"Indie electro": the worst genre ever?

During the last couple of years some trendy friends of mine have dragged me to various trendy clubs, where they always inevitably play the music I call "indie electro". I'm not familiar with this genre to name any band names, but you know what I'm talking about - lo-fi, electro-influenced dance music (sometimes with added rock guitars) combined with indie-style, shouty and nasal vocals, which are quite often distorted. And every time I have to hear this stuff I feel like it's the worst genre ever. It takes away the sexiness and funkiness from dance music, and in return adds the whiny, miserablist nature of indie to it. It's like the worst of two worlds!

What's the point of this genre? Does it exist merely for indie fans who feel that regular dance music is too gay or too smooth or too lower class or too black (or whatever) for them? Or is there something I'm missing?

lo fi? what?

is it important to question the validity of things you do not enjoy? i suppose people find it fun, there are plenty of venues that play your kind of music, no?

wait isn't that about 50% of threads on ilm

You know, buzzing synths and simple drum machine beats, not much processing of the sound. I'm not saying it's actually made with lo-fi instruments, but they're definitely trying to imitate the pre-digital/pre-computer electronic music sound.

(xx-post)

http://i29.tinypic.com/2n6t8k4.jpg

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/8505/kudos1sr.gif

You know, buzzing synths and simple drum machine beats, not much processing of the sound. I'm not saying it's actually made with lo-fi instruments, but they're definitely trying to imitate the pre-digital/pre-computer electronic music sound.

Hasn't this been happening since the electroclash boom of 2001 Tuomas?

And yes, like all genres there's some bad stuff (never understood the appeal of shit like the Klaxons for example), but there have been some great tunes from this genre: "We Are Your Friends", "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above", "Alice Practice" etc.

Hasn't this been happening since the electroclash boom of 2001 Tuomas?

Yeah, but I'm talking about a specific genre that adds (often distorted) indie vocals to it.

I remember listening to a band called Crystal Castles which seemed like the prime example of this in all its awfulness.

Also, the focus of this music seems to be in the upper register sounds whereas bass sounds usually play a smaller role, which adds to the unfunkiness of it.

This is the dominant form of electronic music played on Austin college radio.

WORST. MUSIC. EVER.

It sound like music made by people with Barbie doll genitals for people with Barbie doll genitals.

It takes away the sexiness and funkiness from dance music, and in return adds the whiny, miserablist nature of indie to it.

I know someone else who does this!

God?

Partyshank ;-)

of penis vs vagina fame??

I dunno Tuomas, it's like all (crossover) genres, there's good and bad stuff. I think the people who listen to this are the same who listened to Screamadelica or Fat of the Land or Bentley Rhythm Ace or Human League or Fischerspooner or Pitchshifter or the Knife. It's perhaps not even meant to be used in a pure clubbing context, just indie acts exploring electronic pallettes rather than sticking to guitar/bass/drums. In fact I'd say that the latest stuff does a better job of marrying rock to dance than clumsy past efforts.

I was joking about Partyshank, they're great.

Whether or not it's meant for a clubbing context it's definitely played at hipster club dance floors, otherwise I would've never come across this stuff.

Also, Fat of the Land and Bentley Rhythm Ace were pure gold compared to this. At least they had some nice beats and basslines, and the vocals didn't make you want to pull your hair out.

Fat of the Land was shutt too though. I don't want to go around defending Crystal Castles cos they're by no means the best band in the world or anything, but I'd rather the indie kids were listening to MGMT, CSS, Death From Above 1979, Foals, Lat Of The Pier and all that crowd than the rip-your-hair-out blandness (Babyshambles and whatever) that they were listening to before.

Great thread.

great poster

http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z92/dazzlej2/greetings/great-day/great-day_18.gif

Lait of the Pierre

Lait of the Pierre

^^^
I give this 24 hours before it becomes someone's username

Had the misfortune of seeing Erol Alkan DJ a few months back - I used to like his style 5 or so years ago - but the music he was playing now was similar to this: funkless, undancable, just crap, the worst bits of dance mixed with the worst bits of rock. Horrible ‘cult of DJ’ surrounding him as well.

Does that make a ‘houseist’?

No he has definitely gone to shit over the last couple of years.

Metal techno: the worst genre ever?

^^^ haha

tuomas you truly are a fucking ponce

1. ponce 342 up, 125 down
An individual who attempts to fake having intelligence, class, or culture

(just in case)

haha

indie electro is the default music for freshmen students around here, its annoying because they are annoying, but we had worse music back in the day, dancing to cranberries 'zombie' was mandatory

also it isnt even the worst dance genre ever, that would be kirmestechno (1 • 2 • 3)

1. ponce 342 up, 125 down
An individual who attempts to fake having intelligence, class, or culture

What does this have to with hating a particular subgenre of dance music?

And if in 2003 I said metal techno was the worst genre ever, that's only because I couldn't imagine something like this would come up within a few years.

I agree with you, Tuomas, this is very obnoxious, but that could be because of the overexposure I've been put through rather than the absolute lack of quality.

To be honest though, "indie electro" probably isn't the worst genre ever, but the other types of awful music I usually manage to avoid, whereas this thing's trendiness in clubs has made it almost unavoidable, if you want to dance in Helsinki.

T/S: indie electro vs frankenstein house

Solution = Don't go to Hipster Clubs!

Dibs on starting this thread next week

i am very glad to be someone who has never hated an entire subgenre of what is widely referred to as dance music

altho goa trance comes pretty close

Which is worse in 2008: bad mersh electro-house or bad indie-electro?

AKA Vandalism's "Smash Disco" vs MGMT's "Kids (Soulwax Remix)":

i'd still take both of those over Darren Styles and Basshunter

Happy hardcore is still by far THE WORST

ILX really needs a "best Hard2Beat release" thread

I don't know Darren Styles but the big Basshunter single was awes.

You should all be listening to this instead:

Happy hardcore is still by far THE WORST

yr
so
wrong

http://content.ytmnd.com/content/d/f/4/df4122aa8f227dfd8fd7cfff6e3d5d1d.jpg

Not worst, just painfully average. The only people who get really annoyed about it are blog house DJs who pretend they didnt spend freshers week pogoing to mr brightside

http://www.hipsterrunoff.com/

Nothing wrong with a good blast of Happy Hardcore (well maybe only a track at a time). Quite often the best bit of watching TMF or 4music is the ads with Hixxy and co. hawking the latest “only album you’ll ever need” happy hardcore compilation.

Listened to those songs up above. Soulwax have really stopped trying haven’t they?

I don't see the point in clubs for indie fans at all. At least clubs where you are supposed to dance. Indie fans don't dance.

:D

hipsterrunoff 'lingo' is hilarious

congratulations, you're old

whats the deal with this music that good looking young people like, and why am i not invited to their parties, its ok tho, because its totally unimaginative and like the sound sucks and stuff, so the fact that im not boning slamming 20 yr old girls is totally cool by me

GIVE ME TEENAGE MYSPACE ELECTRO OR GIVE ME DEATH!!!!!!!!!!!

tuomas where were you when nu-rave hit

I'm boning for pat

Geir has made the best post on this thread.

actually liked Velko's

indie fans do dance, its just they go home after the clubs and have sex with each other instead of taking drugs all the next day

yet somehow this music results in less sex and less drugs (or more, who even knows)

I will now try to kill this thread by posting a Trouble Andrew video

And if in 2003 I said metal techno was the worst genre ever, that's only because I couldn't imagine something like this would come up within a few years.

Tuomas, part of what loads of people are trying to tell you here is that indie-styled electro has been going on since like 2001 or so -- I'm not sure what it is about these new acts that you see as so fundamentally different from the indie/electro or synthpop acts of back then. Some of them are less poppy, I suppose, but indie types subbing in a 909 and an octave bass line instead of finding a rhythm section is really really not a new thing.

they are taking the three babby back to new york to ladytron to rest

Tuomas, you'd really hate earlier Cabaret Voltaire. They're the most indie electro of them all. And you can barely dance to them either.

tuomas has always been too black for me

Tuomas, part of what loads of people are trying to tell you here is that indie-styled electro has been going on since like 2001 or so -- I'm not sure what it is about these new acts that you see as so fundamentally different from the indie/electro or synthpop acts of back then.

Okay, maybe it's been around for longer, but I've only been aware of it for the last couple of years. Early 00's stuff like Ladytron or The Knife still sounded more like "synth pop" than "indie electro" to me, but since I don't actively follow music trends anymore (especially not in indie), I guess I migth've been slow to notice this thing. It's still awful anyway.

Can you please explain to me who specifically you are talking about in recent years, or at least how what you're hearing differs from old indie/electro/synthpop areas like Fischerspooner, Ladytron, ARE Weapons, stuff on labels like Ersatz Audio, some stuff on labels like Morr, etc. etc. etc.?

Besides Ladytron, I haven't heard the stuff you list, so I don't know if it's "indie electro" or not. In my mind, what makes "indie electro" different from nu-electro or synth pop is the lo-fi aesthetic and the (whiny or distorted) indie vocals. The stuff Ladytron did in the early 00's (don't know what they're doing these days) was more synth pop because it had a more polished sound and more poppy vocals.

x-post come on nabisco, there are huge differences, I don't know what you'd call the distinction exactly, but indie-electro in 2008 has no house/trance/italo/new beat elements left as it still did in 2001.

I'm assuming Tuomas means remixes of indie bands and guitars and that generally abrasive sound.

At first I thought he was talking about the Ting Tings; now I'm not sure.

he's talking about crystal castles and no one else

but since I don't actively follow music trends anymore

but since I don't actively follow music trends anymore

but since I don't actively follow music trends anymore

YOU CANT BITCH WHAT YOU CANT MEASURE

x-post come on nabisco, there are huge differences, I don't know what you'd call the distinction exactly, but indie-electro in 2008 has no house/trance/italo/new beat elements left as it still did in 2001.

I'm assuming Tuomas means remixes of indie bands and guitars and that generally abrasive sound.

Yeah, you put it much better than I did. The generally abrasive sound (whether it comes from shouty singing or distorted vocals/synths or from something else) is what I most dislike about this stuff, because it makes what could be dance music sound like rock, and I hate rock.

Tuomas, what about this?

are people seriously arguing there's no such thing as shit indie electro? I know you guys like to rag on tuomas but go to a fucking club....this is the biggest sound on planet earth.

you'd really hate earlier Cabaret Voltaire. They're the most indie electro of them all. And you can barely dance to them either.

i've always wanted to dance to 'Sensoria' in a club

it's pretty obvious what recent (past year or two) trend tuomas is talking about, i agree it's mostly reprehensible but i can't be arsed to argue about it any more.

but since I don't actively follow music trends anymore

YOU CANT BITCH WHAT YOU CANT MEASURE

Just because I can't name bands or labels doesn't mean I haven't heard this stuff all around. And other people on this thread are talking about it too, so it definitely exists.

(xxx-post)

this is the biggest sound on planet earth.

lol

he hates rock

he's a guy who hates rock
and he does feminine studies

i still really like that dan deacon trakc :-/

he comes from finland
he respects women and their bodies

he's tuomas

Is there something wrong with that?

(xxxx-post)

n/a mark danjer described dan deacon as what he imagined my brain sounded like on a saturday morning and i think he was right

LG I can't acknowledge differences because Tuomas has been unable to describe what, specifically he's talking about! Seriously, give me some freaking names and I'll happily acknowledge anything that's true here -- I'm just not sure what new thing he's talking about.

So far all I'm getting from Tuomas is that it's dirtier and the vocals are whinier, and what I'm getting from you is that it has no dance-music elements left in it. Between the two of you, what you would seem to be describing is simply called "indie"

haw xpost

your brain sounds like a sweaty geek

mostly on saturday mornings it sounded noisy and hurty plus weed

Holy shit, that tune Jaymc linked to pretty much crystallizes everything that's awful about this genre. I hope it's a parody.

you like parodies

ITS CALLED NU-RAVE ASSHOLES AND ITS OVER

actually its called blog-house and it just started

that clip jaymc posted is terrible

i do like this tho

So far all I'm getting from Tuomas is that it's dirtier and the vocals are whinier, and what I'm getting from you is that it has no dance-music elements left in it. Between the two of you, what you would seem to be describing is simply called "indie".

Well, to my ears it pretty much sounds like indie done with electronic sounds instead of a band. I call it "indie electro" because it's sonically close to electro, but formally and aesthetically it's much more indie rock than club music.

esp. the Justicey bit at the end (xp)

yeah in fairness cutty it being over doesn't stop it being everywhere! I don't know who's big in this scene lately but as Tuomas says you don't need to know the names to know it exists. okay so it's kinda lame dismissing something without being able to name acts but then last time I was in a club playing this music it was clearly a really big deal for everyone there, very defined and very much a sound.

anyway from where I'm standing nabisco is being as naive as Tuomas ever was here, not that either should be slated for this.

Tuomas, would you consider Chromeo and Calvin Harris part of what you're talking about?

you couldn't slate nabisco if you tried

like it's impossible

idk if u didn't automatically realise tuomas was talking about nu-rave, blog-house, all that crap, i don't think u should be ragging on him

even though there's nothing u inadequates like better, i realise

i'm sure they aren't playing fucking dan deacon in the clubs tuomas goes to

they are playing shit like "does it offend you, yeah"

dude tuomas how many threads do you have to start to boast about not liking rock music... we get it

since i despised happy hardcore that nu-rave shit was never gonna appeal to me. But somehow they made it worse

xxxx-post

i'm sure they aren't playing fucking dan deacon in the clubs tuomas goes to

That's why I was confused about Ronan's point about this being the "biggest sound in the world" when Tuomas seemed to be talking principally about Crystal Castles.

