opinions on where electronic music is at right now

this kaito record, beautiful life, is really amazing, not just because it's a lush slice of microwhatever, but because it - along with the mri album - really points at some heretofore explored merger of deep trance and microhouse.

not like "beau"...the best way i can describe it is: i was sitting in the living room reading tonight with it on and nancy walked in the room and said: "you don't normally listen to stuff that sounds like this." "what are you talking about, i listen to stuff like this all the time." "not stuff this trance-y." it's got the sweepy filter stuff, and the sweet plangent kinda sticky melodies, and it all sorta chugs along anonymously. but if you listen closely there's snipped guitar and little chimes and all the other microhouse toppings. and then the beats start to reveal themselves as more intricate than you first realized. it's simultaneously Big Room and dainty, if that's even possible.

(side question: is soul center iii any good?)

thanks for the names tho jess. i've been pretty disappointed with most new electronic stuff (the whole shebang from d&b to tomita) for the last couple years. it's still nice and recreational, but the good rush of it is gone. (and i'm not in any way really referring to drugs and please excuse my awful puns.)

m.

And re Soul Center: III's best by far. And it's an isolated bright spot on the album, but seek Lowtec's "Rock Me Easy"--a swaggering funk rundown that Philip Sherburne pretty awesomely described as following the kind of el-p vamp that "gives Moodymann nightsweats."

It looks like I will be able to make myself a selection that will at the same time make a significant departure from the "minimalist flair" of my last excursion in these territories and be able to sustain my attention for a reasonable period of time. BTW is anyone into stuff that is more academic?

Kompakt , some melodic stuff, Pause 2 have some mighty artists like Stoloff and Hopkinson, EU and Maps and Diagrams.

There is good stuff out there but it takes a bit of sorting out.
I have to admit the last BoC was ok, as was the Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. The Autechre ep is good. Oh I don't know I rock, I know that.

of course, this explains why i sell very few records and am increasingly universally reviled!!!!!!!

still, i'm having alot of fun doing it , nonetheless!!.

is the akufen album worth checking out (not sure i spelt right there!)

love

matt

Oh yes and let me second Akufen - v. good album indeed.

I get a little frustrated with Tomas Jirku. His pieces usually start out great, but then, rather than develop that material, too often he just piles on increasingly obvious noises or feels a need to work in some insipid melody. After coming on all brave sounding, he seems to lose courage.

And, it goes without saying, but any mention of Moodymann on ILM makes me very happy. Those who love the Soul Center LPs will likely get something out of his and Theo Parrish's productions. Moodymann, while techy on occassion, leans heavily toward deep funk-house; Parrish is extremely techy in everything he does -- raw, gritty, challenging. I was listening to his remix of Jill Scott's Slowly Surely this morning while driving before the sun came up, in a dense cloud of fog. It was ideal for that.

That Lawrence album. Couldn't get into it at first. Now it's one of my albums of the year.

Let's second that Italic compilation. Lovely stuff. As a totally useless aside I'm actually moving to Borneo & Sporenburg next week (well Sporenburg to be precise). I was very surprised that a Swiss/German duo would name themselves after a new Amsterdam neighborhood. I feel so techno now. :)

I can't remember if it was myself or Jess who said some time ago that microhouse and 2-step exist as the sum result of two of the most exciting narratives within dance music, and that now they divide pretty much all the "good stuff" between them.

"it's simultaneously Big Room and dainty, if that's even possible."

I sort of think of Kaito as a what-if - ie. what if Force Inc. hadn't run away from but rather fallen in love with "Age Of Love (Watch Out For Stella)"?

Sorry that post got interrupted by the Mobile Phone Threat. I guess also I have my concerns about MicroHouse which is that while I like the stuff I've heard - Luomo, MRI, odd tracks from assorted MH bods - it feels like a lovely area to wander about in picking the odd cherry rather than the future of anything very much. I find I need to concentrate quite hard to enjoy any of it - or even notice any of it - and so I'm intrigued by why Tim, Andy K, and Jess (particularly Jess cos he's been quite hostile towards other 'new big things' that get put forward) see so much in it.

