Scott-O -- as in Scott Walker and SunnO)))

just a bit of funn O))) let's be cool

I like latter Scott partly because I find it challenging. It's not exactly Kenny G is it? Even Tilt, I mean, Farmer in the City is its own kind of harrowing and I don't find the Cockfighter relaxing to listen to. It's fantastic art music but you can see why a lot of people don't like it.

It's not exactly Kenny G is it?

No but neither is anything

not what you'd call "dinner party music"/one for the music buffs/predicting a solid &c

In some ways, the 60s Scott albums are as 'difficult' as Tilt etc for some modern listeners because they code as MOR, with all the negative connotations of blandness, show business, non-rock action that that entails.

Kenny G!

Yeah, but that means you have to listen.

There is a whole chunk of "This could be Stuart Gilles" amongst the sixties stuff, but keep the Scott penned stuff and the Brel stuff and you will be all right.

stuff

Keep it all & throw out your bs hangups about show biz non rock action imo

would be fun to hear scott o))) in st. john's

I heard the Brel version of Jackie for the first time the other day and honestly, if you can understand the language it's a very amusing take. The Walker version is a brilliant translation but some of the nuances of the French language are just as, if not more, hilarious.

It's not like everyone gets all the popular stuff. Lots of people don't understand lots of pop music. Not everyone gets Beatles.

I said I don't get most art house films (mostly realistic stuff, I like surreal arthouse) but I also don't get James Bond films.

More than anything the appeal of first person shooter videogames like Call Of Duty is the most baffling mystery.

kenny G)))

Really looking forward to this based on the Quietus interview.

In some ways, the 60s Scott albums are as 'difficult' as Tilt etc for some modern listeners because they code as MOR, with all the negative connotations of blandness, show business, non-rock action that that entails.

definitely true for me. My introduction to Scott Walker was Tilt and I quickly grew to love that album. I then decided to go back and check out his early albums and could not get into them for a long time.

In retrospect, I think the mistake I made was going from Tilt all the way back to his first album. I should have worked my way backwards from Tilt.

For me, words like "difficult" and "challenging" never seemed right in describing music or images. Straining and putting effort into understanding something always backfired on me. I think I probably didn't get into a lot of stuff in my early teens was because I worried too much and got frustrated.

I don't think I've ever got into an album and thought "whoah that was tough", it was always just a case of listening to it enough times, which isn't difficult unless it really tries your patience. But some music you just never get.

I've never heard of "hardmanning" in this context, makes me think of some big bald muscular guy saying "I'm a huge fan of Scott Walker and neo realist films; you may have seen me in an episode of Danny Dyer Meets Britain's Hardest Bastards".

I guess this is more about amateurist's view that calling Tilt 'difficult' is something a sixteen year old would say. Obv, the semantics of 'difficult' and even 'challenging' are open to long and boring debate, and it's entirely subjective. but it's not 'easy' listening. There are quite clear barriers here.

i don't have a problem with using the word 'challenging' to describe a piece of music any more than i would have trouble calling a book 'challenging'. 'Difficult', I can see, has a suggestion that the artist is being wilfully awkward or unlikeable, so i can see why there's an issue with this word.

i should be more clear about what I said before. I totally agree that Walker mk II is challenging and unsettling music, in fact I cannot think of any active recording artist who can evoke pain and desperation and a terrible immanence and dislocation as well as him; and I think he has made it pretty plain in interviews that he does make it wilfully 'difficult' at times when he feels a piece is going down too easy. but, for me, it is also a deeply accommodating music, like, the first time I listened to Tilt there were a lot of things that invited me right in even while other things were throwing darts at me.

adfsajklasdfakh;asghl

Yeah let's get back on topic!

this is pretty fucking awesome

Right?

i like all kinds of putatively 'difficult' music and film etc. but i guess the times i've listened to swans stuff (mostly the '80s stuff) it sounded almost cartoonishly abrasive and unrewarding. but so many people that i respect like them a lot so i've been meaning to try to find another way "in" to their oeuvre. so, srsly, what album(s) should i start with?

