Thanks to everyone who submitted a video answering the question 'What's the wildest piece you know' - I loved including everyone and was only sorry I couldn't include more. If you'd like to be involved in future participatory things like that do follow me on twitter (@davidbruce) or instagram (@davidbrucecomposer).
Thanks for the video! A particular band/collective that I'd have loved to see here is IGORRR - Barrock, heavy metal, Opera, Electronic music and much more all combined into one wild experience. I don't have a particular tune to recommend but they made an awsome making of of their last album "spirituality and distorion" I can't recommend it enough! ua-cam.com/video/m0B4Zddc9j0/v-deo.html Another two cent's - when you mentioned the mechanic/automatic piano - this would have been a good place to also mention all the developments of electronic music - say skrillex or what not :) I love your videas thank you for all the awsome work and introducing me so so many great artists while making me laugh, smile and gereally enjoy myself :)
So wild ! (I enjoy the arrangement for two pianists too! Cacophonous & wonderful and i totally agree with the Bach analogy, like a bad tempered clavier!)
What comes up to me for its wildness… - Ferneyhough - La Terre est un Homme - Schnittke - Overture from Gogol Suite, Mvt.2 ‘Toccata’ from Concerto Grosso - Rouse - Gorgon - George Crumb - “Music of the Apocalypse” from Star-Child - Xenakis - Most of his orchestral pieces - Peter Maxwell Davies - 8 Songs for a Mad King
Good to see someone mention Schnittke here. For me his first symphony takes the top spot, being an ultimate exploration of wildness, fun, and intensity, combining pretty much everything you could think of in music in ways almost unimaginable, both seriously and not.
Mine: Peter Maxwell Davies: Eight songs for a Mad King Karlheinz Stockhausen: All of his Licht, especially Dienstag and Freitag Stockhausen again: Gruppen and Carrè All of Bussotti and Ferneyhough
@@vwnb I'm a huge fan of toecutter, prob my favorite mashcore artist. i've noticed quite a few underground breakcore artists dipping their toes into mashcore in the past couple years, im not sure i'd say it's back in fashion? but there certainly is a resurgence to some degree. There have been more mashcore albums documented as released this year and the year prior on rate your music than any time in the past! This is likely connected to the overall expansion of the breakcore scene which has happened in the past couple years.
I really like free improvisation/free jazz; it's undoubtedly wild and wonderful. So I would like to recommend everyone two albums: one is Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Orchestra's 'Out to Lunch' (a rendition of Eric Dolphy's album), and Zeitkratzer's 'The shape of jazz to come' (an album of standards by a german ensemble which usually focuses on more contemporary music. It is unrelated to Ornette Coleman's album of the same name). I love both albums and I hope you like them too
My first thought would be something by Cardiacs - either The Duck and Roger the Horse, or Eat It Up Worms Hero. They have the compositional intricacy of prog rock, but the energy and intensity of punk or metal. The songs are, on first listen, completely unpredictable, changing key, time signature, and volume without warning. Cardiacs are my standard answer whenever someone asks me what's the weirdest music I like.
Dirty Boy is a pretty good example of the Wild Stubbornness (or possibly Intense Focus On One Sound), with that impossibly extended choral dominant 7th that lasts long past every musician listening to it has ground their teeth down to nubs waiting for it to resolve, and then...
When I first heard Bitches Brew as a teenager in 1969 or 1970, I thought it was just unorganized noise. But with repeated listens due to my and my friends' quest to be cool, it grew on me. Now I wouldn't be surprised to hear it in an elevator.
that era evolved into something really crazy, try listening to Pete Cosey's 12 string guitar solo on Ife on the 1973 Vienna concert that's here on youtube, it is completely out there and my nominee for this
Thanks for the Turangalîla shoutout! I think musical wilderness can go many ways - on one hand you have artists like Daedelus and Daisuke Tanabe who go to great lengths to micro-engineer a texture to the songs they produce. On the other, it's so fun to see bands like Sigur Rós or composers like Messiaen who wind you up with the sheer mass of their compositions. Stay wild, folks!
Always amusing that Death Metal is seen as the wild end of music. Even Metalheads would easily and quickly point to Grindcore as far more against the grain, whilst still having the distorted guitars and heavy drums and gutteral growls. Death Metal is a pretty solid and straight forwards style of music, in the range of all that is music. I think one of my favourite bands for being wild, in my consideration, is Unexpect. Which, as the name implies, defies expectation. Until you've heard it a thousand times, of course. But that first listen hits you like a bus.
How the hell did I not think of Unexpect? I've been sitting here racking my brain trying to think of the wildest song I know. Intense? easy. Wild? Not how I would describe a lot of this stuff. Unexpect though, yeah, that's it. But which song? When the Joyful Dead are Dancing?
I feel like there are some highly experimental death metal bands which can provide a very real sense of wildness, Uzumaki being my go-to, but that's more in how they defy the expectations of the genre than in how they exemplify it. In terms of personal wildness in extreme metal, the collapse into pure chaos on the untitled final track of grind/sludge titans Burmese's Lun Yurn, which is significantly longer than the rest of the album combined, is probably tops, although I would also point to certain particularly grotesque depressive black metal bands, specifically early Todesstoß and Sortsind, as having a genuinely unhinged and inhuman sound to them.
@@ConvincingPeople Death Metal gets put together with a lot of other things to form microgenres and fusion genres. But in itself, and in the form that David even points to in this vid, has a straightforwards sound. It's quite tight and structured. Its complexity is in its performance, not its musicality. It can be technically and physically difficult. But musically, its most wild feature is its oft atonality. Which is a low bar for being considered wild.
Unexpect is great. I'd also nominate Igorrr, which careens back and forth between genres at the drop of a hat, from death metal to breakcore to operatic arias, swing, polka, pretty much anything.
It‘s over a hundred years old, anyone over the age of 10 has heard it any number of times, yet a good performance of The Rite of Spring is perfectly capable of sending shock waves throughout the body! There seems to be some thought that the riot at the premiere was not as extreme as reported, perhaps a setup to push ticket sales - but it‘s too good a story to debunk! Another wild piece: Prokofiev‘s Toccata! A certain amount of that is probably amazement that anyone can play the damn thing! Yet plenty do.
I've seen a few comments mention this but Pulse Demon by Merzbow is literally 75 minutes of ear-shredding static and feedback; basically an entire album of exactly the kind of sounds you usually avoid in music production like the plague. Also, in terms of stretching the definition of what music even is: Homotopy To Marie by Nurse With Wound. The first track, called "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind", is three minutes of metal crinkling sound, followed by five minutes of groans, then three minutes three minutes of chewing sounds. For best results, listen with the lights off.
I was thinking the same thing, or rather the whole japanoise scene in general. A personal favourite is Hanatarash: ua-cam.com/video/L7p_C9OlN40/v-deo.html&ab_channel=RoiloGolez
Lots of people have mentioned stuff I thought of, but two bands/artists I haven't seen mentioned would be British industrial black metal band Anaal Nathrakh and French experimental producer Igorrr. Anaal Nathrakh's music may not be as "brutal" as some others, but especially their older stuff is _extremely intense._ The first time I heard "The Supreme Necrotic Audnance", I was floored by the massive sound and sheer violence of the vocals, on a completely different level than most death/black metal or grindcore vocalists. They also slip into noise music at times, it's fascinating. Igorrr on the other hand is... odd. He mixes breakcore, black metal, baroque music, classical, jazz, triphop, operatic vocals mixed with guttural screams, and some properly odd stuff like putting a bunch of seed on a toy piano and recording the sound of hens pecking at it. And yet, it somehow works and is entirely listenable (and in my opinion, very good!) Some of my choices for songs by Igorrr would probably be "Tout Petit Moineau", "My Chicken's Symphony", "Cheval", and "Biquette" (feat. Ruby My Dear). :)
One song I came to think about a bit later is "The Most Unwanted Song" by Komar and Melamid, composed by David Soldier. It's a bit of a joke, where they surveyed a bunch of people asking them to identify what they enjoy least and most in music, then created the most wanted and most unwanted songs they could. It mashes together a rapping opera soprano with cheap drum machine loops, bagpipes, polka, "cowboy music", a children's choir urging the listener to shop for various holidays at Wal-Mart, commentary on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and political slogans shouted through a bullhorn. "The Most Wanted Song" is also fascinating, but much less wild, haha. Both are also quite interesting perspectives on popular music tastes in 1997. I also remembered that the entire genre of lowercase exists, which consists of recordings of near-silence that have been extremely amplified until you can hear the tiniest noises. One of the most well-known albums in the genre is Steve Roden's "Forms of Paper", which applies this process to him handling sheets of paper.
