WHO IS REX THE DOG? (ideas, NOW)

Ties in with a thread I never started about decline of British dance music/producers, climate change and usurping by Germany etc.

hmm, i dunno, i think 'i look into mid-air' still stands up really really well. 'frequency' isn't so much dated as...v v closely associated with the time it came out cos it was played so much, rather like 'rocker'. i don't know if my problem with the royksopp rmx is that it's dated so much as just...boring.

i think barima may be right about the knife rmx.

basically i favour his maximalist approach, and in the face of so much intricate minimalism dogging (ha) dance production elsewhere, he stands out. as usual 'dated' is a given (see also 'Rocker' as Lex says). but i'm not bored of the 'Heartbeats' remix because i haven't heard it much lately (but then i'm not bored of the original mix either - song of the decade!).

MFA and Fake would be up there too re Brit producers of course. if there's a point where Rex's style correlates a little with MFA's maybe it's that 'ravey' aspect of 'Rinse Time'. But I think Rex could do something more like 'Mandarin Girl' and would LOVE to hear that.

Is Pete Heller still making tunes? After that thread where Ronan went mad for Mayer playing 'Sputnik' he could do v well!

And again I wonder where Medicine 8 are (for that true RETRO 2002 techpophaus sound). Maybe I should google them right now and find out.

I dispute you need to particularly dense or multilayered to be textually interesting though.

Then don't bring it up at all - it's made you look like a backpedaller. No one actually said anything for you to dispute on this point anyway, tho' I find multilayering does so much for me - to stay on topic, Rex gets so much out of the Mylo mix by using so many passages and a palette of sounds that repeat listening is guaranteed simply because he doesn't bash most of the ideas into the ground in the first 2 minutes and repeat them for the next 5.

I personally feel the handful of sounds approach can only be done right by a select few. Rex's Prodigy remix does it well. The Micronauts were pretty good at it. Cagedbaby's (second) Van Helden remix is also a good example and I'd be remiss if I didn't compliment the early Get Physical releases for doing this excellently, but I'd be hard pressed to say it's any better than multilayering because so the returns are too inconsistent. I think Stevem's mindset appears similar to mine in this regard.

Ewan & Al are pretty high in my top producers list even though they get together about once a year and are Scottish. Probably a little too black-sounding for the current electro scene too ;-).

I quite like the Rex the Dog remix of Royksopp but I don't think he's a very good producer really, I liked the original well enough that I think the vocal is a fairly key component in it anyway.

Also there are tons of maximalist producers that are far more prolific and at this point probably more popular than Rex the Dog, whatever your opinion of them, the point being "minimal" dominance is not utterly outright, even if the lines between minimal and electrohouse are a little blurry occasionally; Huntemann, John Dahlback, Tomas Andersson, Tekel, Black Strobe, Lutzenkirchen, Boys Noize, the MFA (definitely not minimal, unless minimal is being used to mean "dance music I don't like", as is so often the case) Duoteque, Linus Loves, Williams, Tiga.

For the record I think pretty much every single one of the above is better than Jake Williams whose brief stint in the sun is pretty much over even if the Royksopp mix gives him a tiny shot in the arm..... and I don't even like John Dahlback!

I wasn't referring to solo Pearson, but I guess I should stop referring to Carl Cox as Ewan Pearson from now on...

Suck on this Rex fans (and Jacques fans), about as good as pop electrohouse gets I think....

http://s56.yousendit.com/d.aspx?
id=1VER2N1GF42Y322VD91Q2JY7NY

in this list only MFA are British right? i'm still amazed that they ARE British!

i can't actually fault Rex as a producer, other than understandably prone to formula (like so many inc. JLC) and not really fitting in with the continental trend(s), in that there are things about that i would love to see co-opted with whatever passes for a British take on electrohouse if that's even workable as a concept.

Ronan why are you being so anti-Pearson anyway? Only six months ago you were saying he buys all the same records as you!

I was going to put together some sort of rambling thesis about being more into that hinterland where electrohouse and minimal house meet these days - Eulberg, Gabriel Ananda and friends, rather than the full-on pop electrohouse. But then that track Ronan linked to PWNED MY ENTIRE WORLD and made me realise I was wrong.

Also on a completely unrelated tangent I think a lot of people are put off unnecessarily by the term 'minimal'. So much plip-plop isn't actually minimal in the slightest - something like Swat Squad's Monsterism is actually really complex and involving. And don't even get me started on the awesomeness of Ihre Personliche Glucksmelodie.

