Two examples that come to me immediately are Enya and Smashing Pumpkins. If music starts feeling stale, I can put on Enya and music feels new again. It’s such a pleasant departure from the standard pop/rock/RnB etc sounds that dominate (even if I like those artists).
Anybody have their own equivalents?
I really appreciate the effort you went to in this comment, and to provide links (inline ones too!).
Mamaleek:
The Axiom Sound System concert is sublime, thank you so much again! That’s a rare concert I would like to attend. Lots of nuance, balance of layers and space between the elements. So refreshing. I haven’t enjoyed something this much since someone linked me to Glasper, Dave, Hodge, Bey: Live at North Sea Jazz Festival 2019. Love the collaboration link you provided too.
Mutaforia Lili is another great example of what I’m trying to discover! I’ve never heard anything like it, thank you so much. The album is probably more expensive than any album I have bought in my life, but I’ll give it some time just in the Bandcamp browser tab and see if it grows on me even further. We’re conditioned to underpay for music/software and labour in general these days IMO.
Universal Totem Orchestra: again, sublime. Another excellent suggestion and I wish I could pin your comment.
Dead Can Dance are one of those groups I’ve heard of many times but never listened to. But listening to the link you provided (again, thank you so much) it’s immediately drawing me in. I think I’ll be putting a lot of my existing music collection into long term storage :)
Yello - they’re new to me, I like it so far. I’ll check out the other suggestions too.
Again, thanks for all this. I tend to make the mistake of falling for a gimmick that sounds unique but wears thin - like a good hook in an otherwise formulaic song and sound scape. So when I made this post I was hoping for discoveries like these, but not expecting so many and such excellent ones in one comment :)
Mutaforia Lili’s several following albums are in the same vein. Also, the dude is a fan of dadaism, and the record prices are rather tongue-in-cheek: I remember them being 666 bucks or something like that at one point. He won’t really mind if you rip the music from Bandcamp with yt-dlp (as he published his music in a local social network), but he sure could use some money considering he’s in Ukraine.
I might add some more bands later, as I likewise dig those with unique sound. I’m also thinking of creating a community for unusual music in this vein, but ironically can’t think of a non-boring name.
For now, check out The Residents. On that album, they incorporated a bunch of melodies from popular music, so it probably sounded even more wild at the time.
And perhaps Nurse With Wound’s ‘Homotopy To Marie’.
You might also like some of what I’m posting in the music communities, e.g.:
John Zorn’s ‘Naked City’
UneXpect’s ‘In a Flesh Aquarium’
Hans Reichel’s ‘Yuxo: A New Daxophone Operetta’
Black Pus
dimsunk aka Max Sansalone
Chipmunks on 16 Speed
I will look into all of those, thank you again. I would definitely like to support someone currently in Ukraine. The personal reports from Kyiv sound frightening.
The community sounds great. Are you trying to avoid a literal/ descriptive name?
I want it descriptive but also at least somewhat quirky. An odd twist is that peculiar naming was how I dealt with boredom of programming in my day job — it was a bit of a specialty of mine, so now having only a boring straightforward name for stuff that’s actually interesting is downright embarrassing. I probably need to get drunk and fire up the thesaurus.
It’s tricky because the name and sidebar carry the job of letting people know the nuance that it’s not just for posting bands we like.