House/Techno switch

original center record = Phuture acid trax

there's only so much navel gazing a genre can do + possible reasons or combinations of the following:

a. the ability to store vast quantities of music digitally
b. ease of filesharing/collaboration
c. software like ableton live or max

i have no idea what constitutes a pure house track or a pure techno track these days. everything i listen to (and i listen to almost exlusively "dance") these days is a hybrid.

i think the quintessential center musician is steve bug.

Since both house and techno are pretty married to a formula of 4/4 grid as a backdrop for tricky percussive ticks n tricks, big loud stompy kick drums, repetitive basslines, a "compositional structure" of kick drum intro, build up, breakdown, build up again, fade out, and oscillations on a scale from "dry" to "wet" for any melodic elements/vocal samples/frills and bits, it's inevitable that the two will blur into each other, because formally, they ARE similiar. But that's why I brought up gender- because it's one of the main signifiers (ie. to whom are they addressed? what kind of emotional triggers are getting prodded?) that keeps these two genres apart. Techno is supposedly about form and house is supposedly about feeling; of course that sounds like rubbish if you spell it out, but look at the kinds of cover art, the song titles, the imagery that clusters around their marketing,etc.

Tricky you are on the money about Ableton Live, that has launched a lot of new projects for people; Max on the other hand doesn't seem as amenable to that "fresh out of the box and already sounding vaguely like records x, y, and z that I already like" thing that Ableton produces within minutes.

doesn't gender blend too? (surely the maker of do you party? will agree on that aspect!)

Do other people dig that Claro Intelecto record for this very in-between-ness genre factor? Tracks like "Chicago" seem to lean to house pretty closely without actually being house, and yet it's not coming from a minimalist tech/micro direction either.

As for blending "gender" (as style) and genre (as form), I think Green Velvet is sitting pretty between girly house and manly techno. But I am no expert on the full tradition behind either genre, I just have my tastes, same as anybody. Where does Titonton Duvante belong in this split? Maybe *what* people like about the music rather than the actual music itself determines whether they're more of a house or techno person, ie. techno people might like Todd Edwards for the editing syntax, house people might like him for the yummy chords. Just a thought. . . .

Why is it that lots of current house is melodically/technically more indebted to detroit techno, and music described as 'techno' today is more like Chicago jacking house tracks?

The first thing that came to mind when I read this was Dave Clarke's "Red" Series. #3 moreso than the other two.

(Of course, it's somewhat ironic that I'm using "Red" as my central example, considering Dave Clarke is a huge electro fan. But I don't hear a trace of that in the "Red" series, I hear jacking house with a beefed-up tempo and rougher hi-hats)

I agree with what I think is part of MindinRewind's point - being that techno's abandonment of rhythm loops in favour of straightforward house-style 4/4 has meant that most techno is now tech-house of some strand by default. And the combined action of microhouse and electorclash has meant that the softer soulful sonics we normally associate with house have lost their grip over house generally.

Green Velvet is sort of different cos he seems to have very little middle ground. The one time I've seen a set by him I couldn't believe how hard it was, compared to what I was expecting.

Blake Baxter is another good example of the centre as well, I reckon.

the titonton stuff i'm familiar with is straight-up beatbox science which i suppose brings it closer to early house, but derrick may was also a master of the drum machine.

maybe the lines between the genres really blurred when they spawned top 40 hits. i'm thinking "big fun" and "jack your body". or maybe the only way to analyze the question is to look at the etymology of the words house and techno.

also, i think for a long while in the 90s, europe picked up the baton when it came to techno, but was reverential when it came to house, so techno got a huge european dimension at the same time, and a lot of those guys came through, but i dont think the same happened with european house.

equally, you could argue, that 88-95 was a period of expansion and diffusement, but since then theres been a gradual merging and retracting across many dance genres, so much so, that its all intermingled (or, that in the post 95 period, it was then house that got a europeans being non-referential)

also, the dance world is now, theres less territory. on a shrinking island, what was far, now seems near

as for electroclash, i see that really as neither house nor techno, but a post-xyz form, or, a reimagining of a pre-xyz form

i think this is the first time, i wrote about dance music in the past tense. i'm not sure how i feel about that

