It's a cruel cruel summer: the sounds of deep tech / shuffle / cuttin shapes / upgrunt house / etc. etc. in 2014

Deep tech is now really pushing the stiff, reticular snare and hi-hat patterns of early house and techno into syncopated, funky-esque territory, I wonder how long it will be before the tunes regularly drop the kick on the two and the four and go full bore on the trebly syncopation.

― Tim F, jueves 25 de diciembre de 2014 1:07 (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can totally see this happening, maybe like a slowed down 2step or summat, or maybe that streetsoul vibe rtc was talking about ages ago? that would be ace. radford is apparently pushing more original vocal tunes too so this could all slot together nicely i reckon.

re funky: so much of this stuff has that 5 beats to the bar rhythm that funky had, but in the bass rather than the snares.

5 beats to the bar rhythm

clave

ballroom has been giving me that particular fix since funky died down

lol I think I find the unadorned pounding kick drum in ballroom to be an equivalent obstacle to hi-hats/snares in deep tech for you. Though more in the sense of "why I like not adore it" rather than dislike.

Afropop is best for scratching the funky itch imo

I like afrobeats but they don't completely speak to me like ballroom does.

Really I like SA house more than West African stuff tbh

I feel like all the ppl here whose taste in dance music mine is most aligned with like lou and brainwasher are gone from ILX and I have no one to nerd out here with :(

What does ballroom refer to specifically in 2014?

When I think of it in a Chicago context I think of stuff that doesn't sound all that far from upgrunt tbh

asking bc id like to hear it btw

https://m.soundcloud.com/cunt-traxxx

this stuff makes me feel old lol

a lil frankendance for my liking...no disrespect.

iirc brainwasher is into fade to mind type dance music i should ask him though what he's been listening to

looked at some chicago ball videos & they're bumping katie got bandz lol http://youtu.be/cp6snsRw_Go?t=1m7s

I've been listening to a lot of Fade to mind-ish (I guessss) dance music and posting some of it on the "doing it wrong" thread.Janus, M.E.S.H, #feelings, instrumental "grime" with lots of negative space, lots of tracks and mixes posted by friends. It's not like I go out anywhere this stuff is played irl but this is the most excited I've been about club music maybe ever.

fade to mind-ish ballroom leaves me totally cold and i haven't worked out whether they're reinterpreting it badly or whether i just don't like ballroom...i find the beats stiff and the rhythms awkward, which doesn't make sense to me given where it come from.

Deep tech is now really pushing the stiff, reticular snare and hi-hat patterns of early house and techno into syncopated, funky-esque territory, I wonder how long it will be before the tunes regularly drop the kick on the two and the four and go full bore on the trebly syncopation

i don't understand this post at all. this is why i don't write about dance music any more

Holy shit @ that Nicky Pressure 1am mix.

Indeed. So much energy.

You guys are all getting it wrong. Tim F linked to... a white British person(??!?). Fade to Mind released some classic MikeQ stuff at a timely moment and have put out a few ballroom-inspired tracks by other producers who aren't closely associated with ballroom, but are entirely tangential to the scene.

The beats for the most part are very stiff in a way (lex you might like B. Ames, whose beats are a lot more rollicking), but they're made to vogue to, and vogueing is kind of a stiff dance. I can understand them not making intuitive sense if you don't vogue, kind of like footwork if you don't footwork (nb I love footwork but I kind of suck at footworking). The emphasis on the crash makes ballroom work in a very different way than any other type of dance music I've heard. Ballroom is entirely oriented around hard beats usually on the 1 or 4 where dance moves are emphasized, and the other beats just kind of provide a foundation between the crashes, so even if it has a similar rhythm as funky on the surface, it actually operates very differently because of the crash.

At the QTPOC party I throw, I always play about 30-45 mins of ballroom at the peak time and there's a vogueing circle and commentator and it's really special. The crew of hardcore voguers are always waiting for that and everyone else gets into it too. I might be DJing an actual ball soon if the guy I work with who's a vogueing instructor gets around to actually putting it together.

These are a couple of my favorite ballroom mixes:

http://www.mixcloud.com/playgroundmag/playground-mix-108-mikeq/
http://www.mixpakrecords.com/blog/2013/07/mixpak-fm-vjuan-allure/

Oh, another way it's rhythmically different from funky is that when the kick is syncopated it emphasizes the onbeat 8ths (that "stiffness") rather than the offbeat 16ths, which are emphasized by the snare, whereas in funky both the kick (when syncopated) and the snare emphasize the offbeats.

