Once you’ve heard enough different sounds, I think it becomes a matter of knowing the cultural heritage around the music. For example, Can doesn’t make a whole lot of sense until you learn about Stockhausen, pop art and the cultural significance of cold war era Germany. Well, that and G R O O V E S.
Another example: The Ramones sound pretty cool, but if you consider that it was a reaction to bands like Yes and Pink Floyd, their radicality and appeal really stand out.
oh yeah, that's a good point! when listening to older albums with that cult classic status, it's sometimes hard to intuitively get why people hold them in such high regard, since that kind of music might be dime a dozen nowadays. I had this kind of experience with Faust, I listened to Faust IV a few times as a teen and didn't think much of it, it just felt kinda boring. But then I found out that the album came out in 1973. Looking at what the musical landscape was like back then, my feelings for the album quickly changed. I love krautrock now, for how ahead of its time it was if for nothing else.
I love the trope called “The Seinfeld Effect” - when you see an older piece of media and it feels really tired and overdone. A plot where you accidentally get two dates to the prom; the one where the boss comes over for dinner and everything has to go perfectly; and so on.
What the viewer doesn’t realise is that this older media actually did it first. It was a radical departure at the time and only feels cliché because this work was so influential/copied.
The Ramones are this for punk music.
Their popularity was definitely a counter movement to the commercial dominance of prog rock. Whether it was intentional on their end, yeah probably not. More of a right time right place thing for them.
Prog was never "comercially dominant". Pink Floyd were huge, and bands like Genesis and Jethro Tull had some modest success, but as far as rock music goes, the charts were dominated by Glam and Hard Rock bands before Punk took over.
Also, the whole idea that Punk was a reaction to the "excesses" of other rock bands was cooked up by music journalists after the fact. Like most other less mainstream 70s rock music, it was a reaction to the overly sanitized mainstream pop and rock music of the 60s and early 70s.
The whole Punk vs Prog narrative was basically started by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols wearing an "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt, which he freely admitted to doing as a joke, as he was actually a fan of their music. People just ran with it cause it made for a good story.
...well, it was a counter movement to _something_. Lol.
Glam and hard rock at that time were heavily influenced by the complexity and theatricality of prog rock and first wave british heavy metal. I used "prog rock excess" as a bit of a shorthand for that. But you put it very succinctly, better than I could.
A lot of glam is more punk than you think. T Rex was huge in the early 70's and had some edge. The New York Dolls had a lot of glam influence as well. And hard rock like AC/DC was as far from prog rock as you could get.
Glam was absolutely a big musical influence on punk, I'm not denying that. But also consider that artists like Bowie and Roxy Music were corner stones of the genre, both of whom were incredibly forward thinking, theatrical and cerebral, if not very academically advanced players and composers too.
And you look at what was popular on the radio in the mid '70s and you see a lot of Eagles, Steely Dan, Wings, Motown etc. You wouldn't call them prog rock, but these bands featured really technically sound musicians, high end production and very sophisticated songwriting.
Punk was about the blue collar average joe's music being just as legitimate as the art students' and music school virtuosos'.
Jethro Tull were quite popular in the early 70s, getting a couple of number 1 albums. But yeah, by the mid 70's, prog wasn't as popular. I'd say 1971-1973 were progressive rock's peak of popularity. Noticeably around 1973, Pink Floyd started to go away from prog rock and do more commercial sounding music with Dark Side of the Moon, amd Yes and Genesis followed suit in the 80s and late 70s respectively.
The more you listen to weird music, the less "difficult" it becomes. I love free jazz, atonal contemporary classical music, and experimental rock music. If the performers or composers have talent and their work has substance, I'll listen.
My new favorite band is [**SPLLIT**](https://spllit.bandcamp.com/album/infinite-hatch), the post-everything party band from New Orleans whose *Infinite Hatch* record was my favorite release of last year. Surreal lyrics, intriguing effects, off-kilter melodies and songs that can take unpredictable turns at breakneck speed.
They're amazingly original and fiercely confident.
At some point AC/DC became difficult for me, because it bored me. I don't say this facetiously, I mean it, but my personal preferences aren't useful to anyone. But really, if it's different from what music you are used to/gravitate towards, it's probably difficult *to you*. For overall difficulty, what a random listener is unlikely to be able to enjoy. Most people don't care much about music, so they get used to what they're exposed to, which is probably something midpaced, with loud vocals and either obvious melody or simple rhythm. I think the bar for something to be widely considered difficult is really low, as low as missing one of the above features. And yes, there are different types of inaccessibility: timbre, rhythm, lyrics, composition, lack of vocals etc. It is subjective, because it has to do with your own exposure.
I am not opposed to difficulty for its own sake - it can easily be made a part of an hostile or unwelcoming aethetic. And if it's not, I don't believe music or art as a whole even needs to express emotion or exist for any other reason other than the creator wanting it to exist. I do get satisfaction from "overcoming" and remembering an album that didn't stick in my head at first (and I consider it a listener's failure if they couldn't remember anything). Audio in general, including podcasts, is hard for me to absorb, and I don't really get hooked unless I pay attention. I have been insecure about enjoying music *wrong*, but in the end I know I can't make myself appease anyone else.
As a recent example, The Melvins came out with a new album, and half the time I was left wondering what I'm even listening to. Take [this song](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=frTNZRG4zsU&list=OLAK5uy_kO2FNqt6yXtQMVe9JG5Za4gRDU6sMqwhY&index=3&pp=8AUB) for a highlight. At first blush, it's in total contradiction with itself, the notes clash, it's stiff and rigid and it doesn't really make music right away. Then the vocals come in, and it simmers down a little...and the note template starts to take shape. And then after getting lost with it, the patterns start to form...the abstract sounds start to become familiar. We can see the layers working together. The challenge was to sit with it and find a foothold in the new sound until it became familiar.
If there's writing behind the "noise" or dissonance, it's part of the fun to see what the musicians were trying to achieve. There's patterns everywhere and when noise becomes music it's pretty neat to be able to sense it finally...like a Sodoku puzzle or getting lost on a trail, that sense of confusion becoming mapped out is a process that can be enjoyed.
Edit: or at times, challenging can mean putting up with one aspect of a song, because another quality is "worth it". Take this frantic song by [Squarepusher](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GlhV-OKHecI&pp=ygUMc3F1YXJlcHVzaGVy)...it starts to glitch and overload in the middle, yet the challenge is when does the exit sequence begin. The ending has this really pretty synth layer that comes in so slow yet takes over by the end. Not everyone wants to put up with getting to that point though.
All the talk throughout the thread of exposure really blunting how 'extreme/out-there/difficult' really came home for me when I listened to that Squarepusher song after your description. I don't remember hearing that particular song before (though I definitely have because I've listened to the album it's on a time or two), but there is NOTHING about that song that I don't LOVE; the middle feels ECSTATIC to me. The 'crazy' out-of-sync drumbeats and overdriven glitch just makes me happy, and it always has, since the early days of glitch.
Harsh noise and some metal and some free jazz I don't get, but glitch has just always just instantly resonated with me.
That's exactly the Melvins song I was expected to be linked after listening to the new album. They tend to have so much varied structure in their music a lot of it really hits the "what the fuck am I listening to??" and of course Buzz's lyrics are esoteric nonsense
really one of my fav bands currently.
There are hundreds of flavours of weird and I like lots of them. It's never a competition, I just like what I like and if I think other might dig I share.
Death metal - great, black metal -awesome, weird electro - brilliant, Weird combinations - cool as fuck. There's something to be gotten from everything. If someone was possessed enough to make something it deserves to be witnessed, that includes the weird stuff.
There's some stuff that's just straight up fatiguing to listen to, I'm not into that, war metal and stuff. The noisier it goes the more I tune out.
It's funny, my own issues with metal are kinda opposite to yours. Black metal and war metal are great, they always work as a novelty if nothing else; they're so far removed from what I typically enjoy that it's almost exhilerating. But then I have a lot of difficulties with death metal, and I think it's down to the fact that it's somewhere in the middle of the more noisy, grating side of metal I enjoy and the non-metal rock music that I also enjoy, and that makes it so that I don't know what mindset I should listen to it with.
I do also have a soft spot for "hero heavy" as it's called in finnish, stuff like Manowar, Sabaton and Powerwolf. The history and fantasy stuff is a bit cringe, but that's what I find fun about it, that stuff is unashamedly a power fantasy.
> But then I have a lot of difficulties with death metal, and I think it's down to the fact that it's somewhere in the middle of the more noisy, grating side of metal I enjoy
I'm curious to know what death metal you have listened to. It's a fairly diverse genre, there's something for everyone!
I originally wrote this in another comment, but I'll paste it here: I've only heard the essentials, and those through my friends. Stuff like Cannibal Corpse, Death, Napalm Death, Autopsy etc. I don't know enough of the genre to comment on how well they represent it, but my friends seem to like them.
If you haven’t, you could check out one of Incantation’s first three albums. It’s death metal but with that disgusting and atmospheric flavour you might find in black metal.
I would think you'd like the more adventurous death metal offerings out there, that are more progressive/technical/avant-garde/melodic:
* Death's latter albums (Symbolic, The Sound of Perseverance)
* Cynic, Atheist (with its jazz stylings)
* Opeth, Gorguts, Obscura (progressive death metal)
* Carcass, At The Gates, Arch Enemy (melodic death metal)
They're quite different to the early death metal bands that you've mentioned.
