I'm completely clueless about dance sub-genres (-genera?)

Basement Jaxx are not specifically 'retro' or reviving any particular era or sub-genre - they have always been just about the NOW for me because their style and sound represent the contemporary futuristic dynamic of melding and merging different styles from before - they've never been JUST house, never been JUST garage, never been JUST jazz-funk-disco etc. - they represent the convergence of the previous 20 years of dance music pretty well. they have been called 'punk garage' in the past because of the way their dance music was intrinsically rhythmic and funky but also full of seemingly sporadic fx and sequences and this resulted in a very fresh exciting kick up house music's arse in general, esp. in '97 - they blew up around the same time as Daft Punk and two have been travelling on parallel paths ever since but obviously there are big enough differences between the two acts - the connection is they have both steered their maverick approach and very strong, inventive production skills and knowledge in more of a pop direction rather than the opposite route which was actually a good thing to see.

'nu skool breaks' seemed to come around when the likes of Adam Freeland set up the Marine Parade label. i suppose it was a way of 'intellectualising' big beat, given the production values of many tracks in that scene were somewhat more sophisticated sonically. the more generic 'breaks' or 'breakbeat' term is probably more in touch with the more jazz-based side of things and tracks that relied on samples of classic breakbeats (e.g. 'apache') rather than NEW breakbeats created digitally out of sliced up drum machine sounds i think.

Hardcore is the post-acid house music that jungle/drum 'n bass came out of. They're all basically the same thing, but the sub-genres make a differention in the music's development. Hardcore up until 1992, jungle up intil 1996, drum 'n bass from then on.

And what exactly is the difference between progressive and trance anyway?

I'd say progressive is trance for people who think they're "above" such cheesy music. But they're just kidding themselves... ;-)

Basement Jaxx f'rinstance, are they supposed to evoke this "1993" that I keep hearing about?

No... says who?

between 155 and 165bpm usually, featuring sampled classic breakbeat (e.g. 'apache' but more commonly 'amen' or 'funk drummer') chopped up and compressed and with a very deep sub-bass line, samples from old dub and reggae or ragga tracks e.g. 'laser' sound effect, sirens, vocal snippets 'timestretched' to buggery...

The distinction between progressive house (Deep Dish, Satoshi Tomiie et al) and progressive trance (Way Out West, Sander Kleinenberg) has also blurred completely, to the point where it all has become just "progressive". The ideal is hypnotizing, minimalist abstract grooves, sonically sophisticated, subtle and "nice" to the ears, devoid of anything "obvious" or exciting, leading to 12+ minute tunes sounding like intros where nothing really happens. Basically music for people with long attention spans, and indeed mostly enjoyed by people who feel they're above the more populist uplifting variety of trance with its in-your-face big synths, arpeggiators, big breakdowns and rising snaredrum cascades.

And to make things more confusing, the music (?) people generally refer to as gabber/gabba has always been named "Hardcore" by its scene insiders.

(Warning for slow connections: this picture is around half a meg!)

Anyway, it's all Simon Reynolds fault.

Shut Up & Dance '£10 To Get In' (1990)
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Lenny D'Ice 'We R E' (1991)
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Smith & Mighty 'Killer' (1991)
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A Guy Called Gerald '28 Gun Bad Boy' (1993)
\/
Rufige Kru 'Terminator' (1993)

basically that enables you to trace the 4/5 year process from which the darker side of hardcore rave turned into jungle when fused with the right elements, obviously DJs were pitching up the first three tunes for a faster rush, in turn prompting everyone to speed up the breakbeats more.

i think this falls into the "o we were there first category" without having much actual relation to the culture. see also plaid "angry dolphin". i mean, you can hear it, sure.

'Bug In The Bassbin' is certainly one of several tracks that triggered the general 'hardstep' sound and style of speeding up breakbeats but being so jazz-based it did not have as much influence on the jungle sound musically as the likes of 'We R E', 'Killer' and the SUAD stuff I'd say

Steve, you just reminded me: please explain hardstep / techstep etc.

that Mixmag chart is not bad but somewhat flawed (e.g. the tenuous connection from 'acid trax' to hip hop) i feel - like Siegbran i confess to knowing all the tunes, but its pride rather than shame :)

some other connections:

Disco & Funk samples + MC & scratching = early hip hop ('Rappers Delight')

Disco (esp. Moroder) + Kraftwerk = synthpop (Blue Monday, Vince Clarke etc.)

