opinions on where electronic music is at right now

this kaito record, beautiful life, is really amazing, not just because it's a lush slice of microwhatever, but because it - along with the mri album - really points at some heretofore explored merger of deep trance and microhouse.

not like "beau"...the best way i can describe it is: i was sitting in the living room reading tonight with it on and nancy walked in the room and said: "you don't normally listen to stuff that sounds like this." "what are you talking about, i listen to stuff like this all the time." "not stuff this trance-y." it's got the sweepy filter stuff, and the sweet plangent kinda sticky melodies, and it all sorta chugs along anonymously. but if you listen closely there's snipped guitar and little chimes and all the other microhouse toppings. and then the beats start to reveal themselves as more intricate than you first realized. it's simultaneously Big Room and dainty, if that's even possible.

(side question: is soul center iii any good?)

thanks for the names tho jess. i've been pretty disappointed with most new electronic stuff (the whole shebang from d&b to tomita) for the last couple years. it's still nice and recreational, but the good rush of it is gone. (and i'm not in any way really referring to drugs and please excuse my awful puns.)

m.

And re Soul Center: III's best by far. And it's an isolated bright spot on the album, but seek Lowtec's "Rock Me Easy"--a swaggering funk rundown that Philip Sherburne pretty awesomely described as following the kind of el-p vamp that "gives Moodymann nightsweats."

It looks like I will be able to make myself a selection that will at the same time make a significant departure from the "minimalist flair" of my last excursion in these territories and be able to sustain my attention for a reasonable period of time. BTW is anyone into stuff that is more academic?

Kompakt , some melodic stuff, Pause 2 have some mighty artists like Stoloff and Hopkinson, EU and Maps and Diagrams.

There is good stuff out there but it takes a bit of sorting out.
I have to admit the last BoC was ok, as was the Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. The Autechre ep is good. Oh I don't know I rock, I know that.

of course, this explains why i sell very few records and am increasingly universally reviled!!!!!!!

still, i'm having alot of fun doing it , nonetheless!!.

is the akufen album worth checking out (not sure i spelt right there!)

love

matt

Oh yes and let me second Akufen - v. good album indeed.

I get a little frustrated with Tomas Jirku. His pieces usually start out great, but then, rather than develop that material, too often he just piles on increasingly obvious noises or feels a need to work in some insipid melody. After coming on all brave sounding, he seems to lose courage.

And, it goes without saying, but any mention of Moodymann on ILM makes me very happy. Those who love the Soul Center LPs will likely get something out of his and Theo Parrish's productions. Moodymann, while techy on occassion, leans heavily toward deep funk-house; Parrish is extremely techy in everything he does -- raw, gritty, challenging. I was listening to his remix of Jill Scott's Slowly Surely this morning while driving before the sun came up, in a dense cloud of fog. It was ideal for that.

That Lawrence album. Couldn't get into it at first. Now it's one of my albums of the year.

Let's second that Italic compilation. Lovely stuff. As a totally useless aside I'm actually moving to Borneo & Sporenburg next week (well Sporenburg to be precise). I was very surprised that a Swiss/German duo would name themselves after a new Amsterdam neighborhood. I feel so techno now. :)

I can't remember if it was myself or Jess who said some time ago that microhouse and 2-step exist as the sum result of two of the most exciting narratives within dance music, and that now they divide pretty much all the "good stuff" between them.

"it's simultaneously Big Room and dainty, if that's even possible."

I sort of think of Kaito as a what-if - ie. what if Force Inc. hadn't run away from but rather fallen in love with "Age Of Love (Watch Out For Stella)"?

Sorry that post got interrupted by the Mobile Phone Threat. I guess also I have my concerns about MicroHouse which is that while I like the stuff I've heard - Luomo, MRI, odd tracks from assorted MH bods - it feels like a lovely area to wander about in picking the odd cherry rather than the future of anything very much. I find I need to concentrate quite hard to enjoy any of it - or even notice any of it - and so I'm intrigued by why Tim, Andy K, and Jess (particularly Jess cos he's been quite hostile towards other 'new big things' that get put forward) see so much in it.

(Also I've yet to hear a MicroHouse track with female vocals that wasn't spoiled for me by them, but that's another thing).

and snd: tender love? its about as cold and dry as a sponge is a very hot bath...maybe you need some good headfones.
or try their second album, snd stdio...

I find this to be true of Hypercity. If I listen closely I totally adore it, but otherwise it sounds like Sasha = a bit boring for me. Taylor Deupree, who runs 12k, told Philip Sherburne that microhouse is "all about listening", and I agree. It's all about those moments when you're immersed in a piece of music, and you notice one beautiful sound in the mix - it could be a hihat or it could be something more obscure that you've never noticed before - and you love it and feel that you could touch it. This is one of the main pleasures of all electronic music, and now there is a genre made specifically for it. It's not an acid jazz thing: acid jazz is about tasteful lush production with natural real instrument sounds, while microhouse is about what electronic music is best at: beautiful alien noises.

Hypercity sounds like it was made by a bunch of guys who have listened to Sasha records this way. To truly enjoy it without concentrating very hard on it, you would probably have to dig Sasha. But if you don't, then the hard listening work you have to put in will pay off bigtime. I don't think that it is an "idm cul-de-sac, house with the thrills and physicality removed" at all. The thrills are just more subtle, and the physicality is still there as long as the pumping house beat is.

it feels like a lovely area to wander about in picking the odd cherry rather than the future of anything very much.

