Listening to different music at the same time.

[Pharaohrock]

Anyone who hasn't tried this should. It's a really good exercise for your ear....right now I'm listening to Sabir Mateen/Hamid Drake and an organ jazz album that's playing on the WarpRadio station here....what's hip is when the layers actually coalesce/merge in a meaningful way.

[jazzypaul]

Strangely enough, one of my favorite compositions I've ever written was done like that...I was sitting at the piano listening to Cast Your Fate to the Wind, and my parents were over and put on I'll follow the Sun by the Beatles. 10 Minutes later, I had a tune together that merged the two pretty well. Didn't realize it though. Then, a couple of weeks later, I was playing I'll follow the sun for someone on the piano, and realized what I had done, and chuckled for weeks...

[Pharaohrock]

that's a good story.

[gabegabrielsky]

Isn't that what Charles Ives had in mind?

[snoutinator]

there's actually a whole science to picking recordings which work well together in this way. a lot of electronic/ambient music is good for layering, but anything with too regular a beat (that will clash with something else's regular beat) tends to be a problem. i remember a profound musical experience when i listened to organic grooves/black cherry (AUM fidelity) for the first time, juxtaposed against a nobukazu takemura record... the doors and windows were rattling, but for some reason nobody called the cops. anyway, it worked very well.

[gabegabrielsky]

In the early days of stereo, when it was very gimmicky, with absolute separation, and there were demo records with ping pong balls bouncing from one channel to another, there was at least one album of big band arrangements wherein two big bands (one for each channel) played arrangements of different tunes with the same chord changes symultaneously. Music Minus One recordings still use this technique to overdub onto the blank side of a prerecorded tape.