Electroclash - Efficacious or just plain Egotistical?

alas, Electroclash has taken off. Any comments?

Well, I suppose that it didn't happen until after the scene had faded into mediocrity. But nonetheless, I'm glad the Sisters are with us.

"electroklash just made it easy for hipsters to admit liking the 80s"

Here's some random mutterings about electroclash circa 01/02:

It never rang true to me why the media seemed to get this genre so bloody wrong all the time. I remember hacks foreseeing the death of electroclash the moment they acknowledged it's presence. The "it'll be over by Christmas, it's just a bunch of fags in lycra being pretentious" slant on things just seemed so very myopic that sometimes I had to question why these reviewers even had jobs.

This was one of the only times this decade I'd actually thought the pop charts were doing something interesting. There were some really great tracks coming out that were genuinely exciting with good beats and melodies. Most of these were greeted with snub-nosed snarkasm by the music press who couldn't seem to see past the spandex veneer.

Admittedly, a lot of it was very faddy and in-your-face but this was the brunt that kept it moving and sandpapered everything else into shape. This trickle-down effect made what was supposed to be, according to Mixmag, Jockey Slut et al, a 3 month bout of nostalgic silliness into a highly important development in dance and pop.

As pointed out earlier on in the thread, so much music being released at the moment has electroclash buried into it. Everyone from Legowelt to Girls Aloud have electroclash to thank for their sound.

What always struck me as strange is that all these acts doing the electroclash thing used the euro-camp schtick as their main reference point. I think this might have been why so many people were turned off by the initial wave (I must admit I always found Ms Kittin and Peaches rather embarassing, no matter how good the music sounded). Why did no-one get to grips with the tougher, more dance-based electro (the only ones I can think who did this were Keith Tenniswood and Michael Forshaw and perhaps a few others). Instead electroclash became a kind of Glam Rock with keyboards and I found that some of the original essence of 80s electro was missing.

I would also have liked to see people being influenced by hiphop based electro like Afrika Bambaataa, Man Parrish and Mantronix rather than the more teutonesque Kraftwerk and Cybotron. Why is this?

I think though that the reason the teutonic stuff struck such a chord is because the late 90s had been dominated by self-consciously "funky" dance music and people were looking for a change. Trance was a fashion disaster area and very old hat, so electroclash slotted in very nicely as a deliberately anti-funk sound. Hip-hop electro had no place in electroclash, one of the many reasons why the name electroclash is so spectacularly misinformative.

What bugs me about right now is that everything seems to be attempting to be pretentious, like why couldn't Felix make a record without James Murphy popping up and going "ah ah eh eh ah aha ah eh eh uh ah uh uh ah ah uh ah uh" for 6 minutes. No offence, I love LCD Soundsystem but the sense of everything being stuck together in dance is a little palpable.

Similarly, Black Strobe, Ewan Pearson, DFA, and the sheer glut of middlebrow electro-house tracks (some better than others I guess). There's certainly an over-abundance of the attitude which says "lets get a faintly pretentious vocal" onto this record. Ironically this trend which in my opinion bolstered and strengthened dance at a time when the "dance is dead" articles were really being wheeled out, now threatens it somewhat, makes it appear almost insecure.

I think there's alot of great stuff going on as a result of electro-clash, and yet at the same time I'd like less nuance, less self consciousness even? You listen to old dance tracks (be they from 02 or 88) and they sound blatantly functionalist and like they almost have a disregard for anything other than getting people moving in clubs. And that's not to say they're stupid.

Of course these sort of tracks are still being made but I'm not sure that the decline in popularity which dance has experienced isn't something to do with it becoming head music and not solely body music.

There's certainly an abundance of "character" around at the moment, and where this used to be a sort of over-ground phenomenon, like with your Chemical Brothers/etc/etc, has now become more underground, the trend for big remixers like Jacques or Ewan. I'm not sure this evolution is a good thing though.

