Booka Shade- Movements (release date May 12)

-- Michael Dieter (mdiete...), February 19th, 2006.

glad to see this moved from Booka Shade-Memento (album)

I imagine that a 12" or two of remixes will appear a month or two after the album release, which is a bit too far away for details to have emerged yet I suspect.

Out of curiosity, what commercials have they done?

http://www.perkypark.com/musicForCommercialsAndMedia/21/instruction

Yeah, I like too how all the little adjustments in the mix are really noticeable (in terms of which sounds are at the front and so on). In busy electro-house or intricate minimal you can sometimes be so overwhelmed with details that you can't hear that, but due to the relative simplicity and airiness of Booka Shade's grooves you can hear precisely how each component relates to one another, and when aspects of that change. It makes for very alert listening: the minute changes in "In White Room" especially sends prickles across my skin.

Ha ha they're totally like Lindsay Buckingham or something.

it's been on quite a few comps now but it first appeared on M.A.N.D.Y.'s Body Language mix a year ago.

xp to Jeff, the second track on the Madonna album sounds like it.

i don't know about that. are you judging it by the same standards by which you judged the album? i think that here we have to observe the distinction between art and design (as tenuous and shifting and fertile as the boundary may be) and consider the ads function and how the music exists functionally. i thought that it was great ad music, really got me in the mood to buy / drive a bmw or some jeans.

ADS'

(for those who haven't heard it yet, like me)

Give me, body
Give me
Body
Body
Give me your body

Don't talk, Baby don't talk
Body language

Give me your body
Just give me your body
Give me your body
Don't talk

Body language
Body language

You got red lips
Snakes in your eyes
Long legs, great thighs
You've got the cutest ass I've ever seen
Knock me down for a six anytime

Look at me - I gotta case of body language
Look at me - I gotta case of body language
Body language - body language - yeah

Sexy body, sexy, sexy body
I want your body
Baby you're hot

Body language

Of course the sensible thing would be to make a "Body Language"/"Slow" mashup.

They could loop the "read my BODY LANGUAGE" bit for ages!

plus added "give me love...give me love so that i can...kill" too!

I dunno, it's hard to see it being a novelty single like "Flat Beat' was (not saying "Flat Beat" wasn't also great as well), and without vocals.

i think it could work in much the same way that something like royksopp's 'eple' worked.

It sounds like it's off a Wighnomy Bros track? From Wuzzlebud KK? But I doubt it. I really can't recall hearing this track on a mix recently.

I'm not sold on this as an "album" at all this far. Some great tracks yeah, but in succession? Overlong, draggy, samey, borderline boring. And that's acknowledging that it's frequently beautiful, surprising sounding, produced & mixed to utter perfection. Perhaps too perfect & too refined.

I totally get the "Frequencies" nod in the sound... but I want a "We Are Back" or just a little something jacking along the way. Or maybe I just need to hear this out.

I do agree with Omar to the extent that I think the album would benefit from one harder track like "Trespass 06".

I love the sound design of all this, I love a lot else about it.. but I want it to lively up itself a bit sometimes!

Seems more like a good late-night smoking chilling type record than a strictly house/dance album.

Seems more like a good late-night smoking chilling type record than a strictly house/dance album.

Yeah, agreed, though most people I've played it for have wanted to dance, at certain points.

Seems more like a good late-night smoking chilling type record than a strictly house/dance album.

Yeah, agreed, though most people I've played it for have wanted to dance, at certain points.

but really, am I just cloth eared or are Booka Shade blatantly sampling Ricardo Villalobos there? I find that quite surprising (if I'm not just going mad of course).

Say what you like about Villalobos' weirdness he simply has more memorable/invigorating hooks, even on Achso, to my ears. And tougher beats.

This suddenly feels very like Ricardo Lite to me. Further distilled for the dancefloor. Which I'm sure the disco functionalistas will argue is therefore even better, but it's leaving me cold.

Except for when they sound more like themselves ("In White Rooms" the original Mandarine Girl and Body Language versions, Panoramic (haven't really heard much else by them))

Listening back over Alchacofa just now I'm not entirely sure what I'm getting at either frankly! or that I haven't just become some kind of ultra-fanboy.

Still, there's something that feels not quite right here... the textures seem pulled from the most interesting ends of minimalish techno/house, but instead of being totally integral to the rhythms, they're just sort of lying there on a quite limp & softly-soft 4/4 base. The production kind of hides this at first, but it doesn't last. It all ends up a bit bland and uninvolving.

