Flim Flam Man
December 4, 2020 11:13 AM   Subscribe

 
Decent playing, but the blindfold is inconsequential. Any drummer would know where their drums are on their own kit without looking — especially a kit as small as that.
posted by jonathanhughes at 11:24 AM on December 4, 2020 [4 favorites]


I used to believe that people wouldn't ever be able to perform IDM like this on live drums because it was just too much polyrhythm and too much broken beat to do without a drum machine and tight programming, but I've now seen way too many instances of people doing just that.

And yet there's people that manage to live drum Squarepusher tracks and that's... that's a lot.

I also would love to have a chance to ask what rock drumming legends like Neil Peart thought about this sort of thing.

For some reason I'm remembering this sentiment right now, and would like to share:

I also have spent way too much time wondering if I could ever get my long departed grandpa to dig some of this music ever since I was a pre-teen to teenager and he said some mean and ignorant things about my choice of music at that age - because it was definitely synth and drum machine heavy and he was a classical music fanatic and loved heavy, complicated music like Mahler - and I remember him dismissing it, and drum machines, and basically anything with rhythm.

But I also like classical and complicated music, and I can easily find myself liking classical as well as jazz and modern music and so on.

I realized he probably did not like jazz at all, or syncopation, or improv, and, well, he was probably rather racist at heart about this general progression of modern music and oh well, sucks to be you.

But after I grew into my own as a music fan I have often found myself wishing I could sit down with him and play some of my favorite EDM/IDM music and talk about music on an equal footing.

There's been, oh, hundreds of moments about tracks I've discovered and cherished that I've thought about this, that I wish I could sit down and play some of this music on some really nice speakers and see if I could find something that he'd understand and even enjoy.

Difficult, complicated, soaring and melodic EDM/IDM music. Neoclassical, too, or experimental music, or even noise. But especially the very complicated, melody and texture-driven IDM stuff like Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and so on with the confidence that there's a whole world of music out there that meets or exceeds the things he loved about complicated and nuanced classical music.

I think the closest I ever got to this when I was a live in caretaker my grandma, his widowed wife. She was also very into music, sang in choirs, played the piano very well, and so on. I used to play stuff like Boards of Canada and Ninja Tunes, the mellower parts of Aphex Twin and so on.

She started to get kind of in to it and would comment now and then, just basic stuff like "Oh, this music is very pretty if a little strange."

And then one day I was playing a Boards of Canada remix of Meat Beat Manifesto that's very breakbeat heavy and bass-focused when I was cooking dinner and she came in and was kind of dancing a little and said "Oh, this one makes me want to do a funny dance!"

Yep, me too, Grandma. That's the whole point. It makes me want to do a funny dance, too. Let's go to a rave!
posted by loquacious at 1:16 PM on December 4, 2020 [17 favorites]


great and eponysterical post, loquacious
posted by stinkfoot at 5:32 PM on December 4, 2020


Love it. It's a whole genre now, playing electronic music that was not really considered viably playable.

Here's an entry of DruMachine covering Square Pusher that may be similarly appealing. He's not blindfolded but he is set up outdoors, in a pleasant rolling field in Wales.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:06 PM on December 4, 2020 [1 favorite]


Playing drum machine note for note is hard enough, but playing the glitch too is just mind blowing.

Boards of Canada

Wow, thanks for mentioning them in this context. I had a whole buncha their stuff laid in but never listened to it until now. It's perfect!

Jello

Relatedly, I want to share this disc I found in a used store and have seen mentioned literally nowhere since. Listening to this skritches me right between the shoulder blades. What do you think?
posted by hypnogogue at 7:12 AM on December 5, 2020


Incredible. This is one of my favorite songs ever, and he absolutely nails it.
posted by tmcw at 6:16 PM on December 5, 2020


That was really great. Here's another acoustic version by The Bad Plus.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 10:45 PM on December 5, 2020 [1 favorite]


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