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

yes! except what i wonder is: how divergent is arthur russell really? is there more melancholy in "let's go swimming" than in "i will survive"? is "kiss me again" more minimalist-psychedelic-dub-freaky than (the temptations) "papa was a rolling stone"? more hermetic?

i have been browsing meltzer's "aesthetics of rock" lately and am wondering when the companion volume for disco/rap/house will be written.

anyway i want to ask the similar questions about kelley polar.

the very definition of "INTELLIGENT" music?!?!

i guess what is fascinating about kelley polar is that it plays w/ genre in an unexpected direction - instead of the usual IDM tricks (electro w/ references to musique concrete, jungle w/ references to gabba + grindcore) we have this sort of mid-tempo electronic album (the reference to PLAID upthread was spot-on) that references disco in the way autechre integrates influences like xenakis or zoviet france, or arthur russell integrates terry riley - i guess a corollary to what i am saying is that this is different in the way that early jungle artists incorporated ragga and the way deep house artists incorporate gospel + jazz music.

i think i agree with this. but for some reason it doesn't seem interesting to me. i feel like he got there by doing a relief of what's already been done when you can't always turn things around. there's a reason why you can pull genres together in certain ways. he's using stuff as a base when they don't have the appropriate qualities for that. he could do it, but he doesn't know how tweek it or relate it. the effect is stuff its not transformed, just misplaced and you can feel exactly where it should be. everything about this feels miscalculated to me. and i feel like i can tell what he's going for, but maybe I just don't get it or it is truly novel and gotta get used to it.

my favorite tracks (maybe revealingly) are the least "dancey" - i think if one song on this album is truly exceptional, it's "matter into energy". i like the way the drums in the first third sound like sensitive jazz-drummer comping, suddenly, when the keyboard trills show up at 1:20, the drums resolve themselves into this widely-spaced electro smurf, same thing happens at around 2:45, where the song really really begins to sound like incunabala-era autechre, except w/ romo references.

I'm not really sure what liking an IDM album (KP quintet) for the wrong reasons (thinking it's disco-house) says about the listener or kelley polar,

jeez, i don't know why you've been wrongly accused?

you're talking about "mood" and I'm talking about sound. I Will Survive is a wonderful and heartfealt song, and great fun to dance to. Let's Go Swimming is a total mind-fuck of a production. The fact that these both come from something called "disco" goes a great distance to showing the breadth of "disco", but I couldn't imagine two more dissimilar songs.

Let's agree to disagree and bask in our co-love for this album.

Who has the Morgan Geist Re-Edit from the Love In..Promo 12"? Please, for the love of god, YSI that bitch.

I think this thread's sort've undervaluing stuff like SINGING and LYRICS and and and

tho I dunno, maybe people should start talking about luomo again. I'm the present, the true lover . . .

1) neuromantic! (ha ha yes of course I'd say this); and

2) late-period 4 Hero

I think if you combine the two you're given the precise latitudinal and longitudinal co-ordinates for this album (including the Plaid resonance, which is like an unacknowledged genetic stain on both sides, like a scoundrel whom both your great-grandmothers had an affair with).

Tim's 4 hero comparison is a good one, especially on "Cosmological Constancy".

I realize that this adds nothing to the discussion about how this album should be classified, but I feel the need to register how bonkers I am going over this album.

Cred Disco
----------
Giorgio Moroder
Chic
Larry Levan
Donna Summer
some Soul Jazz comp...

Pop/Mainstream-to-cheese Disco
------------------------------
Saturday Night Fever OST
Boney M

Leftfield/Rediscovered Disco (& Italo-Disco)
--------------------------------------------
Disco-not-Disco compilations
Arthur Russell (rereleases)
I-f - Mixed Up In The Hauge
Morgan Geist - Unclassics

Tim, there's absolutely a disco canon, but nobody talkes about "albums". Sure there were great disco albums, but that was never the point. Hell, I'd say many disco canon albums are just compilations anyway.

re: fandango's list...