Disco + Kraftwerk + punk and krautrock = 'warm leatherette' and proto-electro (cabaret voltaire etc.)

Early hip hop + synthpop = electro-boogie, 'Planet Rock', 'Boogie Down Bronx', 'Clear', 'The Message', Mantronix etc. also including hits like 'Pump Up The Volume' and '19'

Electro-boogie + E + TB-303 = acid house (Acid Trax, Voodoo Ray, Chime etc.)

acid house + jazz = melodic/ambient house/techno (Derrick May, 'Pacific State', 'Flotation', 'Sueno Latino')

acid house + drug-induced negative feelings as experienced by socially alienated early rappers(?) = hard techno (Energy Flash, Dominator) + speed = gabber

acid house + disco + rare groove/80s soul + pop song values = vocal house ('tears', 'your love', joe smooth sterling void, marshall jefferson etc. including 'barefoot in the head') - include gospel for the house style of Chicago and NY that would eventually become Garage (Fire Island's 'There But For The Grace Of God' etc.)

acid house + dub + prog = The Orb

i'm trying to place Omni Trio but stuff like 'Renegade Snares' is so ethereal and euphoric it only just overlaps hardstep - because it came out in 1994 the Omni Trio stuff actually is the perfect bridge connecting hardcore rave with both hardstep AND happy hardcore...meanwhile House Crew's 'Nino's Dream' is pure hardcore rave but with a distinctive breakbeat that obviously played a part in forging both the jungle (check Leviticus 'The Burial' and you should pick up the influence of 'Nino's Dream') and hardstep

(and techsteppin i guess)

Carlito 'Heaven', 'Grapevine'
Galliano 'Higher Ground (Peshay mix)'
Peshay 'On The Nile'
Sci-Clone 'Melt'
Subject 13 'Jazz Style'

another branch of the genre that has always been hard to classify is the entire LTJ Bukem/Good Lookin; catalogue including late 90s material by Blame and Intense. 'Logical progression' was classed by many as 'intelligent drum n' bass' at the time, and yes this annoyed many junglists - the best way to describe it is as jazzstep but with more clearly identifable roots in the transitional period of 1994, as with Omni Trio, giving a nod to the euphoric rave of old Sub Base and Movin Shadow and retaining harder breakbeats than the jazzstep tunes i listed above. Bukem and his label created a real niche in that respect, the 'undie' of drum n' bass i guess you could say.

you are correct - by techno i was referring more to the harder Beltram style rather than the Derrick May stuff tho...its probably necessary to distinguish between May's techno sound and Beltram's techno sound as they are noticeably different - May's is more melodic and ambient, Beltram's was hard, cold, pulsating basically like gabber slowed down...its the latter that is more of a feature in techstep than any vaguely melodic elements, even samples are less common

and like i say, hardstep is for me the broad term for drum n' bass in general which can include all post '96 jungle (whereby the empthasis shifted from ragga/reggae influence to more of a hip hop one in terms of samples used and general mentality of artists)

There are two main streams of hardcore: UK and European. What is generally referred to in the UK as gabba/gabber has been known in Europe as hardcore. The geneology of the European hardcore sound stretches back to the early 90's (and before, but my knowledge of new-beat and stuff like that is pretty vague) and the hard techno you'd see on labels like R&S. That developed into the Rotterdam sound that is what most people think of as gabba (distorted kicks, high-velocity bpms, crazy samples, tearing riffs) which has now fragmented in lots of different ways (doomcore, hardcore tekno, newstyle, speedcore, artcore etc etc a million times over) and remains more of a European phenomena than a UK one. The largest current hardcore sound is the Dutch newstyle stuff, which is slower than the stereotypical old gabba, generally between 150-170 bpm. For the most part it retains the stereotypical distorted kick and yer big huge riffs.

Anyone interested in the state of European hardcore should look at http://www.sector-1.com which is an online record store that stocks huge amounts of hardcore. There's lots of sound samples, so that should give you a pretty good idea of what it is.

