Noze - How To Dance

i wouldn't call it a masterpiece or anything but there are definately enough great moments to justify picking it up if you liked Kitchen. while the vocals aren't there they are able to create a similar fun vibe in other ways. i'd rate it as the best tech/house album i've heard in '06 thus far.

I should hear this but I think I have to swear off expensive imports for a while

I really like the Kitchen 12" though

from Sherburne's latest pfork column:

my favorite moment has been closing with Nôze's fantastic (and poignant and cheeky) piano-house singalong, "After Love", a track whose every aspect resists slotting seamlessly into your typically greyscale set of tech-house

where can I find this overwhelmingly promising-sounding thing? I checked beatport and bleep and have been googling like a sonofabitch but can't find anything.

that's cos it's called "remember love".

and it is really really wonderful

yeah, i fucked that up -- sorry about that. now fixed on the site! it really is incredible, easily one of my top 10 tracks for the year. and i just realized that the totally genius dOP are responsible for the remix!

weed & fact-checking have a weird way of canceling each other out

it could have been a hidden closer musik reference/slip! (speaking of greyscale.)

2007 has been a weird year for techno. when everyone was complaining last year about how 2006 was such a bad year for music, i was like, not in my corner of the world and now 2007 is seemingly going to reverse that. it wasn't bad, but it wasn't especially mindblowing. i was thinking about going through every month of 2007 and picking my highlights, but it's kind of a daunting task. and then there's the fact that i discovered tunes in the late half of the year that came out in january.

that's the thing (and this is prolly the wrong thread for this diversion but whatever) -- 2007 has been a stellar year for individual tracks and even albums; if i just referenced my top 10s for the year (and if i'd kept them more consistently) it would look stellar. but the year as a whole, if we're going to look at broader movements or trends, beyond the individual standouts, gets limper the more i look at it. i'm not sure how to reconcile those two views. i really think a lot of it just boils down to me getting more promos than ever (thanks to the rapid shift to MP3 promos), and the subsequent burnout from listening to too much bloopty bloopty tick-tock minimal. at home, these days i find myself reaching for jazz and folk as often as i reach for house & techno, at least where leisure listening is concerned.

i just said "stellar" twice. sorry.

"i'm not sure how to reconcile those two views."

it's almost like it's loop or micro-genre/trend of the month, but on the ground that's how it always is. like it can't be encapsulated in a yearly roundup because things would ultimately be missed and the details are where it's at. the flip of that is the big trends like the divergence between analog and digital (machines vs. computers like your column says) are becoming more pronounced -- artists are seemingly taking a stronger stance one way or the other. but even that is blurry!

and then there's this

ihttp://ongaku.de/img/shirts_dyn/60_asphalt_432c_white.png

to be honest i'm not sure that analog-vs-digital IS really that important; it's simply about people choosing to learn their tools (or not). what makes nsi. so compelling to me isn't that they're analog bad boys but that they know their kit inside and out, which allows them to ACTUALLY PLAY IT. it's not like real-time is the only tense that matters for dance music, but these guys have figured out a way to make it work for them, and to use it to turn out stuff that sounds utterly unlike anything else out there.

your comment "the details are where it's at" is spot on, i think. maybe the "long tail" is really winning? like, the big trends i couldn't care less about, but the esoteric stuff on the margins is more thrilling than ever.

xpost, damn. that was a t-shirt that says, "vinyl kills the mp3 industry"

agree about the long tail and i think part of that is because it has become so easy to find things now which means among other things that it's possible to be way more calculated re creating big trends. i'm not sure what that means for collective vs. personal enjoyment though.

Deep house revivalism finally taking off properly seems to be the trend-of-the-year from my perspective. I've really enjoyed it because by the time I started going out dancing deep house had purged all of its druggy signifiers and entered the Naked Music phase of hyper-cleanliness, hyper-sophistication.

Whereas the only deep house that's really been picked up this year from a european perspective has been the druggy stuff (i.e. the stuff that sounds like early or wild pitchy Strictly Rhythm or Nu Groove, or the stuff that sounds like whacked out Motorbass style French house). So Ferrer's "Son of Raw" or "Transitions" get played a lot but not his light diva anthems.

It's like, when early Chicago house and acid house were revived in 04/05, it was because all the electro-house producers and DJs saw themselves reflected back in it (squealing riffs, brazen sexuality, raw production values, "ruffness" etc.).

Whereas the deep house that's being revived or recreated now is the stuff that minimal DJs and producers look at and see themselves reflected back in - so it's all the really trippy, disorienting stuff that's like a thicker, more moist version of the prevailing minimal anyway - "deep" in the sense of "woah, that's deep man".

In that sense my two favourite "minimal" tracks of the year are the Loco Dice remix of "Son of Raw" and Matt John's "Soulkaramba".

okay so I finally heard this and it is *amazing*, although it does more to get me pumped at the prospect of a revival of house music driven by a big-ass piano than of the prospects of minimal (sorry y'all, it's just not my idiom). Any suggestions as to where I should go from here? Time and time again 2007 has left me convinced that there's this whole renaissance of people trying to pick up where the first minute of Marshall Jefferson's "Move Your Body" left off (this, the first song on 45:33, "Happy House", maybe "D.A.N.C.E.", etc) and it drives me NUTS that I only come into contact with it occasionally.

Check Henrik Schwarz's remix of Alton Miller's "Clouds are Gone".

i was just listening to that!

tim your comps are excellent btw.

new album Songs on the Rocks -- anyone heard? RA review's got me interested. loved the Kitchen / Tulip Schnapps 12"

http://www.residentadvisor.net/review-view.aspx?id=5235

Clips that I heard the other day sounded intriguing but very un-Get Physical. Sort of... organic Eastern European folk-house?

yeah that review sez "Balkan music" and I was having a hard time imagining what that's gonna sound like!

I got it through Beatport - nothing on the album tops Remember Love, but there's some pretty wonderful and adventurous stuff on there. Big Tom Waits influence, oddly. Remember Love comes across as the LEAST freaked-out track on the album, followed by Danse Avec Moi and You Have To Dance. I'm not sure I'll ultimately listen to it that often, but I'll take an ambitious attempt that might be alienating over a thousand competent but anonymous tracks.

WEIRD SHIT MAN

I have to say that I listen to it constantly. Probably my most played album of the year in actual fact. There's something about it that's kind of universal in terms of mood or moments, once you've absorbed and internalised the aesthetic.

ok this record's kind of awesome

Big Tom Waits influence

otm!

"Childhood Blues" is total bonkers

Big Tom Waits influence

Except without the suck that this would normally imply

scarlet.johansen.jpg

there isn't actually a tom waits influence on the record, imo. sure, they share the same influences - romany music and kurt weil for instance - but that doesn't mean that this album is waits influenced.

maybe I'm just not as familiar w/ the farther back influences but when I hear something like the beginning of You Have To Dance I think, "Marc Ribot guitar." plus the kitchen sink percussion and unhinged / gruff vocal style (not particularly on that song but plenty of others). but anyway ... yeah good album.

Loving this shit right now.

it's a bit too 'wacky' for me.

I don't think it's wacky, it's certainly humorous but I don't sense they're going all out to make a comedy record at all.

they did the RA podcast this week

Dani Siciliano on Danse Avec Moi = pure sex, marry me, etc.

i really dig the multi-tracked vocals on Remember Love and a few other songs as well, but i'm not sure about the Waitsian growling on eg Childhood Blues. apparently it's one of the guys from dOP. huh.