Big musical influences...mainstream or underground?

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I listen to a lot of bands that are now underground and it gives my style an interesting artistic flair, but it also makes the style hard to explain for others. So I had a thought...

Is it better to be influenced by kmainstream bands and follow trends or to follow underground bands (often the trend followers)?

Are 80s post-punk considered mainstream or underground influences these days?...

I like The Wonderstuff, what do I win?

What you're felt with is what you're felt with. I think that's the only ground to produce music from.

Do what you want.

Yes, a lot of undergorund bands mentioned here.

I am influenced by both, am just curious if aspergians tend to listen to more udnerground music than non-aspergians.

It depends on what you want, I guess.

Personally, I find the underground more interesting, but at the same time harder to access. Maybe a mix of both would be ideal.

You nailed it TheHouseholdCat, a mix is best.

Underground is almost always mroe unique but less well composed I've found. The familiar can be very calming of course...sometimes it's good listening to a generic band a cut abov the rest in the genre, like me with Art of Dying.

I often have the feeling that underground bands are even more generic than the mainstream.

I don't think simpler compositions mean that the songs are more generic.

Overproduced music in general makes me cringe. It does not calm me down. ^^

I don't think mainstream music sounds a lot alike. Sometimes, what enters the mainstream, is and remains quirky. I often wonder why some bands "make it" into the mainstream and others do not.

Jeez my spelling was awful that post, two typos!

And it depends on which genre. Rock is definitely more generic when underground, but in progressive, alternative rock and a few other genres they tend to be just as good.

I basically only listen to underground House music and Techno. I've been DJing at underground warehouse, desert, and forest parties since '98, since then I listen to almost exclusively electronic. Before that it was Grateful Dead, ska/punk, west coast gangsta rap, and Miami breaks.

I have a 1500 watt soundsystem in my truck, a 6000 watt system for throwing parties, so I can tune my tracks to sound good on my systems, and I make my own DJ mixes, so I'm usually listening to those. Distorted audio drives me crazy. It can be loud as hell, but a tiny distorted TV speaker kills me.

Electronic music drives me nuts, usually there's just chaos with no real composition outside of the same beat for 4 minutes then a brief break and back to the beat for 4 more minutes. Of course there's a crapload of sub-genres, but none I've heard have been interesting.

Closest I get is the midsection in Clockwork by Chimaira.

I can understand not liking it, but I have to disagree with the assessment that it's simplistic in it's form, or that the composition is any more repetitive than any other genre of music. How is techno's beat-break-beat any different from verse-chorus-verse? Consider that you may not be attuned to the intricacies of the music, knowledge of the instruments being used, and therefore appreciate the sounds they manage to make, not used to the complexity in the rhythmic structure that you hear as "chaos", etc.

I can understand why. If it's a genre you're not interested in, you're not going to put much effort into learning about it. I have a fairly musical background, I've played cello, organ, etc.. and it took me probably 6 months of going to parties every weekend before I could tell you the difference between House and Trance. Probably another year before I could tell Tribal Techno from Goa Trance. It's night and day when I listen to it now, but it started out as all Oontz Oontz Oontz music to me, too. Now I can tell you the difference between Rotterdam Terrorcore and Dutch Gabber. I listen to House all day long, but Trance bugs the crap out of me. Drum n' Bass is good stuff, but DubStep does nothing for me.

There's as least as much creativity going on there as any non-electronic music out there, but I understand if it's not your thing. That "dance music" crap they play on the radio absolutely should not factor in on the equation. Radio stations are clueless about electronic music.

Also, the tracks aren't made to be played individually, in most cases. They're setup with a fairly standardized phrasing so that a DJ can mix them and not have them trainwreck. It's largely up to the DJ to vary up the beats and keep things fresh. If you're just listening to the tracks, you're missing half the performance.

You have to make a difference between "electronic" and "techno". "Techno" is mostly the same beat over and over again. The stuff you listen to when you get completely wasted. To me, no offense, it's the musical equivalent of a headache. It's like a constant rhythmic pounding in your head.


As with any genre, in the mainstream electronic music somehow becomes very superficial.

I don't think I could ever like techno as a genre, but when I was 12/13 I liked some of the electronic music that got a lot of airplay. For me, it is not a general dislike of electronic music, just if to me it seems played badly, meaning... not interesting to me.

As for the "chaos" aspect...

"With electronics, the ear often has no reference to decide if a sound is too loud or too soft because you don't know the source of the sound. Electronics are usually taken at face value. If you hear a loud trumpet, the ear has a reference for what a loud trumpet sounds like. With electronics, that doesn't happen."

If you listen to "Early Phone Call from Blair" from the "Less Than Zero" O.S.T., you can totally see what Thomas Newman means. It's got a very eerie and gloomy sound. Haunting. I think the problem is when you think of electronic music, usually you think of mainstream electronics.

I actually like the... round quality of electronic music. Say... "Treefingers" by Radiohead. It is just 3 and a half minutes of synthesized music. It has a very meditative effect.

I don't even mind repetitive music. I often find that minimalist music seems more pleasant to me than a lot of progressive rock. Progressive rock is like a new form of experimental jazz. It's too much for me, really. I'd rather listen to something... simple.

"I’d finally found a way of asking what the difference between a synthesized and a string sound was, and how they emotionally affected me. I felt that I made a huge amount of discovery in those terms. I devised three chords that were very sweeping, but they never sounded as good with full orchestration as they did with synthesizers. You couldn’t get that push, or “round” quality I needed with real strings. The temp track had U2’s “Bullet The Blue Sky” over the beginning, and I spent weeks trying to drive that song out of my head! It’s always interesting to cancel out temp music, so it allows you to reach that unique place."

That's the advantage of electronic music, really. It's very... pure, if you like to call it that way. Electronically synthesized music has a very round sound. But if it is used in a superificial way that does not seem appealing to you, it can become quite ugly.

That is exactly my problem with overproduced pop music and rock music. It's much too clean. It does not enhance the music for me.

If you actually think about it, electric guitars are nothing but electrically modified guitars. So if you say electronic music is not your thing, this should be included. The real problem is that we like to draw lines between genres. I personally believe that the best music transcends genre boundaries and that it takes the best from everything.

"I’ve always been trying to reconcile electronic against orchestral. Both of them really interest me, and I’d never choose one over the other. I hate the notion that electronics are a cheesy way of doing things, and that orchestra is the only “true” approach to scoring. But you can understand those critics, because electronics allows you to make easy choices. Anyone can do it. But while synthesizers are things you hide behind sounds, they can also be put in places you’d never expect. I’ve always wanted these boundaries to be amorphous."

I like the "anyone can do it" aspect. Because that is the main criticism of electronic music. That it is "easier" than playing guitar or drums. While it's just a different way of doing things.

"What I hated about synths - or “electronics” as I prefer to call them - is that you can hide their sounds in the wrong way. Electronics can be really hideous, ugly and oinking. But if you cloak that with processing, then it becomes interesting because you can’t trace the source of the sound. I wouldn’t even describe Reckless as a rock score, since that implies a similar formula."

I think any music can become hideous. There's also classical composers who just seem to want to please audiences. It's a general problem, if you think about it.

I like improvisation a lot. It's a space where you cannot see a clear pattern and you never know when the process is over. Several of my favourite bands compose through improvisation rather than composing a nice pop song. I think electronic music also encourages improvisation. And I like that.

I can't talk music with anyone because nobody has a clue who my favorite musicians are.
Most of them are from U.K. (Either punk,post-punk or folk music). In America my music is virtually unknown.