OTOH I understand how the people who weren't feeling "We Are Monster" felt now :(

This becomes more clear when listening to Movements in the context of other Get Physical and similar releases at the moment - Jona's 12-inch is a v. good example of this, but moving further afield we can take in all the usual suspects like Trentemoller, Gabriel Ananda and so on - in that the move towards a very layered technoid take on electro-house (to the point where the term "electro-house" seems to be of scant relevance) is happening almost right across the board. Again, Villalobos is definitely an influence but only in the same way that, say, african rhythms are an influence on Villalobos himself - in that the fact of this other thing being an influence doesn't mean the music hasn't progressed organically or that it must have been cynically reverse engineered.

x-post I can't imagine liking Memento and not liking this! How does that work???

I guess this strikes me as (and this sounds more dramatic than I mean it) something approaching a dismissal of the current german sound full stop, rather than just a critique of booka shade. But then maybe that's because I don't hear the close sonic connections b/w them that you do fandango.

i feel exactly the same way. after considering all the reasons i may not be feeling this as much as i expected outside of a handful of songs, i think that, despite the quality of the production, the sounds in each song just don't mesh very well. the various sonic palette's don't sound anywhere near as unified as wearemonster's to me, and because of that, the album gets sort of boring. there is something about the way that each instrument in say, schrapnell or face b or pillowtalk, is tuned or equalized or whatever to support every other sound towards some central schrapnell or face b or pillowtalk aesthetic. long before i knew the names of the songs on that record i was able to refer to them in my own head by their sonic aesthetic.

while pong pang (which i love!) and mandarine girl have very different instrumentation and pacing, their timbres still sound exactly the same to me.

am i imagining this divide between the two? would i have loved movements if it had simply been mastered differently? let me know what you think.

i do see how achso has tougher beats. just because the songs are long and one of them sounds like talk talk doesn't mean that the beats aren't pounding, menacing, spidery, wiry etc (excluding sieso). when the beat drop in ichso at 2:00 it's like bombs falling.

Whoever it was in the other thread that drew a comparison with Orbital circa 'Brown album' was dead on, I reckon. It's got that same delicacy to it, and balance of prettiness and dancefloor emotion that makes it great to listen to either at home or out in a club.

On the other hand "In White Rooms" is like the melodrama sequel to "Mandarine Girl", while "Darko" blatantly self-cannibalises the percussion from the original "Mandarine Girl" (this worried me until I heard the album version of the latter, which has a totally different beat).

lf your perspective is an interesting one but if as you say Wearemonster got you into dance music and Villalobos is the next best thing, maybe Booka Shade are too, I dunno, actually club-focused?

It's interesting that people are complaining in this thread either that Movements isn't clubby enough, or that it isn't arty enough. I'm not saying that the disparity cancels each complaint out, but I suspect that Movements will be equally praised for (what is in some people's minds) striking a balance b/w the two poles, and criticised for (what is to others) falling b/w two stools.

Yeah but, y'know, people looking at this from a macro macro macro perspective who don't really follow this music as a scene and are looking for an album to sit next to Vocalcity and Alcachofa and Wearemonster. I can see how such people might purchase on the basis of hype and then feel tricked or something.

Anyway I think this album is actually less "arty" than Memento, which had an even stronger "soundtrack to an imaginary film" vibe going.

maybe it's the functionalism of booka shade which grates on fandango? whereas with eg isolée and villalobos, when it is dancefloor-friendly, it seems to be almost by accident, a side-effect of whatever the artist is aiming at, whereas with booka shade, while they may be using all sorts of weird 'arty' textures and so on...at root is this express dancefloor imperative. which i prefer. but i don't see that it makes it any less 'arty'.

Wearemonster couldn't be more dancefloor friendly!

I'm saying it fails (for me) at both. I'm really not trying to set up that horrible IDM vs. Dance argument yet again. That's surely dead & buried by now?

Movements is a great album. It works beautifully in the headphones and out on a big system. I played Pong Pang on Sunday night and people were really getting down to it.

I am really keen to see the live performance. Last years show at Sonar was strong with Mandarine Girl providing the big finish. This year I think they've got some more moody and varied material which should make a better show.

Except to say that I have, trust me, absolutely nothing against current german dance music! And I wasn't expecting to be filing this along with more auteur-ish albums either (Vocalcity, Alcachofa etc) almost the opposite in fact.

Fandango I'm not complaining about yr lack of knowledge or investment in current club music, just trying to understand where you are coming from.

"Except to say that I have, trust me, absolutely nothing against current german dance music! And I wasn't expecting to be filing this along with more auteur-ish albums either (Vocalcity, Alcachofa etc) almost the opposite in fact. "

Well this makes sense: I wasn't sure if your complaint was "this is faux-Villalobos and I want real-Villalobos" or "this is faux-Villalobos, and I wanted something different, I have real-Villobos already". Despite the fact that I disagree with the first part of each proposition I can now see that your complaint seems closer to the second version than the first.

