Like Something on Kompakt, Only Bad

-- disco sparxxx ), December 24th, 2003.

See, that was part of my question. How are the perspectives different?

have you ever read generation ectasy, mark?

there's just as much bullshit indie, of course. or hip-hop. or metal. or or or...

Actually, no, I didn't live it in the least, but yes, I did read it. And I'm not sure it applies to how music on labels like Kompakt are being received in the US at present. We're not talking about London pirate radio, this is music that OtherMusic and Aquarius carry, various free weeklies write about, that ends up on otherwise rock-dominant top 10 lists.

all so boring i want to pull my hair out.

well it's about fuckin time they noticed

generation ecstasy is not just about london pirate radio...

i go out to see my friends spin minimal house and it's fine but EVERY track sounds exactly the same and i could've heard it all several years ago anyway. poker flat and trapez are particularly guilty in this regard.

when i listen to taka taka i tend to sit bolt upright in my chair when the claro intellecto and maurice fulton tracks come on.

on the other hand, labels keeping it real: klang electronic, sender, shitkatapult, deepchord, kompakt...

well that's a problem with the dj set then!

Microhouse has been sounding sterile for awhile now. Shuffletech is fine and dandy I guess but like somebody else said, it reeks of IT pro late 20-something dinner parties in a loft in san fran. I think it is time for something that sounds a bit more rough and ready. Computer synthesis and pristine mastering are making it all sound a bit too clean.

Fleisskoma. What an awful, awful label.

that would be me, then, except i don't throw dinner parties and i don't live in san fran. i think the best microhouse does not lose its funkiness (you can dance to it!) and a lot of the producers realize that funky > cerebral, but the best tracks are some combination of the two.

deepchord is a detroit label isn't it?

i wasn't try to say that funky > cerebral (cause it's not), just that if there isn't a loud kickdrum or at least a syncopated snare/hihat i just tune out (i'm lame like that).

xpost

also, i'll stick up for recent trapez releases - the LTD series has been great lately! i'm thinking specifically of the the sarah goldfarb record and bern's 'lille' (which is total hypnogroove goodness)

I know what Jess means when he says the genre doesn't move fast enough, but how much of this is due to our own hypervigilance? Stumbling across this stuff for the first time in early 2001, it seemed like all of this hyperactive development had been occurring under my very nose; now that my nose is attuned, I can see that it's not nearly as hyperactive as I thought it was, but nor has it ever been. Certainly though at this stage I think Mayer/Kompakt and artists with similar song-minded objectives are the only ones with any clear idea of what to do next. More than anything else Taka Taka sounds like a reassertive last gasp for microhouse as we knew it.

as for the genre not moving fast enough, i can't really see that. i do agree that "microhouse" as a tag is increasingly useless, though i don't entirely refrain from using it myself. but look at the varying directions people continue to move, all at once, from dimbiman's dry springiness and villalobos' increasingly convoluted polyrhythmics and luciano's continuing latin fix -- all on the one hand -- to areal's fat, overdriven massiveness to sascha funke's glossy 80s sheen, to the weird blocky nearly unfunky quality of the "k cabal" (ark/krikor/cabanne/circus company/ et al), etc., and i don't see anything but bright and restless energy. true, the genre (in a sort of macro sense) may be losing a certain amount of cohesion, but that's a good thing in my book - good for the records, and good for the DJ sets. and leaves lots of room for producers to come back and fill in the gaps during dry spells.