^^^^^ ok that sucks xp 2 cutty

tuomas is this the kind of song you mean:

that's not indie

it's lo-fi, electro-influenced dance music with shouty vocals

klaxons?

Presets?

looking forward to
Rolling 2009 lo-fi, electro-influenced dance music with shouty vocals Thread

poor henry rollins will never make it in electro

tuomas did you even remember starting the Metal techno: the worst genre ever? thread?

just wait til he hears indie-metal-techno with shouty vocals (Pitchshifter?)

was that before or after he became a sock?

LG, I'm not being naive, I am repeatedly asking y'all to specify what fucking music you're talking about and you're either unwilling or unable to. I am also unconvinced you and Tuomas are talking about the same music, since his feeling that Dan Deacon "crystallizes" what he doesn't like doesn't seem to jibe with your talking about dance-music influences having been pulled out of old nu-electro/synthpop. At all. I still have no specific idea what kind of stuff either of you are talking about, because you are both being really bizarre about not specifying, naming more than one act, or even listening to people's guesses and saying "yes, like that."

But mostly I am just confused by Tuomas saying this:

Well, to my ears it pretty much sounds like indie done with electronic sounds instead of a band.

Which is weird because

(a) this is exactly what you, LG, have been bizarrely arguing with me about (note the part upthread where I said "it sounds like you are just describing rock with synths"), and

(b) this attitude just seems silly to me -- "it makes what could be dance music sound like rock, and I hate rock" -- ?? So he doesn't like indie; why precisely is he protective of people playing indie on instruments like the ones in genres he does like, exactly? This is like a Sousa fan saying "I saw Miles Davis with a trumpet and got really excited, but that stuff is awful, you can't march in a parade to it at all!"

P.S. I know you think I am arguing with you about whether this stuff is bad or new or not, but that is not the case -- I am arguing with you about whether or not either of you is going to specify what we're even talking about in the first place

indie and electro already so fucking nebulous as terms that no wonder shoving them together causes such confusion (even if T gives guitar-less Crystal Castles as an example)

I liked Crystal Castles for about 20 minutes.

Of the two acts specifically named on this thread, Dan Deacon and Crystal Castles, both seem to have way more to do with chiptune-style stuff than dance music, one has actually been accused by a chiptune group of ripping something off, and the other is a dude who studied electro-acoustic composition and made a big soundboard with a glowing skull on it and is better described by that and 8-bit noize than anything having to do with electro as a style of dance music.

All I can figure that Tuomas is saying is "it has synths in it but it's not actually dance music," which is (a) true of most things that have synths in them, and (b) almost too silly to argue with

a playlist of their decent tracks is about that long yeh xp

P.S. The upcoming Dan Deacon record sounds good so far

one has actually been accused by a chiptune group of ripping something off,

this whole thing sounded as lame a controversy as the youtube clip of 'Discovery' samples

Yeah, I know, but I think it says something about where they're coming from versus "they are making dance music indie"

a lot of these bands do actually sound like they thought 'yeah Discovery is OK but Human After All is their real masterpiece'

Can you tell me more about who "these bands" are?

sure! let me just go to my...basement...

If Miles Davis kept showing up at parades and playing, I can see why the Sousa fan would complain!

nabisco key point here, there are probably tons of one off/small non album artists in the scene.

why doesn't tuomas just go to a gay club and dance? they wouldn't listen to this stuff there, would they? where did tom of finland hang out? go there!

i like that crystal castles album and "indie electro" is a reasonable a way to describe it, at least generically. better than "nu electroclash" or something i guess. (i also like the first fischerspooner album, utah saints, "head like a hole," and the various other things crystal castles remind me of.)

squiggly synths, disembodied vocal loops and occasional bursts of static, what's not to like?

(although tuomas you could've spared us the definitional angst by just going on the crystal castles thread and saying "i hate these guys.")

I think Crystal Castles and other such acts are a misnomer here as they tend to bridge the gap between first-gen electroclash and the current indie-electro. Also I don't get the impression that they're as popular in DJ sets as they are as an album act.

"Nu-Rave" is also a bit of a misnomer insofar as it tends to conjure up images on The Klaxons.

Tuomas' complaints immediately make me think of (the worst parts of) Kitsune, Soulwax remixes, basically the entire spectrum from Justice to Does It Offend You Yeah.

This stuff is clearly distinct from electroclash. Electroclash was artier and less masculine ("art-phag" basically), and its (for the most part) slightly anaemic production style was I suspect more a reference to the past than a "lo-fi" move per se - whereas a lot of the stuff from the past few years actually embraces a certain buzzy ugliness: harsh, awkward grooves, lots of midrange, shouty bleary vocals rather than detached new wave cool. And it basically takes "Robot Rock" as its aesthetic genesis, right? It's not looking any further back in time than that.

Both scenes have sought to combine dance and rock (or dance and not-dance) but in very different ways I think.

what does thestartrekman think about indie electro

fuuuuuuck I think there might not be a the in the dude's name

i think the analog fetishists also figure into the genealogy (add n to x, etc.).

I actually thought of Add (N) to X during the intro of that Late of the Pier song YouTubed upthread.

i've always wanted to dance to 'Sensoria' in a club

No no Rough Trade era CV

Just because I can't name bands or labels doesn't mean I haven't heard this stuff all around. And other people on this thread are talking about it too, so it definitely exists.

lol so start a thread naming a genre you apparently can't stand but can't even define.

thread = successful

"Thrash grime": the worst genre ever?

GRINDIE

nothing will ever top ska-punk tho

i think tim f just hit it otm. fuck all this pretend bs on this thread. from tuomas first few sentences i knew exactly the crap he was talking about. beauty bar here in sf plays all these terd records all the time. just go to any local hipster club in any major metropolitan city and i am sure you will hear this crap at least 50 percent of the night haha

nothing will ever top ska-punk tho

OTM

no, that's just sf

lol

we could argue about the definitions of any genre, stop being such pedantic fools here. srsly some of the americans on this thread are 1000000 times more naive than tuomas on this thread. "there's no such thing as indie electro", erm yeah of course there isn't he doesn't need to know exactly what acts it is to pick up on the existence of this scene. I feel like going to youtube and posting video after video of European clubs except I can't be bothered...or asking some friends for a setlist. nu rave/electrohouse/electrorock, call it whatever and stop acting like genre names are some ultra tight locked container.

I know pretty much exactly what Tuomas is talking about and I could send you to a club that plays it...

x-post oscar otm grow up you clowns...

so which rock/dance combo does Tuomas hate again?

the Sabbath/Moroder combo?

or the Pussy Galore/Kraftwerk combo?

the BIG ELECTRO ACT REMIXING CHART ROCK ACT COMBO

the DEMENTED WELL OFF 18 YEAR OLDS SCREAMING THE TING TINGS COMBO

the BLURRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH NOISE COMBO

the NEW WAVE FRENCH TOUCH SEBASTIAN/SURKIN/JUSTICE/ETC COMBO

ffs this shit has been saturated for about 3 years, the only sense in which Tuomas is naive is that complaining about it seems late, but whatever.

Local Garda, I'm not sure if you're not reading what people are saying or just declining to understand it. (For instance, I'm not sure who has said "there's no such thing as indie electro" -- some of us have been saying that this sort of thing is so common, and has been for so long, that we're not even sure what specifically you're referring to.)

other people on this thread are talking about it too, so it definitely exists

Maybe I'm just behind on things and someone needs to explain this to me like I'm 8 years old ... but I'm not at all convinced that people on this thread are talking about the same things! For instance, I have a ton of trouble seeing the coherent style/genre that encompasses Justice, Soulwax remixes, AND Dan Deacon. And I don't see how productively we can talk about any of the stuff without maybe focusing in on something coherent in there.

If we are talking solely about things that sound like Does It Offend You, Yeah?, then I agree with Tuomas.

okay now TING TINGS are a part of this? you guys need smaller nets, seriously

xxxpost

3 years seems about right, but hasn't ILM already had a hate-on thread for all this stuff already? I definitely remember someone complaining about Justice/MSTRKRFT/Digitalism etc. and how terrible they were, cursing indie kids for dirtying up electronic dance music.

name me a "coherent style/genre"

x-post who says it's a small sound? I've just wasted the last 20 minutes of my life trying to point out how wide ranging and popular it is, but make no mistake that there is a huge crossover and a really big scene around a huge amount of acts, hence it's hard to define, hence there will be debates and quibbles but let's say post-electroclash or something and have done with it. this is the big crossover dance sound at the moment and I think "indie-electro" tells me plenty about what tuomas is complaning about.

this is way bigger than simple musical definitions too...electroclash had nothing like the same presence online which seems a vital part of this sound too, post-internet electro? or post-broadband anyhow...

most clubs in London surely just lump all this together so you'd hear LOTP, MGMT, Friendly Fires, DIOYY, CC, CSS, Hot Chip, LCD, Soulwax remixes, Hadouken, Shitdisco, Foals, Klaxons, The Automatic + Battles, Arcade Fire + Bloc Party + Justice...all at the same night

xxpost

Yeah, it was in the MSTRKRFT - The Looks "we don't know what to call this genre, but it's everywhere" thread.

DIOYY are working with martin rushent so who knows they may improve

the rapture - "out of the races and onto the tracks" or "house of jealous lovers"

name me a "coherent style/genre"

Hahaha if the bar is set at anything where two people complaining about it can name at least three representative acts, then pretty much everything on earth is more coherent.

Gonna try not to argue with you about this anymore because you're not making any effort to read/comprehend, but if your argument is that it's some kind of wide-ranging sensibility that marks our times (which would be a fair argument!) then most of what Tuomas was saying here would begin to look really silly. The few artists mentioned in this thread range so widely in their styles, approaches, and audiences that one-size-fits-all criticisms like "there are synths, but it's not dance" don't really work very well. I opened this thread without a clear idea of what specifically in that range Tuomas didn't like, and no one's clarified it yet, and you continually decline to clarify it. Which is fine, but I can't talk in the same terms about things stretching from rock remixes to dancey pop bands to synth punks to blog house to noize freaks to the grainy aftermath of electrohouse -- this stuff varies a whole whole lot.

P.S. If he were referring in a limited way to the kind of Justice/ MSTRKRFT/Digitalism style discussed above, I would know exactly what he meant (and would agree insofar as I don't personally care for it) -- I just think you're stitching a whole lot of nets together by the time you're getting Dan Deacon and Ting Tings in the same boat

nabisco, Does It Offend You, Yeah? goes from Klaxons to SebastiAn to the Killers to Brainiac on their album, so even your example is too vague, lol

Let's go back and revisit Tuomas's own original description of this music:

1. lo-fi, electro-influenced dance music (sometimes with added rock guitars) combined with indie-style, shouty and nasal vocals, which are quite often distorted

2. buzzing synths and simple drum machine beats, not much processing of the sound. I'm not saying it's actually made with lo-fi instruments, but they're definitely trying to imitate the pre-digital/pre-computer electronic music sound.

3. the focus of this music seems to be in the upper register sounds whereas bass sounds usually play a smaller role, which adds to the unfunkiness of it.

Just to keep people on point...

ting tings are shit

Ghostland Observatory

poor indie. hated when it doesn't dance, hated when it does.

Tuomas, are either of these it?

http://www.myspace.com/unicornbasementmusic

Ha, J, those three original points will just return me to what I was saying at the beginning, which is that the gist of all that is a pretty long-running sound (e.g., much as I know what they're pointing at now, those three points could just as easily be describing Nine Inch Nails)

^^ that was not an argument that Tuomas should like this stuff, just making the point that it's not necessarily some newfangled monstrosity

ooh the G.O. bomb. Nice.

http://consequenceofsound.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ghostland_live-736972.jpg

I listened to that album by The Blow for the first time in a year, and liked it even better. That's some good song-ritin. I have never made it through the Crystal Castles album.

indie is too big for me.

I know exactly what Tuomas is talking about, and I suspect you all do but you just want to be really precious and annoying about it (those that are being that way). This stuff sucks by the way.

lol maybe it would help if nabisco wrote in big bold capital letters "name some bands then"

most clubs in London surely just lump all this together so you'd hear LOTP, MGMT, Friendly Fires, DIOYY, CC, CSS, Hot Chip, LCD, Soulwax remixes, Hadouken, Shitdisco, Foals, Klaxons, The Automatic + Battles, Arcade Fire + Bloc Party + Justice...all at the same night

― Yentl vs Predator (blueski), Thursday, December 11, 2008 12:07 AM (1 hour ago)

name me a "coherent style/genre"

x-post who says it's a small sound? I've just wasted the last 20 minutes of my life trying to point out how wide ranging and popular it is, but make no mistake that there is a huge crossover and a really big scene around a huge amount of acts, hence it's hard to define, hence there will be debates and quibbles but let's say post-electroclash or something and have done with it. this is the big crossover dance sound at the moment and I think "indie-electro" tells me plenty about what tuomas is complaning about.

― Local Garda, Thursday, December 11, 2008 12:05 AM (1 hour ago)

Tuomas' complaints immediately make me think of (the worst parts of) Kitsune, Soulwax remixes, basically the entire spectrum from Justice to Does It Offend You Yeah.

