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Uniquely structured music

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Never mistake motion for progress.\

I should put quotes somewhere.
 

FunnyDigestion

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Don't disregard math rock. It totally counts.

yeah, sometimes counting is ALL it does!

Just derping, bad joke. & as I've said, counting 4 lyfe &_&

I hadn't heard any Autechre, that track was pretty cerebral. It was cool how the rhythm leveled out for the last minute, that was a neat transition.

Polyrhythm and polymeter are both interesting things.

African music's all in that, i'll try to find some good stuff.

The only "free jazz" artist I know anything by is John Zorn.

[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VkeiKqc-xc"]bailey & parker[/YOUTUBE]

Wait until it "gets going"

The cool thing about this stuff is the structure is exactly what it is. Making music like that is like lucid dreaming, so hearing it is like watching someone dream. or watching someone creatively bash things with a hammer

On another note, you should probably not quadruple post. These things are generally frowned upon.

WON'T STOP, CAN'T STOP, WON'T EVAR STOP!!
 

Xyk

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Weird music is some of my favorite music. I value uniqueness above most things.

Now that I actually look through my music with "weird rhythms" as the criteria, it's tough to find. I'm more of a harmony man. But here's some stuff.

The Frames- Ship Caught in the Bay doesn't seem to be on youtube, but it fits here. From the "Burn the Maps" album.
This song has some weird rhythms, but not as weird as some of the other posted stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adBPg8Zdp2g

Also, the Seatbelts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93_MFYyu5q4
 

gmanyo

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*bailey & parker video*
That's pretty interesting. Too bad the video's quality is a bit questionable.

Weird music is some of my favorite music. I value uniqueness above most things.
...
Also, the Seatbelts.
I like that Seatbelts song. I should get around to watching some Cowboy Bebop.

As far as "weird" music goes, I love it too.
Wolfgang Voigt has some pretty experimental stuff, although the beats aren't too strange in this one: mainly just a 3-4 polyrhythm. Some of his songs almost have reverse experimental beats; beats that are so straightforward that they're odd when combined with the tonal quality of the music.
[YOUTUBE="yyLfA9QixNE"]Kakfatrax 3.1 by Wolfgang Voigt[/YOUTUBE]

One of the best albums I've ever heard is Body Riddle by Clark (formerly Chris Clark). It's sort of like a jazz-electronica mix, and I've never heard anything like it; not from before it, not from after it. It has some great beat structures.
(Neither of these videos are of the best sound quality, unfortunately; look them up elsewhere if you like them)
[YOUTUBE="XM1lLuOz-58"]Herr Bar by Clark[/YOUTUBE]
[YOUTUBE="h-c44tSekRo"]Matthew Unburdened by Clark[/YOUTUBE]
 

Orangey

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[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eguv6_mF3Bo&lc=-kmzD6uTMnCwDqtX60wiDSiLPBpCvlhW49l3Xt1YR6c&context=C365bb48ADOEgsToPDskJ9udnApWcQjwyVontALyLF"]Awesome Oud Play[/YOUTUBE]
 

FunnyDigestion

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[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eguv6_mF3Bo&lc=-kmzD6uTMnCwDqtX60wiDSiLPBpCvlhW49l3Xt1YR6c&context=C365bb48ADOEgsToPDskJ9udnApWcQjwyVontALyLF"]Awesome Oud Play[/YOUTUBE]

I've always liked the sound of that instrument, great resonance.
 

FunnyDigestion

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sleuthy, are you a walking directory of super-outsider music.

Add me into your bag of outsiders

[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cD4s21Iwkc"]freebase credit cards[/YOUTUBE]
 

pinkgraffiti

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I think I just love you. :wubbie: Do you want to be my friend?

I have nothing to contribute to this thread right now, but I'm going to read it carefully and will come back to you if I feel inspired by something. Thank you for creating it. :)

Music with unusual structure is endless fascination for me. You can play 4 beats of an E into an F# for all eternity & it's never completely drained, but when you take a strange melody & enmesh it in a 5/4 rhythm or something, people can't help but stop & think a little.

