What in God's name does Balearic mean?

http://beatresearch.blogspot.com/2005/07/deep-forest.html

in the late 80s, british kids in ibiza got turned on to really corny late-80s spanish disco. these records were like a combination of hippified leftfield disco (think larry levan / walter gibbons / arthur russell) and sunkissed adult contemporary soft pop, with a strong gipsy kings vibe. here is "stop bajon", one of the big balearic hits.

this sort of thing passed in and out of style, but enough people had their heads tweaked by spanish disco (which sounds even more spangly and loose-limbed and utopian and freaky on LSD and ecstasy, obviously) that there was a 2nd 90s wave of british balearic deep house. things like muzique tropique, etc.

in fact, this vibe because such a big thing in and of itself in british deep house that even US acts have been strongly influenced by balearic music - here is ten city (chicago), w/ their track "nothing's changed".

there is also a balearic style of dj'ing : mixing balearic records (spanish disco) w/ british soft rock and ambient house (nowadays not too many people in ibiza do this, most people apparently spin trance and progressive house) ... some people might not admit it (because lots of balearic music is rather tacky) but this is clearly a big factor in the current disco revival.

ten cityt - nothing's changed

little known fact: before their career as extraordinarily mediocre postpunk indietronica moperockers, warp records' two lone swordsmen were balearic deep house masters!

two lone swordsmen - turn the filter off

A1 Electra - Jibaro (Full English 12" Version)
A2 Code 61 - Drop The Deal
A3 Beats Workin' - Sure Beats Workin' (El Sonido Casa Balearico)
A4 Enzo Avitabile - Black Out
A5 Mandy - Mandy's Theme (I Just Can't Wait) (Cool & Breezy Jazz Version)
B1 Residents, The - Kaw-Liga (Prarie Mix)
B2 Woodentops, The - Why Why Why (Live)
B3 Nitzer Ebb - Join In The Chant
B4 Finitribe - De Testimony (Collapsing Edit)
B5 Thrashing Doves, The - Jesus On The Payroll (Street Groove)

now this is an irish track, right? these guys started out like the new disciples or brand new heavies and eventually ended up in the hardcore house territory of soul ii soul? i am sort of shady on their history ... but this was a big hit in ibiza (so i hear), and it's very spanish flamenco disco sounding ... so i guess this is like 2nd wave balearic? and the later british deep house and US deep house (both that ten city and two lone swordsmen are from 96/97) would be like third wave balearic?

and that makes the idjut boys and lots of other eskimo records acts ... fourth wave balearic?

xpost: that compilation etc dug up highlights another sort of important thing - the balearic djs were about free-floating, eclectic, syrupy disco grooviness ... another key link to the current glimmer twins / eskimo records zeitgeist.

I have to know....

(brilliant coverage, by the way)

(two lone swordsmen = mediocre postpunk indietronica moperockers = ouch!)

So nice, though...

the Balearic spirit is back !

Justin Quirk on the comeback of Balearic | | Guardian Unlimited Arts

Happy days are here again

Balearic - a club scene from the 1980s spinning everything from folk-rock to disco - is flourishing again. Justin Quirk on why the conditions are perfect for a third summer of love

i want to believe...

ah what i mean is i want to believe that it could cross over to u.s. clubs but that's very unlikely to happen

won't happen in the us. maybe certain one offs but thats about it.

hey guys come over to this thread where a bunch of americans and tim f have been talking about this for 9 months:

this is a thread for the BALEARIC REVIVAL

Picked it 2.5 years ago mofos, where's my cheque:

Two wondrous, gorgeous slices of angelic alien-disco that have been occupying my thoughts all through this half-year just gone: one is the Maurice Fulton remix of I:Cube’s “Vacuum Jackers” which you can find on Chicken Lips’ Clicks, Acid & Disco mix, which I don’t propose to talk about here except to acknowledge its greatness in passing. The other is Manhead’s “Doop (Reverso 68 Mix)”, which was the flip of a track a DJ at a record store played me in an attempt to lure me into a purchase (12 inch in question being Manhead’s The Italians E.P.). Said DJ was surprised when I showed more interest in this one: “Oh, that slow track, yeah that’s okay” he admitted somewhat dismissively, with an almost petulant edge to his voice.

Reverso 68 productions (and never mind Manhead; the remixers are the star here) do have a sort of lethargic, sluggish feel to them, not too far away from Metro Area or other neo-disco exponents in their anti-perspirant kick/handclap lassitude. But whereas this particular approach tends to signify a kind of anti-rave, pro-club elite refinement (and I say that with the recognition that this approach can often be a very productive one), Reverso 68 seem to be in tune with another sort of vibe: BALEARIC. Oh yeah, I know there’s not much difference between the two if we take “Balearic” to mean spinning Woodentops tracks for Paul Oakenfeld and his friends on a beach in Ibiza in 1986. But what I always got out of the idea of Balearic was that its eclecticism was sort of false or precarious: surely the point of it was that if the E was good enough it all sounded like house music anyway??

For me Balearic is shorthand for a special brand of dance music eclecticism, where the self-conscious diversity and obscurantism is somehow dissolved into a “don’t fight it, feel it” love of house as some sort of universal panacea, the beat that your heart makes. Think 808 State’s “fourth world” fusionism, or the multi-layered percussive prog of the better Hardkiss stuff. Actually “Doop (Reverso 68 Mix)” is quite close to both of those, if you imagine their lofty ambitions and simple techniques filtered through the last ten years of sound design. The layers of wobbly synth patterns and quavering cumulus clouds of simply indescribable squiggly sounds parade a production flair as nuanced as Isolee (whose remix of Recloose’s “Cardiology” is in a similar realm of deep forest beauty), while simultaneously creating a sense of humidity, a warm torpid heaviness that makes everything feel a little bit too bright, too intense. But Reverso 68 know how to keep it simple when they need to: halfway through the tune breaks down to just a simple kick/clap rhythm over an insistent bass pulse, like you’ve penetrated to the heart of the rainforest to find a sacred grove. Then a bustling hi-hat pattern drifts in, then some tense, clipped Chic guitar strumming and a stompy bongo, and then you’re off again into the deepest recesses of the jungle.

