Rolling 2007 neo-deep-house thumping big beats with cloudy noises and the odd vocal snatch thread

Guy Gerber is totally different but awesome - love "Seagull" esp, and his remix of Eulberg's "Bionik".

Odd though if Gerber epitomizes this sound as I also think fo him as neo-trance.

Speaking of which, has anyone actually seen the Neo-Trance compilation? Surprisingly good and on-point tracklist!

ha. very appropriate cover, too

= http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y109/fez_/thrills.jpg + http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y109/fez_/2004030419195114812_1.jpg

I think you mean his remix of Mari Boine.. Hopefully on its way to me as we speak..
http://www.juno.co.uk/ppps/products/251927-01.htm

i feel like this is sort of a predecessor - or at least a big influence - to this sound.

c'mon, germans gettin soul-vibey. i hate it.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=D1XVK83K

tracklist for that section goes [unknown, ESP Genius Of Fun!, Visitor - Stop the music] electro/house/techno mixed to throw into relief the best bits of each genre by contrast with each other. I'm surprised you weren't into it, Jacob

Anyway if we're talking Germans getting soul-vibey I'd add the new Manmadescience album. Bit Moodymannish/Parrishish, bit DJ Premier in a house context, but really nice.

also, henrik schwarz is a great cook, and i'm always fond of producers who have talent in the kitchen. have you seen the slices interview where he makes spaetzle?

I think Matt's split makes more sense - 03/04 Schwarz versus 05/06 Schwarz, with the latter period being heavy on the remixes. His remix of Wei Chi was perhaps the turning point - the moment when he eased up on the Moodymann homages and is much more on this ethereal orchestration tip.

My favourite is probably the Alton Millar remix.

My top ten Schwarz-related stuff is like:

1) Clouds Are Gone remix
2) That track, whichever one it is
3) Where We At
4) Stop, Look & Listen
5) Imagination Limitation
6) Faces & Phases remix
7) Don't See The Point remix (only if pitched up a bit so it doesn't sound draggy - best context I've heard for this is one of Tricky Disco's mixes)
8) Walk Music
9) Leave My Head Alone Brain
10) Chicago

http://www.myspace.com/themartinezbros

But do you really think Rej is crap?

skopp - 24-Oct-06 08:46 AM
I don't see what the fuss is all about. I have listened to this Rej over and over, purely for the sake of catching on to it and saying "Ah! Now I get it!"...but I don't. It would have been a brilliant minimalistic instrumental piece without the silly 'scary' synth up front (which sounds like it was stolen from a circus by the way).

I will give due to the background instrumental programming and a nice low constant bassline, however.

skopp - 27-Nov-06 07:58 AM
ok ok...i eat my words
and my socks.

i saw the power of rej at an intimately underground club deep in the Johannesburg city. James Lavelle played it. People were going mad...this track is meant for large speakers. It simply eats the floor whole. It melts into a billion pieces and tickles every goosebump on your neck

Yeah, "Imagination Limitation" is what really caught my ear with Schwarz, but all three versions of "Stop, Look, and Listen" hit me just right as well. And while "Jimis 2006" may not be completely new, it is another of his original productions that scores highly with me. I'm still not super crazy about "Where We At," but I agree with the assessment of his remixing being particularly nice. On that tip, I just found this on Beatport the other night, and the Schwarz remix is great and definitely in the vein of his more recent work: http://www.discogs.com/release/358292

"That..s what first got us into the whole music thing and sent us in the direction toward where we are now,.. Steve adds. ..The soulful-house sound is pretty much the most musical kind of dance music out there. It..s not as computerized, not as obviously done on a machine, as a lot of other sounds out there. You actually have to know how to play instruments to make a soulful-house record; you need a real vocalist to do a soulful-house record...Steve and Chris..s musicality is evident in their DJ sets, which tend to combine electronic ..techie.. tracks with more traditional NY flavored deep, vocal house and classics."

fuck. off.

(maybe that's why so much "soulful house" sounds so fucking dreadful, because producers are spending too much goddamn time wondering about what's real or not, mmmm?)

so is this the electrohouse backlash thread?

