Discuss - 20 years of disco revivalism

explanation required

Indie-Dance / Punk-Funk - What Went Wrong The First Time?

you mean kylie minogue?

x-post x 10

xpost - who's talking about shep petitbone? i'm talking EARLY madonna

But that's nothing to do with 'revivalism', which as I understand it is directly imitating/sampling earlier musics. And as Andy K says is rarer than people think.

re the 808:

It was not retro though, I dont think Ron Trent put 909 on altered states because he thought 909 shuffle was historic. He did it because he wanted it to be easily mixable with all the other records that were out at the time. Post-house DJ records are not music, they are fragments of a mosaic. If you used an 808 you could mix your track into Klein and MBO's record because you had the same drum sound on your record. A house record was a lo-fi grime version of Italio-disco and Midwest funk. The chassis for the entire genre was the 808 and 909. The music evolved from there, Deep House is when Larry Heard mixed a 909 with a 101 and jx8p playing jazz chords, Acid was Phture with 50$ 707 and a 303 that was given to pierre because Marshall Jefferson was bored with it, jack trax were Adonis or Virgo banging an 808 raw dog with maybe a 101 bassline. Techno was just the Detroit guys hearing the Chicago records and playing up the Parliment and electro influence. Same gear, different vibe. It all fit together though because the drum machines had the same sound and feel.

The goal posts of house music are very narrow, that is the whole point. You want your record to fit into the pack, but still be new at the same time. Folks used the 808 and 909 because they were easy and they defined the feel of the music. People have said I am nuts on other threads for saying this, but if you really want that Detroit/Chicago feel you have to get the real boxes. Those boxes sound and feel a certain way, and that is why all those old records feel like they do. The people who argue the loudest have never actually been in the studio with the real thing.

I don't think it was a retro decision for the basic reason that they were in fact grabbing samples and laying them over an 808. House's ability to gobble everything in sight is what makes it house. If they were really going back to basics they would have had session guys and live instrumentation. They were referencing past dance music in a house context. They were throwing yet another layer of sound over that Roland drum chassis. Those sounds might have had signifers of an eariler era, but they were secondary to the modular rhythm bed of house music.

For me late nineties deep house and punk-funk feel like flipsides of the same coin: a stylistic reproduction of (certain strains of) disco which venerates process (live musicianship in particular) over - or as much as - product. There's a refinement and lushness to a lot of deep house (and conversely an almost muddy dense randomness to punk-funk) that is enjoyable as a sonic end in itself, but nonetheless such affectations seem designed to evoke a sense of the circumstances in which the music was made, and a self-consciousness about dance music as a mode of production (electroclash does much the same thing but wrt electro/synth-pop).

Conversely, styles like French house, italo-house and electro-house seem to regard disco as a field to be plundered for sonic signifiers, and so while all three of these in many ways steal the most *obvious* parts of disco, they're also the ones which sound the least retro-fetishist because the mode of production is modern and maybe even unselfconscious to some degree (though I'd be prepared to accept that producers would be aware of what they were doing by eg. framing Chic riffs in pummelling house beats). Maybe the best way to differentiate the two approaches is to look at the fault-lines between them: Adult vs Ewan Pearson; Faze Action vs Isolee. At issue is whether disco is being venerated or merely instrumentalised.

I don't think one approach is intrinsically better than the other, as both produce great music and both have downsides: veneration seems to lead to a pointless quest for barely differentiated models of perfection or obscurantism; instrumentalisation --> the more typical descent into banal familiarity as the once novel fusion of old and new stagnates or ossifies.

I agree with alot of what you say, in fact I think stuff like House's ability to gobble everything in sight is what makes it house is a perfect description, but I think the statement above is a bit of a totalitarian stance, or a very techno-centric way of looking at dance music.

Not every DJ is Jeff Mills, not by a long long shot.

I guess there is something wrong with me when I think the ideal dance record should be a dry punchy 808 kick and some subtle AM radio static run through a bit of reverb and delay with *maybe* a fizzy synth noise every 16 bars.

