Rolling Dance Partisans 2010 (Also bobbin, bobbins, bobbins!)

Well this is definitely not my place, but I've gotten too much out of the grand tradition of the bobbins threads to not want to see some lively debate about dance music on ILX. I'm thinking that the remit of the last bobbins thread was sort of limiting so this is a very broad sort of thread.

Anything and everything that excites you about dance music in 2010 can go in here.

That includes everything from Berghain techno to the deep house revivalist stuff, and then also the music coming out of the UK's underground. Think things in line with Joy Orbison, Brackles, Shortstuff, Bok Bok, what Tim calls FACT music. Its all getting heavily incestuous anyways, Shed just recorded a mix that was more than half dubstep from 2007 and 2008.

I know that there are running threads for Funky and Dubstep and even for what Deej called Frankenstein dance music. Well if its unwelcome in there, or you're confused about some kind of genre label its completely welcome here.

That includes all the Guido/Joker/Punch Drunk pseudo IDM kind of thing that Lex likes too.

I'm kind of hoping that this doesn't turn into a bunch of closeted IDM fans squabbling though, hopefully this will be for actual club music? Anyways I'm really liking LHF and Deep Teknologi's recent mixes at the moment.

http://soundcloud.com/deepteknologi

And oh yeah, Jam City.

Jam City rules.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1148

I am down with this thread. So much dance stuff that I'd probably like flies by me because it's not stuff I have a prior interest in and checking for.

Did you check out that Bookworms track ?

http://www.junodownload.com/products/1453653-02.htm

I am going to try and post on this thread this year

Have we talked about the Andrew Saag remix of "Hyph Mngo" that turns it all gospel-house rave-up style?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0bmIS6d8bQ

jam city is amazing

can't post more as have to catch flight now! super-late :/

And I really should be asleep, but I like that Andreas Saag remix and will check for more of his stuff. Tim, you're totally welcome in here too.

I didn't want to pollute the Funky thread any further with all of the crossover stuff.

i would like to ignore most of the above cues and rep for DEEP BATIDA (original demo) by anto vitale, which has totally been kicking my ass of late - it is like deep afro tech i guess, only with a bit of an underground resistance kinda martian gangsta that makes it not boring. CHECK IT

The idea of the bobbins thread centering on British dance music would have seemed insane three or four years ago. I suppose that shows how far the UK has come in that time.

It really doesn't have to center around the UK, there's plenty of music coming out of Western Europe and out of Africa right now that is great. Even some interesting music from New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles. The point is that dance music is becoming increasingly decentralized and also increasingly interconnected.

It just seems strange to me to wall off certain scenes by geography when they're influenced by a global collection of ideas. A lot of the African tinged house I like is made my ex pat's in Britain, but also by people in Germany. And that Bookworms track is kind of broken beat, but it was made in San Francisco.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RaeUN20sDE

This is fun. Cooly G TV.

Shit, that was the wrong Youtube link, well thats a decent song anyways.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EptPsp-_1Y8

One of the artists that I've been enjoying lately is DJ Zhao, based in Berlin I think.

http://soundcloud.com/djzhao

His Fusion mixtapes are all really great if you find any of these tracks interesting.

In another vein altogether Dr Dunks's remix of Nomi and Rampa's Inside is great.

Can't seem to find a streaming version anywhere outside of Juno or any of the other DJ services.

This'd be the same Nomi that tours with Hercules and Love Affair.

http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=247633

Floating Point's remix of Sebastian Tellier L'Amour Et La Violence.

what Tim calls FACT music.

I laughed at this.

I was actually going to start a new bobbins thread before seeing this thread. There was nowhere else I could mention that "headfuck" is probably one of the worst names for a genre ever. It makes Ketamine-House look witty.

I guess I can also mention my fondness for LD. I've been sort ambivalent/passive regarding a lot of UK funky house, and I don't know where LD fits in, but that's an avenue I'm interested in.

I've found the attitude around some of the Techno community online to be very offputting recently, its like the truce between techno and house never existed. MNML SSGs in particular seem to be on this "we only ever like proper techno, and proper techno comes out on limited runs of white labels that are sold at Hardwax" thing that I just can't get into.

I'm not saying that Donato Dozzy or Levon Vincent are bad or anything, just getting sick of the aggressive nerd posturing. That and I've always been more into house. And minimal.

OTM!

Reading Mnml ssgs makes me feel like I hate myself and listening to music more than it does anything else. Their (rather, his, it's pretty much one guy now) endless crusade to save 'real' techno, I find, is very alienating. I think a lot of the time it's just a really quite narrow worldview veiled in a sense of righteousness-cum-critique. (I also mentioned on the other thread that their seemingly pathological need to disown minimal - prove they 'never were mnml' as it was - is just as offputting).

That and most critical techno writing is almost all a narcissism of small differences anyways.

That said Peter Chambers is an intelligent writer.

and then again, I'll never forgive them for coining the phrase "Headfuck"

In other news, I think it's kind of note-worthy that Cadenza is putting out a new record by Frivolous (oooooh!). Could this be an upswing back into interesting territory for Cadenza (it is accompanied by a reboot remix though, so chances of relative not-interestingness do remain). It even has a kind of new album art.

I didn't post much on ILM in 2009; let's see if I get back on the horse in 2010.

I'm still not terribly enthused about any scenes (or even mini-scenes), broadly speaking, and I still can't figure out if that's the cause or an effect of my steady drift away from clubbing. But there are plenty of good records about. My last trip to Hardwax netted some savage, fucked-up stuff from Mike Dehnert (MD2, I believe, red sleeve, red sticker, no info) and Milton Bradley's Do Not Resist the Beat #4, which I like more than #3. Interestingly, the long A-side, "Uncontrollable Desire," is extraordinarily similar to his remix for Cio D'Or upcoming on Prologue -- almost identical beat structure and mood, and yet different enough in execution that I'm not mad at it.

The new Nebraska on Rush Hour is a lovely four-track EP of Rhodesy deep house; I like the way that three of the tracks seem to proceed almost as a game of round robin or something, each track jumping off from an element of the last.

Anyone else check out Aardvarck's Bleed series? Really bizarre stuff there -- super-sparse and heavy dubstep edits/bootlegs using samples of heavy metal, Massive Attack, and other shit I can't identify. I bought #3 and 4 from Beatport or maybe What People Play, but need to find the vinyl.

Thanks for the tip on the Aardvarck Phil, this reminds me a little of early Vex'd.

Its got that combination of heaviness and groove, and groove has been sorely lacking in a lot of the wobble noise recently. That being said I did find myself enjoying a Rusko track the other day (Go Go Gadget), maybe I should give some of the mainstream a survey again and see whats going on.

yeah curious state of things in 2010. so many directions, lots of good things happening some new some revival of older and much older ideas... but IMO loads in this "FACT" cannon is as confused as the scene itself -- i.e. that mid rangey faulty wonk gaudy nu-rave puke-synth stuff. obfuscation and convolution DOES NOT EQUAL innovation.

cooly g's music is so great... she was talking about singing much more in the near future and going completely digital with her productions... will be interesting to watch for sure.

FACT music

thanks Tim, I've been trying to coin a way to describe that really annoying scene all week!

EDB I agree with your post pretty much 100 per cent.

the fact nobody can think of a name for this thread is damning in itself

http://mnmlssg.blogspot.com/2010/01/mnml-ssgs-mx48-redshape.html

I'm assuming that this is as good as his recent FACT mix, which I think everyone can agree was stellar right? His live only tracks seem to be among the best material I've heard from the man so far, hopefully this'll be more of the same.

And mmm, I love me some synth puke music.

Not all of it, but a lot of it, and no I don't think its especially innovative. It just sounds like someone combining early prog house (Leftfield, Papua New Guinea) with IDM. As ILX's resident IDM nerd that suits me just fine.

Speaking of which, just about everything the Black Dog have released lately has been great, truly truly great. Radio Scarecrow is probably my favorite album of the last 4 or 5 years. And Further Vexations wasn't too shabby either. Hope they release more material this year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=801D4fZLyOE

There might be some legitimate rave influence in there as well, now that I think of it.

That Frivolous track I mentioned is actually really great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjF207RMrEo

He really is a quite talented producer, I think it's the sort of nerdy-white dude vibe he gives off that maybe prevents him from having Cadenza-type people care much? At the same time it is such a delicious breath of fresh air (I think the other thing is that, being half Chilean, none of the South-American fetishism that's been in part driving this sound in the last few years has much affect on me).

I would think that that would make it annoy you even more.

(But yeah, that Frivolous track is good.)

Errrr, just realized a pretty glaring absent of a 'not' in that post, which doesn't make much sense to begin with.

Being half Chilean, the South American fetishism of Cadenza et al has NOT had an effect on.

I mean to say, though, that Frivolous has the talent to really hit hard, and I think it's great for both him and Cadenza that /\/\/\ was released.

and effect on ME.

third time's the charm...

wait no, that first sentence was right. I'm going to just start proofreading my posts better instead of correcting them 3 times.

The other Cadenza thing is that the following record is remixes of Mirko Loco Ricardo Villalobos and Carl Craig (another change of pace, I guess?), which also seems interesting.

speaking of Cadenza, new Luciano album goes beyond the coy percussive hints of Africa well known of his label, and features straight up mashup style center piece "Africa Sweat", which adds beats to Senegal's Ali Boulo Santo (who is the nephew of legendary "King of the Kora" Soundioulou Cissoko).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lsUP08SWeM

people hating on "fact music" has always been tedious and is now getting seriously old

I don't hate it it all but it's definitely a kind of genre-not-genre at this point. In a lot of ways it makes more sense to group it together than to pretend otherwise.

Maybe equivalent to that early 2005 moment when all the dance music in germany felt both diverse and yet connected, and people weren't calling it "minimal" yet - you could have conceived of it as post-microhouse, house, electro-house, tech-house, techno etc depending on individual tracks/artists/labels but it still felt like one scene really.

oh i agree with that, and the sooner people agree on a decent term for it the better, but the hating is boring and mostly inaccurate

I don't care if people hating on "fact music" is tedious or old....i didn't say i hated it to create a grand entertaining event for the nation, I said it cos I think it's incredibly boring British people making faceless boring music.

Anyway negativity offers little to this thread.

ps how can hating be "inaccurate"...

shame on me I need to recheck my own opinion, I'm guilty of huge factual inaccuracy, I lost the tape when I interviewed myself and just made a bunch of shit up

do u mean

Guido - lovely lovely lovely (rolling post-dubstep/Purple Wow Sound thread for 2010)

?

the situation now is exponentially more fragmented, diverse, and confusing than 2005 pre/post minimal click micro techno.

plus 2005 was around when minimal began to lose its innovative and rigorous vitality and become the diluted elevator music for boutiques and bars it is today (at least in Berlin).

what music from today are you referring to, specifically...and what music from 2005 is the root of that

Now that 'minimal' has become pejorative, '2005 minimal' is a priori shit, and anything that was good was 'never really minimal'.

"diluted elevator music for boutiques and bars"

did this series of words come from ikea? i think the glue is showing???

Are there any online Villalobos mixes from the recent past? He was playing 'Blimey' ages ago right?

hahaha i just finished building some IKEA shelves... they make it pretty damn easy, and no need for glue at all :)

whatever you think of my choice of adjectives, that's exactly what minimal has become, lowest common denominator muzack for generic hipsters.

but true minimal will always occupy its rightful place in the center of the cannon (can't fuck with Brinkmann) and it will always be good music. copy cats swarm every genre and should be expected; they might confuse some youngsters and dilittantes but ultimately can not tarnish the awesomeness of the real deal. like Wynton Marsalis can never truly take away from our ancestors and their true descendants... but i digress.

Yeah, but minimal wasn't a sound so much as an prolonged event, people needed a convenient category so they made one, when it became inconvenient (when, as you say, copy cats and dilettantes swarmed it) they scrapped it, disowned it, and now make the same thing with a few minor tweaks and call it something else. Talking about what was real is kind of missing the picture, I think, because what constituted "minimal" is not only a very malleable, unstable thing (see Vasco's post), but, I would argue, doesn't really even affect Rob Hood, Thomas Brinkmann, etc. They predate the invention of the category of minimal as it was understood in 2006.

And that's, again, why still complaining about minimal today is irrelevant, given that it barely exists except to talk about how bad it was.

Frivolous track is really good. Not legions away from Midnight Black Indulgence. I like this and the recent Markus Nikoli on Perlon, they have the same micro-house familiarity. I've looked and can't find a proper definition of FACT music.. is it what was being called Wonky?

see your point EDB and i know what you mean by "barely exists", but here in Berlin it's literally EVERYWHERE. in every shoe shop lounge wine bar and 9 out of 10 dance clubs. and that's why complaining about it is still very much relevant... for people who live in Berlin at least.

i dont think you got what he meant?

there is no such thing as FACT music. what people are refering to is the Nu-Garage Post-Dubstep Semi-Funky Not-Quite-House Whatever-Wonk Skwee-Beat stuff that FACT magazine just happen to champion a lot of.

what this thread is about is a dozen different "emergent" micro styles, with just as many diametrically opposed aesthetic tendencies as similarities.

there shouldn't be an umbrella term for all these often very different sounds. that would be both reductive and misleading.

Did shoe shops use to play better music?

EDM is saying that minimal is a superficial coinage which has zero effect on what i would say are the "true" practitioners. and it's a valid way of looking at it.

but even as a superficial label, it is ubiquitous. and it does exist now, if it didn't exist before: there is a barrage of the dreadful stuff coming through the pipes every day.

but how did this become about Minimal? shouldn't we be discussing Untold or something?

"Did shoe shops use to play better music?"

good point. i'd rather hear Mobilee tracks rather than top 40 when i'm picking out trainers. but i don't want it on the dancefloor.

sorry nothing against Mobilee. just came to mind when trying to think of a typical "minimal" label.

I'd have thought Berlin, being sort of ahead of everyone else, would have been the first place to forget about it. I think in North America those that still talk about it are the sort of progressive/hard/big room DJ's against whom Minimal as a distinguishing term, and even then they've just as quickly gone back to doing their thing.

The other thing is that I think 2009 was a great year for music because people had largely gotten past all the fussing and feuding about what's what. Not only did techno blogs feel less like a warzone but the relative lack of central, framing concept in techno/house was really productive insofar as it allowed for a greater diversity of people to do their thing without it (by producer's, DJ's or listeners) being forced into a convenient category, especially as ubiquitous and encompassing one as minimal or post-minimal deep house. That's why I think Bass/Fact music is in a good place, it's moving fast enough, in so many directions that it resists becoming homogenous, not only because there's lots of styles, but the way we percieve and relate to it feels less prescribed... maybe?

what neighborhood do you live in, zoom? i rarely hear minimal when i'm out and about in the city.

also, it seems weird to ascribe a single genre of music to FACT when the site tries to include everything from purple/wonky/whatever-step to matias aguayo to detroit techno. i'll agree that FACT's sphere of coverage feels slightly different from RA's -- more UK, less continental, basically -- but i hardly see FACT as having any singular agenda to push a given sound. if anything (and i say this as a supporter of the site/ friend of the editors), i think sometimes it seems like they're spreading themselves a little too thin, reaching out in every possible direction.

