While I agree wholeheartedly that the emotional value of the lyrical content is not actually musical content, I don't understand what you mean by "music is feel and melody and how you put chords into a musical language or form." Please elaborate. Firstly, why is music a language? Do you mean that metaphorically, as music "communicates" feeling? What is form in music - do you mean that a good piece of music must have exposition, development, and recapitulation? And how do Beefheart, Zappa, and the Velvet Underground lack melody or feeling?
"The Ascension" by Glenn Branca is indeed one of the greatest tracks of all time. My brain dissolves in the music every time I listen to it. Branca is an intellectual modern composer, but his music excoriates its listeners, then redirects them into primal stages of the universe's creation.
"The Ascension" can be appreciated both for its ingenious composition (the way Branca makes those guitars howl is no incident - he had map the harmonic series a la La Monte Young in order to create that resonance and feedback), but it's also one of the most deeply emotional tracks ever recorded.
Have you ever heard "So That Each Person is in Charge of Himself"? It's a track off a recently released (but recorded back in 1981) Glenn Branca CD. The track consists of an interview with John Cage who had a very low opinion of Glenn Branca.
Oh, and didn't Bob Dylan actually like the Beatles?
I certainly like your standpoint. I don't think that Scaruffi's top 25 list should go unquestioned - I think there can be variations in critical assessment, and I'm very glad to see lukeprog take a stand and acknowledge Ys and Glenn Branca's The Ascension as masterpieces, despite Scaruffi only giving them 8/10. Scaruffi is only human; it would only be expected for him to ocassionally overlook the artistic qualities of certain masterpieces. And he has a few self-contradictory opinions. And I think he holds ethnic fusion and cultural hybridity in unusually high regard, as if having these qualities automatically makes a work a masterpiece.
However, I don't agree with your position that "Scaruffi values originality above all else in music; I'd even go so far as to say that it's all he values". I don't think it's so much originality he values as emotional power, which is very difficult to achieve through conventional media. Some have done it (according to him): Bruce Springsteen and Lisa Germano to name a few. Red House Painters weren't the first slo-core band, nor was Klaus Schulze the first minimalist, nor was Faust the first band to ever try to destroy and then reconstruct the entire music landscape. The guitar ensembles of The Ascension may have been predated by Chatham and Bedford, but the emotional force and triumph of Branca's masterpiece is unmatched. Husker Du was not the first hardcore band, and even if they were the first band to put hardcore songs, psychedelic/hypnotic ululations ("Tooth Fairy and the Princess", improvised free-form freak-outs (like at the end of "What's Going On"), and bitter folk-rock laments ("Never Talking To You Again") on the same album, such an achievement would have been trivial if it did not amount to any sort of emotional impact. Also, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica draws its composition process on many avant-garde composers of the early twentieth century. The chromatic atonal melodies that grace songs like "Sweet Sweet Bulbs" and "My Human Gets Me Blues" are not unheard of when one considers Feldman's indeterminacy. Ives was a lot like Beefheart in a way: complex polyrhythm, conflicting tempi, lots of dissonance, everything going on all at once - but yet a strong sense of beauty, poignancy, and flirtations with popular music - in Ives' case, it was with ragtime; in Beefheart's case, it was with blues. The point is that all music has archetypes and predecessors, but it's when someone can build off of these predecessors with emotionally resonant results that a masterpiece is created.
One last thing: I find it funny that some of the musicians Scaruffi praises severely disagree with his opinions. Captain Beefheart hated Bob Dylan. Mark Stewart hated Captain Beefheart. Ives couldn't stand Wagner, and Aldous Huxley didn't like James Joyce. And Dockstader, whom Daniel Vahnke greatly admired, was not given much critical praise.
Have you ever listened to The Residents' Animal Lover (2005)? Scaruffi gave it a 4, but I believe he vastly underrated this album.
It is a harrowing album of underground chants, tribal overtones, existentialist themes, avant-garde influences, Webern-quality tension and dissonance, musical theatre pretenses, new-age mysticism, modal passages, and evocations of catharsis and ecstasy. Like Not Available, it pronounces the human race's doom in a bizarre and tragicomic way. Specifically, every track is some maniacal cult's ceremonious ritual.