Just fyi, if you want the italics to work properly, there needs to be a space after the second underscore, so the full stop should be inside the underscores.
Meredith Monk deserves a mention for wildest music. I would LOVE a David Bruce episode on Meredith Monk. She really deserves to be better known. Two songs to start with: Madwoman's Vision and Gotham Lullaby.
“Machine Gun” by Peter Brötzmann. I can 100% guarantee that listening to it all the way through in one sitting is one of the freakiest and most disturbingly beautiful musical experiences you may ever have!
It would have been really cool to hear Bruce discuss freely-improvised music. There’s a whole tradition of music making that, in my opinion, is quite a bit wilder than anything on this list. But a great video nonetheless!
Stravinsky: Rite of Spring, with the lights OFF. Caused a riot at its premiere in Paris 1913 and still stands out today, its wild relentless and asymetric rhythmic drive and dissonance, deliberately evoking a wild Pagan and ancient ceremony that scandalised Polite Parisian sensibilities and expectations
Black midi stuff bewilders me by its ability to sound conventionally good in some aspect while literally making laser sounds out of a piano. The few black midi renditions of Akasha by xi that are around on youtube just absolutely blow my mind.
For me there are two "moments" in the pop era that depicts very well the ideia of wild: Jimi Hendrix playing live, which is the wild meaning "savage", and the instrumental mess in A Day in the Life, meaning "there's no rules".
Hendrix' "Star Spangled Banner" might go down as one of the wildest performances. It wasn't just taking the old and familiar and injecting it with the unexpected, it was almost like it peeled back skin and exposed the organs of what that song truly meant in a more chaotic, dissonant time and place. He managed to turn a song made for praising a country into a thorough thrashing of it. I have nothing but respect for him.
Yeah, Hendrix. 'Wild' suggests throwing off the shackles of civilised order and just expressing yourself animalistically. I've never seen a musician so uninhibited. It's sexual, it's violent, it's instinctive... When he fucks his guitar and lights it on fire, that doesn't feel an exaggeration of his music. [Now that I think of ritual sacrifice, the energy in Rite of Spring is truly wild as well.]
oh, and thank you very much for a very entertaining little show! Would have loved to hear the examples in full length but you put the adresses in the stuff below the window. Thank you again!
I'm going to have to say the entire "Calculating Infinity" album by The Dillinger Escape Plan. I've never heard anything else that even approaches the intensity and chaos of that whole album. Especially when you see live performances.
Honorable mention: "You Won't Get What You Want" by Daughters. Though not the most chaotic, or panicked album (see above), it induces an intense state of panic and chaos in me when listening. For best results, turn it up loud in a room with the lights off, and listen start to finish.
Check out DollMeat by MouthBreather, Our Puzzling Encounters Considered by Psyopus, Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning by Behold... the Arctopus!, and Meta by Car Bomb
Great video! If I were to add one aspect into the conversation, it would be wildness in sound design / production. IDM/Glitch/Breakcore music has been pushing that boundary for a while now. The wildest stuff I can think of right now is Dariacore, a genre consisting of hyperspeed song mashups with over the top synths, bass, and drums that is genuinely enjoyable to listen to. Not wild for wildness sake, but pushing the boundaries of music for the love of music.
I love that there’s so much on UA-cam now taking theory based thinking and using it to try to understand why things work and derive new understandings. So much of theory is often presented as ironclad rules and that breaking them is bad but I think this kind of thing is exactly what makes theory so valuable. Thank you for making this kind of content
When John Coltrane performed Vigil live in Comblain La Tour in 1965... The beginning when it is a duet with the drummer, that dialogue between sax and drums is just so powerful. And then it transcends when piano and bass join in. The wildest music!
Le Toit Du Monde - Gorguts. It is death metal but it's also one of the most intensely immersive experiences, still leaves me feeling absolutely bewildered, almost distraught, and I've been listening to it almost every week for 9 years since it first came out. Hell, the entire Coloured Sands album is its own unique experience.
I would say Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki. Not only is it wild in the sense of going against commonplace musical structure and expectation, it chooses to tackle a very upsetting real event and really drive home the horrors of it. I's say it's wild in the sense that it takes something we wouldn't like to think about and places it center stage
I was gonna say either Penderecki’s Threnody, Miles Davis’s On the Corner, or Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity, but reading these comments, I realize there’s a LOT of wildness I need to explore (or had forgotten and need to re-explore!) 5 minutes in and I already know this is a video I’m gonna have to revisit many, many times! Absolutely golden! Thank you so much, David!
Wildest song I know is *SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter)* by Scott Walker. It's an absolutely insane, 21-minute masterpiece that skeeves me out every time I think about it - it's so out-there in the most inconceivable ways to me. I've definitely heard more complex songs before and since, but A Flagpole Sitter just goes for it so hard that it can't not take that top spot of "weirdest song I've ever heard."
This comment introduced me to Scott Walker and after I listened his last 3 albums, I came back from that dark and funny dimension with a new perspective, it changed the way I percieve music now, as a listener and as a composer. Thank you. Now I know the source, the well of ideas from which my personal influences (Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Steven Wilson, Mikael Akerfeldt, Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen) had been drinking on.
@@mar.pequen I'm glad I could be of service! I will say, it's worth noting that his albums from the 60's are much, much more normal than his later work, so it's unlikely that the SUPER weird stuff ended up influencing those people you mentioned. his earlier stuff is definitely still worth checking out though if you haven't
Love this video. I never really thought about different ways music could be “wild.” Also every time Dorian shows up in your videos it just melts my heart, such a cute little character ❤️
A few come to mind; Jonchaies by Iannis Xenakis, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki, Aberinkula and Drunkship of Laterns by The Mars Volta, Alucard by Gentle Giant, Sugar and Vicinity of Obscenity by System of a Down, Nasty Habits by Oingo Boingo, Micro Cuts by Muse, Out of the Grave by Sigh, The Holy Drinker by Steven Wilson, Aumgn by CAN, Bring the Sun by Swans, The Girl in the Magnesium Dress by Frank Zappa, and Seven Words by Sofia Gubaidulina, and lastly, the band that took the peak intensity of Cannibal Corpse and did something different with it, it would be The Leper Affinity by Opeth.
I fucking love opeth, but they're not that wild, Gorguts' Obscura is the one. Also I know it's the metal elitist in me, but the way you worded that, that made it seem that cannibal corpse was somehow the most intense death metal band ever, really bugged me... But anyways...
I will nominate Lost Rivers by Sainkho Namtchylak, a female Tuvan singer. Compared to a lot of examples in the video that are loud and cacophonous, it is just a single voice, however the quality of the voice is freaking wild (go have a listen you would agree). The wildest part for me is the simultaneous difference and harmony between the intent and the actual realisation - the intent being mourning the lost rivers of her homeland and advocate for environmentalism, and the realisation of noises and cries strengthens that perfectly. A truly amazing listening experience.
I've been listening a ton to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's new album Omnium Gatherum. It's wild to me how many genres of music they cram onto a single album and all done at a high level.
Fleeting Joys - Young Girls' Fangs Shoegaze is a genre I find interesting because it specifically leans into the transcendental effect of wildness/intensity, and sits exactly on the picket fence with layers of abrasive noise but often in recognisable harmony and entrancing repetition.
It is wild to me how metal begot the kinds of puritanism it has. Punk has loads of gatekeeping, but not for sound the same way. I think the closest equivalent is like bluegrass purists. Honestly I think it comes from that kind of instrumentalist nerdery that comes with obsessive technical pursuit. Occasionally it crops up in mainline rock, like in "The Rock Bible"
Gerald Barry has some wild pieces. Sur les Pointes is about the wildest I think. It has a section with the direction 'like a wild pianola' and it's ridiculous.
Before looking at other comments I also first thought of Merzbow's Pulse Demon. But for me the wildest piece that is more "comprehensible" that I periodically revisit is Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet.
John L by black midi is pretty wild. For a majority of the song it's basically a wall of noise except for this weird melody that pokes through that somehow doesn't feel like it really fits in. The vocal delivery is also pretty wild, it's sounds like some cowboy rambling about this cult/political leader who galvanizes the masses into basically worshipping him. It also has this crazy music video that perfectly encapsulates the wildness, I highly recommend watching it.
I'm going to go with Glenn Branca, Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven) as the wildest music I actually listen to by choice, though I was tempted by the rapid changes of John Zorn's Naked City, and if I didn't qualify it with "willing to listen to it by choice", I might pick The Resident's Third Reich 'n' Roll. (This comment made before watching the video, as requested.)
