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Music: The Strangest Music You Ever Heard

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  1.  (2374.1)
    Tell me about it. What's the strangest music you've ever heard? Run a search on YouTube and show it to us, if you can. (Or play it for us or link it if it's possible and you feel moved to.)

    --W
  2.  (2374.2)
    Many years ago Kenny Everett (I think) played the 50 Worst Records. Amongst these were two that stuck in my mind because they weren't so much bad as disturbed genius. I can't find them on YouTube and I may have got the titles wrong but one was Paralysed by The Starstruck Cowboy which is one man screaming his pain at the world and one was I Want My Baby Back for which this is the Wikipedia entry:

    <em>The most legendary parody of the genre is the 1965 novelty record "I Want My Baby Back", written by Perry Botkin, Jr and Gil Garfield and recorded by Jimmy Cross for the Tollie label. The singer/narrator tells of a road accident similar to that in "Last Kiss," but it turns out that the couple is on the receiving end of the motorcycle crash at the climax of "Leader of the Pack." Several months after his baby's death, the singer decides that he is going to have her back "one way or the other." With realistic sound effects, he digs up his baby's grave, crawls into her coffin, and closes the lid for a muffled final chorus of "I've Got My Baby Back." The record failed to make the national top 40, but was rescued from obscurity in the 1970s by Dr. Demento, who featured it regularly on his syndicated novelty record program. </em>
  3.  (2374.3)
    Most of the stuff I hear nowadays is considered strange, as I'm really into noise (and the related genres). So your regular Merzbow, Whitehouse, Grey Wolves, Women of the SS, to name the most recent on my playlist. A great artist that none of my friends can't like is Diamanda Galas. Something less noisy and more musical that many find strange (but usually like) and is unknown is Univers Zero (http://www.univers-zero.com/). Actually the strangest thing that I heard regularly was Eigenradio (http://eigenradio.media.mit.edu/), I was addicted to it while it lasted, spent months without listening to anything else.
    • CommentAuthoracacia
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008 edited
     (2374.4)
    'Strange' is so subjective! Depends very much on taste and mood/setting, and in that sense, I'll mention Stockhausen's work used in the Brothers Quay's "In Absentia": http://youtube.com/watch?v=zNqSd_pHqV0 - Some of the audiovisual combinations there stood my hair on end.

    Edit: I think it was a section in Part 2 that got me when I first saw this:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzj3ryC1TW4
    •  
      CommentAuthorAlan Tyson
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008
     (2374.5)
    THAT. Was very strange indeed.

    The strangest music I've ever heard probably doesn't at all match up to what people are going to post here - I'm not nearly as musically educated as I'd like to be.
    •  
      CommentAuthorFractal
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008
     (2374.6)
    Oooh, that's an amazing question.

    For sheer weirdness, STIMMUNG, by Stockhausen, is pretty out there. It's all vocal, all dissonant, and stretches the human voice very, very far. Stockhausnen based it on 50-some "magic words", which are stated in an order to be dertermined by the players, and with great emphasis and intent. Moving through all these words takes about an hour, and is overwhelmingly surreal.
    A small sample is here.
  7.  (2374.7)
    The strangest music I've ever heard was at a friends house. Her father was a zen-buddhist with a training studio in the house, and he had a giant thing given to him by Genesis Audio Ltd. It was a decagon made of metal pipes, but huge. Speakers were placed on the vertices and it had a bed in the center with subwoofers underneath it. It was hooked up to an old Apple running proprietary software that would show "the flow of energy" or some metaphysical B.S.

    Anyway, my friend's dad had me lay on the bed in the Genesis and listen to music played on/with human bones by Tibetan monks. HUMAN BONES. Flutes and shit. Blew my mind. Not sure I can find any, but I'll give it a try.
    •  
      CommentAuthorAdam
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008
     (2374.8)
    Not the strangest music certainly, but the videoclip to Soundgarden's Spoon Man always had me thinking how horrible living would be if that was how the world was every second tuesday of the month. The ever present pervading sense of foreboding as the days ticked by closer and closer... Heheheheh.

    For a legitimate entry to this thread I'll have to go back and study my Culture Club book. Its got an awesome section on the reeeeally out there compositions from artists like La Monte Young and so forth. One of the compositions was written and performed many decades ago, and technically the performance is still going...
    •  
      CommentAuthorPaul Sizer
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008
     (2374.9)
    For sheer weirdness, STIMMUNG, by Stockhausen, is pretty out there. It's all vocal, all dissonant, and stretches the human voice very, very far. Stockhausnen based it on 50-some "magic words", which are stated in an order to be dertermined by the players, and with great emphasis and intent. Moving through all these words takes about an hour, and is overwhelmingly surreal.


    I've seen some other information on this composition; Stockhausen also notated this composition with the words connected and drawn in lines that showed the direction the tones where meant to go, i.e. a word would then be followed with another word (connected with a line, in the way that cursive letters are connected) placed lower on the page, indicating that word should be sung in a lower tone. He was trying to break away from the hierarchy of traditional musical note notation. This notation looked like a huge "follow the path/maze" on the page. Stockhausen was the man, that's for sure!
    • CommentAuthortmofee
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008
     (2374.10)
    @Adam - What happened to the Shuf? Is he still on JJJ or did he get kicked off when Charlie and Mel's show disappeared?

