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

And you are way under-appreciating the amount of care and attention they put into the production, compared to most dance music made these days. Remember when it was shocking to hear a live instrument on a dance record?

oh shit I'm listening to caught up right now and will ferrel is just about hitting the cowbell on beat. close enough to be funny anyway. I'm sure it works with anything...try it.

(heightened lushness and obviousness being among the key achievements of Get Physical's earlier, more discoid efforts vis a vis Metro Area)

But semantics aside, Tim, are you suggesting the record would benefit from more Metro Area, or less of it?

one of my favorite things about metro area is the way they capture what is to me a kind of urban american street vibe, an urbanity that is not so polished, but still very pretty: multicultural, multiracial, multisexual, gritty, vacant, wide streets with buildings so high they obscure the sun during the daytime so it's perpetual twilight (the streets are like tunnels you can get lost in), anonymity, trash and sleaze, glitz, hardness, tighly knit patchwork neighborhoods, all of the people down or up on their luck, flustered eye contact on the subway, graffiti, men and women in suits, kids in the street everywhere, the guys selling drugs on the corner next to the homeless dude with one shoe, the rivers and bridges and the ocean, endless traffic and noise, a kind of hopeful sadness, the pressure of all of those other souls around you, the masks people wear, the madness and rush of modern capitalist culture, the release of nighttime...

also, scratch "time out" and replace it with "freemind"

Ha! Yes.

are you suggesting the record would benefit from more Metro Area, or less of it?

Wouldn't that be the the three Quartet 12-inches? (which I really don't feel as much as the album. But then Ronan really nailed my feelings re. Metro Area.)

On a more practical level: why oh why no vinyl version? It's perfect for an old-school two side pop-LP, Cupid & Psyche '05. Jeezzzz.

and yes: I like Herbie Hancock.

Obviously not stuff like "Time Out" or "Mandarine Girl" or "Jah"...

Justus Kohncke and then the whole Lindstrom "space disco" axis are other obvious "metro area but maximalist" practitioners - has anyone noticed how "Kreig" is Kohncke's obvious (and awesome) Lindstrom nod in the same way that "Station 17" was his obvious Metro Area nod?

I'm with you on this one.

lindstrom + prins thomas = freak-folk

please, tell me you can understand the difference between "tired of the relentless Soul Jazz Records compilation machine" and "devoted fan of Soul and Jazz records".

not that i know of. the tune they play in the BIS mix is "world turning" and it's awesome.

lindstrom-freakfolk Is this supposed to be a put down?

i didn't read it that way...

yep, tim, idealism> was reissued. recently, i think, too.

nope.

i guess the way i look at it, the IDM approach (from the artist perspective) is to revivify "played out" forms by introducing new formal elements from outside. in the case of (what most people on this thread are comfortable w/ calling) "real" IDM, this means granular synthesis and other MSP patches on top of what is basically electro or lite-industrial w/ xtra-convoluted rhythms. the trick here is getting the listener to accept that the forms being revivified (dance music, drum & bass, more lately hip-hop) are played out to begin with, often this involves rejecting the inherent modernism of streamlined, "functional" musics (european techno club bangers, mainstream jungle, street rap, etc)

this trick works surprisingly well - note how much column space gets devoted to kelley polar's juilliard training vs how much discusses how the non-disco elements basically boil down to the same tricks a whole host of other electro-pop acts that didn't make the juilliard have been pulling, ie postal service, junior boys, the gentle people, etc ... this sort of suspension of disbelief of in the inherent sameness of music is pretty important in these experimental/connosseieur music circles (see the breathless IDM music reviews weekly on boomkat + aquarius records ... "ABSOLUTELY KILLER!" "MUST BUY!" "THE GREBTEST ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC ALBUM SINCE ... LAST WEEK!")

what i guess really pulled the rug out from under "proper" IDM was the eventual reification of one set of tricks (autechre, funkstorung, skam, schematic and all the rest of the clones) (or two sets of tricks if you want to count drill+bass) under the title "IDM" ... that really pulls the rug out, because it makes implicit the assumption that a new set of formal tools is going to revitalize genres that are supposedly moribund because of formal constraints ... placing way too much stock in things like "production technique" (not surprising for a producer-oriented genre, i guess) instead of looking at how these albums + singles work in a culture (not surprising since the hallmark of people who buy dance albums + buy into genres like IDM is their relative lack of engagement w/ dance culture)

