Chris Ott on The Disintegration Loops

Chris Ott seems to think that Basinki is a talentless hack. Does that make him a talentless hack? Am I a talentless hack?

youtube.com/watch?v=KGE7q0oDlEI

Discuss.

Chris Ott is always correct.

I absolutely agree with Ott that Basinski used a tragedy to make money. And the "disintegration" aspect is just bullshit.

Ott is my guy. Period.

anyone got a link to chris ott's music? can't find it on discogs.

literally who

The Disintegration Loops are fucking great.

ott and i did a duo diss track on grimes several years back. :)

An ex-P4k writer who frames himself as a no-nonsense voice of reason despite oftentimes running headfirst into hyperbole to air out his controversial opinions.

lmao his analysis of ecco jams was nonsense

if you check his twitter he posted his shoegaze stuff a while back

He hasn't run the twitter in ages now lmao

>ex-P4k writer
thanks for the rundown, opinion discarded

t. pleb

t. plebeian

He wrote the 33 1/3 for Unknown Pleasures though, he's the real deal.

yeah i noticed, i cant remember where he put the download link up but his music's definitely floating about

he had a pretty bullshit excuse for not finishing it too but it probablt went with his twitter account

lester bangs wrote for a pretty misogynist publication, does the publication invalidate a music critic's work?
what does that say about fantano?
asking out of interest

To be fair he hasn't written for them in well over 10 years.

i will agree that basinski seems to exploit tragedy to release music but aside from that all this video is, is chris giving you some "history" on his experience with tape music trying to build up an image before he starts spewing a bunch of bullshit about basinski's music being generic
idk what genres of music he genuinely cares about but maybe he should fuck off with tape music and stick to something that seems like more his bag. maybe alcoholism?

>dictating music's worth by the talent required to create it
LOL

i think if you really wanna insult him you should post zoomed in pictures of antony fantano's forehead

This is a pretty disingenuous response, because Chris Ott does have a history with this sort of music. I think his stuff is wildly hit or miss, but at least talk about what about the video sucked.

t. no talent piece of shit

That's not really what anybody said.

don't know much about this ott guy but he's right, disintegrations loops in trash

half of the video was him trying to establsih a reason why we should listen to his opinion on tape music and drone and whatnot and then second half was him saying "lol 9/11 how dare you use that tragedy to sell records your music is generic garbage look i can hear this effect in it!"
both parts sucked
i don't care about your history with tape music and drone and shit, if you have a good opinion i will listen to it. too bad your opinion is, literally, that of an american who still thinks 9/11 is a topic that's off-limits. "MUH 9/11"

You're missing the point of the video dude

>lester bangs
>fantano
do i care?

explain in your own words how hes exploiting a tragedy, he filmed it from his apartment building and set it to his newest work
people just repeat this bullshit cause they cant into ambient

not really, that's literally what he does. what's the point then? to call out basinski's character?

>writes for pitchfork
>think he knows everything about music now

are their any critics that aren't affluent and full of shit?

why talk about music criticism like it matters when you cant offer a discourse though

did you just want to diss pitchfork? because i believe there are a lot funnier ways to do that

plus you still didnt answer my question

>writing for pitchfork
>affluent
Pick one and only one.

This is in no way what Chris said. He said that the story was bullshit and that the only reason Basinski told people this bullshit story was because "OH IT HAS SOME SPECIAL MEANING BECAUSE 9/11". He never once said anything resembling "Nobody should talk about 9/11", he was saying that this otherwise generic loop music (which clearly has effects added to it, contrary to Basinski's claims) would not have taken off if it weren't for the fact that the album has a 9/11 connection that made people weep.

You could even say it's . . . emotionally dishonest.

i came to the thread to hear why the disintegration loops is bad, from a perspective i hoped it to be from a musician

i learned not only he was a music critic, but a music critic for a lame hipster website, again, opinion discarded

look at the official music video on basinski's yt channel, look at the covers of all 4 releases, then look at the boxed set's contents. there's an unboxing vid of it somewhere, but it's filled with imagery from 9/11

you can't really deny that he used it for sales. the loops are good, but the attachment to the towers burning is almost as much a part of the music as the music is itself

I can into ambient. This is just average ambient people put on a pedastal over the years for the wrong reasons.

i'm pretty sure he makes a big point about perceived value and using it to sell when it comes to talking about the loops, the fact that 9/11 was tacked on to this album gave it unwarranted attention compared to other music of its kind because of some kind of dishonest value added

the point wasnt about 9/11 it was about how bullshit and dishonest the selling point is, watch the video again

to be honest, chris ott could have been a more influential force in music criticism if he had stayed off music forums and actually wrote about music beyond his year or two at pitchfork almost two decades ago.

he literally spends half of the video talking about his history as a musician and fan of tape loop music

every writer on p4k is a bunch of spoiled college kids with daddy and mummy's money they waste on getting a failed "journalism" degree

would being a musician honestly give you a better perspective than a critic?

what if it was thurston moore or michael gira offering the same critique, wouldnt your reaction be the same?