(Also I've yet to hear a MicroHouse track with female vocals that wasn't spoiled for me by them, but that's another thing).

and snd: tender love? its about as cold and dry as a sponge is a very hot bath...maybe you need some good headfones.
or try their second album, snd stdio...

I find this to be true of Hypercity. If I listen closely I totally adore it, but otherwise it sounds like Sasha = a bit boring for me. Taylor Deupree, who runs 12k, told Philip Sherburne that microhouse is "all about listening", and I agree. It's all about those moments when you're immersed in a piece of music, and you notice one beautiful sound in the mix - it could be a hihat or it could be something more obscure that you've never noticed before - and you love it and feel that you could touch it. This is one of the main pleasures of all electronic music, and now there is a genre made specifically for it. It's not an acid jazz thing: acid jazz is about tasteful lush production with natural real instrument sounds, while microhouse is about what electronic music is best at: beautiful alien noises.

Hypercity sounds like it was made by a bunch of guys who have listened to Sasha records this way. To truly enjoy it without concentrating very hard on it, you would probably have to dig Sasha. But if you don't, then the hard listening work you have to put in will pay off bigtime. I don't think that it is an "idm cul-de-sac, house with the thrills and physicality removed" at all. The thrills are just more subtle, and the physicality is still there as long as the pumping house beat is.

it feels like a lovely area to wander about in picking the odd cherry rather than the future of anything very much.

Microhouse doesn't sound like a great irresistable-future-force like jungle did in 1995, but it's deceptive. It's more like an invisible future-virus slowly infecting everything. It may just succeed better than jungle did, because it's not something that can be easily hyped up or easily slapped onto existing musical formats to cash in. Its lack of overt futurism means that it will not quickly run into a dead end like jungle did. Its spread will be slow and subtle but powerful.

A lot of it is not glitchy or Sasha-like or "small" at all: The Modernist's "Abi '81" is Moroder on steroids, Gebr. Teichmann's "Aus Der Ferne" is a cubist take on The Rapture's "House Of Jealous Lovers", Matthias Schaffhauser's "Hey Little Girl" is shimmering synth-pop, Sascha Funke's "When Will I Be Famous" is pounding electro, Markus Nikolai's "Passion" is an epic disco sex-fest, Decomposed Subsonic's "Part Of The Machine" is slo-mo gabba, Closer Musik's "You Don't Know Me" is a relaxed, sleasier take on Nine Inch Nails' "Closer", Kaito's "Beautiful Day" is Jam & Spoon '02... This "genre" is the opposite of an aesthetic cul-de-sac, as it's totally defined by how un-hedged-in it is. And if you don't think it's sexy, darlings, you clearly haven't heard Jeff Bennet's "Last Breath", have you?

I suppose in that sense it's a bit "parasitic" on house music proper a la drill & bass; the differences however as I see them are that a) most microhouse still fulfills the function of house (getting you to dance) quite admirably, and b) the "tampering" takes many forms and chooses various goals, such that microhouse doesn't exist tangentially to house but rather interwoven with house - like the knotty backing to a flawless-but-plain weave.

To prove this point one last time, 15 RECENT TRACKS THAT REALLY COULDN'T BE CALLED "DAINTY" IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM:

1. Decomposed Subsonic - Part Of The Machine
2. Schaeben & Voss - The World Is Crazy 2
3. Michael Mayer - Love Is Stronger Than Pride
4. Closer Musik - You Don't Know Me
5. Glowing Glisses - Shaked Ladies
6. Pantytec - Elastobabe
7. Codec & Flexor - Crazy Girls
8. Phil Stumpf - Du Kannst Nicht Tanzen
9. Sascha Funke - 2:1 Fur De Liebe
10. MRI - Data Boogie
11. Akufen - New Process
12. Thomas Fehlmann - Gratis
13. Gebr. Teichmann - In Love With Acid Maria
14. Metaboman - Kommse
15. Matthias Schafhauser - Fuck, Past & Future

By Nitsuh's definition this is really INDIE HOUSE!