If you wanted something particularly housey I don't Movements is necessarily the best record precisely because it is, as you say, an attempt to find a middle ground b/w flashy electro-house and minimal. And at the same time Booka Shade are, for better or worse, trying to make an album in a very classic and time-honoured sense of the word, i.e. not a comp of club tracks, not a mix-cd. Since these producers also do make club tracks which end up on comps and mixes I don't think this is them asserting a heirarchy so much as trying out different things. Movements and Memento do serve different functions to their 12 inches, and their productions for DJ T and M.A.N.D.Y., and their productions for advertisments.

But at any rate, I would recommend the 2nd Anniversary Mix M.A.N.D.Y. did in 2004 (and presumably the new 4th Anniversary Mix) as a better introduction to the housier side of Get Physical.

Susan I'm sorry if you think I'm/we're pressuring you to like this record, I was just hypothesising as to reasons why someone might not be over the moon about this record. Surely this is the natural response when people post that they're disappointed or confused or nonplussed or unmoved by a record that other people are enjoying. The alternative responses I might make are "oh, right, it is a boring record", or "everyone's entitled to their opinion" - from my listening perspective the first is wrong and the second is pointless.

I don't particularly mind or get offended by assumptions either for that matter, it's all part of the discussion :)

"And I won't comment on Villalobos, because I'm resigned to the fact that some people are determined to deny that he makes dance music. I'll just say 'Segui il tuo corse, e lascia dir le genti' to sweet Ricardo and have done with it. "

jimnasium, I think Villalobos does make dance music, but I think the dancefloor functionalism of his music is decreasing over time. This is not a criticism, any more than I'd be criticising Booka Shade if I said some of the tracks on their albums are more functional than others. I guess the reason people feel the need to periodically emphasise Villalobos's non-functionalism is because his productions clearly demonstrate different priorities to those of other dance producers, whose music wants to hold onto that functionalism more strongly. This isn't an issue if we're not using Villalobos as a stick to beat the alleged non-creativity of other dance music. Which is not what people are necessarily doing here, but comparing, say, Booka Shade unfavourably to Villalobos can give that impression, however erroneously (see my post to fandango above where I'm trying to clarify what the thrust of his negative comparison actually is).

When talking about whether music succeeds or fails, we run into

don't worry timmy i definitely 'get' functionalism. maybe i think that booka shade are trying to have it both ways and not succeeding at sustaining it for an entire album.

Oh Tim, I thought you were the last one left with the idea that The Present Lover was the Luomo-masterpiece. Oh well, I guess Tessio on Vocalcity will always keep you from the light ;-)

The LP/Beatport version has a slightly extended outro that's longer than the CD/leak version.

I think that, if anything, this album is too functional-- that is, I believe it 'flows' as a good album should, yet doesn't end up with anything but quite a few good transitions, some standout tracks, and a nearly perfect way to end: "Lost High." That is what it feels like, particularly between "Take a Ride" and "LH."

the sounds in each song just don't mesh very well

Uh, what? Listen again.

I can't imagine liking Memento and not liking this! How does that work???

Not to try to pressure you, Susan, but I don't get that either. Memento is flat compared to Movements, in my opinion. But I also don't like a lot of the vocal stuff in Memento, so that might make some difference.

Finally, comparing Booka Shade to Villalobos is like comparing Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice to No-Neck Blues Band. Similar scene, but a different aesthetic and sensibility towards dance (in the former case) and freeform improvisation (the latter). This is a bit of a leap to make, but I feel like much of the discussion on the Drone/Psych thread as to why people don't like (or are let down by) WWVV is similar to the discussion here. It's just that many, many more people hate WWVV than Booka Shade, for obvious reasons.

'mesh' was a lazy choice of words because it's so vague and used out of the context it was designed for. i wasn't trying to refer to the question of whether they fit with each other or sound good together (i think they do). however, i think that the rest of my paragraph makes up for that word choice in its detail, except for where i left implicit (perhaps too implicit) the conclusion that all of movements seems to me to share the same sound; that the aesthetic is too uniform or that the songs don't have their own voices. i don't know here if 'aesthetic' or 'sound' is the right choice of words but with these i'm actually trying to not be lazy.

and by functionalism i mean dancefloor functionalism. DOES IT MAKE YOU MOVE YOUR BODY? it does.

xpost - I dunno lf I think Movements is incredibly diverse sonically and stylistically. The amount of ground covered is broader I think than on either Villalobos album, since we're using that point of comparison. Uniform compared to what?

Some good answers here: Electro-House? Micro-House? WTF? (noob question)

Oh Tim, I thought you were the last one left with the idea that The Present Lover was the Luomo-masterpiece.

