Lunatique
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Great response.
I wouldn't want anyone to stop positing the music they like. My comment was really just making conversation about the music in the thread, since part of the fun of the thread is to discuss how we feel about the music itself (along with other things, like the visuals, the stylistic choices, the cultural idiosyncrasies, the time periods, etc).
A musician friend of mine from way back in high school--he is a great example of someone who can play more conventional styles (he's a keyboard player), but chooses to do really avant-garde stuff, such as musique concrète, ambient noise, and combining that modern dance, and he is still doing that now, in his 40's. To have remained deeply in that avant-garde mindset all these years, there must be something about it that fascinates him, and I can totally understand the intellectual motivations behind it. It's basically the aural equivalent of the whole modern art debate. So much of modern art lives and dies by the intellectual ideas behind them, but the work themselves are often not what anyone would want to have prolonged contact with. Yes, the pieces have sociopolitical messages, and as delivery vehicles for those ideas, they're effective, but I wouldn't want a print of it or put the original piece in my home, or have it as a wallpaper on my desktop, or even own a book about the works. With music, it's the same. The really oddball experimental stuff that lacks musicality--I can appreciate whatever intellectual point the musicians wanted to make, but I wouldn't listen to it for enjoyment.
I'm definitely not one of those people who resists music that's not "pleasant." As a composer, I do listen to a lot of very complex and challenging stuff, and there's a lot of music in my collection that most people would never think of listening to for leisure, such as really terrifying cues from horror movies and games--music that messes with you psychologically and freaks you out. There's also avant-garde, death metal, really experimental IDM, obscure ethnic music, etc--most are not what the average person would want to ever listen to, because most of it is not pleasing the way conventional genres are. But there's always a certain level of musicality in all of them, and whatever ideas behind them are conveyed with enough musical quality to still be unmistakably music.
I think the threshold for me, is how much the basic building blocks of musical quality are used--elements like rhythm, melody, harmonic structure, arrangement, as well as exploration of timbre, texture, and progression. Even if only very few of those elements are used, if they are used in a musical manner, it still works (for example, factory noises used as rhythmic element, and the various noises are used for their unique timbre and texture, and there's a sense of musical development). If it's just random factory noises, then musically it become pointless to me, because it simply sounds like field recording of a factory, and if I wanted to listen to that, I would buy one of those "Hollywood folly effects/sound design" libraries instead of buying music. Adding aimless distorted guitar feedback noises to it, and maybe the ghostly moaning of some drugged out guy, would only add more layers of unmusical elements. But if the factory noises, the guitar feedback, and the ghostly moans were to be given to let's say an electronic musician that likes to cut up samples and arrange/layer them in a musical manner that's very clever, then those exact same elements would now take on a whole new life that's much more musical than just random/aimless noises without any sense of interesting development. Now, I know some of the experimental stuff you posted does fall into that category, where there's a certain sense of musicality, but (and this is where personal bias comes in), the musical sensibility just didn't appeal to me.
Anyway, just making conversation.
BTW, I actually have a list of the music I love on my website (along with my favorite movies, TV shows, books, artists, photographers, etc), and anyone interested could take a look here: http://www.ethereality.info/ethereality_website/about_me/influences.htm
