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Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing thread

#3,061
monsterthompson said:
This has been the huge advantage of my ambient project. Attendees recline and meditate with their eyes closed, so there is no visual performance element once it begins... Though we try to set the mood with lights and decorations at the start and end.

A room full of eyes-closed people has a totally different set of expectations.
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for sure. kind of what i meant by fellow travelers.

if your goal is to proselytize to people who aren't normally into your scene, you're more likely to come up with indifference and distraction.
 
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#3,062
monsterthompson said:
This has been the huge advantage of my ambient project. Attendees recline and meditate with their eyes closed, so there is no visual performance element once it begins... Though we try to set the mood with lights and decorations at the start and end.

A room full of eyes-closed people has a totally different set of expectations.
Click to expand...
Well, one thing is, ya sure don't feel that pressure to make 'em dance, which, coming from a funk background, is pretty liberating for me.
 
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#3,064
Interesting discussion last few posts. My experience has been that the audience for most experimental, ambient, or contemplative electronic music will tend to be small, no matter how much you try to make a show of yourself, while EDM tends to have huge festivals loaded with stoned fans. I dislike EDM, as I don't dance and don't consider dance music to be listenable, so I guess that's that for me.

That said, it's not that simple. Here in the DC area the electronic scene tends to be more noise-oriented, with a smattering of other stuff. Audience is usually the other performers and a few friends, and the venues are off the wall places, art spaces, libraries etc.

Meanwhile, up in Philly, there is a much more vibrant electronic scene, and Berlin School is still big there. A local radio show called Star's End runs on WXPN every Saturday late night since the 1970s, and the show's director/DJ Chuck Van Zyle runs a hugely popular concert series on the Penn U campus several times a year which tends to have pretty large crowds, and he manages to book some pretty big-for-the-genre names to play there, including international acts like Radio Massacre International, Robert Rich, Air Sculpture, I even saw Johann Johansson there years ago before he got famous doing movie scores. He also books more local acts, and they tend to put on good shows.

So there's this but also that.
 
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#3,066
i recognize at least one of those names (r rich). he's big news in that scene.

i want to add one other thing here. sometimes the difference in these things is the person/people who put on shows. (and i wonder if that contributes to the dif between dc and philly stated above.)

to have people who are dedicated to getting performers to come and promoting shows is extremely important to any music scene. for the less commercial stuff, it's absolutely necessary and shouldn't be taken for granted.

promoting non-commercial music can be a thankless job. i try to give respect to the people who do it.

stepping down from soapbox.
 
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#3,067
Ok, I'm brushing up on my sp404sx skills. Looking up videos if there are some tips and tricks I don't know about etc....

If I hear one more #+#-$#(( bad lame boring lofi beat....I'm gonna jump off a cliff.

(Lofi does have some awesome dudes making some don't get me wrong. Ohbliv, Elaquent, Ras G and Dibia$e are freaking amazing)

I mean the lame cookie cutter YouTube SoundCloud stuff...... someone end me....I beg of you
 
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#3,068
dukeorock said:
It's a real challenge to make a one person electronic show a SHOW.
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Part of the problem though is the expectation that every live music performance is supposed to be "a SHOW". But nobody goes to a recital and expects "a SHOW".
I'd much rather see venues and promoters better setting expectations, rather than artists feeling compelled to add perfunctory choreography or other entertainment devices to their performance.


cosmicevan said:
have a camera pointing at the table top so we could see what he was doing.
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Remember when Rick Wakeman used to have a couple mirrors set up above & behind his keyboard rig so the audience could see his hands?
At the time I thought it was pretentious...now I'm tempted to say it was prescient.
 
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#3,073
lordradish said:
That's the downside of the democratization of music. Anyone with minimal skills can get their stuff out there and make it that much harder to find the good stuff.
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To add to this, I was listening to an interview with Robert Rich and he said something along the lines of, anyone with a softsynth can just hold down a key for 15 minutes and make a drone composition. It takes a lot more to go beyond that to create something unique and special. I struggle with it, myself, because some of the best drony stuff (a lot of Steve Roach's stuff comes to mind) does sound pretty simple to make, but when one scratches beneath the surface, there's a lot going on.

I recently started meeting some other synth players. I live in Vermont, US, so there ain't exactly a scene up here. There's your typical dj stuff, and some EDM, but not much electronic music that is designed for actual listening. And one thing I've noticed, after hanging with some people and playing with them.... I'm kinda shocked how many don't seem to be able to do anything BUT improvise, every single time. Now, there's nothing wrong with improv, of course, and a lot of my compositions start off that way, but again, I think it's that democratization at play... there's a lot of people that don't seem to be able do much more than make a bunch of noises, and never have anything with more intention than spontaneity. Not always bad, of course, but as someone who's taken learning my craft very seriously (and again, almost all of this was as a somewhat conventional bassist), it can be frustrating to find other people who work with when half of them don't even know how to play more than one or two chords.
 
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#3,078
lordradish said:
While I have your attention, any of you ever listen to the CryoChamber label on Bandcamp? Great cinematic dark ambient, I've been digging the hell out of it lately. Check it out (I am not affiliated with CC in any way, just love it).
Cryo Chamber
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Huge Atrium Carceri fan right here. His collabs with Kammerheit and Apocryphos are awesome.
 
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#3,080
Bob_Ross said:
Part of the problem though is the expectation that every live music performance is supposed to be "a SHOW". But nobody goes to a recital and expects "a SHOW".
Click to expand...
for sure. consider that all these different shows now seem to have to *need* a visual component, like live video. jazz, free improv, etc.

i like the concept, but usually the musicians don't actually pay attention the the visuals—so why care? and i tend to find the visuals not very good and distracting.
 

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