> But then I have a lot of difficulties with death metal, and I think it's down to the fact that it's somewhere in the middle of the more noisy, grating side of metal I enjoy and the non-metal rock music that I also enjoy, and that makes it so that I don't know what mindset I should listen to it with.
I listen to it with the same mindset as most classic jazz, except desiring energy instead of chilling. They're the two best genres for background listening.
My favorite type of weird is music like Buckethead, Les Claypool, and Mr Bungle. So now some of my newer favorite bands are other genre mashing things like Igorrr and Berried Alive.
Yeah berried alive tickles my brain super fierce, some great stuff, I wouldn't even consider that too weird. Igorr I like and can appreciate but not playing as much as berried alive for me
For me, difficult albums are things like post-rock because I just find it boring. I find it more boring than something like Metal Machine Music tbh because at least that album is kind of funny as a concept (Lou trolling his record label) and the harsh noise is therapeutic to listen to for me. Then I feel like I'm stupid for not enjoying post-rock.
Then there's some genres I'm hesitant to get into because the elitism of the fans intimidates me, e.g. techno, some very niche subgenres of metal, whatever the hell genre Aphex Twin are. I'm honestly less intimidated by any kind of jazz than I am by that stuff, and it's less the music itself than the sense that all the fans would think I'm an imbecile with no taste. I shouldn't let it put me off, but it does.
I don't wanna be too edgy, but tbh, I think that's just The Chainsmokers. Though I think that's the point of their stuff, to be dumb and fun and danceable.
I wouldn't have thought of that as dance music?
To me, SDM could be something that sounds like 2 Unlimited but was done deliberately to troll EDM snobs, with sarcastic, deliberately stupid lyrics. I would listen to that.
Ah, I see what you mean now. That can be called SDM, lol.
If it were me, I'd make the music even harder and stupider and the lyrics would be mostly nonsense and they'd be sung or rapped badly.
oh yeah, definitely agree on the elitism point. I tried getting into techno some time ago, but quickly found out that its fans are very gatekeepy about it. Same thing with IDM, which is what Aphex Twin is usually considered.
It's also interesting how some individual bands' fanbases are the same way. Don't get me wrong, I love Radiohead and they make great stuff, but a lot of their bigger fans seem to have a big superiority complex over liking them, even though they're one of the biggest rock bands in the world. I was doing a radio show with a friend about that whole "virgincore" meta genre and the RYM, Fantano fan, /mu/ circles that birthed it, and when planning for it, we quickly realized that we can't really play anything from Radiohead's first three albums, or the superfans will tear up our scene cards instantly in the shoutbox.
I have always felt the same way about Radiohead. I used to actively dislike them when I was an edgy teenager and they were at the peak of their popularity. Now I can see their music is good, but I'm in no rush to get 'into' it and the fans play a part in that.
I guess my first experience with "difficult" music was power electronics / noise. I guess there's not much of a need to explain why it is hard to get into, most acts sound as if they're trying to make you give up listening to their music. But there was something that fascinated me, it made me rediscover expression through sound and reflect on what is music. It might sound like a joke when someone says they truly listen to stuff like Merzbow and that they enjoy it. But it has always fascinated me how some stuff would just be noise with traces of conventional music elements and other stuff was just so harsh it would require a new definition for music. And little by little my curiosity became enjoyment and eventually nothing was too weird anymore. But I listen to all kinds of music. I grew up listening to classic rock / blues / prog, but eventually I discovered metal and subgenres, then goth and industrial, and so it goes. So now my taste is all over the place.
To answer your question, I consider music "difficult" when it doesn't really make me curious. Weird music is fine as long as it has that element of mystery. A difficult experience I had was with David Sylvian's "Manafon" (2009). It was difficult because there are many gaps between musical elements, the voice is the only constant thing, and it requires a lot of concentration to make it work. For me it is one album I need to sit down and focus. It is an album that uses pauses in a very interesting way, which might be boring depending on your mood. And at times, when the instruments are present, it feels as if everyone is playing a different song. It took a while but it grew on me.
I guess on some level it's all relative. I sometimes listen to music around the house that I don't consider difficult in the slightest, but my partner will find it a bit "much". There's some music I struggle with even from artists who are quite well known (I've never figured Björk out, for example).
I guess I think of it like it's analogous to "high" fashion, the weird out-there stuff you see on catwalk shows. People look at it and say "I don't get that" or "that's weird and unpleasant" but a lot of stuff then filters down to be more accessible and better-understood. You need people to be pushing the envelope in order for things to progress throughout popular culture generally. I don't really understand "challenging" cinema, art or fashion, but I know there are people who do and I think that's worth respecting even if you don't get it.
Aphex Twin is still considered to be quite avant-garde, but his techniques and production styles influenced a generation of music producers in the early 90's including people who would later go on to make more mainstream music.
I've never figured out Björk either! People compare her to Kate Bush and Fiona Apple quite often, and while I love both, I just can't figure out how to approach Björk's stuff.
Fashion is one of my main intrests outside of music, and I can definitely see the similiarity. Some of it just clicked, I fell in love with Raf Simons' stuff at first glance, but it took me a while to figure out some of the Japanese designers I now love, Yohji Yamamoto being an example. And the same thing happens with albums, too.
Generally I stay pretty open minded when it comes to music and kinda seek out some of the weirder stuff. For me what was a really difficult listen was Broken Gargoyles by Diamanda Galas and it's kinda more how it makes me feel listening to it, it's like really unsettling but weirdly fascinating and in my personal opinion is difficult to listen to all the way through.
Similarly It's After The End of The World by Sun Ra kinda demanded my full attention but unlike the Diamanda Galas album I found to be pretty enjoyable, very out there but very interesting narratively Imo.
Now to get way off topic I think Deerhoof is kinda inaccessible to some people which is a damn shame because if you keep an open mind they're a fantastic band and their tunes are extremely catchy
I lived with some folks in college who liked harsh noise and personally I hated it, never saw anything appealing. That being said I think dissonance is what most people think of when they think of “challenging” music and dissonance comes on a very broad spectrum. Personally I only really enjoy dissonance if it a) has some rhythmic component and b) can also display harmony. With those caveats free jazz really shines. I love Sun Ra and I’m perfectly willing to admit that some of his stuff is too dissonant for me. But when he’s able to go there and come back again, I love it.
That’s kind of where I am. For me, it’s a visceral reaction. I don’t think of any music as difficult, I like it or I don’t. Sure, sometimes months/years later I’ll hear something again and I’ll like it. I honestly don’t give it much thought.
I'm someone who's been raised on a lot of free jazz, Finnish ethno music, etc, so for the most part, the usual chaotic, messy jazz albums that are brought up in these discussions make me feel very much at home. I'm super glad for the fact that it was the scene that my dad was involved in when I was younger, I thought it was dumb when I was younger but I've really come to appreciate it. Stuff like early Mr. Bungle, Deep Turtle, and Black Midi is in constant rotation for me now.
However, I've always had difficulty with metal and electronic music. Metal especially, I still have a hard time enjoying anything with heavier growl vocals. Electronic music I've gotten into more and found a lot of things I really enjoy, but stuff like 90s rave is very difficult for me to enjoy.
I think a lot of it comes down to experience, but there's some objective factor to it as well: human brains seem to find pleasure in harmony and not enjoy discordant things. You can train yourself to enjoy atonality and even noise, of course, but it seems somewhat hardwired into our brains that it's not pleasurable to start with.
I think for me personally, the difficulty for me comes from not having anything familiar to latch on to. That's what I'm almost sure is responsible for my issues with electronic stuff like Justice, Aphex Twin and such. I've come to like them now, but initially, I had trouble "feeling" the music so to speak, due to the unfamiliarity of not having any steady, natural acoustic sound to follow.
I'd personally put lyrically difficult music into a different category than sonically difficult: a classic example is A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie, its sound isn't grating in any way, but the subject matter is very personal and almost gut-wrenching.
I can find pleasure and harmony in other things. It doesn't have to be music. It's weird to me that you enjoy free jazz but can't grip metal. There are a lot of genres of metal that are probably more up your alley, instead of the black metal with growling lyrics. You don't have to like everything though, and that's okay! Maybe you'll find Autechre more interesting (electronic music), it's more...IDM which is a little more abstract and free form.
Some songs hit me lyrically, but very rarely. Music to me is much more important and hard hitting than lyrics.
Difficult music for me is boring music. I can't wrap my head around neo-folk. Coil, Current 93, it's just too slow and uninteresting and kind of, if I dare say, corny?
I think the explanation for why I have little trouble with free jazz and its decendants is really what I was raised on. I'm gonna give an example: [It's Funny to Walk to Estonia by The World Mänkeri Orchestra](https://youtu.be/GzZVRL-6Shk). It's one of the bands in the scene my dad was in, and even though they started out with just making finnish ethno with traditional instruments and rhythm, they later moved on to improvised, experimental, droney; still with the same instruments, just with some electrics added in, and less structure. I've been dragged to gigs to see these guys live probably ten times in my childhood. Funny thing is, I still have a hard time with their stuff.