I don't really think of it as a really cohesive genre either, its just that Tim seems to feel that a lot of the space that could be occupied by "real" Funky has been taken up by slightly more crossover friendly and/or middle class variants of the music.

My position is to say alright then, well if there are legitimate differences in aesthetics here I know which I'm enjoying more at the moment. The editorial slant at FACT is generally very high quality, I've got immense respect for Mr Lea and Mr Sande. I don't seem to be able to love mainstream Funky for what it is at the moment so lets have a more general debate.

Some of my favorite techno made last year was from Zomby, which probably says more about my general ignorance regarding the genre than the level of music being made inside it. And yes a lot of this music is made by slightly more boring bedroom producers, not many Sebo Ks or Lucianos working in Britain at the moment. Except Sebo K bores me shitless, and the bedroom producers don't. Just because there's a difference in lifestyle doesn't mean there's a correlating difference in the quality of the music.

You throw in some of the antipathy that a few Funky DJs feel towards gays and I really start to wonder why I even bother. I wonder if Marcus Nasty has any conception of how much his music owes to the legacy of "poofs". I should probably just unfriend him on Facebook.

I guess my point is that its not generally a good idea to alienate the gays if you want your scene to be thought of as cosmopolitan, friendly, or even just a fun night out.

Not that that really matters because it'll likely be years before any of these DJs or producers even make it to the American Midwest. I'd have to go to Canada to see a Funky DJ at this point.

Anyone liking this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dv_0d0rz0k

Kind of dubby disco not disco. Nice low end.

"what neighborhood do you live in, zoom? i rarely hear minimal when i'm out and about in the city."

i'm in p-berg and if you go in the boutiques in mitte, i.e. hackeschermarkt or kastanienallee, or bars for upwardly mobile hipsters, in a lot of them you get the obligatory and quaint MNML sonic wall paper. seems to be the ubiquitous musical expression of modern designer simplicity chic (talk about IKEA mentality). i was in a shoe shop in a mall once, i think it was Alexa actually, and they were playing minimal techno. but i may be exaggerating because some of them do play different music, LIKE ELECTRO. and it's just everywhere at night no? from watergate to cookies this lifeless brainless formulaic untz untz. sorry to go on about this... probably only thing worse than boring music is talking about it.

yeah lets all stop the FACT joke, which never was anything more than a casual joke thrown in for entire lack of better, RIGHT NOW before it gets out of control.

marcus nasty is a homophobe? strange and strange i didn't know that. ironic that when he played at the Villa last year i heard he cleared the room with his soulful sweet R'n'B tinged sound. because you know, Berliners want mechanical lifeless Robot Musik and nothing else, and they probably all thought he was gay...

I'm not calling him a homophobe.

He just made a posting on his Facebook about how all the guys who make Funky Skanks are basically doing the same thing as the Village People, ie they're all just a bunch of poofs. Its not an attitude I find particularly surprising, Funky tends to be very very hetero from what I can see of it online.

Sort of ironic considering most of the people who like it on here are either gay or bisexual.

A lot of the fanbase seems to be coming out of RnB/Bashment/Grime.

You should probably ask Lex, or someone closer to the scene like Martin if you want to know for sure. I'm American, this is my perception of it, it could very well be off base. There was certainly plenty of homophobia in Bassline House and Grime, and I'm not particularly into modern Dancehall either.

And to be perfectly clear, I think he's an incredible DJ. Got a lot of admiration for his skills.

I understand why Tim is such a huge fan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rTcxpS1TL0

I find the fact that this exists deeply deeply amusing.

Kind of curious to hear the Cooly G remix as well, can't seem to find a decent version of it.

i haven't mustered the strength to hear those ke$ha remixes yet. god, ke$ha is a pox on pop music.

it doesn't surprise me that marcus nasty uses unreconstructed language re: gays - i'm kinda inured to it from years of being into grime and hip-hop anyway - though i've never seen any evidence of homophobia on twitter so i doubt it's thought through or anything.

it's funny that tim et al love to pigeonhole "fact music" - i'm very pro-the genre-not-genre they refer to but the stuff i write about for fact is, like, gucci mane and rihanna and dizzee rascal.

there's a huge gay funky/dancehall night in london (shystie, lady chann, kyla and donae'o have all played it) that i've been meaning to go to for a while - got as far as planning a night out to it (with mosca and melissa b, lol) then of course i got a sodding chest infection on the day :((((

this: The Crystal Ark is the fourth recording guise that Russom has used for DFA to date. He is perhaps best-known for his collaborations with Delia Gonzalez on a range of projects, including the album Days of Mars; last year he released a solo album of off-kilter acid house as Black Meteoric Star.

The inspiration for The Crystal Ark came when Russom spent five weeks performing in, and travelling around, Brazil – absorbing the sounds of carioca funk, atabaque drumming, tropicalia and South American club styles. At the same time he was preoccupied with the work of Belgian rave supremos Praga Khan and Nikki Van Lierop, particularly their classic Phantasia 12″s ‘Inner Light’ and ‘Violet Skies’. The Crystal Ark is his attempt to combine these two disparate strains of party music.

yeah, keen to hear that!

really like that space dimension controller track alan, have never heard that before.

i've been a bit out of the loop lately. saw trevor jackson spin on the weekend, that was the first bit of '10 clubbing for me. small crowd but everybody was into it.

yesn enjoying the space dimension controller also, it reminds me of CYLOB LOL

it's funny that tim et al love to pigeonhole "fact music" - i'm very pro-the genre-not-genre they refer to but the stuff i write about for fact is, like, gucci mane and rihanna and dizzee rascal.

It's funny that lex et al love to pigeonhole "pitchfork music" - the stuff I write for pitchfork is, like, electrik red and radio slave and uk funky comps.

i'm in p-berg and if you go in the boutiques in mitte, i.e. hackeschermarkt or kastanienallee, or bars for upwardly mobile hipsters

See, that's your problem right there. (I'm sort of kidding, but there is something to it; as you point out, mnml is indeed one of the currently privileged soundtracks to upwardly mobile commerce & leisure these days. Have you heard the intro to Seth Troxler's Boogie Bytes? Something about "running around mitte and prenzlauer berg with nothing to do, taking drugs, this is our life..." Bit of a shame as I quite like Seth and his music, but that intro is the most incredibly vapid thing. Part of me thinks it's tongue-in-cheek, but it's really not clear....)

i wish to god that cooly g would let slip the instrumental of her ke$ha remix -- the beat itself is stunning, but it's completely ruined by the vocals. ke$ha's a fucking abomination.

ke$ha seems like a really weird choice of track to be rmxing for both of those guys, esp untold?

how often is this gay funky night?

Fuck Ke$ha and fuck Untold and Cooly G for remixing her.

fuck you

not after I've remixed her too

fuck

Just kidding lex btw.

The new Mosca "mini-mix" on (duh) FACT is pretty great.

haven't heard that yet but he was super-awesome at fabric the other week (on same bill as todd the god <3 ), dropping "the bomb" among other stuff. have you heard "nike" yet? really quite excellent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOSwp9TiSlQ

Yeah it's great. Very clever how it constantly switches up.

I would happily call this "dubstep" actually. I almost feel sorry for dubstep that so many of this sphere of artists seem uncomfortable with the term (though that is hardly surprising).

that's nice!

Well if the first thing that comes in to people's minds when they hear the word Dubstep is a resonant "FACKK!" followed by some LFO stupidity, you wouldn't want to be a dubstep DJ either.

I don't use the word because I've never cut a dub in my life, seems kind of hypocritical.

Who is this Mosca character? Pretty nice track, that "Nike." I love that more and more people are exploring tempos like this one.

No idea where Mosca came from but that's a pretty wicked single.

yeah, that's insanely good.

There's a FACT Profile on him with attendant DJ mix here:

http://www.factmag.com/2010/01/22/10-producers-to-watch-in-2010-part-two/3/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAx1ZaIMxaA

I have been lookin for a thread like this to talk about::

FEAR
OF
TIGERS

omg omg so good!!!!

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

Is that Fear of Tigers song some sort of hommage to the Rhythm of the Night? They share the same verses don't they? Haven't heard the song in years.

@stevie d: no offense, man. but i think that belongs in the rolling indie thread.

ok i love love love mosca and "nike" but i would also like to know why, when i post that, it gets a ton of omgs, but when i hype subeena, no one responds? subeena is so so so underrated so far. i swear i'm going to change that.

I want to get "Nike", but its 'album only' on iTunes. Are any of the remixes good enough to justify buying the whole EP?

Lex I don't really have a strong opinion on Subeena but what I've heard sounds a LOT like mid-nineties techno - perhaps it's that the superficial familiarity prevents from people making an immediate passionate commitment.

loving this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxzqgAZa_4E

12" also has a tensnake remix of the a-side

both Analyse and Excuse Me by Subeena really remind me of LFO and Black Dog. i like that kind of thing, so this is good.

subeena is okay but she's really understated. i still haven't heard a song by her that registers as more that "hum, that's nice"

i think what really strikes me about subeena is how versatile she is - yeah "boksd" is a bit of a throwback (if exquisitely executed) to, idk, border community or future sound of london depending how far back you want to go, but then she can get grimy and nasty on "znare" and amazingly soulful on "solidify", which probably has the best use of vocals i've heard in dubstep-not-dubstep...

her next single "picture" has some ridiculously awesome electronic harpsichord action btw

this is absolutely suuuuuuuuuuperb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOZS9rAtxFs

this thread needs more youtubes

i like this recent Ikonika

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb5Mv_sNwNY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WA8L1LcMdg

R O C K O U T!!!!!!

solidify is a goddam slow jam! reminds me of a dubstepnotdubstep soul ii soul which is a v good thing obv

can we set up a separate fact thread

You can totally go start your own house and techno thread if you want.

What are you enjoying right now?

I haven't really kept up with your site recently.

enjoying fish 3/4 times a week, regular running, drama classes, and work....v fulfilling.

i've never heard of any of these LG genres

reading the death of virgil on the tube

Kinda funny how there's now this really strong slide back into 1990s values w/r/t dance music - basicaly everything is once again 1) stripped down pummelling techno 2) spacey dub techno 3) soulful deep house 4) IDM/"album dance" (this thread so far I guess).

What I liked about minimal at the time is that it sorta combined all of these tendencies but also added an air of quasi-ravey populism it inherited from electro-house on the one hand and serious drug consumption on the other (what's also true about all four of the above is that they're radically opposed to/distant from/ignorant of current popular dance - not gonna hear or read about "Riverside Mutha****er" in these circles - but this was a process that started with minimal so you could argue that it's minimal's "fault" or at least its chickens coming home to roost).

Which meant that the kind of values listeners would bring to the table were kept in suspension somewhat, people were bigging up the same tracks for what would in other settings be mutually exclusive reasons.

Whereas these days I find a depressingly large proportion of the music criticsm about all these different corners boring/lazy/rote/myopic even when i'm really enjoying the music.

there is no such thing as FACT music. what people are refering to is the Nu-Garage Post-Dubstep Semi-Funky Not-Quite-House Whatever-Wonk Skwee-Beat stuff that FACT magazine just happen to champion a lot of.

what this thread is about is a dozen different "emergent" micro styles, with just as many diametrically opposed aesthetic tendencies as similarities.

there shouldn't be an umbrella term for all these often very different sounds. that would be both reductive and misleading.

thanks. i think this is the most spot on thing posted in thread so far.

phil - arent those aardvark things called bloom? or is that a different thing altogether? i've got a couple of the bloom whites, they're crazy. heavy dubstep but it's incredibly dry and brittle which makes it work.

i'm not sure how i feel about that new subeena. i think it'll grow on me. i love most of her stuff tho.

what this thread is about is a dozen different "emergent" micro styles, with just as many diametrically opposed aesthetic tendencies as similarities.

Well this thread is "about" "rolling dance partisans" so that's a no brainer surely.

tom - yeah, you're right. pretty sure this is where i got them:
http://www.zero-inch.com/artist/Aardvarck

the more i listen to mosca's "square one" and "nike" (man, i gotta find that on vinyl), the crazier i am about it.

tim, i can't say i don't agree with you about dance criticism at the moment, although i'm also wondering how much of it has to do with the media at hand and the culture at large -- frankly, between atrophying print and the internet eating its own tail, i feel like criticism (hell, THOUGHT in general) is not in wonderful health.

but i would like to hear you talk a little more about "populist values" -- i think you were digging into this on the P&J thread, and while i'm theoretically sympathetic to your position, i also have a knee-jerk reaction that's like, "so what?" oof, i keep writing long, tail-eating responses to your posts and i end up deleting them all -- essentially, i want to write from a position of my own subjective tastes (and i know how overdetermined that position is), though i do understand the, let's call it, *sociological* value of a populist-focused criticism. (though so often it feels to me like a kind of willful contrarianism -- not from you, but from lots of critics.) anyway, i'll cut my rambling here and ask you, what are the populist forms of dance music getting right that the others aren't? (and what exactly does it mean for forms of music to be non-populist, really? are people with niche tastes not people too?) i'm not taking the piss, i'm genuinely curious.

I'm not really into what I would call popular/populist dance music at the moment - or, rather, what i said this time two years ago holds true, that is:

1) Too little of what it is popular and good is populist
2) Too little of what it is populist and good is popular
3) Too little of what it is popular and populist is good

And I don't think "populist forms of dance music" (to the extent that it exists) is getting things right.

At any rate 90% of what I write about these days is UK Funky so I am almost the most niche of all (I reckon UK Funky by and large falls into category (2) above).

My reading is that the more dance music criticism generally falls out of touch with (for want of a better term) populist impulses, the more over-determined by its own heirarchical values it becomes. There's a sense in which populist scenes will produce anthems unexpectedly, or outside the watch of music critics, who then have to run to catch up. It keeps people on their toes. Whereas what I see with the splitting I described above is that the relationship between what's big critically and what's big on the "scenes" (assuming the scene in question is a genuine object of focus) is much more rigidly co-extensive. This encourages the ossification of musical values around particular shared assumptions.

Conversely "populist" dance music suffers from this separation because there's simply a void of good criticism trying genuinely to explain or account for it.

how can too little of what is popular and good be populist? are you saying powerful elites are driving elitist music into popularity?

