All India Radio - Free Me





http://allindiaradio.bandcamp.com/album/free-me

Hace unas semanas Amazon lanzó su Cloud Player, ayer Google lanzó "Music Beta" y en los próximos meses otras compañías harán lo propio. No acabo de pillar el entusiasmo por este tipo de servicios, que al fin y al cabo son como ipods en la nube. Si llevo un reproductor en el bolsillo, ¿para qué sirven? ¿Sólo para ampliar el espacio de almacenamiento? ¿Cuál es la idea principal que hay detrás, lo que va a hacer que millones de usuarios se vuelquen en estos servicios?

¿Opiniones?

The iPod has changed the way we listen to music. And the way we respond to it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2289177/pagenum/all/
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By Nikil Saval

The following essay is excerpted from the latest issue of n+1 magazine. It is available online only in Slate. To read the complete version, click here to purchase n+1 in print.

Two years ago, at the nadir of the financial crisis, the urban sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh wondered aloud in the New York Times why no mass protests had arisen against what was clearly a criminal coup by the banks. Where were the pitchforks, the tar, the feathers? Where, more importantly, were the crowds? Venkatesh's answer was the iPod:

"In public spaces, serendipitous interaction is needed to create the 'mob mentality.' Most iPod-like devices separate citizens from one another; you can't join someone in a movement if you can't hear the participants. Congrats Mr. Jobs for impeding social change." Venkatesh's suggestion was glib, tossed off—yet it was also a rare reminder, from the quasi-left, of how urban life has been changed by recording technologies.

The concern that recorded music promotes solipsism and isolation isn't new. Before the invention of the record and the gramophone (1887), the only form of listening people knew was social; the closest thing to a private musical experience was playing an instrument for yourself, or silently looking over a score. More often, if you had the means, you got to sit in the panopticon of the concert hall, seeing and being seen to the accompaniment of Verdi—an experience most fully described by Edith Wharton in the opening scene of The Age of Innocence (1920), just as it was going out of style. With mechanical reproduction came the hitherto unimaginable phenomenon of listening to multi-instrumental music by yourself. How, a contributor to Gramophone magazine asked in 1923, would you react if you stumbled upon somebody in the midst of this private rapture? It would be "as if you had discovered your friend sniffing cocaine, emptying a bottle of whisky, or plaiting straws in his hair.

People, we think, should not do things 'to themselves,' however much they may enjoy doing them in company." But it wasn't only solitary hyper-listening that recording facilitated. By 1960, recorded popular music had begun, in mysterious ways, to promote new social movements. Former Black Panther Bobby Seale recounts in his memoir how Huey Newton developed an elaborate reading of Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man" as an allegory of race: "This song Bobby Dylan was singing became a very big part of that whole publishing operation of the Black Panther paper. And in the background, while we were putting this paper out, this record came up and I guess a number of papers were published, and many times we would play that record." The song wasn't overtly political but its mood of stately menace seems to have insinuated itself into the politics of the Panthers.

The '60s were a decade of both mass protests and mass concerts, and this was more than a coincidence. Barbara Ehrenreich has suggested that the roots of second-wave feminism could be found in the tens of thousands of shrieking girls who filled arenas and ballparks at the Beatles' American stops, from the Hollywood Bowl to Shea. These girls, unladylike, insistent, were going to scream for what they wanted. Social change drove musical experimentation, and—more remarkably—vice versa.

The music of this era was—it's worth repeating—an incitement to social change. It was the sound of not going reflexively to war, of mingling across class and racial lines, of thinking it might be all right to sleep around a little, of wanting to work a job that didn't suck.

Of course the radical hopes of the '60s collapsed. The highest-rated YouTube comment on a video of Joan Baez singing "We Shall Overcome" manages to be both smug and glum: "Though we obviously failed, I am so glad that I am of a generation that believed we could make a difference." By the early '70s, popular music had more or less forfeited its capacity to promote social movements. From then on its different varieties would be associated with defining lifestyle niches, consumer habits, and subcultural affiliations. In this way the make-it-new modernist imperative, which seized pop music several decades late, came to seem little different from the program of advertisers launching fresh product lines. Jadedness swept pop music enthusiasts, many of whom, heartbroken by their brief glimpse of collective life, would discount the whole era of the '60s as history's cunning preparation for a descent into hellish consumerism. Welcome to dystopia, a counterfeit heaven where music plays all the time.

***
The first to ring the alarm about the omnipresence of recorded music were classical music snobs who, as part of their contracted duties as university professors, had to spend time on college campuses. "This is being written in a study in a college of one of the great American universities," wrote George Steiner in 1974.