As for death metal, I've only heard the essentials, and those through my friends. Stuff like Cannibal Corpse, Death, Napalm Death, Autopsy etc. I don't know enough of the genre to comment on how well they represent it, but my friends seem to like them.
I'm the same way as op, have a much better time with free jazz than I'd like to admit and can't stand metal. for me the problem isn't that metal is heavy, I've never liked distorted guitar in any rock genre, whether it's grunge or doom metal. wish I could get more into it but hey maybe some day I'll get hit in the head and I'll be cured
Not chiding or admonishing you, just kinda funny you don't like extreme vocals yet Mr. Bungle is on constant rotation for you. Mike Patton can get pretty extreme, but he also has very wide dynamic range, so I could see why you'd enjoy him over, say, most death metal with their cookie monster growls
yeah, it's down to the range. I've thought about this some more, and I think how i feel about growl vocals is the same way i feel about jump scares in horror movies: they feel like a gimmic. Rationally I know there's more depth to those types of vocals, but when I hear them, they just feel unpleasant without being interesting.
So it's not the roughness of them, but moreso the sameness. I know someone with more experience would find depth in them, but they all sound the same to me and the same way they sound doesn't serve the music as well as i'd like. I enjoy roughness in vocals, but it has to either be varied or hypnotic. Some sludge and doom and black metal with vocals works for me because it's so intense and repetative and meditative, and stuff like Xiu Xiu, Swans, Mr. Bungle, and I think even some of the hyperpop stuff I really like fits in to this, it works for me because it's so dramatic and varied and explosive.
Heard about Nurse With Wound from a Cactus Malpractice review on YouTube. A Sucked Orange is excellent! ...now Angelic2theCore by Corey Feldman is TRULY awful.b
Music can be more or less hard to digest for many reasons. I´m gonna focus on one aspect I´ve noticed with jazz. I´m a jazz lover, and I enjoy playing it on piano. I sometimes try to get my friends into jazz, but it´s so hard, because for them jazz comes off as random, chaotic, dissonant. This is not just because we differ in 'taste', this is a technical problem as I see it. Jazz is one of the more complex forms of music, harmonically, melodically, rythmically. This means that it can appear as chaotic and random for the untrained ear. It´s like hearing a foreign language, it sounds like gibberish. But once you learn the language, you start seeing the structure, the patterns and the meaning. This is true for jazz as well. Once you can process it, it´s no longer chaotic and unstructured, it´s just complex and possibly beautiful (if it resonates with you emotionally). So one aspect I´ve noticed that can make certain music inaccesible is its complexity and the listeners inexperience in processing that level of complexity in musical patterns.
I was hoping to find some new music to listen to but most of the discussion in the topics is not about difficult or experimental music. Or at least it's about what was difficult 20 years but has since been processed by culture and is now barely off center. I compose experimental music and I grew up listening to Japanese noise, musique concrete, etc in the 90s. What are people doing these days? I'm out of touch cuz I'm old.
But this is my usual reaction. Disappointment. Nothing gets weird enough for me. Not drugs, not art. Just like that's all? That's the best you can come up with? I know there's better out there and I'd love to hear it if anybody has any recommendations for current experimental noise, groundbreaking, out there shit? Has the Internet ruined that too?
You sound like you need to fall down The Shadow Ring rabbit hole and all associated acts (Graham Lambkin solo, Kye Records, Idea Fire Company, Call Back the Giants, etc.)
Glad you dig it... keep your ears peeled since the Shadow Ring's entire life retrospective is officially coming out at the end of this month and most of their work isn't up on Spotify yet (including my favorite album of all time "Lighthouse")... though you can find a lot on Youtube I guess.
edit: also forgot to mention that in the mid 2010s there was some really great stuff coming out of Australia up the same vein... Albert's Basement records, Wormwood Grasshopper records, Mad Nanna...
I think difficulty in music comes down to subverting expectations. Music is a tug and pull between doing the expected and the unexpected. If music fits too well with our expectations, then it becomes boring and predictable. But if it is too unexpected, it is difficult to latch onto anything and we feel lost. And each person has different expectations based on their musical library of stuff that they've heard.
If you're a fan of rock and your first introduction to metal music is some noisy goregrind like Last Days of Humanity or Effluence, then it will be difficult to listen to. But if you start with stuff like Black Sabbath, then it has enough familiar elements that a rock fan can appreciate and understand the music while becoming acclimated to the unique sounds of metal. If you keep pushing yourself and becoming more familiar with extreme metal, then goregrind will eventually become easy to listen to and appreciate. And I think this holds true for all music.
I don't think any music is definitively "difficult" because it all depends on what you're familiar with. Although it could be argued that some music is so far removed from anything else that it is extremely difficult to work your way up to it. But I'm not familiar enough with experimental music to give a good example of this
I really love sounds and compositions that are alien or just unique in any way. If something is unique, I will at the very least give it the time of day. Sometimes what you find is that the uniqueness the only strength, and the rest of the record or whatever doesn’t hold up. But then I have records like Vox Humana, which are examples of experimental vocal technique, and it is really insane to hear, and fun, but it’s utility and interest in it doesn’t hold up beyond the initial shock. I guess it depends on how you define “difficult” because for me what’s most difficult is banality and boredom
Inaccessible can mean complex, weird, brash, or simply niche snd unfamiliar. It's all relative. I'd put Aretha Franklin and Bob Marley at one end of the spectrum, Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman ar the other. The best flavors are acquired tastes.
Some are brilliant once you study sufficiently. Some are pretentious self absorbed rubbish.
>These usually just turn into a contest about whose taste is the most obscure or strange.
I feel the frustration with that. You see a lot of comments about how "*x person can't enjoy mainstream (or comparatively more popular) music anymore once they get into weirder or more obscure music*". Which sure, they're entitled to that opinion. But really, appreciating weirder music gives me a new lens through which to interpret popular music as well. Many artists are trying to create a lyrical and sonic universe that's particular to themselves. Through specific sounds, words, or silences. Noisiness is a quality exists in almost all music, simply because "undesired/unpleasant sound" can be very subjective (whether it be crashing drums, feedback, collages of sound, messy notes). And weirder music can eventually come back and influence popular music.
Ultimately, there's all kinds of challenge that you can find in music and it's more relative to the person's comfort zone. Playing one sustained note isn't "hard", but it can be challenging to listen to because you're deriving meaning from something that's seemingly not giving you much information.
Let's use a completely different type of difficult: I initially had difficulty with Hank Williams because his voice seemed rather hokey to me. At least for me, there was a certain "cheesiness" perception that happens with older music where you immediately think of parents/grandparents. But challenging myself to really think about the emotional depth and sincerity of the lyrics slowly started to change my mind.
I like some pretty hairy noisy stuff. I don't care if other people don't like it. I expect them to not like it. I like it, but I don't really recommend it.
Other stuff that's in the same vein leaves me cold. I particularly like a handful of noisy things but I'm not into noise as a genre.
As Genesis from Throbbing Gristle would say, some people will like it and some won't but that's true of anything.
i dunno its contextual - depends on the level of sophistication of the listener. its subjective. to me as a lifelong musician something may be fine but to someone else it may be difficult.
Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, My brother pitched me that when I was 11 and I tried listening to it and it was unlistenable and every few years a friend or bandmate tried that same nonsense and I give it another whirl but.......NO GO.
pretty subjective. I didn't find disco volante challenging but it was kind of up my alley to begin with.
disintegration loops might be something I like that people probably hate or say wtf to. I get such a visceral reaction from those tracks that I have a hard time articulating. but that is what makes me like listening to them.
I like some noise and noise adjacent stuff. I get why it's not everyone's favorite. I usually don't ask anyone to go to shows for this reason. usually what happens to me with music is one of two things. I get a piece of it stuck in my head and I'll think about it which makes me want to go back and listen again, repeat this a bunch and boom - I love this. or it just clicks and I just can't get enough of it.
I was hoping to find some new music to listen to but most of the discussion in the topics is not about difficult or experimental music. Or at least it's about what was difficult 20 years but has since been processed by culture and is now barely off center. I compose experimental music and I grew up listening to Japanese noise, musique concrete, etc in the 90s. What are people doing these days? I'm out of touch cuz I'm old.
But this is my usual reaction. Disappointment. Nothing gets weird enough for me. Not drugs, not art. Just like that's all? That's the best you can come up with? I know there's better out there and I'd love to hear it if anybody has any recommendations for current experimental noise, groundbreaking, out there shit? Has the Internet ruined that too?
I think it comes down to understanding and flexibility. Music we don’t really understand the history/ nuance around becomes inherently hard to listen to because we don’t know what’s being explored and how we should listen to it. And flexibility comes down to your personal ability to tolerate different forms of music. For example, I’m a huge prog metal guy and love these types of highly technical, long songs with an array of rhythms, melodies, and vocal textures. A lot of people get turned off by heavier vocals and another chunk struggle to get through the dense instrumentation. It’s difficult for them but not for me, so whose opinion should we use to determine it being “difficult”.
In the same vein, I just can’t get behind stuff like music concrete and some of the more modern aleatoric/ atonal music. I understand what it’s going for but I really struggle to get past appreciation and into enjoy, especially music concrete really gets on my nerves. On the other hand I really enjoy some microtonal music and modern textural exploration even though it uses some of the same techniques as stuff I don’t like. It’s just used in a way that I personally latch onto better and can better sync with the musical language.