This stuff is clearly distinct from electroclash. Electroclash was artier and less masculine ("art-phag" basically), and its (for the most part) slightly anaemic production style was I suspect more a reference to the past than a "lo-fi" move per se - whereas a lot of the stuff from the past few years actually embraces a certain buzzy ugliness: harsh, awkward grooves, lots of midrange, shouty bleary vocals rather than detached new wave cool. And it basically takes "Robot Rock" as its aesthetic genesis, right? It's not looking any further back in time than that.

Both scenes have sought to combine dance and rock (or dance and not-dance) but in very different ways I think.

― Tim F, Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:33 PM (Yesterday)

bro i was talkin to u

I'm not your bro

also the other half of his point is that its not clear that the stuff ronan is talking abt is the same as the stuff tuomas is talking about. also blueski basically just named every 'pitchfork recommended' band of the last 5 yrs so thats not really a 'sound'

???????? why arent you my bro ?????????

I have two sisters and that's it

I am the only boy in my family

it's that whole Field thing all over again

its a figurative title duder not literal

"blueski basically just named every 'pitchfork recommended' band of the last 5 yrs so thats not really a 'sound'"

Have you been to one of these hipster clubs, there's a lot of ppl doing jerky dancing ironically to this shit.

duder?

Search And Destroy: Indie-Dance

I have never heard anyone say The Ting Tings out loud

ok yes but u r going to have a hard time convincing me that the arcade fire is 'indie electro' there tiger

pretty sure that if I based the quality of music by the people I saw dancing to it/enjoying it at clubs/gigs, I'd either stop listening to music or never leave the house again.

i really like The Knife

put a donk on it

that's because they are brilliant

dirty house is the worst subgenre ever.

Have you been to one of these hipster clubs, there's a lot of ppl doing jerky dancing ironically to this shit.

can ppl can it with calling every single thing "hipsters" do "ironic". like ppl are just dancing.

OMG i saw a hipster eating a cheese burger, it was dripping with yellow melted irony!!!!

how is this stuff diff from frankenstein

pretty sure that if I based the quality of music by the people I saw dancing to it/enjoying it at clubs/gigs, I'd either stop listening to music or never leave the house again.

― Gukbe, Thursday, December 11, 2008 1:19 AM (1 minute ago)

That's not really the point, but a style of music this popular becomes largely defined by the fans because of various factors of promotion and pandering, these seem to be the main patronising force of this stuff, but obviously not the only one by a long shot, you just need to look at the charts to see that.

it's like the werewolf to frankenstein

but who is van helsing?

Have you been to one of these hipster clubs, there's a lot of ppl doing jerky dancing ironically to this shit.

can ppl can it with calling every single thing "hipsters" do "ironic". like ppl are just dancing.

No really, I could show you things you wish you'd never seen.

whenever i have sex i do it 'ironically'

so ironically that even the word 'ironic' is in quote marks to convey my own ironic distance from irony

how is this stuff diff from frankenstein

― ohhhh we pop champagne (deej), Thursday, December 11, 2008 1:22 AM (57 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

edgar winter has better beats?

Have you been to one of these hipster clubs, there's a lot of ppl doing jerky dancing ironically to this shit.

can ppl can it with calling every single thing "hipsters" do "ironic". like ppl are just dancing.

No really, I could show you things you wish you'd never seen.

― Take You Down (I know, right?), Thursday, December 11, 2008 1:24 AM (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dunno i went to "Too much love" this indie/electro dance nite cuz we were playing in the other room of the club...all the kids looked really retardedly dressed but they just seemed like...kids...getting drunk and dancing...

i dunno. alls i'm saying is that at a certain point you gotta just let all that shit go, like they are 21 and having parties and shit, it's probably no stupider than shit anyone does at that age.

but yeah, you're right, I'm just sick of this place I always end up going. familiarity/contempt

oh you mean the club

haha

no but dancing there is mainly about dancing *badly* on *purpose* in a way that seems like its *referencing* something like *Devo* maybe

I'm sorry, I'm just a burt_stanton sockpuppet tonight, normal service will resume etc

maybe they're bad dancers? or maybe stuff like Justice is so grooveless that it's difficult not to dance in a herky-jerky fashion?

I have no doubt that the kids get a lolfactor from dancing ridiculously, but without evidence that a certain percentage are doing the sprinkler or the lawnmower constantly, or at least mimicking carlton from fresh prince, I just don't buy it.

all that said, i totally get being fed up with going to the same bloody indie-dance club all the time.

Yeah, I hate this shit and I'm probably the most ironic dancer ever. This is largely caused by my badness tho.

Justice/ MSTRKRFT/Digitalism

^^^this kind of shit i can't hang with.

I saw a mention of Friendly Fires upthread. I've never heard them properly, but if they sound anything like the Aeroplane remix of Paris, this thread is all kinds of wrong. Or at least count me in with the irono-dancing hipster.

&

the juke/bmore/bloghouse frankenstein dance music they play at clubs

where do Simian Mobile Disco and Boyz Noize feature in this?

well yeah

xp

"I saw a mention of Friendly Fires upthread. I've never heard them properly but if they sound anything like the Aeroplane remix of Paris..."

They don't, really. Hence it being an Aeroplane remix. If Tuomas had started a thread complaining about all the opulent maximal disco played at clubs for the 25-30 hipsterati set you might be onto something.

Although non-remixed Friendly Fires are at the quality end of this spectrum of music. Their stuff is much too crafted to really fit in with what Tuomas is complaining about, except insofar as there's a shared fanbase and context of "nu-rave" (which is like one of the circles in the venn diagram of this thread). It's a bit like how Britpop clubs play Radiohead, Supergrass, Saint Etienne and Belle & Sebastian, and I can think "oh that sounds awful P.S. Saint Etienne are my fave band sometimes".

"...then this thread is all kinds of wrong."

Given the above, this was a wildly speculative claim.

Thing is, at a club, this stuff makes you feel heavy, drunk in a nagging bad way, and like dicks that never danced much are making music for dicks that usually don't dance. I'm with Tuomas. At home, well, no one listens to it.

"the opulent maximal disco played at clubs for the 25-30 hipsterati set "

I have no problem with this stuff at all btw

I do. people who like it are racist homophobes who hate poor people.

wtf MSTRKRFT is a ton of fun, you crazies

I'm with Tuomas too, as is every right thinking person surely. It's the worst.

This is the sort of thing I imagined the thread was about:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/L9xFseTTK-E&hl=en&fs=1";></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/L9xFseTTK-E&hl=en&fs=1"; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

er...

Hahaha if the bar is set at anything where two people complaining about it can name at least three representative acts, then pretty much everything on earth is more coherent.

Now you're not listening Nabisco. At what point did I complain about this music? Maybe it's clear I don't like it from my posts but if you've set yourself out to defend it then don't defend it from me, I have no desire to lambast it.

I just think people are being extremely naive here. Just because Tuomas may be speculating a bit wildly about this sound does not mean I can't imagine exactly the kind of club he's been to. I think the problem is this sound has become so big that you could probably just say "modern indie dance" or something and that would describe it.

It's perfectly likely that you'd hear the Ting Tings, Justice, the Klaxons, a Soulwax remix, all of this stuff at one particular club. I don't think loosely calling this "indie-electro" is wrong. A scene heavily based around people going to see DJs who play music which veers between rock/electro/house.

The reason it's hard to say who all the acts are, which you seem to have ignored as I said it already, is that the glue used to stick the above records together will be by remixers of the time, producers with a year or two at the front of this scene. You need to be strictly following it to know who they are.

I think basically Tuomas means that really abrasive blurrrrrrrrrgh French touch stuff but there's a bigger culture of all kinds of shit being mixed with that. I also did name several acts and you just ignored me. The idea that because Tuomas says Dan Deacon and I might disagree that Dan Deacon is part of this then it's some sort of witch hunt is just nit picking.

From the outside, like lots of other genres, it kinda seems all the same. Even if obviously there's more nuance if you're a close follower of something I think this is a pretty well defined scene by now.

I just have to laugh at something which is the biggest deal for so many 18-whatever year olds, like manic screaming at clubs and weird hysterical enthusiasm, and people here are like "but who are these acts".

I mean for christ's sake I bet you can find "indie-electro" or "electro rock" on someone's fucking myspace and if you cross questioned them with their best buddy you'd be all I WANT THE TRUTH, YOU SAID BOYS NOIZE WHILST SHE DOES IN FACT ENJOY DANCING TO VITALIC.

you could have had this exact debate about "minimal" a few years ago where if you wanted to be perverse you could say "but this isn't MINIMAL, you include DUOTEQUE in this???" yet did that genre not exist? plenty of genres become ambiguous...in fact it's surely a sign of massive popularity. is it still impossible to say you dislike everything from such a genre? yes probably, but you could also might dislike the general scene, plus if "plip plop" was the demonised sound for minimal then "blurrrrrrrrrrrgh" is it for indie-electro.

I wonder do people who like indie-electro hate the fact that blurrrrrrrrrrrgh is its public shame-face as much as I used to hate plip-plop playing this role for minimal. I don't think so somehow.

the difference i suspect is that only records you didn't know sounded like "plip plop", whereas many of the anthems of the blog-house scene seem to go for a blurrrrrrrgh sound quite deliberately.

Not that it's specifically blurrrrrgh but the anthem I hear in public more than any other is the Herve AK remix of The Chemical Brothers' "The Salmon Dance".

from my perspective I am quite enjoying the different directions both this and the frankenstein house thread have taken despite appearing to have extremely similar sonic starting points - of course I'm in the "whaddabunchaGAAAAAHHHHBIDGE" camp w/r/t both sounds (mostly because they make me feel extremely old, I think, least exciting dance music ever amirite) and I doubt I'd be remiss in believing that this makes it easier for me to pinpoint exactly that mediocre blurrrrrgh quality

Jesus fucking Christ people, just pick an MP3 blog at random and the chances are you'll find it FULL of fourth rate stuff like this. It's harder to find music that DOESN'T sound like this.

The other amusing thing when talking about this stuff is that all the good stuff immediately gets hived off into other microgenres because people rightly want to disassociate it - eg fidget house.

Rosetta Stone

http://www.modernbeats.com/images/fruityloops1.gif

pssssshhhhew!

Matt DC's point is part of my argumen that the word "techno" should be retired once and for all.

"techno" and some of its cousins like "electro" have gone the way of "indie", as far as becoming a term that's just collapsed at the rails.

tell it to emo

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a145/alanspach/emo_philips_comedian_6x9-72.jpg

there's no other way

as i was reading this thread, i received an mp3 of South Centrals cover of Josh Winks 'classic', higher state of consciousness, to post whereever i bloody well like.
you dont even need to hear this to know exactly how its going to sound do you ?

How the hell do you a cover version of a tune like that?

"do you do"

.. by just adding lots of justice styled distortion to the original.

pick an MP3 blog at random and the chances are you'll find it FULL of fourth rate stuff like this. It's harder to find music that DOESN'T sound like this.

Hahaha how is this not basically the point I've been arguing this entire thread?

I.e., this would not seem to be a discussion about a genre, it would seem to be a discussion about a sensibility so wide-ranging and encompassing so many different types of things that maybe -- just maybe -- talking about it like a specific genre is about like talking about "rock" as a specific genre

It's not even a "sensibility," the way this thread has talked about it, it's practically more like just "modern music in mid-to-late-00s"

Girl I'm after at the moment has "mainly indie and electro" under her music on Facebook. Nearly enough to put a guy off.

manly indie and electro

this thread otm

this shit is everywhere in l.a., i can't seem to find a decent place to dance without it being some kind of bullshit dead-eyed d-bag electro scene

ilx is getting old lol

blackdisco parties at the mountain bar were the best times i had in la personally

if i put a NO DISTORTED BASSLINES IN 09 shirt up on cafepress, who would buy one from me?

mountain bar has had some of the good shit though the last time i went it was some night called "electro luxx" i think and it was pretty weak

yeah i wouldnt go there any ol night--maybe dudes dont do it anymore but for the last year or so nitedog and lovefingers had like a biweekly party

or semiweekly? every two weeks

It may be that some in this thread are trying to expand the definition into a uselessly broad net, nabisco, but local garda totally OTM a couple hours back. "Ting Tings, Justice, the Klaxons, a Soulwax remix" (plus folx like CSS, bumping up against Hollertronix & Girl Talk) does seem to describe a specific subgenre of contemporary club music/culture, and not the sum totality of "modern music in mid-to-late-00s".

i'm checking nitedog's myspace, last thing they promoted on here at least is something in august

yeah blackdisco was fun. now i only go dance to deep house if i'm in the mood and i have money, which is rare. it's a sure thing they won't play this shit if it's not a weekend night and it's specifically advertised as something else.

they used to do some minimal kinda shit in the upstairs lounge, that was okay too. but yeah i dunno, all over the place the flyers i see are all on an aoki/mstrkrft kinda tip so i end up just listening to fabric mixes in the car and going to bars instead

sorry omar looks like i left town just at the right time ;-)

This sort of stuff seems to be slipping out of fashion a bit in London at least. The only place in Shoreditch that still seems to play it is the Electricity Showrooms which is now basically the Shoreditch Theme Pub for bridge and tunnel types.