I hear Mr. Delay himself prefers TPL!

i realized after some discussion that a lot of the component parts of each song simply sound interchangeable to me. i don't have a strong impression of sonic variation, and or that messrs shade used this uniformity to their advantage.

and not playful enough for me? i'll sleep on it.

The way I look at it Villalobos is still making functional dancefloor music. Whereas Booka Shade might be functional for 3am, I'd say Villalobos, both as producer and DJ, is more suited for 11am.

this is very true, but at the same time part of my surprise re people's disappointment is that if you're familiar with the singles, movements shouldn't really be a surprise. most of the praise is along the lines of "woo! it is what we hoped it would be, rather than being singles plus filler like 75% of dance albums" - sure, i could understand if you didn't think it worked as an album, but (correct me if i'm wrong) i think fandango and susan are objecting to how booka shade fundamentally use sound?

But isn't the point of 11am dance music that everyone's too fucked up to really dance with much enthusiasm?

enthusiasm is all wethey have left!

Villalobos' name unfortunately invokes all sorts of other arguments on the side which I didn't really intend to pursue in relation to this music at all.

Mr. Delay HATES Vocalcity - the interview i saw had him sneer when he talked about how other people call it his "underground masterpiece" (he used the air quotes).

I stand justified in my love of TPL.

Booka Shade, as some irritating dance critics will enthusiastically rush to remind you, produce a lot of records for other artists on the Get Physical label. Undoubtedly, they are very good at this particular function: adequately realising someone else's vision. So good, in fact, that it's tempting to suggest that this is in fact their primary talent, enhanced (made possible even) by a certain paucity in their creative vision. This would be fine (we need producers as much as auteurs) if they didn't obstinately cling to the notion that they can make it is as artists themselves. Movements, their seconda album, is conclusive proof that their time would be better spent elsewhere: a weak and muddled attempt at an atmospheric dance album which sets itself too many goals, and achieves few, if any of them.

It seems clear that Booka Shade are interested in the emotive possibilities of the current electro-house/minimal sound, whose reiteration of the role that melody, complexity and narrative development can play in instrumental dance music has resulted in such excellent albums as Isolee's Wearemonster and Ricardo Villalobos's Alcachofa. Quite aside from the obvious sonic references to these and other forebears strewn throughout the album, Booka Shade also reveal their enthusiasm for this approach in their occasional nods to trance's histrionics, such as on "In White Rooms", the album's simplest, best and certainly most overwrought moment.

But the duo do not have the commitment or the clarity of vision to follow through on this idea: whereas their debut release Memento at least plowed a furrow of nervous claustrophobia with admirable single-mindedness, Movements tries to balance this with a vibe of club-friendly carefreeness which sits at odds with their other going concerns: on various tracks here you can tell that they're trying to foreground the music's emotional capacity, but there doesn't seem to be any particular feeling the music wants to convey - or maybe there's just too many emotions murmuring quietly they become the equivalent of background noise. While this music can sound nervous or remorseful at times, there is nothing here which approaches the dense lugubriousness of Villalobos's "Dexter", for example.

Is the issue, then, that this album is too club-friendly? Perhaps rather it's not club-friendly enough: if the grooves were sufficiently intense these issues probably wouldn't matter, but the duo seem invested in some misguided veneration of relentless midtempo middlegroundedness, as if a light sheen of perspiration is somehow more enigmatic than a drenched t-shirt and bloodshot eyes.

Admittedly, this approach can work on occasion: last year's club anthem "Body Language" worked precisely because it felt so empty and unpeturbed, a bit like gazing into a well, its simple riff blending into and taking on the resonance of whatever tracks it was mixed with. But stacking so many of this type of track together on one album simply draws attention to the music's well-meaning superficiality.

At times I'm reminded of a trophy wife discussing in detail her pet dog's anxiety condition: I can be impressed by the speaker's articulate and inventive analysis, but the subject matter ultimately bores me deeply.

As per the trophy wife's linguistic dexterity, Booka Shade are always impeccable producers, and everything here sounds airbrushed and pored-over to within an inch of it's life. But I'm left wondering: to what purpose? Ultimately, the consummateness of their sonic signature itself begins to annoy, because it seems to be the only thing there - "oh great, another superbly produced track!"

One gets the impression that Booka Shade are being given props simply for trying so hard to translate German minimal house and techno's winning qualities into a more obviously mainstream dialect, but the end result can sadly be summed up in its entirety with that most fatal of kiss-offs: "album-dance".

Ha, exactly. Is this what ILM has come to?

In any case, I love this record. I suspect that the sculpted of production might be related to a short lifespan. But that said, I'm not bored by it yet. This is great candy.

The epic trance-riffs (In White Rooms/Darko) are so awesome. Reminds me of moments in warehouses listening to trance - this was not a 'cool memory' until recently.

