Gimmicks for live shows! what's yours?

[casecandy]

Weird that you can say Merzbow means a lot to you while you decidedly don't get Vomir. One would think 'getting it' was part and parcel unless you'd read that Merzbow was important and hadn't heard the same about Vomir.

No, no, not at all. I came to Merzbow honestly. Through his frequent collaboration with Boris. I enjoyed a lot of his concepts. Frog was a really neat album... Merzdub, the album he did with Jamie Saft, is great. I liked Merzbeat, too. I remember reading an interview with him where he said his favourite part of rock music was the noise, like he loves The Who, and sees Pete Townshend's feedback as an example of something that influenced him. I really indentified with that. The jam on "My Generation" on Live At Leeds was a formative experience of listening to rock music for me. Plus we have very similar views on whaling and marine mammals in captivity.

Still, I don't think anything he's done is so great that I'd put it on, say, a list of my favourite albums.

[casecandy]

I would probs bring Minazao vol. 1 that's like 'the Merzbow record' for me.

Haven't heard this one. It is admittedly hard to wade through the discog. Every year brings about a dozen new releases.

[casecandy]

But seriously like you seem like you're all about manifestos and shit. No love for the HNW?

Not really, no. I like being entertained and engaged by music. I like pop music. I like songwriting. I like melody. Melody is the number one concern for me when it comes to the music I listen to. So I think limiting yourself to noise music is... I dunno, I guess I can't sacrifice my enjoyment to make a political point.

I found this in an article over on The Quietus (great site)...

That said, Perrot's oeuvre is not completely without glimpses of humour. When performing live as VOMIR, his distinctive trademark has been to perform with a plastic bag covering his head, standing unmoving over his pedals, or even turned with his back to the crowd or lying on the floor. It's hard not to see an element of humour in this, or at least a darkly ironic celebration of the absurd. Such a commitment to a negation tinged with absurdity means he can, I think, be understood in the playful French tradition: his work has a touch of surrealism, Dada and the Situationists, even Michel Houellebecq echoes his approach to some extent. But Perrot would, no doubt, resist such easy classification.

That's what I was trying to get at.

[D.o.S.]

Who's limiting?

from that interview:

came up with the idea of performing with a rubbish bag on my head as a symbol, well, of rubbish, of waste, but it also works on a number of different levels, I think. Initially, I used a huge gravel bag, then moved onto smaller, more manageable bags. I also hand them round the audience personally, so they too can do likewise, if they want: isolate themselves in the noise. It's true that I am a little associated with the plastic bags, and people expect them at my concerts, but I'm not convinced it's a successful marketing gimmick!

But, again, not exactly taking the piss.

[D.o.S.]

I would probs bring Minazao vol. 1 that's like 'the Merzbow record' for me.

Haven't heard this one. It is admittedly hard to wade through the discog. Every year brings about a dozen new releases.

It's the one about the whale for which it's named. Important put it out in, uh, 2006?

[casecandy]

I would probs bring Minazao vol. 1 that's like 'the Merzbow record' for me.

Haven't heard this one. It is admittedly hard to wade through the discog. Every year brings about a dozen new releases.

It's the one about the whale for which it's named. Important put it out in, uh, 2006?

Oh yeah! I never got around to listening to it but I remember now. It was elephant seal, actually. At an aquarium near where he lived. He used to visit it all the time and feed it, I guess he was there so often that he knew the trainers on a personal basis. After the seal died he had a huge change of heart about marine animals in captivity? And wrote that album about him. I knew the story but I never listened to it. I'll have to get that one. Google is informing me there's a volume two, too.

[DarkAxel]

I just went here from the Pantera thread and it's like I never even left

[goroth]

[casecandy]

I just went here from the Pantera thread and it's like I never even left

Haha, maybe I need to start less crap on here. In my defense I am not alone LOL

You know who was a shitty band that was not shitty live? Finger 11 (a.k.a. Rainbow Butt Monkeys), a Canadian nü-metal act that went soft in the early 2000s. They were just awful to hear on the radio of MuchMusic (er, sorry, MTV2, for you 'Muricans).

But I saw them live and they absolutely slayed. The gimmick? The guitarist was quite adept at throwing his guitar about five feet in the air and catching it, picking up right where he left off in the song. It was like he caught the neck of the guitar right where the chord he needed to play was. That was the whole gimmick. It was... oddly mesmerizing.

[D.o.S.]

Finger 11 are still basically a radio-rock staple, from what I understand.

They're no Vomir, though.

[casecandy]

Finger 11 are still basically a radio-rock staple, from what I understand.

They're no Vomir, though.

No, they are most certainly not.

I think I'd rather listen to Vomir then the radio.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I think I just got Vomir.

[SPACERITUAL]

This is hopefully the last time I'm going to respond to case candy. I can't leave well enough alone.


Your argument is garbage. You don't like merzbow. You don't respect merzbow. You don't get merzbow. Music beyond your sad, diminutive collection of so-called "greats" is an absolute mystery to you because you listen insofar as you read a magazine article. Ive read your blog, you like putting things into neat little charts and graphs and you consider understanding textbook fundamentals behind everything as having grasped the music.

Ive dealt with a lot of people like you. Once upon a time i wasted a lot of time, money, and effort "studying" art history and critique. My preferred subject matter is high minimalism. Its something most people can't even begin to grasp but its shiny and seductive and infinitely slick, so they read the wikipedia page, they pick out their favorite color of donald judd sculpture, and put a cap on that shit bam they like minimalism.

