theo parrish s/d

"to be fair, deej, it is just his scene and his generalization about that scene-- techno is pretty much dead to gay people in the US, at least from what i've seen and experienced first hand. progressive house, shitty club house, hip-house and then disco reign.

-- the table is the table"

exactly.

did paperclip people invent filter loops?

see, pipecock's last comment there is what i was trying to say, vahid. the majority of gay clubs play such garbage that i get tard tingles when i pay my $40 cover to watch a bunch of gym-monkeys try to out-queen each other.

"world hold on" (c2 remix #4)

"OK, i'll bite, pipecock. who invented filter loops? DJ sneak?

-- moonship journey to baja"

i mean, disco loops are tracable back to the 80's in Chicago, i honestly couldn't tell you who made the first one but Daft Punk jacked it from Chicago in general, though obviously their production was a little less clean and polished than the French shit that blew up charts.

i dunno, man. you guys are really transparent. maybe nobody pays you for your music writing because 90% of the stuff you say is just an attempt to fluff up the music you happen to play and to talk shit about the music that other people happen to play.

uh, it is true. have you heard of philadelphia soul? i mean, the early disco deejays were playing almost entirely straight black soul music, read "Love Saves the Day" for a pretty excellent recap of that time period since you obviously havent been paying any attention.

ive read it. im asking you about the audience for the dance music that was disco, and the rise of club culture. yeah obviously it came out of soul music that was commonly performed by straight ppl - i dont know why youd think that was even in dispute - but the genesis of 'disco music' and its aesthetic is not solely inherited from the aesthetics of straight early 70s soul ... a lot of shit came into the style in between harold melvin and it leaving and becoming house and electro and whatever else in the early 80s ... im not talking about how the artists themselves identified, im talking about aesthetics and the engine behind the music, which was one part early 70s philly soul but also plenty of showtunes and kitsch and (other cliche shorthands for gay aesthetics that im probably being somewhat offensively reductive about) that are just as much about what makes disco 'disco' as straight black dudes w/ a four on the floor kick.

say what? popular gay culture moved on from disco music, i do not see how this can be argued.

...only in the sense that all cultures 'moved on' from disco music

unless you try to count crappy trancey nonsense as house, techno, or disco, then the popular gay culture is just not as closely associated with that music as it was from 1975-199something. blame raving, blame whatever you want. in cities like New York or Chicago black and gay people are still down with that music, but it is not SOLELY their domain as it once was. i dont know how you can argue that unless it has been 20+ years since you have been to a gay club.

if by this you mean that gay ppl are a diverse group who listen to a variety of styles of music, then yes i agree

xpost

like, it always spirals inward toward your music collection, and your podcasts, and the house parties you DJ at. guess what - you guys don't have a monopoly on meaningful engagement with music, nor are you the first people to own records + tables (and maybe even a crate!) in the history of the world.

which was one part early 70s philly soul but also plenty of showtunes and kitsch and (other cliche shorthands for gay aesthetics that im probably being somewhat offensively reductive about) that are just as much about what makes disco 'disco' as straight black dudes w/ a four on the floor kick.

or maybe the most obvious example here is THE DJ coming out of gay club culture, thus EDITS and extended breakdowns and all that shit that makes up current dance music ... black & italian dudes spinning for gay black dudes???

i mean, disco loops are tracable back to the 80's in Chicago, i honestly couldn't tell you who made the first one but Daft Punk jacked it from Chicago in general, though obviously their production was a little less clean and polished than the French shit that blew up charts.

-- pipecock

yeah, but it doesn't change the fact that mike clark's "in the morning" sounds as commercial and polished as any cassius or dj falcon track. i mean, what do you make of that, and the fact that geography aside, clark and planet e put that record out around the peak of the international filter-house boom, and not in 80's chicago?

xp to pipecock/self - point being its supremely reductive to imply that gays were just an incidental audience for 'black culture' and maybe things are a little bit more complex

the funny part is i agreed w/ a few of your criticisms of ronan, if not the obnoxious way in which u phrased them, but you happened to sound just as stupid and reductive if not moreso in your dismissal of, you know, nuance and complication

i dunno, it's like talking to geir. it's like a game of twister that you play with your brain. you're going to pick which things you like: 80s chicago house, 90s detroit techno, "underground" disco (but not the bee gees), theo parrish. and then you try to build an intellectual position where you stick a hand or a foot in which each one, but don't touch anything else, no matter how convoluted that makes your stance.

vahid, i'm pretty open to a lot of things in the world of dance music. i just have never liked progressive house, except for that one Sasha and Digweed mix i bought when i was 14 after watching Groove. pretty much everything else in that subgenre, i find rather garbagey. but to say that all i do is look inward is fucking wrong, and you know it, so seriously shut up.

story i quoted in the bobbins thread:

KEVIN STARKE: "There was this one story that I always talk about. I would go on Saturday nights when Armando played at the Warehouse. I would go down there to watch him play and talk to him, just find out information on records. He'd always show me records when I didn't know what it was.