Last night I also heard a bootleg of "In White Rooms" with Vandalism's "Never Say Never", which was more annoying than anything else. Fuck off bored deadpan female spoken word vocals! No more "Shiny Disco Balls" knock offs!

I am also really enjoying the new "Mexico" mix of In White Rooms.

Don't suppose anyone has a decent quality rip of Booka Shade's Essential Mix set from last week that they could YSI/upload/whatever...?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYkayEvBeE0&search=madonna%20get%20together

Saw it on VH1 last night and that is instantly what came to mind.

dude, i will agree with you say the album has little emotional import. but a) it is seamless in its production and flow as an album, which leads to b) it being an incredibly boring album after the first few listens. i think that 'fucking flaccid' is a bit too strong.

Actually I suspect that "Get Together" was inspired by "Mandarine Girl" and then "In White Rooms" was like halfway between the two.

Damn seamless production! Making it so enjoyable to listen to! Not like those badly mixed/flawed but endlessly debateable failures! Yeah

Kornél, were you same one who mashed up Mandarine Girl and Annie's Heartbeat?

Yes, and that's also up at http://www.omgwtf.se - which is down for the moment but probably online tomorrow.

the tortured indie on pitchfork

oh wow, nice straw man

i mention the pitchfork thing because if you make an LP then you get reviewed and discussed in the non-dance press and by non-dance music people and it gets compared to other LPs, i.e other non-dance music.

Also,
*Compared* to stuff like Villalobos, etc, it's certainly *not* lacking in emotion..!

On the other hand, the bit of my devil's advocate review lf quotes (which I don't even actually agree with, of course - i can't think of a 2006 dance track that would make me drench my t-shirt more enthusiastically than "In White Rooms") is basically a complaint that the album isn't much of a banger. I don't think even in devil's advocate mode I would have said the album was unemotional or samey. These seem like unsupportable arguments to me.

I can better understand a hater arguing that the emotionalism is unconvincing, or that the formal variety is undermined by something unlikeable in the duo's production style that is common throughout.

(in the same way that saying "Love Actually is an unemotional film where all the stories are the same" seems unsupportable to me, whereas saying "I'm not moved by the emotional displays in the film and I think that all the different stories are boring because of [x]" is probably a pretty easy position to argue)

In White Rooms just feels so classic, like people will be playing it for years.

Sweet! I just made a version with a somewhat louder, clearer mixdown, more suitable for playing out - will upload it as soon as my server comes back to life. Send me an email and I'll sort you out with a wav file if you like.

I'll take the test. I wasn't moved by the emotional displays in 'Love Actually' because halfway through I realised it wasn't about love at all but it was a comedy about sex. even the old married couple story was just about sex.

I listen to 'In White Rooms' and I feel kinda wistful and excited but i can't analyze why. is it the chord changes? the structure? the sounds themselves?

music is much more direct and mysterious than film (to me)

ok, i'll bite. their emotionalism is unconvincing, although i'm not sure if i recognize a distinction between lack of emotion and unconvincing emotion, which just comes across as so much insipid calculation (is that rockist?) of course i understand where people see the emotion, i can hear them trying to tug on my heartstrings with those big trancey synth chords, but it doesn't work!

as for the issue of breadth, i can also see the variety they've employed, those slinky synths in 'darko,' the breathless bounciness of 'pong pang,' the ringing hook in 'mandarine girl,' etc., but i also feel that the pacing is way too static throughout (obviously pong pang is an exception), and even though they are using different sounds on different songs, the timbre always seems to me to be the same and that timbre is too saccharine and flat. and i don't think that's a function of my stereo because i've listened to it over the months on one high-quality computer stereo system, one very nice set of studio monitors, and now a single old handbuilt hi-fi speaker, downmixed to mono with a cheap plug from radio shack.

i would think that it boils down to a personal distaste for booka shade's overall method of making music but i like a lot of what their work for other artists.

and tim, while i don't think 'in white rooms' is the 2006 get-out-and-shake-it track for me, i definitely love hearing it out. i quoted that passage in reference to the album as a whole, i guess, because a lot of the songs are great in isolation.

This is exactly it-- it is very pleasing to listen to, but it is "nowhere near as interesting, emotive, or functional" as a whole LOT of other dance music being made right now...it does not lack depth in terms of song craft or anything like that, but in terms of soul. (Remember that they do commercial work. That is squeaky clean and good for what it is.)

I think that there are many things to be said for Booka Shade both good and bad, but my prevailing opinion is that none of it has stayed with me. And many other dance albums/tracks stay for longgggg periods, at least when I'm listening to music by myself, and much of that is because of the way other tracks shift with each listen. Movements can make people get out on a dance floor sure, but it is all flash with no character behind it.

