Music Theory How to Write Noise Rock Art Rock

Art rock is an evocative merely nebulous term. So what exactly is it?

Role of the trouble is that "art rock" has all too often served equally a pigeonhole into which negligent hacks have stuffed whatever number of contenders, too awkwardly shaped to slot neatly into whatever other sub-category. It's been described as "rock music that incorporates elements of traditional or classical music," which strikes some of u.s. as near wilfully antithetical to even the broadest understanding. Surely a key art stone principle is forging ahead, the shock of the new?

A closer fit would be "music that tends to have experimental or advanced influences, emphasizing novel sonic texture" – the start interpretation that pops up if you conduct even the laziest Google search for "fine art rock" while paying homage to Yoko Ono's 1966 art motion-picture show, No.iv (Bottoms).

Listen to the best art rock songs on Spotify.

The nascence of art rock

By common consensus, British art schools in the tardily 50s and early on 60s served as hothouses of musical creativity. Several of the era's prime movers famously brushed at easels earlier wielding plectrums: John Lennon (Liverpool College of Art), Ray Davies (Hornsey Higher Of Art, then Croydon Art School for its movie and theatre programme), Eric Clapton (Kingston College Of Fine art), Keith Richards and founding Pretty Thing, Dick Taylor (Sidcup Art Higher), Pete Townshend and Ronnie Woods (Ealing Fine art College, also attended by Freddie Mercury and future Bonzo Domestic dog lynchpin, Roger Ruskin Spear), and Syd Barrett (Camberwell College of Arts), to name a handful.

The inference is that art schools indulged and empowered some of rock'southward almost original thinkers, who blossomed past design or default in a laissez-faire, bring-your-guitar-to-lectures environment amongst a coterie of intellectuals. Still, care should be taken not to read as well much significance into this rite of passage as a failsafe formula. Perhaps it's safest to say that, in the mid-to-late 60s, the artistic impulse in pop manifested itself as a heightened awareness of presentation and iconography, a superabundance of imaginative (and/or pictographic) lyrics, a devotion to musical and/or lifestyle experimentation and the use of recording studios equally a means of constructing sonic canvases.

The Who: "We play popular art with standard grouping equipment"

In mid-60s Britain, no 1 joined the dots between art and music more assiduously than The Who, bedecked in the arrows and roundels of their howdy-vis popular art regalia, adapting the flags and medals of a crumbling empire to their ain symbolic, sartorial, and gestural ends. Whether or not guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend diligently took notes when attending a lecture given past auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger at Ealing Fine art Higher, he certainly talked a proficient game. In Before I Get Quondam: The Story Of The Who, Dave Marsh contends: "Townshend, like Lennon and perhaps Davies, displayed a thorough familiarity with contemporary artistic theory, which tin easily exist seen in his immediate application of ideas derived from [Sir Peter] Blake'southward pop art paintings… and in the utilise of the automobile-destructive technique…"

Invoking Metzger's motorcar-destructive ethos fabricated the trashing of The Who's equipment a legitimate art gesture in theory, fifty-fifty if some contemptuous journos and horrified musos remained resolutely unconvinced. "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere," the band'southward May 1965 second single, accordingly approximated the pinned-pupil aggression and bluster of The Who's alive set and the demeanor of their mod fan base, but also aped the sensationalist wink and immediacy of a particular strain of popular art, with its combustible tracery of Morse-code feedback: Roy Lichtenstein'south Whaam! set to music. "We play pop art with standard group equipment," Townshend deadpanned to Melody Maker at the time.

Townshend's fine art school peers Keith Richards and Ray Davies don't twitch ane'south art stone antennae to the same degree. For all that the Stones knocked about town with London art dealer Robert Fraser, and given that their seditious image was carefully fine-tuned by manager Andrew Loog Oldham, their R&B-rooted music was essentially traditional and reverential. Notwithstanding, "Paint Information technology, Black" makes the art stone cutting, proffering a rarefied nihilism that plummeted into a dangerously tempting realm of societal disengagement backside closed curtains, in a prescient shimmer of sitar.