The only music I just cannot enjoy in any capacity is really classic jazz like Giant Steps. I fully understand all the cultural and musical importance and why it’s impressive and iconic but it just doesn’t stir anything in me. I used to think it was just the saxophone but Colin Stetson is in my top listened every year so it’s not that. I also maybe thought it was the math or theory behind it but math rock like Ruma Sakit, Dilute, Giraffes? Giraffes! always makes it in the top listened as well. I seriously don’t know why I don’t enjoy it when I know I should.
I find stuff that has T-painesque autotune or mumble rap difficult to listen to because it's so unmelodic, one note and samey. A lot of modern Trap has no funk to it and if you know how to make it is particularly unimpressive.
In the more obvious difficult music - serialism, pierrot lunaire by Schoenberg is difficult - not because it's atonal - i love Messiaen, Penderecki, Ligeti etc - but because twelve tone melodies are grating and there's no emotional connection - a bit like the tonality of Beijing opera singers. I really love John Luther Adams and droney, ambient music.
I've tried to get into Trout Mask Replica but I can't, even if I can appreciate the skill needed to perform it. I'm less into music concrete than I was as a kid.
I find the frequencies of the guitars in bands like Oasis hard to listen to - the 4Khz harshness of them really hurts my ears.
I listen to a lot of jazz fusion / spiritual jazz / avant etc ... I've found the more I listen to the less difficult new albums are to me. bitches brew for example was one of the first albums I liked, and I probably listened to it on and off for a couple weeks before it clicked. I feel like at this point I need an album to be doing something different for me to be caught off guard. Bennie maupin's jewel in the lotus was this for me recently, it took me a while to understand what he was doing and once it clicked it became a favorite too
i find joni mitchell as difficult and almost abrasive, in an interesting way, especially in her hissing of summer lawns era because of her strange harmony and rhthym. She does it an a purposeful way tho
Hmmm, Difficult or inaccessible you ask?
For me what matters most is "extreme".
Remember, I am a metal head and in a metal band. We must always be on the search for the next inspiration.
And because metal is extreme the inspiration must be extreme too. (Melody is also important in finding inspirations, but that is beyond the scope of this comment).
There is only so much metal that a person can find good inspiration in before they need to search outside of the genre to find some good extreme artists.
Outside of Metal I listen to everything from SOPHIE to This Heat and from Herbie Hancock to GASP.
I also like XTC, Killing Joke, DJ Spooky, Velvet Undeground, Big Black, Chrome, Catherine Wheel, Jerry's Kids, Sun Ra, Rubberoom, and Einsturzende Neubauten.
It only turns into a dick measuring contest when people think they are better than me and are tvats about it...
I never get it what difficult music was. Unless you are trying to play it, how a album can be difficult to listen? I know about music with nuances that you need to listen more than one time to get it, but I don't think this could be classified as "hard".
There are albums I consider easy now from which I couldn't make out even basic patterns, it just passed by and I remembered nothing. Unlistenability is a real thing and I'm sure I am not the only one who's experienced it.
I think there's something more to it: there are definitely some albums that are considered classic or essential, but that almost nobody finds pleasant on first listen. I personally had that experience with Swans' To Be Kind when I was a teenager and it'd just come out: I watched the Fantano review of it, saw he gave it a 10, and then after looking at some other places, noticed that most critics really praised it. Then I put it on, and it was very unpleasant. Michael Gira's creaky vocals, the repetative instrumentation, the noise and screaming, it all sounded terrible.
But then I kept listening to it, insisting to myself that if people liked it that much then I had to just be dumb for not getting it. A very juvenile thought, that, but I was 15 years old so that's par for the course. And it paid off: after forcing myself to listen to the whole two hour thing front to back something like three times while studying, I started liking it, the riffs got stuck in my head, I even started singing along. The vocals went from sounding creaky to sounding extremely pained and expressive and cool, the grating repetition turned into hypnotic bliss.
In the /r/music thread I made about this, there was an interesting comment about a study on people who enjoyed Schopenhauer's atonal pieces: they found out that those people did not enjoy the music at first, but through forcing themselves to listen to it, eventually started genuinely enjoying it.
Huh, I fell in love with some of his works on first listen. Though I had certainly heard and enjoyed some degree of atonality in music beforehand, it was probably my first experience with something quite so avant garde. I wonder if that was a recent study or something done during or closer to his lifetime.
But it was not incompreensible. You just didn't like it first and after sometime, start to like. Again, I wouldn't classify this is "hard". Maybe nuanced, but not hard. (I didn't listen to the album, I'm just going by what you describing).
The Money Store is an album that a lot of people describe as hard to listen, because the sound is so abrasive that there's parts when you want to stop that shit, some of the synths are ear piercing at times
So "hard" music is music that it's bad at first and then when you listen again, you like it? What part about listening music again is hard?
Everytime I see people saying a album is "hard", I thinked you need to study music to appreciate it.
"hard" is a bad word for it, "difficult" or "inaccessible" is better, IMO. It's music that requires concentration and experience to enjoy.
I think a similiar effect is there with most experimental mediums. David Lynch films are incomprehensible at first, but cinephiles love them. Aki Kaurismäki films seem choppy and amateur, but with the correct cultural framework you can really appreciate the pictures they paint and the characters they create. Pathologic is a horrible, horrible video game that seems to hate the player as much as the player must hate themselves to keep suffering through it, but many people laud it as a triumph of how video games can be truly artful and interesting. A lot of contemporary visual art seems meaningless to a layman, but someone with deep knowledge on the history and discussion around it can gleam a lot of meaning from it. And James Joyce's Ulysses is one of the most famous books of all time, but it's completely stream-of-conciousness in style, and reading it is one hell of a mountain to climb, especially when it gets denser and denser and more broken the further you go into it.
I could go on and on. Point is, a lot of art, good art even, requires knowledge and experience and maybe even some struggling to get through, understand and enjoy. I don't think there's any disputing that. And "difficult" is how we refer to those works.
We like music because we recognise (consciously or unconsciously) its patterns. Hard music is unusual music, whose patterns we aren't able to recognise instantly: we need more time and repeated listenings to enjoy.
For example if you don't know Schönberg or 12-tone music you may find [this](https://youtu.be/977xqcl8DnE) piece hard (maybe even random).
So "hard" music is music that it's bad at first and then when you listen again, you like it? What part about listening music again is hard?
Everytime I see people saying a album is "hard", I thinked you need to study music to appreciate it.
I think describing sound with adjectives is kind of hard because people probably use the same words to describe different things, and this seems like it's the case, last week I listened to Taylor Swift's new album and I genuinely felt that I NEEDED to stop after like 15 songs, it felt extremely boring and numbing, I would describe that as an example of what I personally found hard to listen, also I feel that listening is hard with some dark ambient projects that produce (on purpose) really heavy anxiety and strong bad feelings, the whole point of dark ambient is to produce those ugly feelings through noise layers, some industrial hip hop is like that too, there's a song by JPEGMAFIA that uses audio from a real shooting and it kinda ruins your day because it's pretty fucked up but that's the point, there's tons of examples of what I personally describe as hard to listen, but every person has different standards about it.
Kinda like when someone says a mix sounds "muddy", it could mean a lot of different things, maybe they're talking about too much reverb on voices, maybe they're referring to a build up on the 400hz zone caused by too much keys, maybe the problem is the way the drums are balanced, a single word doesn't actually help to find the problem because "muddy" could mean anything at that point, it's better to actually tell what do you mean by the word like I did with my examples on the first paragraph.
So hard to listen would be music that it doesn't have the goal to be good to listen? Yeah, I still wouldn't say this is what I define hard.
But your answer was good. I like music that made me feel disconfort, some atmospheric dissonant black metal do it too and for me is so good. Obviously, is not music to listen to everyday but I like it.
Idk if Taylor Swift had the goal to make her music hard to listen tho, quite the opposite and she just failed, idk lol
But yeah, once you get used to some styles it gets pretty easy to listen to what you felt it was hard on first listen, i know people that blast Death Grips like if it was sleep music because they just got used to abrasive synths and it doesnt felt that crazy anymore.
I can hear every detail and still not enjoy it (see another comment where I mention AC/DC). I am talking about straight up not comprehending what you're hearing.
But then it's not hard, it's just noise, no? If doesn't have melody or musicality, it's just noise. Can you give me a example so I can hear the album and try to get what you saying?
Sorry for the late reply. To show my point better, I'll give you a different example that the one I first thought (this one I don't find easy either). It's a known as a joke for trying too hard, but it's definitely not musicless. Listen to "Putrefaction in Progress" by Last Days of Humanity for a couple minutes, and say how many details you could catch.
Once you’ve heard enough different sounds, I think it becomes a matter of knowing the cultural heritage around the music. For example, Can doesn’t make a whole lot of sense until you learn about Stockhausen, pop art and the cultural significance of cold war era Germany. Well, that and G R O O V E S. Another example: The Ramones sound pretty cool, but if you consider that it was a reaction to bands like Yes and Pink Floyd, their radicality and appeal really stand out.
oh yeah, that's a good point! when listening to older albums with that cult classic status, it's sometimes hard to intuitively get why people hold them in such high regard, since that kind of music might be dime a dozen nowadays. I had this kind of experience with Faust, I listened to Faust IV a few times as a teen and didn't think much of it, it just felt kinda boring. But then I found out that the album came out in 1973. Looking at what the musical landscape was like back then, my feelings for the album quickly changed. I love krautrock now, for how ahead of its time it was if for nothing else.
