Gamelanstep & the sucking trumpet

Dunno if there's a thread for this already, but fired up by the press release hall of shame, I wondered about what people's favourite ever examples were of total out-&-out pretension in music itself. I'm no heathen, I used to be involved in running an avant-garde jazz club in Leeds, but sometimes you do just have to roll your eyes or slip into a coma with some of the stuff featured in Wire mag or laugh uproariously at people's attempts to do something never done before that really may not have been worth doing (see the South American hip hop version of The Magic Flute that I posted in the Worst Thing You've Heard Recently thread). LPs where all you hear is a slight rustle of some paper every coupla minutes, po-faced delivery of absurd concept albums, let's have em...

OK, let's start again...

This is the sorta thing I'm thinking of....

http://www.discogs.com/Sukora-Oeo/release/687124 (virtually silent bar a few rustly noises on each side)

That terrible improv turntable orchestra thing (featuring really good people) that toured ten or so years ago.

That version of Cream "Spoonful" from Wheels Of Fire with the really poor 15 min drum solo



Basically...

Ahem...I might have done!

Listened to some of yr gamelanstep the other day on here & its lovely of course, I just came up with that back in the days of dubstep early prime, when waving around a sample/pad of some randomly picked ethnic instrument & shoving it haphazardly on top of whatever you were making seemed to make you a god of fusion. I like some fusion stuff but its best when its not forced I think & comes about organically - gamelan is great, dubstep is great, people who use gamelans already & like dubstep then fusing the two sounds is good with me, but people thinking "I know what'll give me some pseudy kudos points, I'll put a bangin' gamelan on it!" equals bad & sorta falls into that 'uncanny valley' thing being discussed on the white reggae thread currently. The Argentinian hip hop Magic Flute is my most recent classic example of this. The other major thread of pretension I was thinking of is illustrated by that Fast Show thing - "because jazz is all about innovation, lets throw the baby out with the bathwater by making something that is innovative if you squint at it, even if it sounds awful". So, a thread about when pretension takes over & ruins the music, yeah...shall we rename it "Wobbleboardstep" then?!

Yeah, I'd agree on most of that although I like a fair bit of contemporary classical stuff, probably for different reasons than you are meant to (ie I think it sounds fantastically, psychedically odd partly just because I don't know enough about how music is written to 'understand' it!). All of those styles have good acts of course, but yeah - that stuff!

Leo said:

night bus, psibient, future trap, sax house...

Click to expand...

I had to google 'night bus'...some of that stuff is OK I think, but yeah, that whole witch house sorta area has potential re: bringing Noise & stuff with beats together but is smeared with fashion victims & wrong-headed art projects

"Sax house" - I've got a few tunes I would term 'jazz house' that I like but yeah, that phrase 'sax house' really sends a shudder thru you, doesn't it! Fake sophistication & no mistake!