REAL HOUSE MUSIC = REAL SINGING, REAL INSTRUMENTS, REAL SOUL bullshit mostly from bitter old record collector types who havent seen a dancefloor in years, if ever

I am actually convinced that the marriage of the computer love/real soul, real singing thing is the way that house (and mayhaps techno) are going to drift (back towards?) this year. I understand the annoyance-- to argue about REAL house music using REAL instruments ignores the history of house's birth in numerous ways-- but whatever, let these kids do their thing.

Have any ways of better conveying emotion, meaning etc in musical composition & performance than voice and instruments been invented lately? If not, may I respectfully submit that there's no contradiction or opposition, but an evolutionary continuum, in which a mere century was spent developing & perfecting electronic performance and composition devices, or instruments. Interfaces get better, with less time spent pushing pixels on grids with a mouse, not to speak of plugging an entire spaghetti dish of cables into a room-sized cupboard.

But no, look a computer! Yay, throw the baby with the bathwater and eventually end up with a bunch of trendy robotic memes contemptuously uttered in German for lyrics. Enjoy your scheissmusik and the vibes that go with it, as you buy every tentative progress made by thousands of bedroom ""producers"" under the form of a 12" release -oh wait, they can churn'em out for free on ka-chingg.com nowadays.

Nobody needs to go back to the rockist model of "synth players" or grotesque sound FX & fake scratches dudes in bands. Let's chill the fuck out and enjoy the seamless integration to come which is already at work in a lot of latin- and mediterranean-influenced house fr'instance. There are other areas where the merger is cooking or looming.

In the end it comes down to what can convey emotion - I get no thrill out of purely M_nis machine-worshipping minimal techno and never have. You need drugs that make you *feel* to enjoy an evening of that, as the software isn't at a level of expressiveness to be able to convey anything other than its own sound. By the same token, some cheesy dude wailing away by himself is not interesting sonically.

I think this stuff should all merge together to bring out the best in it all.

Guess who.

Anyway, I'd be wary of going overboard with the "it's the end of minimal as we know it" predictions - almost exactly 2 years ago I was in Berlin and Chicago House (both the originals and latter day homages) was huge and word on the street was Strictly Rhythm 12 inches had skyrocketed in price... but within only a couple of months pretty much everything was hyper-Euro again. I'd be surprised if this latest trend wasn't just another fleeting stage in Germany's house/techno dialectic. This is the whole point of German stuff though, isn't it? Its mutational restlessness?

Interesting though that for blunt it's more a case of US deep house having attained perfection many years ago and become a sort of vocation in refining perfection, whereas the many stylistic shifts of minimal are just the plaintive flapping of a fish on dry land.

A friend of mine who is a dance critic in Melbourne takes a similar line, and every review of US house comps he does ends with a dismissal of fashionable european sounds, in a manner which is increasingly true school vs unbelieving heathens. It seems to be a point of contention for many, which I'm a bit surprised by - it doesn't appear to me that US house has receded in popularity exactly.

JEROME SYDENHAM (IBADAN / USA) 1999
ANTONIO OCASIO (TRIBAL WINDS,WAVE MUSIC / USA) 2005
Dj WIRED (D) 1999
ALTON MILLER (PLANET E,KING STREET / USA) 2000
YANNICK (NEEDS / D) 2002
LARS & MAREK BARTKUHN (NEEDS / D) 2002
FRANKIE VALENTINE (ESTEREO/UK) 1999 / 2001
JUJU CHRISTIAN TREUTER 1999 - 2006
TOBIAS FRICKER (SOULSIDE / D) 2001
MIGUEL MIGS (NAKED MUSIC / USA) 2000
GERD JANSON (RUNNING BACK / D) 2002
SVEN HELWIG (D) 2002
CASSY BRITTON (MENTAL GROOVE / A) 2002
JOE CLAUSSELL (SPIRITUAL LIFE MUSIC/BODY & SOUL /USA) 1999
DIRK DUAL (D) 1999
GEORGE SPRUCE (FINLAND) 2000 / 2002
SIMON REFLEX (A) 2000
KATJA"KJ"GOWIN (D) 2001
MINNOSH (D) 2002
DANIEL DELANE (A) 2000
SHAKTI SEDAT (D) 2000 / 2005
MENTAL SOUL -live- 2000
JENNIFER BLISS (D) 1999
KENNY DOUGLAS (D) 2001
BOB -vocals- (USA) 1999
HENRIK SCHWARZ (D) 2002
Dj WALKER (RU) 2004

not in Berlin at all however. Note the from Jerome to Henrik span mirroring this thread

even though i wasn't there

(ronan, i was only sort of joking. i likez yr blog-thing a lot. just tell us waht you're thinking).