Off the top of my head, in no particular order, here are some candidates (composers/artists rather than specific pieces) for "wildest music": - Merzbow - Conlon Nancarrow - John Cage (eg 4'33") - Throbbing Gristle (eg Tiab Guls) - Arnold Schoenberg (eg Pierrot Lunaire) - Anton Webern - Screaming Headless Torsos - Steve Reich (eg Pendulum Music) - Adrian Jacobs (David Lang) - Brian Ferneyhough - Ween
Glad to see Nancarrow on the list, he was one of my first thoughts. Lots of my other ideas on closer listening weren't particularly wild. Intense, yes, but you'd struggle to call them wild in the same way that the pieces on your list are! Surprised no one mentioned any specifically aleatoric pieces though.
I mean as an adult probably Threnody or some of Cage's work but I want to highlight as a younger man, a dyed in the wool metalhead at that (which means I learned a lot about human culture as a teenager THROUGH metal, not learned it outside of metal and then rediscovered it within a metal context) I think a seminal 'wild' piece of music that I still resonate with is the Austin Texas band Watchtower, their second album 'Control and Resistance' that came out in 1989 was definitely wild. It gave birth to the whole progressive metal thing, obviously, and today we could go back and listen to that music and classify it as some sort of fusion. And there's a *lot* of wild fusion, like proper jazz/rock/world music fusion that is wilder than anything any metal band could came up with. But 'wild' is about context, and in heavy metal context, against the conservativism of most rock music trope, Watchtower were fucking wild and they still sound wild. It's not just the riffs and compositions actually, it was their attitude and extra-musical elements that also gave that impression, such as, teenagers wearing USSR t-shirts during the cold war in Texas (even ironically, that's quite a statement!), the punk sense of humour that is antithetical to heavy metal seriousness, and of course the fact that they play this hypercomplex, flowing sort of metal but they're not robust and muscular at all, the drummer sounds like they're half improvising a song they don't remember, yet he's still in pocket. Control and Resistance captures the feel of the late end of the cold war perfectly, the musical programme and the thematic programme are in sync. Now we're heading towards more cold war terror, so the lyrics sound more prescient than ever.... sadly. It was a more abstract, complex and open to interpretation and mood kind of metal music that simply didn't exist before Watchtower invented it. It will always be the 'wildest shit' in my heart even now I have a broader musical horizon. Thank you for asking, David! You are a class act.
Wildest for me is pretty much anything from John Zorn's project Naked City. Seems that they recorded a bunch of sessions to explore exactly this idea... How wild can it get - pretty wild... and also the idea of using contrast with nearly normal snippets of coherence to stop you becoming completely desensitised to the wild crazy parts. Not sure which track to suggest though...maybe Snagglepuss?
I also think of his Cobra performances as the perfect example of controlled chaos. Using a bunch of cue cards and miscellaneous headgear he's at the centre of the stage telling the players when to play, but not what to play. I wouldn't say it's sonically pleasant but as an audio-visual experience it's really interesting to watch. His Electric Masada project also does that sort of thing in a more controlled setting, particularly Hath Arob on Disc 2 of At the Mountains of Madness, that for me is as wild as it gets.
"Dead Dread" and "NY Flat Top Box" for me. I saw him performing the Naked City stuff in 1990 when it was released and half the audience walked out after the first two songs. He told them they could get their money back at the box office as they left. Those of us who remained had a great time.
Kawaii is just the Japanese word for cute, and in English refers to a uniquely Japanese style of cuteness. Much in the same wat twee refers to a uniquely hipster/cottage core style of cute.
The way extreme metal figured how to stay wild is, in most part, to add complexity and that usually also means more contrast. People who can sing both guttural and melodic (without harming the melodic ability) are also wild to me. Jinjer has been a great source of reaction videos because of that. And you may add the complex rhythms to that. Djent bands like Meshuggah are wild because they are heavy usually not by means of being overly noisy, but with clear, wild rhythmic permutations and polyrythms. The wonders of audio compression... Outside of extreme, maybe most people are past that, but I still think Dream Theater's changes in time signatures are wild. "Dance of Eternity" became a meme because of that.
I feel a little embarrassed for providing the more predictable examples of prog metal, but the reader may swap my examples for other artists and it will still work. (Which is the definition of example, I guess...) Devin Townsend is wild too. He goes from screaming to Broadway and back in the blink of an eye. I also remember his compositions being just as wild.
The Mingus big band can have a very wild and crazy sound with a lot of players doing something different but still in conversation. Haitian fight song and Moanin are good examples of this
Mingus was very heavily influenced by Dixieland and other Earlier styles of Jazz, and he tried to work in the simultaneous improvisation mentioned at 9:39 in this vid. The Mingus Big band pay homage to this...but with an entire big band.
The artist Jute Gyte makes some of the wildest music i know - it's heavy microtonal black metal which sounds crushing and brutal while also atmospheric in a distinctly alien way
The wildest music I know is probably Gorgon by Christopher Rouse, its very vast paced and dissonant, and it moves between ideas rapidly. It's a work in 3 movements with these percussion breaks in between each movement, which adds to the overall chaotic atmosphere.
A lot of moments from Captain Beefheart’s _Trout Mask Replica_ come to mind. And in a sense the music of The Shaggs - completely free of “what you’re supposed to do in music”. (Hah! I made this comment a couple of minutes before you mentioned both. Great minds think alike!)
Amazing list! I would propose Philip Glass's Opera "Einstein On The Beach" as a wonderful example of "wildness through repetition / composition", in a pretty transcendent musical depiction of genius and the miracle of consciousness.
@@jwc3o2 That sounds amazing! Do you know where it's available - can't seem to find it available anywhere on the internet, for purchase or streaming! Thanks :)
Either general power electronics, Grindcore and it's derivatives, or one specific classically and jazz influenced death metal album, Imperative Imperceptible Impulse by Ad Nauseum. It's got right left ear dissonance, and all kinds of crazy shit. It's great, genuinely, and feels more like jazz than metal sometimes.
Pleasant surprise to see Imperative Imperceptible Impulse being mentioned here. I actually found out about this channel because their vocalist/one of the guitarist is subscribed to it ahah
Most music is tuned 12 notes to an octave, 12-TET, 12 tone equal temperament. But there's a plethora of beautiful tuning systems like 19-TET, 22, 53, they're all wild
I adore The Most Unwanted Song by Komar and Melamid which was designed to incorporate simultaneously all of the musical features people claimed in a survey to like least. At 22 minutes, it's unreasonably long. It includes bagpipes, kids singing holiday song themes, advertising, cowboys, tubas, organs, opera singing, megaphone political announcements, and wild changes in volume, tempo, and tone. It manages to be challenging, bizarre, and nonetheless whimsical, hilariously silly, and fun. It's completely wonderful. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Unwanted_Song I hope it made your list, David. Let's see. (I see I'm not the first to come up with this suggestion).
I find the question itself a little hard to get to grips with. I'm strongly tempted to say Tallis' Spem in Alium, though I can't think of any way to defend that choice to others. But while I was a maths student I used to use Skinny Puppy as my studying music, because it would thoroughly overload the parts of my brain that deal with the concrete, and leave me in a better state to process abstractions. I think (my maths background is showing again here) that there's a great deal of duality in play: I often find big-C Classical music irritating because I can predict it too successfully, and randomness relaxing because I can, as it were, bathe in it. Intensity is found in some middle ground where I am actively tracking a lot of ideas without being too completely defeated…?
"Windowlicker" by Aphex Twin is pretty wild. "John McLaughlin" from "Bitches Brew" by Miles Davis is very wild. "Hajnal" by Venetian Snares gets a bit wild. "The Litanies of Satan" by Diamanda Galas is also quite wild. It's a wild world, just ask The Birthday Party as they "Blast Off!".
Back in the Eighties I was involved in a meditation group that imported rituals and meditations from various cultures. One striking moment for me was meditating to Tibetan Water Music. (I can't find anything online near it but instead I'm getting results for all sorts of 'soothing' new age sounds.) This 'music' was an intentional cacophony of noises, some sounding like the roar of an elephant alongside arrhythmic pulses from crashing gongs, wood blocks being struck and so on. It slowly faded in and then slowly faded out after it reached a peak for about five minutes or so. It was the avant-garde-est of avant garde music I'd ever heard. The intention, according to what we were told, was to clear out and purify the mind of thoughts. I wish I could find an example online but I simply can't. Everyone seems to think that Tibetans are all about gentle, soothing, meditating culture, and that's all the internet is presenting.
found one for you: ua-cam.com/video/29SySL779_s/v-deo.html and another ua-cam.com/video/L42AnSAdzXw/v-deo.html It is a deliberately discordant cacophony, played with drums, cymbals, and horns.
