Hi everyone,
I am looking for an ever-evolving, dense, intricate, nuanced and through-composed (using wikipedia's definition: "music that is completely non-repetitive, music that is not interrupted by dialogue, or music that is composed in linear order") records like Tunnel Canary's Jihad / Live at the ECCA 1980. Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 3 also fits these descriptions, although he was more conservative in his choice of sounds than what I am looking for here - music that uses any sound without prejudice as long as it sounds good.
A good example is the track "Humiliation" from Sutcliffe Jugend's The Victim as Beauty. I love how the sounds in it morph into other sounds, become merged with and separated from each other. I also love how the sporadic and convulsive (rather than constant and consistent) rhythms just barely but persistently hang on to each other, with sparse sustained sounds in between to hold them together. And most importantly, none of the sounds feel out of place. Did anybody else take this sort of approach, and/or develop this sound further?
Another one I have in mind that is close is The Room Extended by Keith Rowe. Some parts of this record, especially the noisier parts, are nicely layered, but he uses a small limited set of sounds throughout the record that prevents it from evolving much.
Below are some more examples to clarify what I mean by each descriptor.
Con-Dom's How Welcome Is Death to I Who Have Nothing More to Do But Die, Grunt's World Draped in a Camouflage, and Aaron Dilloway's Modern Jester are also great examples of dense, intricate and nuanced music, though they do repeat some parts.
Cremaster's Noranta graus a l'esquerra and Joe Panzner and Greg Stuart's Dystonia Duos are examples of dense, intricate, probably through-composed, but not nuanced music. In my opinion, they are not nuanced because they have a lot of sounds that could or could not be there and would not make a difference in how I feel about them. For the same reasons, I am not looking for things like TNB's Live at Hinoeuma, or Yoshihide's Melted Memory II from Rapid, because although they are dense and intricate (and good), they are not nuanced.
By 'nuanced' and 'intricate', I don't mean to imply 'insipid' or 'effete'. I mean something that is precisely and accurately the experience that it sets out to be. For example, if a record sets out to be violent, I want it to feel like a precise mixture of rage, confusion, sadness, terror, and so forth, rather than be a reductionist representation of violence where some person talks about things related to violence, like rape, murder, etc. in a namechecking fashion without actually expressing how those things feel.
I am open to any sound source - acoustic, electronic, electroacoustic, and whatever.
