What is the sound of now?

I think the Minimal House thing is overrated. Interesting that the trend for subtlety in dance over the last five years has culminated in something so discreet and polite that it lacks tune or a decent beat means that this is a last frontier before we go back to the big basslines and mentalist loops of the early 90s.

anyway, the mid-2000s will obviously be best remembered for the dixie chicks. and paris hilton.

Without wanting to risk doing what you said, can you recommend me some minimal dance with these in? I just can't imagine what bright, fast, furious minimal would sound like. The only thing I've come across in dance music lately that really does take things up a notch is breaks and stuff like Pendulum who I've been told are really untrendy ;0)

I think minimalism is definitely affecting the alternative end of rock/pop though. The albums I mentioned upthread and also Thom Yorke's new one. I'd say this is a genre in itself - I liked the label "Haunted House" given to the Knife album by someone I Can't remember. I guess it's all subdued, creepy minimal electronic/orchestral pop rock??!

Minimal House is much too easily associated with being "discreet and polite" if you haven't heard it at say... Berghain club!! (not saying you haven't, I wouldn't know, but volume does make one hell of a difference).

i do agree with you that certain rhythmic techniques and timbral tendencies popularized (if not invented) by minimal are sneaking into all kinds of music, including yorke and the knife. (but then olof is doing his own, straight-up minimal techno productions as well, so i'm not sure you could entirely count them outside the phenom.) too bad yorke's beats aren't, uh, better.

How? You've said this a few times before. Electro I define as having a certain sound whereby there's a definite synthetic feel to the beats and melodies and a retro-futuristic vibe. Crisp 16-bit melodies, 80's aesthetic. That kind of thing. Drum'n'Bass and House are equally loose terms but just as effective. You're acting like Electro is the dance equivalent of Emo whereby it doesn't mean anything any more. I'd say that this might come from the fact that Electro prevails at the moment and since the rise of the Electroclash "fad" has influenced more and more producers from pop to r'n'b to hip hop to alt rock. It's because of it's ubiquity that it feels like it isn't there. Compare recent pop to that of the late 90s and you'll hear the difference in sound. Post-Britpop it was all about getting real musicians in and creating Bittersweet Symphonys. Everyone was at it, now everyone's about vintage synths and 808s.

AKAI

What a load of shit, what artists specifically do you even mean here?

The music people dismiss as "minimal house" is doing everything maximal house/deep house/techno/prog have ever done well all at once. Mostly people just want an end to minimal cos it does not deign to create crossover rock influenced dance music.

yeah i know that but geezer mentioned the neptunes!!

Surely the sound of timbaland 1999 was just as minimal as his current! minimal r'n'b sounds i can think of off top of head = 2-step garage'n'b, turn-of-millenium timbaland, neptunes, bubblecrunk. That sort of lush streamlined minimal sound in pop music isn't very specifically 00s so much as late-nineties-into-00s.

oh but it will - anyway I think the disdain for minimal comes mostly from people who like to call anything they haven't heard "just hipster music" and pretend that only 3 people in the world like it anyway, to make themselves feel better

OTM... but not a 'sound' i don't think.

where is nick southall to say 'overcompression'?

Shitty late-90's loop techno probably. Or Alexander Kowalski (which is hardly 'minimal'!) I think your ears are reaching & stretching to hear something from this sound that it just isn't going to give you in the way you're expecting.

my only exposure to minimal house is the stuff i get on the front of mixmag and while i do like it (i do) i just can't imagine dancing to it ever ever ever. so the idea is that it has to be played LOUD? i can see that. at the same time, shouldn't dance music make you at least want to jump around a bit whether you're listneing to it in your kitchen or in a 5-storey megaclub? isn't the whole point of minimalism that it is subtle and repetitive? as opposed to say, ragga-jungle or whatever?

if anything i think the first phase of minimal phase of dance music will be shortlived (much like Electroclash in 2001) but its influence will stay with us for years to come and define an era. We can already see that with the Knife and Thom Yorke.

this leads me to believe even more that your problem is with house music, not minimal

To steal (mangle) a quote from Mr. C - techminimal house is "techno for the girls, and house for the boys"

People seem to use "minimalist" to describe anything that isn't primarily and obviously based around samples of old records. Which is ironic b/c the move away from sampling tends to lead to records being busier.

