Heavy Vanguard: Iannis Xenakis // Electronic Music [Compilation]

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Avant-garde classical music took a huge leap forward in the 50s and 60s when a handful of composers (including John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others) began to play around with simply wild ideas in terms of composition, beyond anything that the likes of Schoenberg or Webern had done in the past. One of the minds essential to this period was one Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer and architect who applied the same mathematical concepts he used to to make buildings to compose music, eventually coining the term “stochastic” music to refer to the mathematical, statistical, and physical principals being applied to music. While he’s perhaps not as well remembered as Cage or Stockhausen, Xenakis was nonetheless an important composer, and an early adopter of electronic music, with this compilation today being a collection of his earliest musique concrète compositions. (The term musique concrète was a French term coined by Pierre Schaefer, whose early experiments with tape recordings essentially laid the foundation for the future of electronic music.)

What Heavy Blog Is Really Listening To – 3/17/17

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For those who missed our last installment, We post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as no surprise that many of us on staff have pretty eclectic tastes that range far outside of metal and heavy things. We can’t post about all of them at length here, but we can at least let you know what we’re actually listening to. For those that would like to participate as well (and please do) can drop a 3X3 in the comments, which can be made with tapmusic.net through your last.fm account, or create it manually with topsters.net. Also, consider these posts open threads to talk about pretty much anything music-related. We love hearing all of your thoughts on this stuff and love being able to nerd out along with all of you.

Heavy Vanguard Episode 9: Krzysztof Penderecki // “Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima”

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Normally, Heavy Vanguard has been about the album format, and giving significant releases of that size some much-needed attention. Today, however, we’re slightly tweaking that formula and instead covering a single composition: “Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima” by legendary (at least in modern classical circles) Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. For…

Heavy Vanguard Episode 1: Nurse With Wound // Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella

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First of all, welcome to a new installment at Heavy Blog that we’re calling Heavy Vanguard. This is a podcast wherein Heavy Blog Editor Scott Murphy and myself (Jimmy) discuss avant-garde and experimental music. Each episode follows an intense, in-depth discussion of an experimental album that is in some way relevant to the world of music. Genres or popularity (i.e. “underground” or “mainstream”) aren’t considered when we pick an album; it’s more about a release that, regardless of how it sounds or how it’s been received, has pushed the boundaries of music in some way or another. Each episode is short (under half an hour), acting as a launchpad for people interested in exploring what the avant-garde has to offer. Today’s album is the debut Nurse With Wound album Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.

The Jazz Club Vol. 7 – Defusing Jazz Fusion

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Welcome to Jazz Club, where we might actually be on track this week! Actually, it’s true; we have a real topic and real albums to bring to your earballs, all about one of the most revolutionary (and highly criticized at the time) forms of jazz of all time, Jazz Fusion! A little note before we start, though: all three albums featured today have sizable contributions from guitarists. Although fusion includes more instrumentation beyond the guitar (for example, Mahavishnu Orchestra once included violinist Jon Luc Ponty), guitar was essentially the big focal point of the genre, as fusion is a blend (no duh) of a few genres with jazz, the biggest being rock music. (Of course, there are other jazz guitarists that aren’t fusion, such as Django Reinhardt, but this is a new sound we’re talking about.) So without further ado, let’s defuse a contentious – but rewarding – subgenre of jazz.

Hey! Listen to Victorian Whore Dogs!

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Rock and metal with a sense of humor is good and all, but with it comes the (often true) stereotype that there isn’t much to it musically. There are obvious exceptions—Frank Zappa managed to make music that was both hilarious and interesting, and Every Time I Die’s sense of humor is always fun to be around; I mean, who else could come up with a track title like “Underwater Bimbos From Outer Space”? The answer to that question is Victorian Whore Dogs, a British-based metal band who recently put out their third studio album Afternoonified last month.