No... but obv scenes that would model themselves as anti-populist are more popular in terms of the size/proportion of their audience - i.e. there are more people who buy into anti-populist notions of deep house or "proper" techno than 5 years ago.

And often this music is good (hence the formulation)! At any rate when I say "too little" for each of thse, I'm saying this not as some kind of general qualitative judgment (i.e. "... and this is definitely a bad thing in and of itself) but rather as reasons why dance music seems very disconnected from populism at the moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVHSDs3rggw

This was my favorite song last year, it is both very good and very populist.

I don't know if its popular because I don't live in Europe.

But I do get your point, and I'd say that things are so fractured right now that the only thing we all can really agree about is that we mostly don't agree about anything. I'm into deep house, dubstep, IDM and associated styles, and disco mostly. I'm pretty certain there isn't anyone else exactly like that on this thread, or even this board.

And don't hate me for the ear worm, its Saint Etienne's fault.

Oh man, I need to re-read that when I don't have several glasses of wine in me. (But thanks, Tim!)

Just saw this; I already love the Polargeist and "Nike" posted upthread, so thank you.

Really really like the Deadbeat mix (Phil wrote liner notes).

But Siah, what you say resonates with me, and also sounds like... just about everyone else I know. It seems like everyone is into deep house, dubstep, IDM and associated styles, and disco. (Plus some drone and doom.) So is this the symptom, the cure or neither?

I must admit I'm unclear on the distinction between "popular" and "populist" at the moment, as well.

Also, I'll admit to being distrustful of populism because, basically, I don't like people very much. With the occasional, crucial exception. (Wait, that might not be true. But I trust that anyone who lived in Bush's America knows what I mean.)

LOL phil drinking wine at 8:30 Thursday morning :D here i am with my cup of jasmine tea... and the fact that it's only been several glasses implies that it wasn't a late night but rather an early morning? that's the kind of dance music critic for me.

I think I might know what you mean Phil.

And I don't know how unusual my taste is in in London or Berlin, but for a factory worker in Wisconsin its downright bizarre. Music for me is pure escapism, and its one of the reasons I don't tolerate a lot of hatespeech in my musical interests. I get too much homophobia in my daily life to want to have it in my escapism. So yeah, I don't like people either really.

That being said I think it is very important for dance music to be for the people, and not made despite them. If there is something I can't defend about my tastes its that they tend to be a little elitist, and this is something I really really need to change about myself.

I really admire what Chuck Eddy does with his engagement with Modern Country, even if I hate and despise 99.9999% of the genre. I think what Deej and the whole swag crew do is very important as well, because they're paying attention to what is happening in the culture. They're engaged, and I'm just desperately trying to escape it. Other than an occasional Lady Gaga or Shakira song.

So I don't know, don't want this to be about me. Lets talk about the music.

Also, I'll admit to being distrustful of populism because, basically, I don't like people very much. With the occasional, crucial exception. (Wait, that might not be true. But I trust that anyone who lived in Bush's America knows what I mean.)

I know you don't mean it this way Phil but in case there's any doubt whatsoever let me note that this would be a rather specious link to make - I'm not sure why populism w/r/t dance music would be any more like Bush's America than Obama's America - both are populist movements. The fact that something is populist is not a point in favour of it being correct or incorrect, really it ought to be value-natural.

At any rate I'm not complaining that music critics don't like Sidney Samson. I'm saying that a dance music crit discourse which is entirely ignorant of and cocooned from the existence of popular dance music ultimately will suffer atrophy as a result.

I think it's common ground that dance music criticism is becoming increasingly detached from any sense that the "natural" (always a dubious term, granted) setting for dance music is the dancefloor, increasingly accepting that 99% of the experience of music now labelled dance music will occur in isolated and individualistic settings.

In some ways this has been a positive change - I'd not want to promote hyper-functionalist mixmag capsule reviews of records based on strict and unchanging notions of how the given style as a superior model.

But I was definitely more enthused about the possibilities-for-criticism in that not-so-long-ago moment when dance music and pop music and art music could not be distinguished from one another - Jacques Lu Cont, say.

Whereas now everyone is claiming to belong to an underground - though perhaps because because few if any artists are successful enough to pass themselves off as "overground"? - and the result is a cheapened currency of indiefied dance music criticism. Of course we live in a time of unparalleled hyper-eclecticism and inter-genre cross-fertilisation, and yet there's a sense in which what all of this can mean is narrowing.

The difference is that there isn't a popular dance music culture in the US the same way there is in the UK or Germany. Well, there is, but it's called hip-hop. House music and its relatives are marginalized subcultures, so it's natural for American house music fans to have an uneasy relationship with populism. What did populism ever do for us?

The difference between a Montreal dance floor and a Boston dance floor playing the same music? The siege mentality on the Boston floor.

Actually there was a popular dance culture in the US for years.

And then it was very forcefully rejected by the mainstream, even violently rejected.

My dad was at the game the day after Disco Demolition Day, said it still smelled like burning vinyl. Every genre of music descended from disco in the US wears this memory like a scar.

Its been almost 20 years since Pop House and High NRG were in the charts, and the last 2 or 3 of having the whole Justin Timberlake related resurgence of trance hasn't felt like much of a consolation prize. I'm still very happy to call myself a New Jack, because mainstream Rap despises me on nearly every single level. Fuck em. I'll listen to RnB.

tim, i don't think dance music crit has EVER engaged w/the truly popular/populist forms of dance music: the commercial dance in the charts, what used to be funky house five years ago, happy hardcore, the continued popularity of drum'n'bass and so on. every dance scene i've been into has been a niche (electroclash/electrohouse/mnml/uk funky/dubstep-not-dubstep) and this is fine, but inventing an umbrella term of "fact music" and then dismissing it on specious grounds just isn't accurate! and you do seem to be dismissing it in unwisely generalist terms - rarely criticising specific artists, often hand-waving about "the music writing" around it, which, a) doesn't matter b) who exactly do you mean? i've seen lots of great writing about this scene, but if you fixate on what some groping-in-the-dark american article has to say instead of what, eg, dan hancox, melissa bradshaw, tom lea, joe muggs and a bunch of others have been writing, of course you'll get pissed off. i also need to know whether i need to be personally offended on behalf of my friends if you're referring to them.

anyway back 2 the music!!! i've just got around to this terrific greena mix: http://www.xlr8r.com/podcast/2010/01/greena

just look at the tracklist! ooh shit damn~~~

01 Omar S "Flying Gorgars" (FXHE)
02 Carl Craig "Sandstorms" (Planet E)
03 Mosca "Nike" (Night Slugs)
04 Ghosts on Tape "Predator Mode (Roska Remix)" (Wireblock)
05 Afrojack "Cheese" (Wall)
06 DJ Funk "Dik Work" (Funk)
07 Geeneus "Ultrafunkula" (Warp)
08 Jam City "Let Me Bang Remix"
09 Major Lazer feat. Nina Sky "Keep It Goin' Louder" (Mad Decent)
10 Julio Bashmore "Um Bongo (Deadboy Remix)"
11 DJ Mystery & Natalie K "Speechless" (white)
12 Untold "Bad Girls" (Fabric)
13 Terror Danjah "Acid" (Hyperdub)
14 Kingdom "You" (Fool's Gold)
15 Martinez Bros "My Rendition (Bonus Beats)" (Objektivity)
16 Mya "Free (Brackles bootleg)"
17 Karizma "33rd Street Anthem" (ITH)
18 DJ T "Dis" (Get Physical)
19 Villalobos "Chromosul" (Perlon)
20 Apple "Dutty Dance" (white)
21 Bok Bok "Ripe Banana VIP"
22 Mosca "Square One (Greena Remix VIP)" (Night Slugs)
23 L-Vis 1990 "Untitled"
24 Ikonika "The Idiot"
25 Claude VonStroke "Monster Island" (Dirtybird)
26 Electrik Red "Freaky Freaky" (Def Jam)
27 Davinche "Megadrive" (white)
28 Low Deep "Down Like That" (white)
29 Terror Danjah feat. Sadie Ama & Kano "So Sure" (white)

greena's "tenzado" is amazing too - think it got lost at the tail end of the 09 threads, this is just a snippet but i LOVE the cut-up vox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6YuKFL97Jk

Lex you seem to be imagining all sorts of things that i'm saying that i'm not.

Where i have dismissed FACT music?

Where I have dissed your friends (the fact that they're your friends would be a bad argument anyway though i'm sure you'll agree)?

Seriously, you keep on saying I'm misrepresenting things but I reckon I've been incredibly careful/judicious/polite throughout. I'd like evidence of my extremism please.

Anyway my point is that it's further from populism than ever - and in fact if you go back to the post Philip quizzed me on, my reference to populism was totally a side-point, and I blamed minimal anyway...

At any rate my comments in here are more about Resident Advisor than FACT, to the extent that they're about any one music site - which they're not at all. The same issues are applicable w/r/t local dance music writing over here as well.

fwiw dance music waxes & wanes as 'popular' in the states, obv in the early 90s it was pretty huge circa jock jams

I want to get "Nike", but its 'album only' on iTunes. Are any of the remixes good enough to justify buying the whole EP?

the vinyl release is just square one, nike, sq. one roska remix fwiw.

Deej I sort of feel like the stuff that's actually really popular over here (at least) right now is very jock jam ish...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u43wTjRzxco&feature=fvst

I think I see these dudes or their equivs every time I go out btw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvoL1yKIYcs

All the dance shows on commercial radio here seem to be switching from mersh electrohouse as their mainstay to a kind of Vato Gonzalez style caribbean-electro-minimal, dominated by Afrojack (dude who co-produced "Pon De Floor). I spose this is basically a logical development from the various directions implied by Fedde De Grand, Guetta rap collab-os and the commercial end of Frankendance, but I find it interesting because I'd started to just blithely assume that commercial dance fans were pretty anti syncopation of any sort.

ha ha I guess it's the charts version of FACT Music! Don't shoot me dudes.

Anyway maybe it's a local thing because I see quite a few references to local dance styles (e.g. obv The Melbourne Shuffle) in youtube comments for this stuff.

Where i have dismissed FACT music?

you pretty much invented that (misleading) label! and have been dismissive of it pretty much every time out - the occasional clarification that it's the criticism you dislike rather than the music doesn't wash i'm afraid when you haven't really engaged with the latter.

Whereas these days I find a depressingly large proportion of the music criticsm about all these different corners boring/lazy/rote/myopic even when i'm really enjoying the music.

^^i mean, who exactly are you talking about? name names! because i've seen lots of both bad and good dance writing over the past year, and it's not disproportionate enough either way for me to invent a category for the purposes of dismissing it.

Me upthread:

I don't hate it it all but it's definitely a kind of genre-not-genre at this point. In a lot of ways it makes more sense to group it together than to pretend otherwise.

You in response:

oh i agree with that, and the sooner people agree on a decent term for it the better, but the hating is boring and mostly inaccurate

you pretty much invented that (misleading) label! and have been dismissive of it pretty much every time out - the occasional clarification that it's the criticism you dislike rather than the music doesn't wash i'm afraid when you haven't really engaged with the latter.

Not constantly stanning for != not engaging. I've listened to Bok Bok/L-Vis, Mosca, Greena, Untold, Joker, Ikonika, Subeena, Jam City, Hot City (who is great btw), Guido, Joy Orbison, Martyn, Ramadanman/Pearson Sound, Brackles, Martin Kemp, Julio Bashmore, Doc Daneeka, Scuba, Kingdom, Deadboy... I could go on for a while here obv.

I think the only artists whose name I hear a lot who I haven't consciously checked so far are Gemmy, Actress and Starkey.

Anyway, M*ml Ssgs is an obvious example of the entire approach to crit I'm talking about, though I know and really like P3te Ch4mb3rs in person so I've been reluctant to use that as a dartboard.

And I've read heaps of post-Pipecock stuff w/r/t deep house, it's practically the in-house style for half the people covering that music (and perhaps when I say "music criticism" I should extend this to "discourse about the music" - the worst stuff is in RA's comments boxes of course).

With Fact criticism, the writing is actually the best of the groups by and large, though what i've said is that the writing is actually very similar to pitchfork in feel and tone and the way in which it frames artists, which speaks both to the way in which it now effectively occupies pitchfork's position w/r/t lots of different electronic music, and to the way in which pitchfork-indie-style values have now been disseminated across the board. This would seem like a mortal insult to you of course Lex, but given I write for pitchfork obv I'm not gonna mean it to be particularly nasty.

it really does seem to me that moaning about the criticism and then backing that up with pipecock (a fucking messageboard poster! who cares!) and RA comments boxes and...what is that ssgs thing? - is slightly weak when there are tons of writers and journalists covering those artists really well.

No i'm saying post-pipecock (as in "like him"). Mnml Ssgs is probably the biggest blog with respect to techno/ambient etc. stuff. Or with Little White Earbuds anyway (whose field differs slightly). They get people like Redshape to do podcasts.

When you say "those artists" do you mean (ha) Fact Music? Because in case it's not clear my comments were not at all targeted at that specifically - e.g. mnml ssgs is about techno primarily.

I mean I've been trying to approach this thread as being about dance music generally, that's the idea yeah? This is not about me vs your friends.

That last bit not meant to be snarky, just trying to be as clear as possible since everything I say seems to inspire such rage in people at the moment!

At any rate I could spend ages trying to find articles I've found boring or derivative but that seems like a fairly lugubrious exercise.

Really really like the Deadbeat mix (Phil wrote liner notes).

more info?

I think the only artists whose name I hear a lot who I haven't consciously checked so far are Gemmy, Actress and Starkey.

actress is his own thing man. i'm not sure he's influenced by a single person you just listed, his sound is very singular, detroit house filtered through south london. you cant group him with any of those people.

check him out though, really, he's an incredible musician. his music took a long time to gel and form with me, but it's something else.

btw tim do you think you could pm me your email on dissensus?

Cutty: Radio Rothko, dub/techno mix, very minimalist, takes a while to rev up, really really nice throughout. Out 3/1 on the Agriculture.

who all here is on dissensus and what is your screen name there? i am zhao.

is hot city the same as hott city?

wait, i thought this hott city thing was like nu-disco and didn't know why u were listing it there but it turns out that its like classic 1979 shit
/retard

re: the above argument....the onus is on you lex to say where the good music writing is....if you're refuting tim's comments.

personally I think after however many years of online music writing/reading the whole thing is pretty stagnant (to me). sure it's easy to say that after you've quit something but in a world where there is a free platform to describe anything you wanty, electronic music writing is, possibly moreso than ever, the athlete's foot on the sole of many other form's of the written word.

it's ugly, partisan, facile, lacking in any complexity. maybe other genre music writing is just as bad, maybe it always was this bad but I don't think so, it's just an echo chamber currently, it's not about writing it's just about aligning oneself to a partisan cause and hammering away at that for however many months/weeks. and if it's not resentful of some barely alive "other" it's just really awful adjectival dull sexless shit....

and yeah it's easy to criticise...but I was in Berlin recently and practically everyone you speak to, DJs, producers, whatever, has this "fuck music writing" attitude regardless of their intelligence...