Honestly, I find The Well-Tuned Piano to be a very emotional work.
The Well-Tuned Piano is amazing. Its influences are very broad, yet the work is uniformly solid. It fuses the modern and ancient - minimalism, mathematics, studies in psychoacoustics all abound, but at the same time, La Monte is going back about 500 years to the time before Western music compromised resonance for convenience with equal temperament. It fuses the East and the West - La Monte was well-researched in classical music of Bali and Java, and drew inspiration for melody on the Kirana vocal style of North India, but aleatory and jazz improvisation also play a large role in a piece in which piano (the epitome of Western Music) is the sole instrument.
The system of just intonation (http://www.kylegann.com/tuning.html#tune4) may sound like a mathematical novelty, but The Well-Tuned Piano is one of the most emotionally effective works I have ever heard. It produces a wild sense of yearning, dark beauty, invigoration, and poignancy. The resonance and echo of the music abolish any sense of emptiness. La Monte allows his clouds of justly-tuned intervals to radiate centrifugally and reach unsurpassed heights, encountering stars and distant galaxies and other worlds, the atmospheres of which you'd initially expect to have too low a density to produce any color at all until you actually witness the light scattering in the atmosphere, the skies imbued with pristine, primeval colors, uncorrupted by the mercury vapor of technocratic cities and their myrmidon inhabitants.
At the very least, I think you should consider La Monte Young for inception into your list of Great Artists That Failed to Release an 8/10 Album or Large Work, simply because La Monte Young was innovative, and without his influence, John Cale, Jon Hassell, and Glenn Branca may never have been able to construct THEIR respective masterpieces.
That said, I do consider Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht to be a masterpiece, and I certainly don't mean to discredit Schulze by praising La Monte Young. I love them both, and I think they both deserve fair recognition. I just sense an overall lack of appreciation when it comes to La Monte Young's compositional magnum opus, and I wanted to speak out enthusiastically in its favor. That's all.
I WAS UNSATISFIED WITH MY OLD POST (too many mistakes which I couldn't edit in the 30-minute grace period), SO I WROTE A NEW ONE THAT'S A LOT BETTER:
I think "Lullaby Land" may have the greatest opening lyric of any album ever.
Daniel Vahnke posted the lyrics to all the Lullaby Land songs on the Vampire Rodents' myspace, and it's really great to be able to read along.
Daniel Vahnke is a genius. The two interviews with him circulating on the internet prove just how intelligent he is. He is a truly odd person with a very unusual mind, but he somehow has the ability to keep his schizophrenically despondent mind at bay. Maybe it's because amidst all of his existential opinions and fixations on misanthropy and downfall, he retains a strong sense of humor.
Looking back on the Vampire Rodents' career, it's amazing how little known they were at the time. No promotion, no merchandising, no touring. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Daniel didn't make any money off of his music at all. We should all feel somewhat privileged to be among the thousand people who have ever listened to a Vampire Rodents album.
Lullaby Land is the only Rodents I have heard, and it really is a fantastic listen. Dementia is inextricably entwined with music. Depending on the song, a bunch of contrasting genres (avant-noise, classical, big band, heavy metal, dance) are fused together, both homogeneously and
heterogeneously. The effect is both comedic and cryptic, both engaging and disquieting. The acerbic lyrics - shouted, not sung - carry a sense of impending doom, stretched out to unrealistic proportions, and blended harmoniously with equally impending music, made from juxtaposing fragments, ever confounding and perplexing, that allow for the entire world to collapse upon itself in the 72-minute span of the CD. And at the end of it all, "Passage" is the ultimate post-apocalyptic piece.
It's really interesting to read interviews with Vahnke because his character reflects many of the qualities of his music: eccentric, full of internal demons and borderline lunacy, casting utter disgust upon the human race and society in all past, present, and future incarnations, focused on humanity's destruction, and erratic, but humorous and rousing nonetheless, and utterly enjoyable.
