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Ambient/Post-Rock/Textural bass playing thread

#8,504
Been away on vacation (imagine that! In the year of the plague/quarantine, my wife found the one place with a lower infection rate than NYC that was both a bona fide vacation town and accessible without having to fly or take public transportation!) so I'm just catching up on this thread. Apologies if these topics are already antiquated...but fwiw:

I too was a prog nerd in my early teens, who then transformed into fusion nerd by the end of high school...but in my freshman year at the Berklee College of Music I became so disgusted with the judgmental "Chops Are Good...But Only Certain Chops" attitude that seemed to prevail that out of mostly defiance I embraced the punk rock stuff that was starting to get some traction. (I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when my Harmony 102 professor took an impromptu poll to find out what everyone listened to, and the most popular acts by a long shot were Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers.) The thing is, yeah, some of that late 70s punk rock was primitive musically...and some of it was brilliantly sophisticated in spite of itself. The saying "You Need To Know The Rules Before You Can Break The Rules" was laughed at by the best of the punk and post-punk artists, and so while my initial embrace of the genre was mostly to thumb my nose at academic authority, I became quite enamored of some of the acts because their music held its own on multiple levels with the academically sanctioned acts [sic] that I'd thought punk was supposed to be rebelling against.

Oh, and here's my favorite Bad Brains story: Sometime in the late 1970s -- I'm pretty sure it was '77, but it might have been '78 -- my buddy Geoff, who was the oldest one of my stoner friends and so the only one who had his own car and unlimited access to it, said "Hey, we should drive into Manhattan and check out one of these punk-rock bands!" (We'd grown up in suburbia 20 miles north of Manhattan; a trip to NYC was always an event. A trip to NYC without parental accompaniment, at night, to see a band, was like the Holy Grail.)
I immediately say "Sure. What band?"
Geoff had somehow found a copy of The Village Voice, and purely based on the name, we decided to go see a band called Noise R Us.
We'd never heard anything by them, just figured with a name like Noise R Us it should be epic. They were scheduled to play a club (bar?) called The Botony Talkhouse. (If you Google that now every hit is an excerpt from some book about Sonic Youth.)
So we drive down to Manhattan in Geoff's turd-brown land yacht and go to the Botony Talkhouse and saddle up to the bar -- btw, regardless of whether this was ''77 or '78 I was still under the legal drinking age in New York at the time -- we order up some adult beverages, and sit back to see what Noise R Us is all about.
We never found out. Because apparently the Voice ad was wrong, or the booking folks screwed up, something, Noise R Us were not going to play that night.
Instead it was some act we'd (also) never heard of, a quartet from Washington DC called Bad Brains.

Ho.
Lee.
Crap.

The Botony Talkhouse was maybe 15 feet wide and 35 feet long. Stage is on the narrow wall. There couldn't have been more than 20 people in the entire audience...because they couldn't have fit more than 30 total. And Bad Brains just blew that little room apart ...as well as blowing the top of everyone's head clean off. I have extremely vivid recollections of Dr. Know and HR literally scaling the walls of the Botony, like they had found a way to defy gravity and were doing so as a way to escape the confines of that tiny space. My wee teenage brain had never experienced an energy like that. Driving home from Manhattan the only words Geoff could say were "Damn... damn..." Over and over and over.
 
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#8,505
Bob_Ross said:
Been away on vacation (imagine that! In the year of the plague/quarantine, my wife found the one place with a lower infection rate than NYC that was both a bona fide vacation town and accessible without having to fly or take public transportation!) so I'm just catching up on this thread. Apologies if these topics are already antiquated...but fwiw:

I too was a prog nerd in my early teens, who then transformed into fusion nerd by the end of high school...but in my freshman year at the Berklee College of Music I became so disgusted with the judgmental "Chops Are Good...But Only Certain Chops" attitude that seemed to prevail that out of mostly defiance I embraced the punk rock stuff that was starting to get some traction. (I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when my Harmony 102 professor took an impromptu poll to find out what everyone listened to, and the most popular acts by a long shot were Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers.) The thing is, yeah, some of that late 70s punk rock was primitive musically...and some of it was brilliantly sophisticated in spite of itself. The saying "You Need To Know The Rules Before You Can Break The Rules" was laughed at by the best of the punk and post-punk artists, and so while my initial embrace of the genre was mostly to thumb my nose at academic authority, I became quite enamored of some of the acts because their music held its own on multiple levels with the academically sanctioned acts [sic] that I'd thought punk was supposed to be rebelling against.