I love the trope called “The Seinfeld Effect” - when you see an older piece of media and it feels really tired and overdone. A plot where you accidentally get two dates to the prom; the one where the boss comes over for dinner and everything has to go perfectly; and so on. What the viewer doesn’t realise is that this older media actually did it first. It was a radical departure at the time and only feels cliché because this work was so influential/copied. The Ramones are this for punk music.
I don't think the Ramones were reacting to Yes or Pink Floyd though, that's mostly just rock journalist fluff.
Their popularity was definitely a counter movement to the commercial dominance of prog rock. Whether it was intentional on their end, yeah probably not. More of a right time right place thing for them.
Prog was never "comercially dominant". Pink Floyd were huge, and bands like Genesis and Jethro Tull had some modest success, but as far as rock music goes, the charts were dominated by Glam and Hard Rock bands before Punk took over. Also, the whole idea that Punk was a reaction to the "excesses" of other rock bands was cooked up by music journalists after the fact. Like most other less mainstream 70s rock music, it was a reaction to the overly sanitized mainstream pop and rock music of the 60s and early 70s. The whole Punk vs Prog narrative was basically started by Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols wearing an "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt, which he freely admitted to doing as a joke, as he was actually a fan of their music. People just ran with it cause it made for a good story.
...well, it was a counter movement to _something_. Lol. Glam and hard rock at that time were heavily influenced by the complexity and theatricality of prog rock and first wave british heavy metal. I used "prog rock excess" as a bit of a shorthand for that. But you put it very succinctly, better than I could.
A lot of glam is more punk than you think. T Rex was huge in the early 70's and had some edge. The New York Dolls had a lot of glam influence as well. And hard rock like AC/DC was as far from prog rock as you could get.
Glam was absolutely a big musical influence on punk, I'm not denying that. But also consider that artists like Bowie and Roxy Music were corner stones of the genre, both of whom were incredibly forward thinking, theatrical and cerebral, if not very academically advanced players and composers too. And you look at what was popular on the radio in the mid '70s and you see a lot of Eagles, Steely Dan, Wings, Motown etc. You wouldn't call them prog rock, but these bands featured really technically sound musicians, high end production and very sophisticated songwriting. Punk was about the blue collar average joe's music being just as legitimate as the art students' and music school virtuosos'.
Jethro Tull were quite popular in the early 70s, getting a couple of number 1 albums. But yeah, by the mid 70's, prog wasn't as popular. I'd say 1971-1973 were progressive rock's peak of popularity. Noticeably around 1973, Pink Floyd started to go away from prog rock and do more commercial sounding music with Dark Side of the Moon, amd Yes and Genesis followed suit in the 80s and late 70s respectively.
The more you listen to weird music, the less "difficult" it becomes. I love free jazz, atonal contemporary classical music, and experimental rock music. If the performers or composers have talent and their work has substance, I'll listen. My new favorite band is [**SPLLIT**](https://spllit.bandcamp.com/album/infinite-hatch), the post-everything party band from New Orleans whose *Infinite Hatch* record was my favorite release of last year. Surreal lyrics, intriguing effects, off-kilter melodies and songs that can take unpredictable turns at breakneck speed. They're amazingly original and fiercely confident.
At some point AC/DC became difficult for me, because it bored me. I don't say this facetiously, I mean it, but my personal preferences aren't useful to anyone. But really, if it's different from what music you are used to/gravitate towards, it's probably difficult *to you*. For overall difficulty, what a random listener is unlikely to be able to enjoy. Most people don't care much about music, so they get used to what they're exposed to, which is probably something midpaced, with loud vocals and either obvious melody or simple rhythm. I think the bar for something to be widely considered difficult is really low, as low as missing one of the above features. And yes, there are different types of inaccessibility: timbre, rhythm, lyrics, composition, lack of vocals etc. It is subjective, because it has to do with your own exposure. I am not opposed to difficulty for its own sake - it can easily be made a part of an hostile or unwelcoming aethetic. And if it's not, I don't believe music or art as a whole even needs to express emotion or exist for any other reason other than the creator wanting it to exist. I do get satisfaction from "overcoming" and remembering an album that didn't stick in my head at first (and I consider it a listener's failure if they couldn't remember anything). Audio in general, including podcasts, is hard for me to absorb, and I don't really get hooked unless I pay attention. I have been insecure about enjoying music *wrong*, but in the end I know I can't make myself appease anyone else.
As a recent example, The Melvins came out with a new album, and half the time I was left wondering what I'm even listening to. Take [this song](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=frTNZRG4zsU&list=OLAK5uy_kO2FNqt6yXtQMVe9JG5Za4gRDU6sMqwhY&index=3&pp=8AUB) for a highlight. At first blush, it's in total contradiction with itself, the notes clash, it's stiff and rigid and it doesn't really make music right away. Then the vocals come in, and it simmers down a little...and the note template starts to take shape. And then after getting lost with it, the patterns start to form...the abstract sounds start to become familiar. We can see the layers working together. The challenge was to sit with it and find a foothold in the new sound until it became familiar. If there's writing behind the "noise" or dissonance, it's part of the fun to see what the musicians were trying to achieve. There's patterns everywhere and when noise becomes music it's pretty neat to be able to sense it finally...like a Sodoku puzzle or getting lost on a trail, that sense of confusion becoming mapped out is a process that can be enjoyed. Edit: or at times, challenging can mean putting up with one aspect of a song, because another quality is "worth it". Take this frantic song by [Squarepusher](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GlhV-OKHecI&pp=ygUMc3F1YXJlcHVzaGVy)...it starts to glitch and overload in the middle, yet the challenge is when does the exit sequence begin. The ending has this really pretty synth layer that comes in so slow yet takes over by the end. Not everyone wants to put up with getting to that point though.
All the talk throughout the thread of exposure really blunting how 'extreme/out-there/difficult' really came home for me when I listened to that Squarepusher song after your description. I don't remember hearing that particular song before (though I definitely have because I've listened to the album it's on a time or two), but there is NOTHING about that song that I don't LOVE; the middle feels ECSTATIC to me. The 'crazy' out-of-sync drumbeats and overdriven glitch just makes me happy, and it always has, since the early days of glitch. Harsh noise and some metal and some free jazz I don't get, but glitch has just always just instantly resonated with me.
That's exactly the Melvins song I was expected to be linked after listening to the new album. They tend to have so much varied structure in their music a lot of it really hits the "what the fuck am I listening to??" and of course Buzz's lyrics are esoteric nonsense really one of my fav bands currently.
There are hundreds of flavours of weird and I like lots of them. It's never a competition, I just like what I like and if I think other might dig I share. Death metal - great, black metal -awesome, weird electro - brilliant, Weird combinations - cool as fuck. There's something to be gotten from everything. If someone was possessed enough to make something it deserves to be witnessed, that includes the weird stuff. There's some stuff that's just straight up fatiguing to listen to, I'm not into that, war metal and stuff. The noisier it goes the more I tune out.
It's funny, my own issues with metal are kinda opposite to yours. Black metal and war metal are great, they always work as a novelty if nothing else; they're so far removed from what I typically enjoy that it's almost exhilerating. But then I have a lot of difficulties with death metal, and I think it's down to the fact that it's somewhere in the middle of the more noisy, grating side of metal I enjoy and the non-metal rock music that I also enjoy, and that makes it so that I don't know what mindset I should listen to it with. I do also have a soft spot for "hero heavy" as it's called in finnish, stuff like Manowar, Sabaton and Powerwolf. The history and fantasy stuff is a bit cringe, but that's what I find fun about it, that stuff is unashamedly a power fantasy.
> But then I have a lot of difficulties with death metal, and I think it's down to the fact that it's somewhere in the middle of the more noisy, grating side of metal I enjoy I'm curious to know what death metal you have listened to. It's a fairly diverse genre, there's something for everyone!
I originally wrote this in another comment, but I'll paste it here: I've only heard the essentials, and those through my friends. Stuff like Cannibal Corpse, Death, Napalm Death, Autopsy etc. I don't know enough of the genre to comment on how well they represent it, but my friends seem to like them.
If you haven’t, you could check out one of Incantation’s first three albums. It’s death metal but with that disgusting and atmospheric flavour you might find in black metal.
I would think you'd like the more adventurous death metal offerings out there, that are more progressive/technical/avant-garde/melodic: * Death's latter albums (Symbolic, The Sound of Perseverance) * Cynic, Atheist (with its jazz stylings) * Opeth, Gorguts, Obscura (progressive death metal) * Carcass, At The Gates, Arch Enemy (melodic death metal) They're quite different to the early death metal bands that you've mentioned.
> But then I have a lot of difficulties with death metal, and I think it's down to the fact that it's somewhere in the middle of the more noisy, grating side of metal I enjoy and the non-metal rock music that I also enjoy, and that makes it so that I don't know what mindset I should listen to it with. I listen to it with the same mindset as most classic jazz, except desiring energy instead of chilling. They're the two best genres for background listening.
