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Avant-garde Progressive Rock
Avant-prog (short for avant-garde progressive rock) is a music genre that appeared in the late 1970s as the extension of two separate progressive rock subgenres: Rock in Opposition (RIO) and the Canterbury scene. History and characteristics A host of groups and artists mainly from the United States, but also from Europe and Japan, "started to write mostly short instrumental pieces that focused on complexity and stripped down instrumentation, while avoiding the pomposity and stage props of the big progressive rock acts." Some groups, such as Thinking Plague and the Motor Totemist Guild, kept working with long durations and rich instrumentation but also forayed into free improvisation, sound collage, and other avant-garde techniques. These artists cumulated on record labels such as Cuneiform (United States), Recommended (later ReR Megacorp, England) and Rec Rec (Switzerland). See also * Experimental rock * Magma (known for developing Zeuhl) * Henry Cow (known for creating Rock ...
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Rock In Opposition
Rock in Opposition or RIO was a movement representing a collective of progressive bands in the late 1970s united in their opposition to the music industry that refused to recognise their music. It was initiated by English avant-rock group Henry Cow in March 1978 when they invited four mainland European groups to come to London and perform in a festival called "Rock in Opposition". History Henry Cow spent most of their last five years touring mainland Europe. There they encountered many innovative groups who were virtually unknown outside their own countries. What Henry Cow had in common with these groups was that record companies were not interested in their music. (Henry Cow's contract with Virgin Records was cancelled when Virgin found that they were not making money for them.) In early 1978, Nick Hobbs, Henry Cow's manager at the time, decided to expose some of these European groups to British audiences and invited them to tour the United Kingdom with Henry Cow under the ...
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Sound Collage
In music, montage (literally "putting together") or sound collage ("gluing together") is a technique where newly branded sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as montage. This is often done through the use of sampling, while some playable sound collages were produced by gluing together sectors of different vinyl records. In any case, it may be achieved through the use of previous sound recordings or musical scores. Like its visual cousin, the collage work may have a completely different effect than that of the component parts, even if the original parts are completely recognizable or from only one source. History The origin of sound collage can be traced back to the works of Biber's programmatic sonata ''Battalia'' (1673) and Mozart's ''Don Giovanni'' (1789), and some critics have described certain passages in Mahler symphonies as collage, but the first fully developed collages occur in a few works by Charles Ives, whose piece ...
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Rock Music Genres
Rock most often refers to: * Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids * Rock music, a genre of popular music Rock or Rocks may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales * Rock, Cornwall, a village in England * Rock, County Tyrone, a village in Northern Ireland * Rock, Devon, a location in England * Rock, Neath Port Talbot, a location in Wales * Rock, Northumberland, a village in England * Rock, Somerset, a location in Wales * Rock, West Sussex, a hamlet in Washington, England * Rock, Worcestershire, a village and civil parish in England United States * Rock, Kansas, an unincorporated community * Rock, Michigan, an unincorporated community * Rock, West Virginia, an unincorporated community * Rock, Rock County, Wisconsin, a town in southern Wisconsin * Rock, Wood County, Wisconsin, a town in central Wisconsin Elsewhere * Corregidor, an island in the Philippines also known as "The Rock" * Jamaica, an isla ...
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Henry Cow
Henry Cow were an English experimental rock group, founded at the University of Cambridge in 1968 by multi-instrumentalists Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson. Henry Cow's personnel fluctuated over their decade together, but drummer Chris Cutler, bassist John Greaves, and bassoonist/oboist Lindsay Cooper were important long-term members alongside Frith and Hodgkinson. An inherent anti-commercial attitude kept them at arm's length from the mainstream music business, enabling them to experiment at will. Critic Myles Boisen writes, " heir soundwas so mercurial and daring that they had few imitators, even though they inspired many on both sides of the Atlantic with a blend of spontaneity, intricate structures, philosophy, and humor that has endured and transcended the ' progressive' tag." While it was generally thought that Henry Cow took their name from 20th-century American composer Henry Cowell, this has been repeatedly denied by band members. According to Hodgkinson, the name "He ...
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Magma (band)
Magma is a French progressive rock band founded in Paris in 1969 by classically trained drummer Christian Vander, who claimed as his inspiration a "vision of humanity's spiritual and ecological future" that profoundly disturbed him. In the course of their first album, the band tells the story of a group of people fleeing a doomed Earth to settle on the planet Kobaïa. Later, conflict arises when the Kobaïans—descendants of the original colonists—encounter other Earth refugees. The style of progressive rock that Vander developed with Magma is termed Zeuhl, and has been applied to other bands in France operating in the same period, and to some recent Japanese bands. Vander created a fictional language, Kobaïan, in which most lyrics are sung. In a 1977 interview with Vander and long-time Magma vocalist Klaus Blasquiz, Blasquiz said that Kobaïan is a "phonetic language made by elements of the Slavonic and Germanic languages to be able to express some things musically. The l ...