Oh, and here's my favorite Bad Brains story: Sometime in the late 1970s -- I'm pretty sure it was '77, but it might have been '78 -- my buddy Geoff, who was the oldest one of my stoner friends and so the only one who had his own car and unlimited access to it, said "Hey, we should drive into Manhattan and check out one of these punk-rock bands!" (We'd grown up in suburbia 20 miles north of Manhattan; a trip to NYC was always an event. A trip to NYC without parental accompaniment, at night, to see a band, was like the Holy Grail.)
I immediately say "Sure. What band?"
Geoff had somehow found a copy of The Village Voice, and purely based on the name, we decided to go see a band called Noise R Us.
We'd never heard anything by them, just figured with a name like Noise R Us it should be epic. They were scheduled to play a club (bar?) called The Botony Talkhouse. (If you Google that now every hit is an excerpt from some book about Sonic Youth.)
So we drive down to Manhattan in Geoff's turd-brown land yacht and go to the Botony Talkhouse and saddle up to the bar -- btw, regardless of whether this was ''77 or '78 I was still under the legal drinking age in New York at the time -- we order up some adult beverages, and sit back to see what Noise R Us is all about.
We never found out. Because apparently the Voice ad was wrong, or the booking folks screwed up, something, Noise R Us were not going to play that night.
Instead it was some act we'd (also) never heard of, a quartet from Washington DC called Bad Brains.

Ho.
Lee.
Crap.

The Botony Talkhouse was maybe 15 feet wide and 35 feet long. Stage is on the narrow wall. There couldn't have been more than 20 people in the entire audience...because they couldn't have fit more than 30 total. And Bad Brains just blew that little room apart ...as well as blowing the top of everyone's head clean off. I have extremely vivid recollections of Dr. Know and HR literally scaling the walls of the Botony, like they had found a way to defy gravity and were doing so as a way to escape the confines of that tiny space. My wee teenage brain had never experienced an energy like that. Driving home from Manhattan the only words Geoff could say were "Damn... damn..." Over and over and over.
Click to expand...

Gotta love experiences like that.

About 6 years ago me and my guitarist buddy went to a nasty little bar in Alexandria, Virginia just to hang out and see if the bands playing that night were any good. At the same the place had mostly originals bands every Friday and Saturday night and some were good and some not so much. The first band was a local DC band that was okay, but they had invited some friends down from Philly, a 3-peice punk band called Spine Chain, and I remember they blew the doors off the place and had everyone going nuts. I still have one of their home-burned CDs somewhere. Then they packed all their stuff back into a pickup with an Eagles (football team, not the band lol) sticker on the window and drove back home to Philly.

I love going out to local joints to check out random bands. You never know when you're gonna find a gem.
 
#8,506
Bob_Ross said:
Been away on vacation (imagine that! In the year of the plague/quarantine, my wife found the one place with a lower infection rate than NYC that was both a bona fide vacation town and accessible without having to fly or take public transportation!) so I'm just catching up on this thread. Apologies if these topics are already antiquated...but fwiw:

I too was a prog nerd in my early teens, who then transformed into fusion nerd by the end of high school...but in my freshman year at the Berklee College of Music I became so disgusted with the judgmental "Chops Are Good...But Only Certain Chops" attitude that seemed to prevail that out of mostly defiance I embraced the punk rock stuff that was starting to get some traction. (I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when my Harmony 102 professor took an impromptu poll to find out what everyone listened to, and the most popular acts by a long shot were Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers.) The thing is, yeah, some of that late 70s punk rock was primitive musically...and some of it was brilliantly sophisticated in spite of itself. The saying "You Need To Know The Rules Before You Can Break The Rules" was laughed at by the best of the punk and post-punk artists, and so while my initial embrace of the genre was mostly to thumb my nose at academic authority, I became quite enamored of some of the acts because their music held its own on multiple levels with the academically sanctioned acts [sic] that I'd thought punk was supposed to be rebelling against.