"The walls are throbbing gently to the beat of music coming from one near and several more distant amplifiers. The walls quiver to the ear or to the touch roughly eighteen hours per day, sometimes twenty-four." Allan Bloom picked up the beat in The Closing of the American Mind (1987): "Though students do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. .... Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music." Steiner: "It matters little whether it is that of pop, folk or rock. What counts is the all-pervasive pulsation, morning to night and into night, made indiscriminate by the cool burn of electronic timbre." The only historical analogy Bloom could think of was to the Wagner cult of the late 19th century. Yet even world-conquering Wagner appealed to a limited class, who could only hear his works in opera houses. By contrast the music of the late-20th-century world was truly ubiquitous. Steiner: "When a young man walks down a street in Vladivostok or Cincinnati with his transistor blaring, when a car passes with its radio on at full blast, the resulting sound-capsule encloses the individual." Bloom: "There is the stereo in the home, in the car; there are concerts; there are music videos, with special channels devoted to them, on the air, nonstop; there are the Walkmans so that no place—not public transportation, not the library—prevents students from communing with the Muse, even while studying." Steiner: "What tissues of sensibility are being numbed or exacerbated?" Yadda, yadda. Yet Bloom and Steiner were right! In fact they had no idea how right they would become. If the spread of home stereo equipment in the 1970s, followed by that of portable devices (the boom box, the Walkman, briefly the Discman), brought music to the masses in a new way, digitization and the iPod have made recorded music even more plentiful and ubiquitous. The fears in Bloom's time that cassette tapes would bring down the music industry are quaint now, in the face of trillions of bytes of music traded brazenly over the Internet every minute. So, too, does the disc mania of record collectors pale in the face of digital collections measured in weeks of music. A DJ's crate of 100 LPs amounts to about three days of straight listening; your standard 60-gigabyte iPod, 50 days. Has anyone these days listened to all of their music, even once through?

Nobody knows how much music we listen to, since so often we're not even listening. The American Time Use Survey, performed every year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, throws up its hands. Does music playing in the background at a cafe count? Music in a film?

Music played to drown out other music? Music played while reading, writing, cleaning, exercising, eating, sleeping—all of this has to count in some way. Stumbling into a college dorm now to ask the kids to turn it down, Steiner would find them all earmuffed with headphones as they stare at their computers, each listening to his own private playlist while something else plays on the stereo loud enough for a communal spirit to be maintained. And this is true not only of colleges but the world at large.

If it's easier than ever to listen to other people's music, it's also more tempting than ever to do so all alone. Walkman listening never lost the stigma of the juvenile; the sophistication—and expense—of the iPod have made adulthood safe for solipsism as never before. What does it mean for us, on the listening end, as we pad around the world with our iPods, trying to keep those shitty white earbuds from falling out of our ears? Public music criticism—a wasteland—isn't much help. It mainly focuses on individual works or single performances, when it isn't giving us drooling profiles of artists. This has nothing to do with our current mode of listening, which only rarely obsesses on particular works or genres, let alone worships particular figures.

In light of the epoch-making iPod, we need a way to find out what all this music listening is doing to us, or what we're doing with it.

***
In the 20th century, the two most considered attempts to connect music and society were those of the philosopher Theodor Adorno and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

Among the main philosophers of Western music—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard—Adorno knew the most about music and worked hardest to figure out its relationship to history. For Adorno, it wasn't just that historical forces circumscribed the production and reception of musical works; it was that historical conflicts appeared in music in mediated form. Thus a seemingly autonomous, nonrepresentational, and non linguistic art transfigured the world and returned it to the listener in a way that oriented him ideologically. The huge melodic conflicts animating Beethoven's symphonies and the brassy, thumping triumphs with which they concluded announced the era of bourgeois ascendancy after the French Revolution. The "emancipation of dissonance" in the atonal works of Schoenberg suggested a crisis of the bourgeoisie in which the self-evidence of tonality, like that of human progress, began to crack up.

Infamously, when society began to produce new forms of music that accompanied unrest by workers and students, the old Marxist turned a deaf ear. His essays on jazz and pop music are notorious classics of "bad" Adorno. The syncopations of bebop were only a mirage of liberty, and the relentless repetitiveness of rock and roll a virtual embodiment of a reified, historyless, mythological consciousness. The problem here was not exactly snobbism or even unconscious racism. It's that Adorno seemed only to understand and accept a model of listening in which music solicits and rewards the listener's whole attention. This is a musical sociology of the concert hall and the study, not the street, store, workplace, block party, or demonstration. From its standpoint, contemporary music of less-than-Schoenbergian melodic complexity can only seem simple, in the sense of dumb.

