The headline: Artificial Intelligence Creates First Prog Rock Record
In a related story, when I was in high school in the early 80s I had a good music friend who came up with the concept of "random notes and metrics" using a pair of dice against a matrix of notes and scales. He's involved in a few albums, so he'll remain nameless to protect the guilty. I don't know if he invented that concept, but one wonders if The Mars Volta didn't come up with a similar philosophy using an online random number generator.
For Frances the Mute I joked "Until now I didn't realize one could get 4 hours of music onto a single disc." And further offered "It's like Led Zeppelin playing the music of Thinking Plague."
Amputechture follows Frances the Mute and largely maintains the patterns above. I'm not really quite sure what to do with these albums. I find them fascinating but not necessarily enjoyable. I can't even imagine playing these songs live - they're not even really songs. It would seem they would need music stands and written charts. It's almost the logical extreme of prog rock. The band must've asked themselves "What if we take Tales from Topographic Oceans... to the next level?" The whole thing seems random and made up as it goes. Which in of itself is not a bad concept, and these guys do on rare occasion catch a groove. Once again, I feel like they're talented hard rockers gone completely off the rails. They're creating an endgame for something that doesn't need it.
Maybe one day these albums will make some kind of sense. Perhaps listening to only one song over and over would help. And then put the CD away for another day. Sounds like a reasonable retirement activity.
Ownership: CD: 2006 Universal / Gold Standard Laboratories. Jewel case with lyrical booklet and bizarre WPA era artwork. I bought this when it came out, but no recollection of where. This is like a $5 CD, so if you're looking for value per notes created, tough to beat mathematically speaking.
2006; 4/4/24 (new entry)
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