(Who are these bands from Japan you keep talking about anyway? And why do I get the feeling this might be a slightly different proposition here?)

i'm still intrigued by the fascination with minimal-complex now. when i say minimal these days i mean minimal-complex usually - this was basically the definition of microhouse anyway (Brits didn't seem to want to make that either), although a lot of what i heard really just seems sparse and monotonous without progressing much. that was what put me off, as i went in the other direction really (pop?).

Although it's probably unfair to pick on Herbert cos there's a litany of British producers who have the same stifled rubbish attitude, check any Freaks interview from when people actually cared about them, laden down with snobbery and attempts to stake a claim to whatever heritage is never theirs anyway. I guess these guys have a complex cos they'll never be from Berlin or Chicago or Detroit but still, it's a very real phenomenon, the snobby British producer/DJ!

still it's the vocals that really put me off. i haven't heard the original royksopp tune but i have a feeling it's awful.

The only snobbish thing he's said that I can remember is a complaint about Tiefschwarz-alike tracks and, well, he had a point there!

Maybe you don't really get this - it's never going to be pop in the way Rex The Dog or JLC are. And maybe it is monotonous, but isn't dance music *all about* throwing yourself into the monotony and waiting for the WOAH moment to smack you sideways?

But often, in order to like it/get it, I have to hear it as a current equivalent to old dance tracks that WERE pop and even hits. Hence 'Mandarin Girl' becomes like an '05 'Pacific State', or 'Gazebo' or 'I Feel Space' an '06 'Energy Flash' or 'Amphetamine' because of that sinister aspect (but minus techno hardness, and obv. empthasis on 'texture' rather than just 'mad sounds' - which does seem like the only step forward). Maybe it's not a good comparison and perhaps tired to even mention age-old anthems, but they do seem to have that same spirit about them, just approaching it in a different way, because they HAVE to surely. It's been a while since you can impress people by sound alone (think dance ran with this as long as it could which was a pretty long time it turned out), in recent years it must be more about what's done with the sounds.

So Rex won't impress so much because the production lacks this 'sophistication' comparatively, but it's still damn fine entertainment. Argument reminds me a little of 'artcore vs junglism' or whatever - when DnB got more jazzy, melodic and sophisticated and you could still dance to it and it would often still awe you but others complained it had lost something or other too. Not that electrohouse is 'coffee-table' of course (not that I've ever had a big problem with that anyway), but I do get that feeling with some tracks - and this is crossing into the 'Gazebo' threads more now, as that's a track that to me seems both 'coffee-table' and clubby (but so were numerous late 90s DnB tracks, and also other genre tracks from this decade that I love that are big on melodic/textural richness albeit older e.g. Duplex 'Late Night Cycling').

Things have certainly developed anyway, and continue to. And that's good.

I've usually preferred the original Royksopp (second album) tracks to their remixes (that I've heard).

I will always make allowances for different intepretations in these instances because I will always come across as an obscurist in these cases, but I think it's a bit of a pre-emptive move on your part to imply Tokyo will have little in common with the UK or Germany. Sure, a band like The Aprils sing over their records (which I know you haven't heard, but Steve has) but that doesn't stop us liking or playing out 'It's Magic' or 'So Good' in electro sets. And electro house in general has absorbed so much from rave, techno, ambient, trance, electrofunk etc (I mean, that's practically Rex's entire oeuvre right there) that I can't say the dancier crews in the elepop are in opposition to electrohouse Europe at all.

Tho' at the end of the day, I doubt either of us gives a damn about what the other likes - this just seems to be more about what we believe (ie. I think your monotony advocacy is both narrow and partially incorrect).

I think a bigger problem is that you expect people to interchange lo fi indie bands with techno.

So, when's this ignore user feature kicking in anyway?

Let's put it this way: I have never referred to The Rapture or Radio 4 or dancepunk acts as electro house and when I talk about not giving a damn what Matt likes, it goes for you and everyone else, including Steve and Alex, but the overriding theme there is that I therefore do not force "expectations" on people at all.

So, get over yourself.

i always think the best video game house is all areal stuff, they do it beeter than those gameboy-core people (i have no idea who that is, is it bodenstandig 2000!!?!?!?!)

I don't really see why we're talking about pop bands from Japan when what I'm arguing is that I don't think the new Rex The Dog stuff is very good, production-wise, compared to other electrohouse producers. Your personal taste or "forcing expectations on other people" (whatever that means) don't come into it.