I feel like as I listen to more music, my threshold for wildness gets pushed even farther. A few years ago, I would have said Torche and Floor were pretty wild and out there. Now, I've listened to things like Sore Dream and Lingua Ignota and Full of Hell, and Torche is almost easy listening. Edited to add: You mentioned Liturgy and I've been addicted to this album and I almost mentioned them also, except I listen to other death metal also.
To me, Liszt's Dante Symphony was wild in the context of transcendence in 12:48 , where it transported you to the realm of hell and heaven. The Paradiso (3rd movement) is so majestic, ecstatic, spine-lifting; it feels like you're entering the gates of heaven.
The first song that comes to mind for me is Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles. The odd drum pattern pounding consistently while reversed saxophones and lots of other reversed noises are filling the rest of the song sounds so odd yet nice
For number 5 I would add Jane Doe from Converge. First time I listened to it I thought it was deranged and pure noise, it takes a few listens to make out each element and I think it is mostly compositionally simple (compared to other wild pieces here) but that album takes noise to another level.
very interesting question...for my money I think combining the intensity of metal with the unsettling qualities (to Western ears at least) of microtonal music is going to be some of the wildest stuff. Cryptic Ruse's Projected Into the Complex Plane, off of Pineal Algebra, is one of the more listenable examples of this, while still being very challenging to the point of actually headache inducing. I love it.
The first part of Keith Jarrett's Vienna Concert is such an absolutely wild piece of improvised music. Forty minutes of pure musical and pianistic genius.
I listen to enough mathcore (car bomb, dillinger escape plan, converge) and dissonant death metal (gorguts, ulcerate, sunless) for them to loose some of their wildness. So I'll go with Girl with Mary Turner by Xiu Xiu or Do You Doubt Me Traitor by Lingua Ignota. Also can't believe no one mentioned Deathgrips yet (especially Steroids). also mount eerie's death is real is wild to me because it is the only peace of music so devastating
All I can say is Troutmask Replica had to be relevant to this conversation. Mosolovs Iron Foundry is really intense, completely atonal yet it can immediately grab the listener. Now, Blotted Science has some exquisite and supremely intense music, while Behold the Archtopus goes a bit too far and has issues... Also I think Cacophony (Marty Friedman/Jason Becker) specifically in their Speed-metal Symphony intro and outro, really push the envelope. Then again Jacob Collier modulating to quarter tones successfully is also far out there. Now ... On the other side, we can consider Wesly Willis to be quite wild (Birdman kicked my ads for example), and similarly I'd say Syd Barret, and other outsider music (Schuman included) ... Are quite wild in the sense that they come from a place where reality is breaking down Stokhauzen has silences way over a minute (and Id argue that makes it irrelevant)... Anyway, this more anecdotal but I remember having listened to a grind core tape. It had 20 or 30 second songs that were rather soundbytes, where they used very dense drumwork, heavily distorted instruments and even ... Someone blowing on a snorkel ... Which was rather silly to me, I listened to about 3 samples. Really interesting train of thought!!
I typically dislike wild music, but I am oh, so grateful that there are musicians out there who produce it. Keep stretching those boundaries of creativity! Thanks for a great video!
There are two types of creative people. 1st make truly amazing and mindblowing stuff which is hard to play but is beautiful and enjoyable. 2nd type stretches their boundaries of "creativity" to the evil side which is much easier way and make absurd things just to confront those who are the best, pretending to be the best... Envious people...
@@HQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQ the two types of creative people you described are actually the same, there is only one type of creativity and it's both the people you describe in one.
"Coward Killing Time" by The Quick Brown Fox has got to be up there. It sounds dangerous but considering it predominantly features audio clips of the Heavy from Team Fortress 2, I'd put it in the "Wild and Fun" category lol
was not expecting someone to suggest one of the lapfox trax "artists". i would say the track wanderlust is wilder. also on that flex you can take it all the way to extratone. if you like that kind of electronic weirdness you might want to check out artists such as Toecutter, Germlin, SAYOHIMEBOU, Passenger of Shit, Dooky
Wow, so many pieces and songs to listen to after this video. This video is kind of like opening a new section of an encyclopedia and coming away with so many ideas
Thanks to everyone who submitted a video answering the question 'What's the wildest piece you know' - I loved including everyone and was only sorry I couldn't include more. If you'd like to be involved in future participatory things like that do follow me on twitter (@davidbruce) or instagram (@davidbrucecomposer).
Thanks for the video! A particular band/collective that I'd have loved to see here is IGORRR - Barrock, heavy metal, Opera, Electronic music and much more all combined into one wild experience. I don't have a particular tune to recommend but they made an awsome making of of their last album "spirituality and distorion" I can't recommend it enough! ua-cam.com/video/m0B4Zddc9j0/v-deo.html
Another two cent's - when you mentioned the mechanic/automatic piano - this would have been a good place to also mention all the developments of electronic music - say skrillex or what not :) I love your videas thank you for all the awsome work and introducing me so so many great artists while making me laugh, smile and gereally enjoy myself :)
Your teacher was Birtwistle?
The best harpejos music
Dude, it's Original Sin - Therapy >>> ua-cam.com/video/zGX0cz6D2oI/v-deo.html
charming fella, great content.
I think the Große Fuge is pretty wild. It sounds like Beethoven hurled himself through Bach and landed on his head in 1915.
One of my all time favorites
Will definitely check that out!
Indeed. If someone played it to me and asked to guess the composer... I would've said Schnittke rather than Beethoven. :-)
So wild ! (I enjoy the arrangement for two pianists too! Cacophonous & wonderful and i totally agree with the Bach analogy, like a bad tempered clavier!)
incredible piece
What comes up to me for its wildness…
- Ferneyhough - La Terre est un Homme
- Schnittke - Overture from Gogol Suite, Mvt.2 ‘Toccata’ from Concerto Grosso
- Rouse - Gorgon
- George Crumb - “Music of the Apocalypse” from Star-Child
- Xenakis - Most of his orchestral pieces
- Peter Maxwell Davies - 8 Songs for a Mad King
Good to see someone mention Schnittke here. For me his first symphony takes the top spot, being an ultimate exploration of wildness, fun, and intensity, combining pretty much everything you could think of in music in ways almost unimaginable, both seriously and not.
Xenakis, agreed 100% still cant understand a thing about Herma
thank you for the list! will try to look for the music. Come to think of it : Rouse wasn't there a sax player by that name .. played with McCoy Tyner?
Mine:
Peter Maxwell Davies: Eight songs for a Mad King
Karlheinz Stockhausen: All of his Licht, especially Dienstag and Freitag
Stockhausen again: Gruppen and Carrè
All of Bussotti and Ferneyhough
Camellia and the Hyperpop genre are so close to the edge of noise sometimes, it's incredibly wild and fantastic.
If you are interested in Camellia and Hyperpop, you may also want to check out the genre Mashcore. Very wild stuff going on there hehehe
Another great example is early Easyfun. Shrek 5 is arguably wilder than those plunderphonic 100 Gecs pieces, and you can dance to Shrek 5
I can't with that stuff, it makes my ears tired after a minute.
Everything is just right up front all at once.
@@minmax5 Is it back in fashion? I used to blast Here I Go Again by Toecutter all the time. Geordie Salvation might be my fave track off it
@@vwnb I'm a huge fan of toecutter, prob my favorite mashcore artist. i've noticed quite a few underground breakcore artists dipping their toes into mashcore in the past couple years, im not sure i'd say it's back in fashion? but there certainly is a resurgence to some degree. There have been more mashcore albums documented as released this year and the year prior on rate your music than any time in the past!
This is likely connected to the overall expansion of the breakcore scene which has happened in the past couple years.
I really like free improvisation/free jazz; it's undoubtedly wild and wonderful. So I would like to recommend everyone two albums: one is Otomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Orchestra's 'Out to Lunch' (a rendition of Eric Dolphy's album), and Zeitkratzer's 'The shape of jazz to come' (an album of standards by a german ensemble which usually focuses on more contemporary music. It is unrelated to Ornette Coleman's album of the same name). I love both albums and I hope you like them too
My first thought would be something by Cardiacs - either The Duck and Roger the Horse, or Eat It Up Worms Hero. They have the compositional intricacy of prog rock, but the energy and intensity of punk or metal. The songs are, on first listen, completely unpredictable, changing key, time signature, and volume without warning. Cardiacs are my standard answer whenever someone asks me what's the weirdest music I like.