I'd say Unclassics is absolutely anti-canon. That was the whole point. Songs that never made it, that weren't necessarily hits, either big hits in the 80s or retro hits today so much.

Because I think these issues - which records to buy, where to start - are the reasons that fewer people check out the canon w/ a genre like disco.

That was probably the question I was answering (in a roundabout way) :)

http://disco-disco.com/
http://www.discomuseum.com/

But you have to think about the way people think about disco as well, how much of it is based on the label, and therefore I come back to what I said about compilations. And I'm not talking about recent compilations, but even of the moment stuff from Salsoul or Prelude, "special full length versions for DJs" double LPs are pretty standard fare.

An album like this might give you a lot of hits, but how many people would think that it represents a "canon?" "Canon" connotes that the music has a general critical approval and I don't know as that many people would associate a mainstream disco hits comp with this.

These are ubiquitous comps with massive critical approval. I'm sorry Tim, maybe I don't get at what you're getting at. I mean, here's a weird analogy...which is more "canon", the Count Five or Music Machine's LPs or their hit singles as compiled on (and "canonnized" by) Nuggets?

If anyone asked me about the disco canon, I wouldn't suggest the Phreak LP or a Change LP or something, but send them to any of the many defining compilations, as mentioned above some vintage, and some new.

when did disco ever have general critical approval?

ha! of course Tim was there first. But yeah first thing that came to mind when I put this on "I got to words for you: Two Pages!" I tend to think of these sort of albums as dead-ends but sublime dead-ends.

same thing with any genre though, no?

re the idm question: one of mark mac's recording aliases is nu era and he put out the "broken techno" ep under that name, the sound of which is not so far off from idm. it's also maybe a better name for the whole genre anyway!

my favorite tune on the aforementioned ep is called "1979" which shares sample source material with morgan geist's brilliant "lullaby" so there is some connection there (although if you know the sampled tune in question it would be pretty easy to connect every musician ever together through six degrees of kraftwerk). :D

This whole discussion has been interesting to watch unfold. It seems to me like there are competing understandings of what a genre is that underlie this thread; maybe what some people are treating as a *categorical fact about the music* should really be thought of as a *way of listening* to music. To be specific: I think there are "IDM-ish" things to listen for in the early disco canon (the dubbier and more effects heavy the better, the more detuned the synths get the better, is there a phaser on the hihat, if so rad etc) just as there is a "tech-house" ish way to listen to early reggae (extra feedback in the delay, weirdly eq-ed hi hats, white noise hiss during dropouts). It doesn't mean that all along early disco was just waiting to evolve into IDM or that all along the end point of Keith Hudson was Rhythm & Sound. I know genre serves a purpose (where does it go in my library? where does it go in my record store?) but it has limits, and often the interesting cases are the marginal ones. When it started up as something people talked about "IDM" occupied a fluid, negotiable, marginal space between other, older genres (not industrial, not dancefloor, not ambient) and arguably IDM died once it took on enough of a family resemblance to actively attempt to constitute its own genre. Long live confusion / mutate or die . . .

Not to drop a dime and be all old timerish but it reminds me of a club night at Static in San Francisco years ago, I think 98 or 99 or so; Matmos played and Morgan Geist Djed. Morgan played amazing music but he was just way ahead of the stuck up IDM kids in the crowd who were like "what is this diva disco stuff, I want Autechre etc. blah blah blah"- they weren't able to make the connection, they weren't hearing what Morgan was hearing in the classic early disco he was playing.

4hero were paying lots of attention to the geist/curtin/titonton school of fussy, busy, bubbly techno just before they went broken beat ("the deepest shade of...")

i like drew's comments on the IDM *way of listening*, sadly, i think that another thing that happened "when IDM died" was that (concurrently) there developed an IDM *way of consuming* dance, a sort of joyless snobbish collection-polishing, an anxiety about skimming only the cream from the top of the dance heap.

the deepest shade comp always seems to come up in these discussions...

i am listening to the new electric institute comp as i type and it's pretty great. it is too bad that it is so obscenely priced. some tracks do indeed remind of kelley polar via the mid-period plaid commentary on this thread.