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a feeling : no really new music can be recorded any more.
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Popel Vooje
5373 posts

Edited Aug 31, 2008, 23:46
Re: Shock of the new . . .
Aug 29, 2008, 20:39
Dog 3000 wrote:
I still experience the "shock of the new" all the time . . . usually listening to old music that I haven't heard before.

"It's new to me."

I'm a fan of both of those new ones you mentioned -- lately I have just discovered the new MATMOS album "Supreme Balloon" which is the best analog electro avant pop record I've heard since the 70's heyday of Kraftwerk & Cluster! (Never heard anything else by Matmos before -- I probably need to.)

As for shock-of-the-new records from this decade (that really don't sound particularly like anything from the past) I would nominate LIARS ("Drowned" and "Drum" in particular) and SCOTT WALKER's "THE DRIFT" (which is very artsy and has very little to do with "rock" -- but it sure is "new and different.")



I like what I own by Matmos a lot - what I own being "The Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure" and "The Civil War", both of which do indeed recall German electronica from the early 70s, including the playfulness that a lot of other bands who hark back to that era seemed to lose in translation.

I agree about Liars - those LPs you mentioned are both extraordinary records which pushed the envelope a lot further than I would have expected from hearing their debut. I saw them play live just prior to the release of "They Were Wrong....", and audience reaction was really polarised between those who thought their new material was brilliant and those punk purists who were excecting more stuff in the vein of ther fist album and therefore thought the new songs were pretentious artwank. Even they have palpable influences, though - I can spot elements of the Pop Group, Silver Apples (now THERE was an original band!) and Lee Scratch Perry in there, but it's certainly offbeat enough not to sound like a knockoff.

I liked "The Drift", but after having heard "Climate of Hunter" and "Tilt" it didn't shock me as such, because I knew from listening to those that it wasn't going to be "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore"!
Excellent album, though - it sounds like the musical equivalent of a really bad dream, what with it's oppressive atmosphere and sinister but never quite intelligible lyrics. It may well be the most extrreme thing he's released, but in terms of hios output over the last 25 years it does make sense in a skewed way.

One album from the 90s that did strike me as being fresh and novel was the Flaming Lips' "Zaireeka" - actually hearing it played on four CD players routed through a PA system with the volume cranked up high was an experience that didn't trigger off any recognisable feeling of deja vu. "A Machine In India" felt like being trapped in a hive with a particularly vicious swarm of killer bees.
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