my brother and I get on bandcamp and click on songs from the live updating list of albums that are selling and we listen to 30 seconds or so of a song and if we like it we add it to a playlist. and we call this "foraging for music."
anyways one of terminology we have coined to talk about music is "Knee Music" which is derived from the fact that album covers that show a person's knees tend to sound the same as each other. It's kind of a sleepy, grungy indie folk pop sound with youthful-sounding, vocals that affect a candid and vulnerable feeling.
or anyway we found multiple album covers with knees in quick succession, and they all sounded the same, hence "Knee Music"
but it doesn't have to be knees to be Knee Music. any kind of blurry, candid-looking photos that include skinny white people is likely to be knee music
My other brother's method of foraging for music is slightly more complicated: he gets on everynoise and uses random number generators to get a random genre, a random artist, and then a random song from that artist.
For a while, his method was slightly different, instead choosing a random genre and listening to it until he found a song from that genre that he liked.
However, this could be very time-consuming. once he became trapped for a long time in "geek rap" which was mostly a lot of people rapping in potentially spanish or portuguese (?) about Five Nights at Freddy's
My brother and I have a rating system where we rate songs on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is absolute dogshit and 7 is the best song ever.
The challenge in this is that even if a song isn't particularly pleasant to listen to, novelty will increase the rating, because it's something interesting we haven't heard before. So, it's incredibly difficult for a song to get the lowest rating, because a song that is outstandingly bad has something different about it to make it bad, which paradoxically makes it good.
We had a very hard time rating this song, Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin. We both disliked it, but we had never disliked a song in this way. The harsh vocals are so far to the background and relatively quiet that it's like, a kind of generic song but there's a guy screaming incoherently somewhere in the next room
We didn't like the harsh vocals, but we also thought they should raise the rating of the song because they made it weirder. We ultimately didn't settle on a rating at all for it.
We both agree that the best random song we found is Butcher Brown- No Way Around It. It is groovy and makes you want to dance, with a unique style.
The genre is Funk, so we looked into funk some more, but it turns out that funk is not very popular anymore and it was popular mostly in the 1970s.
Only one other random song we rated with a 7, which is Thrailkill- Cattywampus.
Those are the two songs we rated with a 7. I haven't counted up how many songs we rated yet, but the ratings suggest that an excellent song is hard to find...
The random songs we rated with a 6 are these. a 6 rating means it is a really good song that we would listen to again and again but not the most excellent song possible
Benny Bleu- Five Miles from Town
Death Threat Cassette- Use Your Delusion
@red-naxe
(Regarding the song Burial Etiquette- Ivy Staircase in Ruin)
exactly! weird art has a charm and fascination to it.
today's foraging for music was successful as we found two more songs that we gave a rating of 6
Gabor Szabo- Some Velvet Morning It has a unique and complex energy with some unusual twangy strings in it that sound good and kind of groovy, and a lovely solo in the middle. It is skillful and fun, doing a lot of different things with subtlety.
Spillings- Terminal Agitation This song is atmospheric, menacing and unsettling, slowly building and developing, the sounds distorting and corroding, with an ominous voice and tortured screams. I love how the kind of "dripping" sound at the beginning ties it all together. It pulls off what it is trying to do so exceptionally well, evoking feelings of dread and horror and inspiring a story to unfold in your mind.
Since I posted the link to "ivy staircase in ruin" many people have been in the tags expressing their love for it.
Clearly it is not a "bad" song it just requires the right listener to appreciate its beauty...or its fascinating and charismatic ugliness? Good art doesn't have to be beautiful...and meaningful art doesn't have to be good...and it's all meaningful