You only get this impression because you want to. Watch his videos on goth or Boy George, he clearly loves this stuff and knows a lot about it.

These people are basically Ezra Marcus looking for the next white whale.

think the dude just wants to get mad at p4k

He's essentially saying that the music is perceived as more than it is because Basinski decided to link it to 9/11.

Which is objectively correct. Looking at the music itself, it's just ok ambient. Nothing special about it.

this. I don't get why people can't just say they disagree and leave it at that. always trying to make people they don't like seem clueless

His anger seems more pointed at the failure of the independent music industry rather than p4k exclusively, but that's certainly part of it.

there are far better albums in basinski's discog anyway. if dlp wasn't associated with 9/11 then it wouldn't have nearly as many fans as it does. but then again, dlp was probably a massive window into ambient music in general.

>(which clearly has effects added to it, contrary to Basinski's claims)
has he ever stated explicitly that there we no effects added? I've been working with tapes recently, trying to damage and destroy them in different ways, but I have never been able to reproduce anything REMOTELY close to what's going on on the disintegration loops. it's very obvious towards the ends of loops like 3 and 4 that there is some kinda reverb and delay processing going on
there's no way the loops are dry. if he's stated as much, I'd probably say that's more dishonest than then 9/11 connection

p4k hasn't been independent for a while now

Disintegration loops is the best thing that happened to ambient.

totally dude, and green day is a great punk band

Because they made actual art. Does listening to tape loop noise for a long time like I do gives me credit for voicing negative opinions? Certainly no, Michael Gira who worked with tape manipulation since the early 80s could give a more credible insight than some sassy guy hating on an album because it's not as creative as his bedroom looped tape album.

It disappoints me that his videos are before they got bought by conde nast but saying he "just wants to get mad at p4k" isn't accurate or fair.

you have such a desperate need to be viewed as the resident expert in every thread. but you don't seem terribly knowledgeable in any specific genre

so what? if someone uses art from wars or other disasters in human history with relatievly unrelated musical content it wouldnt be considered exploiting a tragedy
then you should understand that people hate it for the wrong reasons too. Being made more famous from artwork and visuals isnt really an argument for it being bad. That being said its perfectly fine to think its trash, just dont pretend its because its "exploiting a tragedy"

He contends that the variation in sound is produced entirely from the disintegration of the tapes. I'm calling bullshit on that, because the bends are too deliberate and constant, in a way that doesn't match analogue mechanics.

This is still sort of a shit argument. You're dismissing him primarily because of who he is and not what he's saying. That's crappy.

I get your point and i totally agree with you but personally i think the guy offers at least some semi interesing insight that isnt just praise and i doubt his background casts such a shadow that it cant be removed

it'd be stupid of me to hear that gira did no wave early in his career so assume all of his new stuff is in the same vein wouldnt it

i get your sentiment man but directing it at chris ott is pretty stupid considering how much internal critique he offers

its on the mark though, i get where he's coming from but in this circumstance it's misguided to cast this kind of value judgement

Ok I literally just make goofy posts half the time and talk about stuff that interests me the other half. Thanks for dedicating so much of your day to thinking about me.

This is a pretty fair retort. People definitely dog on it exclusively for the concept and decide to ignore the content of the music. I just think presenting your art in such a pretentious and dishonest way makes it hard to focus on the sounds. It was clearly a decision for him, and maybe everything he's saying is 100 per cent true, but there is a thick layer of bullshit here.

As an album, it's . . . fine. It isn't great in my opinion, but it's not like a bad ambient/loop album at all.

>He contends that the variation in sound is produced entirely from the disintegration of the tapes. I'm calling bullshit on that, because the bends are too deliberate and constant, in a way that doesn't match analogue mechanics.

ah okay. I think the tape decaying while it's playing is natural and makes sense, but I do think the effects were done in real-time. when he does stuff live, he plays the mixing board and his effects, and doesn't touch the tape. I don't see why dlp would be any different. the effects are definitely post-processed.

>pretentious and dishonest
cant say its not pretentious but dishonest seems a bit strong. I like the album fairly well and the visuals work very well with it, even if i didnt know it was 9/11. I prefer listening to it when im outside though, very pleasant in the right state of mind

If his story is true then I'm a complete asshole for calling him and the album dishonest. But the whole spiel is that those tapes were coming apart the morning the towers fell. It feels so calculated.

I agree with ott for the most part but it is pretty enjoyable to listen to

i completely agree with Chirs Ott about this

>Because they made actual art. Does listening to tape loop noise for a long time like I do gives me credit for voicing negative opinions? Certainly no, Michael Gira who worked with tape manipulation since the early 80s could give a more credible insight than some sassy guy hating on an album because it's not as creative as his bedroom looped tape album.

