Are DFA over-rated?

also: i'm not sure if this is part of their shtick, but some of the segues on the Colette No5 mix are among the clumsiest i've heard (outside of my own)... the Muzik one seems a little bit less slapped together.

gygax!
m.

LCD Soundsystem - Beat Connection (edit)
The Juan Maclean - You Can't Have It Both Ways ("live")
Metro Area - Orange Alert (DFA mix)
LCD Soundsystem - Losing My Edge
Radio4 - Dance to the Underground (DFA mix)
The Rapture - House of Jealous Lovers
The Juan Maclean - By the Time I Get to Venus
LCD Soundsystem - Give It Up
Le Tigre - Deceptacon (DFA mix)
Fischerspooner - Emerge (DFA mix)
The Rapture - Olio
The Juan Maclan - Give Me Every Little Thing
Black Dice - Endless Happiness (EYE mix)

For me the main difference with original post-punk stuff is that the DFA are heavily influenced by acid house as well.

Snarf. You'd be saying otherwise if you ever visited Seattle, at the least.

I felt that the DFA mix for muzik was a bit of a history lesson in dance music. You start off with the Metro area remix which is an opening statement of where they start in the whole disco-punk thing (we still sequence, but we do sample our own basslines and use "real" drum samples) then you segue way into Out Hud doing sorta Italio'ish disco followed by DK7 doing acid house then you get Beat Connection which is tracky conceptual disco followed by Radio 4 doing a pre-acid classic DJ International-esque Chicago trig-in house track followed by Black Dice which is fucking whale vomit and ruins the continuity of the mix, then you get House Of Jealous Lovers which is what ACR would have sounded like if they were American and The Deceptacon remix which is just strait disco with punky vocals then you get Make It Happen by Playgroup which sounds like early Cabaret Voltaire having hot deviant sex with a loft disco record then you get Casey Spooner's fat ass doing some Lame-O remix of emerge which sounds like a twee version of the Clipse featuring faux 808 tom percussion finished by Juan MacLean doing a quite straight take on Italio-disco without any of the grimy cheek that makes all the Rotterdam/Hague records so mind-blowing.

All in all, they know their history and they are not afraid to sell it right back to you with a smirk and a mesh-back hat. You have to give them credit, they hooked up with Universal and this shit is about to go mainstream. They were the first ones to make it out the gate, and they are about to brand Disco-Punk. I think a lot of their material is hit and miss, but when they hit it is out of the ballpark. I just hope the whole thing doesn't implode on them, the genre is already tired and acid house is going to become the next dance music revivalist trend. It is 1985 right now, and 1988 is just around the corner.

Funny like ha-ha or funny like a one-toed foot?

PS Hard to disagree with Mike Taylor, esp. about the dread spectre of Acid House Has Risen From the Grave.

I guess I just remember 1988 in Chicago really well ...

I am just finding that No Way Back is way better than all the dry computer records that are coming out these days. I would rather listen to old Steve Poindexter records than what is coming out on Force Tracks. Ever since computers replaced hardware as the tool of choice for dance producers things have gone down hill.

mike if you can explain to me WHY that is without resorting to some nebulous argument about "soul", i'll buy you a case of whatever your preffered beverage is.

http://www.detroithistorical.org/promo-techno/images/tnobjuan.jpg

There is just something about hardware synthesis that computers cannot touch. It is not a soul thing, I am not going to call you an asshole if you disagree with me, it is just a personal preference. I don’t think computer synthesis sounds as good in a lot of cases. You can try and cover it up with mastering through tube amps, high-end graphic eq's and tube compressors, but that underlying characteristic is still there.

Computers are great; they give you a lot of options cheaply, they allow you to work quickly, and they make it easier to make music, but I don’t think that the results are always as good. At the same time, the interface sort of pushes you into certain directions and towards certain creative outcomes. Also, a lot of the software is based around the concept of centralized time keeping, rather than through distributed sequencing through multiple synchronized clocks. I like the idea of a whole bunch of little boxes working together to make music rather than one single interface. Also, I think that computers give people way too much time to edit and re-edit and edit the re-edit... visually and it can make things a bit sterile and overly considered sounding.

I am not going to say that all microhouse is soulless and blah blah blah, I simply have an aesthetic preference for the older analogue stuff. I like the way a handful of synths, a couple drum machines, two outboard processors and a cheap mixer sound. I like synth/drum machine tracks a lot more than audio manipulation tracks. A lot of computer audio just doesn't sound good to me. I would rather listen to I-F than Sutekh right now.

At this point I think you owe me a case of beer, Jess. I will be mailing my address to you shortly.

Although I'm tempted by this argument having worked on computer software, surely the challenge is to overcome whatever creative constraints you're imagining here Mike.

It's not as if ForceTracks, or Playhouse or Perlon have produced a 'microhouse' sound simply from composing on a laptop. I wouldn't pay up a case of beer with this linear line of reasoning...

as always i am far more interested in what the music sounds like (and by that i don't just mean the individual sounds) than the machinery it's made on

So the age old complaint of 'real' instruments versus synths/samplers is now mapped over 808s vs. laptops - eh...

