Who Gets To Call It Rock?

Attention to minute instrumentation details has interchangeably bled through post-rock, math rock, black metal, and post-dubstep. Post-rock acts like Tortoise share a clean, bright instrumental tone with their math rock siblings such as This Town Needs Guns. Meanwhile, contemporary post-rock acts that use vocals such as Mogwai further blur these genre distinctions when math-rockers Hella often stray farther beyond generic rock devices. Similarly, At The Drive-In and The Mars Volta maestro Omar Rodriguez-Lopez delivers his music in an unconventional manner whereby guitars needle through feedback, drums resonate like mosquito wings in your ear, bass lines carry Cuban undertones, and surrealist pianos lumber through organ stabs fluctuating parallel to vocal crescendos. Mars Volta vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala has described his vocal style as "painting with sound," a statement reminiscent of Sigur Ros' "Hopelandic" vocal style.

The Mars Volta is famous for its live performances, which often dismantle rock tropes to the extent that the music's waveform resembles a Rorschach test. Sound engineering slices up spoken voice inserts, implants shreds of songs previously recorded throughout the show, interlaces Latin structures, and entombs blaring saxophones in tunnels of aural pulse. One of The Mars Volta's most famous live recordings is posted below from their album "Scabdates" which ended in a continuous improvisation that straddled the 40 minute mark.

 

As live performances continue to experiment with their conditions of possibility, genres may feed into one another, allowing for more flexibility and dialogue between musical worlds. Radiohead's "Kid A" exemplifies a band's nuanced acculturation to the digital technologies allowed them. With the development of new recording techniques and live instruments, progressive rock acts may more closely resemble their post-rock and ambient siblings.