easycure

Very beautiful, Joe.. it's important to highlight their essentially reactionary vein.. excellent album, for me MUCH better than the first two. By the way, I’m going to Pistoia too, where are you from?

I didn't like it... I found it overall rather superficial and very unimpactful... you describe the form, but the way you describe it, it's just a mix of distortions, odd time signatures, etc... I don't see how someone who doesn't know the album could have any real understanding of what they would be listening to... that grunge "boring genre" then... and in '87, sorry, but who had exploded in grunge? :-)

You’ve managed to convince me even by mentioning the word “garage”… which is no small feat ;-)

Perfect review. In my opinion, you fully captured the essence; the fact that it doesn’t “intrigue” means nothing to me... a review is not a novel.

beautiful review.

As far as Blues is concerned, as I believe I've made sufficiently clear to you, my perspective is rooted in rock. It's obvious that this applies not so much when we speak specifically about Blues (a genre that adheres to a few stable and quite simple parameters, from which I acknowledge you cannot transcend) but more generally to all those musical genres that are so sectarian in one way or another that they do not allow for a universal approach. For Jazz or classical music, my discussion would be completely nonsensical (and I have never claimed to broaden it), but I can say that it is a valid discourse for rock. I think that's the beauty of rock—its incredible dryness, immediacy, and almost Dionysian instinctiveness, primitive, yet precisely for that reason also endowed with enormous musical potential, because its elastic simplicity allows it to be expanded almost literally for the pure use of human creativity. It wouldn't be so varied and full of subgenres, and it wouldn't have evolved so rapidly, almost frantically, if it weren't for its malleable elemental nature.

Third point: no no, the Velvet Underground had a non-technical approach in the literal sense of the term; Cale, the only "technician" in the group, played the viola in a way that was deliberately outside any scholarly canon.. he treated it like a howling dog, not exactly a form of codified expressiveness :-D ..Maureen Tucker, the drummer, had literally never picked up a pair of drumsticks in her life before playing with them; hers is a purely instinctive approach. Again, I'm not saying that hers is the only possible case, but I simply want to point out that her expressiveness is stunning, despite having literally not a shred of technique. As for patterns, you still seem to have not considered at all that a pattern can be assimilated, but that does not mean that the learning of a pattern follows such a passive logic. There exists, I repeat, the accommodation of the pattern, meaning its modification according to one's personal interpretative structure. There's a big difference: it’s one thing to learn bending parrot-fashion (to return to the old example), and quite another to adapt that specific stylistic element to one's way of feeling, understanding, wanting music. So it’s not about more or less assimilated patterns; it’s about the how and the way.

Second point: I don’t care at all that every combination is already written in music books; what matters to me is that every combination, regardless of the harmony—which is, even academically, an absolutely relative concept—and regardless of any pseudo-teaching, can be discovered and exploited in a completely unconscious manner compared to the codifications in the books. That’s why I speak of "invention." Moreover, harmony in itself makes no sense. Since every form of music also possesses a rhythm and a certain type of sound displacement. But if we take into account these two undeniable variables, the possible combinations of the various harmonic structures become practically infinite. And anyway, even limiting ourselves to harmony, I remind you of twelve-tone music, which initially overturned all the previously established harmonic (and also rhythmic) canons. And in any case, to conclude, the human ear is formed by listening, not by reading.

Well.. it will certainly be difficult to change an idea, but I've never particularly felt that you've significantly impacted my arguments :-) ..anyway, point one: you felt the need to take lessons starting from being self-taught. Of course! But yours was a choice made later, motivated by the fact that what you WANTED to play required a certain type of techniques to learn.. so your path is not one that placed technique as something a priori. What characterized it, as you yourself state, is a certain type of listening. Whether this cultural background leads to addressing a discussion of formal learning or not is at everyone's discretion. What I've been keen to emphasize since the beginning of the discussion is that such deepening can be set aside.

Moreover, you call technique, or rather patterns, the position of the chords; in my opinion, you are mistaken: these are necessary impositions due to the constitution of the instrument, which however do not pertain to a canonized INTERPRETATION. In fact, any chord can be easily invented, regardless of the hypothetical "ugliness" of the sound, and the limits of such inventiveness are purely logistical, NOT musical.