Theodor Adorno (center)Bourdieu was a kind of anti-Adorno, his sociology a negation of the traditional aesthetics Adorno had mastered. Bourdieu practiced a deliberate and heroic philistinism.

He seemed to know virtually nothing about music; it's not even clear he liked it. "Music is the 'pure' art par excellence," he wrote in Distinction. "It says nothing and it has nothing to say." Adorno would have recognized this ostensibly timeless aperçu as a historically specific statement, the product of a whole century (the 19th) of debate over precisely this question: What and how does music communicate? Yet out of this falsehood Bourdieu came to a startling conclusion, the truth of which we've all had to concede: "Nothing more clearly affirms one's 'class,' nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music." In the mid-1960s, he conducted a giant survey of French musical tastes, and what do you know? The haute bourgeoisie loved The Well-Tempered Clavier; the upwardly mobile got high on "jazzy" classics like "Rhapsody in Blue"; while the working class dug what the higher reaches thought of as schmaltzy trash, the "Blue Danube" waltz and Petula Clark. Bourdieu drew the conclusion that judgments of taste reinforce forms of social inequality, as individuals imagine themselves to possess superior or inferior spirit and perceptiveness, when really they just like what their class inheritance has taught them to.

Distinction appeared in English in 1984, cresting the high tide of the culture wars about to hit the universities. Adorno had felt that advanced art-music was doing the work of revolution.

Are you kidding, Herr Professor? might have been Bourdieu's response. And thus was Adorno dethroned, all his passionate arguments about history as expressed in musical form recast as moves in the game of taste, while his dismissal of jazz became practically the most famous cultural mistake of the 20th century.

***
In Adorno and Bourdieu we have two radically different perspectives, inhabiting each other's blind spots, with a convergence in both authors' political sympathy with socialism. We can agree with Adorno that music has immanent, formal properties that are connected, somehow, to large-scale historical forces. And we can agree with Bourdieu that musical taste is an instrument in the legitimation of class hierarchies.

Pierre BourdieuSo Bourdieu is helpful when we ask what the iPod has wrought in the realm of musical classification. The social world of opera-going may be headed the way of polar bears and ice caps, but society hasn't disappeared. A hierarchical social world has managed to absorb the omnipresence of music pretty effortlessly. You can see this in the violent intragenre squabbling that animates indie rock circles, and in the savage takedowns of avant-garde opera performances in art-music magazines. Meanwhile the proliferation of genre names represents an ever finer process of social differentiation, each genre's acolytes determining (as Serge Gainsbourg put it) qui est "in," qui est "out." The rise of generic distinctions has lately reached a climax of absurdity, such that we can name off the top of our heads: house, witch house, dub, dubstep, hardstep, dancehall, dance-floor, punk, post-punk, noise, "Noise," new wave, nu wave, No Wave, emo, post-emo, hip-hop, conscious hip-hop, alternative hip- hop, jazz hip-hop, hardcore hip-hop, nerd-core hip-hop, Christian hip-hop, crunk, crunkcore, metal, doom metal, black metal, speed metal, thrash metal, death metal, Christian death metal, and, of course, shoe-gazing, among others. (Meanwhile, 1,000 years of European art music is filed under "classical.") Some people listen to some of these; others, to only one; and others still, to nearly all. And this accomplishes a lot of handy social sorting, especially among the young, whenever music is talked about or played so that more than one person can hear it.

At the same time, modes of listening seem to be moving toward the (apparent) opposite of micro-differentiation: a total pluralism of taste. This has become the most celebrated feature of the iPod era. "I have seen the future," Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, wrote in 2004, "and it is called the Shuffle—the setting on the iPod that skips randomly from one track to another." Here the iPod, or the digitization of musical life it represents, promises emancipation from questions of taste. Differences in what people listen to, in a Shuffled world, may have less and less to do with social class and purchasing power. Or, better yet, taste won't correlate to class distinction:

The absence of taste will. As certain foodies score points by having eaten everything—blowfish, yak milk tea, haggis, hot dogs—so the person who knows and likes all music achieves a curious sophistication-through-indiscriminateness.

Adorno would be more at home analyzing the uses to which the omnipresence of music has been put in the service of "the administered life"—the background Muzak and easy listening, the somehow consolingly melancholy shopping pop, that we hear in malls and supermarkets almost without noticing. "I do love a new purchase!" says the Gang of Four outright—while all the other songs merely insinuate it. Around the holidays, Banana Republic will alternate familiar hits like George Michael's "Last Christmas" with pounding C-grade techno, lulling you into a state of sickly nostalgia before ramping up your heart rate—a perfect way to goose you into an impulse buy. So, too, as Adorno would have been unsurprised to find out, has music become a common way for people to get through the workday. Your local cafe's barista may literally depend on Bon Iver's reedy lugubriousness to palliate a dreary job as you depend on coffee.