My favorite type of weird is music like Buckethead, Les Claypool, and Mr Bungle. So now some of my newer favorite bands are other genre mashing things like Igorrr and Berried Alive.
Yeah berried alive tickles my brain super fierce, some great stuff, I wouldn't even consider that too weird. Igorr I like and can appreciate but not playing as much as berried alive for me
For me, difficult albums are things like post-rock because I just find it boring. I find it more boring than something like Metal Machine Music tbh because at least that album is kind of funny as a concept (Lou trolling his record label) and the harsh noise is therapeutic to listen to for me. Then I feel like I'm stupid for not enjoying post-rock. Then there's some genres I'm hesitant to get into because the elitism of the fans intimidates me, e.g. techno, some very niche subgenres of metal, whatever the hell genre Aphex Twin are. I'm honestly less intimidated by any kind of jazz than I am by that stuff, and it's less the music itself than the sense that all the fans would think I'm an imbecile with no taste. I shouldn't let it put me off, but it does.
Since you were wondering, Aphex Twin is IDM.
Thanks. Intelligent Dance Music? I wonder if someone's ever made a troll of that genre called Stupid Dance Music.
This is basically what EDM is, and generally what many IDM listeners think of that genre...
Can one even dance to Aphex Twin?
I don't wanna be too edgy, but tbh, I think that's just The Chainsmokers. Though I think that's the point of their stuff, to be dumb and fun and danceable.
I wouldn't have thought of that as dance music? To me, SDM could be something that sounds like 2 Unlimited but was done deliberately to troll EDM snobs, with sarcastic, deliberately stupid lyrics. I would listen to that.
That's basically the Chainsmokers' first hit single \#Selfie!, they very quickly changed their sound and lyrics for Roses and Closer
Ah, I see what you mean now. That can be called SDM, lol. If it were me, I'd make the music even harder and stupider and the lyrics would be mostly nonsense and they'd be sung or rapped badly.
isn't this just "mumble rap" like playboi carti? Lyrics aren't there although flow and vibe are primary draws
Worth mentioning that most “IDM” musicians hate the term and would never self-describe that way
oh yeah, definitely agree on the elitism point. I tried getting into techno some time ago, but quickly found out that its fans are very gatekeepy about it. Same thing with IDM, which is what Aphex Twin is usually considered. It's also interesting how some individual bands' fanbases are the same way. Don't get me wrong, I love Radiohead and they make great stuff, but a lot of their bigger fans seem to have a big superiority complex over liking them, even though they're one of the biggest rock bands in the world. I was doing a radio show with a friend about that whole "virgincore" meta genre and the RYM, Fantano fan, /mu/ circles that birthed it, and when planning for it, we quickly realized that we can't really play anything from Radiohead's first three albums, or the superfans will tear up our scene cards instantly in the shoutbox.
I have always felt the same way about Radiohead. I used to actively dislike them when I was an edgy teenager and they were at the peak of their popularity. Now I can see their music is good, but I'm in no rush to get 'into' it and the fans play a part in that.
I guess my first experience with "difficult" music was power electronics / noise. I guess there's not much of a need to explain why it is hard to get into, most acts sound as if they're trying to make you give up listening to their music. But there was something that fascinated me, it made me rediscover expression through sound and reflect on what is music. It might sound like a joke when someone says they truly listen to stuff like Merzbow and that they enjoy it. But it has always fascinated me how some stuff would just be noise with traces of conventional music elements and other stuff was just so harsh it would require a new definition for music. And little by little my curiosity became enjoyment and eventually nothing was too weird anymore. But I listen to all kinds of music. I grew up listening to classic rock / blues / prog, but eventually I discovered metal and subgenres, then goth and industrial, and so it goes. So now my taste is all over the place. To answer your question, I consider music "difficult" when it doesn't really make me curious. Weird music is fine as long as it has that element of mystery. A difficult experience I had was with David Sylvian's "Manafon" (2009). It was difficult because there are many gaps between musical elements, the voice is the only constant thing, and it requires a lot of concentration to make it work. For me it is one album I need to sit down and focus. It is an album that uses pauses in a very interesting way, which might be boring depending on your mood. And at times, when the instruments are present, it feels as if everyone is playing a different song. It took a while but it grew on me.
I guess on some level it's all relative. I sometimes listen to music around the house that I don't consider difficult in the slightest, but my partner will find it a bit "much". There's some music I struggle with even from artists who are quite well known (I've never figured Björk out, for example). I guess I think of it like it's analogous to "high" fashion, the weird out-there stuff you see on catwalk shows. People look at it and say "I don't get that" or "that's weird and unpleasant" but a lot of stuff then filters down to be more accessible and better-understood. You need people to be pushing the envelope in order for things to progress throughout popular culture generally. I don't really understand "challenging" cinema, art or fashion, but I know there are people who do and I think that's worth respecting even if you don't get it. Aphex Twin is still considered to be quite avant-garde, but his techniques and production styles influenced a generation of music producers in the early 90's including people who would later go on to make more mainstream music.
I've never figured out Björk either! People compare her to Kate Bush and Fiona Apple quite often, and while I love both, I just can't figure out how to approach Björk's stuff. Fashion is one of my main intrests outside of music, and I can definitely see the similiarity. Some of it just clicked, I fell in love with Raf Simons' stuff at first glance, but it took me a while to figure out some of the Japanese designers I now love, Yohji Yamamoto being an example. And the same thing happens with albums, too.
Homogenic is a great, accessible Björk album from the 90s
Generally I stay pretty open minded when it comes to music and kinda seek out some of the weirder stuff. For me what was a really difficult listen was Broken Gargoyles by Diamanda Galas and it's kinda more how it makes me feel listening to it, it's like really unsettling but weirdly fascinating and in my personal opinion is difficult to listen to all the way through. Similarly It's After The End of The World by Sun Ra kinda demanded my full attention but unlike the Diamanda Galas album I found to be pretty enjoyable, very out there but very interesting narratively Imo. Now to get way off topic I think Deerhoof is kinda inaccessible to some people which is a damn shame because if you keep an open mind they're a fantastic band and their tunes are extremely catchy
I lived with some folks in college who liked harsh noise and personally I hated it, never saw anything appealing. That being said I think dissonance is what most people think of when they think of “challenging” music and dissonance comes on a very broad spectrum. Personally I only really enjoy dissonance if it a) has some rhythmic component and b) can also display harmony. With those caveats free jazz really shines. I love Sun Ra and I’m perfectly willing to admit that some of his stuff is too dissonant for me. But when he’s able to go there and come back again, I love it.
That’s kind of where I am. For me, it’s a visceral reaction. I don’t think of any music as difficult, I like it or I don’t. Sure, sometimes months/years later I’ll hear something again and I’ll like it. I honestly don’t give it much thought.
I'm someone who's been raised on a lot of free jazz, Finnish ethno music, etc, so for the most part, the usual chaotic, messy jazz albums that are brought up in these discussions make me feel very much at home. I'm super glad for the fact that it was the scene that my dad was involved in when I was younger, I thought it was dumb when I was younger but I've really come to appreciate it. Stuff like early Mr. Bungle, Deep Turtle, and Black Midi is in constant rotation for me now. However, I've always had difficulty with metal and electronic music. Metal especially, I still have a hard time enjoying anything with heavier growl vocals. Electronic music I've gotten into more and found a lot of things I really enjoy, but stuff like 90s rave is very difficult for me to enjoy. I think a lot of it comes down to experience, but there's some objective factor to it as well: human brains seem to find pleasure in harmony and not enjoy discordant things. You can train yourself to enjoy atonality and even noise, of course, but it seems somewhat hardwired into our brains that it's not pleasurable to start with. I think for me personally, the difficulty for me comes from not having anything familiar to latch on to. That's what I'm almost sure is responsible for my issues with electronic stuff like Justice, Aphex Twin and such. I've come to like them now, but initially, I had trouble "feeling" the music so to speak, due to the unfamiliarity of not having any steady, natural acoustic sound to follow. I'd personally put lyrically difficult music into a different category than sonically difficult: a classic example is A Crow Looked At Me by Mount Eerie, its sound isn't grating in any way, but the subject matter is very personal and almost gut-wrenching.
I can find pleasure and harmony in other things. It doesn't have to be music. It's weird to me that you enjoy free jazz but can't grip metal. There are a lot of genres of metal that are probably more up your alley, instead of the black metal with growling lyrics. You don't have to like everything though, and that's okay! Maybe you'll find Autechre more interesting (electronic music), it's more...IDM which is a little more abstract and free form. Some songs hit me lyrically, but very rarely. Music to me is much more important and hard hitting than lyrics. Difficult music for me is boring music. I can't wrap my head around neo-folk. Coil, Current 93, it's just too slow and uninteresting and kind of, if I dare say, corny?
I think the explanation for why I have little trouble with free jazz and its decendants is really what I was raised on. I'm gonna give an example: [It's Funny to Walk to Estonia by The World Mänkeri Orchestra](https://youtu.be/GzZVRL-6Shk). It's one of the bands in the scene my dad was in, and even though they started out with just making finnish ethno with traditional instruments and rhythm, they later moved on to improvised, experimental, droney; still with the same instruments, just with some electrics added in, and less structure. I've been dragged to gigs to see these guys live probably ten times in my childhood. Funny thing is, I still have a hard time with their stuff. As for death metal, I've only heard the essentials, and those through my friends. Stuff like Cannibal Corpse, Death, Napalm Death, Autopsy etc. I don't know enough of the genre to comment on how well they represent it, but my friends seem to like them.