"Saturday night at the Warehouse was primarily a black night. There weren't too many white guys. But I remember this - he looked at me one night, and said, 'Watch this. This is the record I'm going to play and mess these guys up.' And he showed me the record: 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana. I'm thinking, oh, they're never going to dance to this. They're going to get pissed!

"These people lost their minds. People went fucking nuts. That guitar riff - people were dancing all crazy. That's when I kind of looked at it like, okay, never say you can only play this kind of music at this kind of a club. Never say this type of people only like this type of music. You never know. Once you've got the crowd, they're yours."

i used to go clubbing five nights a week, when i was closer to 25 than to 30 (actually i'm 31). and because in california the clubbing scene in general and the gay clubbing scene are pretty tightly knit, i've been to my fair share of progressive house scenes. there was one particularly big one, i forget the name of the dj, but she's pretty famous, a very butch lesbian. the only track i recognized all night was basemenet jaxx's "fly life", which was pitched up like +8. i think it might have been a laidback luke edit or something like that. did i like it? no, not really, but not enough to get very snobby about it. it was a weird sort of music, but only a few steps removed from robert armani or dj funk, both of whom i enjoy a lot.

i dunno, maybe i'm too old to get "tard tingles" over people liking music i don't like. maybe it means i like detroit techno less than you do, i dunno.

take my best of 07 list, which i would edit qquite a bit in hindsight, but:

1. Jichael Mackson / Wasn’t Me EP (Musique Risquee)
2. Brendon Moeller / Jazz Space EP (Third Ear Recordings)
3. Echospace / “The Coldest Season Part 2” 12″ (Modern Love)
4. Kiki & Sasse / “Belvedere” 12″ (Moodmusic)
5. dOP / Between the Blues EP (Circus Company)
6. Substance & Vainqueur / “Libration/Resonance” 12″ (Scion Versions)
7. Nomadico / The Nomadico EP (Underground Resistance)
8. Pom Pom / Pom Pom 29 EP (Pom Pom)
9. Breakage / “Clarendon/The Shroud” 12″ (Digital Soundboy Recording Co.)
10. Len Faki / “Work/Odyssee I” 12″ (Podium)

Detroit techno, new-era British jungle, dub techno, live instrument house music, european minimal and tech-house.

i ain't no one-minded slouch, is all i'm saying. i don't like being called that sort of thing.

i'm not even going to look at that list because i don't really judge people on their musical taste.

these conversations are just like conversations i used to have with trance DJs in the late 90s, except instead of talking about "soul" and "grit" and stuff they talk about "emotion" and "vibes". they talk about techno the same way you guys talk about the banging house they play in gay clubs.

i have to say i'm pretty wary of arguments that work equally well when you keep the propositions the same but swap or substitute the subjects. i think the greeks had a word for that ... rhetoric? is that it?

considering the fact that you called pipecock and me inward-looking slouches, you defintiely do judge people based on what you perceive to be their taste in music.

and yes, it is all personal. but i have a goddamn right to hate mainstream gay club culture and the music that is played there.

this is a serious poster, who listens to serious music

oh fuck you deej. if i had enough money i'd be chillin in baltimore at whartscape this weekend, wearing silly clothes and getting naked and taking mushrooms all the time. not serious.

"i dunno, man. you guys are really transparent. maybe nobody pays you for your music writing because 90% of the stuff you say is just an attempt to fluff up the music you happen to play and to talk shit about the music that other people happen to play.

-- moonship journey to baja"

i approach my music writing not from the standpoint of a "critic" which to be honest i find quite worthless, especially in something that is as functional as dance music. i approach it as someone who participates in the culture that i write about and nothing more or less. i just say the things that my friends and i talk about, not as music critics but as people who live dance music.

"ive read it. im asking you about the audience for the dance music that was disco, and the rise of club culture. yeah obviously it came out of soul music that was commonly performed by straight ppl - i dont know why youd think that was even in dispute - but the genesis of 'disco music' and its aesthetic is not solely inherited from the aesthetics of straight early 70s soul ... a lot of shit came into the style in between harold melvin and it leaving and becoming house and electro and whatever else in the early 80s ... im not talking about how the artists themselves identified, im talking about aesthetics and the engine behind the music, which was one part early 70s philly soul but also plenty of showtunes and kitsch and (other cliche shorthands for gay aesthetics that im probably being somewhat offensively reductive about) that are just as much about what makes disco 'disco' as straight black dudes w/ a four on the floor kick."

i wouldn't disagree with any of that, only that the initial influence was black music. in fact, you can see in that book certain disco deejays lamenting when the music became too "white" and moved out to Fire Island and similar rich white spots.