On the other hand, Adorno's prejudice against empirical research—as Brecht said, Adorno "never took a trip in order to see"—meant that he never understood how music could be used for different purposes by the very people it was supposed to manage and administer. People not only use music to help them swallow an unpalatable life, but to enhance and enlarge their capacities for action. If a bass line of a standard 12-bar blues, repeating with machinelike regularity, keeps you clicking through the data entry sheet, a sharp post-punk squall can move you to sabotage and revolt, and vice versa. Of course music can also move you in less obviously political ways, filling you with romantic enthusiasm or unshakable sorrow. Then there are all the uses of music that are beneath good and evil, that neither shore up nor undermine the system. In utopia, as under late capitalism, there will still be a lot of cooking and cleaning to do, as well as long drives to take in our electric cars. These slightly boring parts of life are made less so by listening to slightly boring music.

If Adorno, in his emphasis on the immanent unfolding of musical works as cognition, didn't understand the mixed uses of distracted listening, Bourdieu missed something even more important. His empiricism blinded him to the utopian potential in music. You would never guess, to read his books, that they were published after the '60s, an extraordinary period that demonstrated the capacity of musical taste to break down as well as reinforce social boundaries. Shoveled at us now as commodities played ad nauseam on Clear Channel, the "classic rock" of the '60s no longer discloses its role in the social movements of that time. And yet—Hendrix, Joplin; Coltrane, Davis, Coleman; the Stones, the Beatles; and Riley, Young, Reich—even if they didn't sing a single revolutionary word, even if they chastised you for "carrying pictures of Chairman Mao," they were all either directly involved with social movements or deeply implicated in them.

***
The great 1990s magazine the Baffler spent its first half-decade analyzing how the culture industry managed, with increasing success, to recognize new musical trends and package them and sell them back at a markup to the people who'd pioneered them. The Baffler looked back to the punk scene of the early '80s for inspiration; it spoke up for small labels that sold music to local constituencies. If you couldn't get what you wanted on the radio, you would have to find it left of the dial—and keep looking over your shoulder for the man.

The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn't care what that song says. Other times he doesn't even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network. To paraphrase Yeltsin's famous offer to the Chechens, take as much free music as you can stomach. We'll see where it gets you.

If recording and mechanical reproduction opened up the world of musical pluralism—of listening to other people's music until you and they became other people yourselves—digital reproduction expanded that pluralism to the point where it reversed itself. You have all the world's music on your iPod, in your earphones. Now it's "other people's music"—which should be very exciting to encounter—as played in cafes and stores that is the problem. In any public setting, it acquires a coercive aspect. The iPod is the thing you have to buy in order not to be defenseless against the increasingly sucky music played to make you buy things.

One radical option remains: abnegation—some "Great Refusal" to obey the obscure social injunction that condemns us to a lifetime of listening. Silence: The word suggests the torture of enforced isolation, or a particularly monkish kind of social death. But it was the tremendously congenial avant-garde gadabout John Cage who showed, just as the avalanche of recorded music was starting to bury us, how there was "no such thing as silence," that listening to an absence of listener-directed sounds represented a profounder and far more heroic submission than the regular attitude adopted in concert halls—a willingness to "let sounds be," as he put it. Such were Cage's restrictions that he needed to herd everyone into their seats in order to make his point—an authoritarian gesture toward an anarchic result. But now in conditions of relative freedom we can listen to 4'33" on record, or on our iPods, and the change in attention it demands is exactly the opposite of our endless contemporary communing with music, our neurotic search for the right sound, the exact note that never comes. What if we tried to listen to nothing? Silence is the feature of our buzzing sound-world we enjoy least, whose very existence we threaten to pave over track by track. Silence is the most endangered musical experience in our time. Turning it up, we might figure out what all our music listening is meant to drown out, the thing we can't bear to hear.

Abro este nuevo hilo porque me parece buena idea enfocar un poco mejor la recomendación de discos. Actualmente tenemos "¿Qué estáis escuchando ahora?" que muchos utilizamos de vez en cuando para recomendar música, cuando no es esa exactamente la finalidad del hilo.
Un ejemplo práctico para ver la diferencia: si acabamos de comprar un nuevo disco y queremos compartir que lo estamos escuchando, lo comentaríamos allí. Si el disco nos gusta y queremos recomendarlo a otros usuarios, lo haríamos aquí.