; )

Five years of Poker Flat is also a good example in this genre, particlularly the Glowing Glisses track Gayo. The vocals give it a house feeling while the clicky instumentation pulls it back into a more techno (ie technological) sound.

x-post maybe try "chicago boogie" for a sort of underground less obvious first wave chicago mix. other than that most of the stuff I've found is unmixed compilation type stuff with some or all of the following tracks. Not sure if others have had the same experience, mostly the comps have tracks by Jungle Wonz, Marshall Jefferson, Adonis, Sleazy D, Kevin Irvine, Mr Fingers etc.

for second wave mid 90s stuff there's that "many shades of cajual" comp which is very hard to find on slsk but I can hook you up with a share for if you want.

I'm sure others know a bit more here, as ever.

Hence Cristian Vogel is Techno, Mr Scruff is House.

Matthew Herbert's an interesting one. Around the House and (less so) Bodily Functions are definitely house records, but the sounds he uses and his interest in the sound of sounds. I was listening last night, and there's some tracks on Around the House that have only two layers of rhythm (two different samples) and one layer of harmony.

I'm the same (only just starting to explore the roots of techno myself), and I agree older Detroit stuff sounds like house; but if you take my definition that techno is exploring what the sounds sound like then it makes sense as techno. I'm a firm believer in being able to tell when someone is exploring something and when they're just playing to a formula. I mean, listen to Strings of Life - if that's not the sound of someone playing with a string sample I don't know what is. The fact that it's 'soulful' or whatever is mostly irrelevant (because it does a pretty poor job of being 'soulful' in me opinion), hence it's not house.

Techno can be (is?) just as formulaic, but it's coming at the same problem from a different angle. House music says, 'make a beaty noise pattern, using whatever, then we'll use that underneath our 'soulful' pads and/or 'funky' bassline. Techno just says, 'make a beaty noise pattern'. The point of techno is playing with the beat; in house the beat (or at least enough of the beat) is a given and the playing happens in the non-beaty bits.

Techno is formulaic by approach, house is formulaic by content. Or, techno's rules are 'play with 4/4, try and make it as 4 as possible while being as weird/strange/different as possible'. House's rules are '4/4 and the rhythmic structure is mostly a given, now go play with what you're putting on top.'

(xpost) but microhouse isn't all about the sound. Microhouse has borrowed glitch sensibilities and draped house over them. Or draped them over house. Or something. Ok, let's think about Dexter. It might be techno because of the way its entire rhythm comes out of something non-rhythmic (a kind of weird bouncy dompbirradompbirradompbirradompbirra thing). But I'd call it more house because the development is driven by the melody rather than the beat.

I suppose the same could be argued about what Derrick was doing with the strings - what concept was he applying when he played with the strings? I don't think his attempt was to make something 'soulful' because the result is not very soulful, and moreover is almost mindnumbingly repetitive, but it works anyway; but please disagree and express why. This is fun.

don't quite get you with the tracks/hooks/zero sum thing though..

This sort of suggests that trackiness and hookiness exist in a binary relationship where one exists at the expense of the other, which I don't think is always or even mostly the case.

"I admit I know njada about Chicago house :)"

Damien buy the new Trax retrospectives! My review of them here actually discusses this whole tracks/hooks issue a bit.

"The best Chicago house imperceptibly intertwines 'track' (sound for sound’s sake, weirdness galore) with 'song' ('This could be on the radio') in a symbiotic relationship."

It makes me wonder, though, what you think of "You Used to Hold Me," which is not only much more song than track, but my favorite Trax release ever (maybe for that very reason, since I tend to favor the mostly-post-acid '89-'94 period of house).

I Feel Love- Donna Summer
Groove Me - Fern Kinney
Bostich - Yello
Computer Love- Kraftwerk
Los Ninos Del Parque - Liaisons Dangereuses
Moskow Disko - Telex