The most obscure music you listen to of all the music you listen to

Note: This is distinct from the "Obscure bands, awesome bands" thread in that while that's just for music that isn't perceived to be very popular beyond maybe a niche audience, this is for music that you know for a fact that almost nobody knows about, that doesn't even seem to have a niche fanbase to speak of.

For my own example, I submit to you Leila and the Snakes, a band led by the late musician, comedian, and newscaster Jane Dornacker (who tragically died during a live traffic broadcast) as "Leila". They were a mostly female rock band from San Francisco in the late 70s/early 80s who regularly performed in clubs and released a single album before fading into obscurity, with its members going elsewhere. Jane Dornacker's life I can't begin to do justice to by describing it myself. Part-time member Pearly Gates would later front Pearl Harbor & the Explosions and marry the bassist from The Clash. Guitarist Miles Corbin would later form a surf rock band called the Aqua Velvets, and also has released solo stuff. I don't know what happened to the bassist or drummer, though.

Also, the following is their best and best-known(?) song, "Rock and Roll Weirdos". I say best known since it's the only one from their whole album (which IS available on iTunes and Amazon, albeit attributed solely to Miles for some reason) that I could find streaming anywhere.

Any other hidden gems that probably no one knows about that you can think of?

edited 20th Dec '12 1:48:21 PM by 0dd1

Shouldn't this go in the Music forum?

Anyway, Cui Jian is an artist who is very well known in his home country but pretty obscure in the Anglosphere. He's pretty much the father of Chinese rock-and-roll and a symbol of the Chinese pro-democracy movement. You could call him China's Bruce Springsteen given his influence and politically charged lyrics, but Springsteen had far less at stake.

His biggest hit, "Nothing to My Name", spoke for his entire generation, its lyrics reflecting emotional detachment and social disenfranchisement, and became an anthem among the demonstrators in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. It's also a damn beautiful rock ballad that mixes traditional Chinese instruments with electric guitar and drums. Give it a listen.

edited 20th Dec '12 12:56:42 PM by Filby

Yeah, I realized I was in the wrong forum after the fact and already hollered to have it moved.

That's a great song, by the way. Oddly enough, it makes me think of Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Street".

edited 20th Dec '12 12:54:27 PM by 0dd1

Thread migrated.

Keita Kiriyama. Japanese electronic musician; his stuff was a mix of chiptunes, techno, and drum-n-bass. I only found out about him because of his tenuous connection to Studio Pixel (Kiriyama used Amaya's Pxtone music program). Last I checked, the dude only has one song on youtube, and that's because I added it.

Runforyerlife. Ska band (with major jazz and funk influences) from Chicago who put out one album and then disappeared. But it was the single best album I've heard from the entire third wave. I only found out about them because they were (incorrectly) marketed as a Christian band for a short while, and I was obsessed with the Christian ska scene for a few years.

Gracias!

I have a couple musicians so obscure that they're not even on You Tube. Most of them are country singers who, while not mind-blowing, had a few solid country songs. One of them had a pretty interesting lyrical turn — the hook is "I'm just fifteen country songs away from Texas", which at the end becomes "I'm just fifteen — make that fourteen country songs away from Texas". I was surprised to hear someone else sing this song later on.

I also have a few songs from some weird, obscure Texas groups that the local station used to play a lot even though this is Michigan.

My own.

I record synthesizer to tape.

My cousin makes music too, but he plugs his stuff often enough. I will not link to his bandcamp.

edited 21st Dec '12 2:44:25 AM by MagicLaser

Probably a local death metal group, Malignant Christ.

Another obscurity for me is an a cappella group from Lansing called Three Men and a Tenor. My HS choir teacher was a fan of theirs and had them sing at our school several times. It's really amusing, because the three Men are six-foot-six each, and the Tenor is five-foot-zip.

They have great voices, and they're swell guys, but their set list is rather limited. Some of the gimmicks, while clever, have gotten a bit old (e.g., interpolating "Wonderful Tonight" with "Don't Worry, Be Happy"; doing only the first verse to "Stairway to Heaven" before switching to "If you think that we're going to sing this whole song, then my friend, you are sadly mistaken"; etc.).

It's a shame because there are some good tracks on their albums that they just never sing in concert for some reason. In particular, their albums are about 50% covers, 50% original songs… but for some reason, they almost never do any of their original songs except for one called "It's You", which they've done in nearly every concert since the mid 90s.

edited 21st Dec '12 7:48:46 AM by Twentington

My English teacher in high school was in a band called The Autumns. Because of a few mitigating factors, I looked them up and actually quite enjoyed their music. Unfortunately, almost jack squat of any of their good stuff is on You Tube, but I recommend "Slumberdoll".

