Might want to tweak the username as well...
*Your favourite record and what it means to you!
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hiraethified
I had to look up what it meant. Oh dear. He's got one chance left.
Henry Cow's Unrest made a huge impact on me when I was about 20 (about 20 years after the album was released). I was into all these 60's/70's rock things. Stones, Hendrix, Sabbath, Crimson etc. and a friend into the same played me the first two Henry Cow albums.
The music made very little sense to me. It was drawing on other more avant garde/improvisional traditions. And it disoriented me, I couldn't grasp what was even going on. And that intrigued me. And very quickly it became a revolution in how I viewed music, what it could do and even what it was about.
In fact to this day having read everything I can get hold of about them, I still don't know what the ingredients are that make up this music. There's a definite free jazz component, but it's in a peculiar musical context that I can't locate outside of their music. Vaguely Zappa at his more classical, but more European than that. More folk. At the time I thought it was "ultra prog rock" but I now hear it as much proto punk as anything. There's a rawness to it as well as a dizzying complexity. To this day the harmonic language used on these albums feels distinctive and my love of it has grown from bewildered fascination to a relative comprehension that's no less bewildered. I see how it works now, but where did this music come from?
The second album Unrest was the one that took hold of me. It has Lindsay Cooper on bassoon and oboe which adds a really warm woodwind sound to the mix. It's also deeply melancholic in tone which mirrored my mood at the time. Isolated and at odds with the world. There was a time that I wouldn't go anywhere without it and would listen to it every other day or so. I guess people think of avant garde albums as albums you perhaps appreciate but that you don't really love, but I loved this. Add drummer/band ideologist Chris Cutler's philosophical/Marxist writings and it feels like being indoctrinated into a cult. Everything had to be re-evaluated in this new light.
Listening back to it now, it's so deeply familiar I find it hard to judge it. If I'd known about, say, Ornette Coleman when I had listened to it it would not have been so revolutionary to me. But then this is something with a very different flavour even if there are parallels in terms of how the music is made. It stands not just in defiance of the world but has built up its own world on its own terms, its own micro sad utopia.
Should say that their three later albums and one earlier album that were all as excellent and went in different albeit equally difficult directions. This is just the one I have the most history with.
I'm not sure Unrest is my favourite album. Just one good contender. Pink Floyd's second album Saucerful of Secrets also made me rethink everything. But that's to do with when I heard it. I was about 17, never heard any Pink Floyd or Jimi Hendrix or psychedelic rock or even the more far out Beatles before. So yes it was something very new and different to me.
Music is often thought of as having these objective good qualities that can be evaluated with personal taste considered separately. This is not a good model and leads to musical iconography. All these great albums with "finely crafted song writing", "sophisticated tasteful musicianship". Watch out for anybody ever using phrases like that. And if the artist is doing something out of the ordinary - something you shouldn't do - then they should make it work so that it elevates the generic sound. In which case it makes for genius. And then you get these icons of good taste for collectors and a part from anything it's a very conservative way of looking at it. Honing, expanding, polishing, progressing.
But the thing I like about Pink Floyd at this time was that they were do things you weren't supposed to do and making it sound like you weren't supposed to do it. They didn't seem to be aiming for something "great" as such but at creating a roller coaster ride that you could choose to get on if you wanted to come along for the journey. (Of course the truth is that they were writing for acid heads at the UFO club...)
Of course Pink Floyd went onto become these monsters of classic/progressive rock with well crafted and well loved albums. Must haves for collectors and boring because of it. Earlier on they felt like they were explorers willing to speak to me on a personal basis as an explorative listener. I think that regardless of the flaws of these earlier records, that's a much more engaging approach.
I don't even like Let There Me More Light or Corporal Clegg anymore. Let's face it, they are just brash and ugly. And Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun is a piece of not especially interesting psychedelic fluff. However See Saw and Jugband Blues are two extraordinary songs that close the album. The former is queasy and all over the place and a genuinely innovative piece of song writing. The latter is Syd Barret's swansong and a thing of strange tension filled beauty and sadness. Those two songs deserve a lot more praise than they get.
But then now it sounds like I'm reviewing Dark Side of the Moon or some such. At the time the whole thing was a revelation both the terrible bits and the great bits. I never thought then and I don't think now that it was something made for other people to like at all. Just something some odd people like me might have had a thing about at some point in their lives. Like there's a secret society of us. Password - Marigolds.
So that's what goes into making a favourite album. Not something that's either any good necessarily or that you even like very much anymore. But something that at some point in your life spoke to you and made you think, "hey music could be something different".
And yes I liked Piper and Ummagumma just as much but Saucerful was my first introduction and has perhaps stayed with me a bit longer.
danski
"vibey"
Marigolds.
I'm not sure Unrest is my favourite album. Just one good contender. Pink Floyd's second album Saucerful of Secrets also made me rethink everything. But that's to do with when I heard it. I was about 17, never heard any Pink Floyd or Jimi Hendrix or psychedelic rock or even the more far out Beatles before. So yes it was something very new and different to me.