(cue the naysayers whining "b-b-but i've been buying moodymann records since 1996 ... i have basic channel ON VINYL")

freak-folk (and the acts on the "space disco" axis) are also playing similar tricks and games w/ genre, using it to pull ideas and associations backward and forward in time ... but here the crucial difference is that i guess they are using it, in a sense, backwards ... devendra banhart is starting w/ a set of concerns as equally modern as any singer-songwriters (questioning the mores of the day ... that's what singer-songwriters do, no?) but using folk-rock (a supposedly "outdated" genre) to throw the contemporary-ness of his lyrics (and his fucked-up-ness) into relief ... i guess this sort of action also resituates our ideas about folk-rock?

idjuts / lindstrom / metro area / faze action / paperclip people have been doing the same w/ disco for a minute now ... their concern remains relentless modernism: increasingly-tight circles of groove music looping round in dubspace towards a vast drug-fuelled emptiness at the center (the same thing the spacier ends of microhouse / electrohouse / k-house have been promising, right?) ... but reaching backwards, using the constraints and conventions of "emptied" genres to do this ... i guess on the whole, i find it to be a more affirmative approach than what kelley polar is up to.

i suppose you might think i am saying the same thing two different ways, i would argue not, because on the one hand you have however many metro area reviews saying "metro area makes disco boogie relevant again", i doubt you will find the same thing happening with kelley polar, instead the reviews will be all "kelley polar brings intimacy and warmth back to microhouse" or some nonsense like that.

when you talk about emptiness, reaching backwards, above, you're really onto some interesting critical shit. but why mire yr arguments in so much internicene sniping and assumptions about what people (especially other ILMers) "really mean"? i mean, look at your last paragraph, it's all about guessing about all sorts of hypothetical reviews, and basing yr frustration on those! why not just quote real sources and start from there?

"quoting real sources" = hurting feelings?

internecine sniping = what makes it a scene, i guess (haha punny)

also i guess it is what separates amateurs from pros and music board bitchery from professional work?

finally, just so you understand my intent, i'm more about invalidating the glommings than the music, phil.

(cue the naysayers whining "b-b-but i've been buying moodymann records since 1996 ... i have basic channel ON VINYL")

I hate to burst your bubble, but you're describing yourself here. Let's reality check that a) you live in a country with an extremely marginal interest in dance music, and b) for those cultures that do pay some attention, you don't really live in one of the states/cities/areas recognized as such.

I'm sorry, but please explain your engagement with dance culture outside of what you buy at the record store, what you read here, and the massive amount of personal social critique you consider in the process.

(I actually think you have a respectable answer to this, but I have to call you out so you'll flex some muscle and stop all this whiny shit...)

as far as the rest of what's being said, I can barely think that hard at this point. I would like to say that I do think Mike's Juliard training is apparent, or at least, I think his stuff sticks out above those others because I can hear the attention paid to harmony and theory, Beach Boys level harmonies, all multi-tracked, key changes, all the music theory stuff I studied in classes I failed. It doesn't sound academic to me, but compared to some of the other recent pop/electronic pop/electronic dance music albums, it certainly sounds thought out and purposeful.

Also, you talk of IDM and dance culture and I don't even see them in the same realm. IDM comes on CDs and people play it on headphones, in record stores and at pretentious coffee houses, while dance music, at least where I sit, is Prince, New Order, lately Disco, bad british rock bands and the latest Hip-Hop.

Blurs b/c it's not quite so obvious as to whether broken beat producers are trying to revivify old genres with new tricks, or trying to speak their "modern" concerns through the spectrum of the past - in fact I suspect it's v. hard to draw a distinction b/w these two approaches w/o specific reference to the discourse of a particular scene - which doesn't mean that there is no difference b/w the two positions, but it might mean that the difference is predominantly perspectival, that it resides more in what we encouraged to perceive in this music than some property of the music itself (this comes back to yr focus on the glomming not the music I guess).

I sometimes think that broken beat and micro/electro/k-house exist as equal opposites to one another insofar as both teeter on this line, and both are sort of retro-modernist responses to the collapse of an obvious narrative of sonic progression in dance music (the distinction b/w the two is in their dividing up of sonic/culture signifiers to achieve similar goals in v. different ways)

(i note that any value we might attach to micro/electro/k-house via this realisation is pre-emptively undercut by yr use of "promises")

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