but yeah anyway this album seems like an instant classic

The last two Swans albums are great ways in. The current one is dead accessible. It's groovy!

children of god, every time

which is v abrasive in places but also often surprisingly pretty and seductive

For some reason Swans seemed so stupid to me during their phase one era and I guess I've given them short shrift ever since. Which is dumb, I should try to snap out of it.

fwiw all the talk of 'difficult' needs context. it's weird what can be difficult to people. when i was in high school i was listening to some of the free jazz/avant-garde stuff happening in chicago (ken vandermark etc.) and found nine inch nails (which a lot of my friends were listening to) really awful and abrasive. i also inexplicably found chrissie hynde's voice to be like nails on a chalkboard. but i took almost immediately to scott walker, having discovered both "tilt" and his late '60s stuff at about the same time (though for some reason i got particularly attached to 'climate of hunter,' and i still love that album as a kind of queasy mid-way point between MOR and his later outre stuff).

nowadays i love all of these things (though i guess jazz is still much closer to my heart).

re swans i've always been a little wary of stuff that seems to try really hard to be shocking, which may not be a fair description of swans but that's something i took away from their earlier stuff. i will try the aforementioned LPs and see what i think!

i also had a weird relationship with the "flat" singing voices of a lot of freestyle in the '80s. i loved it as a kid growing up, then in high school and college could barely stand to listen to it (I remember yelling a friend to turn off the car radio when some freestyle cover of a cyndi lauper song came on), but more recently can't understand why i ever hated it.

this is the least interesting detour

anyway, i'm really off topic, sorry.

scott walker

haha xpost

wanna hear earth record with david sylvian now

though for some reason i got particularly attached to 'climate of hunter,' and i still love that album as a kind of queasy mid-way point between MOR and his later outre stuff

i kind of think climate of hunter is his most "difficult" for this very reason

hmmm, that's an interesting thought

i like how it occasionally sounds like a oddball MOR record (billy ocean backing vocals, sizzling guitar licks and all)

though it pointedly has very very few drum fills

climate of hunter is actually a pretty catchy album ("...run out of recognize...")! and there are parts of tilt i find myself singing in the shower etc. ("can't go by a man from Vigo..."). I have a harder time conjuring up hooks from the last two records.

you can /almost/ hear some of "climate" sung and arranged in Scott's earlier mode: "The shadow of the son made the son a shadow" etc.

i think that one might actually have been released as a single btw

My favorite goose pimple moment on that record:
And the ceiling is rising and falling...

I'd literally loose a couple of toes to hear an album recorded by Antony Hegarty and Sunn O))).

I guess this is more about amateurist's view that calling Tilt 'difficult' is something a sixteen year old would say.

that's not what i wrote. i agree that "tilt" is difficult.

the review i was paraphrasing said something like "tilt is the most difficult album ever made"

it was the "...album ever made" part that seemed not just hyperbolic but juvenile

the "difficult" part i agree with

it's so easy to misread people online, isn't it...

...and i must be getting sloppy with my online communication b/c it seems to be happening more and more to me recently.

FWIW the AMG review that I was paraphrasing seems to have been replaced. i remember, back in the early 2000s, there was a rather short and uncomprehending review of tilt that had the "most difficult album ever made" line in it. I think it was written by stephen thomas erlewine. it's been replaced with a longer and more sympathetic review.

apologies for misunderstanding you amateurist

oh, it's no problem. i think i'm getting bad at communicating, or i just use a shorthand that nobody else can understand or something.

im going to church tonite

wish i had gone but i'm feeling rather lurgee-ish atm.

This is the film he's scoring, starring Robert pattinson & Stacey Martin

http://www.thechildhoodofaleader-film.com/2014/10/13/scott-walker-will-compose-score-childhood-of-a-leader/

When I saw it was a "Robert Pattinson movie" I was really, really hoping it was the new Herzog.