Haha that doesn't necessarily make dance people or Berlin residents any different than any other kind of musician.

i gotta say music writing has pretty bad pr

i like music writing. sometimes. not that what Loco Garda is describing is not ringing true on many levels.

interested in what some reasons you might give for electronic music journalism allegedly being in worse shape than other kinds of music journalism, Mr Garda. might it be the general fragmentation and confusion of the music which easily leads to partisan in-fighting? and why is partisanship necessarily a bad thing? can it, realistically or theoretically, give rise to good writing? i don't read much music writing (wire subscription ran out years ago and never bothered to renew, mostly skip and go straight to samples on boomkat, etc), but i have a hard time imagining that compared to dance music writing, say, indie rock writing, is in robust health.

Music writing on blogs, and in review sites is basically my only point of access for the vast majority of music I listen to. I'm not a critic, I'm a bedroom DJ. So from that perspective I would prefer for the writing to continue.

I honestly don't give a damn whether the writing is great or shoddy as long as the critical tastes driving it are relatively reliable, fortunately a lot of dance critics have fairly good taste in dance music. I could see how from an artists perspective a lot of the critical attempts to place narratives on what is admittedly a wildly chaotic and severely fractured group of musical scenes as (at the very least) moderately annoying.

My question for anyone who is committed to critical writing on a professional level is this:
why should I care? Why should I care about this music, and why do I need to spend my time listening to it? As someone who has a problem with getting obsessively and emotionally attached to individual scene aesthetics I've become increasingly tentative about sinking myself into new ones. The UK puts out great music in a relatively reliable cyclical pattern, why not just wait around until the next cycle if I'm not hugely into this one?

Thats not aimed at anyone in particular, just thinking out loud.

And I say it as someone who enjoys and is excited by a lot of music on this thread.

For an example, I've downloaded two XLR8R podcasts in the last day.

I really don't expect great writing from them, but they do tend to have an ability to find good music and distribute it. Which is all I really want from them, my local DJ shop wouldn't stock any of this stuff unless I had them order it for me. I'm an ocean away from the scene in Europe, and a long flight away from the coasts. I'm not driving to Chicago just to buy records and to hear the latest news about what going on in dance music. This is what I expect from Resident Advisor, FACT, XLR8R and the many, many blogs out there.

Most of the music I buy is boogie and disco out of dollar bins, I don't really support any of these scenes materially because I legitimately can no longer afford to. Dance music criticism should keep an eye towards its functional value first, to spread news and to critique from a DJ's perspective. I'd say Resident Advisor does both of those very well, and FACT is basically the Pitchfork of electronic dance. Which is why I use it to try to convert indie oriented friends.

Local Garda, I do hear your complaints as both legitimate and valid.

But if I were to take them to heart they'd rob me of some of the joy in my life, and thats something that is in short supply at the moment. I need to care about something, this is whats available in the small section of the web that I follow.

Sorry I'm posting on an iPhone all week so typos possibly undermine my argument...

Yeah as an info source the blogs etc all do a job, but that's sort of the least you expect.

When I cited that Berlin thing I don't mean that I am speaking to some major elite or whatever, just that the people I know who live there are prob the most involved and active house/techno fans I know...

Of course people always hate on music writing but I do feel like lots of people who are open to it dislike it currently.

And yeah maybe it's just as bad outside techno...but I'm not convinced.

Nb I haven't read fact since that horrible hawtin piece with the mocking "disableds" etc etc

fwiw i didn't mean to defend techno writing - really no idea what the state of that's like at the moment - it was more of a point that tim seems to rag on the likes of cooly g, bok bok et al for being written about in a boring way, and it's the writing about that scene that i think can be really good. not gonna bother digging it up as i've been posting links to great articles &c &c for the best part of a year now and if you didn't read them then you're not going to read them now.

BTW Lex I don't mean to offend by comparing Pitchfork and FACT.

I'm just comparing both institutions ability to shape some of the narratives around the music they cover through their writing and their editorial slant. Its not a value judgement in either direction really.

if you mean this Fact Hawtin piece: http://www.factmag.com/2009/05/09/richie-hawtins-10-most-ridiculous-ideas/

I thought it was hilarious and want more of this kind of fluff

Lex, again, I wasn't ragging on writing about cooly g and bok bok.

Sure I have issues with the way in which cooly g/scratcha/etc. have occasionally (not really by Fact, or except to a very very limited extent) been presented by some critics as somehow transcending creatively stale unadventurous funky, but that's an entirely separate issue.

LOL at how even I feel nervous about comparing FACT and Pitchfork in Lex's presence.

never mind comparing, merely mentions of pfork makes me a bit tetchy.

i actually agree w/you that the occasional presentation of those artists in that way vis-à-vis "proper" funky is horrible journalism (and mostly comes from a confused idea of what "proper" funky is - even lots of funky heads who do like this stuff haven't heard it due to it NOT BEING RELEASED UGH - maybe those writers just hear a couple of the cheesier/lazier skanks and extrapolate from those?) - BUT i don't think it's sufficiently disproportionate to bang the drum about it whenever cooly g's name comes up, and i also think that cooly g et al are making music which is dynamic and interesting enough that it deserves to be taken on its own terms, not the terms of a few lame-o hacks.

Okay will agree with all of that last paragraph. But you do know I really like Cooly G right.

yes but that "but..." is usually prefaced by many more words complaining about the press she gets so always seems a little lost!

dunno about the "unreleased" next level funky (and funny haven't heard anything resmbling that on pirate radio rips either), all i can attest to is the fact that the genre, on its own turf, not in the minds of outsider nerds, is predominantly populated by fickle tacky throw away bubblegum tunes not in the least concerned with "pushing things forward". as it should be i suppose.

Local Garda u may not seem to notice this but u do realise that you're being totally elitist in "u kno in berlin nobody cares whats on blogs" r whatever. Because to be honest a lot of ppl like Siah says upthread are consuming this stuff at a remove from the epicentres and they gotta get what they're given and construct their own app. of music 4om that persp.

^^^ otm

between this and dropping "dinner party music" or some equiv onto every fucking thread lately. you gotta reconnect with the common man or something

tbf you could make a case that any healthy scene is inherently elitist, in terms of being about ppl who are local & connected vs ppl who are far away and observing. the far-away ppl don't have anything like as much at stake as the local producers/audiences. /reynolds

obv the whole point of this board is ppl comparing perspectives from all difference places but you'd have to think the perspective of ppl in berlin wrt dance music & its writing is an, uh, interesting one?

yeah i do, but i think that competing versions of the truth are important for the lol techno diaspora r whatever, so dismissing vast swathes of listeners bc they're "not here and dont get it" seems not just dumb but really douchey

i agree but i don't think that's what LG was suggesting but i won't speak for him!

i dunno terms coffee table music and dinner party music seem like pretty solid designations of "wrong ways to listen to music" which of course these awesome berliners arent guilty of but this is like 50% migraine talk so

I think I clarified the berlin thing...if you look a few posts later. Actually tho I'd like if more "outsiders" had things to say about dance music.

"coffee table music and dinner party music seem like pretty solid designations of "wrong ways to listen to music" which of course these awesome berliners arent guilty of"

of course not. but does brain-dead going-through-the motion half-dancing to vacuous formulaic shit count? oh wait there's a fair bit of coffee table music here too.

berlin is a coffee table

i think anyone can get away with "coffee table music" if they're talking about goldfrapp...

dunno about the "unreleased" next level funky (and funny haven't heard anything resmbling that on pirate radio rips either), all i can attest to is the fact that the genre, on its own turf, not in the minds of outsider nerds, is predominantly populated by fickle tacky throw away bubblegum tunes not in the least concerned with "pushing things forward". as it should be i suppose.

Is there a way I'm supposed to read "fickle tacky throw away bubblegum tunes" so as not to make this a fairly ridiculous thing to say?

If all you mean that "funky isn't explicitly about futurism" then, sure, I get you, but otherwise this characterisation is way way way off base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMdf1onDkxA

This is completely unrelated to Funky, but I'm liking it.

Not exactly re-inventing the wheel here but I like what he does with the break. I think its from Got My Mind Made Up. Seriously check for his remix of that Nomi track too. Fairly epic.

Goddammit, thats twice now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYCNWwjKq-c

Sorry everybody.

I seriously am starting to think that my browser is just screwing with me.

How hard is it to copy and paste a Youtube link?

"Is there a way I'm supposed to read "fickle tacky throw away bubblegum tunes" so as not to make this a fairly ridiculous thing to say?

If all you mean that "funky isn't explicitly about futurism" then, sure, I get you, but otherwise this characterisation is way way way off base."

well i just meant all the really cheesy (to an outsider nerd) r'n'b vocal tunes. great fun sometimes, but often with not much depth, sonically or in terms of emotional content. and we all know there is a lot more of this kind of output than the kind we are mostly, presumably, into here.

you are a very vague and negative poster, as far as i've seen

it's like the strawman i've been ragging on tim for focusing on has come to life!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSUMZQQekf8

There's a part of me that wants Sa Ra to start making House, this is as close as I'm likely to get for the moment. New Dam Funk related music is always good anyways.

Zoom, my problems with Funky mostly revolve around my occasional inability to DJ the swung snares that are all over a lot of the tracks. I actually like the RnB sounding stuff a lot. Mostly I just don't enjoy the side of it that seems to be turning into uptempo Dancehall.

i love it the funky funky, i love them the funky not funky. i happen to listen to and play the funky not funky more. and i don't think there is anything wrong with making a distinction between the 2 (given that it isn't without too much subjective value judgement).

anything particularly "negative" or "straw man-ish" about that?

Reading this, I have a perfect mental image of a huge group of people, in Berlin, lining up in front of a club in the shape of a giant coffee table, discussing what tracks they're going to drop at their next dinner party.

Not exactly re-inventing the wheel here but I like what he does with the break. I think its from Got My Mind Made Up. Seriously check for his remix of that Nomi track too. Fairly epic.

This guy lives in my town (Porto.) Plays frequent sets at this riverside place cattering to thirtysomethings. Really great stuff and yet the dancefloor is never very full.

(err, Social Disco Club, not Dr.Dunks, who I guess you were talking about. Sorry.)

given that it IS without too much arbitrary value judgement - what i meant above. for what its worth. not much probably... ok carry on.

There's a part of me that wants Sa Ra to start making House

http://limelinx.com/files/4bb864f48e78d64fa7d6dc2db6060734

enjoy ;)

(not quite house, maybe, more in this genre: Mark E, The Revenge & Slow-Motion House/Disco)

Thanks Rev, this is great. They did that track with Rozzi Daime on the first one thats kind of 4x4, sounds more like their take on electroclash than anything really.

http://www.thefader.com/2010/01/28/the-xx-islands-falty-dl-remix-mp3/

I hear the new Falty DL is very boogie influenced BTW, Toby Tobias seems to like it.

This remix he did for the XX is one of the few things I've enjoyed by them.

was gonna bring up falty dl on this yesterday for some reason but i can't remember why

http://www.rushhour.nl/store_detailed.php?item=53091

Check the samples on that, me want.

I don't know anything about this stuff, but I am really enjoying Pantha du Prince's Black Noise (enough so that I might do some digging around in minimal techno and micro-house after all). But I guess maybe this is the tail end of something a bunch of you would have been excited about a few years back?

(I should at least try to hear Bliss anyway.)

You might like Lawrence's music too, they're very similar in style.

Kompakt: Search und Destroy

If you've got to start somewhere, this thread is a pretty good primer.

fuck that polargeist is a double hitter

yes!

"I'm Good for You" is really nice, thanks for posting that.

If anyone cares, I do this every month: http://www.avclub.com/articles/february-2010,37719/. Reason you might: I linked ten mixes I liked a lot in January. You might not know a couple.

matos, did you hear greena's xlr8r mix? think you'd like http://www.xlr8r.com/podcast/2010/01/greena

I have it queued but not played yet; will do soon. (I have something like 50 mixes either d/l'ed or in line to be, though I obviously can't get to all of them.)

yeah there are sooo many it's sort of distressing these days - that one's def worth it though

Awesome, thanks.

has anyone figured out what the vocal sample in mosca's "nike" is saying? it's driving crazy as it is stuck in my head all the time.

when i listened to it properly for the first time i was in a supermarket withit on myipod and i turned around to see where that noise was coming from

so good.

Thanks for that column Matos, I'm checking a few of those mixes.

That Boogie and Modern Soul one looks interesting, even if I'm sort of jealous that she has a few of those records.

There just aren't enough D-Train records in Wisconsin frankly.

Thanks to nice people on this thread I bought a copy of Mosca's Square One/Nike this weekend and have played it about 27 times.

http://soundcloud.com/ossieproducer/tracks

This is one of Luka's causes at the moment, I honestly don't know what its got to do with Funky really, sounds like a Broken Beat producer to me. A very good one, but still working in that vein.

Which totally suits me fine, I want everybody to get along.

Check that Michael Jackson remix, or the Omarion and Amerie ones.

If anyone's curious what I'm listening to BTW, this is my Last FM.

http://www.last.fm/user/ecchiTech

Add me people! I need more friends on there.

Ooh, I like Ossie's remix of Sandra Nkake almost as much as the Blackjoy one.

Sweet.

added u siah alan, there's a last.fm thread bobbing around somewhere too

soundcloud keeps not loading for me NNGGHHH

im very very pleased my general obnoxiousness doesnt stop you from checking out my recommendations.
ossie doesnt sound like funky too me much either but he does get played on some funky sets, tarantula mostly, which is not one of my favourites. i like the r&b remixes, particularly the why dont we fall in love one. i like ossie baba a great deal and as mentioned above Ossie's remix of Sandra Nkake is superb. im fairly sure he went to st bons catholic school in forest gate which is the alma mater of about 70% of the grime scene and i think quite a few of the up and coming funky producers. dont quote me on that though...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bonaventure%27s_Catholic_Comprehensive_School#Notable_alumni

the list of alumni is far from comprehensive (geddit?!) so so many people went there.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/72032852d2c5b351/

There's his Michael Jackson remix, in case Soundcloud keeps acting up.

http://www.zshare.net/audio/72032896b4529871/

And this is his remix of Sandra Nkake's cover of La Mauvaise Reputation.

I got both off of his Soundcloud, hope he doesn't mind. Thanks Luka for the tip!

Check out the Omarion remix too!

BTW Luka, I'm scarboi on Dissensus.