(Obviously there's also none of funky's sometime emphasis on tune, melody, or harmony either. It's all very hard and rhythmic.)

i don't understand this post at all. this is why i don't write about dance music any more

― lex pretend, Saturday, December 27, 2014 10:29 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reading me for some ten plus years must have been quite a trial. You have my condolences.

I'm talking about the way that a lot of deep tech seems to be de-emphasing the role of the steady 4X4 kick and filling the void with an emphasis on the rhythmic patterns created by the other rhythm hits (snares, hi-hats, sometimes claps - all of the drum sounds which Rev thinks are too trebly).

One of the things garage did as part of its transition from speed garage (which had 4 evenly-spaced kicks per bar, one-two-three-four, like most deep tech) to 2-step (which sparingly placed kicks all over the place, but most commonly on the one and then on the third-off beat - i.e. right before where a fourth kick would go) was keep a kick on the first beat and the third beat but drop out the second and fourth.

This doesn't create that full-on slinky 2-step vibe - it's the off-grid placement of the second kick (and sometimes third kick if there was one) in 2-step that really determines that - but it gets a lot of the way there, by forcing you to dance not to the steady boom-boom-boom-boom of the kick drum but to the rhythmic patterns created by all those snares and hi-hats around it.

Deep tech feels right on the verge of that just as a lot of '97 speed garage did.

What deep tech does in addition - as benny b notes upthread - is have these really impacting riffy baselines creating counter-rhythms - e.g. clave rhythms - that push this vibe before you even start involving the actual percussion.

lol rev as far as I can tell ballroom is filled with annoying white (sometimes british) people, I admit my choice was a bit of a troll though.

I perhaps over-associate ballroom now with that sweary drag queen side now owing to knowing quite a few people who are into all of that.

100% of the core ballroom producers are black Americans.

Yeah i get you but you do need to say "core". It's like saying 100% of the real techno producers are black and from detroit. It requires a lot of filtering out.

In the soundcloud / everyone's a DJ age this is true of nearly all dance sub-genres.

I like B Ames but haven't kept up for about two years - any essentials in that time?

I mean, I hear ballroom out in two very different contexts, at white-dominated electronic music events, and at black gay events. The selections and contextualization you'll hear at each are very different but at the latter 95-100% of the ballroom tracks you'll hear are by black Americans and that's ballroom to me, the rest is tangential.

B. Ames afaict hasn't really put out anything of worth lately, even most of the tracks he's put up on his soundcloud lately are actually from 2010-2012. Vjuan Allure, Byrell the Great, Jay R Neutron, Divoli Svere have been releasing great stuff pretty regularly.

fwiw, I made a ballroom edit of "Sex Machine" recently while we're on the topic

https://soundcloud.com/reverenddollars/jb-sex-machine-reverend-dollars-suicide-dip-edit

Posted this on the Dissensus thread so may as well post it here too - quick mix I did:
http://www.mixcloud.com/MrAndyM/house-trip-volume-1/

Awesome mix dude :)

Reading me for some ten plus years must have been quite a trial. You have my condolences.

yeah not all your writing reads like a maths essay about rhythm though. i don't think i've ever listened to music in the way you describe (or explain). like, do you count along???

One of the things garage did as part of its transition from speed garage (which had 4 evenly-spaced kicks per bar, one-two-three-four, like most deep tech) to 2-step (which sparingly placed kicks all over the place, but most commonly on the one and then on the third-off beat - i.e. right before where a fourth kick would go) was keep a kick on the first beat and the third beat but drop out the second and fourth.

i mean i actually know the difference between garage and speed garage when i listen to them but this is like, maths or physics or something to me

Lex, that's not willfully obfuscatory on Tim's part though, it's just the standard vocabulary used to describe rhythm. I think that people who are used to thinking about rhythm in this way (including all trained musicians) just instinctively know which beat of the bar they're on, you can feel it in the pulse of the music and it's particularly straightforward in loop-based music. But I can see how it would look confusing written down - the trick that Tim is describing is what gives two-step beats that kind of skippy feeling, as opposed to the more rigid speed garage (or even more rigid techno).