Josh I agree with the second point you make: I was thinking a bit earlier about Pass Your Bedtime, large swathes of which are very deep housey, but which is also very much a minimal mix circa 2005. Likewise Cassy's mix from last year. Likewise Fuckpony's US house allusions also from last year. And in 2003/2004 you had Get Physical releasing lots of tracks that would basically fit into this thread (e.g. "Our World (Our Music)".

In other words there's pretty much always a constant bridging between traditional and modern variants of house at any given time. Whether the balance is right currently is a different question, but I think it's sometimes a bit easy to slip into thinking that what we class as "minimal" is all plip plop electronic sounds.

The new M.A.N.D.Y. Resident Advisor mix is a) excellent, and b) a good example of what I think is the current spectrum, moving between lush deep house and totally dense post-Schneider abstraction.

Speaking of which someone do me a favour and ID the second track with the male vocals singing "and i really don't remember... what it was... that we fought about... anymore..."

i take umbrage w/ all of the mean cracks about "saxapohone (sp) house"

look, you people might *think* there's some sort of genre called sax house, and yeah, there's a lot of ultra-mediocre deep house tracks that use the sax and so on, but really, has the problem w/ the tracks ever been the saxophone itself?!? ever hear a track and go "wow, too much saxophone, too much live instrumentation, too much singing" ...

i would be curious to hear exactly what people think *is* the problem w/ these tracks. it's not the live instrumentation - look at smith'n'hack's mix of herbert. there's horns and shit all over that track! look at blakkat's "street party remix" of shaboom's "if you need me"! five minute sax solo! bangin track!

i agree there is such a genre (bad deep house) and we can call it sax house, but let's back off a little bit and try to nail down exactly what *is* wrong w/ sax house (i think it's rhythm, but i'm curious to hear exactly what ... and don't say "generic rhythms", because soundstream/soundhack/smith'n'hack has been using "generic rhythms" to amazing effect for a minute now) before we further besmirch the noble instrument of albert ayler, boney james and john coltrane.

It's not the sax itself that is the problem (actually "sax house" makes me think of Norma Jean Bell - or the sax hook in Jon Cutler's "It's Yours") so much as how some strains of deep house and garage reify certain notions of tastefulness into a very restricted set of formulas (one of which involves a particular type of use of the saxaphone). I mean, if all deep house producers sounded like Herbert circa "Leave Me Now" it would be equally as boring. But of course one of the reasons "Leave Me Now" works - while ticking all the deep house boxes - is that it's getting to the same place by relatively unusual means. But this is only one option.

Equally as interesting is using the same means to go somewhere else. This is why I started the Spooky Deep House thread. Interestingly blunt said on this thread "Deep house + spooky = very restrictive" - by which i think he means "not much has been done in this field". Why not? To me using deep house tricknology to get all otherworldly is, like, the number one obvious manoeuvre.

P.S. I wasn't saying Henrik Schwarz was a composite of different genres, but of all the different otherworldly aspects of deep house which I like - i.e. he epitomizes a certain strain of deep house, but in doing so takes it to a new edge we weren't fully aware was there.

P.P.S. I agree with Negro mostly - his recent single "Make A move On Me" was unabashed populist club-divatude, albeit very well produced club-divatude.

"as the software isn't at a level of expressiveness to be able to convey anything other than its own sound"

WHAT THE FUCK!?

the distinction between organic/sampled and noemotion/synthesised is tired and old.

re: bad sax/bad deep house and 'banging' sax/good deep house. isn't it just sounds that have been lazily sampled/applied without any thought about the context and form... the track loses focus because there is no focus/cohesion with the way the sounds have been put together. a lot of bad house does this. i think the other prob is there are a lot of bad/funky sax players out there.

for example, i like the sax use in... Jabre's 'Swimming Places,' especially in the Sabaudia Gabin remix. it works well with the rhythm and adds a little... funkiness to an otherwise squeaky track.

what are some bad uses of 'sax? a lot of Defected stuff seems to have the problem of being infused with too much dumbo saxiness, but is this just because they proclaim to be heading up the 'reinvention' of "Urban House"?