I DJ under the name Control CORPS, sometimes Babylon Sister.

I really need to stop collecting pseudonyms, nobody knows how to connect all the dots.

LOL @ "Babylon Sister"! Good name.

Yeah it works, I think I'm keeping that one.

Might lead to some confusion when a guy with a beard shows up for a DJ gig though.

If I heard that name I would expect nothing less though.

http://www.facebook.com/ossieproducer?ref=ts

quite a lot of free music through his facebook page. become a fan.

those ossie remixes!!!!!!! yes!

Anyone heard Discotexas' "Forbidden Cuts Vol. 1"? It reminds me of what Ed Banger would do if it had approached pre-Moroder nonsynth disco. It sounds kind of boring to me. Opinions?

I just tracked that release down Stevie, I'd heard of Moulinex from back when I was spending too much time on Hypemachine. So far its sounding very like early Daft Punk, French filter house kind of thing. Sounds like something that would have come out on Crydamoure, only a tiny bit more ADD.

I wonder if Moulinex is a fan of DJ Sneak at all?

Its not terrible, but neither is it terribly exciting.

I think you can still do great things with disco samples, and even by filtering them.

But this isn't really matching up with someone like Soundhack for me at least.

But then I get still get my kicks listening to deep house like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RrvcVs5Y_8

That Boogie and Modern Soul one looks interesting, even if I'm sort of jealous that she has a few of those records.

which mix are you referring to?

http://yearofmixtapes.blogspot.com/2010/01/week-33-post-disco-pre-house.html

It is very good, although I guess Chrissy is a guy. Sorry, I've never heard a man use that as a nickname before. I guess I really shouldn't be one to talk about unusual names though.

met that dude once.

too bad his productions are VOMITOUS.

I downloaded like 15 of those mixtapes and they're mostly phenomenal. How do we know he's a guy again?

Oh that pic! I just though it was a cute lez.

matos likes his stuff i know. its kinda library-ish for me, esp coming from a dude who is my demographic entirely (w/m/chicago/mid20s) & hes, like, dropping knowledge culled from internets i guess? i mean thats how we all do it now. im not sure what point im making. im sure some of these are cold, theres some good tracklists

a few thoughts:

- woh what happened to house/techno bobbins? i do welcome this more inclusive thread, tho.

- i really like the new santiago salazar single, and the aaron-carl remix. it's very detroit mid-90s vibe, but a nice breath of that every so often is just PERFECT.

- it's ugly, partisan, facile, lacking in any complexity. maybe other genre music writing is just as bad, maybe it always was this bad but I don't think so, it's just an echo chamber currently, it's not about writing it's just about aligning oneself to a partisan cause and hammering away at that for however many months/weeks. and if it's not resentful of some barely alive "other" it's just really awful adjectival dull sexless shit....

i mean, i understand some of ron4n's other comments, and feel kind of dirty whenever i'm 'at work,' but i also think that the above isn't really true. most of the electronic music writers i have contact with on a regular basis are hardly partisan— i'd even call them catholic— and pretty much all of them agree that there is a lot of interesting stuff churning out there at the moment, sometimes too much to keep up with... i don't really think anything i write is really that flarking great or anything, but the diversity of records that i give good marks to is certainly indicative to me of the general attitude most people i know have towards music and writing about it.

oh no, his MIXES are pretty good.. his productions are awful.

http://media.xlr8r.com/files/downloads/mp3s/3.Thighs%20%28feat.%20Miles%20Bonny%29.mp3

When I used the word partisan in the thread title I meant it in the sense of advocates for electronic dance music.

It wasn't meant to mean that a bunch of people with really narrow interests should use the thread, more the idea was to bounce various scenes off one another and try to have a broader understanding of where things are at at the moment. So far its doing very well at that.

There is a more standard House and Techno bobbins thread, although both genres are welcome in here.

I just can't seem to find any music that I enjoy at the moment that doesn't pull in influences from a very broad spectrum of times and places, so why restrict it to just House and Techno?

subeena posted upthread is a total slow burn slow jam, but makes me think its jamie woon i need to pay attention cos i used to love that burial wayfaring stranger thing

yah this sits right in the crosshairs b/w maybe kinda exp rnb/ triphop/ dubstep in a totally awesome way that i have not heard b4 but from those utubes of jamie woon i jus checked out, that is not the way to go to find more of this?

http://www.zshare.net/audio/725778045d4c9577

Salif Keita - Yamore (Luciano Remix)
Cobblestone Jazz - Traffic Jam
Luciano - Mousa Big Band
Junior Vasquez - If Madonna Calls (Junior's House Mix Radio Edit)
Congorock - Exodus (Malente Remix)
Slackk - Sweat Shop
Radio Slave - Koma Koma (Karizma Kaytronik Remix)
Ian Pooley - Celtic Cross (DJ Sneak's Hardbangin Mix)
DJ Hell - My Definition of House Music (Renaissance Man Bootcut)
Khenton Slash Demon - Singla
Lifelike - The Cult
Kelis - Flashback (Naked Music Remix 1)
Reggie Dokes - Let Me Go (Culoe De Song Remix)
Sandra Nkake - La Mauvaise Reputation (Ossie Baba Remix)
Voodeux - Skeleton Key
Blackjoy - Mercurian
Projection - Heart and Soul (LA Mix)
Kathy Brown - Can't Play Around (MAW Bonus Beats)
Sounds of Blackness - Everything Is Gonna Be Alright (Junior Vasquez Dub)
Michael Jackson - Remember (Ossie Baba 2010 Remix)

I posted this in the gay thread over on ILE, crossposting since I know not everyone here reads that.

Slackk is mostly Funky/Grime crossover but he's made some great beats lately.

Plaxico, you heard this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Ay7J2ing4

Different Jamie, and I'm not convinced its all the way successful at what its attempting.

Seems like the Glasgow producers are mostly best at remixing other artists.

yeah its pretty good but it doesnt have that zoned-out spaciness of the subeena

i keep wanting to post stuff in here but it keeps not being on youtube

hot city - no more
solo - the big stef/joga bola
nguzunguzu's free ep at http://www.wholeareas.com/
kingdom & shyvonne's "mind reader" is such a huge banger that i might even start a new thread for it at some point - it's at http://www.myspace.com/kkingdomm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=858VSsQBnGo

kingdom & shyvonne's "mind reader" is such a huge banger that i might even start a new thread for it at some point

Do it. Kingdom probably needs his own thread anyway.

i'm waiting for the original to exist on youtube so people will actually listen to it!

Kingdom Fabric Live promo mix on SoundCloud is very good. Personally, I think the Todd Edwards mixes are just amazing...

New AVC column, w/10 mixes (mostly from early Feb): http://www.avclub.com/articles/march-2010,38670/

nice, bookmarked

awesome matos! i really look forward to these columns.

the frivolous track is superb!!

Thanks, Tracer.

What happened to the rolling dubstep thread?

still knocking around: the genre known as dubstep - search and destroy

will definitely pick up oneman's rinse 11 - out this week.

also here: Guido - lovely lovely lovely (rolling post-dubstep/Purple Wow Sound thread for 2010)

These types of threads have been pretty quiet this year. What are people enjoying in the first three months?

Sk International, although that has nothing to do with techno

out on dvd shortly:

There have been many documentaries about dance music, either focusing on a broad survey of the music (Modulations, High Tech Soul) or backstage with certain superstars (Sasha and Digweed’s Delta Heavy, Tiësto in Concert), but none like Speaking in Code, which fixes the camera on a special set of characters and follows them for years—experiencing their triumphs, their failures and their near obsession with a music long forced to the fringes of mainstream culture. It is all spectacularly framed by Director/Producer Amy Grill and Cinematographer Scott Sans, who travelled to the world on a shoestring budget to bring the characters to life.

These characters include: Monolake, the inventor of music production program Abelton Live; Modeselektor, a DJ/production duo whose famous fans include Radiohead’s Thom Yorke; The Wighnomy Brothers, who, raised in East Germany, brought a new sound to the music and catapulted to success; Philip Sherburne, an established journalist and producer himself; and David Day, the director’s then-husband, who attempts to change a rock-centric American city. Together they form a near-perfect portrait of an underground, global community.

Filming began five years ago, and the squar3.com blog chronicled the journey. Word grew until everyone—from well-known artists to countless of blogs and fans—desperately wanted to see the film. It then screened all over the world, from China to Poland to Holland and at film festivals like Independent Film Festival Boston, CMJ Film Festival and San Francisco’s DocFest.

I saw Matias Aguayo do his thing last night, and it definitely doesn't belong over on the House/Techno thread.

Pretty mindblowing actually, there were parts that were like a hybrid of reggaeton and techno.

Stuff that was like electro cumbia, some very noisy areas, and he even played one Funky track.

Fan for life at this point.

And the fact that he did it all with a sampler and a pair of CD DJs and some effects was very impressive.

Singing, kind of half rapping, playing about 6 different percussion instruments through a delay, all while deejaying.

Damn, it was tight.

i mean INVITATIONAL - gawd i always do that

i think techno fans would like it though

This probably seems like a good thread to ask if any Britishers (or plane-getting people, who knows) are going to the Bloc weekender this weekend?

xpost. I saw Matias Aguayo last year, he was just fantastic. As Siah says, mindblowing. It made me feel so energised. A pity I can't get into his last album.

Jesus Fucking Christ that Bloc Weekender lineup is amazing.

I know right - I thought there might have been some chat about it, I've only been down to go for about a week but I'm really jazzed for it

I'd have tried to organise something if I'd known. As it is I'm going to Prins Thomas/Tensnake tomorrow and possibly Lindstrom & Christabelle at Fabric on Saturday so that should do.

i'm going - fbook me your digits mencap

i am fucking STRESSSSSSSSSSSED right now though, so much to sort out and think about before i go

am also vainly planning a ~quiet~ festival, in which i work sensibly and soberly during the day and only occasionally venture out of the chalet for a little dance

What are people enjoying in the first three months?

ikonika's new album esp "they are all losing the war" and "psoriasis" + her remix of the brown acid's "bastard kids"
subeena's latest single - "picture"/"spectrums"
various jam city tracks esp "in the park" and "a"
new guillaume & the coutu dumonts album is EXCELLENT, maybe that should go in the house/techno bobbins thread, no time to find it tho
the ayobaness ep someone mentioned a while ago in the rolling funky thread of south african house

Lindstrom & Christabelle at Fabric on Saturday

WAIT, WAHT?!?!?!?

Linstrom is booked for Bloc so hopefully that means that Christabelle is gonna be there too! Nice.

Ikonika album has some really superlative moments.

yeah she really came thru with it

superlative artwork lately too - this is the album

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GmmfkTOoWsE/S1jBnAjrFwI/AAAAAAAAAOY/uSR9YBfuW60/s320/ikonika-sleeve-32838.jpg

and this was the "sahara michael" sleeve

http://www.goodfellas.it/newsletter/imm/HDB029.jpg

Fabric on Saturday - Lindstrom & Christabelle (Live), Rub N Tug, Andy Butler, Phenomenal Handclap Band (Live), Omar S, Terry Francis, Agoria & Oxia back to back, oh and lol Craig Richards.

Actually that looks fucking phenomenal.

Erm, wow. There's a lot on that lineup I'd like.

But no. Can't deal with Fabric. No no no.

But I am well jealous if you get to go.

the ayobaness ep someone mentioned a while ago in the rolling funky thread of south african house

Keep meaning to check this out - South African house should by all rights be the best music ever.

that fabric lineup looks so amazing. you britishers are lucky

God that Fabric line-up looks utterly insane. Thank goodness for the weekend.

Kenton Slash Demon remix of Kasper Bjork's "Alcatraz" is great. NB to all producers: going shamelessly trancey in the second half of yr tune is a trick that never gets old.

^sounds wicked. Downloading now!

Also, are you doing a 2010 glamorous pop club this year?

Probably. But I should try to finish off my 2009 review first I guess. Work has been awfully busy recently :-(

i guess its just fashion, but a lot of stuff i couldnt stomach a few years ago sound like such awesome propositions right now, im thinking esp big trancey synths

just mean that that track is awesome but ur description had me hoping for something way more new-agey and 90s

I saw Matias Aguayo do his thing last night

damn this WAS pretty mindblowing. earbuds still recovering tbh

^^^ great show! for his first 15min or so, it was like: electronic dance beat, crossfade to old cumbia track, repeat. but when his live set finally got underway, AWESOME

Have I tried to talk abt Kyle Hall here yet, I still haven't heard the thing he put out on hyperdub but dude feels pretty paradigmatic the spirit of this thread

So Oni Ayhun was pretty good on Saturday. Awesome medieval-futurist costume, pretty pastoral paintings in gilt frames behind him. Something about the sequencing didn't really work for an hour-long set, but of course he closed with OAR003-B and everyone went crazy.

Ewan Pearson tomorrow night, if any Berliners want to meet a random ilxor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bJyaCRXhjM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkHAeL-33Ok

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjY_tzLSW4o

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

apart from the ikonika remix, the other three all marry restless electronic questing beats with pretty female vox on top; i don't really know who glasser or emika or lauren pritchard actually are, but i want to find out more...

electro cumbia

I understand this has been a big thing in south america, especially BA the past 5 years or so

Am looking forward to possibly seeing Matias Aguayo do his thing at Mutek, am very much not looking forward to possibly hearing any electro cumbia.

So it looks like there's a lot of stuff of mathematics (Jamal Moss's Label) that's being sold for cheap, including the Music From Mathematics EP's, anyone know if there are particular outstanding ones from these EP's?

when we talk about electro cumbia what are we talking about? Because if it's just cumbia made with synths and drum machines that isn't anything new and isn't generally all that inspiring imo. Ok to dance to after a couple of promos in a provincial chilean nightclub i suppose.

Well my two reference point are Senor Coconut (and I don't honestly know how much of that is actually even cumbia), and the ZZK guys.

What Matias was playing when I saw him was worlds better than what I've heard of ZZK, but it wasn't a quantum leap forward by any means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st9cbxY9HUA&feature=fvw

It was mostly the way he mixed it with everything else he was playing, it felt like a very cohesive whole for such strange music.

Compare this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_IQb11N2Fw

To this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYLK8ACId3Y&feature=related

Found info on Glasser and Pritchard from Fader (http://www.thefader.com/2010/03/01/glasser-tremel-astronomer-remix-mp3/) and Rcrd Lbl (http://rcrdlbl.com/2010/03/11/premiere_lauren_pritchard_stuck_various_production_remix_). MP3 works on first, not on second.

Xpost to Lex

Emika has been making a lot of great stuff recently, you heard her stuff on Aus? I liked the Appleblim remix particularly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Lw6NKx663g

Sorry if this is old news for everyone.