Hardcore in the UK sense has been pretty well covered in this thread, or at least up until the split with jungle going off in its own direction. From the mid-90's the hardcore scene gradually rapidly saw breakbeats de-emphasized in favour of the 4/4 kickdrum which was placed underneath more traditional UK hardcore elements (stab riffs, pianos, diva vocals). An example of this is 'Toytown' by Hixxy & Sharkey, which was absolutely huge in '96 and had a very hard Dutch-style kick underneath a, well, slightly cheesy melody. ;)

By the end of the 90's the UK happy hardcore scene had driven itself into a rut. There was no variation in the tunes at all, too many embarrassing rip-offs (even by hardcore's standards) of bad pop tunes, and no creativity. I remember going to a Slammin Vinyl rave at Bagley's and hearing 'Shooting Star' five times in one night! When stuff like that happens, you know a scene is in trouble. The hardcore scene has managed to revive itself over the last couple years, mainly through its Freeform subsection, which started out as being called trancecore, but then the name was changed by agreement (don't ask me why, it's confusing). The current UK hardcore is probably not to the taste of people on ILM as it's neither particularly intellectual nor thrillingly futuristic. But the raves are full again, record sales are up, and the scene lives on, which seemed unlikely for a while. The most successful UK hardcore label now is Hixxy's Raverbaby, which basically puts out 165-170 bpm Eurotrance. I think it's pretty poor but it's popular. There is however some smaller hardcore labels putting out solid stuff (well, in my opinion, anyways).

Hope that was of interest to some people (although slightly meandering away from the original point). That's a pretty vague overview, but I can write more if anyone is interested.

cos i might say siegbran's fourfold plan in the u.s. would be, hip-hop/r&b, salsa, house/techno, and industrial/goth/britpop/etc in the punk clubs. and then line dancing on the sides, in the same place as drumnbass over there, in the totally inbred retarded cousins role. as descended from, respectively, display dancing [kid on stage impressing crowd/cheerleaders/soul revues/interpretive ballet], partner dancing [drunken pre-sex folk dancing], ecstatic dancing [dancing with eyes closed, for oneself, with the music, not on display or as seduction], and involuntary dancing [dancing as lost art played at, headbanging / fistwaving that accidentally becomes dancing, shoving, group grope].

i'm sure you were talking about some rhythmic difference or cultural thing though, right?

(really though, thanks. Sometimes one gets interested in the history of things)

couple things though, the 'jungle techno' thing was not a separate genre, it was just another name for hardcore which fell out of use along the way.

theres also 'darkness' or even just 'dark', which was this sort of genre, but was more of a buffer zone between implosion of rave and emergence of jungle, like it was still hardcore or rave or whatever, but people just started calling some tunes happy and some tunes dark, happy eventually becoming the breakless happy hardcore hixxy stuff popular in scotland etc, and dark becoming jungle. its kind of weird because jungle as a term was sort of in use right back as far as 91, but not as an actual 'thing'

even then its complicated, as stevem mentions The House Crew - Euphoria (Nino's Dream) (and also some of the manix tunes), because they are definitely post-rave/hardcore, but pre-jungle, but they weren't dark either. you could sense that something was definitely changing with these records, they were totally london, and they were more vibey than hyper, like the tempo same but more woozy. to me ninos dream is a record that falls outside of genre classification

jungle techno: as it was gareth who reminded me of this term in the first place after completely forgetting it existed i hold my hand up - less of a specific sub-genre and more of just a term for describing the 'darkcore' or dark stuff that began integrating more dancehall-orientated elements en route to jungle, i recall a track from '94 featuring a sample of the Rasta drug baron from Predator 2 that seems to fit in with that - it was probably by DJ Hype.

House: the immortal 4/4 disco groove
Techno: abstract electro(funk)-futurism
Trance: focus on melody and atmosphere over rhythm (hmm...Geir alert?)
Hiphop: the breakbeat

I like your "how people dance to it" classification system! Lots of interesting links between genres make some sense that way...

your richie hawtin minimalist stuff: technically techno, right? but most people dance to this in a putting on a show sort of way, if only for themselves; they vary their moves all over the place, cos they can't just think about the music when the music's so blank. really it's like a macho version of trance.

if i wanted to make your grouping a little sillier, and include ways of looking at reality...
hip hop - history,facts,value,jargon,recycle,draggin beats,past tense
house - what's in?,present tense,fiction,evolution,on the beat,fashion
techno - what's next?,future "tense",sci fi,thrills,noises,on up beats
trance - idealist/conditional,fantasy,heaven,2nd reality,losing the beat [into ambient]

The other issue is the geo-cultural differences in dancing itself. In Melbourne we tend to dance with our arms down by our sides; in Sydney people tend to dance with their arms up in the air; Canberra, which is sort of halfway between the two, seems to have lots of people who (quite hilariously) dance with their arms almost horizontal. There are also different musical tastes as well between each city, but those dancing styles will differ for people dancing to the same style of music.

