Jay Haze - Love for a Strange World

R.I.P. https://ra.co/news/83338

I came of age in the late 00s minimal boom, and for a while it felt like Jay Haze was a force unto himself. To me, he vividly encapsulates that time - the sound, attitude, debates and cultural growing pains - both good and bad. And then he just dropped off, moving to rural Peru at the top of his career.

That era hasn’t exactly aged well, but I’ll always have a place for this track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HJfkNvKpA8

Sad news for sure. I interviewed Jay around 2005 or 2006, and we ended up becoming quite good internet friends. I sometimes did little bits of writing for his labels and stuff. He was quite eccentric in his own kind of hippy punk American way, but I always thought he was a really nice person behind a lot of sometimes amusing bluster. Lots of good music, I really liked the Tuning Spork label and a lot of the Fuckpony stuff was good too.

I met him in London once or twice finally and he was really nice in person also. Sad stuff as he must be barely 50.

terrible news, I remember listening to this severely underrated Tuning Spork label mix every day during the winter of 2006–07, totally fun, silly, sleazy, druggy, irreverent house music. it coincided with my first explorations of going out in London, learning how to mix records, tentative attempts at track making via FruityLoops and everything in life generally feeling new and exciting

That era hasn’t exactly aged well

totally disagree, loads of stuff from that period sounds really fresh and futuristic to these ears though I do find it humorous that 20 years on people are still reluctant to admit that the "mnml" whatever scene was responsible for loads of excellent music, it's almost been written out of history ... deep house "won" and then everyone had to pretend that they were only ever playing Jus Ed and Omar S records in the mid-00s

Ironically the mnml backlash almost made sense when listening to Jay Haze because he almost always got better the more simple and overblown he got - some of the tunes on the Fuckpony album sound like Technotronic

none of it even makes sense, like not to go down this dark road again but the amount of diff music that was being called minimal back then, lol. "oh it's from germany, it must be 'minimal'" even if you're playing a hard techno record, or a house record, or whatever else.

In some ways it was a beautifully pure backlash: it started the moment Mixmag and Ministry started hyping Loco Dice and Luciano and that is basically all it was about

yeah or like loads of it was about m_nus also which i know people liked but not critics really, i can't ever remember any actual hype around m_nus apart from they were having some big parties or djing a lot and there was a lot of drugs.

i personally didn't really know anyone who likes m_nus but it seemed to be responsible for so much hatred.

I think the minimal backlash was kind of disingenuous because a lot of it was people disowning what they had been listening to because it had reached peak saturation and become uncool. And “it” was so loosely defined to begin with. But I burnt out on the tuning spork (and similar label) sound after a few years, after being pretty into it. A lot of it to me sounds like abelton bursting onto the scene and lots of people using it in similar ways.

I still love that era, which means a lot to me, even if it hasn’t sounded fresh to me for some time.

Anyways, I think Jay Haze wasn’t someone you could pin down to a specific sound easily. Good to hear he was a nice guy, if only bc he had a reputation for having a big, sometimes challenging personality, definitely eccentric. This feels like when Monkey Maffia of Wighnomy Bros passed some time back, like a chunk of a time in music and my musical life is now gone.