There is an amazing John Talabot remix of Glasser as well but I like their sound. As an aside, Talabot is pretty much my favourite producer out there at the moment but maybe he's more at home on the Balearic thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utHihYF5j_k&feature=related

I like the Appleblim remix of this one as well.

And thanks to Ninja Tune's dickhead licensing I can't buy it because I live in the States.

should be all good for purchase in the US

https://www.beatport.com/en-US/html/content/release/detail/224222/eyesdown

Must be a glitch with Boomkat then, apologies.

thx for the mymy/emika heads-up siah, i hadn't known about that. good stuff.

feeling this mix from girl unit A LOT - http://palmsout.net/2010/03/22/girl-unit-mix-2010/

1. GIRL UNIT – Temple Keys
2. Hardrive ft. Lynae – Never Forget When You Touch Me (Dubbel Dutch edit)
3. DJ Sdunkero – Choosing Love
4. Ikonika – Dckhdbtch
5. NGUZUNGUZU – Got U
6. Sekta ft. Spoek Mathambo – Peter Pan (Dubbel Dutch remix inst.)
7. Roulet – Kitamanda (GIRL UNIT remix)
8. Rishi Romero – African Forest
9. Marcus Price & Carli – Var E Näääken (Bok Bok remix)
10. Jay R. Revlon – The Godzilla Ha
11. Jam City – A/Arpjam
12. DJ Assault – Vandalism
13. K.G. – 808
14. GIRL UNIT – IRL
15. Jagged Edge ft. Trina & Gucci Mane – Tip Of My Tongue (Inst.)
16. GIRL UNIT – WUT
17. Terror Danjah ft. Swindle – Kiss Chase (Inst.)
18. Justin Timberlake – My Love (Inst.)
19. Asia Cruise – Boyfriend
20. Mike V. – Feelings
21. Leatherface – Requiem
22. DJ Solo – Juk3-tron
23. DJ Nehpets – GJM Trax 2
24. J.O.H – Goom
25. Kingdom – RedBaron Juke
26. Aaron-Carl – For The Money
27. DJ Spinn – Breezy
28. DJ Assault – Sometimes (Inst.)
29. Mister Ries – Sugar (Kill Frenzy remix)
30. DJ Rashad ft. DJ Gant-Man – U See Dem Hoes ‘09
31. DJ Deeon – I Hope Its U (Juke Mix)

this is a bit random but from joker's twitter feed

# Goooning on these hitler girls 9:19 PM Mar 20th via web
# @djplastician lol tell @snoopdogg i said wada ta 8:56 PM Mar 20th via web in reply to djplastician
# in germany - munich about 2 go mash up dance 3:51 PM Mar 20th via web

wada tai

are other kingdom tracks available outside of mixes? i have only heard mindreader/You

no, though there are his remixes - kid sister, ultravid, telepathe, lil wayne, mujava, l-vis 1990

i have high hopes for the emika album.
new single has just dropped (need to dig out the email !).
lets just hope that in 5 minutes my hopes are not dashed.

Enjoying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlZQ3C2ASgo

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

no, though there are his remixes - kid sister, ultravid, telepathe, lil wayne, mujava, l-vis 1990

There's an amazing Black Box remix as well.

Way late to this party (ignoring ILM and this thread until now has treated me pretty well), but after reading the entire thread...

I have to laugh at people expecting criticism of dance music (a field which is populated largely by artists who are continually refining/replicating the work of their influences because the original formulas are the ones which keep people dancing) to find fresh, deeply theoretical points to make with any regularity. Most often I find myself completely turned off when someone starts in on the "hauntology" of this or that, or tries to tie together deeply philosophical arguments about present/past culture with the latest UK dance music fad. Not to say this music doesn't deserve or need smart, insightful criticism with a broader analytical perspective, but it's such a turnoff to read people wanking their Masters degrees onto their keyboards like it's high art or grist for an academic journal.

From reviews I expect some relevant information about the artist/label being reviewed, what it sounds like, where it fits into/diverges from the wider scene/smaller movements, and whether or not it's worth owning (why it is/n't exceptional). Where necessary, delving into the issues tackled within or by its peers, offering a historical perspective, puzzling over what the release means for the artist/label/sub-genre's development. Maybe that makes me a simpleton (or on this thread, a Pipecock), yet expecting critics to open a new theoretical door in your brain in most or many of their (single) reviews seems like setting yourself up for a head-meets-keyboard faceplant. If someone can take it further without making it a chore to digest, I'm all for it. But I don't go to XYZ dance music site to read armchair dissertations.

All that said, I appreciate pressing writers to give more consideration to their analysis. It's all too easy to write wham-bam-thank-you-Sam single reviews, especially of relatively rote releases, and finding something interesting to say about those tracks is something we should all strive for. To add to the point, I think it's time more reviewers take on records they aren't thrilled with: to dissuade readers from plunking down their hard earned cash, to prod producers to do more than ride the bandwagons (even if they care fuckall about reviews [their labels are always begging for our feedback!]), to point out that big or revered names aren't infallible, and not because it's relatively easy to bash stuff you don't like (a thoughtful reviewer will know it's not enough to dismiss something without giving it a fair hearing and understanding why people might like it).

I know, I know, there's SOO much out there, why bother with the failures, but I think one of dance music criticism's present flaws is ignoring the rest of the records that provide the context in which great releases sound so great. Not to say, for example, Falty DL's latest is enjoyable because it's surrounded by tripe, but reading a lot of sites you'd get the impression only pretty good and great music is being released. Productive negativity is what I crave. Somehow I feel like this ties into the brief discussion of populist dance music, but I'm not going to try to explore a possible connection without at least seven hours of sleep.

Lately I've been enjoying:

Marino Berardi, Best Intention
Both Mount Kimbie remix EPs
Boe Recordings' "Halal Prepared Vol.1" (tracks by KiNK, Iron Curtis, Ladzinski; nothing phenomenal but nice takes on contemporary deep house)
Kyle Hall, Kaychunk/You Know What I Feel (amazed no one has mentioned this yet)
Fudge Fingas, About Time
Tevo Howard, Crystal Republic
Tensnake, I Need Your Lovin'

Of course I realize a possible riposte to my missive just before getting into bed:

a field which is populated largely by artists who are continually refining/replicating the work of their influences because the original formulas are the ones which keep people dancing

One might ask, how is that different from rock/rap etc.? It's different in that producers know that their tracks are most often used by someone else to keep a flow going and to keep dancers on the floor, which I imagine encourages house/techno producers to fit into a popular mold more than, say, your average indie rockers. I can't imagine too many producers consider even for a moment those of us who are listening to their tracks on headphones at home and cringe at hearing more of the same.

Have I tried to talk abt Kyle Hall here yet, I still haven't heard the thing he put out on hyperdub but dude feels pretty paradigmatic the spirit of this thread

― plax (ico), Monday, March 15, 2010 11:02 PM (2 weeks ago)

i like this the least of all of his stuff i've heard, like its nice and all but i liked the phaggier vibe on the water is fine

i discovered the water is fine ep last week and was sort of blown away by how good it was

never heard this guy out dancing but seems like he is more headphonzy, kaychunk esp sounds as idm-bloggy as it does purple/detroit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uRVE7DdJ4U

Simple but huge.

Yeah, i'm disappointed in the Kyle Hall Hyperdub release. Feels too much like he's trying to fit himself into their aesthetic rather than just sticking with what he does best.

he is like 18 tho, and i think there was a fairly big expectation, just wished he was putting out more.

Obligatory Beat Connection link: http://www.avclub.com/articles/april-2010,39826/ -- mixes this month are by JAK, Thompson, Anja Schneider, Modern Love, Sheldon Drake, Donnacha Costello, Mike 2600, Fiedel, Girl Unit, and Jam City.

ayyy, nice to see that girl unit mix in there. his "irl" track is massive (think it's being released on night slugs later in the year)

Feels too much like he's trying to fit himself into their aesthetic rather than just sticking with what he does best.

Except it sounds a) nothing like most Hyperdub releases and b) fits in perfectly in the wide range of aesthetics he's capable of producing well (see The Dirty Thouz). What a great fucking record.

i have pretty much no idea about dance music, but would like to know more. are there any good articles out there that give a good overview of where dance music as a whole (or any specific subgenre/scene), is at right now? thanks in advance, guys!

also, if there are any print publications, websites, or blogs you'd recommend i read, i'd be interested such suggestions also

this is probably track of the year for me so far. so very very big

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt5fTRW0gJc

From the Resident advisor post on the upcoming Immer 3: ...Justus Kohncke's cover version of Round Two's house classic "New Day."

Am very curious about this. I love his Chic covers.

In another thread its all about face asked me what I like about Hyperdub.

I then realized that all the Hyperdub artists I like the most seem to release a lot of their best stuff off the label.

For instance I like this Cooly G track way more than Love Dub, Narst, or Weekend Fly.

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

Or this Zomby track, way way more than the Hyperdub beats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua2WdkqlCQU

And I love the Kyle Hall remix of Aidy's Girl is a Computer, way more than the original.

Still not totally on the Ikonika train yet though. No offense intended Lex.

yeah, i love love love that kyle hall remx

Thanks to Andy on Dissensus, I'm liking this Ikonika mix a lot.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/bw46vc

Burial – Untrue
Roska - ???
Ricardo Villalobos – Spritzcussion
Altered Natives – Rass Out
Nightcrawlers – Push The Feeling
Deep Tecknologi – Anthem
Somore – I Refuse (What You Want)
Martyn – Mega Drive Collection
Sunship – Cheque One-Two
Dj Naughty – Firepower
Lil Silva – Seasons
Scratcha DVA – New World Order
Steve Gurley & Al Brown – Killin Me
Ital Tek – Moment In Blue (Ikonika Remix)
Modek – Mumps (French Fries Remix)
Jahcoozi – Read The Books (Ikonika Remix)
Ikonika - ???
Rox - My Baby Left Me (Arms Remix)
Seiji – Chekere
American Men - Claude Speed (Ikonika & Optimum Remix)
Ikonika & Optimum – Ampersand
Dikolous – Win or Lose
Endgames - Ecstasy (Jam City refix)
Four Tet – Sing (Mosca Remix)
Scuba – On Deck
DJ Deeon – Let Me Bang (Jam City Remix)
Egyptrixx – Everybody Bleeding
Ikonika – They Are All Losing The War
Menta – Sounds Of Da Future
Blaque Ivory – I Do (Phuturistix Mix)
Skream – Rottan
Kode9 – 9 Samurai

I've given her album a couple of listens, and I sort of feel like in a couple of years she'll be making some really amazing techno.

Fish and Psoriasis have got their moments definitely.

yeah i do like the look o that

Mixes this month: Traxx, DJ Marky, DJ Canyon, Agnes, James Lauer, Jackmaster, Simbad, Schlachthofbronx, Thomas Fehlmann, and 2562.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/may-2010,40691/

hi dance partisans!

i know almost nothing about dance music beyond a few lol indie crossover records

picked up the new Crystal Castles -- lol indie dance -- on a whim today, and i really, really like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTBccJpTjs0

could you point me to some more dance music that's like that? also, i really liked The Field's 2007 record and both Burial records. if you could point me to anything that sounds like any of that stuff, i'd be really grateful. thanks guys!

two other records i really liked: the Fever Ray debut and the Knife's Silent Shout

that CC track makes me think of M83, Metronomy - both French. try the Kitsune Maison compilations.

if you like Burial check Scuba, Kode9, Martyn, Darkstar and stuff upthread e.g. that excellent-looking Ikonika mix shit gotta dl that when i get home

Metronomy aren't French, they're from Brighton!

thanks, blueski!

i think my taste in dance music, as totally uninformed as it is, pretty much comes to: either "dark" or "blissed out"

comes down to

a fucking plus mix:

http://2010.sonar.es/en/artistes/braiden_258.html

Mashepest - Fundamental
Justin Martin - Get Low
DJ Sdunkero - Choosing Love
Lil Silva - Perfussion
Jam City - Arpjam
Claude VonStroke - Monster Island (Christian Martin remix)
Braiden - The Alps
Geeneus Ft. Ms Dynamite - Get Low
Girl Unit - IRL (Scratcha DVA Remix)
DJ Deeon - Let Me Bang (Jam City refix)
Mr Majeeka - Different Lektrix
Goapele - Milk and Honey (Joy Orbison refix)
Loco Dice - How Do I Know? (Cassy remix)
Melé - Digits
Girl Unit - Shade On
Gosub - Laugh Track
Skepta - Rescue Me (Melé remix instrumental)
Addison Groove - Footcrab VIP
Space Dimension Controller - Space Party
Girl Unit - Wut
Cassie - Kiss Me

I fucking HATE Girl Unit's IRL, it's taken on almost totemic value to me as the quintessential clumsy Brit dance track. So lumpen and colourless and stuff like that is a big part of why I've never really been able to embrace the whole Bok Bok/L-Vis/Night Slugs thing.

I really like a lot of the Night Slugs stuff - anything with Bok Bok's name on it especially - but when I first heard IRL I thought it was really disappointing given the context of the label and hype etc.

I think I hate Bok Bok's productions as well, a lot of this stuff feels like it's missing a sense of, well, groove, really.

Does tend towards overbearing.

wouldt say that abt the L-Vis stuff i have heard, tho thats not loads

L-Vis can trend a lot lighter than Bok Bok I think.

His remix of Mos' Wanted/Mr Mageeka's "Different Lekstrix" provides a nice concise encapsulation of the points-of-difference between the overall L-Vis/Bok Bok sound and funky per se, I think. Tip: stay away from any Boomkat reviews of any of this stuff if you want to hold onto your lunch.

Think the issue is that the dubstep elements tend to drag everything else down.

Hi ilxor! pleased to meet you all. I wanna just tell you about: http://sonicrouter.blogspot.com/ It's a blog I've been working on with some other peeps for a while, we fit right in with the Rolling Dance Partisan thing since we vibe off the original dubstep vibe as much as we do grime, techno, house, garage and uk funky as well as hip-hop variants. We had one of the first mixes from Untold to name but one... But my faves have to be FaltyDL, Martin Kemp, Heytal, Shortstuff, The Hizatron, October, Tokimonsta, Emptyset, Fantastic Mr Fox, XxXy, Pariah, Non Person, Club Root, Simon/off, Daynoo, Dema, Milyo, West Norwood Cassette Library... But I'm bias. I would have loved to have got involved more before I pimped my blog on here but I singed up ages ago and forgot the password and gave up for a while haha, hope it aint too much trouble :D

Oh yeah the Bok Bok/L-Vis thing... I'm kinda torn about them. They're killer DJs and label curators with Night Slugs but a little hit'n'miss as producers. I really dig bits they do. L-Vis' 'Run' and the Crazy Cousins remix are sooo good but I'm not too fussed about owt else. Bok Bok kills it with Citizen Dub and his remix of Marcus Price & Carli. They both kind of stragle that growned between played out Diplo blog house/electro and pretty vibrant uk funky/global bass... They mostly sit on the fence between it as producers I find, some stuff works and others don't for me. But as label heads and DJs they're really on it.

i agree w/jimi re: bok bok and l-vis.

i didn't really get "irl" until i heard it on the dancefloor - that DUN-DUN-DUNNNN is just so massive. it's a bit of a dj tool, really. but i absolutely adore girl unit's next single (i presume), the k michelle-sampling "wut" - so glorious and opulently emotional:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pssl7RZtSUg

also when jam city's "arpjam" eventually finds its way to a release => top 10 single of the year for real.