(Speaking of which I hope the people who try to paint Jess as some kind of populist poseur are following this thread)

(Guilty as charged Rick)

haha ronan to thread.

i'm not sure if it's even possible to be a real populist (faux or otherwise) in dance music anymore (at least/especially in america!)

heh, geeta keeps saying my favorite genre of music is "handbag microhouse"...i only wish this genre actually existed.

And I can't see how it's very different from IDM... ;) Same principle, slightly different sounds.

Not at all! This is totally missing the point. Microhouse is interested in what makes house work as *dance* music. It is not at all effecting a mind/body cartesian split a la IDM vs dance music.

"By Nitsuh's definition this is really INDIE HOUSE!"

Closer, but i'd say its relationship is more like post-punk vis a vis punk rather than indie vis a vis pop. The point being that, at the end of the day, microhouse is still undeniably house music, still committed to the idea of house and still in love with the effect of house. I don't think I'd like it much if it wasn't (most "straight" clicks & cuts, for example, doesn't really grab me at all).

Certainly I don't feel as though there's any opposition between micro- and mainstream house; in fact "mainstream" is one of the very components that it can overdose on (Jess - what are "Falling Hands" and "All Around (Everybody's Kissing)" if not micro-handbag?).

The fact is anyway that all house music could conceivably be defined as microhouse - house producers have always been in love with sound-as-sound, groove-as-groove, to focus on those things and exploit them. Germany is simply where the most creative application of this passion is happening right now.

i really am starting to think that - beyond tim's (admirable!) taxonomic efforts - microhouse is a term (at least on ilm) that has outlived it's essential usefulness. (which is basically to say that i agree with tim that "all house music could be called microhouse, i'm just in love with those wacky germans right now.")

(tim is "falling hands" the mayer track on total 4?)

(Is house really buried? It's been a pretty unbroken continuity for 15 odd years... it's not like it went away ever)

No Akufen or MRI I've heard has sounded remotely danceable, but I will download some of those tracks and try and get my funk on ;)

(full disclosure: i'm not 100% convinced about mhouses dancibility.)

"But saying "Falling Hands" is mainstream is so much the equivalent of saying that the New Pornographers (or whoever) is great pop i.e. the reasons it isn't are what makes it itself (and good or bad depending on preference)."

Well I wasn't quite saying that "Falling Hands" *is* mainstream - rather that it's taking a certain mainstream-dance idea (weepy ethereal lovey-dovey vocals) and putting it under the spotlight. You could argue that indie does this too, but I think that indie's idea of what is "pop" is is so divergent from what pop actually is currently and perhaps has always been that it renders indie oppositional to pop - in a manner which challenges the neatness of Nitsuh's theory probably. In comparison I can't imagine Mayer seeing his work as *fundamentally* different to "Can't Get You Out Of My Head"; he's just made different sonic/stylistic choices to Kylie.

(also mainstream dance music is already so self-consciously concerned with both progression and nostalgia that trying to draw a distinction becomes quite hard)

(yes Jess "Falling Hands" is that track)

"(full disclosure: i'm not 100% convinced about mhouses dancibility.)"

Jess have you actually danced to it though? When I saw Isolee/Ricardo Villalobos live it was the hardest I'd danced to anything bar jungle and Basement Jaxx live. I went home exhausted.

If you don't buy that paradigm then i'm not sure of your motivation behind grouping microhouse with IDM and complaining that you can't dance to it. I'm not trying to be argumentative, I've just sort of lost the thread of your argument slightly.

i think "when will i be famous?" could totally be mainstream, in the full-on, no-justifications sense. (mostly because it's 2002 and it so effortlessly treads the line between microwhatever and nu-electro.) (and it covers a bros song.)

heh, tim outside of my bedroom or livingroom: no. (mostly this is because isolee or luomo aren't going to come to seattle any time soon.)