Its fucking infuriating. I went to the same high school as the singer from creed. My english instructor had a signed picture of him up on the wall behind her desk. Being me, and being a teenager, I waited until she had left for lunch period one day, went into the room, took the picture out of the frame, and relocated it to a new installation hanging in one of the second floor boys urinals.

I got suspended and she cried and shit and i had to write a paper on why i did it. It was then that i realized that creed were music for people who don't like music but need a soundtrack to certain points in their lives. Or maybe they just need something to put on when they're trying to daterape some poor drunk girl at a party.

Either way, your musical tastes are a lot like that. You listen to a lot of absolute garbage with little merit but you shove it down everyones throats because it reminds you of that one time at that one party where that one dude made out with you or whatever. To you, music is the soundtrack, whereas to us, it is the experience. You're like the people that i went to college with that like TOTALLY DIG MINIMALISM but their favorite artist is andy warhol or some other garbage like that. They don't dig minimalism or like minimalism, but they SIMPLY MUST appear well-rounded when they need to impress the younger kids at their bible study class at starbucks that ask them about college.

They just say OH YEAH ITS A BIG METAL SQUARE ITS DEFYING GENRE CLICHES I TOTALLY GET THIS ITS CLEVER. They don't ever stop for a second to consider Tony Smith calling up a steelworks and ordering a 6x6x6 steel cube painted black, naming it DIE, and delivering it to a client. They don't consider the GESTURE of doing that. To them pollocks works are just colorful splotches, They've never actually watched him paint and taken the time to consider how deliberate he was or how in control. In the end its just DOES THIS LOOK PRETTY AND MAKE ME SEEM CULTURED WHEN I HANG IT IN MY DORMROOM????

Its exactly how you don't consider the gesture of someone handing out painted plastic bags for the audience to wear, putting one on themselves, and crawling on stage to blast - with their back turned - 30 mins of earsplitting feedback.

And you'd never take it to a desert island cause it simply doesnt remind you of that one time that one dude jerked you off in his saab at the something corporate concert. In the end isn't it just easier to say you don't really like something that trying to go through all these trite machinations to convince everyone of the opposite??? I mean you can IDENTIFY as someone who likes music all you want but in the end you're just a frizzy haired midwestern white woman wearing way too much spray tan....

[casecandy]

Are you quite fucking through?

Did it feel good to get that out of your system?

You know, I joined this forum to talk about music and effects pedals. Not to be bludgeoned with every fucking sentence I write. And usually, it's fine, even really funny. I like the dynamic I have here, where I like a lot of music that you guys don't, and I listen to it very differently than you guys do. With D.o.S., for example... we've developed a sort of... benevolent antagonism. It's becoming humorous, how frequently we disagree. I thought it was the same with you? But looking at what you just wrote, it looks like I actually strike some kind of nerve with you? Like you're pissed off? You're accusing me of being overly sentimental and "soundtracking" my life with music, and yet look who's writing me paragraphs and paragraphs of cold-pressed, extra virgin butthurt oil about when he was in high school and college.

Here's the deal. Do not ever accuse me of not loving music as much as you or experiencing music as much as you. I live and sleep and eat and breathe music. I play, write, and listen to music, for a substantial portion of every day, and I am generally euphoric while doing so. Music is essentially my life. You make some pretty sweeping statements about me up there. You assume that because I like different music than you do and because I engage with it in different ways than you do that I do not really experience music. It is very difficult for me to come up with a response to this other than "Fuck you." While I use music as a tool to dismantle things that irk me, I am not an iconoclast when it comes to music. I am a reverent. I believe in the fundamentals and the classics. I hold them up. I remember them. I love them. Guess it's the religion in me.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

You and I need each other, right? Dialectics? Push and pull? Wolves and caribou appear to be antagonists, but in actuality, they're two sides of the same coin. If the wolves didn't prey on the weaker caribou they'd never evolve; without caribou to eat the wolves would starve. They keep each other strong. Just like wannabe rock critics like me need fuckbois like you. It's discourse. It's how we're gonna get to the future. It all comes out in the wash.

Anyway, yes, I do use music as a soundtrack to my life, and that's fine! You're not nostalgic, and I am. And that is a very legitimate way of listening to music. If music is good, then it ought to be able to be a soundtrack to your life. Sometimes that's what being good is about, the ability to evoke emotion in someone. Take for example two really fucking shitty songs, "In The End" by Linkin Park and "Friday" by Rebecca Black. Those are both on a par with Creed for eye-watering lack of artistic merit. AND YET—every time in life that I try so hard, and get so far, but in the end, it doesn't even matter (i.e. any time I talked to you, ever), I sing that song. Every Friday, when I realize it's Friday, Friday, and that I gotta get down on Friday, I sing that song. So, in actuality, those songs are pretty good, because they achieve a nostalgia in the listener. They are relatable.

That's how I'm relating to music, always. Not just the experience of the moment, which is by definition fleeting, but with a view to posterity, and with a view to memory. Stop telling me that that's not valid or real or meaningful because you do not have all the fucking answers, breaux. Fuck yeah I love charts and books and lyrical analysis and oral histories and all that jazz. I love music so I study the shit out of it. Newsflash: THAT IS A WAY TO EXPERIENCE MUSIC.

Fuck you suck so much.

[D.o.S.]

Was it a nice saab at least?

[casecandy]

Was it a nice saab at least?

The funny thing is, he nailed this. Not the gay part or the Saab part. But I don't think my wife and I had a single makeout mix back in the day that didn't have "Konstantine" on it

After all, the present's just a pleasant interruption to the past.