2) 'Twinkle Of The Stars', which was the song I was really referring to in terms of the video game electrodance canon is sampled on the site and I will stand by that. The reference also came about because I felt the USP of the Linus Loves remix was evidently done better elsewhere. I mentioned Max Tundra in this regard also, but naturally, you've ignored that because this wouldn't jibe with your belief that I'm the black Momus or whatever.

The other, better examples of The Aprils doing electro such as 'Stro-B' and 'Pocketship' aren't, so I suggest you find those yourself. I completely fail to see how you can't find anything electro or housey about at least half of Astro, but then again, YOU'VE NEVER HEARD THE COMPLETE SONGS, have you?

3) what I'm arguing is that I don't think the new Rex The Dog stuff is very good, production-wise, compared to other electrohouse producers. Your personal taste or "forcing expectations on other people" (whatever that means) don't come into it.

Ah, where to begin?

a) Spot the hypocrisy - a guy arguing a personal opinion born out of personal taste telling another person not bring his own opinions (born out of his own personal tastes) into it.

b) Yes, you have your argument, but I think we established a while ago that aside from generally not being agreed with, people are more interseted than speaking about the scene at large than wasting time on quibbling. I don't care what you think of Rex, end of, and the last thing I actually spoke to you about was actually about you dropping self-contradicting nonsense into your posts.

c) "We" are not talking about Japanese pop bands. I mad some off-hand comments about production and you're assisting in devolving the thread into a strawman circus.

d) RE: expectations - either you have reading comprehension issues or you didn't actually read that quote-and-response.

e) At least recognise that when I'm talking to Ronan (as enjoyable as that is), I'm talking to Ronan. I'm not interested in your attempts to pull yourself into every conversation.

Also, last time I looked we were involved in a conversation involving several people (all of whom, yourself included, happen to be my friends) on a public message board. To suddenly go "I'm not talking to you anyway" is childish and frankly fucking rude. You weren't exactly being all sweetness and light to Ronan either.

(xpost - seriously, turn off the computer, do something else and calm down)

If you'd bet money I've been thinking the exact same thing about you, you'd be slightly richer right now.

Also, last time I looked we were involved in a conversation involving several people (all of whom, yourself included, happen to be my friends) on a public message board. To suddenly go "I'm not talking to you anyway" is childish and frankly fucking rude. You weren't exactly being all sweetness and light to Ronan either.

Well, gosh, Matt, public or not, for you to respond to a post of mine that was specifically in response to an accusation from someone else entirely and therefore specifically not aimed at you...I can't possibly imagine what isn't unnecessary about me chastising you for it.

Ronan and I haven't exchanged words for the better part of about 8 months, which I've honestly been glad about. It was born out of the fact that when I got burnt on electrohouse last year, Ronan's idea of encouraging me to continue caring was posting "I think you're wrong" ad nauseum and pulling the same kind of tricks he's been doing here ("Barima hates all electrohouse/tries to substitute it with different things entirely" **. That he actually went to the lengths of attacking me for (politely) turning down Toby's invitation to Fabric one time told me all I needed to know about how much I should interact with him in the future. I actually had to justify that to Toby in person simply because of Ronan's snarkiness), albeit with more condescension back then. The online disagreements in the past between you and myself or Alex and I have NEVER dictated our ILX interactions henceforth, but there will always be that one person hellbent on being an exception. So really, I can go without responding to him again and should be able to continue on this thread/ILX while keeping that up.

(xpost - seriously, turn off the computer, do something else and calm down)

Matt, pulling the "softly, softly" approach in an argument (and you used the term first) is an uber cop-out. You don't want to set off my bullshit detector? Fine. Agree to disagree and move on but don't dare presume you're any less pissed off than I supposedly am or that you'll automatically look better in an argument by talking about our (online) personalities instead of our opinions. Do you really think this will harm our real life friendship or something (yes, Steve, I know you're kidding about a murder in the DJ booth)? I certainly don't.

**g) So I listened to 'My Friend Dario' and 'Frequency' back to back and I can't understand why the former should have more in common with the latter than it does with 'I Like The Way You Move'.

You should have seen Steve and I at Clique though. When I wanted play Gregorian monks chanting over folk-gabba-theatre hall instead of Mel & Kim and Black Strobe, things got...ugly.

x-p I don't think Ed will be getting them back any time soon. Steve is rather handy with a Zippo lighter and a spray deodorant.