Matthew Dear - worthy of the hype?

the ghostly international website has some downloads

That was James Cotton though.

I sort of like Leave Luck to Heaven as well.

But yeah, Laguna Madre is great! And the album is quite nice too but doesn't really push boundaries like Villalobos' Alcachofa who I think has merged vocals and "microhouse" very well.

(As a tangential footnote, I wish it could've received half the amount of attention that was paid to that obnoxious Postal Service record.)

Or you could say that my love for the record is solely based on jingoism. I do roll around my neighborhood with this blaring from my General Lee-style SUV every day.

otm

also his music is the most well-done and idiosyncractic electronic stuff to come out of michigan in a lonnggg time (to these ears anyway) and for as moody or dry as the tunes can be they are so so funky

thirding the praise for "laguna madre"...

Thanks for the reminder

but really, i don't see where you find the pleasure in this. it's like you suck all the fun out of some good bouncy house and replace it with these post-isolee plug-ins. it was slightly boring by the tenth time i'd listened to the isolee album, let alone the tenth artist who was ripping off the style. and there's still all those weird american indie hangups about taste / restraint / underachieving.

the website, with the photo of them standing around all unsmiling in their sociology dept. hallway like they're posing for details or gq just makes me tense.

the mr. fingers comparison is extremely literal here, i think.

b-b-but dear has made some good bouncy house, it may be competely neurotic, but it's bouncy

the comparisons to postal service and dntel baffle me

maybe pop has become a worthless descriptor

but yeah, different strokes for different folks and all that

I mean I think if we use this liberal definition of pop then you could argue easily enough that a MASSIVE percentage of house music is pop or popist. I quite like this idea but maybe only because I like house music and pop music. I have some sense this might be taking too favourable a view of the music we like.

I sympathise with Vahid's position a bit here, only in a kind of irrational way though. I just think of the dance critics here in Dublin putting Dear and co at the top of all their end of year lists and then playing regular club house every weekend.

The Dear/Fingers thing is interesting because there is a great deal of snobbery from fans of both towards regular house music or whatever, in some sense though I empathise more with the Fingers lovers, there are surely alot of Matthew Dear/DNTEL/Kompakt people who are unaware of the existence of the rest of dance music

I am surely the anti-Mike T, but then again I have listened to almost nothing but that Derrick Carter mix and Ten City and stuff for the last few weeks.

I'm not really so it's speculation on my part.

ward 21 ---> sean paul ---> shaggy

mikkle metal ---> mr. fingers ---> vengaboys

Not really. You either like it or you don't; anything I have to say isn't going to change anyone's opinion.

He did not make my year end list.

Personally, I think his album is great, I think vahid tends to see things a little too much in terms of battle lines. I know he is a techno purist so that kind of relieves the weight of a lot of what he says in regard to dear, dntel, postal service et all.

Being first is cool, but if something does something slightly derivitive and it makes me happy and want to dance that is cool too. I mean what isn't derivitve? Even Atkins and Derrick May liked Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk.

I kind of like this movement of techno and pop together, even in this obvious way. Dear, Villalobos, even Luciano has a pop sensibility that is hard to miss.

i still like pop as a descriptor better because it's shiny, flat, and nicely vacuous.

Stupid?! Akufen's music is as witty as Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, as breathtaking as a bungee jump off the Eiffel Tower, as elegantly and absurdly constructed as a Frank Gehry edifice. Come to your senses; check out My Way and all of his 12s on Perlon and Background, and then try to tell me his music is "stupid."

can't it be popish and not part of the pop continum?

Throbbing Gristle wrote pop songs but would you call them pop?

Its just genre mash up.

i don't think i can ever listen to akufen again.

re tg: i think it's the flipside of my last sentence re the fascination with everything from manson to warhol. they're Pop, not pop. they're pop if porno is pop. i do recall someone comparing timbaland to z'ev is his year end roundup...

profan >>>>> kompakt >> pop

oh, and matt dear >> emo

Deck The House is a crap big beat song, I shudder to think of clubs full of people dancing to it.

He was dancing his ass off the whole time but that is what he said.

Now that is a good analogy!

It does sometimes interest me here how alot of people came to dance music from the intellectual end and maybe moved towards the visceral, whereas for me the opposite is the case. Is this a fair assessment of people here, correct me if I'm making assumptions, of course.

I think Kompakt is kind of a middle ground, its not full on Jungle/Trance/House/Breaks maddness that doesn't translate to the home but I know for a fact I can dance my ass off to it too.