"reticular snare" and "trebly syncopation"??

but it's not really a vocab issue, it's more that this is just not how i think about or respond to music at all

Yeah okay "reticular snare" is a bit OTT but "trebly syncopation" is a completely valid thing to say about music.

I think you probably DO respond to these things, unless you dance to a rigid 4/4 tech-house track in the same way as a slinky UK garage cut, but these things are designed to provoke instant reactions, in the same way you can respond emotionally to a chord change without having to think about its construction.

Yeah, being a musician, a classically trained dancer (in tap of all styles, which is more rhythmically complex than just about any genre of music you hear), a producer, and a dj, each of those things has taught me to think about rhythm in very particular ways, to the point where a rather heavy portion of how I engage with music is thinking about how particular rhythms work. I just wish I had as rich an understanding of melody and especially harmony, which can hold as many complexities as rhythm, but many of them are lost on me on an intellectual level.

I mean, I don't go into a piece of music counting the beats, but if I'm trying to figure out how a particular rhythm works, sure I do.

right talking about rhythm isnt meant to happen ~while dancing~ or something, these are just terms to help us understand intellectually after the fact what we know instinctively.

rev, i'm curious about the ballroom production scene ... like i know chicago for example has a long running (since the early 1900s) black ballroom scene but it seems like the music is always de-emphasized—like I look up videos, event flyers & etc. and none mention the DJs, the music is always pushed to the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzSWtZvs0wo

Is this stuff developing in a localized scene anywhere, or is it pretty much interlinked soundcloud DJs? Obviously there are different sounds depending on where you are, I would def think Chicago has a different sound than Jersey. Are there clubs where this stuff is played all night without the actual balls taking place? Where can I hear individual tracks? That video above features Jack Mizrahi, btw, who had a spot on the deluxe tracks on JLo's album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSZ5Aq3EGpo

The stuff being talked about in this thread is v obv in the context of a UK-centric dancefloor-oriented scene; I guess I'm curious to what degree the ballroom music is incidental (the way footwork is dance music so specifically functional) or if it's stuff that has traction outside, and what the relationship is between inside/outside, where the exact spaces for 'in' is, particularly in 2014.

right talking about rhythm isnt meant to happen ~while dancing~ or something, these are just terms to help us understand intellectually after the fact what we know instinctively.

Yep.

I probably do think about rhythm when I'm dancing more than most, but more about the interrelationship between the beats and what my body is doing than what specific things the producer has done with the beats.

Awesome mix dude :)

Cheers pal, I'm glad that you liked it 'cause I know you're not always mad about this stuff.
Should hopefully get part 2 recorded and uploaded tomorrow.

Deej: The only dedicated ballroom club night outside of the balls themselves I know of is Vogue Knights in New York, which is founded and promoted by Jack Mizrahi, with MikeQ as the resident DJ. NYC is definitely the center of the scene, although there are a few outposts like DC and Atlanta and other producers sprinkled here and there (like B. Ames is Houston-based). Vjuan Allure was the first to edit MAW's "The Ha Dance" in 2000, which marks the proper start of ballroom as genre, rather than simply tracks that were played at balls (hard percussive house tracks were definitely preferred), although his Ha edits gained traction in DC before NYC and other cities picked up on them. The production scene was mostly developed between producers swapping CDs and giving tracks to established ball DJs and started to become fully formed around the mid-2000s as Jay Karan (his stuff is absulutely fucking nuts, MikeQ and others started producing. I haven't gotten as much of a sense for localized sounds as much as different producers having distinct takes. I don't know anything about the Chicago ball scene, so you might know more there than I do.

Ballroom's relation to function is pretty similar to footwork, as far as being there to facilitate a very specific form of dance. I don't think it has as well-developed an infrastructure to distribute it to the outer world. There's stuff that's readily available but I have to go deep web to find a lot of the stuff I play, a lot of stuff can only be gotten directly from producers. There aren't whole albums of this stuff being released on established labels like footwork. Afaict, most or all of the core producers DJ at "in" spaces (balls, drag pageants, an event like Vogue Knights, other black gay/trans spaces) and most play at least occasionally in "out" spaces. Obviously there are a bunch of "out" producers producing and playing ballroom, but only rarely if ever in "in" spaces.