One of the best bands out there. Tim Smith was a genius!
Dirty Boy is a pretty good example of the Wild Stubbornness (or possibly Intense Focus On One Sound), with that impossibly extended choral dominant 7th that lasts long past every musician listening to it has ground their teeth down to nubs waiting for it to resolve, and then...
Definitely unpredictable; amazingly listenable; endlessly fascinating; uniquely inventive
Thinking the same thing, wild but brilliant music
My favorite wild music has probably got to be death grips. So gritty and stark, yet so damn groovin
Ah I knew someone would beat me to it. Yeah I was gonna suggest "Hot Head" off of Bottomless Pit. The lyrics alone deserve a mention.
I just listened to it. Quite good! Thanks!
If you like death grips check out blackhandpath and a good song by them would be theoxx
When I first heard Bitches Brew as a teenager in 1969 or 1970, I thought it was just unorganized noise. But with repeated listens due to my and my friends' quest to be cool, it grew on me. Now I wouldn't be surprised to hear it in an elevator.
that era evolved into something really crazy, try listening to Pete Cosey's 12 string guitar solo on Ife on the 1973 Vienna concert that's here on youtube, it is completely out there and my nominee for this
Thanks for the Turangalîla shoutout! I think musical wilderness can go many ways - on one hand you have artists like Daedelus and Daisuke Tanabe who go to great lengths to micro-engineer a texture to the songs they produce. On the other, it's so fun to see bands like Sigur Rós or composers like Messiaen who wind you up with the sheer mass of their compositions. Stay wild, folks!
Who are Sigur Ròs?
Always amusing that Death Metal is seen as the wild end of music. Even Metalheads would easily and quickly point to Grindcore as far more against the grain, whilst still having the distorted guitars and heavy drums and gutteral growls. Death Metal is a pretty solid and straight forwards style of music, in the range of all that is music.
I think one of my favourite bands for being wild, in my consideration, is Unexpect. Which, as the name implies, defies expectation. Until you've heard it a thousand times, of course. But that first listen hits you like a bus.
How the hell did I not think of Unexpect? I've been sitting here racking my brain trying to think of the wildest song I know. Intense? easy. Wild? Not how I would describe a lot of this stuff.
Unexpect though, yeah, that's it. But which song? When the Joyful Dead are Dancing?
I feel like there are some highly experimental death metal bands which can provide a very real sense of wildness, Uzumaki being my go-to, but that's more in how they defy the expectations of the genre than in how they exemplify it.
In terms of personal wildness in extreme metal, the collapse into pure chaos on the untitled final track of grind/sludge titans Burmese's Lun Yurn, which is significantly longer than the rest of the album combined, is probably tops, although I would also point to certain particularly grotesque depressive black metal bands, specifically early Todesstoß and Sortsind, as having a genuinely unhinged and inhuman sound to them.
@@ConvincingPeople Death Metal gets put together with a lot of other things to form microgenres and fusion genres. But in itself, and in the form that David even points to in this vid, has a straightforwards sound. It's quite tight and structured. Its complexity is in its performance, not its musicality. It can be technically and physically difficult. But musically, its most wild feature is its oft atonality. Which is a low bar for being considered wild.
I would agree in Unecpect here with you
Unexpect is great. I'd also nominate Igorrr, which careens back and forth between genres at the drop of a hat, from death metal to breakcore to operatic arias, swing, polka, pretty much anything.
The Rite of Spring must surely be mentioned. A ballet about sacrificial virgins which caused a riot at the premier; nothing tops that.
You could add this to the criteria of wildness: name a piece which caused a riot in its first performance.
It‘s over a hundred years old, anyone over the age of 10 has heard it any number of times, yet a good performance of The Rite of Spring is perfectly capable of sending shock waves throughout the body! There seems to be some thought that the riot at the premiere was not as extreme as reported, perhaps a setup to push ticket sales - but it‘s too good a story to debunk!
Another wild piece: Prokofiev‘s Toccata! A certain amount of that is probably amazement that anyone can play the damn thing! Yet plenty do.
The Rites of Spring is a gateway drug. ;)
One of my favorites. Eternally magnificently wild.
good choice
I've seen a few comments mention this but Pulse Demon by Merzbow is literally 75 minutes of ear-shredding static and feedback; basically an entire album of exactly the kind of sounds you usually avoid in music production like the plague.
Also, in terms of stretching the definition of what music even is: Homotopy To Marie by Nurse With Wound. The first track, called "I Cannot Feel You as the Dogs are Laughing and I am Blind", is three minutes of metal crinkling sound, followed by five minutes of groans, then three minutes three minutes of chewing sounds. For best results, listen with the lights off.
I was thinking the same thing, or rather the whole japanoise scene in general. A personal favourite is Hanatarash: ua-cam.com/video/L7p_C9OlN40/v-deo.html&ab_channel=RoiloGolez
sorry but Pulse Demon is fuckin entry level Merzbow
@@mnchls Oh, go on, then; enlighten me. I know you're gagging to.
I was thinking of Alec Empire & Merzbow CBGB New York live watching this.
@@dmrfnk Just listened to that; the first track had a descernable melody and drums. Get this pop bullshit out of here; I want _noise._
I absolutely love reading through the comments and seeing all the different interpretations of wildness in all imaginable musical styles.
Lots of people have mentioned stuff I thought of, but two bands/artists I haven't seen mentioned would be British industrial black metal band Anaal Nathrakh and French experimental producer Igorrr.
Anaal Nathrakh's music may not be as "brutal" as some others, but especially their older stuff is _extremely intense._ The first time I heard "The Supreme Necrotic Audnance", I was floored by the massive sound and sheer violence of the vocals, on a completely different level than most death/black metal or grindcore vocalists. They also slip into noise music at times, it's fascinating.
Igorrr on the other hand is... odd. He mixes breakcore, black metal, baroque music, classical, jazz, triphop, operatic vocals mixed with guttural screams, and some properly odd stuff like putting a bunch of seed on a toy piano and recording the sound of hens pecking at it. And yet, it somehow works and is entirely listenable (and in my opinion, very good!) Some of my choices for songs by Igorrr would probably be "Tout Petit Moineau", "My Chicken's Symphony", "Cheval", and "Biquette" (feat. Ruby My Dear). :)
One song I came to think about a bit later is "The Most Unwanted Song" by Komar and Melamid, composed by David Soldier. It's a bit of a joke, where they surveyed a bunch of people asking them to identify what they enjoy least and most in music, then created the most wanted and most unwanted songs they could. It mashes together a rapping opera soprano with cheap drum machine loops, bagpipes, polka, "cowboy music", a children's choir urging the listener to shop for various holidays at Wal-Mart, commentary on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and political slogans shouted through a bullhorn. "The Most Wanted Song" is also fascinating, but much less wild, haha. Both are also quite interesting perspectives on popular music tastes in 1997.
I also remembered that the entire genre of lowercase exists, which consists of recordings of near-silence that have been extremely amplified until you can hear the tiniest noises. One of the most well-known albums in the genre is Steve Roden's "Forms of Paper", which applies this process to him handling sheets of paper.
And continuing on with conceptual wildness, another genre really pushing the limits would be "danger music", which truly lives up to its name.
I absolutely love Igorrr. Came down here to mentioned him
Just fyi, if you want the italics to work properly, there needs to be a space after the second underscore, so the full stop should be inside the underscores.
@@EdenLippmann Thanks! Fixed. :)
Meredith Monk deserves a mention for wildest music. I would LOVE a David Bruce episode on Meredith Monk. She really deserves to be better known. Two songs to start with: Madwoman's Vision and Gotham Lullaby.
“Machine Gun” by Peter Brötzmann. I can 100% guarantee that listening to it all the way through in one sitting is one of the freakiest and most disturbingly beautiful musical experiences you may ever have!
For me it's the peak of European free jazz, wonderful album
@@wojciechdraminski3035 absolutely!
It would have been really cool to hear Bruce discuss freely-improvised music. There’s a whole tradition of music making that, in my opinion, is quite a bit wilder than anything on this list. But a great video nonetheless!
i read "Machine gun" and thought you meant hendrix but still i thought that was pretty wild too
RIP Peter.
Stravinsky: Rite of Spring, with the lights OFF. Caused a riot at its premiere in Paris 1913 and still stands out today, its wild relentless and asymetric rhythmic drive and dissonance, deliberately evoking a wild Pagan and ancient ceremony that scandalised Polite Parisian sensibilities and expectations
Black midi stuff bewilders me by its ability to sound conventionally good in some aspect while literally making laser sounds out of a piano. The few black midi renditions of Akasha by xi that are around on youtube just absolutely blow my mind.
