Lindstrom: Where You Go I Go Too

major swellings?

this sorta thing isn't usually my bag at all, but i've been playing the living fuck outta the promo i got. WOW, seriously - amazing "house." is it house? i'm totally outta my depth on the various modern dance/electronica genres and junk.

Totally not what I was expecting him to sound like. Kind of noodley and krautrock where I was expecting it to go boom-tish boom-tish.

Now that's the way to get me to pay attention to dance music. Have them dress like shaggy dronerock boys and reference Cluster albums. I may have to get this.

(And not just because of the trousers so tight I can see which way he's packing.)

i really don't like any of his other music, and after reading some of this thread i almost wonder if he meant to do what he did with this album - or if he was totally trying to do something else and failed miserably. either way, i'm loving it.

Surreptitiously addictive, and hence possibly my most played track of the past few weeks. Hoping to enjoy it on a whole new level once it's out on CD.

haha the last few comments make me think this is going to be the big 'crossover dance' album of the year, despite not being particularly dance-able

Out tomorrow!

*buzz*

I am going to complete a full orbit of the earth and listen to this album in its entirety 300 times as my spacecraft traces the line of sun's rays creeping across the earth's surface.

-- Tim F

actually low-earth orbit only takes 90 minutes

yeah but hes going the speed of the sun's rays

then that would be 24 listens, not 300

i'm trolling tim's kinematics because trolling the "circa 2003 outkast thread" response to this album is unworthy of trolling

Vahid you're assuming that my spacecraft obeys the normal laws of physics. Clearly Where You Go I Go Too has suspended these.

trolling the "circa 2003 outkast thread" response to this album is unworthy of trolling

Reading the recent contributions to this thread, I kinda sympathise with rap fans who loved SB/TLB but felt their buzz being harshed by neophytes.

"I have never heard this kinda funky funky groove thing before but it makes my body want to do something!"

im sort of more annoyed by the implication that lindstrom probably didnt know what he was doing

"god no way this established and well-known producer and dj has listened to enough records or knows enough about music production to make a disc that references krautrock and ambient music"

I really like this album but it's not like it's actually that far from what he's done before, or from what other producers in the scene are doing. Really this is about producers egging eachother on, I reckon - the first and the third tracks here feel like ripostes to Prins Thomas and Mungolian Jetset (esp. the Prins Thomas remix of Hatchback's "White Diamond").

this happens to a couple dahnce albums every year though!

xxp wrt ilxor crossover

Yeah true, but usually it's more like "I don't know much about the dance scene that this is from but I really like its uptempo pop toons", which is always a less annoying (because humbly oblivious) tack to take than "isn't it great how this producer has inadvertantly made music that stands next to the greats of 70s krautrock and ambient music" etc.

The first is distortive and reductionist, but the second is both those things and kinda condescending as well.

As odd as the critical uptake w/r/t The Field was, no-one (as far as I know) was trying to connect it to some entirely non-dance-music lineage in some kind of redemptive move.

yes i agree tim--honestly this is only a few steps beyond something like 'nummer fire en' or 'turkish delight'

thats an agreement w. ur xpost. tho i also agree with your second post.

those might be more self-consciously 'disco' though

"those might be more self-consciously 'disco' though"

Wait do you mean the earlier L/PT tracks or prior crossover albums?

haha the earlier tracks--turkish delight in particular

what about mighty girl, it's a freakin can cover!!!

s1ocki, what is the can track it rips?

Download version of the album includes a bonus track, Grand Ideas (John Agebjorn remix)

It's a straight (great) cover. Can's version is only available on their Peel Session, as far as I know.

Thanks for that. I'll have to do some digging around for it.

Oh my! Apols for distortive and reductionist neophytic buzz-harshing, but you can't help liking what you like, can you?

Um, I'm pretty sure we weren't talking about you mike!

today I did the Lindstrøm Listening Party for our ILM overlords, Paper Thin Walls.

Nice interview--your Betablog series talking with different nu-disco people was crucial. The PTW streams are so handy!

"The Long Walk Home" is really grabbing on first listen--I like how the production sheen/strong melody on that one seems esp. kindred to some of the tracks he picked for Late Night Tales (Rainer Bloss, Pekka Pohjola--both happening to be from the same year, 1986, fairly weirdly enough)...

the first and the third tracks here feel like ripostes to Prins Thomas and Mungolian Jetset (esp. the Prins Thomas remix of Hatchback's "White Diamond")

i mean i completely agree with the fact that the vein of nu cosmic disco lends itself to pushing the terms grandiose, drawn out, and seemingly self-indulgent with its compositions, but i think Lindstrom is doing something far more interesting here in refining his ideas while referencing past works.
the first track is clearly an elaboration on most of his current stuff out there (Nummer Fire En and Turkish Delight are perfect examples) but this I feel exceeds those both in dynamic contrast and sheer energy. the second track is IMHO his best dancey track yet that maintains its integrity as cosmic (Breakfast in heaven and I feel space were along a similar vibe, but i feel great ideas achieves this much better). then the third track is an obvious reference to Transfer Station Blue, i mean it's pretty ridiculous how much he takes from that track, and it turns out great.
but i don't think he is trying to make some kind of all-encompassing album that bridges krautrock, ambient, disco, blah blah blah... it's just the best lindstrom i've heard to date.

thanks, Craig!

while i think it does sound at times like a riposte to others mining in that vein, i pretty much agree with san frandisco in that i find the album pushes past all his previous stuff into uncharted territory. maybe that's why i always inverted the pronouns and thought the album boasted "Where I Go, You Go Too." it doesn't sound like "longer" versions of prev. LPT but like something else altogether. i also found calling it "house" or "nu-disco" sorta failed to explain it either. but then again, i'm not one for tags.