Likewise, Ray Davies possessed a restless intelligence, a painterly eye, and a mannered archness (a Marble Archness, if y'all bought that label'southward cheapo Kinks compilation albums) which betokened an fine art school groundwork. Nevertheless, it wasn't long before the already jaded, distanced observer of "Defended Follower Of Manner" was wistfully looking over his shoulder at the psycho-geography of an England which was a non-objective illusion to brainstorm with. Notwithstanding, before Davies' reactionary inclination dug its heels in, The Kinks had already ticked the "novel sonic texture" box with Dave Davies' game-changing, slashed-speaker guitar audio on 1964's "You Really Got Me." Furthermore, the sinuous raga tonalities of 1965's "See My Friend" inarguably gazed to the far horizon.

The Velvet Underground: unflinchingly confrontational

Meanwhile, in the U.s.a., The Velvet Hole-and-corner boasted an explicit link to the art earth by dint of being squired and theoretically managed past a genuine artist, Andy Warhol. Warhol designed the sleeve of their March 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico , and was a galvanic, totemic presence during the recording. The anthology in question was exhilaratingly crude in sound and viscerally unflinching in subject area matter, every bit Lou Reed matter-of-factly spat along non-judgemental vignettes concerning drugs and dealers ("Heroin," "I'k Waiting For The Human being"), sado-masochism ("Venus In Furs"), mortality ("Black Affections's Death Song") and – lest anyone forget – unequivocal tenderness, with the Nico-sung "I'll Exist Your Mirror."

With Warhol's patronage, the Velvets moved in arty circles (and gobbled costless food at social club parties), only the band's confrontational material, immoderate decibel count, and calculatedly unsweetened musicianship often engendered suspicion or revulsion. For many observers they were far too much, far too soon – though, of course, their eventual influence on the sound, look and content of alt.rock (which, subsequently all, is only "fine art rock" with a single alphabetic character substitution, after all) would be incalculable.

In the early months of 1967, the Velvets and Warhol pulled apart. The band's 2d album, Jan 1968'due south White Lite/White Heat , is ironically the one that truly cements their claim to art rock divinity: a blackness-hearted, clangorous, advanced masterpiece. Lou Reed, a BA graduate from the Syracuse College Of Arts And Sciences, would go on to deliver 1975's noise-in-excelsis double-album, Metal Machine Music – a defining art gesture, which can be interpreted every bit a nose-thumbing contractual obligation and a cerebral ecstasy of racket with equal justification.

Psychedelia in the UK

In the Uk, the onset of psychedelia in 1966/67 signified open flavor for bands with a plausible claim to art stone pertinence. (The belatedly Patrick Lundborg defines the first flush of art stone equally "an intellectualized form of psychedelia" in his book Psychedelia: An Ancient Civilisation, A Modern Way Of Life.) The Pretty Things, led by art school compatriots Dick Taylor and Phil May, evolved from compelling R&B degenerates into psych satyrs with the multi-faceted 1967 single "Defecting Grey" and 1968's SF Sorrow, a far-sighted, diligently mapped concept album.

At that place was also The Creation, a precipitous, antsy, Who-similar quartet whose violin-bow-brandishing guitarist, Eddie Phillips, delivered the deathless quote: "Our music is red with purple flashes." Their 2nd single, Oct 1966'southward "Painter Human being," richly took the piss out of starving-artist ideologues while also providing an excuse for vocalist Kenny Pickett to indulge in live onstage "action art" earlier setting alight to the canvas. (Ronnie Forest, a bona-fide art school attendee, was a later fellow member of the band.)

Then, of course, there was The Pink Floyd, fronted at the fourth dimension by a man whose painting aspirations were derailed by his regrettably cursory music career, simply who nevertheless applied an art approach to playing his mirror-disc-embellished Fender Esquire, espousing "texture rather than technique" (as Rob Chapman puts it in Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head). Intrigued past the bold initiatives of guitarist Keith Rowe, from committed experimentalists AMM, Syd Barrett ran a Zippo lighter upwards and down the neck of his guitar, plugged information technology through a Binson Echorec, struck out for the unknown and trusted to providence on the early on Floyd prepare-slice, "Interstellar Overdrive." The version captured on the Floyd's debut album, Baronial 1967's Piper at The Gates Of Dawn, achieves moments of free-falling transcendence even under the lights of Abbey Route Studio iii, and remains a visionary landmark of improvised music. (Twelve years later, with The Wall, Barrett's erstwhile colleagues would literally build a wall between themselves and their audience – an art rock conceit if always there was ane.)

