Metal Reviews

Yeah it was a sitar.

Sorry about not replying. This thread got out of control before I could even reply, and now it's a bit overwhelming. I don't have the time to quote and respond to so much.

As for my tastes, let's put it this way; I have over 5,000 CDs, and not even 1,000 of those are metal.

Dude, repect your vast knowledge, but you lost me at "sitar" so I folded......... BTW, just for the record, the coolest Euros I ever met were all from Holland, serious. I used to drink with a group of them all the time in Taiwan for like 2 years. Good people.

Going back to the other discussion, I think metal can become MUCH more broad, seeing as it is really only defined by being "heavy", and sometimes not even that. In my mind, metal is already a very broad genre and can get more diverse. Then again, I didn't really get all of that stuff about timbre and harmony...so maybe I'm missing something.

And Misha, I think it's kind of cheap to argue that metal isn't very diverse because avant-garde is comparatively so much more diverse, when avant-garde isn't technically a genre of music but anything pushes the boundaries of what music is.

Also, I've got a couple questions...what's a mode and what's a microtone?

I think there's more to it than that. It has to do with the way riffs are written and song structures and stuff.


I don't consider avant-garde very diverse because it all sounds the same

Nuh uh. You should see the looks i get when i wear my burzum shirt! People look at me like "wtf is that?". BLack Death and Doom are still pretty underground.

that depends on where you are FTR. in your australian hick town i guess it would be surprising, but what if you were Finnish or something?

and i think the common music listener is more likely to at least have heard the terms black or death metal, even if he doesn't know what they mean, than Raga and No Wave and that other crazy shit Misha mentioned.

this is not to say that BM or DM is (is or are?) mainstream music, because even those who think BM is Cradle or Dimmu Borgir constitute a small % of music listeners.

Respect, but are you willing to share some genres?

Don't worry leee, I was replying to Ken ;)

I wasn't implying that avant-garde is a broader genre than metal, I was argueing that jazz is broader. Avant-garde isn't really a genre, I think, although that would be up for discussion. Jazz is a much broader genre than Metal, and Metal is not defined with the word "heavy". If it were, then some of my jazzrecords are metal. Example: Peter Brötzmann Octet - Machine Gun, which is a 1968 album featuring three saxophonists, two bassists, a pianist and two drummers. It's a lot louder and more chaotic than any metal record I've heard.

The modal stuff is when you change the key all the time, quite common in classical music. You change the key when you encounter a note that fits in the current key as well as the key you want to go to. Microtonality is using tones that are not in any key in the 12-tone system, thus in the 12-tone system at all. There are systems that split the octave in equally or unequally devided tones witout ending up with 12.

Although metal is popular here, underground metal is still underground. Most Finnish metalheads think that Dimmu Borgir is the most extreme band in existence. Finnish people outside of the metal scene think that Marilyn Manson is black metal.

Yeah, that's kinda the point, there is an underground in every scene, but at least people have heard about the genres, which cannot always be said about the genres I mentioned, even if they heard about drone, they mostly are misinformed as well. Saying Dimmu Borgir is typical black metal is wiser than saying Sunn O))) is typical drone. While No Wave is not perticularly large, Raga, Drone and Music Concrete are far older than Metal as well.

Dunno too much about modal classical music, but modal jazz often involves much less changing. Typically you will spend long sections of soloing over just one scale, which will sometimes alter after a specific amount of time, or when you cue it to, or sometimes not at all. For instance, Miles Davis's "So What" is a 32 bar form that repeats openly. The first sixteen bars is D Dorian (think a major scale with the 3rd and 7th flattened) which turns to Eb Dorian for eight bars, then the last eight is D Dorian again. Modal jazz is generally about using long periods of static harmony, not rapidly changing harmony.

I thought classical music goes quite far with it. I thought Shoenberg's early serialism (or actually dodecaphonic music) was taking the modal system to a constant change in key, resulting in the total absence of a key, and all 12 tones used.

Serialism is a completely different thing than modal music. For modal classical music, check out old church chorals.

Hm, I had alwas felt there was no such thing as key in serialism, and no such thing as modes- the sound is defined 100% by the tone row, which is chromatic, not part of any mode. For me when I think of modalism in classical music I think of people like Debussy, not that it's really an area I know much about.

EDIT- yeah, also agree with Jurgen.

That's called modulation. Modality is a completely different term, although modulation can happen in modal music.

Thats completely wrong. Smiply put a mode is a scale that uses the same notes of any given Major scale but starting from a note that is not the root. It has nothing to do with changing keys, infact it has everything to do with staying in the same key. For example, if we were to take C major C D E F G A B and make a dorian scale from it (dorian would be the scale starting from sceond note of the major scale of your choice, in this case C major), it would be D E F G A B C, making a D dorian scale. It stays in exactly the same key (C in this case) but gives it the tonality of D. However you can only really spot a mode when its being used with chords, otherwise it would just sound like a C major scale. The chords that would work well with this D dorian scale would be D minor chords, yet importantly the key would still be C. Hope that explains it

Yes, I know that, I know a mode is a key. But the "modal jazz" genre means that changes within these modes are used. I could be wrong, but while mode means key, modal means changing it.

A mode is not a key, its a scale. But anyway, he asked what a mode was i explain it in a way he can hopfully understand coz it is quite complicated