Fifty Years of Minimalism (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Fifty Years of Minimalism (2015)

moredarkthanshark.org

72 pointshowsilly11 comments

Paste this into the developer console to make it a bit easier to read:

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    body, .container, .ital { font-family: Georgia; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; } \
    a:link { color: #00f; }',
    style = document.createElement('style');
    style.type = 'text/css';
    style.appendChild(document.createTextNode(css));
    document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);

(Don't worry, there's no hidden unicode characters or anything. Just adds some CSS.)

I would like to point out that lowercase music exists.

This comment is a fine example of how HN became an artist's (me) hideaway. Art related posts on HN rarely escape a dose of rational review that hardly exists anywhere else.

A little goes a long way, though... Having done a CS degree and an art degree myself, I appreciate the rigor of the CS mentality but it definitely cannot be successfully transplanted into the art scene, at least not into the public discourse of art. The agendas are too different. (A lot of artists are handy technical people, but usually in the workshop, not the coding variety)

I entirely agree.

English is not my first language (assuming hideaway is a place one goes to hide from something). Do you mean that as a good or bad thing?

It is a good thing, the context implies it is a place where he or she has chosen to hide away. The idea of a chosen place to hide is "good" because the choice means that if it we're bad the author would not have chosen it.

Saying "hideaway from the police" would be an example of it being bad, because the police have forced the hiding.

Not the person you asked, but I can assure you, it's a good thing. And I feel the same way.

I mean it as a good thing, and that I think it contributes to my sanity. :)

I really think a lot of people are too quick to pass up what could be at least interesting listening experiences. I used to be a very "basic" listener with relatively normal tastes like 80s/90s rock, some classical (it didn't matter which), prog, The Beatles and the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever.

That's not to say that I don't enjoy that any more, of course I do, but getting engaged with people who have the kind of music tastes I know nothing about got me into things that elicit different emotions. I learned that music didn't have to be about a quick entertainment (that's how I treated it) but rather it can arouse various emotions, too.

I started with 80s synthpop and especially J-pop/city pop, finding a wide variety within that subgenre alone, but it drew my attention to electronic instrumental music; listening to Boards of Canada and ambient by Stars of the Lid for a start, venturing into drone music from there (Phil Niblock, Klaus Schulze's Irrlicht and especially Celer), finding modern classical simultaneously (Schonberg, Béla Bartók) and then getting more interested in the "avant garde" modern classical like by Jurg Frey and from there to EAI and improvisation such as AMM, leading up to what best fits the category "ECM style Jazz" (as on Rate Your Music anyway), into experimental music with tapes and Graham Lambkin (and his idea of listening to listening to music), further to the simple beauty of field recordings such as by Toshiya Tsunoda and Marfred Werder's interesting concept of raw recordings in one place (2005¹)and then back to interesting lowercase by the likes of Taku Sugimoto and Keith Rowe (The Room).

All along the way I felt things that I never used to feel, perhaps it's a placebo, but it has significantly altered the way I think about music, what constitutes music, and the sort of things I like to listen to. It's also been inspiring for me, someone with not much musical knowledge (I abandoned the violin at grade 4) to try and make my own music.

Lowercase and other music usually considered "weird" or not music at all makes pleasant listening experiences, depending on how open minded one is, or if it's suitable for one's tastes. I'm not trying to say it's some new height of music for patricians, rather, it's something different which people may find nice to enjoy. I've found I've started to develop a more eclectic liking[0], so I certainly don't stop enjoying the things I did, but rather I just enjoy new things in different ways.

I hope this inspires someone to go out and see what there is to listen to.

[0] http://ue.iwakura.moe/chart.png

50 years is way too much, wouldn't 1 nanosecond be more minimalistic?

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