What current house music isn't microhouse?

(It is much easier for me to see that big Isolee track as danceable... I love that track)

Not so rubbish though in talking about the principle behind a genre as a whole, as I think Ben was - but I want him to clarify for me. I think it's relatively safe to say that certain electronic music is designed not to be danced to, and other stuff is designed primarily to be danced to. The lines between IDM and dance music have been continually blurring over the last few years, but that's because producers are allowing an increasing sense of physicality into their work - these seem like hybrid strains much in the same way as microhouse is.

Of course there might be people who go hard dancing to "Selected Ambient Works Volume II", but if we're talking about the purpose or effectiveness of whole genres then we're inevitably going to generalise.

"What current house music isn't microhouse?"

That was sort of my point - in honesty you can't rule any of it out; but it's a useful tool in describing varients which most deliberately foreground the ethos in their work.

Nick Kilroy has done a pretty great mix-set where he seamlessly combines lots of microhouse stuff with more 'mainstream' material and it works perfectly.

Re: Isolee - "Beau Mot Plage" strikes me as *way* more abstract and removed-from-the-dancefloor than most of the music we're talking about (though I love it too)! I wonder what microhouse you've heard that strikes you as less danceable than that? (eg. MRI are shorely not any less danceable than deep house for their first album or prog for their second?)

But this just leads us straight back to the whole intentionality debate - user experience vs producer intention as the focus of conversation...

I dunno, I never heard it on the dancefloor (I am far too old for dancefloors these days heheh), but Isolee has kind of a pumping rhythm and that guitar riff is pretty anthemic... but often with this stuff you're talking about an imaginary dancefloor anyway...

Of course it does, and the "can you dance to it" debate we're currently having demonstrates that perfectly - but the context of Ben and my point of contention was a genre's superstructural idea of itself - within which producer intention plays an enormous part. Critics and dancers and DJs do too, but there's enough consensus around these areas generally to make generalisations most of the time.

Does this exist though? ;)

a) Dancefloor is limited litmus test of whether something is aimed at mind or body

b) No matter what the intention of producer, neither mind nor body can be left behind; there is no either or

c) Value structure of body=good, mind=bad (linked to corollary binaries of class, gender etc) blinds you to qualities of individual works and forces them into narrow boxes linked to very large sociological abstractions

d) Why is this the fundamental axis of value? What other binary might produce more interesting results?

Sorry, I'm getting all academic...

(btw, do you mind if i quote you on that - i'll look up the actual quote - in this dj/rupture thing i'm writing?)

Jess yeah fine - I said it first about Chill Out on a KLF thread actually but nobody noticed so I swiped from myself.

I think Tom is right that Tim's description paints microhouse as my idea of a house "indie" but evidently my brain isn't up to processing that idea any further: it seems like the two things match but it also seems a meaningless thing to think about. All of the microhouse I've heard really has given you most of the same things house delivers -- it can serve the same "purpose," largely, only with its own particular slants on it -- so the division doesn't seem like a problematic one.

In fact, if you take into account the idea of house music as being sort of context-bound -- the idea, which some of you might agree with and some not, that something like house "works" in very particular contexts (the club? the car, at night?) but not so well in others (hung over Sunday morning?) -- the slants of microhouse can seem like sort of contextual ones. Tom's description of the morning-after echo is spot-on for a lot of the bits of the genre I like, what I suppose are the "dainty" bits -- most of what house gives you, but ... I want to think of words for this that don't seem as pejorative as "restrained" or "polite." I'll just go with context-shifted: house for someplace other than the house. (NB I'm not sure how much I really believe this argument, but it seems close to something I do believe.)