Oh, and here's my favorite Bad Brains story: Sometime in the late 1970s -- I'm pretty sure it was '77, but it might have been '78 -- my buddy Geoff, who was the oldest one of my stoner friends and so the only one who had his own car and unlimited access to it, said "Hey, we should drive into Manhattan and check out one of these punk-rock bands!" (We'd grown up in suburbia 20 miles north of Manhattan; a trip to NYC was always an event. A trip to NYC without parental accompaniment, at night, to see a band, was like the Holy Grail.)
I immediately say "Sure. What band?"
Geoff had somehow found a copy of The Village Voice, and purely based on the name, we decided to go see a band called Noise R Us.
We'd never heard anything by them, just figured with a name like Noise R Us it should be epic. They were scheduled to play a club (bar?) called The Botony Talkhouse. (If you Google that now every hit is an excerpt from some book about Sonic Youth.)
So we drive down to Manhattan in Geoff's turd-brown land yacht and go to the Botony Talkhouse and saddle up to the bar -- btw, regardless of whether this was ''77 or '78 I was still under the legal drinking age in New York at the time -- we order up some adult beverages, and sit back to see what Noise R Us is all about.
We never found out. Because apparently the Voice ad was wrong, or the booking folks screwed up, something, Noise R Us were not going to play that night.
Instead it was some act we'd (also) never heard of, a quartet from Washington DC called Bad Brains.

Ho.
Lee.
Crap.

The Botony Talkhouse was maybe 15 feet wide and 35 feet long. Stage is on the narrow wall. There couldn't have been more than 20 people in the entire audience...because they couldn't have fit more than 30 total. And Bad Brains just blew that little room apart ...as well as blowing the top of everyone's head clean off. I have extremely vivid recollections of Dr. Know and HR literally scaling the walls of the Botony, like they had found a way to defy gravity and were doing so as a way to escape the confines of that tiny space. My wee teenage brain had never experienced an energy like that. Driving home from Manhattan the only words Geoff could say were "Damn... damn..." Over and over and over.
Click to expand...

wow. great story (and you win the i-net tonight). my sole nyc punk experience was in 1980 or so. in a sort of nyc-only deal we were at the tin palace seeing someone like hilton ruiz and arthur blythe, maybe fred hopkins. during intermission we jumped over to cbgb's, where we caught the plasmatics, including wendy o williams chain-sawing a guitar during a song. kinda epic really. then back to the tin palace.
 
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#8,507
steubig said:
i don't know how good i should feel about everyone liking my post about me being an opinionated a-hole.

;)

really, i'm here to say that anyone who has gotten the hydrasynth or is thinking about it should know that they just released their fourth firmware update with new features.

Click to expand...


Loving the hydra...finally starting to get my head around how to use it. Haven't done a factory reset yet and it's loaded w patches from the prev owner
 
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#8,508
Bob_Ross said:
Been away on vacation (imagine that! In the year of the plague/quarantine, my wife found the one place with a lower infection rate than NYC that was both a bona fide vacation town and accessible without having to fly or take public transportation!)
Click to expand...

Do share the magic vacation spot...have been searching.
 
#8,510
Just thought I'd post this here since every time I hear it I think of you guys.

I am an old electronics tech as well as a history buff, and so the history of electronics and electronic warfare in WWII is right up my alley. This series has been great fun, but the reason I bring it up here is the killer music during the end credits. This show was made in 1977 so I am assuming we're hearing all analog stuff here. I have a record from a Philadelphia band called the Nightcrawlers that made this kind of music in the early 80s and it reminds of them.

Skip to 49:15 to hear the music.