Probably the best place to hear individual tracks is the Qween Beat (MikeQ's label) soundcloud page. There's some chaff, but most of the important ballroom producers and emcees have been affiliated with Qween Beat at some point or other and that page has a lot of the cream of them, plus you can follow links back to the individual producers from there.

word this stuff is interesting to me.

i do want to note that perhaps the reason ppl around here dont fuck with it isnt nec. taste but bc its so hard to acquire!

oh yeah, there's this thread too thread of ballroom chants, vogueing beats, and associated cuntiness (MikeQ, B. Ames, Vjuan Allure, Jay Karan, etc.)

did not know it existed! *bookmarked*

Still not sure what's possessed me to start doing this again, but here's another mix:
http://www.mixcloud.com/MrAndyM/house-trip-volume-2/

Tracklist:
Hodgson - One Spliff
RS4 & Kane Law - Time Out
Calle Lebraun ft Abbee- Sometimes I (Fantasize)
Retrosynths - Everybody Dance
Kane Law - Free Your Mind
Kele La Roc - My Love (Majesty remix)
Matt Fear - Invasion
Mr & Mrs Smith - London To Dubai
X5 Dubs - Le Sex
Hugo Massien - I Know
Anton Romero - Keep Calm (Aizi Robinson remix)
A2H - Effin Cockneys
James What - In The Dark
Lee Edwards & Storm - Enchanted Nights
Russ Jay - Flavour
Majesty - Mr Backerman
RS4 - In The Dark
Nick Holder - Erotic Illusions (Steve Bug & Martin Landsky remix)
NRKY ft Lenzez - Old Skool Skank
Archie B - On & On
Tazer - Wet Dollars (Donaeo remix)
Second City - I Enter (X5 Dubs remix)
NRKY - Polly Crayon
Nightshift - Dreams
Camo Crooks - Maestro
Jack N Danny - Jump Around
Paul Robinson - Space Rider
KG3 - Believe
Truce ft Kenny Knots - Take Control

Download link here:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/y5p8to
(Also added on the Mixcloud page).

Hopefully not too much overkill in terms of length/number of tunes - for the last 20-30 minutes I was stuck in the zone of 'OK I should think about wrapping this up now - ohh alright, just one more tune' etc etc.

Rev btw the Mike Q Playground mix that you posted is ace. Just stuck on the Vjuan Allure Mixpak FM mix and it's sounding pretty good too so far.

rev dropping knowledge itt

i like this Divoli S'vere mix a ton:
http://dotheastralplane.com/2014/04/15/divoli-svere-mix-for-the-astral-plane/

Ctrl-f "upgrunt"
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/30/how-deep-tech-became-clubbings-biggest-success-story

Great piece despite that shocking absence.

are Dusky deep tech? love them

They're not but I like them too.

Part 3 in the mix series now up:

http://www.mixcloud.com/MrAndyM/house-trip-volume-3/

Tracklist:
Just JDan - The Master
Jack N Danny - Flying High
Lost & Found - Lana's Lies
Hugo Massien ft Mavora - Damage
Ante Perry & Kolombo - Completely Positive (Walker & Royce remix)
Oliver Huntemann & Stephan Bodzin - Rubin
DJ Pioneer & TJ ft Dana McKeon - Circles (Truce dub mix)
Lucky Paul ft Mara TK - Elephant Island (Ossie remix)
Theo Nasa - Galaxy Jungle
Jay Cee - Steryophonic
A2H - Sorry's Not Enough
Jack N Danny - On & On
Skinnyfat - Necessity (Praise You)
Mr & Mrs Smith - F The Radio
Limitless - Darkest Part Of Me
Kid Tizoh - Mind Games
Creative Mind - House Of Evil
Jakkin Rabbit - Rock Steady
Hugo Massien - Myndgamez
Syap - Your Hate
Carnao Beats - The Witness
Route 94 - Misunderstood
Danny T - So Much Pressure (AR remix)
Majesty ft Anton Romero - Touch
Archie B - All Night Long
Omex - Murder Sound
Arun Verone - Short From Change
Playtime Productions & Majesty - Cruel Summer (Apollo 84 remix)
Erly - Siren

Download link (Sendspace):
https://www.sendspace.com/file/53v7di
Download link (Mediafire):
http://www.mediafire.com/listen/dl80yksj9n3jvku/HouseMix3.mp3