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Experimental Rock
Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. Artists aim to liberate and innovate, with some of the genre's distinguishing characteristics being improvisation (music), improvisational performances, avant-garde influences, odd instrumentation, opaque lyrics (or instrumentals), unorthodox structures and rhythms, and an underlying rejection of commercial aspirations. From its inception, rock music was experimental, but it was not until the late 1960s that rock artists began creating extended and complex compositions through advancements in multitrack recording. In 1967, the genre was as commercially viable as Popular music, pop music, but by 1970, most of its leading players had incapacitated themselves in some form. In Germany, the krautrock subgenre merged elements of improvisation and psychedelic rock with electronic music, ...
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AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the database was first made available on the Internet in 1994. AllMusic is owned by RhythmOne. History AllMusic was launched as ''All Music Guide'' by Michael Erlewine, a "compulsive archivist, noted astrologer, Buddhist scholar and musician". He became interested in using computers for his astrological work in the mid-1970s and founded a software company, Matrix, in 1977. In the early 1990s, as CDs replaced LPs as the dominant format for recorded music, Erlewine purchased what he thought was a CD of early recordings by Little Richard. After buying it he discovered it was a "flaccid latter-day rehash". Frustrated with the labeling, he researched using metadata to create a music guide. In 1990, in Big Rapids, Michigan, he founded ''All Music Guide' ...
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Free Improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician(s) involved. The term can refer to both a technique (employed by any musician in any genre) and as a recognizable genre in its own right. Free improvisation, as a genre of music, developed in the U.S. and Europe in the mid to late 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of free jazz and modern classical musics. Exponents of free improvised music include saxophonists Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brötzmann, and John Zorn, composer Pauline Oliveros, drummer Christian Lillinger, trombonist George E. Lewis, guitarists Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith and the improvising groups Spontaneous Music Ensemble, The Music Improvisation Company, Iskra 1903, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and AMM. Characteristics In an atonal context, free improvisation refers to where the focus shifts from harmony to other dimensions of music: timbre, melodic intervals, rhythm ...
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Avant-garde Music
Avant-garde music is music that is considered to be at the forefront of innovation in its field, with the term "avant-garde" implying a critique of existing aesthetic conventions, rejection of the status quo in favor of unique or original elements, and the idea of deliberately challenging or alienating audiences. Avant-garde music may be distinguished from experimental music by the way it adopts an extreme position within a certain tradition, whereas experimental music lies outside tradition. Distinctions Avant-garde music may be distinguished from experimental music by the way it adopts an extreme position within a certain tradition, whereas experimental music lies outside tradition. In a historical sense, some musicologists use the term "avant-garde music" for the radical compositions that succeeded the death of Anton Webern in 1945,Paul Du Noyer (ed.), "Contemporary", in the ''Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music: From Rock, Pop, Jazz, Blues and Hip Hop to Classical, Folk, Worl ...
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Motor Totemist Guild
Motor Totemist Guild is an American rock band, formed in 1980 in Orange County, California by band leader James Grigsby. Described as an avant-prog, avant-rock and chamber rock band, Motor Totemist Guild was noted for its songs that worked into epic durations and rich instrumentation but also forayed into free improvisation, sound collage, and other avant-garde techniques. History Being the only constant member, Grigsby assembled an everchanging lineup, that featured vocalist Emily Hay, as well as Rod Poole (acoustic guitar), Bridget Convey (piano), Hannes Giger (contrabass), and David Kerman (drums). Grigsby disbanded the group in 1989 to focus on the project U-Totem. Nevertheless, Grigsby and Hay reunited the group in 1997 with a largely expanded lineup, including former members Lynn Johnston (clarinets, saxophone) and Eric Johnson-Tamai (bassoon). The new lineup also featured musicians from 1990s West Coast new jazz scene, such as Vinny Golia (clarinets, saxes), Jeff Kaiser (tr ...
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Thinking Plague
Thinking Plague is an American avant-garde progressive rock group founded in 1982 by guitarist/composer Mike Johnson and bass guitarist/drummer Bob Drake. Based in Denver, Colorado, the band has been active off and on since 1982, taking on a number of musicians over the years. They have made seven studio albums between 1984 and 2017, and released one live album recorded at NEARfest in 2000. Their music is a mix of rock, folk, jazz and 20th-century classical music. Music.com remarked that "...Thinking Plague stand out as a shining example of avant-garde music blended with just enough rock for it to be called progressive rock..." While never directly related to Rock in Opposition (RIO), Thinking Plague was strongly influenced by this late-1970s movement, particularly Henry Cow and Art Bears. In spite of Johnson's dislike of the term, the band has often been categorized as a "RIO" band. History Early Plague Mike Johnson and Bob Drake first met in 1978 and played in several ...
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