For me there are two "moments" in the pop era that depicts very well the ideia of wild: Jimi Hendrix playing live, which is the wild meaning "savage", and the instrumental mess in A Day in the Life, meaning "there's no rules".
Hendrix' "Star Spangled Banner" might go down as one of the wildest performances. It wasn't just taking the old and familiar and injecting it with the unexpected, it was almost like it peeled back skin and exposed the organs of what that song truly meant in a more chaotic, dissonant time and place. He managed to turn a song made for praising a country into a thorough thrashing of it. I have nothing but respect for him.
Yeah, Hendrix. 'Wild' suggests throwing off the shackles of civilised order and just expressing yourself animalistically.
I've never seen a musician so uninhibited. It's sexual, it's violent, it's instinctive... When he fucks his guitar and lights it on fire, that doesn't feel an exaggeration of his music.
[Now that I think of ritual sacrifice, the energy in Rite of Spring is truly wild as well.]
oh, and thank you very much for a very entertaining little show! Would have loved to hear the examples in full length but you put the adresses in the stuff below the window. Thank you again!
Expected you would mention 4'33''.
It's a classic, still kinda wild
Igorr's Hallelujah is the first thing that came to my mind reading the title of this video. I love a good chicken solo
I'm going to have to say the entire "Calculating Infinity" album by The Dillinger Escape Plan. I've never heard anything else that even approaches the intensity and chaos of that whole album. Especially when you see live performances.
Honorable mention: "You Won't Get What You Want" by Daughters. Though not the most chaotic, or panicked album (see above), it induces an intense state of panic and chaos in me when listening. For best results, turn it up loud in a room with the lights off, and listen start to finish.
Great choice :D
Bro i immediately thought of dillinger too especially sonething like pig latin with mike patton
Obscura by Gorguts?
Check out DollMeat by MouthBreather, Our Puzzling Encounters Considered by Psyopus, Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning by Behold... the Arctopus!, and Meta by Car Bomb
Shostakovich 4 is definitely his most wild symphony.
Great video! If I were to add one aspect into the conversation, it would be wildness in sound design / production. IDM/Glitch/Breakcore music has been pushing that boundary for a while now. The wildest stuff I can think of right now is Dariacore, a genre consisting of hyperspeed song mashups with over the top synths, bass, and drums that is genuinely enjoyable to listen to. Not wild for wildness sake, but pushing the boundaries of music for the love of music.
There are also artists like kobaryo and m1dy who are pushing the speeds of music creation
I love how modern production has been influenced by breakcore, glitch and even nightcore
I love that there’s so much on UA-cam now taking theory based thinking and using it to try to understand why things work and derive new understandings. So much of theory is often presented as ironclad rules and that breaking them is bad but I think this kind of thing is exactly what makes theory so valuable.
Thank you for making this kind of content
When John Coltrane performed Vigil live in Comblain La Tour in 1965... The beginning when it is a duet with the drummer, that dialogue between sax and drums is just so powerful. And then it transcends when piano and bass join in. The wildest music!
I'm a little surprized that Stravinski's Rite's of Spring didn't get a mention, because of the riots it caused in 1913.
Le Toit Du Monde - Gorguts. It is death metal but it's also one of the most intensely immersive experiences, still leaves me feeling absolutely bewildered, almost distraught, and I've been listening to it almost every week for 9 years since it first came out. Hell, the entire Coloured Sands album is its own unique experience.
Good choice, their album Obscura was the first metal album that actually startled me
Amazing record but I concur: Obscura is definitely more unhinged
omg the first tome I see a gorguts fan in the wild. been a massive fan since colored sands!
Colored Sands is 100% one of the best albums of the 2010s. Maybe even the 2000's as a whole. Maybe ever.
I would say Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki. Not only is it wild in the sense of going against commonplace musical structure and expectation, it chooses to tackle a very upsetting real event and really drive home the horrors of it. I's say it's wild in the sense that it takes something we wouldn't like to think about and places it center stage
Shostakovich's 4th and 2nd symphonies are pretty wild!
I was gonna say either Penderecki’s Threnody, Miles Davis’s On the Corner, or Dillinger Escape Plan’s Calculating Infinity, but reading these comments, I realize there’s a LOT of wildness I need to explore (or had forgotten and need to re-explore!)
5 minutes in and I already know this is a video I’m gonna have to revisit many, many times!
Absolutely golden!
Thank you so much, David!
Penderecki is pretty insane. Found him through Greenwood's work on There Will Be Blood...Threnody has to be the most terrifying piece I've ever heard.
Wildest song I know is *SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, a Flagpole Sitter)* by Scott Walker. It's an absolutely insane, 21-minute masterpiece that skeeves me out every time I think about it - it's so out-there in the most inconceivable ways to me. I've definitely heard more complex songs before and since, but A Flagpole Sitter just goes for it so hard that it can't not take that top spot of "weirdest song I've ever heard."
I was also going to mention Scott Walker's later albums. Definitely "mysterious wild" for me. I'm completely enraptured by those albums.
This comment introduced me to Scott Walker and after I listened his last 3 albums, I came back from that dark and funny dimension with a new perspective, it changed the way I percieve music now, as a listener and as a composer. Thank you. Now I know the source, the well of ideas from which my personal influences (Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Steven Wilson, Mikael Akerfeldt, Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen) had been drinking on.
@@mar.pequen I'm glad I could be of service! I will say, it's worth noting that his albums from the 60's are much, much more normal than his later work, so it's unlikely that the SUPER weird stuff ended up influencing those people you mentioned. his earlier stuff is definitely still worth checking out though if you haven't
Gotta say Schnittke's 1st Symphony, just an hour of stopping every 30 seconds to ask yourself what on earth you are listening to.
That one's great! So eclectic. :)
Love this video. I never really thought about different ways music could be “wild.”
Also every time Dorian shows up in your videos it just melts my heart, such a cute little character ❤️
A few come to mind; Jonchaies by Iannis Xenakis, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima by Penderecki, Aberinkula and Drunkship of Laterns by The Mars Volta, Alucard by Gentle Giant, Sugar and Vicinity of Obscenity by System of a Down, Nasty Habits by Oingo Boingo, Micro Cuts by Muse, Out of the Grave by Sigh, The Holy Drinker by Steven Wilson, Aumgn by CAN, Bring the Sun by Swans, The Girl in the Magnesium Dress by Frank Zappa, and Seven Words by Sofia Gubaidulina, and lastly, the band that took the peak intensity of Cannibal Corpse and did something different with it, it would be The Leper Affinity by Opeth.
I fucking love opeth, but they're not that wild, Gorguts' Obscura is the one.
Also I know it's the metal elitist in me, but the way you worded that, that made it seem that cannibal corpse was somehow the most intense death metal band ever, really bugged me... But anyways...
I will nominate Lost Rivers by Sainkho Namtchylak, a female Tuvan singer. Compared to a lot of examples in the video that are loud and cacophonous, it is just a single voice, however the quality of the voice is freaking wild (go have a listen you would agree). The wildest part for me is the simultaneous difference and harmony between the intent and the actual realisation - the intent being mourning the lost rivers of her homeland and advocate for environmentalism, and the realisation of noises and cries strengthens that perfectly. A truly amazing listening experience.
Thanks!
I've been listening a ton to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's new album Omnium Gatherum. It's wild to me how many genres of music they cram onto a single album and all done at a high level.
ME TOO!!! I love that Microtonal stuff! I've order their Flying Microtonal Banana! Can't wait to get it!
In that department I recommend to you (if you haven't heard it already) Disco Volante from Mr Bungle.
A wildly eclectic and disappointing band. Tried listening to them two or three years ago, never again.
great album
The names are wild enuf.
Fleeting Joys - Young Girls' Fangs
Shoegaze is a genre I find interesting because it specifically leans into the transcendental effect of wildness/intensity, and sits exactly on the picket fence with layers of abrasive noise but often in recognisable harmony and entrancing repetition.
I'm so happy you cited Liturgy! The level of rage they inspire in purist metalheads is a sure sign they are breaking fences.
It is wild to me how metal begot the kinds of puritanism it has. Punk has loads of gatekeeping, but not for sound the same way. I think the closest equivalent is like bluegrass purists. Honestly I think it comes from that kind of instrumentalist nerdery that comes with obsessive technical pursuit. Occasionally it crops up in mainline rock, like in "The Rock Bible"
I am surprised not to find Shostakovich in the answers here... His 4th symphony might be the wildest piece of orchestral music I have ever heard.