We've done this argument a million times before in different ways and not ALL of this stuff is bad (there are great records on Kitsune as well as a lot of dross). Because the software it's made on is so ubiquitous and the style doesn't exactly require meticiculous sound design or attention to detail, it's pretty easy for people to knock out a Justice or Crystal Castles rip-off without much in the way of talent, ideas or inspiration. There have been so many people repping for it and willing to distribute it (if only for free) and a lot of these people seem to have pretty relaxed notions of quality control.

I suppose it's because this stuff is so in your face that people are so bothered by it - it's essentially the new Oi or nu-metal or something. I mean, how many shit minimal records are there out there? But as soon as one of them is over it's forgotten within seconds, while the stuff Tuomas is talking about kind of demands your attention whatever.

yeah shit is grim over here xp :/

http://www.moonshadowsmalibu.com/bluelounge/dj/index.html

this place always has something interesting going on omar. i saw harvey there over thanksgiving and it was ace. woolfy does a monthly thing there that covers the beardo/balearic/ edits side of things whcih is good.

also, dam funk does a weekly that is more on the disco/boogie side of things in culver city. these parties are lots of fun. la is not so bad if you know where to look. sorry for the thread derail ;)
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=110924668

no!

the worst genre ever is post-Libertines era Britpop v.2 aka the most utterly beyond belief dreary stagnant boring unimaginative leaden music I can to the best of my memory remember having to suffer through in my lifetime (so far). And I thought the FIRST time round was bad!!! FUCK that for a golden age.

alright "nu-rave" is a grim idea, almost as bad as Grindie

but DESPITE the quality control issue and the bright colours attracting the WRONG KIND of youth (middle class, hormonal and having more sex than ILX by pure dumb luck, delusions of cooler-than-they-actually-are-compared-to.. Wiley.. or something).

so called "indie-electro" is a desperate gasp of fresh oxygen indeed COMPARED to the worst genre ever.

Really.

And it's not like *I* even like it that much, but then I've really not been keeping up tbh and have probably missed out on a lot of good tunes by way of apathy & bit of jadedness.

Not even an ilm consensus that it's all crap?

so all music is crap then?

i thought he meant ILM is all crap

I have way less faith in the ILM consensus about anything that I did even a couple of years back.

And even then there are a few central planks of it I've just never bought at all, fundamental disagreements... this is before even getting into how much I find myself loathing certain posters ideologies of taste and the ways they choose to defend them which make me want to go scratch my fingers on a blackboard rather than even begin attempts to engage them reasonably.

landfill indie RIP - hurrah for New Wave of Indie Dance. young ppl be likin stuff that you don't. hardy har har

hardly har har

I have way less faith in the ILM consensus about anything that I did even a couple of years back

??? What was so great about ILM taste-consensus circa 2005?

Old people like indie elctro, just look at Bill Murray hanging with MGMT

http://www.nypost.com/pagesixmag/issues/20081207/Bill+Murray+NYCs+New+Party+Boy

"Ting Tings, Justice, the Klaxons, a Soulwax remix" (plus folx like CSS, bumping up against Hollertronix & Girl Talk) does seem to describe a specific subgenre of contemporary club music/culture, and not the sum totality of "modern music in mid-to-late-00s".

That list isn't pointlessly broad, no, but I still can't help detecting certain weird splits in it. Part of it just strikes me as new-wave: the last time I saw Ting Tings they were covering Altered Images on a TV show, and I hear CSS as just a party-rock band, practically more in line with the B-52's or "Heart of Glass" or something than any history of electronic dance music. I understand that the sensibility and the audience have a lot of overlap with the other things you're talking about here, definitely. But it seems weird to me to talk about how that music works in the same handful as, say, rock-themed crossovery dance music (Justice), mashed-up rock/dance DJ action (Hollertronix, Girl Talk), conventional-type rock bands with electro signifiers (Klaxxons), etc. I shouldn't have said "modern music," you're right -- I should say "modern party music," because any wider of a net seems to just refer to that. (I almost feel like part of the complaint here is that people are hearing party music at clubs, when they want to hear club music at clubs.)

And you can probably tell that while I agree with you on that list being roughly coherent, I was getting annoyed upthread by stuff further afield getting shoveled in -- you widen that net far enough to include Dan Deacon, MGMT, Foals-of-all-things, and the Blow, and I really don't know what we're talking about anymore, obviously.

i'm not a young ppl either, and i LOVE all this shit - i'm just trying to relive being a student vicariously through all this.

remind me, cos I waz not ther

but did ILM ignore nu-metal (for an example) quite as thoroughly as it has done this awful, awful Tuomas hurting music which may well actually be quite a significant % of an average teens (wrong teens obv.) listening these days?

ILM be dropping as many balls on average as any other popular internet music site around IMO.

frankly I'm just boggling at ppl talking shit about MSTRKRFT

xpost: ILM was aware nu-metal existed, even though most people didn't like it. Kind of like this, actually.

Old people like indie elctro, just look at Bill Murray hanging with MGMT

Maybe it's just that Bill Murray likes people who're holding.

miccio liked some nu-metal
xposts

??? What was so great about ILM taste-consensus circa 2005?

― Suggest Ban Permalink (contenderizer), Thursday, December 11, 2008

I never said it was that great(!) already up there, harldy perfect (but still very entertaing & sometimes informative) but maybe it just dovetailed with things I was getting excited by a lot more than it does now....

Which could certainly have given me a false impression that more attention was being paid to better music across the board than is the case now :-|

did ILM ignore nu-metal (for an example) quite as thoroughly as it has done this awful, awful Tuomas hurting music?

Which ILM is it that ignores Justice? Cuz I think I'm getting the other one. Listened to the Let There Be Light demo the other day. Still great.

Dan Perry boggling at the consensus again!

"OMG i CAN'T BELIEVE PEOPLE LIKE LUOMO AROUND HERE?? GAY!!!"

I have not been a regular ILMer in a while, but the idea that it has "ignored" any of the music discussed on this thread is mindboggling to me

i think pretty much every genre has been covered on ILM,sadly including Ska-Punk.

There have been a bazillion bad imitations of me but that was far and away the worst. By an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE (one for the "fans").

not totally ignored, but like, apart from Spencer, Tim F, Vahid bored and contrarianly riffing on anything under the sun with a beat as always (not an insult fwiw sterling work), Firstworldman, er.. Piscesboy.

okay someones gonna say there's not a rolling Kitsune/Ed Banger thread for a reason (Tuomas, this is not your moment..)

but WHY should't there be?

rather than another fucking "hey let's POLL the first side of WATERY, DOMESTIC e.p. now!!! and do the other next week!!"

shitbox thread.

pretty sure spencer chow would be down with that rolling thread

lol Dan, point taken but I do wonder where you got the idea they (MSTRKFT) were universally loved from? It can't be here... if anything they were the prototype band first run for JUSTICE "oh god it's all a bit buzzy and compressed!!" hate surely?

there were like two thousand posts to the justice thread

many if not most of them pro-justice incl. such ilm heavyweights as spencer, vahid, jessica harvell, simon trife

There are at least three separate threads having to do with Ed Banger and at least one having to do with Kitsune; they can be made to roll if you want them to!

cutty also

but WHY should't there be?

Because this music is too closely associated in the ILM imagination with imaginary "d-bag hipsterz", and the imaginary association makes people talk a million miles of useless shit whenever the subject comes up.

Fandango OTM about MSTRKRFT prototype function. Plus they're horrible (see what I mean?).

still love that Para One mix of MSTRKRFT 'Work On You'

cutty also

what?

i dont think i'm on the justice thread. you can correct me if i'm wrong.

besides saying it was good to jog to

I didn't see anyone talking about MSTRKRFT at all because I stopped reading ILM for a long stretch of time. I heard MSTRKRFT completely out of context with this apparently ubiquitous d-bag hipster scene (a friend of mine played them for me when I was visiting my parents) and thought the album was a lot of fun. At the end of the day, I really couldn't care less about what ILM at-large thinks of my music listening habits and it would probably be a healthier place to discuss music if more people behaved as if they felt the same way.

apologies then, I just tend to take it as read that everyone else in here usually has a bastard twitter feed update rolling of the current state of everyone else's listening habits, and which direction the consensus is blowing any damn day of the week.

that's certainly how it feels if you spend too long here.

besides saying it was good to jog to

― cutty, Thursday, December 11, 2008 3:19 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

thats what i was saying

u are ilx heavyweight and were defending justice, prob more than 'simon trife' who said he only really liked 'd.a.n.c.e.'

or not defending, but endorsing for jogging purposes

and yes, more not-giving-a-fuck is what this place sorely needs of late. The air's become distinctly less fresh the last couple of years....

The problem is probably worse relative to just how specialist the thread is too.

i was just saying that album was good to jog to

i don't jog anymore so i have no use for it

I'm not sure the actual indie bands (MGMT, Foals, CSS, whoever) really fit in here unless you're talking Soulwax mixes. That's yer proper indie dance (as opposed to indie-friendly dance which is what we're really talking about here).

In the UK at least, there's hardly any straightforward guitar-bass-drums indie getting props at all these days. If you aint got keyboards, female vocals or a pointless verse from a grime MC in the middle of your song then it aint shit.

Dance-wise, the real fun's being had on the Balearic threads anyway, seems that after a few years of minimal or reallynoisyelectro clubbers are beginning to shift back to something that's a bit more melodic/less lairy.

thing is that cross is actually not that great to jog to! like, some trax are, but most aren't. i was really disappointed

I BEG TO DIFFER SIR

i was surprised!

the RA aeroplane mix tho that jhoshea consented to me DLing last night was A+ for riding to school today, tho, good work

there's hardly any straightforward guitar-bass-drums indie getting props at all these days.

this is why ppl keep elevating Glasbloodyvegas

Possible Primer/Rough Guide tho:

Justice vs Simian 'We Are Your Friends'
New Young Pony Club 'Ice Cream (DJ Mehdi Mix)'
The Gossip 'Standing In The Way Of Control (Soulwax Remix)'
The Automatic 'Monster
The Futureheads 'Skip To The End (Digitalism Mix)'
The Rapture 'WAYUH (Simian Mobile Disco Remix)'
The Shakes 'Sister Self Doubt'
The Rakes 'Binary Love (Loving Hands Remix)'
Alloy Mental 'God Is Green'
The Shortwave Set 'No Social (Optimo Espacio Mix)'
Midnight Juggernauts 'Into The Galaxy'
MGMT 'Kids (Soulwax Remix)'
M83 'Kim & Jessie'
Late Of The Pier 'Focker'
Ghostland Observatory 'Stranger Lover'
Surkin 'Next Of Kin'
Crystal Castles 'Good Time'

but indie/electro ratio varies widely with some of those, i'm probably over-estimating the overlap here and there and there's a lot more stuff from this year you could include (look at Alkan or Soulwax sets for starters i guess)
+ half this stuff comes from my DISCO PUNK folder...

random, small sampling of kitsune tracks would suggest that they are booooooooooooring

M83 'Kim & Jessie'

whaaaa

I have never disagreed with you as much as I do here Nabisco.

talking about it like a specific genre is about like talking about "rock" as a specific genre

erm...hardly, that's a massive overstatement, an utterly ludicrous one.

I shouldn't have said "modern music," you're right -- I should say "modern party music," because any wider of a net seems to just refer to that.

what about techno? hiphop? any other million party musics that are not on peaches geldof's playlist? I cite Peaches cos this is so zeitgeisty in the UK just as if you go to certain parts of London practically every single girl aged 15-20 looks like her, it's more than a music thing as I said, this stuff is culturally huge hence the spillover from all sorts of popular music.

But I think the indie-electro is the glue that binds it all together. I can imagine Erol Alkan for example playing almost any of the acts cited on this thread.

"modern party music" apparently excludes rnb/rap/boybands too now

whaaaa

i envisage people swaying to it at the end of the night, plus thinking back to 'Don't Save Us...' M83 clearly loves his abrasive electrofuzz as much as anyone

btw, have we merged this and that frankenblog thread yet, or did that just happen in my brain

tag this thread as "butthurt"

guys if we accept this is a genre we validate fake tuomas's existence

the stakes have never been higher

VOTE NO ON INDIE-DANCE

err electro

electrosoul-dance

indie electrosoul-dance

The stakes have never been higher, and I'm honored to be a part of this historic campaign.

are all the threads on ILM butthurt? i haven't been over here for like years. i don't even know who the hell most of these danceband indie electrosoul performance acts are!

if any argument about music can now be defined as/reduced to butthertedness then yeh

Pig Radio
http://www.pigradio.com/
"Pig Radio, streaming the best electronic and indie pop rock music 24/7"

Skiffleclash: Worst Genre Ever?

http://ask.metafilter.com/46956/Help-me-find-more-good-indieelectro-dance-music

^^^ will fuck yr head up good

Re Nabisco's complaint about the broadness of this genre - again, I feel that this stuff is about as broad/narrow as "britpop" was as a sensibility, and occupies a similar "we are youth culture" position in the UK in some ways (there are obv. massive differences b/w them but work with me, this is analogy not conflation). Like Britpop, trying to narrow it down to a particular sound or sensibility is a fairly useless exercise, and it's highly unlikely that you'd dislike everything that gets tarred with this brush, but that doesn't mean that you can't dislike it as an overall trend.