The common rhythms came out of biological fact, like biped walking generates 2-based marching meters, 2/4, 4/4, etc. & the heartbeat / sexual rhythm generates 3-based meter (think about the pattern of a heartbeat, ba-BUM-(stop)-ba-BUM-(stop), & the intoxicated sexual writhing you can get into is a 'swung' 3-based pattern, etc)... so it's interesting to think what can happen to one's mental & bodily functioning when music is tweaked into unusual structures.

What could a 5/4 rhythm mean in biological fact? Most people hear it & they're confused, but after you get used to it you find yourself in a more expansive world, like the musical circle of awareness is larger & encompassing more creative space.

'Math rock' is cool yeah yeah etc but I'm more intrigued by the subtler stuff, where the music isn't literally diagrammed into sequences of odd meters & tempo shifts & that. I like free jazz, Frank Zappa, Penderecki, Boulez, etc. but there are very few people who can take a populist pop-music mentality & combine it with experimental structures, working in that hidden realm of thinking..... where the mind is imperceptibly bent to an other reality.

I'll give an example to start, the band Animal Collective. It's so retarded that they're culturally boxed-in to this 'hipster'-hunting he-said-she-said cutlure-war bullshit when their music is so fucking unique &, as far as I know, unprecedented. Aside from being the first 2000s band to go full-on into pop music from a completely experimentalist, post-verse-chorus-verse mentality, they do all kinds of theoretically interesting shit with melody, rhythm, timbre, vocals, you name it really.

Like the song "My Girls", which people make fun of cuz blar de blar, hipsters etc, that song does something extremely unusual which is that its chorus resolves to the 7th note on the scale. That's extremely rare, I don't think I can think of any other radio song that does it. The first 3 or so minutes hover around the tonic chord, the kind of 'at-home' feeling using the 3rd 5th & 1st notes, but then the chorus moves into the 7th which creates a surprise feeling of mystery & romanticism. The 7th when used a certain way is the mysterious, romantic note in the major scale so to have that as the resolution in the chorus is particularly cool.

Also this song:

[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C985uGVnso0"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C985uGVnso0[/YOUTUBE]

Avey Tare, one of the Animal Collective guys. This song is doing some incredible shit. First of all, the structure is something I've never heard before. Notice how it starts out kind of dead, mashed into some swampy morass region, like a feeling-dead-inside type of depression, & piece by piece comes alive into some emotions, & ends with a peaceful feeling. Pretty sweet, & the melodies themselves are pretty sweet & unique.

But the rhythmic shift at 2:38. It's a definite change in meter & tempo but sounds natural (almost to the point of being unnoticed) because the basic rhythmic pulse is identical. The song starts with a beat in 3/4, so you get 6 8th notes, 12 16th notes. Then that divides by 4 to get 4 groups of 3 16th notes, so you get a 4/4 beat with triplets instead of 8ths. So the meter & tempo change while the basic rhythmic pulse is identical. It sounds a lot more complicated in math than how it sounds, which is pretty natural, but it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

Awesomeness to the nth power on that shit.

What's some uniquely structured music you know about? Tell me a thing or two, I like hearing perspectives.
 

pinkgraffiti

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@Funny Digestion actually, I got something: download the new St. Vincent album, it's called Strange Mercy. You might like it very much, the first time I heard it I was overblown, there are a lot of strange tempos, changes when you least expect, overposition of riffs, beats, different sounds....it takes a few listens before one understands what the hell is happening. As an example I can give you.....
[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjZgiv2F1QY&ob=av2e"][/YOUTUBE]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjZgiv2F1QY&ob=av2e
(more than weird tempos the interest of this song is how the structure changes so much)
 

gmanyo

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[video=youtube;o1DyteW1YM4]o1DyteW1YM4[/video]

Btw, Rifts is better.
 
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