Has downtempo led people to think differently about house? Will microhouse?

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There are plenty of people who enjoy different sorts of electronically produced pop- and/or experimental-music genres but tend not to enjoy house, techno, or anything else that functions more strictly as a "dance" genre: in most cases anything with a conventional four-on-floor beat will need to do something pretty special with it to hook them in.

Downtempo and microhouse, from what I can tell, have both had some ability to bridge that gap, to get people to have those crossover responses to elements of genres they don't usually get much out of. The former has, in some shape, succeeded on a pretty popular level; the latter hasn't really had that sort of impact and doesn't look like it's really aiming for it.

What do you think they do, are doing, can do, or will do to the landscape of listeners? Which elements of which work for whom? Which bits do you think have been "important" or had significant "impact" on different groups of listeners?

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 6 March 2003 18:28 (twenty-three years ago)

ninjatune suX

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Thursday, 6 March 2003 18:42 (twenty-three years ago)

I thought this was sort of a good question! :(

― nabisco (nabisco), Thursday, 6 March 2003 23:16 (twenty-three years ago)

it is nabisco, but I really don't have the time here at work to think about it. So shame on everyone else!

― oops (Oops), Thursday, 6 March 2003 23:18 (twenty-three years ago)

haha microhouse might get me into that undanceable glitch-dub-idm-whatevah! (heh, despite a typically offputting excursion into Beautiful Music today - geez, all the fans of that stuff sure hate the middles of their body, eh?)

(er despite flippancy this is a good question, nabisco)

― Ess Kay (on Elisabeth's computer) (Elisabeth), Friday, 7 March 2003 06:52 (twenty-three years ago)

I love house, for the record. I love the middle of my body.

And Ninjatune does not suck.

― Kenan Hebert (kenan), Friday, 7 March 2003 07:09 (twenty-three years ago)

I think the sound-design, etc. of microhouse probably holds out a lot of allure to non-dance people, but I’d guess the slavishness to rhythm all but demanded by the 4/4 pump requires some sort of engagement, however tangential or short-lived, to dance music as music for actually dancing. I say this as someone who came to dance music via a drawn-out, circuitous route through experimental electronic stuff: I’d always been intrigued by dance music for what it signaled sound-wise, but never fell for the pulse of it until I got sucked into a house party that radically reordered my priorities.

As someone who writes (in my less defeatist moments) about this stuff with aims of kicking that reordereing into motion, I wonder how possible it is to trickle up to full-on house/techno/etc. without having one of those moments to draw from (or trickle down from, revisionist-style) thereafter.

― Andy, Friday, 7 March 2003 08:07 (twenty-three years ago)

I thought downtempo had more to do with hip hop and dub than with house. Also, house is dance music by definition. If it isn't danceable, it isn't house. House music isn't defined by the four-to-the-floor beat (though most house producers use it) but by the energy and emotionality designed for the dancefloor (though you can enjoy it at home as well). Respectively, any track with a four-to-the-floor beat isn't necessarily house.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Friday, 7 March 2003 09:01 (twenty-three years ago)

Interesting questions N, but I need some clarification. Are you talking about this stuff from the indie POV? Because it seems like both genres have a different meaning to more mainstream listeners.

For example, the connection I can see is that both these genres, when they're at their smoothest, are a perfect accompaniment to the retail shopping experience. You hear downtempo & house in the malls.

Also, if you go into a smaller, crappier Tower Records (like the one in town here), just about the only CDs in the “Dance/Electronic” bin are those chill-out collections, both of which contain lots of downtempo and light house.

But if you’re talking about a link between indie/IDM electronic music and dance music, then that’s something else.

― Mark (MarkR), Friday, 7 March 2003 14:12 (twenty-three years ago)

if downtempo's gotten ME to think more about house - as an unabashed house-o-phile - it's gotten me to realize that i like house, not jazzy coffeeshop shite

nabisco by yr own admission downtempo doesn't do precisely the things that are off-putting to your imaginary dance-phobe - the 4/4 jack of the beats, the insistence on "stupid" repetition, the essential pulse of it that hovers around 120bpm. so what gap is getting filled here? as you said microhouse is prolly less successful at 'winning over' this imaginary dance-phobe, since it relies on the above list.

i'm actually way more interested in this kind of conversionist missionary style language in your post, like 'what kind of honey shall we trap these flies with ha HA'!! i notice myself pulling this too, with my friends, like is there any way i can fool them into liking stupid dance music, like under the radar? all research signals no: they have to confront the essential tropes of the genre head-on, and embrace them

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Friday, 7 March 2003 14:39 (twenty-three years ago)

Well yeah, I should be clear that I'm not saying downtempo or microhouse should be "tricking" people into liking house, or something. I guess I'm curious about how much of a bridge you think it's offered to the non-dance person -- whether they've in any sense pulled a group of people across, or whether they even can. Because yeah, my sense is that downtempo, for instance, doesn't at all -- that even at the extremes it still gets taken as dance musicians using their tools to make non-dance music, with no invitation beyond that.

Part of why I ask has to do with the last big listener-shift I can think of -- the fact that trip-hop and Big Beat and album-oriented "electronica" seemed to take a lot of people who'd never listened to electronics at all and shunt them over into, well, IDM and downtempo, at this point: it reframed their ideas about process and sound but only slightly affected the actual dance vs. non-dance dynamics.

I'm sort of wondering if anything can do that with the actual dance dynamic, because on some level I don't think you actually need to dance to enjoy dance music (although possibly you have to at least have experienced how that works). And I wonder if the dance vs. non-dance split will remain this permanent chasm, or whether it's possible for certain genres to show people paths to wander between them. (For instance, electro has upped my consumption of non-electro dance music quite a bit, though this mostly has to do with spending more time in stores where it's going to be available to me: plus I dance.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, 7 March 2003 17:13 (twenty-three years ago)

on some level I don't think you actually need to dance to enjoy dance music (although possibly you have to at least have experienced how that works).

I used to listen to almost nothing but dance music, as did many of my friends. I never dance (unless I'm being goofy) and half of my friends didn't either. Some of them never even went to a club/rave/whatever

― oops (Oops), Friday, 7 March 2003 17:16 (twenty-three years ago)

four years pass...

everyone loves house these days but im not sure if downtempo or microhouse had anything to do with it.

― ☪, Saturday, 28 July 2007 16:47 (eighteen years ago)

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