I think "Lullaby Land" may have the greatest opening lyric of any album ever.
Daniel Vahnke posted the lyrics of all the songs on the Vampire Rodents' myspace, and it's really great to read along while listening to the songs.
Daniel Vahnke is a genius. The two interviews with him circulating on the internet prove just how intelligent he is. He is a truly odd person with a very unusual mind, but he somehow has the ability to keep himself contained.
Looking back on the Vampire Rodents' career, it's amazing how little known they were at the time. No promotion, no merchandising, no touring. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Daniel didn't make any money off of his music at all. We should all feel somewhat privileged to be among the thousand people who have ever listened to a Vampire Rodents album.
Lullaby Land is the only Rodents I have heard, and it really is a fantastic listen. Depending on the song, a bunch of contrasting genres (avant-noise, classical, big band, heavy metal, dance) are fused together either, both homogeneously and heterogeneously. The effect is both comedic and cryptic, both engaging and disquieting. The acerbic lyrics - shouted, not sung - carry a sense of impending doom, stretched out to unrealistic proportions, and blended harmoniously with equally impending music, made from juxtaposing fragments, ever confounding and perplexing, allows for the entire world basically to collapse upon itself in the 72-minute span of the CD. "Passage" is the ultimate post-apocalyptic piece. Really, that's what I love most about Lullaby Land: the utter dementia.
It's interesting to read interviews with Vahnke because his character reflects many of the qualities of his music: eccentric, full of internal demons and borderline lunacy, casting utter disgust upon the human race and society in all past, present, and future incarnations, focused on humanity's destruction, humorous, and erratic.
I'd say Brian McMahan of Slint is a worthy candidate. Listen to "Washer". His voice is very childlike and uncertain, especially around 4 minutes 40 seconds in, when he quivers a faint "promise me the sun will rise again", and you can almost hear the dessication of his vocal cords on record. One of the most emotional vocal performances I've heard.
Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters isn't bad either. His voice is just so smooth, always singing as if upon reflection. "Medicine Bottle".
Jennifer Herrema on "New York Avenue Bridge" is amazing. Everything is so slurred and somnolent. Her singing is akin to a painter who exclusively paints with very fat paintbrush; everything is legato, the consonants are enunciated very slowly, short vowels are made into long ones, the syllable nuclei are morphed and contorted, and she has a somnolent way of gliding notes together. I can't really describe it, but listen to how she sings "yesterday my jeeaaaans looked unnrreeeeal" and hear the micro-notes and quarter tones she inadvertently sings. This may all sound like technical jargon, but the emotive effect that she produces when she sings is significant. It's just so dark and paranoiac. It teeters on the edge of delirium. She sings as if trying to seduce each and every listener into her underworld of sleaze, drugs, estrangement from all reality and debauchery. I'm flattered by the invitation.
I'm a new member here. Please forgive me if this has been discussed before:
What do you think of Borbetomagus - Barbed Wire Maggots (1983)?
Personally, I've only made it through the first 4 minutes. I find it very difficult to listen to, not because of any problems with the compositional aspect of the work, but because the recording quality is so abrasive that I'm afraid I'll physically damage my ears if I listen to the whole 45 minute album in one sitting. I think it warrants speakers, not headphones. Once I gain access to some speakers I'll give the album another try.
Anyway, I noticed it wasn't on here; I was just curious if you had heard it and, if so, what you think of it.
I found Faust to be absolutely amazing the first time I heard it. It's a very listenable album. The sheer density of the album (microtonality, polyrhythms, 20 seconds of Nancarrow-esque piano, melodic noise, noisy melodies, Spanish classical guitar influenced drones, opera-influenced melisma, delay effects so prominent that I think I'm hearing a choir, unheard-of distortion sound effects that sound as though chirping birds are wedded with minimalist keyboards, Residents-y nothingness 2 years before the first Residents album, occasional flirting with the "low" art of an all-out rock jam, unveiled and raw bits of energy, double drums not for kitsch but for a strong pounding effect) is unparalleled in most rock music. And that, to me, was obvious from first listen. I don't understand what about the album is off-putting. Maybe there's another aspect to the album's greatness that I haven't discovered yet, but even so, there are aspects of the album's greatness, noticeable upon first listen, that would immediately warrant the album praise.