I think the venn diagram model is useful here: if there are a lot of overlapping circles here, it's (by and large) where they all meet in the middle that the really objectionable stuff is. That's also why sceptics tend to "rescue" the stuff they do like by claiming it for another genre/movement - it's likely that the stuff they like fell in the outer part of one of those overlapping circles anyway.

Ironically NME et. al. are pushing britpop revivalism perhaps precisely because they are aesthetically and ideologically ill-equipped to get with its actual current incarnation.

definite butthurting from this thread, almost unchecked ilm from my new answers sheet

Ha, LG, I feel like you keep arguing with me by not actually disagreeing with my point.

But perhaps it is just a UK thing to have turned, evidently, "dance remixes of indie party music (in the style of dance music with indie-party appeal)" into some kind of coherent thing that kids actually swear by.

Dance-wise, the real fun's being had on the Balearic threads anyway..

― Matt DC, Thursday, December 11, 2008

I just can't possibly imagine that's true.

I could care almost less than The Lex about <insert> about any of that whole deal unfortunately... is it all super-lush-dreamy ZERO balls whatsoever nu-soulboy creeping middle age nostalgia music?

I don't blame the kids AT ALL for spurning this stuff and techno/house that's just become unable to shake off it's commercial rules of engagement and finding solace in the Klaxons or Crystal Castles, is the sad thing.

No, lots of it is shiny disco pop as well.

NME et. al. are pushing britpop revivalism

interspersed with periodic US rock/garage/indie revivalism then back to the Britpop flogging without gaps since anytime from 1994 onwards surely?

is it all super-lush-dreamy ZERO balls whatsoever nu-soulboy creeping middle age nostalgia music

it takes some balls to stand up to such fierce criticism and keep making music

Ironically NME et. al. are pushing britpop revivalism perhaps precisely because they are aesthetically and ideologically ill-equipped to get with its actual current incarnation.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, could you elaborate?

Is this Disco in the sense of actually dancing or just more achingly producerly nu-deep-house in different clothes?

I'm not being sarcastic by the way, genuinely curious...

you can actually dance to it

I could care almost less than The Lex about <insert> about any of that whole deal unfortunately.

actually i really love all that balearic cosmic disco stuff

Max I'm fine with Balearic sounding records TOTALLY

I'm just suspicious of what the label means in the 00's, I suspect it's not at all the same thing but I could well be WAY OFF! Like I say I just find the *idea* off putting enough (of a re-warmed 'vibe') that I've given it just about the widest berth possible to give so far...

to be fair some of this stuff sounds pretty achingly producerly nu-deep house-ish

this stuff meaning balaeric

indie-electro "ugh how tasteless"
nu-balearic "ugh how tasteful"

The housier more danceable Balearic isn't really achingly produced deep anything. The 'pretend you're on a beach at 7am' side maybe more so.

well there are those of us who seek out only the corniest of musics

yeah it's not particularly intricate xp

we all have our prejudices, I'd rather be upfront.

and yeah, for me I guess

tasteless > tasteful

if I'm after kicks

I'M JUST HONEST

i like the way you can simultaneously pretend you're on a beach at 7am and in a yuppie apartment straight outta american psycho, w/the balearic stuff. it's decadent. omg has there been a sade re-edit yet??

I imagine there's a POX on the Balearic thread somewhere? Oh god, maybe I'll have a look and be all "duh!" when I realise I actually have been missing out, it's quite possible!

The general tone of this thread seems to be "eww, noisy crap for rich teenagers", whereas the frankenstein thread seems to be "eww gentrification".

Is this really entirely about the perception of class differences?

Because I'm dirt poor and I love a lot of this stuff.

Along with the hipster yuppie mana that is balearic.

kicks are better when u can taste them

omg has there been a sade re-edit yet??

i'm still holding out for re-edit of Linda Di Franco's 'TV Movie'

Manna, that is.

xpost - class or drugs or maybe sex

did I miss anything?

what are those differences

shit i meant 'TV Scene'

X-post Well I'll admit I'd rather this music was associated with the more stereotypical raver drugs, cheap blow and vodka and Redbull is a shitty way to power a genre.

tv scene is a great song

"Ironically NME et. al. are pushing britpop revivalism perhaps precisely because they are aesthetically and ideologically ill-equipped to get with its actual current incarnation.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, could you elaborate?"

I'm talking about the critical hosannas for the Oasis album, the excitement over Blur reuniting etc. I'm postulating here but I suspect that there's nostalgia for the way in which Britpop united all the "hot" British bands/music into a semi-coherent movement/scene. Correct me if I'm wrong but nu-rave/blog-house is really the only current thing vaguely comparable for young white Britishers. But it's not a sound that the NME et. al. can really wholeheartedly endorse once you get any dancier than, say, The Klaxons.

OTOH I may be making a cause & effect mix-up along the lines of proclaiming that thunder sours milk.

Fandango you'd be right (achingly producerly nu-deep-house) about some of the nu-disco/balearic but then other stuff is very rushy/wide-eyed/just-dropped-an-e in feel. Albeit in a way you might not like. Aeroplane, who are probably the standard bearers of this sound, are like a more discoid version of stuff like Ewan Pearson, Ada's "Lovelace", DJ T's "Freemind" (actually "Freemind" is a very good reference point for their sound given it's already very post-Metro Area discoid). I've never gotten the impression that you go for this sort of stuff though.

rushy/wide-eyed/just-dropped-an-e sounds good! although my experiences with actual drugs of that ilk have been VERY underwhelming haha

you might be right but I feel like, I should actually give it a go definitely... there's only so much of that feeling you can get from more rave-y tracks before it does start to feel rote I think, might as well add some variety ;-)

i dont think 'omg gentrification' is what the frankenstein thread is about

i think mostly the frankenstein thread is about how easy it is to derail a thread

how easy it is for max & ice craem to free associate for a few hours

xpost - it's also at least one thing that I LOVE about Sylvie Marks DJ sets when they're good, those kind of tracks... so I don't know that I totally avoid this kind of thing, it probably is just a bit prejudicial of me.

it was cross promotion for our band/lifestyle magazine "i love cricket"

X=-post to Deej

Well isn't gentrification a succinct way of describing new jack producers bastardizing established genres of street dance?

I feel like its 1973 and we're arguing about whether its a good idea to lengthen the breakdowns of Philly Soul records, or worrying about incorporating salsa and rock elements.

Or its 1988 and Todd Terry is making a royal fucking mess of the difference between hip-hop and house. And what the fuck is with this weird acid shit?

Just saying, I like Disco and Rave.

i dont think thats a good parallel and im normally v embracing of this sorta 'its just history repeating itself WHY CANT YOU SEE THAT' argument -- but to me its not adding up right now -- like im not getting whats new that is coming out of it (talking about frankendance) and im trying to get someone to pull a smart dude argument for it -- not just defense where you say things like "well the kids like it" or "its cheesy and tasteless and cheesy tasteless things are the engine to the best music!" type simon reynolds arguments -- i want to hear an almost formalist defense of the music, telling me what its doing to people who go to clubs and hear that crazy synth-y bmore break and just have to cut loose -- ive danced at clubs w/ booty/ghetto house before and its a v different vibe, even if its not the kind of thing i would go to on a regular basis. i 'get' the logic of that music. i don't 'get' this

sort of like how tim talks up aeroplane a few posts up -- it makes sense to me, i hear the music and im like "yes -- i see what they are doing and why it is special." i dont hear that, even with frankendance songs i like to an extent like "day and night" -- thats just a dope melody which is cool, but the song's internal logic just seems thrown together and the vibe of it is just -- there is no real vibe, the drums and buildups and everything dont seem targeted at a dancer or at someone wanting to go out and enjoy themselves

maybe they want to but can't cos they have to work or feel feverish

when i don't get something that a lot of people seem to like a lot, i often think i'm missing out, and it bugs me.

I don't think frankendance is gentrifying baltimore club music so much as hypostasising its lack of gentrification as something to be enjoyed by people external to that scene. If a producer was making "avant"-baltimore it might be different but I'm not aware of that happening and it's certainly not what the scene appears to be "about".

Compare/contrast with Soul Jazz making dubstep/dancehall-fusion records - that's gentrification.

BTW Fandango if you are interested check the Aeroplane thread - there's links to a Resident Advisor Aeroplane podcast that should give you a decent sense of what that scene-within-a-scene's about (although from memory the mix revs up from a fairly placid beginning so perhaps skip the first fifteen minutes or so).

is there an opposite of gentrification? like proleification? so Dubstep, yes very good Soul jazz, Bassline... very good 3CD comp from Ministry on the shelves two weeks after "Heartbroken" hit.

not really a fair comparison mind as im not sure what, if any chart hits Dubstep has had (maybe 'Night' got to #33 one week or something when I wasn't looking...)

and cheers Tim I will see what I find :-)
(and promise not to return to ILM bitching if it doesn't do much for me..)

I kind of think the Soul Jazz flame is a little unfair re: DUBstep but can't quite nail why...

X-post to Deej

I can't make a formalist defense for it, sorry.

I can give some context for my tolerance of it.

Spent the last 7 or 8 years listening to as much weird shit as possible: Breakcore, Grime, Dubstep, 2-Step, Minimal Tech-House, Electrohouse, Filter Disco etc. etc.

So the glitchy nature of the productions doesn't bother me, the stop start samples don't either.

What does bother me is that it is house (mostly) that adheres to the same bass drop aesthetic that killed off drum and bass and is slowly killing the populist parts of dubstep.

I'm guess I'm talking mostly about Crookers and that general line of thinking here.

And for some one like me, who has listened to real noise, along with tons of Black Metal and Drone and Doom and whatever the noise isn't hard to put up with. I worry about tinnitus, but
thats about it.

Maybe it just is restart of the whole breaks thing again, completely divorced from the Florida and California scenes and using Baltimore loops instead of actually chopped breaks.

My point is that hybrid styles can have potentially unforeseen consequences, and that the amount of passionate and interesting people in a scene can be an indicator of future growth. And with how ubiquitous and generally inescapable this stuff is the likelihood of there being both of those growth trends (hybridization and passion) increases with the amount of DJs and listeners.

I have been wrong before though, I can't really tolerate where Dubstep ended up.

To Tim

http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=141671

And if I read you right Tim, you're saying the marketing of Baltimore is basically all about slumming? As in outsiders saying "Here's this tight knit scene, been around since the late 80s. Lets mix it with popular dance music and in the process gain the superficial appearance of street cred?"

(maybe 'Night' got to #33 one week or something when I wasn't looking...)

#96 iirc

shit the bed.. and it was playlisted on R1 as well?

Dubstep really doesn't feel like a 'niche' thing in any way anymore, so that surprises me tbh. Perhaps downloading/decline of 12"s I dunno... I did feel like it had possibly charted in a minor top40 way though. Thanks for the info anyway :)

"I kind of think the Soul Jazz flame is a little unfair re: DUBstep but can't quite nail why..."

I'm not knocking Soul Jazz, their dubstep (and dubstepesque) releases are actually pretty good - but certainly, esp. when they use ragga vocalists, this stuff ends up feeling more gentrified (certainly more gentrified vinyl sleeves!) than typical dancehall, say.

Gentrification isn't always a bad thing. It's a thing that can be good or bad,

Not sure if the appropriation of baltimore club is prolefication, it's not making the music more proletarian. It's just not gentrifying it either.

But yeah I think there's a certain aesthetic of slumming in this scene. To some extent this is just an intensification of the vibe you always get when indie-esque audiences get into party music of any kind. There's a mild aesthetic of slumming to kitsune dance as well, insofar as the dance music is being employed to represent uncomplicated boozy fun.

none of that means so much of the music has to be this deliberately cacophonic, highly strung or abrasive tho...which may be going back to tuomas original gripe.

Absolutely. This is why this music can be criticised - otherwise Nabisco would be correct in that the same criticism would apply to pretty much all contemporary party music.

A lot of this stuff as described on this thread is evoking images of Atari Teenage Riot slowed down and with the charm removed.

LOL ILM heavyweights

i have nothing to say except i like justice a lot less now that i've seen their tour DVD ... as i said earlier on a different thread, the whole thing smacks of stuff like jon spencer blues explosion or luscious jackson or other "funky" indie rock circa 1996 ... trying a little too hard to project that sleazy rock-n-roll vibe

or maybe trying a LOT too hard

yeah that's kinda one of my gripes too

another sub-reason for me hating on eagles of death metal and that sorta thing too

if a scene can be slummed in, there will be people slumming it there - this is absolutely not contained to the indie-dance umbrella. if anything there's less of a class factor than there is, say, in posh white kids from west london getting in on the uk garage scene.

i would say that there is an element of...how to put this...if you want to be well-known but retain credibility (ie if you want to get in the london tabloids for being "cool"), this scene is something you'd gravitate towards (am reasonably confident this is what agyness deyn, alice dellal, whichever geldof is still around, all that lot are into).

xps

Thank you, vice magazine

yeah, I'm surprised that it took this long for vice to get a mention

"But yeah I think there's a certain aesthetic of slumming in this scene. To some extent this is just an intensification of the vibe you always get when indie-esque audiences get into party music of any kind."

i wonder why this wasn't true in the 80's? new wavers made awesome disco and electro back then ,and they didn't come from dance music backgrounds. course, it probably doesn't help that indie types and rockers didn't want to have anything to do with dance music from 1990 to 1999 or so. they have a lot to learn. and listening to some of the stuff mentioned on this thread is like listening to someone discover the synthesizer for the first time. but not in a good way. other than DFA, i can't think of any new waver who has made decent and credible dance tunes.