Dog Latin if you go to the Minimal House Bobbins thread in 5 minutes I will have posted a list of 10 banging "minimal" tunes for you.

Hystereo :)

You've answered your own question there I think Tim.

Maybe I do have a minor problem with House, Ronan. Most of the stuff I get exposed to is absoultely volatile but I'll still advocate it as a genre as the mitigating circumstances I've had the opportunity to hear what I would say is decent House then I can safely say I've enjoyed it. That said, when I've enjoyed it it's normally prefixed with Electro- or Tech- or, yes Minimal- etc. I've just never really been exposed to being in a good club for the reasons I cite above - it's a world I just can't get to grips with. The few times I've been clubbing in London I've either hated every minute of it (Home in Leicester Square circa 1999) or just been left feeling a bit flat (something trendy in Hoxton where they played Discopunk circa 2003). Otherwise I've been to Electrowerkz and seen thigns but it's hardly a proper club is it?

I don't think of it this way, it really is just more of a sense of less happening in the foreground within a track that makes me think it's minimal. Either that or a sense of space and distance in a track, esp. within hip-hop, crunk etc. - sycnopation of beat etc. It's got nothing to do with whether samples are involved.

Funnily I don't really think of the latest Pet Shop Boys single as minimal (perhaps it IS, relatively, for a pop song).

ring the OTM alarm!

Arguably "Snap Yo Fingers" and "Boom! Shake The Room" are as minimal/maximal as one another - except one uses synths and programmed beats and one uses samples. Crunk doesn't "background" its sounds more.

And what is so wrong with wanting some banging chewns anyway? All this mincy house stuff is fine and dandy but every time I buy a new Fabric compilation by my favourite artist, I sit through the whole thing waiting for it to kick in and it never does. Even the Adam Beyer one was slow and limp. What's wrong with wanting to tear up the dancefloor a bit? Get people jumping? Or have we evolved beyond such Neanderthal tactics that we mustn't be seen having a great time, just as long as people spot us nodding our heads discreetly whilst propping up the bar with a £12 cocktail?

I know I'm being a bit OTT and generalistic here (I'm waiting for someone to leap down my throat with a dozen arguments) but is it really so right to say "boshing beats are passé now darlink, I just can't BEAR catchy melodies any more, they're vulgar". This isn't just house, or even dance music. I believe the absence of catchiness and boshability in many genres has been losing out in the last few years to something else - stuff that is more textured, more subtle - not necessarily worse, but just different. But I do miss the FUN associated with bouncy basslines, cheeky samples, memorable melody lines, big build-ups, false starts and endings... what happened to music like that?

but consider old Teddy Riley productions - he had no real inclination to use space as a feature itself rather than as something to fill in, so it seems, to the extent where a track like 'Poison' or 'Her' or 'She's Got That Vibe' might seem even 'clumsy' by today's standards. It was all a lot faster then as well which makes it seem bigger and busier too.

It depends on the examples often though I suppose. Three 6 Mafia 'Poppin' My Collar' has a LOT more going on within it compared to 'Drop It Like It's Hot'. En Vogue's 'Hold On' is pretty sparse compared with a lot of stuff like it at it's time. But if we're talking generally (always dangerous but often useful), the difference is clear as day to me/my ears.

err... whattage? I just can't recall a big psych record coming out this year whereas last year there seemed to be a new one every week. That might be a slightly rose-tinted view of things because I think I might have been discovering all these bands and quickly obtaining their back catalogues.

Plus I think the 00s will also be music by new acts rather than being nostalgic about the music of their youths, creating a whole new market for acts aimed at a somewhat older market, such as Coldplay, Travis, Keane, Norah Jones, Katie Melua and Dido.