I forget if this was the thread, but to whoever posted Fantastic Mr Fox - Sketches (Sbtrkt Remix) some months ago, once again, thank you, thank you!

ok so i've been digging the hell out of this new blondes record/ep ('touched'). this isn't my favirite track on there, but it is a good one nonetheless...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR0r1oDPO3g

lol favirite

nice tune! haven't checked out "touched" yet, will have to track it down.

also, how did i miss Endgames - Ecstasy (Jam City refix)!?!?! and where can i hear it NOW?

without wading through a 45min DJ mix, that is

Yeah Lex IRL is so huge when you get mixing with it and it just kills it when I've heard it in the clubs.

To much good stuff going on in this grey area right now though. It all comes alive in the clubs really. You have to see it to beleave it sometimes, but the stranges Zomby bit or some James Blake track will mnake some crowds fucking loose it and at other times it has to be more obvious.

Big up the EDB too mentioning Fantastic Mr Fox cos we got a killer mix by him: http://sonicrouter.blogspot.com/2009/11/interview-fantastic-mr-fox-black-acre.html Interview too.

Pretty sure Jam City has quite a bit on the way for all those asking. !2" shouldn't be to far away then some...

Oh yeah...

Work Them by Ramadanman

*ahem*

People have been sleeping on Martin Kemp too, he's tooooooo gooooooood.

actress is his own thing man. i'm not sure he's influenced by a single person you just listed, his sound is very singular, detroit house filtered through south london. you cant group him with any of those people.

check him out though, really, he's an incredible musician. his music took a long time to gel and form with me, but it's something else.

^ i'm on board with this actress business too. the album is pretty consistently enjoyable; sounds a lot less like the purple-wow-sound stuff than i was expecting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HNS8cKtU8o&feature=related

I totally hate actress for making me want to buy his album so much but having to wait because I've already bought too many records this month.

lex ur fact review for the SA house comp is A+, need to pick that up

You really should, it's astonishingly good, I've been caning it the last couple of days.

i didn't really get "irl" until i heard it on the dancefloor - that DUN-DUN-DUNNNN is just so massive.

It would totally harsh my buzz on the dancefloor I think, hearing it crop up in mixes, it's sort of the aural equivalent of having some moshing idiot crash right into you when you've been dancing quite happily.

I really like that Blondes track upthread. Sunset driving music!

that zomby track that siah posted upthread is beautiful btw

If there's one trend that I'm not overly happy with at the moment its this interest in juke.

I've tried to understand what's causing all this interest, listened to some DJ Rashad, old Slugo, picked some footwork video's at random off Youtube and none of it really excites me. Just sounds like kids screwing around with FL Studio, and I know that description covers both early grime and dubstep but this is just not my thing.

If I understand correctly Juke is the more 4/4 stuff, and footwork has the offbeat toms?

We should probably get someone who actually lives in Chi to comment, but hasn't this kind of music been around forever? Databass records? I swear that electro bass has been going on in Detroit since the early 90s.

I really don't see any huge leap from what DJ Godfather and DJ Slugo were doing 5-10 years ago to this new stuff. Maybe its just the tempo that's got all the junglists interested.

There's a group of producers in Chi called the Ghetto Division who've got some cool stuff going on though.

http://soundcloud.com/djmdok/m-dok-meet-me-halfway-remix

http://soundcloud.com/silverbackrecordings/ultravid-total-recall-maddjazz-remix

http://soundcloud.com/ghettodivision

I caught there live show about 2 months ago and was really impressed with their productions.

So this is the thread to talk about how awesome REDLIGHT is then? He seems to be single handedly trying to do to dubstep and funky-influenced bass music what Vitalic did to electro. Everything I've heard is just so ridiculously ravey and banging.

Man, Ikonika mix for XLR8R is outta of this world. Grabs you from the start and just won't let go.

Speaking of which.

http://www.xlr8r.com/mp3/2010/07/space-rock

Kinda techo-ish Ikonika track?

Sonic Router Mix #50 Blawan [Hessle Audio]

We just hit 50 in our mix series :D

1. Titus 12 - Step Up (Mosca Remix) [Unreleased]
2. Afefe Iku - Bodydrummin' (S63 Refix) [Silver Label]
3. Ludacris vs Joe - How Low Claptrap (DJ Orgasmic Bootleg) [Unreleased]
4. Wookie - Weird Science [Manchu]
5. Randomer - Be Electric [Unreleased]
6. Mistamen - Lengthy Riddim [Bass Tourist]
7. DJ Faz - Believe [Locked On]
8. Menta - Sounds Of Da Future [Sounds Of Da Future]
9. Unknown - Unknown [Unreleased]
10. Untold - Angry Hat [Unreleased]
11. Commix - How You Gonna Feel (Pangaea Remix) [Unreleased]
12. Unknown – Unknown [Unreleased]
13. Ramadamman - Fall Short [Swamp81]
14. Blawan - Potchla Vee [Unreleased]
15. Oris Jay - Trippin (2010 Dub) [Gusto]
16. Untold - Come Follow We [Unreleased]

http://sonicrouter.blogspot.com/2010/07/interview-blawan-hessle-audio.html

http://disko404.org/podcast/podcast.html

Cool looking mix by Scratcha, since its not "real" Funky, I won't bother the purists.

1. COOLY G - UP IN MY HEAD
2. FINGAPRINT - RISING SUN
3. L VIS 1990 - FOREVER YOU
4. SMASHER - DUBZ 2
5. DVA - NEW WORLD ORDER
6. MAGNETIC MAN - I NEED AIR (REDLIGHT REMIX)
7. BOK BOK - DANCE REPORT
8. FUNKYSTEPZ - FULLER
9. BREACH - FATHERLESS (DOC DANEEKA REMIX)
10. DONAEO - IM SO FLY
11. R1 RYDERS - HYDRAULIC
12. DEEP TEKNOLOGI - DISTORTION 101
13. EL B - I FEEL
14. KODE 9 - BLACK SUN
15. DVA & STARKEY -
16. GREENMONEY - WHO'S GREENMONEY (DUB MIX)
17. REDLIGHT FT MS DYNAMITE - WHAT YOU TALKIN' ABOUT

I've got to admit though, this line of thinking hasn't really been doing a whole ton for me lately.

Been listening to a lot of balls to the wall techno by Ancient Methods and Obtane, some T++, and Alex Cortex.

Its been interesting hearing actual legitimate new ideas coming out of something as hidebound and fetishistic as the European techno scene. Maybe its dubstep giving it a kick in the pants, maybe its the recession and lack of good times making Club Med friendly minimal sound kind of bullshit. Don't know.

Anyways the really dark end isn't as boring as it used to be.

http://graphitenorth.blogspot.com/2010/06/graphite-north-mix-volume-04-mixed-by.html

I listened to this mix almost every day for a month, good shit.

I really disliked that Scratcha mix, couldn't see what the appeal was at all, felt like it was systematically purging all the elements of funky that I actually enjoy. The exception being I'm Fly, and that Redlight remix of Magnetic Man which is absolutely storming.

Its been interesting hearing actual legitimate new ideas coming out of something as hidebound and fetishistic as the European techno scene. Maybe its dubstep giving it a kick in the pants, maybe its the recession and lack of good times making Club Med friendly minimal sound kind of bullshit.

Eyeroll.

You heard that Obtane mix up on Modyfier?

There's some synth textures in there that I've never heard from any kind of dance music before.

And it might be a good idea to keep in mind that I like Club Med minimal a lot. And have for years.

The tracks I liked most in that Scratcha mix were the El B and L Viz ones.

I think Redlight may be an initial step in making Funky go overground, take it from someone who listened to too much dubstep, when the drum and bass DJs show up to the party its time to assess your priorities.

Redlight is DJ Clipz right?

that actress sounds like it's honest about being idm at least, which is more than i can say re etc

Well the Scratcha mix is more along the lines of electrohouse with some dubstep bass.

The Graphite North mix is dubstep and techno, so yeah, IDM. T++ is so clearly IDM.

All the other Redlight stuff I've heard, aside from Stupid and that Magnetic Man remix, has been totally electrohouse, barely any funky or dubstep in there at all. Strikes me as a dabbler, albeit a very good one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6IN62TMG_4

this new ones alright

He'd be pretty good working with a lot of yer grime-era rent-a-sirens - KT Pearl, Sadie Ama and whoever.

hmm, dunno about that - he's no geeneus. might not even be a zinc tbh.

I mean yer bombastic pained gangsta's moll wailing rather than anything classier.

I think Redlight may be an initial step in making Funky go overground, take it from someone who listened to too much dubstep, when the drum and bass DJs show up to the party its time to assess your priorities.

This analogy is flawed I think. Redlight is more like Johnny L dabbling in 2-step garage (with shades of DJ Zinc and DJ Hype at the same time) than drum & bass artists dabbling in dubstep.

I was surprised by how respectful his remix of Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah" is. Sounds like Mylo a bit.

Well they piled into indie electro like no one's business as well.

I'm thinking of Treasure Fingers = 1/3 of Evol Intent. And a bunch of other people.

Whenever a genre starts to sound like NI's Massive synth it's not a great sign.

If anyone's going to take funky overground it's Dotstar anyway.

Following the "add eurotrance synths = profit" golden rule at least.

magnetic man (skream + benga + someone else) are going top 10 this week sans eurotrance synths; different tempos apart, the thinking behind their new stuff (and "katy on a mission" which has really grown on me, such a tune) and redlight's "stupid" isn't vast; i'm thinking something like "wile out" but with a singer rather than patois-heavy mc could be a huge hit.

oh god i'm talking about what can cross over and what can't again, i don't know why i do this to myself. i have no idea of what makes for a good crossover record EVER.

The someone else in that equation = Artwork. Adam Smith. Made techno back in the day as Grain.

I'm sort of pissed off at him for being involved in this thing, yeah the money's good, but he's capable of a lot better music. With Benga and Skream the populist banger router is just to be expected.

Populist banger route. I'm going to sleep. Damn insomnia.

Artwork also = part of Menta & D'n'D = already had a crossover hit with their radio edit of Daniel Bedingfield's "Gotta Get Thru This".

And made some awesome 2-step tunes - "Pick It Up", "Diamond Rings"...

Grain was a quality project, similar was the excellent Santos Rodriguez 'Road to Rio' e.p.

yeah grain was amazing, wild stuff

i posted about grain on the fatcat thread but nobody replied :(

but yeah some pretty great records, dark and tribal millsian techno. listening now i can see how those kind of rhythms would easily translate to garage

I had completely forgotten about Menta and DnD, and I own all those Menta records.

Point being, at least for me, that I'd much prefer he was cranking out the dark tribal garage / techno then being Benga and Skream's mastering partner. Its not full on Euro trance, but its close enough to be annoying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2vWQFHP3D0

I'm fine with trance synths in RnB, when the Dream or NeYo use them it can sound great.

But when I have to play a wedding and they ask for Basshunter, Da Rude and Eric Prydz I feel less inclined to think that their ubiquity in modern Pop is a good thing. There's my strawman anti Pop side coming out.

dnr that ppl liked basshunter in america

Following the "add eurotrance synths = profit" golden rule at least.

I don't think this is so straightforward. Early adopters of eurotrance synths in any sub-genre don't tend to do that well. It's more a case of eurotrance synths often coinciding with a decisive shift into a kind of urban-dance middle ground (typified by guetta, BEP, Calvin Harris etc.) which is ripe for crossover regardless of whether euro-trance synths specifically are deployed or not (note that all of Dizzee's big singles in the past year or two only "Holiday" sounds remotely trancey).

Certainly it's not like Dotstar has ultimately blown up with either "Stick Up" or "Stunna Shades" ;_;

Xpost to plax(ico), It was a surprise to me, Bride and Groom specifically asked for it.

I don't really like trance synths in rnb, it usually feels they've been thrown in there as colouring-in because the producer couldn't think of anything else to do. Exception being when there's actually a sense of build ie the end of WFU by Electrik Red, but most rnb doesn't really go for that sense of big build so it usually ends up sounding flat.

I have a hard time imagining Miss Indepedent without that main synth riff either, and that's like in my top 5 for RnB songs of the last decade or so. But for every song like that I'll grant you that there are tons and tons of Sean Kingston and Trey Songz and what have you that blow.

And the Three Six track with Tiesto made me weep bitter bitter tears.

I think the problem with blatant crossover moves in Funky and Dubstep is that for a tune to actually crossover it has to lose 99% of what made it representative of either genre. Just like Dizzee had to MC over bad electro house before he charted. And I've given up on Dillon now, for what 4 years?

In other news, the little resurgence of arty broken beat going on right now makes me really happy. Between Altered Natives, Funk Butcher and some of the stuff getting posted on the main Funky thread: things are good.

Who's feeling this new dubstep-influenced drum'n'bass as practiced by acts like Instra:Mental? I thought there'd never be a way I could be excited by the genre again, but it's caught my attention.

Really loving this track today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cWRgIvyrGQ

That's a pretty good track but struggling to hear how that would work as drum and badd, felt very late-90s all things said and done.

anyone else digging the jamie grind podcast for sonic router?

lol, drum and badd. Freudian typing.

Realised that DJG also made this slick tech(dub)step track I loved earlier in the year too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-1blK7sHZE

altered natives i don't think are actually all that good barring "rass out" and "bullet blade knuckle slap". this stuff is arty but like a lot of broken beat it's pretty shallow actually. slap overly complex beat on some signifying noises borrowed from other genres and call it a day.

nobody noticed when labels like certificate 18 and hard.edged were doing cool neurofunk steppers around 2001. how is today different w/r/t instra:mental. just because it's not angry dinosaur noises over 180 bpm snares doesn't make it not linear to the point of boredom.

anyone interested in a dance bobbins listening thread?

altered natives i don't think are actually all that good barring "rass out" and "bullet blade knuckle slap". this stuff is arty but like a lot of broken beat it's pretty shallow actually. slap overly complex beat on some signifying noises borrowed from other genres and call it a day.