(fyi: i hate most of the stuff mentioned on this thread. justice and noize boyz treble-core makes my teeth hurt. mstrkrft and chromeo and most of the rest can suck the big one too as far as i'm concerned. even all the electroclash stuff mentioned did absolutely nothing for me at the time. as far as oi! and nu-metal in dance, i'll take hardcore or gabber or even friggin' alec empire over these doofs. and i feel bad that so many kool goths and ebm types get ignored when they have been flying - a much more tuneful - electro flag for years on end.)

some of the stuff mentioned on this thread is like listening to someone discover the synthesizer for the first time

To be fair, the synth thing may not be the key thing here what? Neighbouring (fsvo neighbouring) styles surely sound like discovering guitar for the first time?

new wavers made awesome disco and electro back then ,and they didn't come from dance music backgrounds

they didn't have a philosophical axe to grind vis a vis good production value = evil, maybe?

and i feel bad that so many kool goths and ebm types get ignored when they have been flying - a much more tuneful - electro flag for years on end

ditto?

seems like it'd be fairly easy to argue that the difference between now and the '80s is the internet and ease of making/marketing your own music, as was touched on in the frankenhouse thread

i swear tuomas bit my idea for this thread and just rephrased it as a challop

yeah when exactly did the transfer happen anyway?

Scott's hatred of this makes me seriously question my take on it.

Part of the reason that I found this music interesting was the whole Moroder + Sabbath thing.

If he and Chuck have no use for any of it, then maybe it really just is all shit.

Anyways, I think the specter of punk hangs over this entire discussion.

I was doing the math today and I figured out that to buy a laptop and an outboard DJ controller + an audio interface (if you bought one of those miniature laptops with half the screen size) would run you just about six hundred dollars. The Numark DJ IO will run you about one hundred, you can get a cheap Torq interface for about the same.

Laptop=400
Audio Interface = 100
DJ Console=100

I'd argue that that would be cheaper than a full band worth of equipment + amps or a PA system.

This music might actually be cheaper to make and DJ then it is to be in a band.

Suddenly dance music has the level of quality control of a hardcore 7".

Moroder + Sabbath

= Goblin?

And Justice sampled Tenebre, its pretty clearly a point of reference.

i think theres a lot more fun and sexyness to the cacophony then people give credit. some of it has way more instant gratification and anthemic positivity to it then some 8 minute laidback techno track. And to deem anything as slumming is passing a huge judgment on a group of people, its just in this case they're indie kids so people can feel safe doing so. pinning down aesthetic differences is cool, but when you get into motivations about the listeners or the artists it strikes me as presumption and projection because it neatly fits your argument.

kool goths and ebm types get ignored when they have been flying - a much more tuneful - electro flag for years

who are you talking about? sounds like old dude nostalgia.

sounds like young dude ignorance

j/k

i am kinda old. i still want everything to sound like this for some reason:

trance trax invented rockabilly house too. time for a comeback:

maybe i'm more of a purist than i think. "rock+dance" was the reason i was supposed to like big beat and mashups too. but i never did. (except for a couple of fatboy singles and a couple chem bros. tracks, none of it was ever as good as old sample-based dance stuff from the early 90's or 80's. okay, i'm old.)

(plus, my rock+oi+dance is hardcore and i'm sure hardcore annoys more people than justice ever will, but i can listen to it for hours a la metal.)

Just because I can't name bands or labels doesn't mean I haven't heard this stuff all around.

ok well since crystal castles is the only one of these bands i really like (as far as i can tell who these bands are) i'm just gonna post a video and wait for someone to explain to me the horribleness.

(fwiw i like it because it's simple, repetitive, catchy and enigmatic. that's a formula that works for me. the first thing i heard by them was the "crimewave" remix, which has the same qualities. the stuff on the album that's either less catchy or less enigmatic is not my favorite stuff, but i don't hate it.)

(the fact that crystal castles are by some accounts assholes doesn't particularly enter into this as far as i can see.)

they bit that off "Clash At Demonhead" for the NES I think

see? bringing videogame music to people who don't play videogames. it's a public service.

haha, yes, I would probably agree that there are some fairly classic tunes that people miss out on having not played certain video games, clash at demonhead has none of those in it though - and anyway, The Advantage do it better

(i also like in that song how the different parts are not really synched, some are too fast and some are lagging. it's an easy trick, but i like unreliable tempos.)

i think theres a lot more fun and sexyness to the cacophony then people give credit. some of it has way more instant gratification and anthemic positivity to it then some 8 minute laidback techno track. And to deem anything as slumming is passing a huge judgment on a group of people, its just in this case they're indie kids so people can feel safe doing so. pinning down aesthetic differences is cool, but when you get into motivations about the listeners or the artists it strikes me as presumption and projection because it neatly fits your argument.

― bnw

OTM. This music is popular mostly because it really is fun, at least to the people who like and use it. It may sound like a shrill, hollow simulacrum of shitty second-hand fun to some of you, but then you don't like it, and thus (pretty much by definition) don't get it.

Plus, what's wrong with slumming? 80s bands like Pussy Galore were arguably "slumming" in 70s rawk. Serious metalheads always claim that this or that band is invading the scene, faking it, playing up only the most cheezy & obvious signifiers for the wrong reasons, for the wrong kind of fans. So what? What's wrong with camp repurposing or even dumbing down?

I dunno. I don't see the moral or aesthetic difference between indie-electro and 80s new wave club music -- generally speaking, I mean. Same function, similar spirit.

I should note that I wasn't claiming that there is anything wrong with slumming per se. Lex is right to note that this is even more extreme with posh west end kids dancing to UK garage, which is basically me.

I was just saying that this scene wasn't trying to "gentrify" baltimore club music etc.

"It may sound like a shrill, hollow simulacrum of shitty second-hand fun to some of you, but then you don't like it, and thus (pretty much by definition) don't get it."

Doesn't this argument basically mean "you don't like it therefore you don't like it"? What does this point establish, precisely?

Suddenly dance music has the level of quality control of a hardcore 7"

from an outsider's point of view i'm sure the level of quality control in most punk releases= the level of quality control in most dance releases. personally i think dance music has a much higher batting average. but then again i have never liked punk music so how the hell would i know?

this term we've adopted makes me think of this
http://photos-g.ll.facebook.com/photos-ll-snc1/v975/54/7/751041513/n751041513_1773878_4063.jpg

What does this point establish, precisely?

contenderizer is bad at arguing

I quite like Justice/crystal castles/the stuff this thread is about, and no virtually nothing about dance music. I guess I'm the demographic for Justice - dance music for people for don't really like dance music - if young, don't usually listen to dance, if old, used to like Fatboy Slim and Chem. Bros before they went wrong, prob. have a copy of Paul's Boutique and Endtroducing and no other Beastie boys or DJ Shadow. (this is me, by the way)

Bearing all this in mind, what music would I like that is more, um . . . "credible", for want of a better word. (credible seems an odd word anyway, but that's the one being used extensively on this thread, so I can go with that for now)

funny this thread took a turn towards hardcore punk while I was gone. I was gonna say Soulwax and the boot/mash fad that followed was like Green Day's "Dookie" (or the Eternal September 1993 on Usenet). It was the moment an isolated culture that had required a lot of effort to crack got an influx of casual fans who'd never "understand" it the way the old timers did.

"It may sound like a shrill, hollow simulacrum of shitty second-hand fun to some of you, but then you don't like it, and thus (pretty much by definition) don't get it."

Doesn't this argument basically mean "you don't like it therefore you don't like it"? What does this point establish, precisely?

-- Tim F

No, that wasn't my meaning. I was responding to posts like deej's ("there is no real vibe, the drums and buildups and everything don't seem targeted at a dancer or at someone wanting to go out and enjoy themselves"). My point was that it's silly to complain that this music isn't really any fun, isn't fit for club use, though it seems to be full of good times dance music signifiers. That just boils down to "I don't like it." I mean, it's obviously fun to someone, and seems to enjoy a thriving club life, with drugs and dancing and everything.

I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that a given style of music deploys "fun" signifiers while failing actually to be fun.

i think theres a lot more fun and sexyness to the cacophony then people give credit. some of it has way more instant gratification and anthemic positivity to it then some 8 minute laidback techno track

HERE WE GO............

electro is fun. techno is serious and intense. men love football. women enjoy shopping.

women are always shopping, tho, LG

I love football.

lock thread.

wait I enjoy shopping too

HOW CAN I EVER PARSE INDIELECTRO AND TECHNO NOW....IT'S ALMOST LIKE....THERE ARE NUANCES???

I think it's perfectly legitimate to say that a given style of music deploys "fun" signifiers while failing actually to be fun.

― Tim F

Yeah, sure, as a means of saying, "I just don't like it." But unless the music in question is clearly failing to attract party-minded revelers, the no-fun claim doesn't mean much beyond that. It seems clear that a lot of people are legitimately entertained by this music, that as a call-to-fun it seems to do the job very nicely (that may even be the problem for some: indie-electro is too crassly, cynically populist; too proudly ignorant of context and culture; too trivially appealing to the "wrong" sort of people).

I think mostly the problem is that it's too jerky and doesn't have any decent bass.

Outside ILM Land, there are plenty of old school racers who love Ed Banger, Kitsune Maision, st al fwiw. It's kinds silly I have to state this in the first place.

Do people here hate Modeselektor, too?

x-post well I think you can say you don't like the fact that it has "this is fun" signifiers in itself. other musics do just as well as a call to fun without those signifiers. I think that's what Tim is saying.

btw I am very much over disliking this music in any meaningful way, last time I was at a club that played it I just felt bemused/kinda old. does anyone here really hate it? I wouldn't want to listen to it much but whatever I guess.

and Mackro plenty of people like this on ILM too, don't play the martyr! the problem with this thread is every attempt to analyse this is defensively refuted, I don't see anyone biliously attacking...

x-x-post I do kinda hate modeselektor but I've never heard them

I do kinda hate modeselektor but I've never heard them

haha I would call you out on that if I didn't do the exact same thing (see: Fleet Foxes, Panda Bear, Animal Collective; maybe I'm just speciesist)

Maybe you just hate all bands with animals in their name?

i can't not call them ModeSkeletor, so classic for that alone

I think mostly the problem is that it's too jerky and doesn't have any decent bass

this is sort of why i preferred that DFA-esque/inspired stuff from a few years back i guess

Yeah Matt, I'm speciesist!

Although I still like Animals on Wheels a lot and have a soft spot for Cranes...

(shutting up now to stop derailing attempts for more serious, informed discussion)

Outside ILM Land, there are plenty of old school racers who love Ed Banger, Kitsune Maision, st al fwiw. It's kinds silly I have to state this in the first place.

― Gino-Vanellyville (Mackro Mackro), Friday, December 12, 2008 11:18 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.fpsmagazine.com/blog/speedracer1.jpg

yeah i don't know what an old school racer is?

...you can say you don't like the fact that it has "this is fun" signifiers in itself. other musics do just as well as a call to fun without those signifiers. I think that's what Tim is saying.

― Local Garda

This is an interesting point. Don't think anyone's stated it quite as clearly as this. Gets to what I was saying earlier about populism. This music is very clear in announcing its PEOPLE FUNTIME NOW! imperatives -- to the point where some may find it foolish, even oppressive. I get that, and can see why that kind of dumbed-down messaging might be troubling to people accustomed to a more reserved stance. But populism is always somewhat foolish in this regard. The messages have to be printed in giant day-glo caps to reach the cheap seats.

I think mostly the problem is that it's too jerky and doesn't have any decent bass.

― Matt DC

See, the first part is what I like about it, and the second is, well... Yeah. It's a problem.

But populism is always somewhat foolish in this regard. The messages have to be printed in giant day-glo caps to reach the cheap seats.

I guess I agree. Techno or even house for instance are actually kinda miserable if taken as read, or if you analyse just the sound of them, yet for so many people they are definitely partying/fun, even if it's often a strangely intense relationship.

and you can just easily replace Techno and House in that sentence with Heavy Metal or 80s Droney Indie no?

(Someone's already brought up big beat on this thread, right?)

xp - LOL.

"old school raver". C is next to V on the keyboard. sorry.

contenderizer i love lots of music with 'oppressive' -- well, i dont find them oppressive, but certainly 'overwhelming' would be a good word -- overwhelming 'call to fun' signifyers. the problem i have with this stuff is more the feeling like 'dancing' feels very secondary to the 'fun' we're having, like everyone thinks the real ghetto-musics-of-the-world (btw im talking about frankendance which is the stuff i was criticizing in the first place since u brought me up) is too dumbed down for their audience and it needs a "who cares, its just dumb music!" remix for 'getting your drink on!' then i start writing like a dk catchdubs parody

i joined a global psychedelic community last night when i was drunk and i've been listening to nothing but psytrance for the last two hours and ALL of it sounds better than justice or whoever.

http://www.psyport.net/

(i doubt if i will listen to it after today, but still...)