Also I have a wife, which may play a large part as she has definatly influenced my taste.
Mellowed me a bit and redeveloped my taste for melody

Hardcore for the headstrong brother!

The whole brainy angle did not even enter the equation until indie people started listening to "intelligent" dance music around 2000.

Likewise I think Kompakt have the capacity to make records that work as both "proper" house records while bringing other ideas to the table which distinguish them (post-Studio 1 minimalism, schlager, whatever). They aren't a mainstream house label, but nor is their attitude to mainstream house entirely or exclusively indie (which would be to sketch mainstream house with *all* the mainstream-ness taken out). Thus they encapsulate to me that perfect union of mainstream and indie which makes Saint Etienne so great.

well, yes and no, because that formulation also gives you stuff like mike dearborn and jess & crabbe. which are non-indie but also work as "proper" house records.

The problem with being "outside" is usually that you're standing in the cold where it's not much fun and you're missing all of the action. The sensation with Kompakt though is kinda like standing outside in the cold but *understanding* what it means to be inside, and dreaming of it wistfully. Kompakt tracks often sound like orphans in this regard (think "Tomorrow", "Falling Hands" etc).

this image too neatly accounts for why non-clubbers like Kompakt for me to buy it.

Does that make Kompakt the Paul Weller of house?

mt wins with the Roxy analogy IMHO...

perhaps i was unclear: i think it's a very good metaphor. too good. because it seems to say more about how the ilm kompakt massive / microhouse fanbase in general (as i've observed of course) wants to see itself and too little about the music itself.

The problem is that there seems to be a big cultural disjunction with regard to talking about any of that, leading to conversations that ever-so-vaguely look like "I was dance before you were dance" matches. Not in a dumb way or even an irrelevant way. But it feels like some central issue is being skirted because everyone is just comparing their personal lines on how "pop" or how "slanted-approach-on" they're willing to let dance music get before they write it off as pandering to (or co-opting by) non-dance audiences.

Which is itself sorta indie: replace the right references and you're listening to about the same discussions rock kids had during the alt-rock major-label explosion thingie.

In any case: I quite enjoy what everyone likes to call "song-form" techno, and I quite enjoy "slanted-approach-to" type dance music; for the most part that's how I enjoy all music, whether it's Interesting Approaches to Rock / Pop / Folk / Hip-Hop / or whatever the hell else. You could call that an "indie" quality, and there was a time when I might have agreed, but I'm not sure I do anymore. Right now I just think it means I'm a student again, which means I spend long periods of time in my room working, and I like to hear slightly-weird things while I do.

ha. not until i start calling for the matthew dear boycott because his distributor makes missile parts or something.

"dancemania motherfuckers make kompakt look like church"

why not come 'inside' then? It's really fun in here! and we accept everybody! lose yourself.

I mean, nevermind whether it's "indie" or not: I just think it vexes things a little. Which isn't even to say that it's irrelevant: I can empathize with the idea among a lot of dance fans that any upsurgence of "songy" or "poppy" dance music may represent another audience trying to "fix" something that isn't broken. But with any genre, rock or pop or indie or whatever, when things start filtering through that lens too much -- the what-camp-is-it-in lens, the "is it real" or "is it hard" lens -- it becomes harder and harder to think clearly about the value of the actual pieces of music being made. It's all political, y'know?

(To be honest I'm at a loss as to how something like "Dog Days" could fail to satisfy either camp, but that could just be an indication of precisely how "hard" I am on this issue.)

I come "inside" on a regular basis - if as Vahid implies I have a certain wishful thinking take on microhouse which seeks to align it more closely with other dance musics, it's only because I'm seeking to find the common ground between the microhouse I love and all the other house I love. I still think though that this stuff is heavily invested in the idea of dance music as dance music - the fact that it joins groups like Orbital and Basement Jaxx as "gateway" dance music doesn't undermine that.

And anyway I don't think it's necessarily a sin or a dance-hating move to seek to complicate one's relation to house music - electroclash is a good example of an attempt to distance oneself from house which ends up producing great, physically riveting house records.

