We had a dumpling-making party last night and listened to The Most Unwanted Music, which you can listen to here (MP3). It’s the result of a purport­edly “scien­tific” study on people’s musical likes and dislikes by the duo Komar & Melamid (its compan­ion piece, The Most Wanted Song, is terrif­i­cally banal). The results are predictable: people like cheesy five-minute rock/R&B love songs much more than they like accor­dions and chil­drens’ choirs. (What’s funny is that people equally wanted and didn’t want “synthe­sizer” and “intel­lec­tual stim­u­la­tion,” I suppose because both these things can take so many differ­ent guises.)

Anyway, The Most Unwanted Song is great party music. It covers a bewil­der­ing styl­is­tic range, from rap-opera to adver­tiz­ing jingle to faux-German Sprech­stimme. The subject matter includes, as far as I can tell, How Awesome Being a Cowboy is, How Awesome Shopping at Walmart is, and Wittgen­stein. The huge orches­tra, which often indulges in Day in the Life-esque atonal freak-outs, includes a pipe organ, bagpipes, banjo, harp, and the most persis­tent wood­blocks you’ve ever heard. For all its weird­ness, it’s quite a happy, rousing piece of music, mostly because you’re rolling around on the floor after about three minutes (the whole thing is 25 minutes long, which really takes stamina).