    I still say he should of taken over The J Files. Give me a reason to listen to JJJ.
    •  
      CommentAuthorJP Stargazer
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008 edited
     (2374.11)
    Well, in my case the strangest I've listened so far is The Legendary Pink Dots. Of course, at this point, they have become normal for me, but I remember that years ago I was hanging with some friends at the house of one of them, and after watching a movie, this friend pulled out a fatty and started smoking it and he says "you have to listen to this" and he starts playing 1992's "Shadow Weaver"; my very first Pink Dots album! And that blunt was really abnormal, I've started to feel sick and dizzy and shit, and I started shouting to him: "You son of a bitch, what did this shit had?!"

    Mmmm, yeah, well, I kind of got carried with my comment.
    Anyway, you should try this:
    http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=157927438
    http://www.myspace.com/thanatoloop
    http://www.myspace.com/unfestinsagital
    Chilean bands.
  12.  (2374.12)
    @acacia I love that film. Terrifying visuals to go with a terrifying piece of music. I saw the Quay Bros. do a talk and they showed that film and they said when they showed the film to Stockhausen he got really upset and started crying and carrying on. If I remember the story correctly, he then accused the Quay Bros. of somehow reading his mind and thought the woman in the film was his mother that was killed in the concentration camps.
  13.  (2374.13)
    Diamanda is up there for me...



    And then there's Fantomas...



    Fantomas is overall is strange and experimental. Patton has been experimenting with vocal chords for awhile now, claiming in an interview that he didn't write lyrics for any of the Fantomas songs because words always expressed an agenda. Diamanda Galas was ahead of him in this, but between all the talent in Fantomas, specifically Buzz Osborn's guitars and tone from the Melvins and Dave Lombardo's drums from Slayer, I do find them more influential personally style-wise.
    •  
      CommentAuthorTrotsky
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008 edited
     (2374.14)
    What I honestly cannot understand is this:

    ELP, WTF?

    Somebody please explain this to me.
    What the hell?
    What happened to make this seem like a good idea?

    Don't get it.

    also, YMCK always scores kinda high on other people's strange-o-meter.
    (but, for me, it's just Tuesday.)
    Go YMCK, GO!
    • CommentAuthorabkosher
    • CommentTimeMay 26th 2008
     (2374.15)
    I have an incredibly soft spot in my heart for Spinmaster Plantpot:
    http://www.myspace.com/ppot
    http://youtube.com/watch?v=m1E24hZ9WDA&feature=related and loads of other You Tube videos
  16.  (2374.16)
    Einsturzende Neubauten's (spelled from memory) song on the Heat soundtrack, "Armenia."

    This song is probly the best horror music I've ever heard because it's much more atmosphere and sound effects than music.

    Oh, there's a melody... a faint, haunting string arrangement that almost sounds more like howling wind. The rest is grunts, clatters, quiet mutterings in german, a screeching buzz-saw, and exactly two shrieking, grating human screams.

    This song is the sound of insanity.
    • CommentAuthorSRT
    • CommentTimeMay 27th 2008
     (2374.17)
  18.  (2374.18)
    I can't link to this, only describe it. Many years ago, probably 1995, during Winchester's annual Hat Fair street festival, a group of travellers struck up camp in the car park behind my flat. About 3am, they struck up the most insane music I'd ever heard (although bear in mind that I'd been asleep and possibly drunk as well). It was this kind of Lovecraftian swamp noise, crazy back to front rhythms, some form of trumpet, a fiddle, god knows what else. I had to fight the urge to get up and join in, leaping around in the night like some sort of savage demon, yelping and cackling. My girlfriend at the time was petrified, she thought the Devil was coming and was cowering under the duvet.

    Then someone from one of the houses went and yelled at them to shut up and it stopped.


    The closest I've ever heard to this again is Coltrane's Meditations, which is absolutely intense, cathartic and so furious it just beats your mind into submission before calming down and letting it breath again. Probably the musical equivalent to being flung into an icy ocean and then pulled out again and wrapped in blankets.
    • CommentAuthorfrenchbloke
    • CommentTimeMay 27th 2008 edited
     (2374.19)
    it's hard to define strange, sure, I can throw in whitehouse, renaldo and the loaf, non, the residents, nurse with wound, ptose, die todliche doris, fred lane, jandek and a cast of thousands but they're not that strange to me. Strange music, to me, is music that has that "what the feck?" factor. for example the Butthole Surfer's had a side project called The Jackofficers and released a truly mad album, "Digital Dump" which, seemingly, was inspired by the acid house scene, only without ever listening to and acid house music. It's great.
  20.  (2374.20)
    Stockhausen's pretty up there in weirdness. i don't know anyone else who'd think playing violins in a helicopter or recording the silence of an orchestra would be a good idea...

    also, tibetan hip-hop is pretty weird. no links as i only heard it while i was there. it was like they heard one hip-hop song once, and tried to recreate it with cheap electronics and asian scales. didn't quite work.

    Nurse With Wound i'd consider up on the strange scale, but also very listenable and hypnotic.
    Nurse With Wound

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