Does it really push into uncharted territory? The thing that really gets me with this album is not how self-consciously epic it is, but how it's at the same time very familiar and evocative.

"while i think it does sound at times like a riposte to others mining in that vein, i pretty much agree with san frandisco in that i find the album pushes past all his previous stuff into uncharted territory."

I don't think it has to be an either/or - I agree that Lindstrom is going further in a particular direction than he has before, and that what he's doing hasn't already been done by (say) the other artists I mentioned, but I think it makes more sense to see them all as using elements of the past to spur each other on to greater and greater heights, rather than to assume that Lindstrom is somehow excusing himself from contemporary developments and communicating directly with the past.

One thing I've been thinking about for a review I'm writing is that Lindstrom has increasingly gone out of his way to locate and seize upon a sound (or sounds) that is/are "transcendent" - that is, a sound so allusive of grandiosity and largesse and exceeding boundaries that these become a constitutive stylistic principle rather than a contingent achievement.

It's a mental shortcut - although not obviously wrong - to therefore describe the album in these terms as if this is an achievement. More precisely, what is impressive about WYGIGT is how the music sounds so effortless that Lindstrom can efface the boundary between transcendence-as-style and transcendence-as-achievement. As Matt implies, more treasurable than the album's grandeur - which should be taken as a given - is how it performs "grandeur" in a manner that avoids hamfistedness and remains intimate.

so is this where dude is finally villalobos'd? what is the comparable villalobos record where he became the name to drop

Alcahofa.

achso was the one where reviews were saying 'too formless for the club', wasn't it, i'd say that.

"he's pushing BEYOND THE DANCEFLOOR"

Yeah I think it was with Achso that the GOAT status started to be applied. Before that he was more like first among equals, though it was probably with The Au'Harem... that a lot of reviews started to read like the critic was afraid to say it wasn't a classic.

Also remember the thing about Alchacofa is that it was released at a point where micro seemed to be about to go out of fashion, but "minimal" per se didn't exist yet. Achso seemed both to ride the crest of the minimal wave while not actually belong to it wholeheartedly - perfect for disproportionate auteurisation.

Lindstrom's maybe at a similar point - when the Feedelity retrospective came out it was like "oh yeah we're familiar with this space disco stuff, isn't it on the way out now?" - whereas WYGIGT seems both to coincide with the current trend for hysterically overblown "balearic", while also (ahem) "transcend" it.

None of which changes the fact that Achso and WYGIGT are great albums.

expansion of existing elements seems a better way to describe WYGIGT, rather than pushing things beyond or fwd or whatever. i mean, whatever musical developments are present in the album which may not have been in the scene before are largely due to lindstrom's self-imposed concept, but it seems more like bringing latent elements to the fore than apecifically adding anything

don't like the idea that this is where he gets villalobosed though :/

deal

if you don't want him to get "villalobosed" aka more successful you are probably an elitist asshole

if you like the dude you should be rooting for him to become successful, and it's not even like it's coming at the expense of his art (cough cough lil wayne)

Jordan, Lindstrom probably is more successful than Villalobos on a lot of measures. I suspect Lindstrom's releases sell more than Ricardo's do already.

On my reading "Villalobosed" means: a critical consensus emerges whereby the value of this artist is in being an innovator as defined against the "rank & file" of, y'know, other producers making pretty similar music.

This was and is unnecessary and distortive wrt Villalobos and it'd be the same wrt Lindstrom.

ok, i probably should have gathered that from reading the thread, though i still do suspect that there is an element of the "wrong" critics/publications getting on the bandwagon

i guess that would be "critical consensus"

im mostly getting reactionary to what i imagine lex means even tho there probably is no reason to

Jordan the point is it's not about excluding the 'wrong' people, it's about people praising this record in ways that are pretty reductive wrt to the rest of the genre, if not downright dismissive and ill-informed.

yeah tim got it, villalobosed as in how people are gonna talk about lindstrom now, not in terms of his success (cuz villalobos w/his multi-platinum albums is such a benchmark there!)

though it's good b/c i do think WYGIGT is an incredible record and seeing reductive praise of it will force me to think less lazily about why i like it

x-post:

Disliking this development is not about being elitist - I'm not gonna cry into my pillow if Lindstrom gets massive but Mungolian Jet Set or Studio remain relatively obscure. What's a bit :-/ is the way in which the stuff that gets said about people like Villalobos and potentially Lindstrom soon, largely out of intellectual laziness, focuses on and celebrates the AMBITION AND DARING and the DOING OF NEW THINGS and the NOT BEING BOOM BOOM PARTY MUSIC. This is ultimately self-hating rhetoric: if Lindstrom is only interesting insofar as he can be distinguished from the spacey disco scene from which he has emerged, why should he bother with disco beats at all?

Similarly, there's a certain type of electronic music critic who will most obsess over Villalobos's least fun, least functional releases, as if this is ipso facto a good thing.

I'm not saying that artists should never try to do anything different or make stuff not primarily for clubs, DJs etc. Not at all. But it seems pretty obvious to me that, insofar as he is working within a tradition of spacey disco revivalism, the value of Lindstrom's work is always how he mediates between that starting-point and the everything/anything-else he wishes to incorporate.