I'm actually playing devil's advocate w/ myself here 'cause I really believe strongly in the importance of the relationship b/w dancing and the groove. I know myself that after an initial and intense immersion in jungle clubs I took ages to get used to and finally enjoy dancing to house, even though I already liked the music lots.

Also, where could you fit electro in this schema? In london people seem to dance to it in a slightly disinterested way, with a lot of finger-pointing action. I guess that makes it indie...

?

great stuff about dancing up there

but the thing i meant to illustrate by singling out big beat in that way is to say, whatever big beat meant in london 1995 or whenever it was coalescing, by the time the chem bros toured the u.s. following mtv's breaking their single, big beat was for us the next step of brit pop. as such it was heard in indie clubs not trendoid places and most smart djs wouldn't touch it except for laughs.

and i think that attitude was largely correct: big beat seems to be suffused with britpoppy brashness, and the funk it purveyed smells as pleasingly decontextualized and unsexy as gang of four or dj shadow.

don't get me wrong i still enjoy some of those records when the mood strikes me -

(1)insert dance genre here

I like dancing to techno aswell I suppose.

And about dancing, I've had no problems dancing to nearly anything falling under the "dance" umbrella over the past 15 years (and lots and lots of older disco, funk etc too of coure), but every time I'm in a salsa club, I feel completely exposed as the white dude without any rhythm that I really am.

my sister is into that sorta stuff...but I think she's far too glamourous (or at least in her own mind) to ever do something as plebeian as sweat.

That was sort of the problem I had: jungle felt like there was more room for movement within the bar, so I could rise and fall with a level of swing (my dancing to jungle - and being self-conscious i've frequently watched my shadow - tends to have a very loose rise-and-fall aspect to it, like waves cresting. This is in stark contrast to the tight quasi-hip hop dancing of most current jungle fans, so I always fear that I look really silly by comparison). With house the 4/4 beat initially seemed to cancel that out, so my movements became more blocky, more repetitive, more tiring... Now I don't notice it at all, and I guess it may be that i'm dancing to the snares and the hi-hats instead (and this is why Jacob's point later down is so OTM). In the case of *really* monolithic house (eg. Subliminal Records style stuff), the sharp beat and the bassline work together to create a great stop-start sensation which is also really enjoyable. This tends to apply to 4/4 electro too. Overall, whatever I'm listening to I tend to invent a secret rhythm in my head that's not just 4/4 pound; if I can't I find it much harder to dance.

Siegbran/stevem : so far, this is the only kind of dance music stuff where i like most of i've heard of it
so - this is called 'progressive house' or 'deep house' or....?

From AMG's review of 'Global Underground:Los Angeles' (which i like alot of):
Nearly every track here employs a progressive house structure — booming 4/4 bass beats, high-hat fills, near-hypnotic rhythm, zero snare rolls — and most accentuate this foundation with an ever-phasing, glossy layer of subtle synth washes that hark back to the classic, early-'90s trance era when trance was truly trance-inducing. Throughout the first set, Digweed focuses more on the house aesthetic, emphasizing Satoshi Tomiie's work; the second set, as expected, heads into more heady territory, as proven producers such as Breeder and Cass get emphasized, along with a number of Bedrock records. Those weaned on late-'90s Oakenfold-esque progressive trance may find this album uneventful, yet anyone looking for a mix that trims away theatrical gaudiness and focuses instead strictly on rhythm, nuance, and sublime poetics should find this Digweed's most rewarding release to date — it's surely his most restrained and least saccharine so far.

could you 2 experts recommend 2 or 3 other compilation albums of this kind of minimal-istic stuff to this particularly clueless ignoramus ?

other enquiry: anybody know what sub-genres are used as the soundtrack to the cable channel 'fashion tv' ?
much to my own surprise i like about half of what i hear on it (but it is never credited)

Satoshi Tomiie "Global Underground Nubreed 006"
Sander Kleinenberg "Essential Mix"
Steve Lawler "Lights Out"
Deep Dish "Global Underground 021 Moscow"
Sasha & John Digweed "Communicate"

But seriously, if you've got Winamp, check out Frisky Radio (just click on the link, select "open"), it's a Shoutcast radio station that plays 24/7 progressive. Nice for relaxing/working.