This is true, I say this as a musician and talk to self-important critics every day. I don't care about the opinions of critics.

I will say this in Basinski's defence: there were millions of people living in New York that morning, tens of thousands of them working in the arts in some capacity. I'm sure there were a lot of freaky coincidences happening that morning. And it may be this was just one freak coincidence that he (and fans of the album) derived from special meaning from.

SOME OF THEM WERE LISTENING TO FUCKING WHAM

His videos on shoegaze are pretty damn good, inside perspective

FUCKING WHAM
D U D E
U
D
E

ART
CON
JACKASS

>Wake me up
>Before you go-go

What did he mean by this?

Chris Ott is daddy desu

I don't get why he likes the Swirlies so much, shit's really not very good.

That's what I'm thinking right now as well, listening to the album of theirs he hyped as one of the best albums of the 90s. Different strokes and all that

It's not terrible but man it just gives up like 2/3rds of the way through. He got me to re evaluate Slowdive though so I'll always be grateful to him for that.

maybe he's not completely right about basinskis complete work, but he's right to be offended about that piece and that review and how it went down
shame he stopped making vids and podcasts, pretty much cut every channel to the public

He's too much of a retard. he could've been a good competitor to fantano if he stopped being a little bitch

I've heard from a few places that he has 4 kids now so I doubt he really wants to spend his time on shit like that

I don’t know who this guy is, but I can already tell from this picture he’s an art illiterate and I’d prefer you never post him again.

he's got a life of his own, a whole career and family. he's got an economic analysis of why online media and culture is toxic, and he even got called out relatively early for literally nothing on twitter. no way he would be able to decently whether the current storm if he was a popular youtuber, so I get that he would prefer to focus on, you know, his real life.
his videos as they are on youtube are a decent body of work anyway. learned a lot of stuff there that you wouldn't get in "music publications" like pitchfork. same for his account on one of these q&a platforms, where I read through several years (I think) of his posts when I got bored once. kind of complimentary to his video series, and learned a decent amount too. can't remember the url or the site though.

Turned it off after 35 seconds. I do not take rock critics seriously, especially if they look like a character from a Will Ferrell movie. Praising a guy as one of Pitchfork's "great voices" - please!

ITT: triggered Sup Forums-males

god music critics are fucking insufferable

he's half a Sup Forums-male himself lmao

This.

He spent too much time shitposting in the p4k forums and then hipinion.

what the fuck is with this man's hair

seems fine

this, hes also a genre tourist and a sonic embryo

this.

post it pls
would love a link for this as well

think he just means him mentioning it in the first half of his disintegration loop vid

ah okay. would love to see a full vid of ott reviewing ecco jams

I'm unsure about the validity of his criticism on The Disintegration Loops specifically, but a reminder to all of who this man is:

"Honestly Grimes is the most overrated, over-reported musical act of this decade. I love a few of her songs and she is clearly Rated just right as a fashion model and youth celebrity, but as a musician, she doesn't deserve the place she's in. There's not enough to warrant it on a musical basis, it's all "X Factor." And that's fine, but I would rather see music media focus on music and she can be a YouTube star like Rosanna Pansino. There's plenty of room to talk about her fabulous clothing and visual aesthetic. I don't know if I could talk about her music for five minutes."

Based.

ITT: Pretentious babies who first got into ambient from Loops are delusional from his obvious shill on using 9/11 to create buzz

>"Honestly Grimes is the most overrated, over-reported musical act of this decade. I love a few of her songs and she is clearly Rated just right as a fashion model and youth celebrity, but as a musician, she doesn't deserve the place she's in. There's not enough to warrant it on a musical basis, it's all "X Factor." And that's fine, but I would rather see music media focus on music and she can be a YouTube star like Rosanna Pansino. There's plenty of room to talk about her fabulous clothing and visual aesthetic. I don't know if I could talk about her music for five minutes."
ott is the best

"I hate Swans. I always have. That guy is a complete fucking waste. Just a total fucking waste of life as an opportunity to accomplish anything.
GG Allin had the balls to actually play with his own shit; Gira subjected his audience to the aural equivalent."

I'm cumming

definitely disagree with that one

>should we care about musicians' political beliefs?

>No, and they should not advertise them. "Get your politics out of my music" was a pretty loud rallying cry at one point. I literally do not care what you think, I care what you bring to a medium that's historically brought me joy.
>And it should be noted that most of the people who end up playing music are not exactly top-tier scholars. The pretensions of post-punk acts like Gang of Four and the Pop Group were always hilarious to me, then I got to a place in around 2002-2003 where all these people were talking about them like they were Hard Art and I was just like...it doesn't take a genius to come up with a slogan.

wtf he was obsessed with Grimes when I followed him on twitter a few years ago. I also remember he said he liked Fugazi up until The Argument, but a month or so later he said they haven't made anything good since 13 Songs. This dude flipflops so quickly.

huh. I actually agree with him on something