... Erm except in the sense that it sounds different to other dance records though? I mean I listen to a lot of house and a fair bit of techno and the Kompakt aesthetic still sounds quite distinct. And then people say "no, [X] has those qualities too!" and then [x] turns up on a Kompakt mix-cd...

i've heard plenty of perlon records in straight-up house sets.

even the luciano mix-cd that he released last year i would consider deep house

Does Young have the pop quotient? Which these days is much more important to me than the glitch quotient (not that Kompakt ever really went down that road much anyway!). Looking at the tracklisting for "DJ Kicks" I sorta doubt it but I'll try to find and pick up a copy anyway.

i'd really recommend you check out ferox records or clear or dan curtin. we're talking people on the same wavelength as morgan geist, basically, as far as rhythmic templates go (though without the 80s or italo fixations). if you're on slsk these days i could even put together an 80 minute cd of pre-microhouse-not-microhouse. (hell, i'd mail it out if you want)

no, the pop quotient definitely ISN'T there, though the music is quite upbeat. well, unless the definition of pop takes into account 70s soul and funk.

I know from buying the stuff when it came out that dan curtain and clear gave big respect to detroit, and clear in particular was all about updating 80's electo. That didnt make their music any less valid at the time it came out or now.

did i miss something by the way when you mentioned that micohouse is oppposed to detroit techno

I would also be very interested in hearing you microhouse not microhouse mix. If i could figure out slsk. I recently dug out some of my old morgan geist 12"s and was starting to feel them again

even the luciano mix-cd that he released last year i would consider deep house "

I think all of this stuff sounds much better mixed in with normal house than one track after another. Or the way Mayer often likes to do it is to juxtapose different slants so that you get micro followed by neo-trance followed by tech-house followed by shuffletech, which works similarly because each track usually only has one or two elements that are unusual so the surrounding housiness/technoness comes through quite strongly.

thats good I thought I was the only one that noticed that in his sets

And "Unter Null" is like an instrumental shuffle remix of Jam & Spoon's "Right in the Night".

wasn't this a Matthew Dear list?

What do you think of it Tim?

well, you've pretty much nailed it, hector. though i haven't exactly rejected kompakt either ... i do own almost all of the mixes and some of the albums and comps, and i enjoy them. but yeah, that's pretty much where i'm coming from.

though i don't think this sets me apart from anyone else: we ARE all planning to write 1,000+ pg hagiographies on our pet scenes, right people?

I love Claude Young, yes.

This thread will double in posts once I have time to say more.

I will steer clear of this semantic genrefication discussion but note that I side more w/ vahid (& have been on 313 list for 4 or 5 yrs)..

vahid, why do you not view someone like matthew dear the same way as metamatics on clear, environ records or dan curtin on peacefrog? if it's got the phonk, why bother adopting a stance, the music ain't.

that would be an interesting read, but in my mind it's such a dangerous thing to do.

i don't really buy the conceptual nature of this thread either. let's all blame mille plateaux and unessentialism/clicks n cuts.

'SPECTRAL SESSIONS' NYC
APT
Thursday 9.16
http://aptwebsite.com/

Matthew Dear (DJ)
Ryan Elliott
Broker/Dealer (Traum/Asphodel/Spectral)

It finally hit me last night why I ever got too deep into this guy's stuff. The drum sounds. Doesn't that sound like a silly answer? And yet every time I try and sit down to listen to any Audion, or, especially, Dog Days, the snares and hihats really piss my ears off.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14533-black-city/

who's heard it ?

Xpost: I don't think that's too silly of an answer really. Too much audion stuff sounds way to dry: thin kicks, shrill high hats, needs a bit of juice to be honest.

Also, I'm probably not going to really bother much with this album, despite how formative Leave Luck was for me as a techno newcomer. Why: Because of how much his last album strait up sucked. I'd probably sell my copy if it wasn't for the hot chip remix.

I've really been diggin' on Black City. Yesterday morning i awoke with a pounding hangover and the stereo tricks this album does through headphones really makes your head spin. Listening again today via cans confirms; this may be the best headphone album i've heard all year.

LITTLE RED NIGHT GOWN
LITTLE RED NIGHTGOWNNnnnnNNNITE GOWN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnU_16mXMNw

This record is great, slept on by ILXors maybe?