"...only in the sense that all cultures 'moved on' from disco music"

not necessarily, i think that black culture stayed pretty attatched to it through sampling in hiphop and house as well as dancing to it in house and "classics" sets. you can still play that music to a black crowd and people remember it and feel it, i am not so sure that the same can be said for gay culture on the whole.

"if by this you mean that gay ppl are a diverse group who listen to a variety of styles of music, then yes i agree

-- deej"

that is fine, it is just a change from when it was mainstream for gay culture to be one with house/disco/techno culture.

"like, it always spirals inward toward your music collection, and your podcasts, and the house parties you DJ at. guess what - you guys don't have a monopoly on meaningful engagement with music, nor are you the first people to own records + tables (and maybe even a crate!) in the history of the world.

-- moonship journey to baja"

never have i said that i do. i do claim to represent a culture that i take part in, one that is what remains of the original house and techno culture. it is not something culturally removed as well as removed in time, as it may be for other people such as Ronan.

"or maybe the most obvious example here is THE DJ coming out of gay club culture, thus EDITS and extended breakdowns and all that shit that makes up current dance music ... black & italian dudes spinning for gay black dudes???"

sure that is a good argument. the deejay was obviously of utmost importance, and that could certainly be a way in which their influence was felt from the beginning. but the tools they worked with were still black and straight! i would never try to take anything away from the importance of gay culture to dance music!

"xp to pipecock/self - point being its supremely reductive to imply that gays were just an incidental audience for 'black culture' and maybe things are a little bit more complex"

never did i say that they were incidental. it was just a later development of their scene that the artists actually making the music changed to more closely reflect the people dancing to it.

"the funny part is i agreed w/ a few of your criticisms of ronan, if not the obnoxious way in which u phrased them, but you happened to sound just as stupid and reductive if not moreso in your dismissal of, you know, nuance and complication

-- deej"

i feel like much of any of my arguemnts are about nuance.

"i dunno, it's like talking to geir. it's like a game of twister that you play with your brain. you're going to pick which things you like: 80s chicago house, 90s detroit techno, "underground" disco (but not the bee gees), theo parrish. and then you try to build an intellectual position where you stick a hand or a foot in which each one, but don't touch anything else, no matter how convoluted that makes your stance.

-- moonship journey to baja"

the things i talk about in relation to dance music are all very obviously connected, you can follow a timeline showing their relation in time and space. i am not against French filter house, i just recognize that it was not their invention. i am also not against the bee gees, but they were not in and of the disco scene nor the soul scene that came before it. they may have had some good songs, but they were derivative of cultures that they were not from.

^^ hear that, ronan? you're removed from the culture that pipecock represents ... just like the bee gees!

;_;

it was DJ irene i was thinking of. i'm not sure i'd call anybody a gym monkey but i'd say things were getting sorta primitive on the dance floor that night.

http://www.cooljunkie.com/interviews/images/interviews/dj/irene_lg.jpg

would kick it with

"yeah, but it doesn't change the fact that mike clark's "in the morning" sounds as commercial and polished as any cassius or dj falcon track. i mean, what do you make of that, and the fact that geography aside, clark and planet e put that record out around the peak of the international filter-house boom, and not in 80's chicago?

-- moonship journey to baja"

i think that by listening to mike's deejay sets or the records that he makes, it is pretty obvious who would have been influencing him when he made the track. i have heard him play any number of chicago jams, never heard him drop a Daft Punk joint though. not that he wouldn't, but for him to put out a record influenced by music that was also influencing other music at the time isn't that strange when he was all about it for years before. i mean "I Can't Kick This Feeling When It Hits" isn't much different from a filter disco song, i am sure you're not gonna say kenny was copying Daft Punk and not Chicago.

Sorry, but I'm still confused about" "really the question is why the fuck would anyone want to appropriate anything from Jews?"

"^^ hear that, ronan? you're removed from the culture that pipecock represents ... just like the bee gees!

-- moonship journey to baja"

if Ronan was only good part of the time he could be the beegees of techno, but he isn't.

psst: "i'm your conscience"

i don't think you can compare "i can't kick this feeling with it hits" to "in the morning", they sound very different.

"in the morning" is basically just the loop of the chaka khan (?) song with some added hats. which is great, that's what a lot of great filter loop tracks do. nothing particularly amazing.