Como se trata de recomendar discos, pienso que podemos adjuntar algún comentario o reseña para hacernos una idea de lo que podemos esperar. Pero que tampoco sea imprescindible .

Y para empezar (propongo modelo sencillo de presentación):


Mercedes Peón - Sós (2010)

World music, folk gallego, fusión, avant-garde.




Actualmente en el primer puesto de la World Music Chart Europe.

"Mercedes Peón is one of the Spanish music scene's true originals. Famous for her cropped hair and multi-instrumental skills, she set out to revive the traditional music of her home region of Galicia by writing new songs that echo old styles, and by using traditional instrumentals in a contemporary setting, making extensive use of sampling and electronica, as well as guitar and accordion. She's joined by other musicians, but this is largely a solo recording, in which she plays 20 instruments, building up often dramatic, epic layers of sound around her powerful, no-nonsense vocals. The mood switches constantly, often within the same song, from swirling folk dances to stark, howling vocal passages, or (in Sao Paulo) switching from the echoes of a church service to drifting balladry and then jazz. There are occasional sections in which she sounds too clever for her own good, as with the overused sampling of children's voices on Nana Meus, but her clash of the traditional and experimental is bold and intriguing, from the quirky Babel, with its mix of edgy instrumental work and voices in different languages, to the rousing blend of bagpipes and electronica on Falar Millor."
Robin Denselow
guardian.co.uk

Se abre la veda

http://www.earphonesolutions.com/westone-4.html?utm_source=cactusconnect&utm_medium=email&utm_content=banner&utm_campaign=W4

Ha salido Djay para iPad. Guau.
http://www.algoriddim.com/djay-ipad

El tema ha sido movido a Discusión general (Off-topic).

http://www.auriculares.org/foro/index.php?topic=4433.0

Estoy viendo el evento musical de Apple y han anunciado una nueva versión de iTunes con red social incorporada. No tiene mala pinta. Puede ser divertido para compartir recomendaciones con los foreros. Habrá que probarla

El amigo John se está dejando los dineros en publicidad. Los que sigáis la televisión americana lo habréis visto en Covert Affairs (USA Network). En los dos capítulos emitidos tenemos un product placement brutal, con diálogos en los que se habla de los Grado RS2 y escenas construidas especialmente para su lucimiento. Son los auriculares que usa el analista ciego, no sólo para usar en su trabajo haciendo "magia" con el sonido, sino también para escuchar a Mingus . Primera mención en la serie:

Annie: Oh. I was gonna ask what the headphones are for.
Auggie: Oversharing. My bad. Grado RS2s. Great for monitoring operations, getting real-time feedback when I'm typing or listening to Mingus when I'm supposed to be working.

Tráiler:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMyHMbLGK0M

Hola chicos. Creo este hilo para ir publicando las impresiones y reseñas de los que ya hemos usado este aparato durante un tiempo, de cara a informar a los que se están pensando su compra. Por favor, intentemos comentar aquí sólo las experiencias de uso y dejemos para el hilo Ipad, opiniones las discusiones sobre el concepto del aparato, Apple, aparatos de la competencia, etc.

Yo todavía estoy madurando mis impresiones . Intentaré publicarlas hoy o mañana, en cuanto tenga un momento para poner algo por escrito.

Ya ha pasado algo más de una semana desde el fallecimiento de Dio y creo que no podemos retrasar más abrir un hilo para rendirle homenaje. Uno de los grandes vocalistas de la historia del rock, era además una figura querida y admirada por todos. Sin duda uno de mis ídolos rockeros desde siempre.

Cito tres de sus discos clásicos para recordar su trabajo:

Rainbow - On Stage (1977)

Black Sabbath - Heaven and Hell (1980)

Dio - Holy Diver (1983)

Y este inolvidable videoclip :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL1RguQL4jQ

El próximo jueves me voy de viaje durante unos días. Con los líos del volcán, anticipo que me tocará pasar un montón de horas en aviones y aeropuertos, así que he pensado en llevarme unos cuantos discos tranquilos que sean interesantes para aprovechar el tiempo y relajarme. ¿Qué me recomendáis? .
Nada ambient, cañero, pop o indie, por favor

Como consecuencia de la actitud de la SGAE y algunos de sus más conocidos dirigentes, es frecuente ver como reacción un fuerte desprecio de la música española. Como eso a mi me parece un disparate de proporciones mayúsculas, he pensado en crear este hilo para recomendar y charlar sobre la música de nuestro país, los diferentes géneros y discos preferidos. ¿Quién empieza? 