Yes, I admit I slept on it. Am attempting to repent by wearing out the mp3s this month. Really fucking good album.

if you're on slsk these days i could even put together an 80 minute cd of pre-microhouse-not-microhouse. (hell, i'd mail it out if you want)

did you ever put this comp together vahid?

love this record. i figured ppl were talking about it in one of the bobbins threads

i really liked 'dog days' back in the day. saw this guy at sonotheque in like '04

this album is pretty different

dog days is a jam tho

gr8080 do u like the audion stuff?

dear has a tumblr btw -- he posts occasionally, usually just photos of food hes eating

http://mdear.tumblr.com/

hmm less food than i remember

jabberjaw singles are good too

Leave Luck to Heaven ('Dog Days'-era LP) & the latest one are the best Matt Dear records imo. Asa Breed got a lot of good press at the time, but imo leans too heavily on the indie vox side of what he does & not enough vaguely evil-sounding techno stuff. Of course, the Audion records are really good for that sort of thing.

yah i didnt like the asa breed lp at all

"mouth to mouth" is still the best thing ever

Been digging this lately

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tWuq-EySf4

(better to seek out the actual EP version)

Black City is def in my top ten on 2010 even though i didnt know it existed till last week

its like brian ferry producing a nine inch nails record

^^
a high compliment & accurate description

MD figured prominently into my best o 2010 as well

Black City is all right, I couldn't really get into it though, I wish it had more jams like the title track. Asa Breed was much better -- it struck a nice balance between "three-minute techno singles" and moody, late 70's David Bowie-esque stuff.

Agreed! Asa Breed completely nails the mix of Goth-Mooodiness and blissed-out-yet-dark dancey floor fillers!

Dear fans should also check out the new compilation out on Ghostly International. More dancefloor oriented than what Dear has been putting out under his own name for a while including Daniel Wang and Gold Panda who are both must-listens for anybody who likes great house music.

I would also recommend his Audion side project for more techno good-ness.

gold panda also one of my favorite records from last year

Yes! A really fantastic record, went on heavy rotation on this listener's iPod.

yeah gp album is dope. 'you.' is the jam!

I much preferred his XX remix to the original track. It makes up a lot of the meatiness and punch that I find lacking in The XX sound.

Asa Breed sucked so very badly that I, even in spite of my mid 00's fawning adoration for Leave Luck to Heaven, decided to not even bother with this one.

Also, I can't help but feel that the fact that dude always puts his own vocals on remixes just reeks of egotism.

yah feeling you there, i remember thinking it was weird that it was the one that picked up a load of hipster kisses. i think i have kindof overpraised Tide on this board before so i wont but I think the more this guy makes "the kind of music he wants to make" is the more i realise i have no interest in hearing it. xx remix was a p awful stodgy groove-free zone.

We definitely part company on that front, I will admit my initial encounter with his music was Asa Breed, and frankly I was somewhat disappointed to explore his previous incarnation as a more minimal producer, really found the rich sonics of his more current output lacking to great detriment.

the more this guy makes "the kind of music he wants to make" is the more i realise i have no interest in hearing it.

Yes! This is exactly how I feel about him.

I did buy the Little People (Black City) 12" (which I, pretty much without fail, always accidentally call "Little City, Black People), and it's alright.

boy i sure do hate it when artists make the kind of music they want to make

it is when it sucks ass!

well idk this record prolly doesnt suck ass but its not half as interesting to me as the stuff he was doing when he was tryna be trendy

yeah I found Asa Breed a bit ridiculous, think it was the vocals..

Heard Little People Black City on a car a few days ago and it wasn't bad.

Loved Asa Breed, I don't understand why people think there's a problem with vocals on this record. Black City hasn't left a great impression so far.

I deleted that album years ago but I remember the vocals being so DEEP and over the top it made me think of Bowie meets Type O Negative or something like that, and I was always about to laugh but it wasn't funny enough just vaguely unpleasant.

Asa Breed sucked so very badly that I, even in spite of my mid 00's fawning adoration for Leave Luck to Heaven, decided to not even bother with this one.

u have made a terrible decision

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q767FrWodRY

"FIRST OF ALL, THE MORSE CODE IN THE BACKGROUND HAS TO GO."

"This will be a failure."

episode FORTY SEVEN?????

Really good new track!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WawXqpqwRn0

New album is great - even better than Black City.

so good!

kind of a Madchester vibe but unmistakably him

this track is brilliant, heard it on bis a few weeks ago. he's really maturing as a songwriter.

I need to try again to get into Black City. I still like his first two albums the best? Probably will like the new one.

Wait, first two albums and the Audion one. Always the Audion one.

I've been listening to Black City on repeat to prepare myself for the new one, and "Slowdance" has finally clicked for me. So, so great.

Nobody should ever listen to what I say because it took me ten years to figure out that "Asa Breed" is realllllly good. TEN. YEARS.

Amazon or google or whatever search engine crawled its spiders into my computer says I should bu his dj kicks. What say you ilm search engine?

looks like it could be cool

fair amount of good tracks on there and new audion is always welcome