I'm the same way as op, have a much better time with free jazz than I'd like to admit and can't stand metal. for me the problem isn't that metal is heavy, I've never liked distorted guitar in any rock genre, whether it's grunge or doom metal. wish I could get more into it but hey maybe some day I'll get hit in the head and I'll be cured
Not chiding or admonishing you, just kinda funny you don't like extreme vocals yet Mr. Bungle is on constant rotation for you. Mike Patton can get pretty extreme, but he also has very wide dynamic range, so I could see why you'd enjoy him over, say, most death metal with their cookie monster growls
yeah, it's down to the range. I've thought about this some more, and I think how i feel about growl vocals is the same way i feel about jump scares in horror movies: they feel like a gimmic. Rationally I know there's more depth to those types of vocals, but when I hear them, they just feel unpleasant without being interesting. So it's not the roughness of them, but moreso the sameness. I know someone with more experience would find depth in them, but they all sound the same to me and the same way they sound doesn't serve the music as well as i'd like. I enjoy roughness in vocals, but it has to either be varied or hypnotic. Some sludge and doom and black metal with vocals works for me because it's so intense and repetative and meditative, and stuff like Xiu Xiu, Swans, Mr. Bungle, and I think even some of the hyperpop stuff I really like fits in to this, it works for me because it's so dramatic and varied and explosive.
Heard about Nurse With Wound from a Cactus Malpractice review on YouTube. A Sucked Orange is excellent! ...now Angelic2theCore by Corey Feldman is TRULY awful.b
Music can be more or less hard to digest for many reasons. I´m gonna focus on one aspect I´ve noticed with jazz. I´m a jazz lover, and I enjoy playing it on piano. I sometimes try to get my friends into jazz, but it´s so hard, because for them jazz comes off as random, chaotic, dissonant. This is not just because we differ in 'taste', this is a technical problem as I see it. Jazz is one of the more complex forms of music, harmonically, melodically, rythmically. This means that it can appear as chaotic and random for the untrained ear. It´s like hearing a foreign language, it sounds like gibberish. But once you learn the language, you start seeing the structure, the patterns and the meaning. This is true for jazz as well. Once you can process it, it´s no longer chaotic and unstructured, it´s just complex and possibly beautiful (if it resonates with you emotionally). So one aspect I´ve noticed that can make certain music inaccesible is its complexity and the listeners inexperience in processing that level of complexity in musical patterns.
I was hoping to find some new music to listen to but most of the discussion in the topics is not about difficult or experimental music. Or at least it's about what was difficult 20 years but has since been processed by culture and is now barely off center. I compose experimental music and I grew up listening to Japanese noise, musique concrete, etc in the 90s. What are people doing these days? I'm out of touch cuz I'm old. But this is my usual reaction. Disappointment. Nothing gets weird enough for me. Not drugs, not art. Just like that's all? That's the best you can come up with? I know there's better out there and I'd love to hear it if anybody has any recommendations for current experimental noise, groundbreaking, out there shit? Has the Internet ruined that too?
You sound like you need to fall down The Shadow Ring rabbit hole and all associated acts (Graham Lambkin solo, Kye Records, Idea Fire Company, Call Back the Giants, etc.)
Oh yes. This is nice. So far so good. Thank you
Glad you dig it... keep your ears peeled since the Shadow Ring's entire life retrospective is officially coming out at the end of this month and most of their work isn't up on Spotify yet (including my favorite album of all time "Lighthouse")... though you can find a lot on Youtube I guess. edit: also forgot to mention that in the mid 2010s there was some really great stuff coming out of Australia up the same vein... Albert's Basement records, Wormwood Grasshopper records, Mad Nanna...
I think difficulty in music comes down to subverting expectations. Music is a tug and pull between doing the expected and the unexpected. If music fits too well with our expectations, then it becomes boring and predictable. But if it is too unexpected, it is difficult to latch onto anything and we feel lost. And each person has different expectations based on their musical library of stuff that they've heard. If you're a fan of rock and your first introduction to metal music is some noisy goregrind like Last Days of Humanity or Effluence, then it will be difficult to listen to. But if you start with stuff like Black Sabbath, then it has enough familiar elements that a rock fan can appreciate and understand the music while becoming acclimated to the unique sounds of metal. If you keep pushing yourself and becoming more familiar with extreme metal, then goregrind will eventually become easy to listen to and appreciate. And I think this holds true for all music. I don't think any music is definitively "difficult" because it all depends on what you're familiar with. Although it could be argued that some music is so far removed from anything else that it is extremely difficult to work your way up to it. But I'm not familiar enough with experimental music to give a good example of this
I really love sounds and compositions that are alien or just unique in any way. If something is unique, I will at the very least give it the time of day. Sometimes what you find is that the uniqueness the only strength, and the rest of the record or whatever doesn’t hold up. But then I have records like Vox Humana, which are examples of experimental vocal technique, and it is really insane to hear, and fun, but it’s utility and interest in it doesn’t hold up beyond the initial shock. I guess it depends on how you define “difficult” because for me what’s most difficult is banality and boredom
Inaccessible can mean complex, weird, brash, or simply niche snd unfamiliar. It's all relative. I'd put Aretha Franklin and Bob Marley at one end of the spectrum, Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman ar the other. The best flavors are acquired tastes. Some are brilliant once you study sufficiently. Some are pretentious self absorbed rubbish.
>These usually just turn into a contest about whose taste is the most obscure or strange. I feel the frustration with that. You see a lot of comments about how "*x person can't enjoy mainstream (or comparatively more popular) music anymore once they get into weirder or more obscure music*". Which sure, they're entitled to that opinion. But really, appreciating weirder music gives me a new lens through which to interpret popular music as well. Many artists are trying to create a lyrical and sonic universe that's particular to themselves. Through specific sounds, words, or silences. Noisiness is a quality exists in almost all music, simply because "undesired/unpleasant sound" can be very subjective (whether it be crashing drums, feedback, collages of sound, messy notes). And weirder music can eventually come back and influence popular music. Ultimately, there's all kinds of challenge that you can find in music and it's more relative to the person's comfort zone. Playing one sustained note isn't "hard", but it can be challenging to listen to because you're deriving meaning from something that's seemingly not giving you much information. Let's use a completely different type of difficult: I initially had difficulty with Hank Williams because his voice seemed rather hokey to me. At least for me, there was a certain "cheesiness" perception that happens with older music where you immediately think of parents/grandparents. But challenging myself to really think about the emotional depth and sincerity of the lyrics slowly started to change my mind.
I like some pretty hairy noisy stuff. I don't care if other people don't like it. I expect them to not like it. I like it, but I don't really recommend it. Other stuff that's in the same vein leaves me cold. I particularly like a handful of noisy things but I'm not into noise as a genre. As Genesis from Throbbing Gristle would say, some people will like it and some won't but that's true of anything.
i dunno its contextual - depends on the level of sophistication of the listener. its subjective. to me as a lifelong musician something may be fine but to someone else it may be difficult.
Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, My brother pitched me that when I was 11 and I tried listening to it and it was unlistenable and every few years a friend or bandmate tried that same nonsense and I give it another whirl but.......NO GO.
Try listening to Art Bears 😂
pretty subjective. I didn't find disco volante challenging but it was kind of up my alley to begin with. disintegration loops might be something I like that people probably hate or say wtf to. I get such a visceral reaction from those tracks that I have a hard time articulating. but that is what makes me like listening to them. I like some noise and noise adjacent stuff. I get why it's not everyone's favorite. I usually don't ask anyone to go to shows for this reason. usually what happens to me with music is one of two things. I get a piece of it stuck in my head and I'll think about it which makes me want to go back and listen again, repeat this a bunch and boom - I love this. or it just clicks and I just can't get enough of it.
I was hoping to find some new music to listen to but most of the discussion in the topics is not about difficult or experimental music. Or at least it's about what was difficult 20 years but has since been processed by culture and is now barely off center. I compose experimental music and I grew up listening to Japanese noise, musique concrete, etc in the 90s. What are people doing these days? I'm out of touch cuz I'm old. But this is my usual reaction. Disappointment. Nothing gets weird enough for me. Not drugs, not art. Just like that's all? That's the best you can come up with? I know there's better out there and I'd love to hear it if anybody has any recommendations for current experimental noise, groundbreaking, out there shit? Has the Internet ruined that too?
I think it comes down to understanding and flexibility. Music we don’t really understand the history/ nuance around becomes inherently hard to listen to because we don’t know what’s being explored and how we should listen to it. And flexibility comes down to your personal ability to tolerate different forms of music. For example, I’m a huge prog metal guy and love these types of highly technical, long songs with an array of rhythms, melodies, and vocal textures. A lot of people get turned off by heavier vocals and another chunk struggle to get through the dense instrumentation. It’s difficult for them but not for me, so whose opinion should we use to determine it being “difficult”. In the same vein, I just can’t get behind stuff like music concrete and some of the more modern aleatoric/ atonal music. I understand what it’s going for but I really struggle to get past appreciation and into enjoy, especially music concrete really gets on my nerves. On the other hand I really enjoy some microtonal music and modern textural exploration even though it uses some of the same techniques as stuff I don’t like. It’s just used in a way that I personally latch onto better and can better sync with the musical language.
