2004: the year electro ate dance music and spat out the 'black' bits - discuss

Couple that with the fact that techno will never go beyond its current pleasant stasis and it's not surprising people were looking for a genre which could do some hybrid of the techno and house things, ie be hard and electronic but also have a heart and if you'll pardon my wretching "have soul".

I think to be honest the argument against electro is a bit spurious without some use of the concept of soul or whatever.

From my point of view, I think the Euro thing is still quite interesting, perhaps it's different for people on mainland Europe but electronic music from Germany and France and stuff feels foreign enough at the moment anyway, perhaps as foreign as it did when it was being made by black Americans, I don't know.

In a way it pleases me to see Europe standing on its own two feet in this manner.

However I think Jess was a bit ott in his criticisms too, and it's a bit simplified to say that electrohouse takes its cue from just italo, ebm, and new beat.

I mean, surely the acid house influence is there for all to see?

Obviously I am a shameless electrohouse booster.

But on the other hand it is significant - I mean, I gotta take it in context of that Blake Baxter tune - this is a new evolution, a new myth for the dance scene. We spent years trying to recreate some sweaty gay chicago basement - not literally, but figuratively you know. Maybe it's overanalysing, but I wanna know what the replacement is.

I mean, is "Frank sinatra" the "Move your body" of the new millenium? Cos that's scary...

Electro
Electro’s victory over house was so total we didn’t even notice that when house structures and tempos began returning to European dancefloors that it was actually still just electro disguised to look like house. If anything is signaling wider dance culture’s death as a whole, it’s this. (I don’t know quite what it says about music in general, also in thrall to 80s retro like nobodies business.) Can you imagine someone, even in 1996, turning and saying, okay, the mission is terminated, music really was better in 1985? Amazingly that seems to be the view shared by everybody, from big room Ibizan gods to microhouse nobodies. Someone told me at the Villalobos/Hawtin/Smagge gig at Fabric a while back the latest sounds heard were probably from around 86 or so. (It’s that house hi-hat…you can’t disguise it.) What I hear in the current electro (and here is where I get all Xgau Euro-conspiratorial, so bear with me) is the final victory of trance, except in a “sonic cool” context. It’s trance slowed down, beefed up, stripped of cheese, purged of any remaining E-motionalism. So it’s the stripping of all remaining “black” influence from house and techno for a European audience. (Think back to Jan Jelinek’s – though please don’t lump him in here – comments in the original “microhouse” article, about wanting to find a European analogue to the works of the great masters, without turning into Jazzanova, wanting to find something with its own European character.) But even more so than the funklessness, it’s the circuitousness of it all that bothers me, the idea of a completed circle. What happened to “let’s push things forward”?

doesnt original 80s electro = computerwelt with a kickdrum? i mihgt be misinformed here.

huge xpost again

For starters, I'm not sure I see the "latest sounds were from around 86 or so" thing, I don't know who said that but "this was all done in 86" must be one of the oldest criticisms of every single dance genre ever.

Also I don't see how "trance slowed down, beefed up, stripped of cheese, purged of any remaining E-motionalism"="the stripping of all remaining black influence from house and techno for a European audience".

I mean even if I could see how those two things were the same, I would substitute the word "American" for the word "Black" straight away.

I also would venture that in the current political climate less Europeans than ever before want to be American, black or otherwise.

Then the word "funklessness", again I think the necessity of "funk" in dance music is an obsolete rule, the concept of funk only exists in dance music as long as the influence of funk remains interesting, whatever it is that is making people dance to Tiefschwarz, DJ T, Tiga, Black Strobe etc may not be funk, but it is making people dance nonetheless, albeit to stuff with a different lineage.

As I said on Jess's blog, electro is one of the first things to feel truly big and new in dance in some time, possibly in my clubbing lifetime, ie the last 3 or 4 years (which may seem a short time but I have digested alot of stuff past and present). I know there must be clubnights starting all around the world playing this stuff, and I also know for a fact of loads of people who only like electro, and know nothing about dance music, but turn up to our night every week and ask you for Tiefschwarz or Mylo or whatever.

