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?
― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Friday, 2 December 2005 03:04 (eighteen years ago) link
"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.
― vahid (vahid), Friday, 2 December 2005 03:24 (eighteen years ago) link
― vahid (vahid), Friday, 2 December 2005 03:26 (eighteen years ago) link
(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...)
― jsoulja (jsoulja), Friday, 2 December 2005 04:35 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Friday, 2 December 2005 05:01 (eighteen years ago) link
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")
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Friday, 2 December 2005 05:09 (eighteen years ago) link
Most OTM
― jsoulja (jsoulja), Friday, 2 December 2005 05:11 (eighteen years ago) link
― Susan Douglas (Susan Douglas), Friday, 2 December 2005 18:23 (eighteen years ago) link
― Susan Douglas (Susan Douglas), Friday, 2 December 2005 18:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ronan (Ronan), Friday, 2 December 2005 23:40 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ronan (Ronan), Friday, 2 December 2005 23:42 (eighteen years ago) link
― Ronan (Ronan), Friday, 2 December 2005 23:43 (eighteen years ago) link
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".
― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Saturday, 3 December 2005 18:08 (eighteen years ago) link
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
― vahid (vahid), Saturday, 3 December 2005 21:48 (eighteen years ago) link
― vahid (vahid), Saturday, 3 December 2005 21:50 (eighteen years ago) link
i'm still going with best john hughes movie soundtrack ever.
― tricky (disco stu), Saturday, 3 December 2005 23:19 (eighteen years ago) link
"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...)
― Tim Finney (Tim Finney), Sunday, 4 December 2005 00:56 (eighteen years ago) link
(still not IDM though, at all)
― jsoulja (jsoulja), Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― dabnis coleman's ghost (dubplatestyle), Sunday, 4 December 2005 07:29 (eighteen years ago) link
and if it was phil's review you specifically had a problem with then why not say so to start with.
― Ronan (Ronan), Sunday, 4 December 2005 12:40 (eighteen years ago) link
btw i'm sober tonight (well, for now) so i'm predisposed to play nice.
― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 4 December 2005 22:18 (eighteen years ago) link
― vahid (vahid), Sunday, 4 December 2005 22:51 (eighteen years ago) link
― justsaying, Sunday, 4 December 2005 23:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― vahid (vahid), Sunday, 4 December 2005 23:34 (eighteen years ago) link
― philip sherburne (philip sherburne), Sunday, 4 December 2005 23:41 (eighteen years ago) link
― Susan Douglas (Susan Douglas), Sunday, 4 December 2005 23:51 (eighteen years ago) link
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
― justsaying, Sunday, 4 December 2005 23:59 (eighteen years ago) link
let's just say it's got a good beat, and i can dance to it.
― vahid (vahid), Monday, 5 December 2005 01:10 (eighteen years ago) link
what else makes it great: it's hummable!
― vahid (vahid), Monday, 5 December 2005 01:11 (eighteen years ago) link
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...
― justsaying, Monday, 5 December 2005 01:15 (eighteen years ago) link
― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Monday, 5 December 2005 01:29 (eighteen years ago) link
i hate the way genre words are endlessly used in music criticism like no other criticism
― justsaying, Monday, 5 December 2005 01:50 (eighteen years ago) link
― justsaying, Monday, 5 December 2005 01:55 (eighteen years ago) link
― Tim Ellison (Tim Ellison), Monday, 5 December 2005 02:34 (eighteen years ago) link
― tricky (disco stu), Monday, 5 December 2005 03:50 (eighteen years ago) link
― tricky (disco stu), Monday, 5 December 2005 03:53 (eighteen years ago) link
― cutty (mcutt), Monday, 5 December 2005 04:04 (eighteen years ago) link
-- 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...
― jsoulja (jsoulja), Monday, 5 December 2005 05:34 (eighteen years ago) link
― vahid (vahid), Monday, 5 December 2005 07:03 (eighteen years ago) link
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?
― Lukas (lukas), Monday, 5 December 2005 07:07 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― jsoulja (jsoulja), Monday, 5 December 2005 09:51 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Dan Selzer (Dan Selzer), Monday, 5 December 2005 14:10 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― justsaying, Monday, 5 December 2005 19:02 (eighteen years ago) link
― tricky (disco stu), Monday, 5 December 2005 19:41 (eighteen years ago) link
"In a year when electronic dance artists such as Jamie Lidell and Roisin Murphy have made a good fist at innovative pop, along comes Croatian-born Kelley Polar to steal their thunder."!
+ omg "nefarious rave rumble"!!
(um, & anyone have any suggestions on what I could stick on a mixtape between "Here In The Night" & Pulp's "Seductive Barry"?)
― etc, Tuesday, 6 December 2005 23:32 (eighteen years ago) link
― Naive Teen Idol (Naive Teen Idol), Thursday, 22 December 2005 05:32 (eighteen years ago) link
― etc, Thursday, 22 December 2005 05:41 (eighteen years ago) link
Have any videos been released?
― fizzcaraldo (Justin M), Sunday, 25 December 2005 23:45 (eighteen years ago) link
but now I love it
― cozen (Cozen), Sunday, 25 December 2005 23:53 (eighteen years ago) link