Gee, at the risk of ...
interrupting anything on the Nest at the mo, I thought I'd revive this thread because questions of influence, genre and innovation always intrigue my twiddly mind.
eadric wrote:I always think of what Tim does as kind of 'unstable', in that it's in between so many other things.
As others have noted, that's a great description, eadric. I've always thought it was a matter of guys coming of age and beginning to make music during post punk / new wave who took their teenage roots in prog seriously. Which makes Tim's approach hardly some grand, conscious attempt to synthesize punk and prog as he says, but just trying to be true to what he liked.
Since the whole discussion was generated by overenthusiastic Cardiacs fans taking advantage of Wikipedia's inbuilt tendency to enable bullspit, we've got to mention that some of those putative "influenced bys" no doubt are working in areas now that few were when Cardiacs were coming up, still in an age of the major labels, music press and broadcast radio setting the parameters on what does and doesn't make "good rock music." Since all of that basically collapsed with the rise of the internet and satellite radio, there are many bands now who use exotic chord progressions and meters and who see themselves, like Tim, as basically "just tunes" bands and not denizens of some avant prog art ghetto. Major Parkinson for one.
Cardiacs is one of those incredibly rare sui generis entities, but they aren't the only ones who have fallen through the genre cracks. Allan Holdsworth's another one: too rock for jazz, too jazz for rock, "fusion" by default -- but sounds like no other fusion. And while shredmeisters fall out of the woodwork to praise him and claim his influence on their
technique, just about nobody -- no, literally nobody -- can play like him (including supremely competent fusion guys) because his harmonic approach is totally unique. Sounding like and playing like are different.
And I'm not just being a hyperbolic fanboy, either. I can cite chapter and verse on this from his own instructional materials -- which contradict everything taught in academic jazz theory.
Captain Beefheart also. How many from the first punks onward rushed in to try to claim him as an influence or at least a major inspiration? But how many artists has anybody heard who sounds like
Trout Mask or
Decals -- or even his later, somewhat straighter stuff? PJ Harvey (who was supposedly weaned on Beefheart) for a riff or so on
Dry, maybe. John French? He played with Beefheart, the guys in Mallard, too, so they don't count. Zappa has lots of directly traceable influenced-by's, but he's a different sort of genius: a genre omnivore. Beefheart, Holdsworth and Cardiacs carved their own, sounds-like-nobody-else-in-creation genre niches.
So sure, there's doubtless a part of all of us who love Cardiacs and will always remain perma-gobsmacked at how they changed our whole outlook on music who, at least secretly, wish that they'd be regarded like The Beatles -- revolutionaries who not only changed pop music forever (Cardiacs have already done that), but who influenced everybody in creation. Or barring that -- at least Magma -- a band who created their own genre with dozens of bands who play it.
But I'm tellin' ya, boys 'n' girls, the third option ain't so bad. Cardiacs, like Holdsworth and Beefheart, are the rare artists who
simply cannot be imitated. I'll take that in a heartbeat.
There's a few odd time signatures but it's not odd time signature music.
This is an unproductive line of reasoning, eadric, because you can never talk about these things in absolute terms. You mean compared to Stravinsky and Bartok, of course not. To avant-prog and tech metal, perhaps not in many cases. But compared to old-school progrock Cardiacs are way more metrically advanced, and more importantly, compared to their
direct ska / Pixies milieu, Cardiacs
are Stravinsky and Bartok. Rolled into one.
Math ska ???Seriously,
The Special Garage Concerts is as mathy as it gets. Ask Bob Leith.
There's bits of musical interplay without being that complicated.
Goodness, have you ever tried to diagram the repeat structure of
Buds And Spawn? -- and that tune in spirit is an otherwise slammin' rock number. You always have to take the spirit of the tunes into account. The opening guitar and first verse of
Bellyeye fool you into thinking that this is going to be
the best party rock song EVAR, that is, until you hit all the key changes in the chorus and then the two different middle 8s in different meters. Even their simpler tunes in one time signature like
Arnaud and
Come Back Clammy Lammy (in 5/4) have modulations and arrangement shifts. Cardiacs are way more complex structurally than they "need" to be.
I can't think of many 'weird' chords, it's strikingly straightforward in that sense.
My friend, you are simply objectively wrong. I can name dozens of extremely weird chords which defy the mode they appear in: the middle sections of
A Horse's Tail and
The Duck ..., the "crawling is my world" section of
Dog Like Sparky, the horrifying middle section vocal tritone alteration in
Manhoo, the tritone-centered cluster that abruptly ends the harpsichord solo in
Odd Even, the fist-on-the-keys piano clusters in the middle of
Hope Day, the enormous string synth "ugly dog, HIDE!" cluster at the end of the chorus of
Goodbye Grace ... shall I go on?
In fact, I think weird chords are more characteristic of Cardiacs than weird time siggies.
Although I'd argue the later stuff is generally 'simpler' than the earlier (it'd have been interesting to see if having KT around reversed that), there's a consistent Cardiacs sound that didn't become too predictable.
Kavus wasn't around for much of the writing (except
Ditzy Scene and maybe
Faster Than Snakes if memory serves), but he
was around for
The Special Garage Concerts, and I'd be curious to know how involved he was in the arrangement process, as Jon Poole was during
Sing to God. I think the earliest Cardiacs may be the most metrically advanced, but Tim grew by leaps and bounds harmonically by the time of
Heaven Born onward. I don't consider any of those three discs to be simplified because their arrangement strategy had to change as a four-piece. The key / section changes and chorus of
Bodysbad (in 19/4), the many metrical shifts in the verse of
Cry Wet Smile Dry and harmonic shifts in the chorus, the spidery, demented steam calliope tuned percussion at the beginning of
Get That Evil Mud Out of Your Soul, the beautifully subtle meter shifts in the lovely
Wind and Rains is Cold, the main riff of
Will Bleed Amen that I still haven't been able to count, not to mention all the changes throughout, the demented whole-tone Southern rock meets
Relayer Yes of
Junior is a Jitterbug, not to mention the deliciously sinuous undulations of its extended electronic outchorus -- these are not the works of a man interested in "simplifying" his music ...
So direct influences... I can't think of many, to be honest. There's bands like umm Ring? Blossom? where they sound like they were listening pretty closely, but I'm struggling to think of anyone big. Suggestions?
Not big, maybe (not yet, anyway), but our very own
Sterbus seems to be demonstrating a way to write extremely Tim-styled music (albeit more of the side projects than Cardiacs) without directly ripping him off. You can check out his new tune on Cardiacs Alike forum.
Bob
)
Good gods, I'm playing 
), but I dunno if being too full of themselves is why Andy Partridge or Mike Keneally necessarily choose to express themselves the way they do. After all, nobody in the music world likes themselves more than Madonna, and nobody has 
Ballsy kid 
(I'm listening to the song 