OK so personal experience is no form of cogent argument, but you can just feel the buzz in the air at nights in the last 6 months, and believe me I don't really get that from the drugs anymore!

xxpost

neither here nor there in regards specifically to this thread's mission perhaps, but i was listening to "fanfares" (at dangerous volumes!) and was struck by how foreign it sounded and thought about the man vitalic himself and his international-ness. it occured to me that this was, pardon the term, "world music."

it's like 'THE JACK' isn't it? crazy sounds decorating a monotonous yet infectious groove.

evidence: Tiga - 'Pleasure from the bass' (Phuture innit?)

(of course one of the biggest criticisms by electrosnobs is that Tiefschwarz are too cheesy and populist (in other words: made for E-heads...)

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drg500/g520/g52006nrk9v.jpg

(Which would probably be a more substantial argument if anyone actually bought, promoted or reviewed this album)

Also because I dunno about anyone else, but funk feels totally redundant to me right now. Like hearing funk records or self-consciously 'funky' hip hop makes me run from the dancefloor these days, which is the opposite of a few years back.

Like funk is kind of done with as an idiom, the way that james brown made those motown hi hats irrelevant. Lil Jon and Timbaland between them have taken anything recognisable as funk in the old sense out of hip hop and replaced it with something else, and maybe electrohouse is just the 4/4 analogue of this.

The only decent dance that still even feels remotely funky to me is Akufen and Pantytec.

what about david carretta - "kill your radio"?

First of all, when Jess says "electro" I'm not exactly sure what he means; I certainly don't get the sense that textbook electro patterns have overtaken anything (but then my entry into electro was the '97/98 revival with Interdimensional Transmissions et al so my perspective may be skewed). Italo definitely continues to be a large influence (but then again Carl Craig remixed Robotnick a while back, so let's not draw our lines too narrowly). At the same time, while somebody mentioned that it's the euro-electro, not amero-electro, that's the primary influence now, the Jonzuns and World Class Wrecking Crus aren't totally unheard; the Crazy Girl single on DC Recordings this year (featuring vocals from the singer of Maurice Fulton's "My Gigolo" and production by Chicken Lips and Depth Charge) is basically a straight ripoff of Disco B's Miami tune "Lay the 'D' Down."

Re: the Fabric gig, I'd be surprised if that was Villalobos that Jess' informant was talking about. Villalobos has been playing lots of almost tribal house lately; lots of house classics, including a shitload of oooold Paul Johnson tracks. His productions induce trance states, but only broadly speaking; for all their microprocessing, they're increasingly based upon Afro-Cuban percussion (and so is Luciano's work, for that matter). The only electro elements I hear in them is the handclap; everything else is fluid polyrhythms, like Detroit techno recreated by a drum circle and then remixed.

Trance is indeed enormous, in the work of folks like Vitalic or even some of Mathew Jonson's tracks, lots of the Speichers, some Italic records. Perhaps it is a European taste; progressive house and psy-trance, however, are absolutely owning Latin America right now (Villalobos may be a superstar there because of his roots, but he hardly represents the masses musically), so I'm not sure how Eurocentric the charge is. (Of course, middle class Latin American kids often want to be European in their tastes – I think this explains much of the success of Global Underground in Latin America – but psycotrance is really reaching a broader spectrum of kids across Mexico, not just the middle and upper class clubbers.)

Ultimately, I hear very few completed circles; mostly, when I do, it's the fairly trad electro-disco-house-EBM (in varying proportions) tracks from Get Physical or MBF or Black Strobe, but those feel more like placeholders, intermediary steps to something else, than signs of resignation that it really was better in '86. Of course that's just my perception, but the predominance of 4/4 music that really is pushing things forward conditions my view.

(And, ultimately, I'm not sure why "funk" needs to be the be-all and end-all of dance music, certainly not funk in one very particular historical sense. Neptunes and Timbaland have certainly moved on to something else, by and large – and crunk is often more moshy than funky – and they don't get taken to task for it.)

this is a pretty hasty post, but i'm sure the idea could be developed further and more cohesively.