"(Someone's already brought up big beat on this thread, right?)"

i did!

and you can just easily replace Techno and House in that sentence with Heavy Metal or 80s Droney Indie no?

erm....no because they are not built around a scene of drug use/partying/clubs

hmmm! i know what you mean by that but obv those genres have their own culture of drug use and clubs too

There should be a thread about indie folk rock accompanied by too many synths. (way different than the indie electro I've seen in this thread but also extremely annoying because most indie folk rock artists CANT PULL IT OFF TO SAVE THEIR LIVES)

for instance, king creosote has gone electro, but I do think he has done a better job than most of those Scottish indie folk electro bands.

i still think the big ilm hang-up about this stuff has to do with the "indie" modifier, the sense of this as being music made by/for a suspect demographic. (i.e. people like us except not as smart, cool, loose, whatever. in this case, people who don't like real dance music the way we do.) i understand it, because i have a sort of aversion to indie-ness too... except when i don't. which seems true of ilm's whole weird relationship to all things indie. backpack rap is suspect, except for that one album/label/era. sad-boy drone is loathesome, except for that one band. etc. there's a sort of lol-indie hipster's dilemma at work here. which doesn't really get at why some people like one particular record and others don't, and in fact sort of overwhelms or short-circuits consideration of the music in any given case because the signifiers get in the way. i know i'm guilty of this in some cases -- dan mentions fleet foxes, e.g., who i instinctively disliked before i ever even heard them. (which means that i can't even trust my own response when i did hear them and dislike them -- i was hardly going in with open ears.)

and of course the whole issue of how we hear what we hear, learned or received responses or expectations, is a lot bigger than indie-electro, or indie itself. in a way the anti-indie respnose is part of a corrective impulse -- to reject the simulacra in favor of the original or whatever -- but as such can also easily become an over-correction that is really just another set of prejudices. and so it goes.

my big hang-up with the stuff is people making dance music who don't know how to make dance music.

i'm gonna stick with my hangup on indie-folk-rock-electro since I don't listen to dance music anyways.

my big hang-up with the stuff is people making dance music who don't know how to make dance music.

i hate loads of competent musicians too tho. O CRUEL WORLD.

the problem i have with this stuff is more the feeling like 'dancing' feels very secondary to the 'fun' we're having, like everyone thinks the real ghetto-musics-of-the-world (btw im talking about frankendance which is the stuff i was criticizing in the first place since u brought me up) is too dumbed down for their audience and it needs a "who cares, its just dumb music!" remix for 'getting your drink on!' then i start writing like a dk catchdubs parody

― deej

That makes sense, but what's wrong with stealing dance signifiers to make only vaguely danceable music? What's wrong with building a parallel club scene out of people who don't like to dance that much, but like to get drunk, jump around and do blow in the bathroom? I mean, it's not like there isn't a definite aesthetic at work in this scene, or a failure on the part of fans to differentiate between what they like and what they don't.

I would put it this way:

everyone thinks the real ghetto-musics-of-the-world is too dumbed down difficult for their audience, and it needs a "who cares, its just dumb music!" remix for 'getting your drink on!' as training wheels.

I mean, training wheels are lame if you've been riding a bike all your life, but tell that to a kid who's trying one out for the first time.

indie types should just stick with what they have always been good at: STEALING STUFF WHOLESALE. instead of trying to come up with crap hybrids that don't make anyone look good (talking about frankenghettohyphyelectrowhatever glop). in the 80's you just stuck a halfway decent disco beat underneath your new wave song and you had a fine remix. no need to overthink things. keeeeeep it simple stooopid. the interweb is rotting people's brainz out i think.

Excuse me for being slow about this but I've been living in the aural equivalent of comfort food for the past 3 years; how do LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture relate to the type of music being complained about here? Are they examples, exceptions or something completely different?

They are the among the good stuff that we are all conveniently ignoring for the purposes of this debate.

haha okay, just wondering

Actually that's me being flippant. Pretty much the acid test as to whether indie-electro is good or bad is whether the bands in question have the remotest conception of how to construct a groove (Rapture/LCD=yes, Justice/Crystal Castles=no fucking way).

Actually that's a pretty unimpeachable rule of thumb.

it's an unimpeachable rule of thumb cuz it's the point of dance music

i gave a shout-out to dfa on this thread as being the exception to the rule.

Didn't New Order invent this genre?

no kraftwerk did.

Not so sure, do Kraftwerk have indie voices and lyrics?

And guitars?

i still think the big ilm hang-up about this stuff has to do with the "indie" modifier, the sense of this as being music made by/for a suspect demographic. (i.e. people like us except not as smart, cool, loose, whatever. in this case, people who don't like real dance music the way we do.)

― tipsy mothra

so ok, someone please tell me, is this "crowd" that this boring music is being made for a) totally uncool and sexless and not as awesome as us, or b) doing lots of drugs and younger and hotter and having more sex. i can't keep track of the arguments here.

actually b, but we tell ourselves a

Surveys have proved Finland is full of hot young people all having promiscuous sex, I don't think you even need to go to an indie electro night to do it.

what if you don't want to go to finland

i'm just trying to figure out if i hallucinated all those times i got laid after listening to music other than justice :/

what was the guy in the trucker hat listening to?

Pretty much the acid test as to whether indie-electro is good or bad is whether the bands in question have the remotest conception of how to construct a groove (Rapture/LCD=yes, Justice/Crystal Castles=no fucking way).

― Matt DC

Yeah, but that depends on intended function/audience expectations. As headphone music, I think Justice work just as well as LCD, though they're obviously not interested in building grooves. And I suspect that a lot of short-attention-span, club music neophytes relate to them for exactly that reason. Deliver a jolt, pause for breath, deliver another. It's a pop/rock approach, divorced from traditional dance music. Weird, then that it seems to present itself as "dance music", but putting the weirdness aside, it seems fine on its own terms.

it's fine on its own terms if you can handle how horrible it all sounds.

lolindie xxp

I like Matt's litmus test. It explains why I liked Cut Copy so much but got tired of Crystal Castles so quickly.

I can't even fathom listening to Justice on headphones, urgh.

I dunno. I like noise.

cilantro tastes like soap to some people.

and vice-versa, I suppose

I like noise, too (look for ATR/Digital Harcore threads and you'll see I'm probably the last bastion on Earth still repping for them) but that's not what I think of when I hear Justice.

that's not what I think of when I hear Justice.

― HI DERE

What do you think of? A while back, I mentioned the "demo" version of Let There Be Light off the 1st Ed Banger 12". I'm listening to it now. It sounds fucking awesome (verbal trucker hat). I don't know what it's supposed to sound like that it's failing to sound like, cuz it's doing such an incredible job of sounding like moron breezeblock horror disco.

Mostly, I think of weedy, whiny irritation.

(There was one Justice song I heard that I liked a lot but it seemed like it was also a wholesale rip-off of Daft Punk's "Steam Machine".)

Matt and Lex, how did you guys end up on the Groove Construction Validation Board, anyway?

I can definitely hear a groove in Justice. You don't have to like it, but claiming they don't have a groove as fact is just.. well, it's so ILM.

when I hear justice I think of what dan said plus CADILLACS U BUY THEM

this is not allowed to become another defense-of-justice thread btw

I can definitely hear a groove in Justice. You don't have to like it, but claiming they don't have a groove as fact is just.. well, it's so ILM.

― Gino-Vanellyville

I assumed they were talking about patiently building grooves over the length of sets, which doesn't seem to be Justice's forty. Song for song, though, they do the job.

this is not allowed to become another defense-of-justice thread btw

― TOMBOT

oops

lol

if patiently building grooves over the length of sets is a rule of thumb of dance music, then fuck that.

seconded

just the idea that there are "rules" to dance music is just really childish and lame.

fyi defending justice on this message board is a waste of time since the best defense of their shit is getting blitzed at one of their concerts and having a threesome with hot 22 yr old scenester babes in the bathroom

xp - then again, this thread was childish from the beginning, and I'm not helping any.. so see ya.

good strawman building work, gents

xp

I don't think that's what they meant.

I find that, for me, there is an inherent involuntary body movement evoked by songs with "groove"; sometimes it's a head nod, sometimes it's rhythmic swaying, sometimes it's full-on dancing. If a song doesn't elicit that reaction from me, I don't think it has a groove. Based on this involuntary (and, I might add, wholly personal) reaction, I find Justice to be grooveless. I could still dance to it, but it wouldn't be all that much fun for me.

plus, they are horrible.

You need to start volunteering at a soup kitchen. You might find that it makes your "problem" seems pretty insignificant.

yeah, just wait till you find out how much you suck at making soup.

lol the old "Your point doesn't matter because people are starving" argument

what if i like crystal castles for listening to on the subway? i.e. as mood music not dance music? (the same way i like screamadelica, which somebody mentioned way up above, aptly i think.) maybe that just means i like mood music that other people don't like, but it sort of makes irrelevant the question of its groovyness.

Well, let me tell you something, funny boy. Y'know that little stamp, the one that says "Justice"? Well that may not mean anything to you, but that means a lot to me. One whole hell of a lot. Sure, go ahead, laugh if you want to. I've seen your type before: Flashy, making the scene, flaunting convention. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What's this guy making such a big stink about indie electro? Well, let me give you a hint, junior. Maybe we can live without indie electro, people like you and me. Maybe. Sure, we're too old to change the world, but what about that starving kid, unable to eat? Doesn't HE deserve better? Look. If you think this is about indie fashion and missing bass, you'd better think again. This is about that kid's right to eat a hot meal once in awhile! Or: maybe that turns you on, Dan; maybe that's how y'get your kicks. You and your good-time buddies.

of course justice/crystal castles have a groove....everything has a groove if you say it does, or doesn't if you say it doesn't...wtf is a groove anyway?

if it's a matter of dancing, and I like this argument, then yeah I like house/techno better cos it feels more languid and even though I don't actually have to think/concentrate to dance to it I probably could if I wanted to, it feels like I dunno, less communal I guess in a way. for some reason I think of berghain/panorama bar when I type this, that experience of being somewhere for 12 hours and the effortless concentration involved.

I can remember liking music which was prob the then dance equivalent of justice/crystal castles and I think I used to like the utterly communal nature of the breakdown/release format that often governs big crossover stuff.

I guess you get older and more wanky/self involved and it's sometimes also nice to think of clubbing as some sort of weird journey inside your own head, rather than solely partying. But I'm sure clubbing still has this element for some people, at least those geeky enough to take it as seriously as I do!

What I would also add though is that crossover/electrohouse DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! Those Tiefschwarz remixes and Black Strobe and stuff like that was a lot "deeper" for want of a better word. That stuff was fairly sombre....it seems the idea of a deep form of house/techno that's not inspired by US stuff has died a bit...but back then you had this weird ebm/rock/italo/trance fusion....may never happen again.

oh and I also like the dancing argument because it helps me articulate why I dislike stuff like Chymera, or recent Kompakt, it doesn't challenge me rhythmically, which isn't some Geirish complaint, it just doesn't actually make me want to dance or make dancing itself seem fresh...

(patiently waiting for contenderizer to come back and tell LG that if he had spent more time teaching algebra to disadvantaged youth, he would see how pointless his argument is)

I once took pity on a homeless person!

all kidding aside, i have worked in a fucking soup kitchen so don't try to tell me about dance music, i KNOW dance music

it just doesn't actually make me want to dance or make dancing itself seem fresh...

Garda OTM, again. Suspect that the appeal is primarily to people for whom EVERYTHING seems fresh, no matter what: dancing itself, music itself, making stupid noise, being allowed in clubs, having a drink, etc. And to brige & tunnel types attracted by shiny things (noise, novelty and energy). Include myself in that last group.

And the soup kitchen bit was joek quote from some weiner on "Techno/House Bobbins of the past". Not sure what the follow-up might be...

your strawman construction/takedown was funnier

That joke might have been more successful if:

a) I had read that thread; and
b) I had used the word "problem" in my post.

I dunno. I laffed. It was for the lovely and talented mr. seward anyway.

I liked it too. I mean Dan MAYBE, just MAYBE you really do need to volunteer at a soup kitchen. Then perhaps you'll "see" that Contenderizer's "joke" isn't so "funny" "afterall".

*chastened*

(I did laff but ledge's followup made me laff more.)

Think I'm supposed to do it like this, but I gets so lazy sometimes.

Plus yeah, FTW ledge zing was the point at which this poor thread should finally have died and gone to heaven.

oh wow that link

roffle roffle roffle

http://media.fukung.net/images/5323/DianeDancesToHell.jpg

Go tell a GM lineman with kids and a mortgage about your problem. I would like to hear what he has to say about it...

Go tell a child who has been abused by a priest about your "problem". I would like to hear what that child has to say about it. Please post it here.

Go tell someone who was in Auschwitz about your "problem". I would like to hear what someone who is in Auschwitz has to say about it.

Go tell someone who can't find the remote control just after finishing cooking their dinner about your "problem". I would like to hear what they have to say about it, as their dinner goes cold.

Go tell someone who doesn't want to leave the house due to feeling miserable even though they arranged to meet friends about your "problem", and is finishing a giant bottle of Hoegaarden. I would like to hear what they have to say about it.

uhoh!

lol

Go tell someone who doesn't want to leave the house due to feeling miserable even though they arranged to meet friends about your "problem", and is finishing a giant bottle of Hoegaarden.

Hey wait, that's me! Don't tell me about your problem. I have too much beer to do.

Not just any Auschwitz mind you. It was LEGO Auschwitz.

"too much beer" you say. well perhaps a child in Africa might like a glass?????

"A child in Africa", you say? Why don't you tell that to Robert Mugabe and see if he "roffles".