But we've always had Adult-Oriented Pop, perhaps even more so in the 80s with Phil Collins, Chris De Burgh, Sting etc. I think there might have been a short period prehaps around the latter half of the 90s where I can't really recall much music that wasn't aimed at the under-18s being in the charts.

Look, can we just lock the thread and be done?

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e13/Dougq8/wm4match1.jpg

yes, and still spawning Indie-Dance & "Haircut House!"

Microhouse, Minimal and ...

NOOOO :X I dunno, perhaps my grasp on the history (and timeline of!) is shaky but isn't it more like two different. concurrent movements ((Minimal)Techno, (Electro)House) edging closer & closer together in their aims until it's become near-impossible to say how & where you can audibly divide them anymore? I mean can you really draw a line that leads from "Kittin and Thee Glitz" straight to "Immer"???

(many) xposts - I like banging techno.

I started this three years ago, but was thinking more of Sparks, TBMG, KLF rather than 'Birdie Song '06'.

I like the idea of a "why no silly songs on the charts anymore" thread...

You start it, for I fear pwnage after having sullied my good name with this one.

The sound of now, as we have firmly established on that other thread, is the Alarm (apropos "silly songs").

The Automatic, innit?

Yeh, I think you might be right. I may be biased in saying it was the IDM scene imploding on itself and then spawning genres like Clickhouse which led to Microhouse and stuff. A lot of early Electroclash I think was associated with IDM too (stuff like Adult. and I-F) I may be completely stilted in my view. But you are right, the two genres grew together and fed off each other til they may as well have been the same thing.

Hahaha, no. RJG != me. You "destroyed" them with your annoying crusade that almost no one cares about.

http://www.rearview.ca/myspaceplayer.jpg

* is a removable post which will use any padlock.

* will deter 20 tonne vehicles.

* will resist being pulled out or down by angle grinders.

* is easily fixed when damaged severely by abuse without needing to fit a new base - you just replace the top.

* is constantly marketable.

* is being used successfully NOW.

http://www.nobbler.org/

The removable post...with a difference

this is an excellent and well-argued thread with many thought-provoking ideas

then you've made an appropriate contribution

There is still really not typical sound of the noughties though. The 00s, more than any other decade, was the decade where people could - regardless of what is in the charts - just "shop" around on the Net and find whatever they like the most. Surely there are still dominating musical trends in the charts, but those are being ignored by a larger portion of the population than the chart hits of the 60s, 70s or even 80s were. Back then, the gaps were between the generations, but now you will not even find an act or a genre able to unite the youth generation. Yes, R&B has dominated at least the Billboard singles lists, but on the other hand, R&B acts hardly sell albums at all. And a larger number than ever of teenage kids prefer to buy (or download) old records by Iron Maiden or AC/DC rather than listen to the stuff in the singles list.

Another trend, that still doesn't have much to do with the "sound of now" is how a reissue of a classic album may actually manage to get into the album lists in very high positions. Examples of this from recent years are Traveling Wilburys and Michael Jackson, plus Dennis Wilson achieved considerably more chart success with his solo album than he ever did upon its original release.

In fact, it could be said that the real sound of the noughties is the mashed together, flat, undynamic and sometimes clipping sound that you get when a record is compressed way too heavy. But this goes for all kinds of genres.

Good fun here.

i don't have access to many clubs and the area i live in is so suburban that funky house is considered really trendy.

― wogan lenin (dog latin), Wednesday, 9 August 2006 11:15 (2 years ago)

How times change.

Low-fi C86-revivalist reverb-drenched psych-pop feels quite "sound of now", but I could be following a false trail.

I've penciled in the term 'landfill electro' for early 2010.

grime and dubstep. and, to a lesser extent, crunk.
― Jay-Kid (Jay-Kid), Wednesday, August 9, 2006 3:48 AM Bookmark

lol Britishes

lol @ "removable post"

a = fingerbangin