Zaph Mann wrote:
quoted 4 lines Erkki, this is hillarious, but also has a lot of truth about it! I'm still> Erkki, this is hillarious, but also has a lot of truth about it! I'm still
> chuckling at the links here. But I liked some prog rock, e.g. Pink Floyd's
> Atom Heart Mother, that PF ran out of ideas and became preposterous is also
> true, and the same will likely happen with many of the IDM heroes.
Well, I think the bad reputation of the progressive rock derives mostly
from the Punk days, when it was fashionable for the group like Sex Pistols
to wear "I Hate Pink Floyd" T-shirts, and for every rock critic who didn't
want to be called an old fart to slag these bands publicly as much as
they could.
I'm not going to defend the biggest and the most bloated dinosaurs of these
prog bands since they probably deserved everything they got from these punks
and rock critics, but I think under the "progressive" moniker some of the
most innovative music of the time was made in the first half of Seventies.
That so, I think, if we count in with the prog genre some records of the
bands like King Crimson or the solo albums of Brian Eno and his
collaborations with the Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp; or the whole "Kraut
Rock" genre in its entirety, consisting of such bands as Can (even John Lydon
admitted they were a big influence for his Public Image Limited!), Faust,
Amon Duul, and also Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream as their fellow countrymen
and contemporaries.
I think there was still some innovation and freshness left with all these
bands keeping experimenting; in contrast to those mammoths like Emerson,
Lake & Palmer trying to create their pompous, bloated, totally laughable
"orchestral" rock (any closet ELP fans out there with flame-throwers? ;).
But talking about the analogy between prog rock and IDM, it may be that the
whole techno genre has reached this same stage, as was with the bands of the
late 60s and early 70's when psychedelia became progressive rock; the acts
creating pompous "concept albums" and the large record companies marketing
these bands as their big time hit products with world-wide marketing
campaigns, and so on. And against this development the whole Punk movement
was born.
So, what could be the solution if we were to prevent this same thing to
happen with IDM/techno/ambient (as it has already happened with some
cases, as _The Face_ story may have/may have not proved)? Or is that
necessary at all, or should we just let the music to take its natural
paths; the market men marketing what they want to market, the underground
going still more underground, and the kids listening just what they want to
listen?
And is this kind of discussion relevant at all, or should we just stick to
the Aphex trainspotting...? ;) Dunno, maybe I'm going to spin my "Piper at
the Gates of Dawn" once again ;)
ERkki
Tampere, pHinland
trerra@uta.fi