recently i have been listening to some prog metal and post-metal again, which i used to be quite into about a decade ago. i have discovered some great bands that are new to me, such as the spanish band toundra:
and norwegian leprous:
and supergroup soen:
and mestis, the solo project of animals as leaders guitarist javier reyes:
but after a while of listening to this, it strikes me that especially the electric guitar used in most of these bands is really limited in terms of sound design. so that makes me hungry for synths again.
I’ve been a pretty serious Zappa fan for years now, so it’s all the more unbelievable that I’m only now discovering the genius message of Joe’s Garage.
I always liked the songs, even recorded a cover of Watermelon in Easter Hay, but only recently I paid attention to the concept and holy cow, this blows all other concept albums out of the water.
It’s actually funny, I was thinking about this just yesterday : Zappa has, as your son so elegantly showed, one of the largest personal mythology, with all those characters, real or fiction, themes that keep coming back again and again, musical phrases that got used numerous times in such different ways that each can easily be considered a whole composition, his humor, his political views, his whole visual image…
I used to tell friends who could never get into Zappa “Well, I could suggest albums and songs, but if you wanna really know Zappa, you gotta dedicated a significant amount of your time immersing yourself with his music”. That’s how deep it goes.
And somehow that seems to be anecdotal when people talk about his music. It’s no doubt today he’s respected as a 20th century composer (not that I’m downplaying rock music, but in that regard he’s unique -other incredibly talented composers did amazing things in the confines of rock music, but Zappa is the only one I know of who got famous), but even on Zappa forums there are endless arguments about his “silliness” (one message I remember finding incredibly clever was a guy saying “so a guy who’s making poop jokes past the age of 6 is supposed to be a genius?”) getting in the way of his musical recognition.
Hi! Just came across a piece called “Sud” by Jean-Claude Risset (from 1985 !). It creates amazing relations between natural and synthetic sounds. Imho the effect is very aesthetically pleasing!
And I might add “L’ile re-sonante” by Eliane radigue:
Not one song, but the program “late junction” on Radio 3 at 11.00 (UK) always has some very interesting pieces of musics and artists throughout you may not have heard of - certainly worth a listen to, either live or on the BBC Radio iPlayer app