 
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#8,511
Bob_Ross said:
Been away on vacation (imagine that! In the year of the plague/quarantine, my wife found the one place with a lower infection rate than NYC that was both a bona fide vacation town and accessible without having to fly or take public transportation!) so I'm just catching up on this thread. Apologies if these topics are already antiquated...but fwiw:

I too was a prog nerd in my early teens, who then transformed into fusion nerd by the end of high school...but in my freshman year at the Berklee College of Music I became so disgusted with the judgmental "Chops Are Good...But Only Certain Chops" attitude that seemed to prevail that out of mostly defiance I embraced the punk rock stuff that was starting to get some traction. (I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when my Harmony 102 professor took an impromptu poll to find out what everyone listened to, and the most popular acts by a long shot were Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers.) The thing is, yeah, some of that late 70s punk rock was primitive musically...and some of it was brilliantly sophisticated in spite of itself. The saying "You Need To Know The Rules Before You Can Break The Rules" was laughed at by the best of the punk and post-punk artists, and so while my initial embrace of the genre was mostly to thumb my nose at academic authority, I became quite enamored of some of the acts because their music held its own on multiple levels with the academically sanctioned acts [sic] that I'd thought punk was supposed to be rebelling against.

Oh, and here's my favorite Bad Brains story: Sometime in the late 1970s -- I'm pretty sure it was '77, but it might have been '78 -- my buddy Geoff, who was the oldest one of my stoner friends and so the only one who had his own car and unlimited access to it, said "Hey, we should drive into Manhattan and check out one of these punk-rock bands!" (We'd grown up in suburbia 20 miles north of Manhattan; a trip to NYC was always an event. A trip to NYC without parental accompaniment, at night, to see a band, was like the Holy Grail.)
I immediately say "Sure. What band?"
Geoff had somehow found a copy of The Village Voice, and purely based on the name, we decided to go see a band called Noise R Us.
We'd never heard anything by them, just figured with a name like Noise R Us it should be epic. They were scheduled to play a club (bar?) called The Botony Talkhouse. (If you Google that now every hit is an excerpt from some book about Sonic Youth.)
So we drive down to Manhattan in Geoff's turd-brown land yacht and go to the Botony Talkhouse and saddle up to the bar -- btw, regardless of whether this was ''77 or '78 I was still under the legal drinking age in New York at the time -- we order up some adult beverages, and sit back to see what Noise R Us is all about.
We never found out. Because apparently the Voice ad was wrong, or the booking folks screwed up, something, Noise R Us were not going to play that night.
Instead it was some act we'd (also) never heard of, a quartet from Washington DC called Bad Brains.

Ho.
Lee.
Crap.

The Botony Talkhouse was maybe 15 feet wide and 35 feet long. Stage is on the narrow wall. There couldn't have been more than 20 people in the entire audience...because they couldn't have fit more than 30 total. And Bad Brains just blew that little room apart ...as well as blowing the top of everyone's head clean off. I have extremely vivid recollections of Dr. Know and HR literally scaling the walls of the Botony, like they had found a way to defy gravity and were doing so as a way to escape the confines of that tiny space. My wee teenage brain had never experienced an energy like that. Driving home from Manhattan the only words Geoff could say were "Damn... damn..." Over and over and over.
Click to expand...
Damn...damn....damn....

Just hearing the story blew my head off.
Bad brains!!!!!
 
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#8,512
Bob_Ross said:
Because apparently the Voice ad was wrong, or the booking folks screwed up, something, Noise R Us were not going to play that night.
Instead it was some act we'd (also) never heard of, a quartet from Washington DC called Bad Brains.

Ho.
Lee.
Crap.

The Botony Talkhouse was maybe 15 feet wide and 35 feet long. Stage is on the narrow wall. There couldn't have been more than 20 people in the entire audience...because they couldn't have fit more than 30 total. And Bad Brains just blew that little room apart ...as well as blowing the top of everyone's head clean off. I have extremely vivid recollections of Dr. Know and HR literally scaling the walls of the Botony, like they had found a way to defy gravity and were doing so as a way to escape the confines of that tiny space. My wee teenage brain had never experienced an energy like that. Driving home from Manhattan the only words Geoff could say were "Damn... damn..." Over and over and over.
Click to expand...

Ah, so nice. I can more or less recall a crazy date I went on in '77 that ended up in some rat hole club in Somerville. The "headline band" was made up of Berklee students who detuned in random fashion, no one tuned to anyone else. And it was quite loud. I'll take that over Steely Dan any day, personally. ;)
 
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#8,514
steubig said:
i like both steely dan and bad brains.

(except i hate gaucho)
Click to expand...

Everyone hates Gaucho. Steely Dan was a great band until my roomies blasted Aja 20 hours a day for a few months. Lot of other great bands are unlistenable for me for that reason too, unfortunately.
 
