How to Djent

if "And the Mountains Rising Nowhere" was playing in an elevator, i would take the stairs. HAHA. I'm messing with ya of course, but it is a little odd when it comes to music, which i'm guessing we all love, that people try so hard to convince other people why they shouldn't like it.
 
Speculum Speculorum said:
I think some of the elements of the whole "djent" think are really... really... neat! And that's about where it ends. The fanboys out there act like it's some sort of musical genius because it's got flippin' mixed groups of 2 and 3 over 4. Well woopdie friggin' doo! Go listen to Elliot Carter for an hour or two and let your noodle fry on rhythm. Oh, they can play stacked fifths in harmonic movements of thirds? Wow-ee-zow-ee! I urge you to listen to "And the Mountains Rising Nowhere" by Joseph Schwantner and bask in the glory of how he decorates those sonorities. Glitchy sections? Xenakis. Drones? Giaccinto Scelsi. Dem feels? "Fratres" by Arvo Part. Awesome harmonic complexity with very little change over periods of time? Steve Reich.

As I said earlier, my biggest beef is that in an effort to sound "big" and "brutal", most of the riffs become trite, boring, and lifeless. The production is totally flat to the point of losing all of my interest, and everything is compressed and limited to the point that it is sonically unexciting. Wow - the verse is as loud as the chorus! There is almost no envelope on any of the notes other than the tonal quality because home studio mastering!

They have, in an effort to gain that polished, big sound, reduced the music to a wall of nothingness. So why is it so exciting to people? Well, I'm assuming it's because a couple of generations have listened to music almost solely through earbuds or laptop speakers and that the quality is generally little more than a streamed Youtube channel or Soundcloud-like file sharing website delivering the loud wall of crap directly to the ears. Deaf mamma jammas, basically.
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I agree with some of this. The musical examples you quote are some of the greats.... I'm a huge fan of Steve Reich and Arvo Part. Schoenberg also... and this is where I draw parallels. Schoenberg was slated by a lot of his contemporaries, including Segovia who was rather mean by calling him an 'ugly man with ugly music'. However, Schoenberg's music has dynamics, and a great capacity for interpretation of touch and feel, moreso than the score would leave you to believe.

The appeal of djent to me is that it takes the percussiveness of music and uses modern production techniques to take it to the limit (no pun intended). This can be a good and bad thing, and it depends really on how organic you like your music. Personally, I have no problem with machine music. Just don't ask for improv. ;)

I'm not a teenager and am well past my 20's. I'm in my late 30's and I didn't grow up with youtube and earbuds. The 'wall of crap' argument doesn't hold, just as it didn't hold when thrash first broke the rock and punk mold. It's just a music evolution. Not a revolution, as some would have it.

I love music. I like the subtleties of a great classical performance, the way the theatre seems to resonate with a great conductor. I love the subtleties of drone music, the way Sunn(O))) seem to get inside my mind, the way Ordo Ad Chao just crawls inside my brain and forces me to very dark places. I love Spiegel Im Spiegel, and how everything seems to breathe and put a tear in my eyes even without words. I love pop, how Lana Del Ray sounds like the epitome of the early 21st century dream sleaze queen.... it's right there in her performances. I love Eminem's ability to spray deep seated anger and Slayer's ability to use a hammer to do it. And I love Periphery sometimes with the pounding junction of guitars, bass and drums on The Walk, the stereo field utterly full and relentlessly barraging me. I love Meshuggah, how Spasm challenges with bone rattling low frequencies, how Break Those Bones... manages to fire me into action every time I listen to it... how Bleed has the same ability.....

In composition, one of the rules is to try to compose without your instrument. People forget this, and rely on preprogrammed muscle memoric patterns to come up with ideas. Very few listen to their head any more. This is both positive and negative. As a positive, it gave is Rock, Metal, Djent. As a negative, it gave us a million variations on the same pentatonic themes which are easy on the guitar, and filled music with dross.