"ICKTFWIH" loops the chic sample at the beginning for a bit, but then rapidly degrades it basic-channel style down to the heavily filter "gonna do gonna do gonna do" loop until it turns it into a soft drone. then he introduces whole new beat sample on top of it and lets that beat ride for a while over the drone. the whole thing is so much hazier and more textured than the mike clark track. i would say the first time i heard it, well after i was acquainted with filter house, was one of those OMG brain-melting moments you have maybe once a year or so.

maybe i'll listen to both RIGHT NOW and let you know if i change my mind, though.

either which way, the point is that both guys were being influenced by the same people Daft Punk were. much of the french filter house thing was Daft Punk ripoffs, or tunes by guys who were also listening to the same records! so no matter what, none of them was really rocking an original style, you have to look to Chicago for that.

one of the reasons Daft Punk will always get a pass from me is the track "Teachers". if only all european artists were so transparent with tier influences i think there would be less of the overall problem that Theo was talking about!

so anyway i was making a point that it's hard to say "planet e fell off because they're following scene trends ..." when really they've been doing that since day one.

which you didn't say in your blog but you said elsewhere on ILX in reference to the buttrich and lazy fat people and saunderson remix EPs

"so anyway i was making a point that it's hard to say "planet e fell off because they're following scene trends ..." when really they've been doing that since day one.

-- moonship journey to baja"

i wouldnt say they have been "following trends since day 1", but they have included many different sub genres that have since died off (broken beat, that glitchy todd sines record, etc). the difference is that it was never such a huge amount of releases all in a row with nothing else interesting inbetween. a record here and there that is like that, even a bad one (which i wouldnt say the agent x, todd sines, or broken beat type jams were), is not big news.

the earliest planet e release were american pressings of popular european dance trends (ie the eevo lute, a.r.t. and quadrant releases)

"the earliest planet e release were american pressings of popular european dance trends (ie the eevo lute, a.r.t. and quadrant releases)

-- moonship journey to baja"

all of which were influenced by Detroit music and were not widely available here. and again, that wasn't all the releases nor were they all in a row with nothing else to show for it.

i think that's all they released in 90-93, except one 69 and one PCP release.

anyway, i actually like the recent watson / buttrich / ripperton releases so i'm not going to be able to meet you on your big point that the 2007/2008 release schedule has been all boring stuff in a row

"i think that's all they released in 90-93, except one 69 and one PCP release.

anyway, i actually like the recent watson / buttrich / ripperton releases so i'm not going to be able to meet you on your big point that the 2007/2008 release schedule has been all boring stuff in a row

-- moonship journey to baja"

http://www.discogs.com/release/33015

http://www.discogs.com/release/4236

http://www.discogs.com/release/8854

http://www.discogs.com/release/4235

as well as this entire sublabel for Naomi Daniels records:

http://www.discogs.com/label/I+Ner+Zon+Sounds

so 3 out of 9 were records that were still good despite being european. that is only 1/3, and when you consider that he was still releasing his own music on Transmat, R&S, and ART instead of only on his own like he does now, it goes to show the much better balance the label had even then.

all I'm saying is personal insults are used here as an excuse not to engage with some of the points I made.

what's more interesting to me is that I, I think like Vahid, feel uneasy about people really vehemently hating on "dumb trance" or "cheesy house" or whatever.

I mean....shouldn't dance music retain vulgarity or a certain lack of credibility?

I don't go out and listen to that music but I'm not a better person because of that, and I like that there is a culture where people do I think.

Otherwise what's left.....message board piety?

And to open that up a bit, would you really be happy Tom, if the artists you like "got their dues"?

What would you be posting about here? Or elsewhere?

If there was no shitty minimal, no morons like myself, what would your music taste be then?

Once somebody "gets their dues" isn't that just when you read about them in the broadsheets or something? And nobody cares anymore....

One final thing on the vulgarity...do you think people who don't like any house or techno hear the subtlety and the differences we do here? Some of them probably think it's all shitty dance music. I still feel Theo Parrish shares more with David Guetta than he does with any non-dance artist.....just for that reason.

gee, i wonder why it doesnt matter to you, Ronan. could it be because you get paid to write about white artists for dance publications owned by white people and marketed to white audiences? it IS completely meaningless to you, you are part of the problem.

and just to bite...for whatever reason, and descend into the record collection game...probably one of the nicest responses I ever got to an article was last time I interviewed a Detroit artist...a guy who was guarded to begin with then emailed me afterwards to say he really enjoyed it.

people aren't this partisan, nobody is, outside of the inner walls of the brain

^^ it was eminem wasn't it

jack white!

I don't go out and listen to that music but I'm not a better person because of that, and I like that there is a culture where people do I think. don't think

fixed

people are supposed to think in nightclubs???

i like to party to dumb shit as much as the next guy, ronan, but that is not cheesey contemporary gay progressive house jams or super trancey stuff. that stuff is pretty empty-sounding to me, and i won't give it the time of day.

and you know what, yeah, i do think people should think a bit when they're in a nightclub. of course, the priority is getting the high from whatever you want to get the high from (the music, thealcohol, the e, etc) and dancing your face off, but a little bit of thought and consideration would actually be totally welcome to most dance-floors, imho.

I'm not saying it should be some spazzed out experience, I just don't know why the need to judge people.