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[Tarazet]

I haven't listened to pop music in so long, I didn't realize Soundgarden's Chris Cornell had released a solo album, let alone teamed up with another band to create Audioslave. I've secluded myself in the realm of classical music for the past five years - at least. And I've also started to migrate towards 20th century music, in which the passion of a Chopin, Schumann or Liszt started to dissolve into atonality, before being blown entirely to pieces by the influence of John Cage.. dissonance, distance, isolation and intimacy together..

That's pretty much where I've been for the past several years. No hip-hop, no bubble-gum pop, and I can read through a musical thread even outside GAF and have no idea who anyone listed is or what they sound like. That's the haze I walked out of when I heard "Pleasure is All Mine," a track from Bjork's Medulla album, while channel surfing on the radio. The sound drew me in like a laser. Wow. No instruments. No tonal centers. It seems to me that Bjork has embraced the "emancipation of the dissonance" maxim that Schoenberg aspired to. I listened to samples of the album on Amazon.com and it strikes me as being of unusual beauty throughout - with some tracks that are rather startlingly dissonant, but have their own special effect.

I don't know how many people would sympathize with me, but this is an amazingly pure synthesis of a modern, post-tonal musical sensibility with today's pop-album kind of setting. I wonder how many of Bjork's listeners might realize this.

Of course, she doesn't use serial technique. That's too rigorous, controlled and harsh-sounding to work in mainstream music. But she definitely uses an expanded concept of musicianship, and it startled me to find such a forward-looking musical outlook in a wide-release, and apparently very strong-selling album.

 

[fart]

<3 bjork

 

[mattiewheels]

You're intimidating me with your music theory, but I love Medulla too. Some of the songs strike a balance between pop and experimental, like Who Is It. That one would've been at home on her other records, only it's full of sighs and beatbox and stuff instead of synth. A few songs go for the unmanipulated vocals, like those choral numbers, but most of em just use voice like a dj would use a sample. It's still really great to me, though.

 

[Tarazet]

You're intimidating me with your music theory, but I love Medulla too. Some of the songs strike a balance between pop and experimental, like Who Is It. That one would've been at home on her other records, only it's full of sighs and beatbox and stuff instead of synth. A few songs go for the unmanipulated vocals, like those choral numbers, but most of em just use voice like a dj would use a sample. It's still really great to me, though.

I don't think that Bjork is too much about the theory, but more about what she does with her voices, with electronics, with instruments. It grows specifically out of John Cage's ideas that any sound can be portrayed as music. That's what makes her a cut above what I hear on KSJO.. to this pair of ears, at least.

She's not breaking new ground really, all of this has been done before, but it's the way in which she creates her own universe, in which I can hear distant echoes of Pierrot Lunaire. It's just really novel to hear something that's similar to the music I listen to, by these insane musical mathematicians and theoreticians whose job it is to stretch the definition of "music." It's really novel to be able to make the connection to something so accessible.

 

[Ollie Pooch]

I don't think that Bjork is too much about the theory, but more about what she does with her voices, with electronics, with instruments. It grows specifically out of John Cage's ideas that any sound can be portrayed as music. That's what makes her a cut above what I hear on KSJO.. to this pair of ears, at least.

agreed - with bjork it feels more instinctual, like it's an idea she wants to try rather than some kind of musical theory she wants to master. have you listened to vespertine?

 

[Manics]

I haven't listened to pop music in so long, I didn't realize Soundgarden's Chris Cornell had released a solo album, let alone teamed up with another band to create Audioslave.

Welcome back. In your absence Radiohead released 3 CD's "Kid A", "Amnesiac" and "Hail to the Thief". Go listen to them now.

 

[bjork]

<3 bjork

thanks

<3 back atcha

 

[Dujour]

:lol