The Beatles lead the accuse

As was so frequently the example in the 60s, The Beatles had led the charge. "Tomorrow Never Knows," from August 1966's Revolver , was a properly avant-garde construct, wholly without precedent for a pop group. A collage of record loops, a disembodied vocal channeled through a rotating Leslie speaker, a backward guitar solo and a lyric derived from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's volume The Psychedelic Experience: A Transmission Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead contributed to an arresting, groundbreaking audio picture. A number of elements fed into the band's envelope-pushing desires during this menstruum – not least Lennon's cover of happenstance; McCartney'south self-bettering involvement in cut-border film, art, and literature; and producer George Martin'due south unflappable skill as an interpreter and facilitator. February 1967's unimpeachable double A-side, "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane," constituted a heady elixir, bloodshot and opaque on one side and brightly hallucinatory on the other; but the apogee of an artfully surreal collective arroyo was arguably "Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite," from June 1967'due south epochal Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band .

With a lyric cribbed almost verbatim from a circus affiche purchased by Lennon from an antiques shop in Sevenoaks, on the same day as filming the video for "Strawberry Fields Forever," the song required a suitably evocative, whirling, fairground backdrop, to which end George Martin sourced tapes of a steam calliope and, utilizing an sound equivalent of author William Burroughs' "cut-up" technique, snipped the tape into pieces, threw them in the air and had engineer Geoff Emerick reassemble them where they cruel. A genius move, albeit one which required further adjustment when information technology was discovered that some sections of the tape had been reassembled more or less in their original configuration.

Provocateurs and deconstructionists

Lennon would subsequently ally Japanese conceptual creative person Yoko Ono, an abstract provocateur whose liberating influence should never be underestimated. Nonetheless, with regard to artful tape editing and manipulation, information technology was Frank Zappa who punted the brawl into the stratosphere on 1967's Lumpy Gravy and 1968'due south We're But In It For The Money – with due respect to advanced forebears such every bit Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Henri Posseur.

Meanwhile, Zappa's friend and occasional collaborator, Don Van Vliet, would in fourth dimension eschew music altogether and pursue a career in painting – simply not earlier completely rewiring all notions of structural logic in the antic guise of Captain Beefheart, goading a serial of long-suffering just prodigiously gifted Magic Band line-ups into producing some of the nigh idiosyncratically synthetic rock music always recorded. The 1969 double-anthology, Trout Mask Replica, represents a hefty throwdown to this twenty-four hour period.

In the combustible, politically polarised, Germany of the late 60s and early on 70s, several crucial bands deployed advanced, deconstructivist principles. Faust, on their clear-vinyl, transparent-sleeved, self-titled 1971 debut album, assembled a cynically humorous if oft indefinably threatening pyre from treated scraps of tape, disjointed snatches of dialogue, static-prickled firestorms of electronica and queasy sing-song passages. The melody-averse mischief-maker Conrad Schnitzler, who formerly studied sculpture nether the custodianship of Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, brought a multimedia sensibility and a determined ethos of "organized" dissonance to the early on Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Meanwhile, NEU! reduced stone music to its most elemental, repetitive and central essence – thereby elevating it to a beautifully streamlined purity – and Kraftwerk outgrew rock's conventional instrumentation and wearing apparel code to become man-car avatars, the immaculately stylized synth pioneers of popular legend.

Above all, Can practical a loftier-minded discipline to the rejection of high-minded disciplines, with at least three members (keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit) consciously turning their backs on the perceived orthodoxy of classical, jazz and fifty-fifty avant-garde antecedents. "Tin are not a pop grouping," Schmidt unconditionally stated, equally David Stubbs recalls in his remarkable book Future Days. "Information technology'southward popular art. It's art music." Serendipitously, Can chanced upon two vocalists in succession – American sculptor Malcolm Mooney, impulsive and anarchic; and Japanese busker Damo Suzuki, blithely unconcerned by linguistic convention – who were uniquely able to give vocalisation to Can'due south fearless music in a manner that owed picayune or nothing to any discernible archetype.