WHAT THE FUCK!?

dunno what's so outrageous about that. a lot of techno records are interesting because of the computer-ness of the sound. i'm saying that meatspace instruments have a greater range of possibility (just like meatspace life does) because musicians directly perform them outside of preprogrammed parameters. when the computers improve, no doubt they'll sound less computer-like.

and dont get me started on spontaneity

a lot of techno records are interesting because of the computer-ness of the sound

As for sponteneity, I'm with Ted Kadinsky: when society get to complicated that we have to let the machines make the decisions, we'll have to be drugged up to get any pleasure at all from this world.

this radio show on music/brain science is worth a listen
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21

? I don't understand this - are you saying that there's some kind of genetic-memory at play in your choices of what to listen to? so that when you, as a human being, hear such a goosealike sound (even though no geese were involved in the making of it), it rings a sympathetic chord with your animal nature (and even had you never heard a goose before you'd still feel the same chord of familiarity because your/our ancestors had)?
Or that in your experience the sound of a goose, or any other naturally-occuring sound, has developed around it a certain collection of related emotions/images - loneliness, sky in autumn, having yr finger nipped - which can be brought in when you hear such goosealike sounds, but haven't had a chance to build up around completely 'new' synth-derived sounds?

itunes just started playing 'roses and teeth for ludwig wittgenstein', no lie (it's not such amazing chance as all that, i'd typed 'mouth' in the search box up top). If my cd cases were with me I'd check and see if it's a real goose sampled there, or an oboe, or a newly-created noise that conveniently happened to sound like a goose. The first is most likely, I think? Anyway: if something's using your personal memory of what a goose sounds in order like to conjure up emotions/images, then not-a-goose-but-quite-similar is perfect (the oboe-goose in peter and the wolf, say), but if something's tapping into some primal sense of 'what sounds are right' I think that only the actual sound of a goose honking would work, that the 'neanderthal brain' wouldn't respond to ersatz.

I'm kind of leery of the neanderthal brain thing, though, because whenever I try and think it through it comes out lamarckian.

The phrase "expressive piano playing" doesn't express an entirely subjective, personal judgment, but that's not because piano playing is (or can be) objectively expressive.

Rather, it's because ideas about expressive piano playing exist within society, it's a mediated judgment call to make because the very phrase brings to mind a socially explicable notion of expressiveness.

There isn't an equivalent social understanding w/r/t minimal electronic dance music. Thus when we do use a word like "expressive" in connection to such music it's often because some aspect of the music reminds us of an area of music where the notion of expressiveness is commonly referred to.

I don't know about this-- it gives too little credit to minimal electronic whatever, especially considering much of its roots in what are very gay, expressive dance forms. What disco started to do and house took on was combining these elements that you're talking about (ie-- 'soulful' female vocals reminiscent of gospel/soul classics) with the computerized, technology-driven element.

In other words, I think there's a great amount of social understanding w/r/t to what we're talking about here, as 'minimal' as it may be.

i guess that what i meant to say was: yes, tim, you're right, but i think that you underestimate the social understanding/relevancy any sort of pulsing music has on people, whether computer-driven or not.

Actually it's telling that your example relates to your moms who doesn't follow popular music. "Expressive" is the kind of term someone who is a bit more deliberate (even self-conscious) about their music fandom is more likely to use. But I'm splitting hairs now.

I am interested in going back to the discussion about deep house etc. again though.

or is this supposed to go on the deeeeeeep bobbins thread. im a little confused

i'm still not sure what everyone's talking about on this thread - so far all the tracks referenced have sounded very very different from each other.

Speaking of Jackmate, I think much of the Philpot catalog would fit in here (or is this too traditionally deep house). And Philpot has it's very own long forgotten thread here: soulphiction / manmadescience / philpot / jackmate / motorsoul