Trout Mask Replica did take some time. I agree with you on that one. It took time and careful attention to realize just how insanely well-constructed TMR truly is. Captain Beefheart's originality is galaxies above virtually any other rock musician (although Royal Trux comes close) in that rather than inventing a new way to simply produce or present already existing music, he invented a new way to compose music, via deconstruction of free jazz, rock, blues, sea shanty, fusing those deconstructions together, and reconstructing it through an avant garde/modern classical mindset: polyrhythm, polytonality, and orchestral chaos. Such originality and genius is difficult to discern, and upon first listen, the album can come across as being random. I was not really sure what to listen for; there wasn't one definite aspect to latch onto. The out-of-time vocals don't sing an explicit melody, and the drums provide neither backbeat nor ground rhythm. The vocals of "Pena" scare the living feces out of me.
Hash Jar Tempo did not take a lot of time for me either, although I can see what's off-putting about it. I could definitely see people saying "This is just a single-day jam session! How is this a masterpiece?" Myself, I was blown away by the sound. I think it's a good album to listen to passively (as background music) as well as actively.
I still don't get Loveless. I think it's a very good album, but it seems like a production artifice to me. Kevin Shields himself says he "genuinely rarely understood more than a third of what people were trying to say about the record", and I tend to agree with him. That said, it's been about 3 years since I've listened to it, and perhaps I'd be more open now. Also, Kevin Shields seems like a very modest person.
While I agree wholeheartedly that the emotional value of the lyrical content is not actually musical content, I don't understand what you mean by "music is feel and melody and how you put chords into a musical language or form." Please elaborate. Firstly, why is music a language? Do you mean that metaphorically, as music "communicates" feeling? What is form in music - do you mean that a good piece of music must have exposition, development, and recapitulation? And how do Beefheart, Zappa, and the Velvet Underground lack melody or feeling?
"The Ascension" by Glenn Branca is indeed one of the greatest tracks of all time. My brain dissolves in the music every time I listen to it. Branca is an intellectual modern composer, but his music excoriates its listeners, then redirects them into primal stages of the universe's creation.
"The Ascension" can be appreciated both for its ingenious composition (the way Branca makes those guitars howl is no incident - he had map the harmonic series a la La Monte Young in order to create that resonance and feedback), but it's also one of the most deeply emotional tracks ever recorded.
9.5/10 indeed.
I have a few more:
Have you ever heard "So That Each Person is in Charge of Himself"? It's a track off a recently released (but recorded back in 1981) Glenn Branca CD. The track consists of an interview with John Cage who had a very low opinion of Glenn Branca.
Oh, and didn't Bob Dylan actually like the Beatles?
Interesting post, darktremor.
I certainly like your standpoint. I don't think that Scaruffi's top 25 list should go unquestioned - I think there can be variations in critical assessment, and I'm very glad to see lukeprog take a stand and acknowledge Ys and Glenn Branca's The Ascension as masterpieces, despite Scaruffi only giving them 8/10. Scaruffi is only human; it would only be expected for him to ocassionally overlook the artistic qualities of certain masterpieces. And he has a few self-contradictory opinions. And I think he holds ethnic fusion and cultural hybridity in unusually high regard, as if having these qualities automatically makes a work a masterpiece.
