could use criticism of the music i've been doing so far?

other_life

other_life

bioconfused
i hope i can... i really should get a live act solid and together.
but i don't want to subject these grown folks at the bar with real fucking jobs and stressful fucking lives to my self indulgent millennial autistic kidult synth noise though. my folks swear up and down I CAN STILL PLAY GUITAR AND SING! but i *loathe* the 'singer songwriter' format in general now. my ideal would be getting people together to make this type of improvised iterative synth-and-amps music as a group.
maybe everyone's early 20's feel stupid hopeless and aimless.
maybe by the time i'm 25 i'll have found my People some place
 
C

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I'm going to admit I got 10 minutes into the 2nd youtube album and then went back to listening to "Eyes Without a Face" and this one Simple Minds song like I've been oddly stuck into for the past day now. I think a greater problem that you have is you do want to transcend the initial impressions of learning how to do this music you've made and the recognition that it feels like a creative dead end for you. The obv. solution is to let go and if you can't like find the love in something that's new and the big deal (entirely fair if you wanna jump off to a new genre or smth), just try to find the love in the world even beyond music. Sharing experiences that are material are going to do you much better and I recognize that it's not going to happen overnight but you should take a moment to pluck a strand of grass and weigh on it's futility or something that can reflect these things in ways that making the monuments won't. You gotta divorce your own ego, it's never gonna be about you and if your music becomes hella futile that's fine so long as you can feel fulfilment of some level at the end, the process is not the redemption, you are not your work, etc. etc.

Ultimately I don't have real substantial things to tell you about the music beyond "I heard the noises and they were there but my heart was cold and I felt my brain go dim". There's no real analysis I can offer you there.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
i just want to make physically *immediate*, emotionally deep, improvised synths/electronics music.
i don't really care anymore if it never has an audience, especially not Art People 10+ years older than me of the type i looked up to when i was a miserable teenager.
Fuck It
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
gonna study the foundational late 60s-70s records of this synth nerd stuff. feels like i have lots of learning to do (in a positive way)
 
M

mvuent

Void Dweller
other_life said:
not to fucking be sorry for myself more than i already have fuck it here goes u have to understand i'm a wallflower living in the northern reaches of the american midwest who only turns 21 this year. in the fucking sticks. i don't have a context for club music, hardcore continuum the same way someone who say grew up in the uk in the 90s does, i *enjoy it sometimes* but it usually feels pretty out of place. so of course what i do is gonna sound like "2011 student house show/dance on ketamine" because *i saw* all of that but was too young to *actually participate* in it. it's really stupid but i feel envious of people who were able to because of how, frozen out and locked down and fragmented in all directions everything feels now
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don't have substantive criticism to offer YET but i had to stop lurking and respond because this is, like, eerily similar to my situation lol. the general lack of interest in "internet music" (or whatever) here can be a bit disappointing at times. anyways what you've posted is very promising, definitely interested in where things will go from there

edit: just going to leave this John Luther Adams quote here to make my first post less boring...
I’m sure that’s true. I have no doubt that that’s true and it might be true a different way for different people. But I don’t think about emotions when I work. I certainly don’t think about a narrative. And as I get older, and the music takes me continually into these strange and beautiful new places, I’m often less interested in telling you or even suggesting what you the listener should think or feel. Or hear in a piece. In fact, nothing makes me happier than when you think or hear or feel or experience something that I, the composer, didn't anticipate or didn't understand was present…was implicit in the music. That is very exciting to me. Look, the music always knows more than I do. And the reason I do this…the reason we dedicate ourselves to music and the reason music is so essential to our lives is that it’s bigger than we are. It’s deeper….it’s like the ocean. There’s not just one current or one stream. There’s this ocean of possibility. I revel in that. I’m not trying to say anything. I’m just listening and trying to hear something I haven’t heard before, and then my job is to try and make that audible so you can hear it too. What it means is up to you.
---
I would say that when I was younger I painted landscapes in music. I made, in some way, “programmatic pieces”. But I haven’t been interested in that for a long time. So Become Ocean, although it has deep connections with the natural world… I don’t think it really depicts nature. There’s a famous episode where someone accosted Jackson Pollock and asked him, “Mr. Pollock, don’t you ever feel the need to paint from nature?” And Pollock snarled back, “I am nature”. And you know…we are all nature. I get what Pollock was saying and that’s kind of an aspiration of my own for the music to be a place…to be a landscape of its own that has something like the wholeness and the complexity of a real place. So I guess I’m saying I believe in the power of music to be itself. ..and in fact I would say if it’s not itself…if music doesn't stand on its own as music, then nothing else is going to save it. Picturesque titles, programmatic notes, extra musical associations…..they mean nothing if the music doesn't move you or touch you or ravish you or terrify you or sock you in the belly…..MOVE you in some very direct way.
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other_life