Also I am not sure there is even one house track on the Felix album except "Ready 2 Wear"

Based on my limited encounters with Venezuelan folks out for a night of dancing, these descriptions are pretty OTM for that country as well.

this seems like it could be unpacked and elaborated quite a bit!

so basically it's house with all the warmth and fluidity taken out?

why not icehouse then?

or Eski-house? :)

incidentally the word "electrohouse" would, if i'd never heard it before, probably first make me think of Nitro Deluxe's "Let's Get Brutal" aka "This Brutal House", they were on this post-electro/latin freestyle label Cutting out of NY area, this is mid-Eighties to 86/87 era -- and it's a sound exactly midway between electro/Mantronix and the non-soulful/non-deep/non-garage end of house -- cold but uplifting, lots of twittery sampling-keyboard derived noises, deep heavy bass (a big tune for the Warp bleep'n'bass people)

i wonder if that Nitro track is a reference point, it was a fucking immense tune in the UK and probably elsewhere in europe i imagine

phil, that villalobos remix sounds amazing but also way too avant (like his recent album) to be the mainstay of dancefloors or basis of a punter-pleasing genre

yeah i'm sure there's still practitioners doing future-fucking stuff (although it sounds like you really have to search to find 'em) but what's different is that the future-probing music was massively popular and in your face -- it was a populist vanguard

no, you're totally right - that was what i was trying to say when i said it would never be "popular." villalobos can get away with a lot on the decks, just because of who he is, but there will always be a divide (i suspect) between his crowd-pleasing DJ sets and his K-hole productions. his recordings, especially the really spacy, far-out ones, will never get even the most avant avant-yobs going!

i'll always have a slightly different perspective from you just because i'm not a raver, never was, and came up on rave music (just like punk) from a bedroom perspective. believe me, i wish it were otherwise! so i guess i'll always gravitate toward form first, and populist vanguarism second. i wish i could believe that techno could be reborn as a populist vanguard, but i don't see it happening at the moment. that doesn't mean i think it's "elitist" - a term i hate - but rather simply content in its compartmentalization.

icehouse is funny.

both myself and my dj partner wet ourselves over that lopazz mix but i can testify that 75% of all villalobos's music clears dancefloors which is a shame, but true. i guess it probably works at 7am when people are really mangled, but sadly most people aren't prepared to entertain it at peak time.

And house without the warmth is a fairly good description but there are exceptions to this in your average DJ set, in a way I like to think of the genre as "electronic house", but that's too general for most. But in an ideal world people could interpret that as house which has left most of the old "soul" ideas behind and (again to be hugely general, but this is genre names we're talking about) mines various points in dance music's history.

As has been pointed out, it's not massive sonic innovation and there is a real cleverness about stuff and it's definitely post-modern but I guess futurism couldn't go on forever.

I think the fairest attack on the stuff is the above point, but it's not as though artists can't create any more new sounds, there is a massive pot of stuff to dip into and experiment with, and I think that willingness is still there, and people are still anxious for new stuff.

As I said on Jess's blog, the enthusiasm for this stuff, at least round my way, is really something. I assume it's like this in other parts of Europe and the world too. Certainly I think dance and house is very healthy at the moment, to the extent that I would expect it to start churning out album acts again soon.

The ideas banging around electrohouse nights have to filter through to the mainstream somehow.

x-post I mean yeah the name is stupid but it's kind of stuck at this stage.

why necessarily, tim? because of technology? i really disagree with this. dance music is all about influence/heritage. the records are designed to be played against the context of each other. what do you mean by pre-house dance music tricks?"

I think I meant more that, when it comes to that central house/techno axis, it's very difficult for all but the most curatorial scenes to just forget about everything that has happened in the last twenty years of dance music. What I said above doesn't scan well because there's essentially a paradox here: in my view it's actually dance music's capacity for remembering everything that's gone before (not in the minds of the DJs or the producers or the dancers, but in the operation of the groove itself) which prevents that sense of heritage from hanging to heavily over most of it.

In other words, it's precisely because producers can't help but constantly massage the heritage of dance music that the sense of there being a continuity with stuff from, say, thirty years ago, remains more complicated, if nonetheless well-established and exhaustively heralded (this is similar maybe to how Jess was saying in his blog that when people from the UK eg Super Furry Animals try to remake Wilson/psychedelic etc. rock they seem constitutionally incapable of forgetting the existence of acid house - it's not that the Wilsonesque/psychedelic qualities aren't self-conscious and abundant, it's just that there's a layer of interference from all the other sonic cues that can't be done away with).