However, I don't agree with your position that "Scaruffi values originality above all else in music; I'd even go so far as to say that it's all he values". I don't think it's so much originality he values as emotional power, which is very difficult to achieve through conventional media. Some have done it (according to him): Bruce Springsteen and Lisa Germano to name a few. Red House Painters weren't the first slo-core band, nor was Klaus Schulze the first minimalist, nor was Faust the first band to ever try to destroy and then reconstruct the entire music landscape. The guitar ensembles of The Ascension may have been predated by Chatham and Bedford, but the emotional force and triumph of Branca's masterpiece is unmatched. Husker Du was not the first hardcore band, and even if they were the first band to put hardcore songs, psychedelic/hypnotic ululations ("Tooth Fairy and the Princess", improvised free-form freak-outs (like at the end of "What's Going On"), and bitter folk-rock laments ("Never Talking To You Again") on the same album, such an achievement would have been trivial if it did not amount to any sort of emotional impact. Also, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica draws its composition process on many avant-garde composers of the early twentieth century. The chromatic atonal melodies that grace songs like "Sweet Sweet Bulbs" and "My Human Gets Me Blues" are not unheard of when one considers Feldman's indeterminacy. Ives was a lot like Beefheart in a way: complex polyrhythm, conflicting tempi, lots of dissonance, everything going on all at once - but yet a strong sense of beauty, poignancy, and flirtations with popular music - in Ives' case, it was with ragtime; in Beefheart's case, it was with blues. The point is that all music has archetypes and predecessors, but it's when someone can build off of these predecessors with emotionally resonant results that a masterpiece is created.
One last thing: I find it funny that some of the musicians Scaruffi praises severely disagree with his opinions. Captain Beefheart hated Bob Dylan. Mark Stewart hated Captain Beefheart. Ives couldn't stand Wagner, and Aldous Huxley didn't like James Joyce. And Dockstader, whom Daniel Vahnke greatly admired, was not given much critical praise.
You've heard In Rainbows, right? That couldn't have been that long ago.
I'd be surprised if you think In Rainbows is superior to Pet Sounds.
After Hours,
Have you ever listened to The Residents' Animal Lover (2005)? Scaruffi gave it a 4, but I believe he vastly underrated this album.
It is a harrowing album of underground chants, tribal overtones, existentialist themes, avant-garde influences, Webern-quality tension and dissonance, musical theatre pretenses, new-age mysticism, modal passages, and evocations of catharsis and ecstasy. Like Not Available, it pronounces the human race's doom in a bizarre and tragicomic way. Specifically, every track is some maniacal cult's ceremonious ritual.
I especially like "Mother No More".
I doubt it. Doesn't Scaruffi refuse to capitalize his name? "p. scaruffi" instead to "P. Scaruffi" would be far more convincing.
Honestly, I find The Well-Tuned Piano to be a very emotional work.
The Well-Tuned Piano is amazing. Its influences are very broad, yet the work is uniformly solid. It fuses the modern and ancient - minimalism, mathematics, studies in psychoacoustics all abound, but at the same time, La Monte is going back about 500 years to the time before Western music compromised resonance for convenience with equal temperament. It fuses the East and the West - La Monte was well-researched in classical music of Bali and Java, and drew inspiration for melody on the Kirana vocal style of North India, but aleatory and jazz improvisation also play a large role in a piece in which piano (the epitome of Western Music) is the sole instrument.
The system of just intonation (http://www.kylegann.com/tuning.html#tune4) may sound like a mathematical novelty, but The Well-Tuned Piano is one of the most emotionally effective works I have ever heard. It produces a wild sense of yearning, dark beauty, invigoration, and poignancy. The resonance and echo of the music abolish any sense of emptiness. La Monte allows his clouds of justly-tuned intervals to radiate centrifugally and reach unsurpassed heights, encountering stars and distant galaxies and other worlds, the atmospheres of which you'd initially expect to have too low a density to produce any color at all until you actually witness the light scattering in the atmosphere, the skies imbued with pristine, primeval colors, uncorrupted by the mercury vapor of technocratic cities and their myrmidon inhabitants.
At the very least, I think you should consider La Monte Young for inception into your list of Great Artists That Failed to Release an 8/10 Album or Large Work, simply because La Monte Young was innovative, and without his influence, John Cale, Jon Hassell, and Glenn Branca may never have been able to construct THEIR respective masterpieces.
That said, I do consider Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht to be a masterpiece, and I certainly don't mean to discredit Schulze by praising La Monte Young. I love them both, and I think they both deserve fair recognition. I just sense an overall lack of appreciation when it comes to La Monte Young's compositional magnum opus, and I wanted to speak out enthusiastically in its favor. That's all.