I had been wondering why the Doop remix was so familiar sounding to me, at least, beyond simply being the music I must have dreamt of in utero. Turns out it was included on Cassius’s nu french house Muzik magazine mix almost two years ago, a cd that became one of many casualties when I moved out of a share house at the time. This ruins all my plans to name this the house track of the year, but luckily Reverso 68 just remixed The Juan Maclean’s “Tito’s Way” into similarly smeary starlit fabulousness – capturing that exact same "walking along the beach with a pina colada… on Mars!! (ON ACID!!!)" kind of vibe, i.e. that same effortless ability to inspire breathless clichéd declarations from yours truly.

Now that they’ve gotten on a DFA 12 inch, there’s a small chance that Reverso 67 will get attention from people into that DFA sound, which is kinda what they’ve secretly been fuckin’ with all along – indeed this could easily have slotted onto that DFA Compilation #2 release alongside stuff like Black Leotard Front (and still would have been a peak track). Such exposure would be both nice and somewhat ironic, as it turns out the guys behind this project have formerly been deeply involved in Café Del Mar and other such bastions of tasteless tastefulness – and maybe it’s the amorphous values of languorous islander ambiance such projects espouse which gives their sound its uniqueness.

It would be easy to reject this stuff on that very basis, but I find that the opposite is the case: part of the enjoyment with this track is that Reverso 68 do tread so close to edge of transglobal bad taste – sashaying on the border between deep forest and Deep Forest – and so close to undermining the reflected glory of all the more palatable historical reference points you might care to draw – Arthur Russell? Liquid Liquid? Talking Heads circa Remain In Light? Partly as well because it’s an enjoyably counter-intuitive experience to witness this particular vibe emerging from within that large interzone we may as well call electro-house – the sound of a scene producing its conceptual opposite (to hear a more conventional mediation of electro-house and Café Del Mar, check their remix of Bent’s “Comin’ Back”, which sounds like Rex the Dog at an afternoon beach party). Mostly though it’s because this stuff makes me suspect that dance music has some unfinished business in the hippy-dippy department; that after almost half a decade of cocaine and haircuts, we might be ready for another dose of tanned skin and PLUR.

(admittedly this 2005 piece is undermined by slightly by the fact that I didn't know the Reverso 68 remix of "Doop" is 50% straight rip from "Clash (Chinjyu of Sun)")

damn tim you wrote that dudes article

but you said "reverso 67" at the end so thats probably why no one listened

great another word for "trip hop"

xpost max, i've never hear of any strictly balearic nights in the u.s. going on now... i could be wrong.. i know there are plenty of people making it or faking it or what have you, but more than a few americans actually dancing to it??

am0n is sort of correct

here in sf dudes will drop tracks in between other stuff, disco, italo, proggy dancy shit, whatever. but balearic all night ? nah. even when prins mutha fucking thomas was here he didn't drop balearic all night. yeah amon is sort of correct in terms of it being downtempo for house/dance heads who listen to jazz/prog/kraut and tons of other shit in their off time. whatever some of its good, some of its terrible. the good stuff though like studio/aeroplane is mighty fucking good imo.

Balearic is even starting to influence fashion: the spring/summer collections from Dries van Noten and Gucci embody the Balearic aesthetic in the form of linen trousers, slip-on shoes and soft pastels.

yuk!

i think this time around they're playing up the soft rock angle much more than in the earlier incarnation

whoa

Anonymous said...
I like this description, because it's not just for dj's or people with a lot of knowledge of the sound.
The key words are "humidity", "ambient" and "tasteless tastefulness".

If you've heard someone like DJ Harvey play INXS's "need you tonight" in the moist middle of some of the underground euro beat tracks it actually grew out of, at a slow tempo, with sweaty smiling girls going crazy around you on a beach or in a basement, you will understand balearic.

xpost: actually, it comes to my attention that "la primavera" is germany's kano.
-- vahid (vahid), Monday, 29 August 2005 05:52 (2 years ago)

this is total nonsense

"hey you got your william orbit in my chemical brothers"
"you got your chemical brothers in my william orbit"
"let's smoke it"

and on and on and on and fucking on

vahid where is that "Anonymous said" quote from?

Errm, I know that this thread has been around a while, but I only just landed here. So, maybe a mite late and all, but there's a UK site for Balearic compilations with an intro from renowned soothsayer Bill Brewster (academically recognised no less and doyen of DJ History) that gives a bit more thought to what is <a href=" http://www.downtotheseaandback.com/about/";>Balearic Music</a> on one of it's pages.

You can't argue much with his observation, that,as dance music writer Frank Tope once put it, Balearci is “pop music that sounds good on pills”!

Errm, I know that this thread has been around a while, but I only just landed here. So, maybe a mite late and all, but there's a UK site for Balearic compilations with an intro from renowned soothsayer Bill Brewster (academically recognised no less and doyen of DJ History) that gives a bit more thought to what is Balearic Music on one of it's pages.

You can't argue much with his observation, that,as dance music writer Frank Tope once put it, Balearci is “pop music that sounds good on pills”!