Westbank Killa, a very talented horrorcore rapper from Detroit.

Call Me Again - Knuckle Joe: So obscure, you can't even find an mp3 download for it. Unless, of course, you use a You Tube converter or something.

edited 22nd Dec '12 7:25:34 AM by Unprettier

Panzerlied from the "Battle of the Bulge" film.

Earlier this year I DJed for an event, and due to the theme the guy running it had me tracking down some pretty obscure Boston bands. A couple I kind of wish I could find more music by would be Turkish Delight and Pastiche - I had to resort to ripping both from youtube. Amazon looks to have reasonably cheap used copies of Turkish Delight's Tommy Bell and Howcha Magowcha though, so I guess sometime I'll snap those up.

Otherwise, there's always Zeehas; 12 Wait, an experimental synth pop duo with one self-released album that went out of print after their breakup. Here's a video promo thing featuring bits of a few different songs from To the Maxxxxxxxxxxx. I've learned through google that Zeehas member Dylan Sparrow has a current project called Giggle The Ozone (who have more of a full-band sound but plenty of the same new wave weirdness), and um, used to be in a satirical multi-racial Nazi punk band called Rykies.

edited 22nd Dec '12 12:08:04 PM by MikeK

Probably Sirius, a German prog band active in the early 80s with two independently-released LPs. Their raison d’être was to set the poetry of William Butler Yeats to music, apart from two instrumental tracks (one on each album), all their songs were based on his poems. Their albums were Running to Paradise (1982) and The Three Bushes (1984). The former was one of the last albums recorded in the independent Brutkasten Studios.

edited 22nd Dec '12 1:53:02 PM by Bananaquit

There are a number of '80s cassette compilations that I have in my music library which contain musicians that even I would have a hard time giving a good summary of beyond, "They existed, and I think they were English."

In terms of bands that I actually have full albums by, there are a few that strike me as being somewhere between "esoteric" and "unknown and unknowable." The experimental group Slashing In Your Slumber are perhaps the quintessential example, lacking even a Discogs entry, but the Portland guitar/drums duo Sufi Mind Game, the noise collective Gonk and the quirky electronic outfit The Sea Of Wires are all contenders for second-best in the mystery stakes.

And this is, of course, entirely ignoring all of the musicians that I actually know.

Yeah, I think we'd have to draw the line at musicians we actually know. (Besides, then I could list myself too )

Yeah, that would be overkill.

In my mind, I've kind of assembled this informal Hierarchy of Music Obscurity, a bit like Glenn Magus Harvey's Sliding Scale of Anime Obscurity but less exact. At the top, with a score of 0, you have groups with the maximum amount of exposure possible, such as The Beatles; at the bottom, say 10 or so, you have private musical endeavours with no actual releases, distribution, or following. 8 is the maximum possible score for a group with legitimate releases (i.e. not demos or private tapes); 9 applies to bands only known through demos or word-of-mouth, and only to a very limited degree.

I kind of think of it in powers of eight, albeit in reverse: A 9 has about eight fans, an 8 has sixty-four people in the know, a 7 a little over five-hundred followers, and so forth up into the hundreds of millions. Elvis Presley and The Beatles are quintessential 0 artists; Slashing In Your Slumber and their ilk are probably, realistically speaking, at 8.

That'd make an interesting page for here...although I think it'd be very YMMV regarding some musicians.

The hierarchy is more about exposure than popularity, so the matter is not wholly subjective. For example, I'm pretty certain that Nickelback would rank pretty high despite the massed hatred of them.

edited 23rd Dec '12 9:43:42 PM by JHM

Hmm...maybe YKTTW it if you could draft it into a format that'd work and link it here.

WMFU often plays obscurities on their radio programs.

Rune Overman is a good example.

edited 25th Dec '12 1:35:19 AM by MagicLaser

The weirdest stuff I ever came across wasn't 'music' as such, just recordings of asylum patients layered over each other with low-fi noise in the background. It was the freakiest five minutes or so of my life. I have no idea who made that.

On the topic of obscure stuff that I *do* know about, I listen to horrorpunk and psychobilly, and they cross paths a fair amount.

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Ivan Flutskaar's album Stellar Wales.