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#8,515
Passinwind said:
my roomies blasted Aja 20 hours a day for a few months
Click to expand...
Ouch. I really dig that album but you should have shoved headphones up their butts and make them eat the record piece by piece with shards of glass.

Same thing happened to me with Pink Floyd, one of my roommates would blast the 3 same albums non stop. Now I respect the band......but can’t listen to more than 4 secs of Dark Side of the,,,,,shoot me now.

;)
 
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#8,518
Bob_Ross said:
Been away on vacation (imagine that! In the year of the plague/quarantine, my wife found the one place with a lower infection rate than NYC that was both a bona fide vacation town and accessible without having to fly or take public transportation!) so I'm just catching up on this thread. Apologies if these topics are already antiquated...but fwiw:

I too was a prog nerd in my early teens, who then transformed into fusion nerd by the end of high school...but in my freshman year at the Berklee College of Music I became so disgusted with the judgmental "Chops Are Good...But Only Certain Chops" attitude that seemed to prevail that out of mostly defiance I embraced the punk rock stuff that was starting to get some traction. (I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when my Harmony 102 professor took an impromptu poll to find out what everyone listened to, and the most popular acts by a long shot were Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers.) The thing is, yeah, some of that late 70s punk rock was primitive musically...and some of it was brilliantly sophisticated in spite of itself. The saying "You Need To Know The Rules Before You Can Break The Rules" was laughed at by the best of the punk and post-punk artists, and so while my initial embrace of the genre was mostly to thumb my nose at academic authority, I became quite enamored of some of the acts because their music held its own on multiple levels with the academically sanctioned acts [sic] that I'd thought punk was supposed to be rebelling against.

Oh, and here's my favorite Bad Brains story: Sometime in the late 1970s -- I'm pretty sure it was '77, but it might have been '78 -- my buddy Geoff, who was the oldest one of my stoner friends and so the only one who had his own car and unlimited access to it, said "Hey, we should drive into Manhattan and check out one of these punk-rock bands!" (We'd grown up in suburbia 20 miles north of Manhattan; a trip to NYC was always an event. A trip to NYC without parental accompaniment, at night, to see a band, was like the Holy Grail.)
I immediately say "Sure. What band?"
Geoff had somehow found a copy of The Village Voice, and purely based on the name, we decided to go see a band called Noise R Us.
We'd never heard anything by them, just figured with a name like Noise R Us it should be epic. They were scheduled to play a club (bar?) called The Botony Talkhouse. (If you Google that now every hit is an excerpt from some book about Sonic Youth.)
So we drive down to Manhattan in Geoff's turd-brown land yacht and go to the Botony Talkhouse and saddle up to the bar -- btw, regardless of whether this was ''77 or '78 I was still under the legal drinking age in New York at the time -- we order up some adult beverages, and sit back to see what Noise R Us is all about.
We never found out. Because apparently the Voice ad was wrong, or the booking folks screwed up, something, Noise R Us were not going to play that night.
Instead it was some act we'd (also) never heard of, a quartet from Washington DC called Bad Brains.

Ho.
Lee.
Crap.

The Botony Talkhouse was maybe 15 feet wide and 35 feet long. Stage is on the narrow wall. There couldn't have been more than 20 people in the entire audience...because they couldn't have fit more than 30 total. And Bad Brains just blew that little room apart ...as well as blowing the top of everyone's head clean off. I have extremely vivid recollections of Dr. Know and HR literally scaling the walls of the Botony, like they had found a way to defy gravity and were doing so as a way to escape the confines of that tiny space. My wee teenage brain had never experienced an energy like that. Driving home from Manhattan the only words Geoff could say were "Damn... damn..." Over and over and over.
Click to expand...

Amazing.

Remember when you had to look at a weekly for local gigs, and guess which band you wanted to see based on their logo and name. No YouTube/band camp/SoundCloud samples. Just roll those dice :bookworm:
 
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#8,520
ugly_bassplayer said:
How about buying records based on thank you lists from other albums......
Click to expand...

I had a good friend who guided me through my entry into the death metal world, and he always looked at producers and engineers to guide his future purchases. At the time I thought he was nuts, and that the band made all the magic. I wish I had paid attention sooner.
 
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