That's just the way of it.
 
levipeto said:
Exactly! Who needs 8 strings, when you only use one?
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listen to the entire song, all the other guitar parts, or anything else they've done. listen to Tesseract or Scale the Summit or Animals as Leaders or any other number of bands. its really ridiculous to try and reduce them down to one string chugging..its one element of many in a song.
 
Speculum Speculorum said:
Each to his own, I guess. I just personally find that the whole "djent" scene just gets silly - piss-poor understanding of everything other than hemiola when it comes to theory. Production where everything is compressed to the point where the whole piece is flat and lacking in power in the mix - very clear, but also static and unmoving. And finally, single-line writing over, and over, and over again. If that's the shift in genre style, it represents a shift toward deeper ignorance of musical depth.
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Musical theory is lovely. Knowledge of it often has dick all to do with someone writing good SONGS.

And, by all means, keep telling us how you personally feel in this thread that you felt the need to come into that has a title with the name of the genre that you don't like.

(And, for the record, I'm not even much of a fan of the genre, so this isn't just fanboyism)
 
I'm not just talking about music theory. Literally, djent music is just absolute shit. It's no even interesting.

For the record, I don't really put bands like Meshuggah, Animals as Leaders, Periphery (though I'm not a huge fan), Textures, Tesseract, Scale the Summit and some of the more interesting bands into the "djent" scene. Oddly enough... all these masterful bands... they really REALLY understand music theory or at least have band members that do... How odd!

The only reason those guys get called "djent" at all is because the spawn of a retarded demon came out with a host of bands that defined the genre by writing endless parades of crap music that offers no creative or independent thought, but boy do they sound da BROOTZ MAN! If you can't take discourse or criticism about this terrible, awful, heinous crime against humanity that some people call music, you can just not read my comments.

But by all means, continue to pick a big fat passive aggressive forum fight with me by proxy, because 10,000 internet points are at stake.
 
Speculum Speculorum said:
I'm not just talking about music theory. Literally, djent music is just absolute shit. It's no even interesting.

For the record, I don't really put bands like Meshuggah, Animals as Leaders, Periphery (though I'm not a huge fan), Textures, Tesseract, Scale the Summit and some of the more interesting bands into the "djent" scene. Oddly enough... all these masterful bands... they really REALLY understand music theory or at least have band members that do... How odd!

The only reason those guys get called "djent" at all is because the spawn of a retarded demon came out with a host of bands that defined the genre by writing endless parades of crap music that offers no creative or independent thought, but boy do they sound da BROOTZ MAN! If you can't take discourse or criticism about this terrible, awful, heinous crime against humanity that some people call music, you can just not read my comments.

But by all means, continue to pick a big fat passive aggressive forum fight with me by proxy, because 10,000 internet points are at stake.
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I'm not attempting to "pick a big fat passive aggressive forum fight" with you. What exactly is passive aggressive about what I'm saying? You're writing things that I find to be rather silly and I'm saying so. There's nothing passive aggressive about that.

To point out the silly in this most recent post: So, basically you're doing the thing where you only count the bands that you don't like as being in a genre (this has been used to great effect, for example, with nu metal). So, basically, all you're actually saying is, "There's these bands I don't like, so I'm going to do my darnedest to insult them, rather than simply saying I don't like their music, which would be a completely valid representation of my opinion. This really has nothing to do with genre, but pretending that it does will allow me to minimize the amount of words I have to write."

Further, no, there is nothing literal about the statement, "djent music is just absolutely shit."

But, by all means, attempt to take the refuge of people that say stupid shit on the internet and claim that it should just all be "let's agree to disagree," even though you're sitting there trash talking music that's been made by actual people. It's not about "internet points," it's about not being a cunt.
 
Speculum Speculorum said:


Oh, and for the record, Maynard would be agreeing with me on this subject. Aha! Touche'!
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Which subject would that be? The original one, or your assertion that, because it's the internet, people should just be allowed to go around being dicks and other people shouldn't say anything about it? And, for the record, so?
 
