A-mus(e)ic

How to turn your Garage\Heavy Metal band into a Post-Rock band.


Step 1; Fire your vocalist plus another member from your band. Because otherwise your vocalist will just become an unproductive groupie like that retarded cousin of yours that your mom insists accompany you on your visit to your friends, and besides unless the vocalist is female, there is no point in keeping one. Usually the other one to go is the lead guitarist, as we all know the post-rock scene is not known for its instrumental virtuosity, but you might even fire your bassist. In any case, the optimum number of members is 3, but in certain situations 4 may be okay!

Step 2 ; Form your own Label. All you need is a name and two band members to say 'yes', majority wins, democracy was never this simple.

Step 3; Give the label a name, as with all names in this genre, it MUST be a phrase of some sort, one that is syntactically correct, it might even make sense as far as semantics go, but it should not be anything relevant, or easily understandable. Examples; Names such as "Pygmy sticks records up his ass-crack" or "Beelzebub thinks, record works" basically string a few nouns, a verb and the word 'record' to form a sentence.

Step 4; Give your band a name, as always post-rock naming conventions apply, however, unlike the naming of your virtual 'record label', you need not use the word 'record.' Examples; "I.want.to.eat.tortillas", or "Cathartic bunnies on moon", a popular method is to add a few numbers to further obfuscate the meaning of the name, like say, "98687MustBeGay" for best results use a random number generator. You might even want to get creative, and add an unnecessary punctuation if required say, "Mongolia! I am from?."

Step 5; Sample witty dialogs from movies and add that to your songs, this works especially well with rants, added points if the soliloquy has swear words. Commonly sampled movies can be 'NETWORK', 'Fight Club', '25th Hour', 'The Rules of Attraction' etc.

Step 6; Sample a guitar riff, use riff over and over again.

Step 7; Give your song a name, as usual, be creative but obscure. like "Is there more falafel !"
or "G.K.G.F.J.T.Y.F" or "No one cares for Kim Kardashian's SexTape,"
bonus point for unnecessary caps, such as "MEatsnaKe"

Step 8; Learn to use these words while describing your music, and pooh-poohing other genres:

1) Motif
2) Soundscape
3) Texture
4) Dramatic Crescendos
5) Cinematic landscapes
6) Intelligent
7) Thinking Music.

Step 9; Distribute your music free on last.fm, and recommend yourself to random users. Anyone who criticizes your music runs the risk of being branded stupid and intellectually inferior in short a 'cockhead' (man, is that a funny word or what ?).

And there you go, you are on your way to a few million scrobbles on last.fm if nothing else.


---------------------------------------
All names are under a Creative Commons license, also there are a few post-rock bands which are really good, 'God is an Astronaut', '65dos' , EITS, being some of the good ones (that I like.)