Si habéis conseguido evitar la resaca (yo no lo he conseguido del todo) hoy es el mejor día del año para escuchar música. Ya sabéis, todo el mundo paralizado en un silencio total hasta las primeras horas de la tarde . ¿A cuántos os gusta hacer el esfuerzo de levantaros el día 1 para disfrutar de una buena mañana de música?

All India Radio (el grupo australiano de down tempo/ambient) regala disco por navidades:

http://allindiaradio.bandcamp.com/

Se trata de un disco de remezclas y versiones alternativas. Está en múltiples formatos incluyendo FLAC y ALAC.

Hay que ver lo que se llega a vender . qué risa

Hola chicos.

Ahora mismo estoy probando de prestado uno de los nuevos iMacs de 27" (iMac10,1). Sólo se puede decir de una manera: son sensacionales .



Es el de la derecha, claro.



La trasera es muy chula, con unos acabados de ciencia ficción.

Lo tendré por aquí buena parte del fin de semana, por si alguien está pensando en comprárselo y tiene alguna duda.

Mención especial merece el Magic Mouse, el nuevo ratón multitouch de Apple. Del diseño poco puedo aportar que no sea evidente: para mi es el ratón más bonito que se haya creado nunca. De su funcionalidad, de momento sólo puedo decir que es una gran mejora respecto a los últimos ratones de Apple, de los que yo no suelo ser nada partidario. Todavía me estoy formando una opinión sobre él. Tiene una ergonomía diferente a la de la mayoría de ratones, creados para ocupar todo el hueco de la palma de la mano. El Magic está hecho para ser manejado con la palma más plana de lo habitual, con el índice y corazón sobre él y "controlado" por los lados por el pulgar y el anular. Lo digo entre comillas porque no se trata de sujetarlo con fuerza, sino de "conducirlo" con la ayuda de la punta de los dedos. La superficie multitouch va muy bien para el scroll, pero con gestos de varios dedos no lo tengo muy claro. La verdad es que es un dispositivo un tanto "zen" diseñado para ser acariciado con delicadeza. Basta con rozarlo con suavidad para que responda .

Os dejo el vídeo promocional:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWOe5QYgn7k

Como parece que hay mucho metalero loco por aquí suelto, vamos a crear este hilo. Podemos hacer recomendaciones, hablar de nuestras preferencias, contar cualquier experiencia o comentar las últimas novedades musicales. A ver quién se anima a empezar

Ayer aguaxp me mencionaba sus experiencias en el concierto de Ancient, una banda underground de black metal, y como le había llamado la atención la "armonía del ruido que practica". Me ha parecido una frase que define toda una sensibilidad musical que es digna de comentario, así que he abierto este hilo. En él podemos discutir diferentes estilos que giren en torno al "ruido" y hacer nuestras recomendaciones para aquellos que se sientan "atrevidos" y quieran experimentar un poco con nosotros .

Hace unos días en "¿Qué estáis escuchando ahora?" mencionaba uno de los discos que más me está gustando de este año. Se trata de Microcosmos de Drudkh (2009).



El caso de Drudkh es pintoresco. Se trata de una banda ucraniana de black metal con tintes folk completamente desconocida por el gran público, pero que sin embargo es de gran influencia entre los músicos de black, pagan y metal progresivo. Su filosofía de trabajo es atípica en el mundo de la música: no dan conciertos, no dan entrevistas, no hacen apariciones públicas. Sólo componen y editan discos, lo que les ha permitido llevar un productiva carrera con 8 títulos desde 2003. Hasta hace poco ni siquiera se conocían a todos los integrantes del grupo ni las letras de las canciones, lo que sin duda ha contribuido ha rodear a esta banda de un halo de misterio que quizás constituye su única concesión a la mercadotecnia.

Como recoge la Wikipedia, Drudkh se caracteriza por la "densidad atmosférica de sus composiciones y la temática romántica y naturalista de sus letras, inspirada en la mitología eslava, las estaciones del año y sobre todo la majestuosidad y el misterio de los bosques". Su música es melancólica e hipnótica, orquestada en torno a espirales de distorsión armónica que se repiten en ciclos inductores de una extraña lúcidez y relajación. Ya sé que cuando lo oigáis a muchos os resultará extraño que una banda de black metal pueda resultar relajante . A ver qué opináis.
Estaba empezando a escribir mis comentarios sobre Microcosmos, su último disco, pero me he encontrado con una reseña en Encyclopaedia Metallum que refleja bastante bien mis impresiones.