The impetus to progress

It gets trickier when prog rock is brought into the equation. The impetus to "progress" was inherent in the description, yet at that place was something about the genre's emphasis on blowhard virtuosity which, ironically, oft seemed likewise traditional and eager-to-please to authorize every bit "progressive" – permit lone art rock.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer, for case, devoted a whole anthology to an appreciation of art – 1971's Pictures At An Exhibition, an accommodation of Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 classical pianoforte suite – but they were playing to a dissimilar kind of gallery altogether. One could, however, make a case for King Crimson and Van Der Graaf Generator, who shared a seam of cloistered, brainy, malignant darkness that you simply knew would follow its own hell-aptitude grade whether or not you were intrepid enough to listen; while, conversely, putative Canterbury Scene artists such as the early Soft Automobile, Kevin Ayers and (the not geographically relevant) Egg leavened their albums with knowing, esoteric or self-referential humor that all the same accompanied challenging, disconcerting interludes of fervid atonality.

For your pleasure: the rise of glam rock

It was really in the UK singles chart of the early on 70s that art rock was most overtly visible, in the idiosyncratic shape of Roxy Music. Even in the peacock context of glam rock, Roxy looked and sounded intoxicatingly exotic; and in vocalizer Bryan Ferry and synth manipulator Brian Eno, they housed, unsustainably, two intractable personalities whose art studies (at Newcastle University and Colchester Institute, respectively) had a significant begetting on the band's advent and sound.

If Roxy Music's early album covers and sartorial decisions flirted deliberately with kitsch and decadence, it was Eno's experimental and flamboyantly non-musical input – at a time when "paying your dues" was perceived to be paramount – that represented the band's almost deliciously provocative aspect.

Between Ferry's bendy enunciation, Andy Mackay's cantering oboe, and Eno's spurting electronics, it was as though a spaceship had crash-landed in the Tiptop 5 when Roxy released their debut single, 1972'southward "Virginia Plain." Taken in tandem with the ring'due south get-go two albums, '72's Roxy Music and the following yr'southward For Your Pleasure, it was clear that a new entry had been deftly added to the acoustic lexicon of nautical chart pop. But within a twelvemonth Eno had moved on, launching an ongoing, clearly fecund solo career as a recording creative person, producer, and fountainhead of ideas and initiatives. His projects have ranged from assembling multimedia art installations and composing ambient albums, to contributing the start-up music for Windows 95. Tellingly, his proper name has been linked with some of the more artistically inclined pop/rock personages of the past 40 years. (Devo, Talking Heads, and David Bowie are specially applicable in this regard, only meet also Half Man Half Biscuit's fond tongue-in-cheek, "Eno Collaboration.")

Bowie was arguably the only chart mainstay in the early on-to-mid 70s who presented a more enigmatic face to the world than Roxy Music, all the fashion from the humanoid boogie of the Ziggy Stardust era to the skeletal, modernist funk of Station To Station, so it seemed inevitable that his and Eno's paths should cross.

The so-called "Berlin Trilogy" (the three albums on which Eno collaborated and recorded by Bowie in Berlin's Hansa Tonstudio: 1977'due south Low and "Heroes", and 1979's Lodger) bore the unmistakable influence of NEU!, Kraftwerk and Cluster in the recondite, insular-yet-expansive instrumentals which predominated on the first two, but too proved influential in turn with their oftentimes abstract compositional and production methods. Furthermore, they were among the few artifacts past a member of the "quondam guard" non to be dismissed out of hand past Year Zero purists in the wake of the punk explosion of 1976/77.

Fine art punk: an impulse to shock and provoke

For all that punk appeared to espouse an anti-intellectual calendar, the impulse to shock and provoke was nevertheless consistent with art stone principles. Of the ostensible new wave, bands including Wire, Devo (and then high-sounding they had their own manifesto), The Disharmonism, XTC, The Soft Boys, and Adam And The Ants all independent members who had attended art schools – every bit had Ian Dury, receiving first-paw tutelage from Peter Blake – while the managers of Sex Pistols and The Clash, Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, were keenly aware of Situationist rhetoric. Meanwhile, the American electronic duo, Suicide, slotted into an advanced lineage which included Argent Apples, Bruce Haack, U.s.a., and fifty Foot Hose, just were nevertheless notwithstanding sufficiently far ahead of the game equally to engender/suffer some horribly confrontational scenes when supporting The Clash on a 1978 United kingdom bout.

Suicide were strong meat even in the comparatively aware environs of CBGB, the legendary United states cradle-of-punk social club run by Hilly Kristal at 315 Bowery in New York's East Hamlet. Simply with due respect to Television set'south prickly dazzler, the CBGB veterans who made the most indelible contribution to the art rock pantheon would be Talking Heads. Defined by David Byrne's bookish, passive-ambitious persona and a propensity for jittery white funk with globe music flavours, they pursued a distinctively eccentric course well into the 80s and enjoyed a particularly beneficial brotherhood with Eno, who produced 3 albums for them (1978'southward More Songs Most Buildings And Food, the following twelvemonth's unsurpassable Fear Of Music and 1980's Remain In Low-cal) and collaborated with Byrne on 1981'southward momentous, sample-based My Life In The Bush-league Of Ghosts.

