The Outer Limits

Dusty

Tone deaf
It would be a nigh-on impossible task. No one wants generic random music thrust upon them outside of their existing comfort zones. Like political views, if someone tries to convert you, you only end up shutting down and stubbornly refusing to accept.

Surely it is the music nerds dream to have an attentive friend, open to the idea of new sounds sit down in front of their (carefully assembled from British manufactured separates) stereo and proclaim "show me the way, with your wisdom of arcane musical arts"

But the reality is most of it is discordant noodly artsy-fartsy pap and we are fucking weirdos. Safer to stay here and pretend these people exist, bouncing ideas off each other.
 

Trillhouse

Well-known member
Yeah, what Dusty said.

Whilst I and everybody else here would relish exploring a curated list of the outer limits of our favourite genres, the original premise seems logically flawed.

Please don't let that kill the thread tho. The idea of a collection of tracks that are simultaneously genre distillation and a boundary pushing sounds great.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
You do get "gateway" artists. The Beatles are an obvious one. I also remember being quite impressed by how my non-nerdy friends absolutely loved Burial's second album, which is pretty weird really. Weird stuff with hooks, and romantic emotion.
 

catalog

Well-known member
i like the idea of a thread about gateway music. i'm sure it's been done, will have a search.

like, the idea of the music that converted you. perhaps conversion moreso than gateway. like, i dunno, jeff mills 'live at the liquid room' converted me to minimal techno.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
For me, the gateway was getting into the charts at a young age when this


sat happily in the top ten alongside TPau or whatever. It just sounded like pop music, wasn't ever that I even consciously noted that it was a bit different. Likewise with the breakout rave tunes in 89 and 91. It was just then a bridge to the genuinely weird stuff, the ordinariness of the idiom had already been set in my mind.
 

catalog

Well-known member
borrowing tapes from the library, and there was one that had this bambaataa tune - assault on precinct 13. oh my god i caned that tune. and when my friend nick copied prince's 'diamonds and pearls' for me and i listened to it every day (side 1 only) on the bus to school.
lifelong prince fan after that.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This is a pretty fucked up tune, if you can call it a tune:


From Black Mass to Blank Mass:


Distinct lack of guitars in this thread. Need to fix that.


And at the other end of the tempo spectrum - hell breaks loose about 7 minutes in.

 

muser

Well-known member
I think a large amount of music people can kind of relate to music they've heard incidentally in day to day life, on TV in coffee shops or whatever. It's interesting how electronic music always sounds like computer game music to people if they haven't heard any before. The first music I heard that really blew my mind was when I was exposed to some Congo Natty as a teen, to be dissensus centric there's really very little incidental music that sounds like jungle and even now its pretty out there but not in a Noisecore or Gabba kind of way for a lot of people.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
there's really very little incidental music that sounds like jungle

funny thing is that - in America - this would actually be the fate of jungle - you'd get these sped up breaks in TV commercials or at the start of news programs, sort of whipping up excitement, 'report just in' kind of vibe. it managed to penetrate the fabric of everyday life in this really bizarrely low-key way. Children's TV too. The Powerpuff Girls would be wizzing about having adventures with really quite boombastic breaks running underneath them!

i wrote a piece about it, it was a knock-on the whole late 90s electronica boom in the US, which fizzled fast in terms of Top 40 penetration and MTV - but for a while TV commercials, channel idents, interstitial music, etc - it was completely over-run with big beats, Crystal Method / Josh Wink stuff, 303 sounds - and quite a lot of drum and bassy sounds. One of the people i interviewed said it was partly because people who work in advertising, information tech etc were fans of that music and listened to it while working - but also not having vocal element it was instantly right as a background, this sort of peppy Monster Energy buzz. and you could cut it up easily into fragments, for short adrenalizing / attention-activating bursts.
 

Trillhouse

Well-known member
There's a lot of jungle/dnb inspired video game music; from somewhat authentic sounding stuff to more outer limits 'inspired' stuff. I think this was partially down to dnb becoming a popular sound in Japan in the late 90s / early 00s. I don't know how much it spread into their mainstream, but it was present in gaming and some anime.
 

0bleak

Well-known member
funny thing is that - in America - this would actually be the fate of jungle - you'd get these sped up breaks in TV commercials or at the start of news programs, sort of whipping up excitement, 'report just in' kind of vibe. it managed to penetrate the fabric of everyday life in this really bizarrely low-key way. Children's TV too. The Powerpuff Girls would be wizzing about having adventures with really quite boombastic breaks running underneath them!

i wrote a piece about it, it was a knock-on the whole late 90s electronica boom in the US, which fizzled fast in terms of Top 40 penetration and MTV - but for a while TV commercials, channel idents, interstitial music, etc - it was completely over-run with big beats, Crystal Method / Josh Wink stuff, 303 sounds - and quite a lot of drum and bassy sounds. One of the people i interviewed said it was partly because people who work in advertising, information tech etc were fans of that music and listened to it while working - but also not having vocal element it was instantly right as a background, this sort of peppy Monster Energy buzz. and you could cut it up easily into fragments, for short adrenalizing / attention-activating bursts.

This was still happening to some degree at least as late as the 2010s in very popular shows like The Talking Dead.
 

0bleak

Well-known member
I have to admit that I totally dismissed Loveless when it came out - I couldn't understand why people were still going out of their minds for guitar bands.
 
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