Finally:
people dissing albums like this as 'unemotional' don't really listen to much electronic music in general, so it all just seems kinda spare to them.

I think I get what you're trying to say, but what do you mean by 'spare'?

Even something pretty average like the new M_nus comp (50% hitrate at best, almost nothing on it feels truly exceptional) feels more "interesting, emotive, [and] functional" to me somehow.

I'm not sure what this means, it feels like a pretty obscure qualification. Lacking depth in terms of soul? Is this necessarily a bad thing, since when does dance-music require soul?

I didn't realise that these things were compulsory.

quintessential ILM.

This is the more convincing argument than "it's unemotional". I don't think it's necessarily rockist to argue this either, although it can be, it depends on what reasons are given for why it doesn't work I guess.

The whole "I see through what they're trying to do line" is always interesting, because the implication (totally inadvertent i think LF, I'm not trying to character assasinate you) is that people whose heartstrings are tugged are missing something, or are easily fooled by ultimately shallow displays of emotion. But I don't think anyone here would stoop to arguing that commercial trance is always shallow etc. I guess I don't really have a point to make w/r/t to this, only that talking about emotions/soul etc. in dance music is simultaneously fascinating and fraught with danger.

I do think the "they do commercials" line is a bit of misnomer. Yeah their arrangements are "squeaky clean" but so are Kraftwerk, and their commercials and music sound nothing like eachother either.
If anything it's the squeaky cleanness that is the vehicle of emotion here - even the title "In White Rooms" indicates this.

Yes, exactly.

I didn't realise that these things were compulsory.

It doesn't-- it's just compulsory if I'm going to end up liking it, long-term. I do think, though, that people who say that dance music doesn't need soul are...uh...deluding themselves.

their commercials and music sound nothing like each other either.

Maybe so, but the fact remains. Their commercial work is mostly obvious, well-produced, with uninteresting sounds that I've heard before. This is great for commercials, but not so great if you want me to love your album again and again, and I think that many of the qualities of their commercials DO carry over.

What I'm saying, Michael, is that it lacks character because other tracks [by other artists] shift with each listen...this does not shift, in my ears or my 'emotional center' or what have you.

Finally, while squeaky cleanness [as] the vehicle of emotion makes sense, this is why all of the heartstring-tugging of the album seems so false to me.

After reading through this entire thread again and listening to the album again, I think that Susan is basically right when she say's that tis a personal thing/standard i think.

http://mouse.webby.com/images2/gd2d8.jpg

Of course nobody can be sure but I am really really really convinced "Get Together" is massively inspired by "Mandarine Girl" which was released well in time for this to happen.

As regards Movements, I really like it, with a few reservations. The main one for me is that their disconnection from dance music is kind of tangible throughout, I can't say exactly how this sounds but I know as a DJ I am not often inclined to play any of this album except "In White Rooms", even "Night Falls" is too much the record of an album making producer for me to have played it very often.

Contrary to others though I think the "emotion" being discussed is the barrier between Movements and the other dance stuff which is being lauded over and above it. It's like the Booka Shade signature, are people really saying there is more emotion in raw minimal house? For me, there isn't, but that's one of the good things about more track based music, it's only meant to exist for it's own sake.

It's easy to forget this distinction tho I think, when you listen to dance music which is more free from identity as if it were an album anyway, as alot of posters here do myself included.

emphatically YES.

For all the care & detail & soft synth loveliness put into "Movements" it does somehow lack in character & personality (to me). Which even raw tracky/beaty music can posess without being especially suitable for "album" listening.

I hadn't noticed it myself but I'm also pretty amazed at the similarity of that Madonna track and "Mandarine Girl"!

It almost sounds like she heard it and thought "y'know this could be top ten if I cheapen/harden up the top end for the hardhouse market and slap some "love-peace-disco" lyrical cheese on top" Which I guess shows that she "understands dance music" or at least how to exploit it, about as well as any other commercial parasites out there.

Sorry, sounding very mean. I'd actually really like an instrumental version of "Confessions..." if one were ever to come out! I can't find it in me to get over her obnoxious prescence on the record unfortunately...

I mean of course you want character and originality but not in the same way as a big heralded dance artist album.

Yet I can completely understand the usefulness of music without obvious character if you're trying to DJ with it. There's good and bad to the "DJ tool" approach IMO, but I'd never deny it's a neccesary thing to have available.

I mean of course you want character and originality but not in the same way as a big heralded dance artist album.

I don't think this is either/or at all... I want BOTH cake and eat, every time!

"Character" doesn't have to mean a sense of tangible personality coming through about the people involved in making it. Character can just be in the inventiveness or richness of the sounds. Booka Shade don't do much for me in either sense of the term here though :/

As fandango notes, character can just be in the inventiveness or richness of the sounds. IMO, Movements lacks this inventiveness or richness.