That's what this music is, really, it's like a child's version of the second world war, and the atrocities committed on all sides. Nobody understands anymore what we were up against. They don't remember the Mayday theme blaring as the tanks rolled into Nijmegen. They don't have a clue why everybody's always shouting about Rotterdam-dam-dam-dam-dam-dam. God forbid they go to the library and read something about what Coldcut built at Oak Ridge Laboratories. God forbid they acknowledge that they wouldn't even be here today without the sacrifice of millions who braved the Hacienda.

Some children never even are born. Perhaps you'd like to tell them about "children in Africa".

x-post tombot otm....btw I saw a truck repairing the roads today....just YARDS AWAY a homeless man was homeless.

Wasn't there a rough consensus here a few years back that middle class white music ("indie") was boring and corny and had too many guitars and was anti-fun and made by dudes who thought dancing was for f4gz and bl4ck people and that they should get on the fun-crazy-dance-party-electronic tip and discover the true meaning of musick and lyfe? And then when all the tastemaking publications that rip off this board for their ideas ran with that and the corny indie fuxx followed suit by absorbing electronic and hip hop influences, a bunch of people here run around screaming that the sky is falling because indie kids are trampling all over the precious canon of techno-and-rap but THESE KIDS THEY JUST DON'T GET IT. But like, isn't this what people said they wanted, sort of? Indie kids waking up and getting on the dance train?

a lot of indie kids got on this "dance train" and "rode the rails" into good music, some of them turned into justice

http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2008/POLITICS/04/29/wright.bio/art.wright.bio.afp.gi.jpg

"Poptimism, your chickens have come home to roost!"

You should be careful what you ask for, because sometimes it turns out that another thing you didn't ask for was actually better.

xpost omar: Then why these mega threads about HORRIBLE NEW INDIE TREND, RUN TO THE CHOPPER. This isn't about a shitty band or two or whatever, this is about AMERICA HEADED IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.

Wasn't there a rough consensus here a few years back that middle class white music ("indie") was boring and corny and had too many guitars and was anti-fun and made by dudes who thought dancing was for f4gz and bl4ck people and that they should get on the fun-crazy-dance-party-electronic tip and discover the true meaning of musick and lyfe? And then when all the tastemaking publications that rip off this board for their ideas ran with that and the corny indie fuxx followed suit by absorbing electronic and hip hop influences, a bunch of people here run around screaming that the sky is falling because indie kids are trampling all over the precious canon of techno-and-rap but THESE KIDS THEY JUST DON'T GET IT. But like, isn't this what people said they wanted, sort of? Indie kids waking up and getting on the dance train?

v good post Gavin, I often think of this, indie did all the things I used to lambast it for not doing.

but it's still fucking shit. maybe it really was just the haircuts? or I dunno, the lack of witty repartee?

the fact the girls still think you are a retard if you like techno

unless you discuss books instead

yowza this thread is now basically like working in a soup kitchen where you guys are all the crazy homeless people

....books about techno?

don't ask me, dogg, i like some of it xxxxp

yowza this thread is now basically like working in a soup kitchen where you guys are all the crazy homeless people

what you mean to say is we're through the looking glass here

and the circle is now complete

I mean, I like indie electro more than regular indie. Sure, a lot of it is shit in execution and I get all jealous that dudes dumber than me get BJs from coked up hipster sluts or whatever, but hey, every so often there's a 12" I might actually want to buy from these dudes whereas 5 years ago not so much. My problem with frankenhouse is the opposite -- I actually liked some IDM (most of these diplo-rip-off dudes went to Tigerbeat6 finishing school, right?), but this stuff just does what rap or baile funk or dancehall or bmore does, only shittier and boring-er.

Wasn't there a rough consensus here a few years back that middle class white music ("indie") was boring and corny and had too many guitars and was anti-fun and made by dudes who thought dancing was for f4gz and bl4ck people and that they should get on the fun-crazy-dance-party-electronic tip and discover the true meaning of musick and lyfe?

I would have just preferred them to die, but that was never going to happen. I will go to my grave hating indie people. The problem is not with what instruments they use (guitars vs synths/beats) but the way they do what they do, regardless of the style of music. They try to make everything more arty and pretentious, but mostly only succeed in making it more trashy and disposable. Not a trashy aesthetic, just trash.

The haircuts are the only thing I like about indie.

just trash

ok, this thread just got madcrazyexcellent...

Maybe you guys would like to ask the WAR-TORN ORPHANS OF GEORGIA if they would like a chance to listen to some Justice, while you all sit here and take for granted the LUXURY of being able to LISTEN TO THEM.

there cloying sense of "omg hilarious!!" with a lot of this music. i think it's defensive and very much against the ilm mission (if there is such a thing -- just granting the premise of Gavin's post). i don't think "show me love" or "shake" is funny, i think it's brilliant -- worth dancing to, worth thinking about, worth loving. indie-electro seems to agree with the rockist idea that there is serious music and frivolous, ironic music. "ilm" at its best said no it's all the same, think for once.

this genre reminds me of closeted married dudes who fuck around and then go back to the wife, or catholics who go off into buddhism or whatever but come back to get married and die. but then i know there are tons of ppl who are super committed to this music so what do i know.

yeah i get that whole nom-committal touristy vibe with a lot of this too

LOL, Giorgio Moroder and the Kraftwerk dudes did rock music before electronic too, u know.

"Son Of My Father"? "Ruckzuck"?

fuckin Haruomi Hosono from YMO. Happy End folk rockie dood gone electro, totally.

I thought "Let There Be Light" kicked ass before I saw the cover art and then was like "oh joeks"... I sort of get the vibe argument but I'd be more comfortable if a finger could be put on the source of this vibe... Sounds? Art? Haircuts? Stupid hats? Or are we just gonna hate the music of the frivolous parties of the overprivileged and undercultured progeny of the 21st century West regardless of what it is? Anyway, Crystal Castles doesn't sound ironic to me, almost too serious in like a gothy way actually.

Justice = "wide stance"

like someone said up above, the tendency to ascribe irony to all things indie is sort of silly. (especially when the dominant critique of yr bright eyes/garden state indie cadre has to do partly with a lack of irony.)

Or are we just gonna hate the music of the frivolous parties of the overprivileged and undercultured progeny of the 21st century West regardless of what it is?

i'm tempted to say yes, except that it's more a specific subset of overprivileged/undercultured. suburban kids into beyonce and frat boys into toby keith are exempt, because ilm'ers aren't afraid of being mistaken for them and so can regard them with detached affection.

i think it's defensive and very much against the ilm mission... i don't think "show me love" or "shake" is funny, i think it's brilliant -- worth dancing to, worth thinking about, worth loving. indie-electro seems to agree with the rockist idea that there is serious music and frivolous, ironic music.

-- gooleUh, okay. If you say so. I dunno, and I don't wanna debate the point. But maybe some of that "rockist" music is also worth dancing to, worth thinking about, worth loving.

yes and?

ilmers like everything, tipsy, some of us just don't like some of this music coming from a style some of us don't care for that much, there is no blanket theory that can cover all ilmers

thread needs more coked up hipster sluts

yes and?

-- goole

Yr post reminded me of people who insist on judging music's merits by its relative sincerity/seriousness/respect for tradition. I.e., rockists. Which is funny, 'cuz that's what you were accusing the music itself of being.

this isn't irony....let me tell you there is raw unbridled enthusiasm for this music. THE KIDS LOVE IT.

lol "soup kitchen electro"

i'm tempted to say yes, except that it's more a specific subset of overprivileged/undercultured. suburban kids into beyonce and frat boys into toby keith are exempt, because ilm'ers aren't afraid of being mistaken for them and so can regard them with detached affection.

Ok, so young middle class people with liberal arts degrees hating on other young middle class people with liberal arts degrees for liking the right music the wrong way, i.e. textbook hipsterism?

there is no blanket theory that can cover all ilmers

― soup kitchen electro (omar little)

No, but tipsy's analysis OTM. WRT some trends, some ladies protesteth way too much.

gavin is bringing dat realness

which part? some of it is not. xp

Is there an I Love Yacht Rock where they hate on Lindstrom and kosmik disko in the same fashion? "Finally they're waking up to this great music.... but THEY DOIN IT ALL WRONG!"

at least as far as my own concerns go. i like cut copy, the knife, m83, santagold, some mia, crystal castles are a'ight. all the same scene, really.

i'm listening to juan maclean right now, am i part of the problem?

The Juan Maclean is the solution.

this isn't irony....let me tell you there is raw unbridled enthusiasm for this music. THE KIDS LOVE IT.

― Local Garda, Friday, December 12, 2008 3:14 PM (6 minutes ago)

that's my theory shot to hell

which part?

-- omar little

this part: "suburban kids into beyonce and frat boys into toby keith are exempt [from contempt], because ilm'ers aren't afraid of being mistaken for them..." With the implication being that the stuff that gets bashed hardest is that which seems to encroach on protected territory. I buy both the argument and it's implications.

Yr post reminded me of people who insist on judging music's merits by its relative sincerity/seriousness/respect for tradition. I.e., rockists. Which is funny, 'cuz that's what you were accusing the music itself of being.

^^ dunno how to respond to this anyway, none of the sentences match up to what i wrote?

my only real problem with this stuff is the ugly glasses

what territory is protected? xxp

okay I have seriously been missing mad threads because I cannot fathom at all an ILM where frat boys into Toby Keith aren't laughed at mercilessly

or perhaps you are talking out the side of yr neck

"seriousness" is a fine criteria, though risk, committment, canniness, or self-assuredness are better names for things that make me pay attention to an artist. the other two, no not really.

xps

what territory is protected? xxp

― soup kitchen electro

Dance music. Clubs. House, electro, disco.

is there something wrong w/being a tourist though? i'm a tourist in a lot of stuff.

the only reason i really got into juan maclean is cuz he was in six finger satellite

There's nothing wrong with being a tourist but you have to accept/expect that you will annoy a surly subset of the locals.

aNoMiE

at least as far as my own concerns go. i like cut copy, the knife, m83, santagold, some mia, crystal castles are a'ight. all the same scene, really.

agreed, and i like all of those too, more or less. and also agreed that there is no ilm blanket theory, except that there is a sort of default anti-indie-ism, or at least indie-skepticism, that crops up a lot. and i understand why (i think), and share it to a certain degree, but it can be as tiring in its own way as any old "that's not real music" claptrap.

xpost: yeah, i thought we had put the tourism charge to rest way back on the dilettante thread.

I cannot fathom at all an ILM where frat boys into Toby Keith aren't laughed at mercilessly

― HI DERE

Disagree. Find me a thread where dumbass pop country and its douchebag fans are mercilessly derided the way indielectro and haircut kids routinely are. ILM bends over backwards to pay respect to anything outside the zones of protection. It's a political thing: part of that ALL MUSIC IS GOOD MUSIC utopianism that goole was calling the "ILM mission" a while back.

oh so actual geographical physical territory. i guess so maybe, i dunno. i think most of the places that play this stuff aren't really "dance" clubs anyway, it's mostly at indie joints that have dance nights, at least in my experience. my trouble with finding places to play other shit has more to do with the lack of that shit more than encroachment. again, personal experience only caveat.

also, has johnny jewel/italians do it better come up on this thread? cuz i like that stuff, and i can imagine it engendering a lot of the same complaints, but i don't remember hearing a lot of bitching about it. (i do remember christgau dudding it, which didn't surprise me.)

There's nothing wrong with being a tourist but you have to accept/expect that you will annoy a surly subset of the locals.

― HI DERE

Tourists may suck, but being a tourist is the best.

i didn't finish after dark comp because when i heard it, it sounded a little too weak. but i like the chromatics' last album and what i've heard of glass candy.

There's nothing wrong with being a tourist but you have to accept/expect that you will annoy a surly subset of the locals.

― Ca-hoot na na na oh oh (HI DERE), Friday, December 12, 2008 9:29 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ah the locals in this case are probably wearing leg warmers and neon sunglasses so i ain't worried.

but srsly i've generally been sorta dilletantish about shit, like i def tend to have a lot of records/CDs by many many artist, but i won't have like 10 CDs by one artist

I mean, I like indie electro more than regular indie. Sure, a lot of it is shit in execution and I get all jealous that dudes dumber than me get BJs from coked up hipster sluts or whatever, but hey, every so often there's a 12" I might actually want to buy from these dudes whereas 5 years ago not so much. My problem with frankenhouse is the opposite -- I actually liked some IDM (most of these diplo-rip-off dudes went to Tigerbeat6 finishing school, right?), but this stuff just does what rap or baile funk or dancehall or bmore does, only shittier and boring-er.

― Gavin, Friday, December 12, 2008 2:38 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

good post

also yah m@tt juan maclean are great

What I say to the Indie Electro person the Soul Jazz Deep House person says to me. He says "Frank, your Cadenza 12s embarrass me". I look at him with his thinning hair and his horn rimmed glasses the same way as the yellow trousered and overmaked up look at me

Nevertheless! I still play every game

i think an ilm thread mocking toby keith-loving frat boys would draw charges of elitism and rockism and god knows what else. (npr liberalism, probably.) and of course there aren't actual toby keith-loving frat boys here (or not many -- was xhuxk in a fraternity?), so it would also be a useless exercise. whereas we can all make fun of each other for being lol-indie all day long.

after dark comp is pretty cool altho it got samey for me after awhile -- but i can drop the, uh, 'needle' anywhere in the cd and probably like the track that is playing -- miss broadway was the hottest joint on that imo