Challenging music

i love lots of beefheart including some bits of trout mask replica... (although i prefer the earlier stuff really) but the thing about a lot of it is, i reckon that rather being "difficult" as a result of the musician's superhuman genius and predeliction for technically awe-inspiring wizardry or whatever, i reckon most of it's just willfully, purposefully annoying. i reckon rather than being technically brilliant or individually complex it's just a bunch of people trying to play in such a way that everything they do grates on everything else giving the illusion of complexity. which isn't to say that that's neccesarily bad by any means! just that i don't the oft-repeated assertion that it's a work of deviant musical genius is particularly waranted.

i read a really long and interesting interview with "winged eel fingerling" a few years back where he was asked about the myth that don van vliet "wrote" every part on the album and locked the band in a room till they'd learned them just-so. he said that the process was that don would say something like "play something that sounds like a bat", they'd play any old shit and he'd go "yeah! that's it!" haha!

still love loads of it though. "ella guru" and "moonlight on vermont" off that album in particular.

also i love that bit at the start of "pena" (there's a track of willfully horrible noise if ever there was one) where you hear don talking one of the band though the "fast and bulbous!" dialogue:

"... yeah but you have to wait until i say 'also, a tin tear drop!'"

the other guy does an almost audible facepalm, laughs and says "oh christ!"

obvioulsy shaking his head at the ridiculousness of the situation he's in. very funny.

have you ever noticed that the record scratch sound effect on "the dust blows forward and the dust blows back" always occurs in the gap between the irregularly spaced spoken word lines?

maybe i've listened to it too much.