other_life

bioconfused
yr response is very encouraging ty especially the john adams quote
i get why dissensus doesn't have to be interested in internet music.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I'm going to spend some more time with this see if it reveals different aspects of itself away from the hunt for instant gratification, (which is sugar basically, sweet calorific instant energy)
 
yyaldrin

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
the people who make internet music would pre-internet have been in a band and would have gotten their share of local fame i think.

i still need to check out your music other_life, which i will when i have a bit more time!
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Me too. There is just so much of it. Without even listening to it it makes me wonder if the quality control is there. Wouldn't it be better to do one killer than ten average things? Or maybe you're the new Prince I dunno.

It's probably not that useful for all of us to tell you to turn it into music we already like. Tell me a bit about what you're trying to do and why and what it means.
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I agree with this though - make it more like what I like and I'll like it more doesn't seem that helpful.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
other_life said:
i don't really care anymore if it never has an audience, especially not Art People 10+ years older than me of the type i looked up to when i was a miserable teenager.
Fuck It
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But we are those people other_life.

i got nothing to add son i moved to the big city 20 years ago hoping to make a name for myself with emotionally charged electronica with an experimental edge. i spent 15 years in poverty and gave up. got a job

you've released too much stuff frankly you have too much energy. quality control is paramount

you come across like one of the victims of the internet and easily available (free) music technology. you're basically the young mr. tea. he is the best person here to offer you advice.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
woops said:
you're basically the young mr. tea. he is the best person here to offer you advice.
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Well I dunno about that in terms of hopes of hitting the big time! (ahem)

But yeah I've churned out a fair amount of music in a short-ish time from a standing start (no music education to speak of, no software training). Plenty of stuff I've made is dross but the stuff I've made that I like, I really really like, and now if I hear a boring tune in a club it irks me much more than it used to because it makes me think "Fuck it, I've made tunes more interesting than this in a couple of hours at home on a Wednesday evening, how come this cunt's music is being played in a club and I've got an audience of about five people?". Basically I have no idea of how to go about self-promotion beyond spamming SoundCloud links here and on FB/Twitter.

What really takes up my time is the endless finessing of a tune that I'll 95% finish in a few hours and then spend months or even years fussing over the last 5%.

That said, I'm doing another night with Joe, Sim and Amy from World Unknown next month, and the last one was huge fun and my tunes went down well, so as long as the small things like that keep working well then I should probably just be pleased with that.
 
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I guess this is where record labels still come in handy - they might not separate what from chaff, but they certainly separate PROPER MUSIC from SOME BLOKE MUSIC in the minds of the multitudes (I'm a member btw).
 
S

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
two most important things in life are self-aggrandisement and marketing.

if their are millions of people out there all making this type of music then you're only going to stand out by marketing it better than them.

cause controversy. invent new taxonomy for yourself. craft a narrative for. turn yourself into an interesting article for the wire.
 
other_life

other_life

bioconfused
self-aggrandisement and marketing has been done to death, when i see people/labels doing that shit (dream catalogue) it makes me feel like they don respec my intelligence as a listener
 
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