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Kerplunk's Music Journal 0.1 by kerplunk (critique requested)

Kerplunk's Music Journal 0.1
Kerplunk's Music Journal 0.1

King Crimson - The Sheltering Sky

Listen to this if you don't mind being challenged by music that messes with your sensibilities.
http://youtu.be/f-zacGme2As?t=24m37s

This song is a really good example of tension and release in music. Music Theory encompasses (in part) the concepts of consonance versus dissonance. An out-of-tune note sounds very dissonant with other notes, but two vocalists singing in perfect harmony sound consonant.

This song will probably fuck most of ya'll's ears, but I think there's tremendous beauty buried within that.

In this song, a steadfastly mellow bongo grooves shores up a twanky hypnotic guitar vamp. A slightly dissonant bass riff wiggles through the groove as the song builds, foreshadowing the discomfort sure to come, yet successfully establishing a relaxing theme at a motivated pace. The lead guitar soon bursts through this envelope and fully crashes the party.

Fripp's lead guitar quackery immediately destroy any sense of comfort enjoyed previously. The squawkingly harsh, mangled notes can sustain forever, and we eventually come to notice this. But the solo, long and for the most part perfectly out of the scale, is primarily frantic and somehow breathless, as if it had come to warn us of something deeper off in the darkness.

What I super enjoy about the solo is the sense of conflict. The notes are mostly dissonant, and so when he resolves the scale to an in-key note, things get super interesting. Sometimes the resolution feels patronizing, just some token consonance to keep your spirits up. Other times it's very deeply satisfying to the point where it feels like the dying wail of some innocent but evil menace, the pain of which we both celebrate and grieve.

Definitely a song <3

Kerplunk's Music Journal 0.1 (critique requested)

kerplunk

The first in a new series of song reviews based solely upon what I'm listening to at the moment and whether I feel i have something to say about it. I'm going to try to contribute once per week, let's see how that goes.

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