Well I think a lot of it is the fault of people like me - 'microhouse' really does probably strictly speaking only refer to a certain strain of this stuff that some of the artists are doing some of the time. But since these very same artists are then doing all this amazing stuff that doesn't fit the strict definition, it seems somehow churlish to be overly scientific. Hence why, despite these long discussions, I've been phasing in "German house" as my replacement; it seems easier to mentally add caveats like "well yes of course Herbert is in fact English and Kaito is really Japanese..."

"In league with Ronan's outburst, threads like this are the result of too much novelty and not enough analysis"

I thought that Ronan was protesting against analysis! And anyway Chris I'm surprised you're saying that because most of this stuff is distinguished by its lack of "pose" - surely something you approve of?

Also, feel free to pinpoint exactly where I (or others) should be using other thoughts. To say that the entire discussion is an extended cliche won't really help us correct ourselves.

ronan: "he doesn't really think i was serious does he?"

"I use the term 'microhouse' but I don't really believe in it. About the only music I'd say it fits perfectly is stuff on Perlon and Luomo's album - the idea of house under the microscope, with all it's invisible particles suddenly transforming into a riot of activity. For me what the broader 'microhouse' scene signifies is a significant but impossibly broad rejuvenation/refashioning of house as a whole, fundamentally changing the ratio of ingredients that have traditionally made up house.

I remember Andy saying when he wrote about Kompakt that if house took the pop out of disco to make it more relentlessly- dancefloor based, Kompakt tried to resurrect the discards. I don't think this can be the basis for a definition of microhouse vis a vis house (there's lots of thoroughly minimal microhouse and utterly poptastic house) but I think it's that dialectic - dancing vs other (eg. pop) - that microhouse explores... how many uses can house serve that are not *just* (but may include) dancing? As such it's not intelligent-house or prog-house but outsider-house, whose range is much less confined than the former two because it doesn't limit its experiments to the "experimental" - it embraces the popular too.

Where do pop-microhouse and pop-house differ? I think that with pop-house you tend to get a comfortable covalent relationship with the song and the house groove - the "top" and the "bottom" of the song are left relatively undisturbed so that they can just do their thing (often brilliantly). With (the best) pop- microhouse things are much more mixed up. On something like Closer Musik's "You Don't Know Me" the groove is the pop song and vice versa. This is why some of it resembles the electro- house craze, because the latter does the same thing pretty much, only with a much narrower and more specific historical and sonic basis.

What makes MRI's new album such a headscratcher is that much of it comes closer to openly courting the original and unproblematic dancefloor-basis of house... it's harder to see where it's mixing up the ingredients. And that's where it starts to approach Sasha-material, for Sasha's materials are always expertly measured and applied from a dancefloor perspective. But maybe the difference is that MRI don't take a dancefloor- focus for granted, and their investigations in that direction sound deliberate rather than interpellated."

Jess, lighten up. The pretensions you aim to fortify this music with hardly mask the stench. Oompa oompa oompa oompa - it's worth having a laugh about, and if it's music it's certainly worth debating in a broader scope than the incestuous edification you spin in circles every time new (read: novel) terminology is proposed.

Well insofar as Kaito is concerned I totally agree - he's really just Jam & Spoon with Basic Channel influences, though great despite/because of that.

Has anyone in this thread mentioned broken beat yet?

Andy's list makes a point I forgot to make, namely that liking the-stuff-formerly-known-as-microhouse and liking "proper" house are not at all mutually exclusive. There seems to be a sense on ILM recently that "we" don't enjoy dancing - It's odd how ILM often acts like Ronan is our token "real" dance-music fan... (no offence at all Ronan! You know I check for you).

(i'd also like someone to point out where on this thread the "pretensions i am to fortify this music with" are. i even say that microhouse is a pointless term!)

It feels very kathy acker.

(can i just mention - in case it wasn't obvious - how offensive and chauvinsitc the idea of "needing to be corrected" [which is different than discussion] is?)

*cough* The Electronic Foundation of Sound and Vision *cough*

http://www.warnerreprise.com/asx/madonna_dieanotherday_128-a.asx

It is apparently the theme song to the new James Bond film.