The opening section of Beethoven's Grosse Fugue is absolutely crazy wild.
Gerald Barry has some wild pieces. Sur les Pointes is about the wildest I think. It has a section with the direction 'like a wild pianola' and it's ridiculous.
In terms of pure wildness, I would have to say Merzbow - Pulse Demon album
Japanoise definitely boils the rules in acid
Pulse Demon and Animal Magnetism are probably two of my favourite noise albums. Intense.
I have long thought that loading a mellotron with jet engine sounds would be a good start.
Before looking at other comments I also first thought of Merzbow's Pulse Demon. But for me the wildest piece that is more "comprehensible" that I periodically revisit is Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helicopter Quartet.
John L by black midi is pretty wild. For a majority of the song it's basically a wall of noise except for this weird melody that pokes through that somehow doesn't feel like it really fits in. The vocal delivery is also pretty wild, it's sounds like some cowboy rambling about this cult/political leader who galvanizes the masses into basically worshipping him. It also has this crazy music video that perfectly encapsulates the wildness, I highly recommend watching it.
Spike Jones is near the top of the list of wild music. Every note is played to perfection but with out of left field instruments.
some of the best hocketing around besides!
Saw the video title and Hocus Pocus by Focus was the first thing to pop in my head. Yodeling, Whistling, and just manic energy through out.
I'm going to go with Glenn Branca, Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven) as the wildest music I actually listen to by choice, though I was tempted by the rapid changes of John Zorn's Naked City, and if I didn't qualify it with "willing to listen to it by choice", I might pick The Resident's Third Reich 'n' Roll. (This comment made before watching the video, as requested.)
Off the top of my head, in no particular order, here are some candidates (composers/artists rather than specific pieces) for "wildest music":
- Merzbow
- Conlon Nancarrow
- John Cage (eg 4'33")
- Throbbing Gristle (eg Tiab Guls)
- Arnold Schoenberg (eg Pierrot Lunaire)
- Anton Webern
- Screaming Headless Torsos
- Steve Reich (eg Pendulum Music)
- Adrian Jacobs (David Lang)
- Brian Ferneyhough
- Ween
Mysteries of the Macabre by Ligeti has to be up there.
The most unwanted song is absolutely up there for the wildest song.
The wildest piece is clearly John cage's 4'33" played on a giant construction site during a tornado.
Genius
the shaggs - philosophy of the world. you truly cannot go wilder than that. it's so raw and primal
Unintentionally so - which is part of its charm.
Glad to see Nancarrow on the list, he was one of my first thoughts. Lots of my other ideas on closer listening weren't particularly wild. Intense, yes, but you'd struggle to call them wild in the same way that the pieces on your list are! Surprised no one mentioned any specifically aleatoric pieces though.
Amazing video and wonderful comments in this thread. Thank you for these explorations.
I mean as an adult probably Threnody or some of Cage's work but I want to highlight as a younger man, a dyed in the wool metalhead at that (which means I learned a lot about human culture as a teenager THROUGH metal, not learned it outside of metal and then rediscovered it within a metal context) I think a seminal 'wild' piece of music that I still resonate with is the Austin Texas band Watchtower, their second album 'Control and Resistance' that came out in 1989 was definitely wild. It gave birth to the whole progressive metal thing, obviously, and today we could go back and listen to that music and classify it as some sort of fusion. And there's a *lot* of wild fusion, like proper jazz/rock/world music fusion that is wilder than anything any metal band could came up with.
But 'wild' is about context, and in heavy metal context, against the conservativism of most rock music trope, Watchtower were fucking wild and they still sound wild. It's not just the riffs and compositions actually, it was their attitude and extra-musical elements that also gave that impression, such as, teenagers wearing USSR t-shirts during the cold war in Texas (even ironically, that's quite a statement!), the punk sense of humour that is antithetical to heavy metal seriousness, and of course the fact that they play this hypercomplex, flowing sort of metal but they're not robust and muscular at all, the drummer sounds like they're half improvising a song they don't remember, yet he's still in pocket. Control and Resistance captures the feel of the late end of the cold war perfectly, the musical programme and the thematic programme are in sync. Now we're heading towards more cold war terror, so the lyrics sound more prescient than ever.... sadly.
It was a more abstract, complex and open to interpretation and mood kind of metal music that simply didn't exist before Watchtower invented it. It will always be the 'wildest shit' in my heart even now I have a broader musical horizon.
Thank you for asking, David! You are a class act.
This video is pretty wild, well done. I've learned and discovered so much, thank you
Wildest for me is pretty much anything from John Zorn's project Naked City. Seems that they recorded a bunch of sessions to explore exactly this idea... How wild can it get - pretty wild... and also the idea of using contrast with nearly normal snippets of coherence to stop you becoming completely desensitised to the wild crazy parts.
Not sure which track to suggest though...maybe Snagglepuss?
The live shows where they bring on Yamantaka Eye to do vocals are easily the farthest I've ever seen jazz get pushed.
@@tjenadonn6158 Been wading through a lot of answers here to find any mention of Yamantaka Eye or, for that matter Hanantarash
I also think of his Cobra performances as the perfect example of controlled chaos. Using a bunch of cue cards and miscellaneous headgear he's at the centre of the stage telling the players when to play, but not what to play. I wouldn't say it's sonically pleasant but as an audio-visual experience it's really interesting to watch.
His Electric Masada project also does that sort of thing in a more controlled setting, particularly Hath Arob on Disc 2 of At the Mountains of Madness, that for me is as wild as it gets.
"Dead Dread" and "NY Flat Top Box" for me. I saw him performing the Naked City stuff in 1990 when it was released and half the audience walked out after the first two songs. He told them they could get their money back at the box office as they left. Those of us who remained had a great time.
Deathstorm (Maruosa & Bong-Ra) - We Are Deathstorm
nothing has ever beaten that.
Kawaii is just the Japanese word for cute, and in English refers to a uniquely Japanese style of cuteness. Much in the same wat twee refers to a uniquely hipster/cottage core style of cute.
The way extreme metal figured how to stay wild is, in most part, to add complexity and that usually also means more contrast. People who can sing both guttural and melodic (without harming the melodic ability) are also wild to me. Jinjer has been a great source of reaction videos because of that. And you may add the complex rhythms to that. Djent bands like Meshuggah are wild because they are heavy usually not by means of being overly noisy, but with clear, wild rhythmic permutations and polyrythms. The wonders of audio compression...
Outside of extreme, maybe most people are past that, but I still think Dream Theater's changes in time signatures are wild. "Dance of Eternity" became a meme because of that.
I feel a little embarrassed for providing the more predictable examples of prog metal, but the reader may swap my examples for other artists and it will still work. (Which is the definition of example, I guess...)
Devin Townsend is wild too. He goes from screaming to Broadway and back in the blink of an eye. I also remember his compositions being just as wild.
The Mingus big band can have a very wild and crazy sound with a lot of players doing something different but still in conversation. Haitian fight song and Moanin are good examples of this
Mingus was very heavily influenced by Dixieland and other Earlier styles of Jazz, and he tried to work in the simultaneous improvisation mentioned at 9:39 in this vid. The Mingus Big band pay homage to this...but with an entire big band.
This was a fantastic video and I need to see share it and see it again.
The artist Jute Gyte makes some of the wildest music i know - it's heavy microtonal black metal which sounds crushing and brutal while also atmospheric in a distinctly alien way
Igorrr, Mr Bungle, Naked City, Psyopus, Lye by Mistake, John Zorn, Meshuggah, Animals as Leaders…. All good “wild” bands.
The wildest music I know is probably Gorgon by Christopher Rouse, its very vast paced and dissonant, and it moves between ideas rapidly. It's a work in 3 movements with these percussion breaks in between each movement, which adds to the overall chaotic atmosphere.
This video is so well documented and edited. Big thanks and big bravo!
A lot of moments from Captain Beefheart’s _Trout Mask Replica_ come to mind. And in a sense the music of The Shaggs - completely free of “what you’re supposed to do in music”. (Hah! I made this comment a couple of minutes before you mentioned both. Great minds think alike!)
Love both lol The Residents are great too, but in a much different style
Came here for the Shaggs!!
Ohh yeah. Captain beef heart is wild for sure.
Fast and bulbous! Bulbous also tapered.
Thanks!
That was a fun one. I'm now in love with the hardanger fiddle.
Amazing list! I would propose Philip Glass's Opera "Einstein On The Beach" as a wonderful example of "wildness through repetition / composition", in a pretty transcendent musical depiction of genius and the miracle of consciousness.
even more fun is Richard Truhlar's "Glass On The Beach", an obvious homage but performed entirely with extended vocal techniques
@@jwc3o2 That sounds amazing! Do you know where it's available - can't seem to find it available anywhere on the internet, for purchase or streaming! Thanks :)
This was my thought, exactly.