Also, Armand Van Helden plugged "No Way Back" into pro-tools and worked out a pretty cool track on 'Killing Puritans'.

I think it's because back in the acid days (not that I'd know) the idea of anyone sitting around and listening to those records would've been unthinkable, but that's exactly the context microhouse is made for. Acid was only ever designed to be heard in sweaty basements, and it retains a real freshness because it was made in a context that is difficult for us in our technology-sated musical world to even imagine.

Microhouse is fantastic, but it is jaded, sophisticated music whereas acid is brutal dancefloor simplicity.

That's not to say one has more soul than the other, but microhouse only ever surprises me on the intellectual level, whereas acid has an insistent rawness that has a completely different, and equally unexpected, effect.

I have to say that I hate DFA's vision of what 80s dance was about, with the exception of Metro Area. It all stinks of dance music that's scared of being club music, which is just wishy-washy. It's all far too arch to cut through on a body level.

Yes, Losing my Edge is very funny, in the sense that the vocal is very funny. The track is workmanlike and a little mehh.

Maybe I spent too long listening to mediocre 80s dance, but I don't think styles like Italo, 80s disco and proto-house work with out that over-dramatic almost operatic 'cheesiness' that the originals have and that DFA have surgically removed. It's like, if you want to have Peech Boys, you have to have MFSB too.

I'd love to hear Jan's view...

until you've danced to it in a sweaty basement club!

jack tracks are definitely already back. there's force tracks' "jack to the future," a recent mark farina 12" on classic or MFF that's actually storming, that "track of the night" tune on playhouse, osborne's work on ghostly/spectral...

acid house / micro house - whatever, it is all sweaty basement dancin' music. that's what it is designed for - DANCING. i've been playing acid house out since 1987 ('i was there") and still play it out from time to time, esp the just pre acid jack trax - denise motto, adonis, the children, gherkin jerks... - and i run a sweaty basement microhouse night BUT, i don't listen to it. none of it makes any sense tome unless heard in the context of a club enviroment at which point it becomes the best sonic experience of my life.

funnily enough, the one thing that has brought many of my friends who were acid house veterans out clubbing again after years of staying in are the sounds of perlon, playhouse, kompakt etc.

given most of it is so slow

ronan - that's what the pitch control is for.

I love that stuff...

Where's your night?

Honestly, I can't convince you because you don't know. I'll put it to you like this, work with an 808 and a 909 and then work with an mpc2000xl with 808 and 909 samples. You can get damn close with the mpc if you try really hard to emulate the programming style of those machines but there is still something missing. It comes down to a feel, it is like the difference between the way two jazz drummers swing. You can give two guys the same sheets and they are going to swing the same beat just slightly differently. If you have an ear for this sort of thing, it makes a huge difference. The old Jack and Detroit records sound the way they do because the sequencers in those boxes had a certain feel. A 909 swings like a 909 for a reason, the 808 sounds the way it does for a reason.

To be frank, to say a sequencers feel in a recording makes no difference is like saying a drummers feel makes no difference in a live band. You are welcome to your opinions, but in this case they are objectively wrong. You can dodge the issue all you like, but in electronic music the technology is the outcome. I've put the hours in behind the old x0x boxes and I have done it behind an MPC. There is a difference, and those who know from first hand experience will tell you so.

To wrap it up for you in plain English; just because you can't hear/comprehend the differences between Elvin Jones and Alex Van Halen doesn't make me an idiot for preferring to listen to the former when it comes to jazz. As for not caring about how the technology changes music; when the machines are your band, the technology is the music.

Or to put it another way in more easily understood rock-centric terms:

You can say that you don't care about the technological basis behind music, but you would have to admit that Girl You Really Got Me by The Kinks would be a completely different song emotionally if it were done on a banjo and an acoustic guitar.

I mean come on, banjo's and acoustic guitars are totally in the same family of instruments as electric guitars; there shouldn't be a real difference in the sound right? And besides, it is all the same, what difference would it make if it was an electric guitar or a ukulele they both have strings and make sounds right? It shouldn't make a difference if this one guy plays on this track or if we just get another guy, they all do basically the same thing right? There is no difference between players, and we don't care or understand how the records are made anyway.

i can hear the alesis mmt-8 sequencer in a lot of early detroit stuff (because yes, i've worked with it), but when i listen to r-theme that's not what i'm really listening for.

Obviously you are going to listen to music because of what is being expressed rather than just because it features a certain piece of gear. There are pleanty of good computer tracks and lots of bad 808 tracks, that is a given. The point I am trying to make is that the technology does change the outcome.

If you were a real dork you would know that R-Theme was made on one of these: http://www.keyboardmuseum.org/ar/k/korg/s/sqd1.html

(thanks for the link)

Technology and electronic music

I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, but The Colette mix was mixed by James Murphy, an avowed rocker turned dancer circa 2000 while the Muzik mix was mixed by Tim Sweeney, who, while a young one, has probably clocked more hours DJing, with regular weeklies and a radio show then James and is an excellent DJ, mixing, scratching, tricks and all that. He was also under the tutelage of Steinski at some point. Not that Steinski's known as a DJ primarily, but I just thought that's a cool fact.