Citar"Finally the very much expected (at least for Drudkh fans like myself) brand new full length Microcosmos is here, and my expectations, as one would expect, are extremely high, after six wonderful full lengths, one of them completely acoustical. And here it is, fresh in all the senses of the world, what we have here is a rather different Drudkh. I would not say better or worse since, this album carries a fairly new spirit and sound, one that caught me profoundly by surprise. Drudkh seems to be improving constantly in little details like sound quality and fierce delivery of extreme music, and regarding the latter they have reached a new high in their career.
We have a nice, folky intro as a welcome, not much unlike the ones at Krov u nashykh Krynytsyakh. A minute or so later we are introduced to the first proper song on the album, "Distant Cries Of Cranes", which, after an almost 3 minutes of harsh and aggressive attack of blastbeats and tremolos, delivers the typical mid-paced Drudkh spirit, not lacking in the emotional riffs Drudkh is well known for, and Roman's vocals, which are better than ever. The melodies themselves are not completely different form the ones on their classic releases, but they do sound fresh and exciting, since the sound quality itself seems to have improved a lot in the last two years.
The approach on this album is similar to that of aforementioned Krov u nashykh Krynytsyakh, with even acoustic sections in songs and dispersed semi-solos dancing around the melodies now and then. However the formula seems considerably renewed and refined, and we get strange but awesome moments of what I call musical plays (as in games, not as in plainly playing instruments), that is a certain incursion in alternative, one would say non-black-metal-ish approaches to deliver melodies and emotion, which is not new on the band, but the actual performance certainly is. For example, the bass seems to take an ever increasingly more important roll in the music compositions, so it gets a lot of moments to shine on it's own, while guitars make alternate spaces of silence to the purpose. Drums seem a bit more varied, reminding me of the most shining moments of Autumn Aurora, they've got this jazzy feeling at times, what with the incursion of time shifts and hi-hat alternation along with drumming that doesn't just settle with a regular blastbeat interspersed with mid-paced drumming.
The guitar tone, albeit heavily distorted at times, is not to surprise any Drudkh aficionado, but it's certainly more distilled than previous efforts which in my opinion is amazingly great. The riffs themselves are as Drudkh as possible: Repetitive yet compelling and full of emotion, but at times we get new, I'd say experimental, approaches to the music, which is really a breath of fresh air for any fan disappointed with their previous effort "Estrangement".
There's not much else I can say about this release. It might very well rank among their best. It's really breath taking at times, in ways they haven't been able to pull since Autumn Aurora. The melodies are considerably more intricate and experimental at times without getting really far from the classic Drudkh sound. Drums sound great, they're not as abrasive as they were on Estrangement, nor as opaque as they were on the older releases. There's a lot of variation and at the same time, the typical, almost hypnotic Drudkh sound is more than present throughout the whole release. This might be one of the best albums to have been released so far in 2009. Extremely recommended.
Originally written for the paper version of the Terror Cult Zine
http://www.terrorcultprod.glt.pl/"

Si os gusta Microcosmos no dejéis de probar discos como Autumn Aurora (2004) o Blood in Our Wells (2006), pero si estáis seguros de que el black metal no es lo vuestro, os recomiendo probar Songs of Grief and Solitude (2006), un álbum de folk acústico que tiene todas las características de la música de Drudkh, pero sin distorsión . Un disco ideal para escuchar en esta época otoñal mientras paseamos por el bosque.

Aguaxp y yo estamos comentando este tema en privado referido a los conciertos metaleros, pero nos ha parecido que vale la pena hacerlo en público para que todos participemos ya que además ha salido recientemente en algún otro hilo. Él acaba de ver a Ancient en una nave industrial creo que con buen sonido, pero lo habitual es que en la mayoría de conciertos nos encontremos un panorama bastante triste.

Os doy mi opinión según mis impresiones. Para amenizar la cosa, os pongo unos cuantos vídeo de Tálesien, grupo en el que toca la guitarra un conocido mío, Jumpin, y que está haciendo música muy chula. Compraos su último disco, Melancolía, que está muy bien . Evidentemente los vídeos no son un ejemplo de calidad de sonido, ya que son de YouTube.

