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

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")

Most OTM

http://www.americanapparel.net/presscenter/dailyupdate/dailyUp.asp?d=12&t=175

Early on when very few people were there I put on My Beauty in the Moon off the 12", which I got my hands on the night before for this exact purpose. It created the only response I got all night from some uber-hipster dude who came over and was like "what the hell is this?, it's totally hot".

another problem w/ what i wrote up there is that it seems to imply that everything is on a continuum between those two approaches, when in fact there are many other ways to relate to the past.

broken beat is probably off-topic because it's "hardcore continuum" music, which has a much less complicated (more arbitrary) relationship to the past than house or techno (i think ... is that right?) in that it never offers seems to be trying to offer either a radical break or an unbroken line ... also broken beat is tough because there's just so many approaches: on the one hand you have amp fiddler (who seems to be saying "the past becomes future in the present", ie "everything relevant exists in the always-now which always sound like stevie wonder") next to total head-shock almost-dubstep labels like soulja and bitasweet and public demand, which exist in constant presentness...

ronan - that is a sideswipe

i'm still going with best john hughes movie soundtrack ever.

"in that it never offers seems to be trying to offer either a radical break or an unbroken line"

I dunno, I think you could say it doesn't or it does with the same level of certainty as per house and techno (e.g. house vis a vis disco is both radical break and an unbroken line - the space for the genre to exist is within that contradiction...)

(still not IDM though, at all)

and if it was phil's review you specifically had a problem with then why not say so to start with.

btw i'm sober tonight (well, for now) so i'm predisposed to play nice.

no, honestly tell me, spare me from reading the whole thing... i skim the thread and it seems like lots of micro-micro-genre-positioning.... there must be something that resonates about it

let's just say it's got a good beat, and i can dance to it.

what else makes it great: it's hummable!

i hate genres. i really could give a flying fuck what genre something fits into and whether its politically correct to like that genre based on its imaginary relation to some other genre at this point...

i hate the way genre words are endlessly used in music criticism like no other criticism

-- justsaying (jus...), December 5th, 2005.

I posted my frustration with ILMers about this exact issue on the Richie Hawtin thread, but you have to understand that this is I Love Music, and therefore identifying genres and picking apart the music as it applies to such is part of a valid discussion.

That said, it is annoying that the tendency here with posts discussing dance/electronic music, which contain enough absurd esoteric genres (folktronica, microhouse, etc.) to drive one batty, is to dismiss the content of an album in favor of academic muscle flexing intent on proving that the author's argument is superior, whether or not it's correct.

But it's still fair game in this arena. If you want to know about what an album sounds like exclusively, check allmusic or amazon or one of the many dance record store sites that offer up snapshot reviews. Or jump in the fite with a good argument.

Or just trust everyone here (these people know better than most) - it's a fantastic record, regardless of what genre it falls under...

I know when I talk about IDM I'm thinking way more about early Warp stuff than anything else, because that's where all my reference points (stuff I've listened to enough to internalize) lie. I stopped buying when it got boring, and a lot of other people did too - more people understand IDM in terms of the Richard D James album than in terms of Chocolate Strawberry Fuckstick or whatever Venetian Snares' new one is called.

People tend to anchor to the golden age of any genre. When people talk about "classical music" in generalities, would you assume they're talking about something more like Beethoven or more like Philip Glass? When you say "punk", do more people think of Rancid or the Ramones?

i don't get it.
-- vahid (vfoz...), December 5th, 2005

=

I, being among said culprits of this exact tendency in the last several 200+ post dance threads will now attempt to mask guilt and throw subtle wink/nudge to my accomplices by inserting dismissive comment.

Get that, smart-ass.

but the golden age of IDM as you talk about it lasted about 6 albums worth. I go with whatever the largest amount of people agree on. The difference between Rancid and Ramones, sonically, isn't really enough, your analogy would work better if you asked "when people think of punk, do they think of Television or do they think of Blink-182" and unfortunately, the answer is Blink-182. You can even replace Television with the Voidoids and it still works.

Not really. Odd dichotomy here: pure sound description vs. genre classification. Still leaves plenty of other stuff to talk about, in my opinion.

Of course I'm fine with hearing about genre. And hey, I like retro-disco too. One would just imagine that, with a 500 post thread, the album must have touched some nerve. I guess the nerve it touched was the classificatory one. What this says about dance music right now I won't dare to speculate.