Kelley Polar - Love Songs of The Hanging Gardens (Environ CD05)

xpost, completely agree dan - "idm" is now largely shit and a completely moronic genre name.

no dummy, because my mom knows what disco is and if i played her kelley polar she'd just say "oh, more electronic noise?" she can tell the difference between disco and other music but to the 99% of the populace that don't listen to minimal electronica this simply isn't disco, or nu romantic or pop or whatever.

that nagging vocal bit in "my beauty in the moon" . . . andrew suggested "wood beez" or limahl's neverending story theme, ha.

I love how it's neuromantic but w/out the emotronica quality that the junior boys/superpitcher/&c have - it's so urbane! both baroque/choral AND on a great gatsby jazz age tip! i'd argue that there's no indie in this record's DNA.

wait, I see the point, we've all been hoodwinked! we love broken beat!!!!!

every song I dance to is magic,
every room I'm in keeps on moving,
when I sleep my dreams are filled with motion
it never gets, never gets, never gets...
oooo, oooo, oooo . . ."

= some of my favourite lyrics of the past few years - the implication & deferment of "you" in the first verse is up there w/phil oakey also avoiding "you" in "love action".

hmmn, possible convergent evolution w/indie - magnetic fields' "all the umbrellas in london"/"rats in the garbage of the western world", if they'd actually sounded like the NY discos stephin merritt has undoubtedly hung out at.

it's nice to see you have such a nuanced defn of IDM!

Not a trick question! If I ask the same question while listening to Luciano, the answer is "Yes!"

re: the comments on the review about the "laziness" of the artwork. They found a cool picture they liked and used it. They didn't know it had been used by the Shalabi Effect, and shockingly didn't know it was used on the insert to a Pearl Jam CD. I don't see why the hard time.

mike powell, 2005

Aphex Twin has continually re-imagined and reinvigorated the minor genre known as intelligent dance music, or I.D.M.—essentially a type of electronica fit for bedroom listening

random slate writer, 2003

The legend was this: Aphex Twin was a mad inventor from Cornwall who built his own synthesisers. Surfing on sine waves, he would lead a pack of young boffins out of the computer screen glow of their bedrooms, into the public domain of clubs, shops, and charts, then back in and out of more bedrooms in a feedback loop of infinite dimensions

david toop, 1994

the interview up at http://www.kelleypolar.com/press/press1.html is k-grebt! he pretty much wishes he was AQUAMAN!
also, this album is still fantastic.

Uniting (or negotiating the space between) the bedroom and the dancefloor is a cliche, but it's a building block cliche for pretty much any dance music which is not marketed directly as "club fare", and I think you're actually making the same point (negatively) when you say that this record is not dance music or pop music, but IDM (which implies all sorts of things about how this music might or might not be useful and useable).

I tend to bristle at the suggestion that "club" music isn't really suitable for private use in a home setting, but I can't deny that when I listen to it at home my enjoyment comes from imagining responding to it in a club setting (and, if no-one can see, perhaps acting that out a bit). Whereas there is other music whose relative gentleness/spaciness/quietude etc. seems not only more suitable for bedtime use, but also more suitable for imagining "the inner space of the dream or the terrestrial space of the country yard" - it's almost as if I'm in my bedroom listening to this music and imagining being in my bedroom and listening to this music, only in a way more romantic than any fly-on-the-wall camera in my room would actually pick up.

The issue with this cliche is how sensitively it's used: is it applied unthinkingly, uncritically, prejudicially to one side (usually the dancefloor), sloppily, boringly, or in a way that seems to bear no relationship to the record being discussed?

I can't tell any of that from the quote from Mike's piece. It's a little bit purple prosish yes, but less so than I would probably be if trying were I to try to make the same point...

I still haven't heard this record BTW, but from what everyone has said I can imagine enjoying it more than the Metro Area CD simply because it sounds like it has fuller, lusher melodies. With Metro Area I find myself returning to the "big hits" - "Miura", "Caught Up", "Strut", "Pina" - and often skipping over that long spell of disco minimalism that characterises the middle part of the record.

IDM is back bitches!