The art stone mindset manifested itself in the late 70s and early on 80s via daring, sonically inquisitive or lyrically abstruse post-punk and beyond-punk bands including Public Image Ltd, Australia's The Birthday Party (featuring a young-but-not-unconversant Nick Cavern), and The Autumn – though Fall frontman, Mark E Smith, the man who wrote "Prole Art Threat," actually warrants a category all of his ain. In America, loosely affiliated "no moving ridge" functioning artists and groups such every bit Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, James Chance And The Contortions, Mars and DNA all pursued a bloody-minded, noncompliant but spirited agenda. All 4 bands were compiled on 1978's No New York – a Brian Eno production, naturally – and their unruly example contributed to a trickle-down effect on subsequent noise adherents, including Sonic Youth, Swans, and Foetus, and industrial outfits such equally Einstürzende Neubauten and Test Dept.

Again, playful art stone initiatives connected to crop up intermittently in mainstream pop, from The Flying Lizards' skin-and-os redaction of "Money" (1979) to Laurie Anderson'southward encouragingly high-charting "O Superman" (a United kingdom No.2 in October 1981), and Trio's morosely parodic "Da Da Da" (1982). Kate Bush-league and former Genesis vocalist Peter Gabriel utilized cutting-edge studio hardware and video technology in the service of some palpably thoughtful, intelligent compositions, while Peter Saville's elegantly modernistic artwork for Factory Records built upon the conceptual integrity of Hipgnosis' sleeves in the 70s by establishing a coolly homogenous identity for the label's acts.

Non to denigrate guitarist John Squire'due south, Jackson Pollock-inspired, cover fine art for the self-titled 1989 debut album by The Stone Roses, simply art rock's next nigh significant metamorphosis was indicated by the formation of inscrutably compelling American bands the likes of Slint and Tortoise – tenebrous harbingers of so-called mail-rock, with its emphasis on texture rather than technique. Does that audio familiar? With an entirely appropriate distaste for reductive labeling, many bands arbitrarily lumped together under the postal service-rock banner (Godspeed You lot! Black Emperor and Mogwai included) have reflexively shied away from the term.

Art rock in the modern era

In the last 20 years, the most high-contour adherents to an art rock ethos would accept to be Blur, whose fitful desire to look across formulaic pop conventions spoke volumes nigh the knock-on effects of a bohemian background. (Damon Albarn's father, Keith, ran the School Of Art And Blueprint at Colchester Found, while guitarist Graham Coxon had been an arts pupil at Goldsmiths College.) Albarn'south numerous, varied side projects – non least Gorillaz, the "virtual", multimedia incentive co-created past Albarn with comic book artist/designer Jamie Hewlett – signify a healthily restless need for artistic reinvention and an clamorous thirst for new stimuli.

In the US, over a similar time frame, Beck Hansen has repeatedly displayed a quixotic disposition and an eagerness to experiment not just with sound, but as well with the music medium itself (witness 2012's Vocal Reader, an album presented solely as canvass music). With a mother, Bibbe Hansen, who starred in several Andy Warhol films, and a granddad, Al Hansen, who was a member of the Fluxus creative person network, Beck has controversial art in his bloodline. Past gleefully smashing together elements of hip-hop, hardcore punk, threadbare folk-blues, parched state-rock, and lo-fi electronica, his best music eloquently testifies to the wisdom of breaking down (or blithely ignoring) the barriers.

The virtually fully realized art stone is compelled to indulge itself, and probably doesn't care what you recall… And, as befits whatever art-related endeavor, yous might sometimes take to stand up dorsum to see it properly. There hasn't been room in this discourse to salute oracular entities who besides served, including The Residents, Jack Reddish, Destroy All Monsters, Annette Peacock, White Noise, Area, This Oestrus, Throbbing Gristle, The Raincoats, Pere Ubu and The Pop Grouping… but we actually ought to doff a hat in their management earlier nosotros go.

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Source: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/in-depth-features/rock-for-arts-sake/

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