Ketamine House?!

I'm liking "plip-plop techno" this week.

It made me laugh anyway.

I've never done Ket myself so I haven't got a first-hand experience of the effects, but this seemed to fit. There does seem to be a sub set of extremely simple minimal house which is quite possibly made for people who have no ability to listen to anything except extremly sparse music.

"Great guitar solo, but it sounded a bit like you were on smack there."

"Wow, that drummer is very 2CI"

i personally can not believe people are still doing this... that alone is hilarious.

so what WAS ketamine house??

what would a ROUGH GUIDE TO KETAMINE HOUSE look like?

All that boring stuff M_nus & company have released the past couple of years. Some Contexterrior and Jay Haze.

stuff like mobilee, einzelkind, vakant, dumb unit, digitaline, gabriel ananda, gallopierende zuversicht, bruchstuecke (release gregorythyme's "a drug for horses" - the first k reference?) was what k-house originally referred to, right? that kind of transition period between electro house and minimal as we now know it. correct me if i'm wrong.

http://www.discogs.com/release/513360 is a nice ketamine-y mix from around the time. and of course that two disc dominik eulberg mix.

the ultimate ketamine house track for me is the villalobos remix of "one night in nyc" but only because i heard it the first time i tried the drug and cot damn did it freak me out.

i want some real hardcore k-house fan to show up and do a POX "essential ketamine house" because

1. at the time i was in a serious phase of denial toward european tech-house, so i think i missed out on the tech-house boat (though i have the 2-disc eulberg set, and i have trouble seeing what separates that from, i dunno, triple r or tobias thomas' mixes for kompakt)

2. i've been listening to things like jamie jones' mix for crosstown rebels ("get lost vol. 2") and other things like steve bug's "fuse presents" mix, and i'm wondering if the ketamine house agenda has been fully absorbed into the current aesthetic, or vice-versa

Aside from /\/\/\/\, Dominik Eulberg, Dominik Eulberg, and Dominik Eulberg.

Cio D'or's kimono ep of maybe 4-6 months ago or so, I think is exceptionally demonstrative of the sound.

I really like this sound (although, yes, 90% of music is listen to is sitting motionlessly infront of a computer, probably sluggish enough as is), although i think in "k-house's" peak it got a kind of rough treatment, maybe? Maybe this can be a cautionary example for the space battle techno thread about what an off-kilter name can do to a sub-genre.

And let's not forget The Au Harem D'Archimede

Also Jacek Seinkiewicz is really good.

so is this cio d'or radiomix on youtube ketamine house? like, basically the mainstream mnml "loco dice" sound of 2007, right?

as ambivalent as i am about the drug (fine for others perhaps, but the very idea of it scares the jeepers out of me), i am rather sorry that the word "ketaminimal" never took off. it's just too perfect!

ha, I missed this a party in London by these guys from Leeds this weekend http://www.ketoloco.com/ ...

one of my favorite music-critic descriptions come from the early 90's, some British wag describing a song by Higher Intelligence Agency as sounding like "Foghorn Leghorn on ketamine"...

yes that cio d'or mix is ketamine house. not so sure about loco dice though.

A friend of mine lived in Leeds when that Ketoloco party was starting up. Apparently it was just in someones huge basement, and he was telling me about one time there when was a few hundred people down there and the police raided the house. It took the police quite a while to discover how to get down in the basement, and so in the meantime everyone downstairs was panicking about what to do with all their K. Obviously the solution was to put it up their noses, and so when the police eventually discovered how to get down to the basement, they had to drag up several hundred people who were lying on their backs talking to spirits.

I always thought Danny Tenaglia's "Elements" was pretty much the distilled essence of K-holism...

Loco Dice's remix of Daniel Taylor's "M.O.R.D." could be considered ketamine, and I think the remix of "Son of Raw" too. I'd hesitate to put the rest of his stuff in this bracket - too... precise maybe.

I don't think the term was ever clearly defined but for me it tends to mean long tracks with a hypnotic (preferably quite housey) rhythm track and a woozy, slurry arrangement on top. In that sense 2007 was actually the unacknowledged apotheosis of ketamine house, what with Daniel und Kabale's "Mumbling Yeah", Radio Slave's "Bell Clap Dance", Onur Ozer's "Halikarnas", Matt John's "Soulkaramba", Michael Ho's "Take Away", the Villalobos remix of "Phunk", Simon Baker's "Plastik" etc. Vahid's original argument back in 2005 (in the villalobos fabric thread I think) that there's a lot of US house that does this too is obv spot on but I think the above was a nice moment in minimal. The diminution of this trend this year has disappointed me a bit: I thought there was still a lot of room to move.