In fact it might be even more them than anything else. It's neither tracky enough to be danceable, and certainly not at the tempo most of this operates at OR organic enough so that the wandering in search of an unspecified, elusive endpoint which may arrive soon or not at all in the next hour (something I enjoy in most minimal/techno/house) grips you.

If you want to call that "songwriting" I think it's weak on that score. Obviously this doesn't apply to "White Rooms" (the big pay off moment, huge billowing clouds of melody to get lost in, almost Orbitalesque)...

But puzzlingly it doesn't really apply to Mandarine Girl or Body language either (original versions I guess) which are neither rigidly tracky, or organically occurring in their rhythms. In fact they're pretty much (as Ronan correctly points out) just perfect pop songs with all the right parts in the right places to create build up-tension-release with the verse/chorus/verse style breakdowns.

It's the moments when they DO cynically tug at the heartstrings that reduce me to a whimpering mess. The album version of Manadrine Girl somehow manages to do something with those filled out synth chords that the original failed to hit with me, and the emo bits, like the At The Window Segment, or Lost High, really chime. It's possibly because I've now heard maybe two thirds of the album out on a dancefloor that I really feel the bits when they go "right, NOW we'll go for it!"

Melodically at least, its a very 90s record, isn't it? There's the garage bassline on Night Falls, This a staggeringly unfashionable thing to say at this point in time, but it's very... Warp? There's a bounce in the bassline and a shuffly beat in Paper Moon that would seem right at home on a Plaid album, and I can see Lost High or At The Window appearing on an Aphex Twin release. And the Orbital parallel in the more melodic, housier moments is apparent to all, I assume.

I don't think "Shimmer" is actually on the CD version though? I think I got into that track more after it was included on the Get Physical Vol 2 mix.

I was also kind of surprised that "The Birds & The Beats" didn't make the CD version - surely that over "Take A Ride" etc.

Now this is awesome:

1. Night Falls
2. Body Language [Interpretation]
3. Paper Moon
4. Birds And The Beats / At The Window
5. Darko
6. Pong Pang
7. Mandarine Girl [Album Version]
8. Take A Ride
9. Wasting Time
10. In White Rooms
11. Hallelujah USA
12. Lost High

Shaving off most of the filler might have just catapulted it into Album Of The Year status for me.

Just to clarify (way back up thread), I don't understand what you mean by 'soul' and I'm not just being difficult. If you care to define it, maybe I'll say whether or not it's necessary for Booka Shade. As it stands, all these terms like character, richness, soul are shallow foundations - even if you apply emotionality or whatever. That's why I feel it's not any kind of necessary requirement for Movements, etc.

Moreover, to align with Tim, Booka Shade doesn't seem interested in any of those categories in the first place. It's the surfaces that count. This seems like a perfectly valid line for producing minimal as pop for me.

I'm being unfair to some extent b/c I'm placing all the critical burden on lf, fandango, trees and susan to explain themselves when they've politely never once asked me to explain myself.

Why Booka Shade should be considered in these terms is beyond me though.

this reminds me of the house versus techno thread. and fwiw, i think techno is healing but yeah i get how house feels close to the bottom line there too. i'm just not sure if it is..

Different forms of art can be considering in those terms, sure. But ultimately, I think these things are both social and material, not individual per se.

I agree with this. Admitting that "soul" is this heavily mediated concept fashioned by mode of expression and capacity for recognition gets to the nub of the issue for me actually: at this level, the concept becomes so abstract and nebulous that it can only be used at an individual level, not because the experience of soul is individual, but b/c we aren't speaking with enough precision to allow for inter-subjective understanding of the idea we're trying to get across.

The album's OK, actually.

'paper moon' is boring! boring boring nothingy nothingy boring! i don't know whether the boring one near the end is 'wasting time' or 'take a ride' actually - i find myself skipping both because i get imaptient for 'in white rooms'.

Finally, while squeaky cleanness [as] the vehicle of emotion makes sense, this is why all of the heartstring-tugging of the album seems so false to me.

I think that 'false' is not really what I meant there. I
guess 'sterile' (in its most hollow, dead sense) is more what I was
thinking-- perhaps I should not post early in the morning, before my
language has really come to me.

In other words, I understand that such notions of truth and falsity
suggested by that post are incredibly problematic. I am uncomfortable
with the fact that my post suggested them, but do think that much of
my problem with the usage (in hindsight) is that notions of what is
true and false are as flimsy and shifting as any of our perceptions,
thoughts, feelings.