I WAS UNSATISFIED WITH MY OLD POST (too many mistakes which I couldn't edit in the 30-minute grace period), SO I WROTE A NEW ONE THAT'S A LOT BETTER:
I think "Lullaby Land" may have the greatest opening lyric of any album ever.
Daniel Vahnke posted the lyrics to all the Lullaby Land songs on the Vampire Rodents' myspace, and it's really great to be able to read along.
Daniel Vahnke is a genius. The two interviews with him circulating on the internet prove just how intelligent he is. He is a truly odd person with a very unusual mind, but he somehow has the ability to keep his schizophrenically despondent mind at bay. Maybe it's because amidst all of his existential opinions and fixations on misanthropy and downfall, he retains a strong sense of humor.
http://themindofmicrowaved.blogspot.com/2007/06/vampire-rodentsether-bun...
http://www.sonic-boom.com/interview/vampire.rodents.interview.html
Looking back on the Vampire Rodents' career, it's amazing how little known they were at the time. No promotion, no merchandising, no touring. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Daniel didn't make any money off of his music at all. We should all feel somewhat privileged to be among the thousand people who have ever listened to a Vampire Rodents album.
Lullaby Land is the only Rodents I have heard, and it really is a fantastic listen. Dementia is inextricably entwined with music. Depending on the song, a bunch of contrasting genres (avant-noise, classical, big band, heavy metal, dance) are fused together, both homogeneously and
heterogeneously. The effect is both comedic and cryptic, both engaging and disquieting. The acerbic lyrics - shouted, not sung - carry a sense of impending doom, stretched out to unrealistic proportions, and blended harmoniously with equally impending music, made from juxtaposing fragments, ever confounding and perplexing, that allow for the entire world to collapse upon itself in the 72-minute span of the CD. And at the end of it all, "Passage" is the ultimate post-apocalyptic piece.
It's really interesting to read interviews with Vahnke because his character reflects many of the qualities of his music: eccentric, full of internal demons and borderline lunacy, casting utter disgust upon the human race and society in all past, present, and future incarnations, focused on humanity's destruction, and erratic, but humorous and rousing nonetheless, and utterly enjoyable.
Thumping good album.
I think "Lullaby Land" may have the greatest opening lyric of any album ever.
Daniel Vahnke posted the lyrics of all the songs on the Vampire Rodents' myspace, and it's really great to read along while listening to the songs.
Daniel Vahnke is a genius. The two interviews with him circulating on the internet prove just how intelligent he is. He is a truly odd person with a very unusual mind, but he somehow has the ability to keep himself contained.
http://themindofmicrowaved.blogspot.com/2007/06/vampire-rodentsether-bun...
http://www.sonic-boom.com/interview/vampire.rodents.interview.html
Looking back on the Vampire Rodents' career, it's amazing how little known they were at the time. No promotion, no merchandising, no touring. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Daniel didn't make any money off of his music at all. We should all feel somewhat privileged to be among the thousand people who have ever listened to a Vampire Rodents album.
Lullaby Land is the only Rodents I have heard, and it really is a fantastic listen. Depending on the song, a bunch of contrasting genres (avant-noise, classical, big band, heavy metal, dance) are fused together either, both homogeneously and heterogeneously. The effect is both comedic and cryptic, both engaging and disquieting. The acerbic lyrics - shouted, not sung - carry a sense of impending doom, stretched out to unrealistic proportions, and blended harmoniously with equally impending music, made from juxtaposing fragments, ever confounding and perplexing, allows for the entire world basically to collapse upon itself in the 72-minute span of the CD. "Passage" is the ultimate post-apocalyptic piece. Really, that's what I love most about Lullaby Land: the utter dementia.
It's interesting to read interviews with Vahnke because his character reflects many of the qualities of his music: eccentric, full of internal demons and borderline lunacy, casting utter disgust upon the human race and society in all past, present, and future incarnations, focused on humanity's destruction, humorous, and erratic.