Well, sorry if the honest truth about the majority of modern recorded metal upsets you. And for the record, lern2swim, Maynard would say the exact thing that I said in my initial post. Almost ALL of the music that is being written in the "djent" category of Periphery 1 spinoffs is just what I said - terrible music. Or haven't you seen any of the interviews where he holds in derision band after band that has even listed Tool as an influence? I'm out of here after this post, as it seems you can't make a salient argument other than using name calling, so good luck with yourself and this hootnanny of a thread!
 
Speculum Speculorum said:
Well, sorry if the honest truth about the majority of modern recorded metal upsets you. And for the record, lern2swim, Maynard would say the exact thing that I said in my initial post. Almost ALL of the music that is being written in the "djent" category of Periphery 1 spinoffs is just what I said - terrible music. Or haven't you seen any of the interviews where he holds in derision band after band that has even listed Tool as an influence? I'm out of here after this post, as it seems you can't make a salient argument other than using name calling, so good luck with yourself and this hootnanny of a thread!
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Actually, I made completely salient arguments and included name calling.

So, now you're back to stating your opinion like it's fact. Awesome.
 
Alexis said:
gosh this, thanks for wasting 9 minutes of my life.
not really funny at all because it's SO overdone
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Isn't that the point of humorous/satirical videos?

Speculum Speculorum said:
But the only thing that sucks more than "djent" is that video.
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BigD1977 said:
Detest this video, not because of it's content, but because of the idiotic gurning of the presenter which together with the editing, makes it a symbol of every kind of 'modern media' youtube video I hate. Multiple facial expression and editing cuts do not hide that fact that a person has nothing witty to say.
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Wow, what's with all this hatred?
I watched the video and found it hilarious.
Plus that guy is actually kind of into djent, which shows he got that healthy self-irony you guys clearly seem to lack. So bonus points to him.
 
seriously Zweibelchen, the you tube guy is terrible. Without dumb faces he's got nothing. not funny at all.

I've seen a couple of his vids. The first one I laughed out loud because I couldn't believe anyone would choose to act like such a douche and broadcast it. Now its just sad, I mean, hes doing role plays with himself probably because no one wants to help him make his videos. And there were quite a lot takes throughout. I wonder what his out-takes were like :star:
 
JJunkie said:
seriously Zweibelchen, the you tube guy is terrible. Without dumb faces he's got nothing. not funny at all.

I've seen a couple of his vids. The first one I laughed out loud because I couldn't believe anyone would choose to act like such a douche and broadcast it. Now its just sad, I mean, hes doing role plays with himself probably because no one wants to help him make his videos. And there were quite a lot takes throughout. I wonder what his out-takes were like :star:
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Well it's a matter of opinion really. I had some good laughs on his videos - and I don't really care wether it was because of the actual jokes or because of the douchebaggery. What matters is, that I did.

There's millions of people on youtube making money with being a douchebag. So why is this guy an issue? ;)
And to be perfectly fair: I've seen bigger douches than this guy.
 
Wow, I didn't know this video was going to cause so much contempt and angered debate, both about the subject of the style of music and about the person that made the video. I apologize to those of you that felt I wasted 9 minutes of your life. I wonder why you didn't just turn it off after 3 minutes if it was bothering you so much?

I thought the video was funny in parts but was overdone in length (it should have been edited down). I just thought it might be appropriate for this forum as the Axe FX II is arguably what brought about the genre of "Djent". I personally like some of it along with most other forms of music. As with any style of music, some of it is excellent and some of it is not appealing to me, which is only my personal and highly subjective point of view. Pretty much like all other forms of music. The reason I posted this video was so those of you that found it funny could have a chuckle. Those that felt insulted by it should possibly ask themselves why.

Music is purely subjective. If I play the spoons or a mouth harp, is either a real instrument? How can we label any art as worthy or not? It is just what it is.
 
Johnnyh64 said:
I play the spoons
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Djentcore spoons are da bomb
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