Halo and Hipp-E - Classic or Dud?

hamburger? barbeque? steak?

yeah, i liked that shit, but that was before we had mcdonalds, y'know?

progressive-y but not plonky vaguely hypnotic sounds - it's amazing how by adding the letter "y" to the end of words you can make music sound lame!

bongo-dub - do you hate bongos? do you seriously think the lack of bongos makes german house better? why do you hate bongos?

late 90s watered down san francisco take on tribal house - watered down? from what? why are you using "late 90s", "san francisco" and "tribal" as sneer words? what's wrong with any of those things? also you need to tell us HOW your recent tech-house is better, not just the obvious-ness of the better-ness.

cold and clinical in a not-thrilling-techno way - is techno the only way to be effectively cold and clinical? drum and bass would seem to suggest otherwise. anyway what's the negative effect of being cold and clinical in a not-thrilling way? sometimes i like cold and clinical, like when i've had too many drinks and i just want to lay my head on the cool, comforting edge of a clean toilet bowl.

Dub is warm and can be fun - sorry about your unfortunate sentence! i will never listen to you regard dub ever again!

their "dub tech house" was neither warm nor fun. But not scary either - jeez! paulhw! what a tough audience! it is too bad there are only two ways to interest paulhw in the world! i mean, you can either be "warm" - whatever that means! - or you can be "scary", and that's it! no wiggle room to be anything else!

as interesting as a 6 hour Steve Lawler set. - are you saying there's no market for 6hr steve lawler sets? because facts would seem to suggest otherwise.

I was about to say that I resent this statement, but that's because I missed the "can" in your sentence Vahid. But adding a "y" to everything is surely a legitimate tactic... yes? Yes?

unfortunately it is a poor substitute for good critical thinking - and is often used as a smokescreen for lack thereof.

in fact i suspect you may be a disgruntled former fan?

are you now, or have you ever been, the owner of anything released on by the people?

anyway this is not true because it ignores jeno + garth (see: jeno's "stormy weather" remix of rocket's "people"), the mirror boys, doc martin's blakdoctor recordings, the entire exist dance label stable, all of the SF-inspired brit stuff on music for freaks and classic and noid recordings, current SF-inspired ILX darlings lindstrom + metro area, etc

No but I have a clutch of Jeno and Garth mixtapes from the early to mid 90s which I loved with a passion and was sorely disappointed when all those types of people started releasing records and forming labels a few years later.

My displeasure is absoutely not with bongo-driven house, or even bongo-driven tripped out house. Actually I love that shit! Especially in the hands of a master (I have much love for ILM pariahs like Kenlou, Kerri Chandler, UBP et al). But it's precisely the rythmic fluidity that you get with well-programmed bongos that I find absent from the SF axis. They apply the signifiers without absorbing the structural factors that make the music what it is.

It's disappointing cos it makes me feel maybe my appreciation of what Wicked et al did as DJs was probably more drug-induced than anything else which is a little saddening.

FWIW i will agree w/ you that hipp-e and halo are a little stiffer than most. in fact i think comparing mixtapes and productions, doc martin + jeno + garth sort of wipe the floor w/ hipp-e and halo.

i really like kerri chandler + MAW too! i really love the NY axis but it's sort of a tradeoff - i guess the garage rhythms are a bit sprightlier but i think you lost the trippy "falling-into-the-k-hole" tunnel vision and focus of the san francisco sound.

at its best, i think of the SF sound as a synthesis of deep house + the early 808 state aesthetic of tracks like "narcossa" and "flow:coma" (which are, not coincidentally, big favorites among the SF djs) - endlessly spacious, cavernous, chthonic pits of bass, percussion, reverb and 303.

interestingly, hipp-e and halo seem to be moving towards the british prog-house take on this SF sound, aligning themselves w/ the tyrant crew and 4/4 nu skool breaks producers. i really think there should be a (not necessarily positive!) re-appraisal of this stuff (other than the lazy kneejerk "it's not microhouse or hardcore so we hate it") ...

i will say this - i saw d je5rani spin at a west coast house party and what he was doing fit right in, and even seemed informed by the aesthetic. west coast house guys have ALWAYS honoured the postpunk / ZE records flame - whether we are talking about hardkiss' undying love for A Certain Ratio or the propensity of jeno/garth to sample ESG + even obscurer postpunk acts for basslines ... there is some thread somewhere where i go off about LCD soundsystem ripping off tyler stadius + jay tripwire ... whereas the usual NY / new jersey suspects always seemed way more into frankie knuckles vision of post-disco r+b house.

There was a lustrous dub-spacious house version of "Moody" which I had a drug-assisted trip-out over at a club about 4 years ago but every version or remix I've come across doesn't seem to be it (a similar and almost related story is how long it took me to realise that the female-vocal version of "Is It All Over My Face" that I loved was actually one of Arthur Russell's original versions, as opposed to one of the million house tracks to share the name).

BTW - opinion on Steve Loria? I have this one amazing tape of his from 1993 but know nothing else about the guy. He's from LA, right?

i remember liking the mix h&h did for fabric.

I'm working in a shop Vahid and you'd want to see the amount of fucking awful US house that comes in, ie the vast majority these days, it just sounds horrid, and contrary to your belief it's not even very popular, actually the people who like that stuff are the real purists, albeit bizarro ones who hate electrohouse and European stuff (despite its apparent, to you or even general sonic 'aloofness') for breaking some kind of tradition despite the fact that any real true traditionalist would surely dismiss the stuff they like as the vapid burnt out ashtray rubbish it is.

This is what I think you need to realise, in your approach generally over the last few months, the snobby purists are not just on the electrohouse side of the fence, far from it. I swear there are people being super snobby about what sounds at face value like one of the stereotypical "song for the proles" type things you seem to be arguing in favour of, and yet nobody is buying this "I feel like shouting and putting naked women on the cover of my records" music anymore. It's just not selling.

You can put that down to changing attitudes to a point but the fact is alot of those records are crap and uninspired.

It's just mostly overly compressed horrible "pumping" crap.

also, are/were halo and hipp-e "beardo disco"???

but halo and hipp-e are the part of the crew that ignored all those bits in favor of a more purist sound.

i actually think halo and hipp-e are pretty boring ... their fabric mix is one of the worst.

i was just trying to start a fight about west coast house vs german house, but if i really wanted to hold up a good example theres about 1000 artists i'd pick before halo and hipp-e

BTW

if you want to listen to really really really good dubby tribal tech-house, it's not halo + hipp-e you're after but actually JAY TRIPWIRE ... dude is CRAZY!