I'd say Brian McMahan of Slint is a worthy candidate. Listen to "Washer". His voice is very childlike and uncertain, especially around 4 minutes 40 seconds in, when he quivers a faint "promise me the sun will rise again", and you can almost hear the dessication of his vocal cords on record. One of the most emotional vocal performances I've heard.
Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters isn't bad either. His voice is just so smooth, always singing as if upon reflection. "Medicine Bottle".
Jennifer Herrema on "New York Avenue Bridge" is amazing. Everything is so slurred and somnolent. Her singing is akin to a painter who exclusively paints with very fat paintbrush; everything is legato, the consonants are enunciated very slowly, short vowels are made into long ones, the syllable nuclei are morphed and contorted, and she has a somnolent way of gliding notes together. I can't really describe it, but listen to how she sings "yesterday my jeeaaaans looked unnrreeeeal" and hear the micro-notes and quarter tones she inadvertently sings. This may all sound like technical jargon, but the emotive effect that she produces when she sings is significant. It's just so dark and paranoiac. It teeters on the edge of delirium. She sings as if trying to seduce each and every listener into her underworld of sleaze, drugs, estrangement from all reality and debauchery. I'm flattered by the invitation.
I'm a new member here. Please forgive me if this has been discussed before:
What do you think of Borbetomagus - Barbed Wire Maggots (1983)?
Personally, I've only made it through the first 4 minutes. I find it very difficult to listen to, not because of any problems with the compositional aspect of the work, but because the recording quality is so abrasive that I'm afraid I'll physically damage my ears if I listen to the whole 45 minute album in one sitting. I think it warrants speakers, not headphones. Once I gain access to some speakers I'll give the album another try.
Anyway, I noticed it wasn't on here; I was just curious if you had heard it and, if so, what you think of it.
I found Faust to be absolutely amazing the first time I heard it. It's a very listenable album. The sheer density of the album (microtonality, polyrhythms, 20 seconds of Nancarrow-esque piano, melodic noise, noisy melodies, Spanish classical guitar influenced drones, opera-influenced melisma, delay effects so prominent that I think I'm hearing a choir, unheard-of distortion sound effects that sound as though chirping birds are wedded with minimalist keyboards, Residents-y nothingness 2 years before the first Residents album, occasional flirting with the "low" art of an all-out rock jam, unveiled and raw bits of energy, double drums not for kitsch but for a strong pounding effect) is unparalleled in most rock music. And that, to me, was obvious from first listen. I don't understand what about the album is off-putting. Maybe there's another aspect to the album's greatness that I haven't discovered yet, but even so, there are aspects of the album's greatness, noticeable upon first listen, that would immediately warrant the album praise.
Trout Mask Replica did take some time. I agree with you on that one. It took time and careful attention to realize just how insanely well-constructed TMR truly is. Captain Beefheart's originality is galaxies above virtually any other rock musician (although Royal Trux comes close) in that rather than inventing a new way to simply produce or present already existing music, he invented a new way to compose music, via deconstruction of free jazz, rock, blues, sea shanty, fusing those deconstructions together, and reconstructing it through an avant garde/modern classical mindset: polyrhythm, polytonality, and orchestral chaos. Such originality and genius is difficult to discern, and upon first listen, the album can come across as being random. I was not really sure what to listen for; there wasn't one definite aspect to latch onto. The out-of-time vocals don't sing an explicit melody, and the drums provide neither backbeat nor ground rhythm. The vocals of "Pena" scare the living feces out of me.
Hash Jar Tempo did not take a lot of time for me either, although I can see what's off-putting about it. I could definitely see people saying "This is just a single-day jam session! How is this a masterpiece?" Myself, I was blown away by the sound. I think it's a good album to listen to passively (as background music) as well as actively.
I still don't get Loveless. I think it's a very good album, but it seems like a production artifice to me. Kevin Shields himself says he "genuinely rarely understood more than a third of what people were trying to say about the record", and I tend to agree with him. That said, it's been about 3 years since I've listened to it, and perhaps I'd be more open now. Also, Kevin Shields seems like a very modest person.