Look up Dan Seltzer that guy is like the Italio Samurai of ILM.

:: V.A.
I-ROBOTS
Cat. No. 515186-2 (CD) 515186-1 (2LP)
Irmagroup ---------------->
The sound of the 80’s, Electro in particular, in recent times has been influencing the world of dance music. Italian Electro Dance and Italo Disco are among the strongest inspiration sources. The first volume of I-Robot (Italian Robot) selected by Gianluca Pandullo want to be a precious retrospective on that musical period. The compiler is a deejay and record collector. He deliberately chose the most rare and influential tracks rather than the most famous ones, already featured in other international compilations.
:: 1. PETER RICHARD Walking In The Neon
:: 2. CHARLIE Spacer Woman
:: 3. KLEIN & MBO Wonderful
:: 4. SCOTCH Pinguins’ Invasion
:: 5. STEEL MIND Bad Passion
:: 6. 'LECTRIC WORKERS Robot Is Systematic
:: 7. SUN-LA-SHAN Catch
:: 8. CAPRICORN I Need Love
:: 9. DHARMA Plastic Doll
:: 10. SPHINX Collision
:: 11. KANO Ikeya-Seki
:: 12. ALEXANDER ROBOTNICK Dance Boy Dance
:: 13. N.O.I.A. Stranger in a strange land

Just say it!

Hey, did you guys know that the Beegee's invented disco?

Also, did you guys know that acid house was invented by Genesis P. Orridge in LA in 1992?

And finally, did you know that Stock, Atkin, and Watermann invented techno with the second Banarama album?

WTF

"house music is a feeling"

a body thing

whenever purity of intention is ascribed to a musical form i am immediately suspicious...

I don't know if you understand this or not, but the entire reason black american popular music is so good is because folks was trying to get real paid. It was good because it had to be, it was the only way you were going to turn a buck with a record. If anything artisticality is what is screwing up music right now.

yes, but mike is also right, in that if you want to get paid, you better be able to judge how its going to be received, if you want to survive.

functionalism is good. bump up against the parameters, dont kick them down.

Larry Sherman was a business man who happened to own a pressing plant, he did not even give a shit about the music, plain and simple. The fact that Marshall Jefferson was pulling strings behind the scenes and acting as Trax records secret weapon does not change the fact that is was a business that existed to make money. There were some great records to come out of Chi, but there were even more bunk ass ones that were put out to cash in. And Trax was the good label, I don't even want to go into DJ International.

The whole thing that people are missing is that awesome records still came out of this soup of dirty business and cut rate music technology. That is the miracle, that through this gritty functional music some warmth and soul still managed to glimmer through the murk.

Also, this is the single greatest post on ILM ever.

I do know that the above is entirely irrelevent to a whole load of people listening to all sorts of house music today, classic or otherwise.

I actually amn't certain we disagree greatly, I'm not saying house is innately more spiritual, just that musically it became such a global success that it's very difficult to still say that it is simply functional club music, house ideas have permeated the mainstream in a way techno ones don't seem to have, and I don't even mean that as any value judgement.

We're speaking from TOTALLY different perspectives obviously but all I'm saying is that I think the view that house is a purely functionalist club thing has been made dated by charts and listening habits, if not in the US then in Europe.

The idea of the house record as a classic single is fairly well established over here.

Yeah I mean I don't see a massive disagreement in our positions, perhaps I misunderstood where you were coming from initially, I do not doubt for a second house is full of all those bad things you discuss, far from it, anyone who's had any dealings with any dance scene in the world would need to be deaf/blind to do that, whatever era they took place in.

In fairness dude I think you were the one who appeared to miss this point first! The people disagreeing with you, as far as I can tell, are the ones trying to argue that the way people recieve or enjoy those records makes irrelevent the process in which they are made, or the reasons for which they were made. The enjoyment of the records wins the day. Hooray etc!

Siegbran what stuff are you talking about specifically? I'm working on the assumption that I like it or would like it whatever it is!

essential 00s italo singles:
Magic Box - If You
Gigi D'Agostino - Super (Un Deux Trois)