Music is often thought of as having these objective good qualities that can be evaluated with personal taste considered separately. This is not a good model and leads to musical iconography. All these great albums with "finely crafted song writing", "sophisticated tasteful musicianship". Watch out for anybody ever using phrases like that. And if the artist is doing something out of the ordinary - something you shouldn't do - then they should make it work so that it elevates the generic sound. In which case it makes for genius. And then you get these icons of good taste for collectors and a part from anything it's a very conservative way of looking at it. Honing, expanding, polishing, progressing.
But the thing I like about Pink Floyd at this time was that they were do things you weren't supposed to do and making it sound like you weren't supposed to do it. They didn't seem to be aiming for something "great" as such but at creating a roller coaster ride that you could choose to get on if you wanted to come along for the journey. (Of course the truth is that they were writing for acid heads at the UFO club...)
Of course Pink Floyd went onto become these monsters of classic/progressive rock with well crafted and well loved albums. Must haves for collectors and boring because of it. Earlier on they felt like they were explorers willing to speak to me on a personal basis as an explorative listener. I think that regardless of the flaws of these earlier records, that's a much more engaging approach.
I don't even like Let There Me More Light or Corporal Clegg anymore. Let's face it, they are just brash and ugly. And Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun is a piece of not especially interesting psychedelic fluff. However See Saw and Jugband Blues are two extraordinary songs that close the album. The former is queasy and all over the place and a genuinely innovative piece of song writing. The latter is Syd Barret's swansong and a thing of strange tension filled beauty and sadness. Those two songs deserve a lot more praise than they get.
But then now it sounds like I'm reviewing Dark Side of the Moon or some such. At the time the whole thing was a revelation both the terrible bits and the great bits. I never thought then and I don't think now that it was something made for other people to like at all. Just something some odd people like me might have had a thing about at some point in their lives. Like there's a secret society of us. Password - Marigolds.
So that's what goes into making a favourite album. Not something that's either any good necessarily or that you even like very much anymore. But something that at some point in your life spoke to you and made you think, "hey music could be something different".
And yes I liked Piper and Ummagumma just as much but Saucerful was my first introduction and has perhaps stayed with me a bit longer.
A mate gave me this album on original tape saying “I think you‘ll like this more than I do”
Had already heard some floyd and Barrett stuff and liked a fair bit of what I’d heard but this then totally solidified my preference for the psychedelic early stuff rather than smooth prog.
I was 23 when I first heard L Voag's The Way Out. I was already into industrial/noise and getting into punk and the avant garde in general. It didn't come as a shock to me when I heard it. No revelation or revolution when I heard it. It's just one of those albums that spoke to me at the time - it seemed to describe a grotty, violent, abusive world and it was angry about it. The album I heard was the CD reissue which included the Move EP and three songs by the Homosexuals. This extra material was even angrier. The entire experience sounds like a squat party gone wrong.
L Voag is one of Jim Welton's projects. All of them are arty and punky and grotty. But The Way Out was recorded at a decent studio at night after hours as such. And it's still arty, punky and grotty but it's also really lush. It's an album I come back to again and again. It has the oddest reggae song you'll ever hear and an even odder jazz-pop-punk song. Riotous horns getting faster and faster, a long series of musique concrète explorations, odd little post rock n roll ditties. Track titles like Helping the police with their investigations, Planning - Budgeting - Shopping, Your Own Hair Your Own Chance. Sound that scrapes at your backbone. But more than that it feels relevant and at that time I didn't feel relevant.
This is one that I like more each time I listen to it. Some of the rhythmic inventions are extraordinary and the soundscapes have this earthy tension. It's something beautiful. My god is it beautiful - but in the way that something horrific is beautiful. All of a sudden the air is clear and everything is clear and you are just confronted with the horror.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
Simple Minds' 'New Gold Dream' is my favourite song. It's uplifting and hopeful and never fails to live my spirits. It's full of energy.
MrSki
Who am I to say you're wrong
You have come across as a bit of a twat but will let you off for your SLF liking. Sort the other bits out though.
MrSki
Who am I to say you're wrong
Well I left the ball in your court. Just fuck off then.
Fairweather
Well-Known Member
My wife is a Geordie, this holds memories.
hastobefunky
New Member
Pete rock and ini`S center of attention
Pete rocks best production work imo
Pete rocks best production work imo
Bahnhof Strasse
Met up with Hannah Courtoy a week next Tuesday
So very hard and of course changes every week.
But every time I hear it, Let It Be. So that one, when things are tough, the words of Let It Be help massively. Cheers Macca.
But every time I hear it, Let It Be. So that one, when things are tough, the words of Let It Be help massively. Cheers Macca.
friedaweed
Me and me girl named Jane
Tara Fitzgerald: ‘People don’t ask me to take my clothes off any more’
The actor on playing trouser billiards with Hugh Grant, bonding with the flugelhorn in Brassed Off, and the magic of working with Peter O’Toole
Fairweather
Well-Known Member
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