element. Except that all too progressive experimental electronic music would probably not be listened here if its aesthetic is all too far out. (I don't think Art Zoyd would qualify for inclusion on the basis of the sound of Champ des Larmes or Pure Noise, just to give a somewhat inappropriate example; these albums are actually listed, but I guess that's because of AZ's earlier merits and RIO membership; similarly Tangerine Dream's Zeit).

So there's a weird "it needs to be progressive enough but not too progressive" about the "progressive electronic" category which indeed seems very hard to evaluate. Chances are it also has to do with culture and social systems;  Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze etc. were properly embedded in the Kraut/progressive rock community; musicians that seem too academic regarding the people that surround them like, say, Eliane Radigue, rather won't be listened (arguably she's too far away from rock aesthetic anyway, but that also applies to Zeit, Champ des Larmes, some Asmus Tietchens etc.). 

Properly being progressive of course is not about time signatures and complexity, it's about pushing the borders; "mainstream progressive rock" on the other hand can probably be defined by such characteristics. Surely at some point in their career Tangerine Dream and others in Progressive Electronics have pushed the borders. Do they qualify because of that? I'm not so sure but fine by me if they do. Now rating is obviously an entirely different matter because chances are that if you push the borders too far from what people who love much of mainstream progressive rock like, only a minority will appreciate it here; there's the tension between being progressive and having the standard characteristics of prog rock.  A primary example is Tangerine Dream's Zeit, at the same time very progressive and not progressive at all (in the sense of "sounding like prog rock"). Given that this is so, 3.68 is actually a rather respectable rating, probably owed to the fact that many here who really wouldn't like it wouldn't even listen past the first 10 minutes and then rather not rate it than rating it low.

Great link to Suzanne Ciani by the way, wasn't aware of her.

She has an amazing history...worked for Don Buchla stuffing boards for $2 an hour until she could afford one of his synths and went on to become (with Pauline Oliveros) one of the first female electronic music pioneers.  I was excited about this youtube link because the only solo Buchla recording I'd heard was Morton Subotnik's "Silver Apples of the Moon", which is historically important, but I much prefer Suzanne's approach.

If you're curious about the whole East Coast Moog vs West Coast Buchla 60's evolution (including a lot about Suzanne and her fellow electronic music pioneers) I'd highly recommend the excellent book, "Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer" 

Very interesting her comment how the keyboard "hijacked" electronic music and took it down a different path.  The book I mentioned takes you back to a time when Moog decided to add a keyboard and it created this Buchla vs Moog conceptual war.  Moog obviously won on the commercial front since subsequent synth manufacturers overwhelmingly took his keyboard as a controller approach and it became the standard...yet Buchla won the hearts and minds of academics and non-commercial composers not wanting to be limited to 12 note per octave tuning.  It's also my understanding that the Buchla somehow incorporated probability theory into it's mode of operation, meaning it didn't just play a sequence it was told, but could change parameters based on various conditional settings (I've never even seen one so don't know the specifics).  I believe Suzanne mentions she'd turn her Buchla 200 on at night and let it run for hours...in the morning it would be playing something completely different than when she left it 

Anyway, a fascinating time to learn about especially since Keith and prog were at the forefront of bringing synth to the world.