--- In [email protected], Tom Pall <thomas.pall@...> wrote: > > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049948/Most-relaxing-song-UK-band-Boffins.html > > Finally there is something even more sleep inducing than a > post from RC or psycho-Ravi or a lecture from Dr. BM.
Hideous. I currently live with a number of wonderful people whom I love deeply despite their faults. They return the favor, which is why we get along. One of the faults I most have to overlook is their choice of dinner music. They tune their iPod to some Internet radio station that plays ambient or "chill" music. They like it. With them (although some on this forum may find this hard to believe) I am tactful and compassionate enough to have led them to believe that I actually enjoy this music, too. This despite the fact that often I find myself eating while suppressing the feeling that I'd rather pull my own teeth than listen to another second of this dreck. I grew up on HEAVY electronic music, the avant-garde of the classical world who discovered synthesizers long before pop music did. Later I discovered artists like Tangerine Dream and Jean Michel Jarre, who basic- ally invented the musical genre we now think of as techno or electronica. But these guys had BALLS. Tan Dream were Germans, ferchrissakes, from Berlin. These were not New Age wusses; they were purebred Germans, with all of the drama about their personalities and their music that you would associate with Wagner or any of the great Germanic composers. Jarre was French, son of a famous film composer, and far more trendy and pop, but he too was not afraid to use electronica as a medium for creating art, and not just as a way to appeal to Newagers. Their stuff just ROCKED. It had ENERGY. The newer ambient electronica I hear? In a word, BORING. Like the track associated with this article. Zero content. Zero composition. Just people fiddling around with sounds that Tan Dream and Jarre invented decades earlier, which are now canned and available at the flick of a switch on their store-bought synths. Tan Dream and Jarre used to perform live. In the case of TD, the three of them would sit up onstage surrounded by dozens of synths and just WING IT. In the early days, they would walk out on stage without any clear idea of what they were going to play, and then just see what happened. It was magic, and it had ENERGY. Most modern "New Age" music puts me to sleep faster than the track in the article.