Yo soy muy aficionado a ver conciertos metaleros en directo. Los conciertos con mejor sonido suelen ser los de mediano tamaño patrocinados por ayuntamientos en exteriores, por aquello de que la acústica no suele dar problemas y los equipos son buenos y están manejados por profesionales.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT347dHLIcA

En salas amplias y sin acondicionar como naves industriales y pabellones, no hay mucho que hacer: el sonido siempre va a ser malo. La opción mejor yo creo que acaba siendo ponerse delante de la amplificación para evitar los ecos, siempre que llevemos los oídos protegidos, claro . Esto a veces es muy difícil, porque puede estar suspendida en lo alto, de tal manera que si no hay amplificación en el escenario en las primeras filas se oye fatal. Y al echarse para atrás, hola eco eco . Así que hay que andar buscando un lado justo delante de la "línea de fuego" de las torres. Es lo que ocurrió en el concierto de Amon Amarth de Vigo, por ejemplo, que no tenía equipo en el escenario. En las situaciones difíciles, todo acaba dependiendo del equipo que haya en el concierto y cuanto más escaso, menos posibilidades tenemos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFFUq7nKZBM

Sin embargo Dark Tranquility tenía el escenario cubierto con el equipo habitual y en el foso se oía de vicio . Para mi fue el mejor sonido de todo el festival.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xODHHzHWyug

En salas pequeñas la acústica suele ser mejor, pero los equipos bastante pobres. En estos casos yo creo que es mejor sólo usar los amplis del grupo (si la cosa está muy cruda) o poner muchos altavoces distribuidos por la sala con mucho menos volumen cada uno, cosa que no se hace casi nunca.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8IS_0t5PtM

Y si se puede prescindir de amplificación sobredimensionada, mucho mejor. En salas muy pequeñas, lo mejor es usar instrumentos acústicos y recogerlos a través de la amplificación normal de la sala:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC03D8GVCT4

Es por eso que yo disfruto tanto de los conciertos de folk que tenemos aquí en Galicia. En un bar, tomando una caña y oyendo tocar sin problemas de distorsiones ni puñetas. Lo mismo con los conciertos de jazz, música inventada para ser tocada en bares pequeños .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaaWnT3rqNo

Evidentemente no se le puede pedir a un grupo de black metal que vaya dando por ahí conciertos acústicos .

En cuanto a lo de la monitorización y preparación de la mezcla, depende del equipo técnico, que trabaja en función de los medios disponibles. Yo no creo que siempre se hace tan mal como opinaba aguaxp. Lo que es más frecuente es que el equipo sea muy justito y la sala sea un desastre. Muchos técnicos son conscientes de que el sonido resultante es flojo, pero es que poco pueden hacer con los recursos que tienen. También hay grupillos que empiezan que se llevan a un "amigo" que habitualmente no tiene experiencia ni conoce las peculiaridades de la sala, pero en estos casos yo creo que es comprensible.
Normalmente el sonido se prepara en función del equipo, siendo habitual que haya varias "zonas" de sonido si el concierto es suficientemente grande. Los músicos sobre el escenario tienen su sonido aparte, como es normal. Cuando vemos músicos dando instrucciones, normalmente es para su sonido particular. A veces es sólo para monitorear lo que están haciendo, a veces también para proyectar sonido hacia el público. En el foso suele haber otra zona de sonido, a veces con altavoces específicos orientados a las primeras filas, a veces sólo con la amplificación del escenario. Y luego está la amplificación principal, en forma de torres laterales o suspendidas a ambos lados del escenario, que no se percibe bien en las primeras filas por falta de ángulo. Esta zona es la que suele estar mejor ajustada ya que se percibe directamente desde la mesa.
Según nos situemos en la sala podemos tener mejor o peor sonido y según nuestro interés lo ideal es moverse un poco para "buscarlo". En conciertos de mediano tamaño no es raro disponer de una buena amplificación lateral pero una muy floja para el foso o incluso inexistente. Se suele percibir de inmediato porque no oímos al cantante. En estos casos es mejor echarse para atrás, aunque nos perdamos la intensidad de las primeras filas. También ocurre todo lo contrario: la amplificación principal puede ser malilla o estar quemada, mientras que la zona del escenario, gracias a la amplificación que lleva el grupo, es excelente. En esos casos más vale pegarse a la barrera y a alucinar .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEnY2Vy7eFw

El caso de los grandes conciertos es diferente. Sin duda disponen de los músicos de más éxito, los mejores equipos y técnicos de sonido, pero para mi la experiencia deja que desear debido a las limitaciones inherentes al formato. Los emplazamientos suelen ser muy poco adecuados para oír música. Los estadios de fútbol y grandes pabellones deportivos tienen una acústica de mala a muy mala. Luego tenemos las grandes aglomeraciones, que hacen que casi siempre estés alejado del escenario. Para ver el concierto "de lejos" y con sonido a verbena, me compro un dvd. Largas esperas, colas, escasez de WCs (¿hay algo peor cuando estamos en mitad de un concierto?), barras alejadas con bebidas a precios abusivos, mala organización... Todo ello aderezado con unos precios altísimos. Para los que no somos demasiado mitómanos, este tipo de saraos, los justos.