You are right when you say that the clean nature of Movements is not
the only thing that makes its emotionalism seem hollow (to use the new
word) to me. I think that some of it might be the context in which I
listened to the album the first few times coloring my perceptions now,
and I think that some of it might just be my aversion to what I hear
as effortlessness, as in it all sounds very easy-- in my mind, Booka
Shade are to new good dance music as John Williams is to good new
classical music. It's not that John Williams or Booka Shade are bad--
in fact, they're good at what they do-- but rather that I can't find
anything ultimately satisfying, emotionally or sonically, in either of
their sounds. The satisfaction lasts a flicker of a moment, then it
is gone-- I don't find this true with 95% of the dance music (both new
and old) that I listen to on a regular basis.

Finally, while I don't necessarily believe this entirely, I think that Tim has the right idea when he says: the concept [of soul] becomes so abstract and nebulous that it can only be used at an individual level, not because the experience of soul is individual, but b/c we aren't speaking with enough precision to allow for inter-subjective understanding of the idea we're trying to get across.

Will post again later, during work, after a half=hour in the sauna. (I'm working at a gym right now).

I think Tim is getting frustrated because people seem unable to explain their distaste for the album in anything other than vague terms that amount ultimately to 'i'm not feeling it.' Look how many times people use 'IMO' and 'personal' and '...to me' in this thread.

I mean I can understand some criticisms of the album. Its just that many of them here seem vague.

But...not in hopes of getting Tim and others to stop the lines of questioning, but merely to ask: isn't saying, "i just don't like it" a valid line now and again? i want to keep on discussing, but am curious.

on another point, after reading through old posts, i see that fandango quite adequately expressed my formal problems with the album:
Still, there's something that feels not quite right here... the textures seem pulled from the most interesting ends of minimalish techno/house, but instead of being totally integral to the rhythms, they're just sort of lying there on a quite limp & softly-soft 4/4 base. The production kind of hides this at first, but it doesn't last. It all ends up a bit bland and uninvolving.

I donno I don't do much writing on dance but thats what appeals to me about it. lf it just seems like comparisons to villalobos or whatever do your argument more harm than good just because its like criticizing Shellac for not trying to sound like AC/DC (or vice versa, i don't think thats a good parallel in any way except that they're both going for something very different in their respective genres).

huh?

It doesn't mean it's less mixable, just that there are bits that make it clear this is an album and not a collection of singles.

Note, deej, that lf has said this upthread: i don't see much of a villalobos comparison.

In other words, it seems like most people don't think that a comparison works.

i think that your observation of "the way it consumes big-room house and wraps it tightly enough that it can fit in, er, small rooms," is really interesting, but i guess that that sort of thing just doesn't really appeal to me.

okay. i started listening to this again, and now find that i actually...really...like it? but more in the same way that i really like that "Two Dots" track by Lusine-- not my usual thing, but it certainly shimmers at certain points.

lol

ja right, esp. given some of what i said two years ago.

i used to like this cd but now these dudes put me to sleep

i think in the end, it comes down to 'in white rooms' and 'night falls,' maybe 'paper moon.' otherwise, i kind of agree with you, omar.

been kinda watching the table/booka shade romance for a while, its like a romantic comedy "you're insufferable!" "Kiss me!" set up

lol, it is. i think that now that my ears have grown up a bit, i am a bit less frothy in my judgments of certain producers and musics.

night falls is dope

Tech house isn't generally my thing, but I've recently been turned on to this album and it is great. I listened to Night Falls four times in a row the other day. What else sounds like this?

Obvious response, but you could do a lot worse than just picking up the first two Get Physical compilations which are still incredible. I suppose this album is a bit more expansive and florid than most of that though.

I think the following are all in somewhat similar territory (in different ways) and all are excellent:

V/A: M.A.N.D.Y. - Get Physical 2nd Anniversary
V/A: M.A.N.D.Y. - Body Language Volume 1
V/A: DJ T - Body Language Volume 2
V/A: Damian Lazarus - Rebel Futurism Volume 2
Ada - Blondie
V/A: Jeff Samuel - Poker Flat Volume 4
V/A: Superpitcher - Today
Ellen Allien & Apparat - Orchestra of Bubbles

Cool, that's a lot to be getting on with. Cheers fellas.

I think the Get Physical 4th anniversary mix is possibly even closer to the mark here.

I'd probably recommend Dominik Eulberg's Flora & Fauna as well, similar 'dance music for wandering around gardens in the early evening' vibe.

V/A: M.A.N.D.Y. - Get Physical 2nd Anniversary

this is still **the one** for me w/ this stuff

seconding all of tim's recs, and i'd add

v/a - kiki - boogybytes vol. 1 <= one of my favourite mix CDs ever
chelonis r. jones - disconnected genius
v/a - damian lazarus - crosstown rebels vol. 1

everyone should listen to dislocated genius