Microhouse doesn't sound like a great irresistable-future-force like jungle did in 1995, but it's deceptive. It's more like an invisible future-virus slowly infecting everything. It may just succeed better than jungle did, because it's not something that can be easily hyped up or easily slapped onto existing musical formats to cash in. Its lack of overt futurism means that it will not quickly run into a dead end like jungle did. Its spread will be slow and subtle but powerful.

Andy's list makes a point I forgot to make, namely that liking the-stuff-formerly-known-as-microhouse and liking "proper" house are not at all mutually exclusive. There seems to be a sense on ILM recently that "we" don't enjoy dancing - It's odd how ILM often acts like Ronan is our token "real" dance-music fan... (no offence at all Ronan! You know I check for you).

(i'd also like someone to point out where on this thread the "pretensions i am to fortify this music with" are. i even say that microhouse is a pointless term!)

It feels very kathy acker.

(can i just mention - in case it wasn't obvious - how offensive and chauvinsitc the idea of "needing to be corrected" [which is different than discussion] is?)

*cough* The Electronic Foundation of Sound and Vision *cough*

http://www.warnerreprise.com/asx/madonna_dieanotherday_128-a.asx

It is apparently the theme song to the new James Bond film.

It'll be a shame if they're never heard of again because their music is startling, a solid acid core with a wild semi-improvised edifice constructed around it.

Ha ha Ronan you will be converted - not all microhouse-fans are dancefloor-phobic chinstrokers y'know.

No idea who's produced the Madonna single but if it's Mirwais then he's improved heaps.

yes and isolle's rest is good too. it's my token microhouse album.

see? glitch-house.

"sigmund freud/analyze this"

I am in love.

so here the em pee free

(with remixes, no less)

*downloads and listens*

Heh. Those stops and starts are indeed pretty great. The Freud line is overrated, though; I prefer her drooling about 'avoiding the cliche,' now that's funny. Dan's right, MUCH better than "Music" ever was. And thank god, it didn't make me think of Garbage, which I was fearing for some reason.

Josh what I was thinking just before i sat down and read your post was that microhouse is kinda like punk (though *obviously* not so epochal or groundbreaking) in that while the actual style of music has been done before, it somehow foregrounds an idea of itself that makes the music seem more exciting or fresh. There's a sort of self-consciousness to punk - a statement of "yes we know exactly what we're fucking well doing" - that makes it (or made it?) seem more U&K. Similarly I've repeated myself ad nauseum about how I reckon microhouse - or whatever we want to call it - makes explicit certain ideas that have existed all along within dance music, putting them front and center so that you're forced to notice them and think about them.

eg. I can imagine Jonny Rotten saying to some garage punk band "You made music like mine, but you didn't do it knowing what I know". It's harder to say how a microhouse artist might diss one of their inspirations in a similar fashion, but it *feels* like they could.

(I think though that acid house did what you're talking about, in that it was an idea about music as well as a specific style of music, explicating something that had existed-unacknowledged in disco, and before that in funk, and before that in ????).

http://www.de-bug.de/texte/5129.html

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,2178257,00.html

Were these articles discussed on other threads? I see that Simon Reynolds linked to them on blissblog.

From Phillip Sherburne's article:

From Glitch To Blog House
Digging through the DJ charts, the results aren't terribly surprising. Carl Craig is all over the place, as is Theo Parrish. Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers represent the more mainstream end of the spectrum, while Justus Koehncke has disco on lockdown. Larry Heard is representing Chicago's deepest. Richie Hawtin, Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio and the Kompakt label are there as well, assuring that minimalism never goes out of style. Oh, maybe I should have clarified one thing, though. These aren't 2007 playlists; they're charts from a decade earlier.

From Carl Craig's remix of Faze Action's "In the Trees" to the Sähkö records on the wall at Hardwax, it does occasionally feel like we're back in 1997 all over again. Minimal techno still rules (except now it's just called "minimal.") Acid and classic deep house are so deeply entrenched, it's like they never went away. Recent remixes of Cybotron's "Clear" remind us that electro is less a genre than a kind of rhythmic time capsule orbiting the earth, beaming back coded data at regular intervals.

Kraftwerk's Autobahn is closer to the end of World War II than to the present day

Awesome.

!!

London clubland definitely feels like it's moving back towards classicism, away from clicky multitextured minimal house and becoming bleepier, spacier, deeper.

Unlike Reynolds I like to view this as a bit of a retrenchment, a move back to something vaguely resembling a centre ground before going off in new and exciting directions, which is a bit different from going "argh, doom gloom dance music cul-de-sac!".

All I fucking hear on the radio is "up-front house", which I think is something akin to haircut house, i.e. live-sounding rock-style drums doing very plodding, un-funktional beats, with big diva house choruses on top.

Versus ... C.O.D. house? Rent-to-own house? "Mortgage?"

oof.

subprime house = underground bitchez

Actually I would SO listen to a genre called "layaway house."

double garage anyone ?

blaze goes 2step? i would listen to that.

two-car garage

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/221/460144735_80baa1587d.jpg