Great homage to your teacher at the end. That was really special!
Either general power electronics, Grindcore and it's derivatives, or one specific classically and jazz influenced death metal album, Imperative Imperceptible Impulse by Ad Nauseum. It's got right left ear dissonance, and all kinds of crazy shit. It's great, genuinely, and feels more like jazz than metal sometimes.
seconding the power electronics, something about Ramleh makes my hair stand up
Pleasant surprise to see Imperative Imperceptible Impulse being mentioned here. I actually found out about this channel because their vocalist/one of the guitarist is subscribed to it ahah
Most music is tuned 12 notes to an octave, 12-TET, 12 tone equal temperament.
But there's a plethora of beautiful tuning systems like 19-TET, 22, 53, they're all wild
I love 43 tone JI per octave
I adore The Most Unwanted Song by Komar and Melamid which was designed to incorporate simultaneously all of the musical features people claimed in a survey to like least. At 22 minutes, it's unreasonably long. It includes bagpipes, kids singing holiday song themes, advertising, cowboys, tubas, organs, opera singing, megaphone political announcements, and wild changes in volume, tempo, and tone. It manages to be challenging, bizarre, and nonetheless whimsical, hilariously silly, and fun. It's completely wonderful.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Unwanted_Song
I hope it made your list, David. Let's see.
(I see I'm not the first to come up with this suggestion).
I find the question itself a little hard to get to grips with. I'm strongly tempted to say Tallis' Spem in Alium, though I can't think of any way to defend that choice to others. But while I was a maths student I used to use Skinny Puppy as my studying music, because it would thoroughly overload the parts of my brain that deal with the concrete, and leave me in a better state to process abstractions.
I think (my maths background is showing again here) that there's a great deal of duality in play: I often find big-C Classical music irritating because I can predict it too successfully, and randomness relaxing because I can, as it were, bathe in it. Intensity is found in some middle ground where I am actively tracking a lot of ideas without being too completely defeated…?
Spem in Alium is wild in a "hold my beer" sense. I sympathise with your thought.
On a Mission by Drumcorps is definitely one of the wildest tracks I've ever heard
"Windowlicker" by Aphex Twin is pretty wild. "John McLaughlin" from "Bitches Brew" by Miles Davis is very wild. "Hajnal" by Venetian Snares gets a bit wild. "The Litanies of Satan" by Diamanda Galas is also quite wild. It's a wild world, just ask The Birthday Party as they "Blast Off!".
Back in the Eighties I was involved in a meditation group that imported rituals and meditations from various cultures. One striking moment for me was meditating to Tibetan Water Music. (I can't find anything online near it but instead I'm getting results for all sorts of 'soothing' new age sounds.) This 'music' was an intentional cacophony of noises, some sounding like the roar of an elephant alongside arrhythmic pulses from crashing gongs, wood blocks being struck and so on. It slowly faded in and then slowly faded out after it reached a peak for about five minutes or so. It was the avant-garde-est of avant garde music I'd ever heard. The intention, according to what we were told, was to clear out and purify the mind of thoughts. I wish I could find an example online but I simply can't. Everyone seems to think that Tibetans are all about gentle, soothing, meditating culture, and that's all the internet is presenting.
found one for you: ua-cam.com/video/29SySL779_s/v-deo.html and another ua-cam.com/video/L42AnSAdzXw/v-deo.html It is a deliberately discordant cacophony, played with drums, cymbals, and horns.
A particularly wild band to check out is Clown Core. And their album/video Van is interesting to watch too.
Ligeti: requiem
Three screaming popes
Rite of spring
Einstein on the beach
Four organs
I feel like as I listen to more music, my threshold for wildness gets pushed even farther.
A few years ago, I would have said Torche and Floor were pretty wild and out there. Now, I've listened to things like Sore Dream and Lingua Ignota and Full of Hell, and Torche is almost easy listening. Edited to add: You mentioned Liturgy and I've been addicted to this album and I almost mentioned them also, except I listen to other death metal also.
Five Percent of Nothing from Yes album Fragile. Short, abrupt, strangely simultaneously melodic and jarring.
To me, Liszt's Dante Symphony was wild in the context of transcendence in 12:48 , where it transported you to the realm of hell and heaven. The Paradiso (3rd movement) is so majestic, ecstatic, spine-lifting; it feels like you're entering the gates of heaven.
The first song that comes to mind for me is Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles. The odd drum pattern pounding consistently while reversed saxophones and lots of other reversed noises are filling the rest of the song sounds so odd yet nice
For number 5 I would add Jane Doe from Converge. First time I listened to it I thought it was deranged and pure noise, it takes a few listens to make out each element and I think it is mostly compositionally simple (compared to other wild pieces here) but that album takes noise to another level.
phoenix in flames i reckon
The original version of Antheil's Ballet Mecanique has gotta be up there
OMG, YES.
you cant have a video on WILD music without mentioning "Camellia"
Already earned my respect there~
surprised no harsh noise came up :p
very interesting question...for my money I think combining the intensity of metal with the unsettling qualities (to Western ears at least) of microtonal music is going to be some of the wildest stuff. Cryptic Ruse's Projected Into the Complex Plane, off of Pineal Algebra, is one of the more listenable examples of this, while still being very challenging to the point of actually headache inducing. I love it.
check out "Chrysalid Requiem" by Toby Twining, if you haven't yet : )
that title just is literally a hint I ha on math homework lol
Jute Gyte is another great example
The first part of Keith Jarrett's Vienna Concert is such an absolutely wild piece of improvised music. Forty minutes of pure musical and pianistic genius.
I listen to enough mathcore (car bomb, dillinger escape plan, converge) and dissonant death metal (gorguts, ulcerate, sunless) for them to loose some of their wildness.
So I'll go with Girl with Mary Turner by Xiu Xiu or Do You Doubt Me Traitor by Lingua Ignota.
Also can't believe no one mentioned Deathgrips yet (especially Steroids).
also mount eerie's death is real is wild to me because it is the only peace of music so devastating
this is one of my favorite videos ever now!
All I can say is Troutmask Replica had to be relevant to this conversation.
Mosolovs Iron Foundry is really intense, completely atonal yet it can immediately grab the listener.
Now, Blotted Science has some exquisite and supremely intense music, while Behold the Archtopus goes a bit too far and has issues...
Also I think Cacophony (Marty Friedman/Jason Becker) specifically in their Speed-metal Symphony intro and outro, really push the envelope.
Then again Jacob Collier modulating to quarter tones successfully is also far out there.
Now ... On the other side, we can consider Wesly Willis to be quite wild (Birdman kicked my ads for example), and similarly I'd say Syd Barret, and other outsider music (Schuman included) ... Are quite wild in the sense that they come from a place where reality is breaking down
Stokhauzen has silences way over a minute (and Id argue that makes it irrelevant)...
Anyway, this more anecdotal but I remember having listened to a grind core tape. It had 20 or 30 second songs that were rather soundbytes, where they used very dense drumwork, heavily distorted instruments and even ... Someone blowing on a snorkel ... Which was rather silly to me, I listened to about 3 samples.
Really interesting train of thought!!
Meshuggah - I
i mean, damn, it's pretty god damn wild
Thank you for a great video!
I typically dislike wild music, but I am oh, so grateful that there are musicians out there who produce it.
Keep stretching those boundaries of creativity! Thanks for a great video!
There are two types of creative people. 1st make truly amazing and mindblowing stuff which is hard to play but is beautiful and enjoyable. 2nd type stretches their boundaries of "creativity" to the evil side which is much easier way and make absurd things just to confront those who are the best, pretending to be the best... Envious people...
@@HQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQHQ the two types of creative people you described are actually the same, there is only one type of creativity and it's both the people you describe in one.
A very enjoyable video, David bravo!
"Coward Killing Time" by The Quick Brown Fox has got to be up there. It sounds dangerous but considering it predominantly features audio clips of the Heavy from Team Fortress 2, I'd put it in the "Wild and Fun" category lol
was not expecting someone to suggest one of the lapfox trax "artists". i would say the track wanderlust is wilder. also on that flex you can take it all the way to extratone. if you like that kind of electronic weirdness you might want to check out artists such as Toecutter, Germlin, SAYOHIMEBOU, Passenger of Shit, Dooky
Wow, so many pieces and songs to listen to after this video. This video is kind of like opening a new section of an encyclopedia and coming away with so many ideas