With rock music, I think it's easier to imagine a lot of the more retro records literally being recorded however many years ago and simply released decades later (but for the surface level shininess of production maybe) - the link is more direct and unmediated (even if, ironically, rock artists are less likely to celebrate it than dance artists). And this maybe has a bit to do with the way that rock music as a medium allows for a strategic myopia, a potential narrowness of scope (which is often productive - one could describe the sound as "honed") when it comes to selecting sonic cues to revive.

I think this is typically harder in dance music. Simon correctly points out that Tiefschwarz are neither particularly electro nor particularly house - this "originality" can be broken down, I think, into a rather complex equation for the stylistic cues they are drawing on, fusing, recombining almost instinctively (elements of Chicago house, acid house, detroit techno, bleep & bass, nu-beat, early nineties house-pop, even (I maintain) late nineties Orbital) - traces of all this stuff which the music just can't eject from its system, clogging up the lower intestines of the groove.

i think what tiefschwarz bring to the table is the clinical nature of their production. even their first lp was utterly antiseptic "deep house" - it's the nature of this kind of production-style to make it kind of genre-less. the sound they come up with actually reminds me of timbaland. everything in its right place. the clinical aspect (if it exists outside of my own head!) is nicely balanced by the visceral reaction their remixes get.

The conglomeration of micro/house/electro/techno seems to find its expression in tough dancefloor anthems that are immaculately constructed. Almost all the big players at the moment reflect this sensibility

Does that make sense?

Anyway, on said thai beach we had a drunk 40something mancunian dj trainwrecking old soul records into "drop the pressure" and "heroin" and it was bloody fantastic, I tell you. So maybe the "soul" thing doesn't hold up. Interesting conversation anyway.

this is music for clubgoers who are not in it for the 10pm to 10am mayhem. it's good for an hour of dancing, fifteen minutes of waiting for a drink, an hour of dancing, etc...

mind you i'm ordering two or three drinks at a go...

Jacob I think you're right about this being like a less smoothed-out trance. I think maybe one of the problems with Gatecrasher trance was that it made the rave experience too easy, too straightforward. The fusion of artiness and stylishness with a sort of brute dancefloor functionalism (all those riffs!) in electro-house gives you an internal conflict that you can work with, vibe off, enjoy...

Ah! I always thought I was the only one who gets irritated by this (can't stand those fuckers who have to drink their beers in the middle of the dance floor.) Probably the main reason I don't dancing as much as I used to (it's nearly impossible to really trance out.)

not so sure about this at all as Jacob points out, it's the druggiest music in years. perhaps I misinterpret the sense you meant it in though.

I agree with Tim/Omar, it fucking drives me nuts if people are bumping into me, but even worse, THOSE FUCKERS WHO STAND STILL!

Jesus save me they are annoying, particularly the ones who act miffed at any form of physical activity around them.

It's good to see others need their trip out space too, I presumed this stuff just annoyed me cos the pills weren't giving me the same kicks.

i agree that it is quite druggy music, but i think that it totally eschews any (presumed) "brute dancefloor functionalism" by the basis that it is interesting in a listening sense, is as riff oriented as a punk song or whatever... i often find myself, whilst trying to sell 'rock' friends on the idea of going to a club, that it's /good/ dance music.

by the end of the night it's alwaysm, "see, you like techno!" to which i have often heard:
"That's not techno!"

I'm annoyed because I'm not on pills!

My absolute most-hated-things-ever:

1) The big beefy guys who lead their little girlfriends through the crowd, clearing a path before them to demonstrate how they'll protect and look after them.

2) Girls who lingeringly drape a hand on your shoulder or (even more crudely) on your bum so that you'll turn around and they can slide past you.

I reach a point where I become so annoyed I either have to close my eyes and fleetingly pretend there's none of these fuckers there, or derive petty satisfaction from simply refusing to move at all so that the migrants are forced to find an alternate route. I don't like myself when I do this though.

what is a better name than 'electrohouse' then? does anyone have any ideas?