It'll be a shame if they're never heard of again because their music is startling, a solid acid core with a wild semi-improvised edifice constructed around it.

Ha ha Ronan you will be converted - not all microhouse-fans are dancefloor-phobic chinstrokers y'know.

No idea who's produced the Madonna single but if it's Mirwais then he's improved heaps.

yes and isolle's rest is good too. it's my token microhouse album.

see? glitch-house.

"sigmund freud/analyze this"

I am in love.

so here the em pee free

(with remixes, no less)

*downloads and listens*

Heh. Those stops and starts are indeed pretty great. The Freud line is overrated, though; I prefer her drooling about 'avoiding the cliche,' now that's funny. Dan's right, MUCH better than "Music" ever was. And thank god, it didn't make me think of Garbage, which I was fearing for some reason.

Josh what I was thinking just before i sat down and read your post was that microhouse is kinda like punk (though *obviously* not so epochal or groundbreaking) in that while the actual style of music has been done before, it somehow foregrounds an idea of itself that makes the music seem more exciting or fresh. There's a sort of self-consciousness to punk - a statement of "yes we know exactly what we're fucking well doing" - that makes it (or made it?) seem more U&K. Similarly I've repeated myself ad nauseum about how I reckon microhouse - or whatever we want to call it - makes explicit certain ideas that have existed all along within dance music, putting them front and center so that you're forced to notice them and think about them.

eg. I can imagine Jonny Rotten saying to some garage punk band "You made music like mine, but you didn't do it knowing what I know". It's harder to say how a microhouse artist might diss one of their inspirations in a similar fashion, but it *feels* like they could.

(I think though that acid house did what you're talking about, in that it was an idea about music as well as a specific style of music, explicating something that had existed-unacknowledged in disco, and before that in funk, and before that in ????).

http://www.de-bug.de/texte/5129.html

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2178257,00.html

Were these articles discussed on other threads? I see that Simon Reynolds linked to them on blissblog.

From Phillip Sherburne's article:

From Glitch To Blog House
Digging through the DJ charts, the results aren't terribly surprising. Carl Craig is all over the place, as is Theo Parrish. Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers represent the more mainstream end of the spectrum, while Justus Koehncke has disco on lockdown. Larry Heard is representing Chicago's deepest. Richie Hawtin, Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio and the Kompakt label are there as well, assuring that minimalism never goes out of style. Oh, maybe I should have clarified one thing, though. These aren't 2007 playlists; they're charts from a decade earlier.

From Carl Craig's remix of Faze Action's "In the Trees" to the Sähkö records on the wall at Hardwax, it does occasionally feel like we're back in 1997 all over again. Minimal techno still rules (except now it's just called "minimal.") Acid and classic deep house are so deeply entrenched, it's like they never went away. Recent remixes of Cybotron's "Clear" remind us that electro is less a genre than a kind of rhythmic time capsule orbiting the earth, beaming back coded data at regular intervals.

Kraftwerk's Autobahn is closer to the end of World War II than to the present day

Awesome.

!!

London clubland definitely feels like it's moving back towards classicism, away from clicky multitextured minimal house and becoming bleepier, spacier, deeper.

Unlike Reynolds I like to view this as a bit of a retrenchment, a move back to something vaguely resembling a centre ground before going off in new and exciting directions, which is a bit different from going "argh, doom gloom dance music cul-de-sac!".

All I fucking hear on the radio is "up-front house", which I think is something akin to haircut house, i.e. live-sounding rock-style drums doing very plodding, un-funktional beats, with big diva house choruses on top.

Versus ... C.O.D. house? Rent-to-own house? "Mortgage?"

oof.

subprime house = underground bitchez

Actually I would SO listen to a genre called "layaway house."

double garage anyone ?

blaze goes 2step? i would listen to that.

two-car garage

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/221/460144735_80baa1587d.jpg