In terms of the original, class of 2004/5 stuff, I'd say all the usual suspects:

Steve Barnes - Cosmic Sandwich (oddly not so much the Eulberg Remix)
Nathan Fake - Dinamo (Dominik Eulberg Remix)
Dub Kult - On and On (Guido Schneider Remix)
Andre Kraml - Safari (James Holden Remix)
Luciano - Bomberos
Robag Whrume - Worktabular (Tobi Neumann Remix)

I wouldn't really consider M-Nus or Mobilee to fall into this category - too precise, even when it sounds druggy. The big exception would be Anja Schneider's astonishing remix of Daniel Stefanik's "The Bells", which captures just the right flavour of whacked out wooziness (in fact that whole series of remixes Mobilee released for their first comp is consistently more ketamine-feeling than the rest of the label's material - for some reason almost all those tracks play down the twitchiness and play up the bleariness).

I swear to god that I saw this thread 3 or 4 times and each time thought it was about Melamine House.

do the recent Somfay longform experiments fall into this category for you guys?

Also, does Steve Barnes' Cosmic Sandwich fit here?

I suppose the thing that struck me about these type of records was that generally most house/techno/whatever records go from low to high - they reach a peak of some form, no matter how subtle/understated. What a lot of K-house stuff seemed to do was go from one state to another. There was no peak, just difference.

Funny, I remember what was either a Pitchfork Kreuch Fleucht review or a This Month in Techno that identified the Eulberg remix of Cosmic Sandwich as definitive of the sound. My understanding is a bit different from Tim's, I usually look more to sounds that aren't supposed to sound like anything identifiable (i.e. not piano chords or something), and repetitive and hypnotic. I think Eulberg is pretty much the one to go for examples, "Adler" is a great one, or try Jacek Sienkiewicz's excellent "Good Night and Good Luck" from last year.

I think the Eulberg remix of "Cosmic Sandwich" is still pretty ketamine-like, but it sounds less druggy and more electro-house-anthemish than the original. For me it's sort of the marriage of unidentifiable sounds a more traditional groove undercarriage that is key. Perhaps Sherburne was trying to define his portmanteau neologism "ketaminimal".

I love the "Good Night & Good Luck" 12inch but isn't that closer to Achso Villalobos i.e. the point where minimal verges on IDM? It doesn't seem very druggy to me.

"I suppose the thing that struck me about these type of records was that generally most house/techno/whatever records go from low to high - they reach a peak of some form, no matter how subtle/understated. What a lot of K-house stuff seemed to do was go from one state to another. There was no peak, just difference."

yeah this is probably what discounts the Eulberg remix of "Cosmic Sandwich" for me.

It's also what makes all Trentemoller bar perhaps "Sunstroke" seem kinda ill-fitting for this category as well.

Yeah, the thing I remember about Cosmic Sandwich is about how it starts all tracky, same old scene and then about three minutes in, it's like "What was that?!" - and it goes from there - the beat is just a canvas to put strange wonderful sounds over, with no particular peak. It could've continued for another ten minutes in a similar vein. In a funny way it reminds me of Stereolab/Nurse With Wound's Exploding Head Movie in that respect.

Trentemoller I never saw as being part of this scene. He was more electro-house - abeit with a sound palette that used similar sounds to glitchy idm in places. Polar Shift is a good example of this.

xpost: I think, as I mentioned, we're operating on different criteria as to what defines the sound, but nonetheless I wouldn't really compare Goodnight to Achso, actually (although I nearly cited in my previous post). I think Achso is a bit more all over the place and really plays around with a lot more sounds, and for that reason is more IDM'ish, than the much more repetitive, hypnotic Goodnight /C.S. remix, with their sqeaky-door synths that don't really stray to far. I generally think of these high-e.q. hooks, kind of tinny, really, that worm their way into your head; this as opposed to, say, the beefyness of Plastik, which I personally would call not all druggy and totally electro-house anthem.

Agreed, Achso isn't K-house. It's Villalobos at his most home listening friendly. Great work CD actually as well :)

"Good Night and Good Luck"

this really isn't k-house to me...

For me I think it's those stasisy minimal tracks like say Luciano/Melchior "Solomun's Prayer" or some of the woozier bleeding synth stuff like I dunno, Minilogue or yes that Loco Dice remix of Dennis Ferrer. Something about the way the track LURCHES...

Yeah I was gonna mention "Solomon's Prayer" too.

Maybe I can't see Sienkiewickz as ketamine because I've listened to "Good Luck" a lot more than "Good Night" - will go back and listen to the latter again before I say you're wrong mehlt. But "Good Luck" is just too pretty and pristine and emotional to fit this category I think. Amazing track though!

Maybe a better candidate than "Plastik" would be Baker's collabo with Jamie Jones, "Kaskazi" - simple three note bass riff, disorienting vocal samples, lots of weird stuff going on, kinda flat (in the sense of travelling on the same level) for the most part. Like "Plastik" it's also uptempo and housey and "beefy", but I don't see these as being a diaqualifier - there's a reason it's called ketamine house.

Otherwise it's basically just microhouse/minimal, innit.

disqualifier, not diaqualifier.