The description of the villalobos gig at fabric that geeta wrote about with the bird sounds and ravers having it sounded like heaven. Experimental yet danceable.

to be honest, this whole black/white thing completely escapes me.

aside from this i am STILL interested in the whys and what ifs of black kids in the Netherlands, Germany and France not getting into and making techno/electro-orientated house and trance. there's perhaps an obvious reason why it may have been/still be difficult for them to do even if they'd want to. in any case i suppose even if it were to happen, i don't know whether it would affect the music at all. in Britain things seem more different too - Britain almost caught directly between the USA and Europe here - initially playing host to some young black producers i mentioned above from the pre-jungle rave era with the influence of Detroit and Chicago apparent (indirect from Germany, somewhat ironically) but this being engulfed by subsequent jungle boom it seems. i might start a separate thread about dance music in Britain just because aside from the issue of techno/electro/house still seeming closed off/unappealing to black Europeans (other than when it was distilled into mutations like 'jungle techno' and techstep, europop on the continent or now grime/eski/sublow/dubstep) i want to assess exactly where it is right now, and why the focus has gone from it save for exciting aforementioned mutations and supergroups like the Chems and Basement Jaxx, The Streets and Audio Bullys, and the more detached likes of Ladytron (connected mainly thru remix choices and obv. 'electroclash' connection, tho they're only part British anyway).

I'm half-serious here: where do you find out about music that shows you photos of the artists? Websites seem to be pretty anonymous, releases even more so.

i don't it's true, nor do i know their names, nor have i even heard much stuff on that label, i'm just going by how it seems to have always been in Europe. if it's changing this decade, cool.

when i was mentioning funny racial politics i was speaking more generally. i'm sort of put off by titles like "dirt crew: cleaning up the ghetto ep". i'm not yet feeling sorted out enough to discuss in detail (naming names and so on) put it seems like a lot of the discourse around chicago house and detroit techno can verge on slightly nasty and condescending and paternalistic.

like i was at a party where some Signed Electroclash Recording Artists were having a conversation with one of my friends a few feet away. and the lead singer guy was all "yeah, when i hear about JAZZY HOUSE i just want to PUKE, to me HOUSE SHOULD BE DIRTY, it should be CHEAP and NASTY SOUNDING, it should sound like ghetto dudes BANGING IT OUT on $50- boxes..."

now i see where this sort of thinking starts and i don't think it leads anywhere really bad but at the same time i don't really know how to square statements like this with my firsthand experience, which is like whatever, it may have cost $50- (probably cost a lot more) but phuture tracks sounds much, much better produced and much more listenable to my ears than, say, "housequake" or something.

i mean, most of the chicago house guys actually were musicians, right? or at least had been in bands and been involved in the local scenes before they started making tracks?

andrew - if you look around it's pretty easy to find pictures of everybody on bunker, get physical, etc

as for stevem's comments about why european black kids aren't more involved, i think it's a really interesting question but i'm not a euro so i don't have any thoughts.

And speaking of "real" electro I think that's full of those sort of people, as a scene. And so up its ass.

I think electrohouse, alot of it, is quite "sophisticated", Get Physical is a deep house label in its own way.

I sympathise with that electroclash person you quoted as polished production sounds like a hospital to me, but when someone gets on one about it it becomes a self-conscious approach, and that can make it rather bloodless and - ironically - 'produced' (ie, deliberately fashioned according to an historically familiar aesthetic - just compare for example adult.'s production with say Malaria!'s from 1982 to really hear the difference).

it isnt realy a question in continental europe since blakc people arent traditionaly seen as musical innovators or bearers of subculture standards or superior dancers or whatever postive racism you can think of. if theyre associated with anything its africa not the ghetto, and africa = 'selling souvenirs' rather than 'making/living music'.

otm. deep and _tracky_.

it's interesting because a lot of the get physical releases sound to me like excellently produced updates on the original cheap and dirty chicago house sound (dirt crew as well). (i think this was already covered upthread - ie. the innovation in this genre is mainly an innovation in production)

I think it is. There is a regular grime do (since about a year) in the upstairs small room of a very popular hiphop/r&b club in Amsterdam. I've been about four times and everytime it was busier than the last time (the regular club is always packed). There are no "dance" or "indie" people there, let me tell you, these are regular kids that marketers wouldn't think twice about branding as "urban". They are the Pharrell generation (maybe I should be in marketing myself ;-) and they have increasingly little trouble relating to and getting into the sound. The DJ is Gomes (he's really good) (full disclosure: he has a webradio show on the same station that I work at [only I'm, how you say, on real radio as well ;-)]), his club is called Oi!, it is part of the Paradisco night at the Paradiso venue.

It frustrates me that grime artists stay so close to home in London so much of the time (with records very poorly distributed abroad) because I see so much potential, I’m sure it is there in Germany and France as well.