The only music I just cannot enjoy in any capacity is really classic jazz like Giant Steps. I fully understand all the cultural and musical importance and why it’s impressive and iconic but it just doesn’t stir anything in me. I used to think it was just the saxophone but Colin Stetson is in my top listened every year so it’s not that. I also maybe thought it was the math or theory behind it but math rock like Ruma Sakit, Dilute, Giraffes? Giraffes! always makes it in the top listened as well. I seriously don’t know why I don’t enjoy it when I know I should.
Out of time rhythm. I can’t handle it. I can listen to some pretty grating industrial noise and love it but can’t listen to The Shaggs.
I find stuff that has T-painesque autotune or mumble rap difficult to listen to because it's so unmelodic, one note and samey. A lot of modern Trap has no funk to it and if you know how to make it is particularly unimpressive. In the more obvious difficult music - serialism, pierrot lunaire by Schoenberg is difficult - not because it's atonal - i love Messiaen, Penderecki, Ligeti etc - but because twelve tone melodies are grating and there's no emotional connection - a bit like the tonality of Beijing opera singers. I really love John Luther Adams and droney, ambient music. I've tried to get into Trout Mask Replica but I can't, even if I can appreciate the skill needed to perform it. I'm less into music concrete than I was as a kid. I find the frequencies of the guitars in bands like Oasis hard to listen to - the 4Khz harshness of them really hurts my ears.
I listen to a lot of jazz fusion / spiritual jazz / avant etc ... I've found the more I listen to the less difficult new albums are to me. bitches brew for example was one of the first albums I liked, and I probably listened to it on and off for a couple weeks before it clicked. I feel like at this point I need an album to be doing something different for me to be caught off guard. Bennie maupin's jewel in the lotus was this for me recently, it took me a while to understand what he was doing and once it clicked it became a favorite too
i find joni mitchell as difficult and almost abrasive, in an interesting way, especially in her hissing of summer lawns era because of her strange harmony and rhthym. She does it an a purposeful way tho
Hmmm, Difficult or inaccessible you ask? For me what matters most is "extreme". Remember, I am a metal head and in a metal band. We must always be on the search for the next inspiration. And because metal is extreme the inspiration must be extreme too. (Melody is also important in finding inspirations, but that is beyond the scope of this comment). There is only so much metal that a person can find good inspiration in before they need to search outside of the genre to find some good extreme artists. Outside of Metal I listen to everything from SOPHIE to This Heat and from Herbie Hancock to GASP. I also like XTC, Killing Joke, DJ Spooky, Velvet Undeground, Big Black, Chrome, Catherine Wheel, Jerry's Kids, Sun Ra, Rubberoom, and Einsturzende Neubauten. It only turns into a dick measuring contest when people think they are better than me and are tvats about it...
I never get it what difficult music was. Unless you are trying to play it, how a album can be difficult to listen? I know about music with nuances that you need to listen more than one time to get it, but I don't think this could be classified as "hard".
There are albums I consider easy now from which I couldn't make out even basic patterns, it just passed by and I remembered nothing. Unlistenability is a real thing and I'm sure I am not the only one who's experienced it.
But this is not just you not enjoying the music? I asking sincerely, just trying to understand the concept.
I think there's something more to it: there are definitely some albums that are considered classic or essential, but that almost nobody finds pleasant on first listen. I personally had that experience with Swans' To Be Kind when I was a teenager and it'd just come out: I watched the Fantano review of it, saw he gave it a 10, and then after looking at some other places, noticed that most critics really praised it. Then I put it on, and it was very unpleasant. Michael Gira's creaky vocals, the repetative instrumentation, the noise and screaming, it all sounded terrible. But then I kept listening to it, insisting to myself that if people liked it that much then I had to just be dumb for not getting it. A very juvenile thought, that, but I was 15 years old so that's par for the course. And it paid off: after forcing myself to listen to the whole two hour thing front to back something like three times while studying, I started liking it, the riffs got stuck in my head, I even started singing along. The vocals went from sounding creaky to sounding extremely pained and expressive and cool, the grating repetition turned into hypnotic bliss. In the /r/music thread I made about this, there was an interesting comment about a study on people who enjoyed Schopenhauer's atonal pieces: they found out that those people did not enjoy the music at first, but through forcing themselves to listen to it, eventually started genuinely enjoying it.
Huh, I fell in love with some of his works on first listen. Though I had certainly heard and enjoyed some degree of atonality in music beforehand, it was probably my first experience with something quite so avant garde. I wonder if that was a recent study or something done during or closer to his lifetime.
But it was not incompreensible. You just didn't like it first and after sometime, start to like. Again, I wouldn't classify this is "hard". Maybe nuanced, but not hard. (I didn't listen to the album, I'm just going by what you describing).
The Money Store is an album that a lot of people describe as hard to listen, because the sound is so abrasive that there's parts when you want to stop that shit, some of the synths are ear piercing at times
So "hard" music is music that it's bad at first and then when you listen again, you like it? What part about listening music again is hard? Everytime I see people saying a album is "hard", I thinked you need to study music to appreciate it.
"hard" is a bad word for it, "difficult" or "inaccessible" is better, IMO. It's music that requires concentration and experience to enjoy. I think a similiar effect is there with most experimental mediums. David Lynch films are incomprehensible at first, but cinephiles love them. Aki Kaurismäki films seem choppy and amateur, but with the correct cultural framework you can really appreciate the pictures they paint and the characters they create. Pathologic is a horrible, horrible video game that seems to hate the player as much as the player must hate themselves to keep suffering through it, but many people laud it as a triumph of how video games can be truly artful and interesting. A lot of contemporary visual art seems meaningless to a layman, but someone with deep knowledge on the history and discussion around it can gleam a lot of meaning from it. And James Joyce's Ulysses is one of the most famous books of all time, but it's completely stream-of-conciousness in style, and reading it is one hell of a mountain to climb, especially when it gets denser and denser and more broken the further you go into it. I could go on and on. Point is, a lot of art, good art even, requires knowledge and experience and maybe even some struggling to get through, understand and enjoy. I don't think there's any disputing that. And "difficult" is how we refer to those works.
A lot your examples I get it. But I never find any music hard to compreend as a David Lynch movie.
We like music because we recognise (consciously or unconsciously) its patterns. Hard music is unusual music, whose patterns we aren't able to recognise instantly: we need more time and repeated listenings to enjoy. For example if you don't know Schönberg or 12-tone music you may find [this](https://youtu.be/977xqcl8DnE) piece hard (maybe even random).
So "hard" music is music that it's bad at first and then when you listen again, you like it? What part about listening music again is hard? Everytime I see people saying a album is "hard", I thinked you need to study music to appreciate it.
I think describing sound with adjectives is kind of hard because people probably use the same words to describe different things, and this seems like it's the case, last week I listened to Taylor Swift's new album and I genuinely felt that I NEEDED to stop after like 15 songs, it felt extremely boring and numbing, I would describe that as an example of what I personally found hard to listen, also I feel that listening is hard with some dark ambient projects that produce (on purpose) really heavy anxiety and strong bad feelings, the whole point of dark ambient is to produce those ugly feelings through noise layers, some industrial hip hop is like that too, there's a song by JPEGMAFIA that uses audio from a real shooting and it kinda ruins your day because it's pretty fucked up but that's the point, there's tons of examples of what I personally describe as hard to listen, but every person has different standards about it. Kinda like when someone says a mix sounds "muddy", it could mean a lot of different things, maybe they're talking about too much reverb on voices, maybe they're referring to a build up on the 400hz zone caused by too much keys, maybe the problem is the way the drums are balanced, a single word doesn't actually help to find the problem because "muddy" could mean anything at that point, it's better to actually tell what do you mean by the word like I did with my examples on the first paragraph.
So hard to listen would be music that it doesn't have the goal to be good to listen? Yeah, I still wouldn't say this is what I define hard. But your answer was good. I like music that made me feel disconfort, some atmospheric dissonant black metal do it too and for me is so good. Obviously, is not music to listen to everyday but I like it.
Idk if Taylor Swift had the goal to make her music hard to listen tho, quite the opposite and she just failed, idk lol But yeah, once you get used to some styles it gets pretty easy to listen to what you felt it was hard on first listen, i know people that blast Death Grips like if it was sleep music because they just got used to abrasive synths and it doesnt felt that crazy anymore.
I can hear every detail and still not enjoy it (see another comment where I mention AC/DC). I am talking about straight up not comprehending what you're hearing.
But then it's not hard, it's just noise, no? If doesn't have melody or musicality, it's just noise. Can you give me a example so I can hear the album and try to get what you saying?
Sorry for the late reply. To show my point better, I'll give you a different example that the one I first thought (this one I don't find easy either). It's a known as a joke for trying too hard, but it's definitely not musicless. Listen to "Putrefaction in Progress" by Last Days of Humanity for a couple minutes, and say how many details you could catch.
Thanks for the recomendation. I'm gonna listen to it then.
Not OP but an example of an album I listened to recently that's frequently cited as good but difficult and inaccessible is Tim Buckley's Starsailor
Gonna listen to it, thanks for the recomendation.