I agree with this but think their remix of Greymatter's "Eu Fumo" is great (though it fits your description of "signifying noises borrowed from other genres")

nobody noticed when labels like certificate 18 and hard.edged were doing cool neurofunk steppers around 2001.]

I did! At least w/r/t Certificate 18. That's some of my favourite D&B ever. Nothing I've heard from the instra:mental camp or similar has been as good as my favourite Cert 18 stuff actually.

tbf to the altered natives guy (i think it's one guy anyway) he seems to have been plowing his little anachronistic junglisty furrow since way before any context happened around him, and like you say about 10 years after any context that would have suited him. he also appears to have pretty much zero interest or idea wrt what separates his hits from his misses - because of this i tend to find him kinda amusingly gross rather than annoying.

it's probably that lack of self-awareness that makes his good tracks what they are in fact. i count 'rass out', the greymatter remix on the funky thread, 'more ways than one', and 'restless native' - and strictly nothing else.

(though it fits your description of "signifying noises borrowed from other genres")

haha yeah ok but samba gibbering x ravebass filth x noodling jazzfunk is a way funner concoction than that makes out still

Speaking of broken beat producers cribbing from everything all at once, been listening to Sbtrkt's 2020 a lot.

I go through CDs of FLACs from Juno in my car, somedays the stuff that seemed boring months ago benefits from being blasted out of my speakers in the middle of the night. Maybe I'm just bored, but while these tracks are quite clearly tools for genre hopping DJs, they're quite well made for all that.

Considering moonship's longstanding following of broken beat, I'll just bow out to his opinions re: Altered Natives.

Somewhere between broken beat and hard grinding techno there is nerd nirvana, and its not even IDM really. Something else.

Upon some careful consideration I've decided that that Magnetic Man tune sounds like a Kaskade track.

I'm off to douse all my early Skream singles with lighter fluid and start a bonfire on my lawn.

http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTedx7l8wg

Seriously very reminiscent of this sort of shit, except for marginally heavier bass and a snare on the 3.

anyone interested in a dance bobbins listening thread?

― moonship journey to baja, Sunday, August 1, 2010 9:30 PM (4 days ago)

yes

^ me too. tho this is a giant spectrum from which to choose, maybe honing in on a subgenre would help?

Good idea, Whatever happened I can't keep up/have very little idea as to what people are talking about in this thread.

I think I'm going to take a break from posting for a while.

Best of luck to everybody, its been real.

will miss u man

anyone seen ramadanman dj? saw him last night and he's too autopilot to me. barely touching his laptop. only playing with the controller and eq.

uh thats the whole point of using a controller? he was pretty dull at field day last week though, mad choice for an hour on the main stage before the fall on a saturday afternoon

I tend to assume that the very presence of a laptop indicates it's not exactly going to be a riveting visual spectacle so not really arsed how people interact with them.

Pretty sure Ramadanman isn't for just standing about and looking at... I mean he's just a dude called Dave that makes ace tracks and DJs really well. I've seen him countless times, his sets are ace, really diverse, really fun, really deep. It was prob the soundsystem being weak as owt that made you look and not dance or it isn't your thing, one of the two anyway...

Partisan wise I'm digging...

The new Pariah EP forthcoming on R&S: http://sonicrouter.blogspot.com/2010/08/recommended-pariah-safehouses-ep-r.html

C.R.S.T. / Mista Men / Martin Kemp / Superisk / Breach / T.Williams / Julio Bashmore

Who all have some killer stuff on the horizon.

Ramadanman was OK, when I've seen him, but I think it's Ben UFO who is the more interesting DJ from Hessle.

I've heard some ace Mista Men stuff in radio sets but don't know anything about him.

euhm, well, i don't know much about dj-ing. but at least the fact that he didn't touch his laptop much indicates that he didn't pick the tracks on the fly?

Mista Men are a group of producers from Doncaster http://soundcloud.com/mistamen Lots of tracks up there for you to hear.

Was he doing a live set or just using serato or whatever. If it's the latter I don't see what the big deal is.

Seeing Floating Points DJ last night was a lot of fun, so much so I made a separate thread about all these new up and comers doing interesting things.

I would like some dance music aficionado expert opinion on this Arab pop house, or house pop, or something, song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9CRSXEj3dc&NR=1

(Not saying I like it, but not saying I don't like it. It combines pretty standard elements of styles I don't normally like, but there's something hooky about it too, for me.) Sorry if this is not the best rolling dance thread to post this.

hello ... what's this?

techno / house / disco / bass / electronic bobbins listening club

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lCCQkWLAoo&p=E505EAC2D4F602FB&playnext=1&index=58

Loving the Friendly Fires' Suck My Deck, really loving this track.

^ seconded! thanks for the tip... i wasn't aware these guys were any good at dj'ing

It definitely came as a surprise to me too. But it's a very good house/mid-'80s-look-back mix.

jack is an excellent dj and has been playing for a long time -- he really knows his techno

having said that, i haven't heard the mix but judging by the tracklist apart from one or two tracks it doesn't look like my thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kV4g6n20Sk

this fucking track <3

wow, i never thought i'd be the one saying it but i think the producers on the instra:mental and d:bridge fabriclive have the "sound design" game on lock. it's linear, but the sounds are sick, and with close listening they've got all these crazy edges that rub up against each other. that doesn't mean it's not "tasteful", it is, and that's a problem, but i really like this.

Night Slugs continue their impeccable run this year
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc6ZqhJWRhE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cwby-5SKy4

Wow Ikonika and Optimum's "Hum" is brilliant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGg9B1Kgah0

come on dudez when even i'm bigging up an ikonika tune you know it's a big deal.

really?! i mean, i like "hum", i would just have never thought to particularly rep for it, especially to non-fans.

however we probably need to talk about optimum's own ep cuz it's kind of amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf6CrMNthes

"crash riddim" and "lily" aren't on youtube but they're as good, if not better - "crash riddim" is incredibly banging, prob my favourite on the ep just cuz it's so huge and obvious. "lily" is very pretty and reminds me of my my's "fast freeze" in a way.

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

however we probably need to talk about optimum's own ep cuz it's kind of amazing.

Hmm see the funny thing is that I'm not much into that Optimum tune. I guess I just like this stuff better when its pretty and crystalline rather than squeally-ravey. I can see how it'd be big at the right moment in a club. But... It sounds like a lot of Australian electro-house I guess! (Haven't heard "Lily" or "Crash Riddim" so cannot comment).

Prefer "Aqueous Cream" and "Ampersand' (which is like a variant on "Hum" anyway) but "Hum" way above all.

Also love the delicacy of the beats on "Hum" - delicacy not intricacy, it's not ostentatious James Blake-ish complexity, just really lovingly sculpted, like Ramadanman at his best.

"aqueous cream" is definitely amazing (and prob the best predictor of where ikonika will go next). i told her it should've been the b-side to "psoriasis"!

"aqueous cream" is an illogical phrase

this is neat. http://soundcloud.com/casio1988/creature-main-mstr

Kim Ann Foxman and Mr. Intl - Creature

soooo glad this track's finally getting a release, have been wanting to share it w/people for so long. love everything about it - that insane percussion, the compulsive hook, the drops...love love love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs5sEaYGNBU

I'm going to go ahead and say that calling yourself Casio1988 is a pretty big dud.

hi guys, i need an ID for this track. it contains the lyrics:

(something2) a little too late
(something2) a little too close
(something2) as far as you'll go
(something2) shake it up break it up make it up take em up

thanks!

Shit Robot - Take 'Em Up feat. Nancy Whang

ah, i see. no wonder it sounds familiar. thanks, mate.

I'm loving tribal guarachero. Much more like "real" electronic dance music than any other genre I really like. (Reggaeton and merengue electronico/mambo de la calle are a little too song-oriented, at least the way I listen to them.)

http://www.manrecordings.com/tag/tribal-guarachero/

Or: http://gainesindamix.blogspot.com/2010/11/dj-crabbe-demolition-tape-8.html

(because now I'm going back over the one I posted and it's got more folkloric or at least kind of trad. vocal stuff mixed in that I think might turn some off and that doesn't seem to normally be so present in this stuff)

he he <3 u jess & crabbe

Not sure I'd want to dance to this stuff though. I wonder. It seems like people aren't sure what to do with it dance-wise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRV7WVr_-qQ

Sorry, was trying to dis-embed that.

hip hop hooray for techstep day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeYe2hhY-5w&feature=related

I like that Natalomba track.

It is a funny track because it doesn't give people clear(obvious) indications where the bar lines are. The quarter note pulse is there, but it isn't heavily accented and there is a lot of other shit going on to distract you from the pulse. It is not easy to dance to unless you have at least a limited understanding of how music works(iow not drunk 19yo chicks...)

I will look into this stuff more because the thing that always disappointed me with latin/mexican dance music in Texas was how conservative/unadventurous it was musically. It would be cool to hear something coming from the same place that is trying to freak out and also not be a watered down imitation of the stuff coming out of the US/Europe.

http://www.factmag.com/2010/12/17/fact-mix-211-bok-bok/

Is this thread worth continuing next year?

Or should we just break up conversation into separate threads a la the Juke / Dubstep / Funky / Techno+House threads?

it's not really any of those, is the thing - though it wouldn't not fit into them - but this thread doesn't get much play. we could turn the wut thread into the "official" one, get a mod to edit the title to include "night slugs" or whatever.

just create a contemporary uk dance or whatever thread for "fact music"

I thought that was what this thread was.

Display Name, I only just now noticed someone had actually responded to something I posted here. (I feel like an outsider on this thread, because I am.) When I am dancing to this in the privacy of my apartment I tend to fall back into moves from African dance and jazz samba classes I've taken in the (ever receding) past, but I'm not sure I'd try most of that in public. Yeah, I think it's worth checking out. I am declaring tribal guarachero Afro-Latin and appropriating it to my rolling Afro-Latin thread. I'm still not sure what it derives from rhythmically, but it feels more African than Native American to me. Then again, I don't know too much about Indian music in Mexico. It's very funny the way it samples both pre-Hispanic (Aztec?) music and Afro-Cuban religious song, like some bad gringo misunderstanding of the culture, but because it's coming from people who clearly know what they are mixing together, it has a different meaning (or is more acceptable somehow).

I promise you, if that tribal guarachero stuff were played in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and probably Brazil as well, people would have a better sense of how to dance to it than what we see in that clip. In fact, I'd love to see that. (Of course they also might just say "What is this weird Mexican shit?" and not respond at all.)

I've seen people in Yorkshire dance to this haha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eatv-gGSzsI

What did it look like? (I don't know any of those crazy UK dance styles by name though.) I think I've heard that before (or if not the actual track than something using a lot of the same stuff), probably on a mix.

This thread needs more T.Williams he's really impressed me this year, I'm always digging out his stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgOyxj2i2l4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6fyhZB5Xwg

People's Choice is well nice.

Mosca's remix is pretty sweet too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7K_BWQa6yA

On an unrelated note I'm suprised this hasn't been talked about here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1hcC9Lzsg8

It goes off every time I hear it.

I don't think we have a name for the dance that people where doing to that track, everyone was just moving like they usualy do to the uk funky/night slugsy stuff. It didn't throw anyone off as far as I could tell. Maybe cos its a remix of a pretty familuar track.

I thought that was what this thread was.

― Tim F, Saturday, 18 December 2010 13:22 (9 hours ago) Bookmark

yes, just need a proper name for it.

The thread or the genre?

Because the thread has an expiration date, and I thought everyone was using the very boring catch all term "bass music" for the genre.

theres also a purple wow p-ds thredd

xpost: the thread. rolling bass music 2011 for example aka if you wanna have a boring title

Yeah T. Williams is great, one of the few funky-influenced FACT-type producers who can translate that influence into his music without watering it down or overwhelming it with other things.

t.williams & terri walker's "heartbeat" really, really grew on me - obv i liked it from the off but it's become quite compulsive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFK4il2I62k

hate dubstep, love silkie, blame finney

rue the day this noble west londoner fell in with a bad crowd and deprived himself of fuzzy logik's peership, i really do

co-sign the t.williams respect - correctly deployed his bangers bang and 'heartbeat' is a quivering bated-breath delight

can't even front on the mosca mix either, fuck

although marcus has been playing a bit of 'square one vip' and the groove on that's quite good too, even if it is subject to the usual moronic clutter by the end of it

Ah, that explains it, I'd heard the VIP and thought "oh that's much better than what I remember", then would go back to the original tune and it wasn't the same.

Hard to say what is so great about Silkie. Maybe it's that he's like the only dude who thinks of dubstep as perky cheerful dance music?

My fave Silkie right now has to be...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAi54N71dsE

80s Baby

I love it when he's on this kind of tip, but he can go down the big banging aggressive route when he's DJing too and I'm not so keen on that.

for me i think mainly his unabashed fondness for the coffee-table album dnb signifier, haha - not sure i'd go so far as to say he's consistently perky as such (although hardly ever gloomy yes). kinda tend to think of him as a pleasure-principled altered natives, if you catch one's drift.

Yeah perky isn't right - I agree it's more the absence of moodiness at work.

And I think I'm repeating myself in saying he's always reminded me of disc 2 of New Forms, which is A+++ in my book.

so you say Tim but really when was the last time you listened to it?

i listen to the photek brown paper bag remix once in a while but that's about it.

not sure i could call them unbiased at this point but xlr8r chose one of bok bok's as their favorite podcast of the year

so you say Tim but really when was the last time you listened to it?

Every couple of months at least, it's probably my favourite d&b full length if decoupled from disc 1.

It excites me to note that someone has posted a Rockwell track upthread. That guy has utterly killed it all through 2010. "My War" just rules.

Yep

i doubt many here will be with me on this, but I loved the Ekoplekz record on Punch Drunk this year. sounds like a lost Portion Control tape or something. kinda wish there was a thread for all this weird gloomy vaguely industrial stuff coming out lately -- Raime, Demdike Stare, the latest Scorn album, recent Mordant Music and Shackleton stuff...

I'm with you on the Ekoplekz 12" its brilliant and Punch Drunk are one hell of a label.

This thread might suit the industrial gloom you're after: imminent loop-techno revival Might need some work mind...

In other news, I can't get enough of Blue by Elgato

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16CN6Q028CE

That breakdown is too good. The flip is brilliant too it just keeps twisting out of shape. Reminds me of a house version of Peverelist, infact those two should hook up it'd be as sick as the Peverelist and Hyetal (king of the colabs 2010) hook up on Punch Drunk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZapOXj0cDo

yeah I started that thread and Demdike Stare et al is definitely not what I had in mind for it

I need to get the two Ekoplekz CD-Rs that came out. there's some top notch stuff up on youtube, super weeded out low-slung analog grooves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swJewbWh4bs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8b50weVo34

Loving this.

oops it's 2011.