Actually I made a kindof piss take track the other day called "Efficient Beat" where everything is on the on-beat but with a robot voice and an electro melody. I was quite pleased with it anyway.

Similarly, Black Strobe, Ewan Pearson, DFA, and the sheer glut of middlebrow electro-house tracks (some better than others I guess). There's certainly an over-abundance of the attitude which says "lets get a faintly pretentious vocal" onto this record. Ironically this trend which in my opinion bolstered and strengthened dance at a time when the "dance is dead" articles were really being wheeled out, now threatens it somewhat, makes it appear almost insecure.

Couldn't agree more. That lcd track where the guy just talks deadpan about music geekery is good fun and all, but i wouldn't want to hear it in a club or even have any of my friends hear it. The recent Fabric disc by Swayzak was great but also full of stuff like this. It just seems so purposefully restrained and London-ite, like it's afraid of making a big statement or if they made a big noise then the hacks would be released and then their artistic cred would vanish. It's pretty sad to be honest.

I mean techno seems to have assimilated electroclash quite well. I just think house is in something of a quandary.

Coming to dance quite late on after listening to Warp records for years, one would think all this arty microhouse and glitchcore and discopunk would really appeal to me but something about it really bugs me. whereas IDM was always quite unfashionable (nay, never TRIED to be fashionable), this stuff sounds like it's trying far too hard. It's the aural equivalent of a desperate fashion victim or even the snarky journalists who slagged off the scene in the first place.

There's something great about being able to like M Mayer's cover of Love Is Stronger Than Pride and hear it in the same mix as a faceless deep tech-house record. I mean I think if anything microhouse (or if it's not micro anymore perhaps we need a new name) is reviving that exciting sense that house music can devour a huge amount of stuff, albeit in a deeper way than populist DJ sets at their best (Felix, Jacques, Falcon, etc etc) That vocals can fit into house, and cover versions, and rock type riffs.

I mean the same things which make house a sort of problem for some people are what make it so great in a way, the sense that it is never ending. I think micro-house really does stand out as the natural continuation of everything house is about, and I say that as someone who got on board a little late since I only have access to lots of it in the last few months, but I think it's a true statement nonetheless.

Maybe this is all beside the point, but what I'm saying is that I attribute this reservedness that is popular amongst the higher echelons of dance to this inner-city attitude of "if I'm having fun, I don't want to know; if there's a hook, I ain't listening; if it isn't referencing Juan Atkins/Gang of Four/Thomas Dolby, then it's not cool enough". I am generalising here and I don't want to slag off Londoners per se.

Would anyone agree with this or am I utterly wrong?

It comes down to being spoiled for choice I suppose, and more discerning maybe, in a way. If it was in Dublin the chances are a DJ of Carter's stature wouldn't be here again for 6 months.

If people started making microtechno or microdnb for instance, and ten mixing that stuff in with electrotech or dnb with electro stylings, I think i'd find that a bit more suited to me. It wouldn't be a massive jump either. The first electroclash stuff, (if you can call it that in this case) that I remember hearing was the Two Lone Swordsmen's "Tiny Reminders" which was very eye-opening to me. It contains very few house elements to it. I think "Emerge" by Fischerspooner had more of a techno thing (maybe even a hardcore slant) than anything to do with house.

Maybe Monstertruckdriver to a lesser extent and perhaps Baby's On Fire. I mean yeah I can see the similarity in terms of there being an image and a coolness and this whole profile business, but in terms of the actual music I don't think there's a crossover. Kompakt has an extremely purist approach to DJing, if you ask me, which doesn't mean there aren't elements of eclecticism, I just think that the art of the mix and the sense of dance 12s as functionalist and made for DJing is most alive in Sami Koivikko's or Michael Mayer's or Superpitcher's sets.

As much as the idea and the marketing may appeal to Trash and Nag Nag Nag the music hasn't quite permeated that scene I don't think. And I don't think it will as long as it remains the way it is.

I mean, for me, being cool doesn't cross them into that area, I guess, because behind it they're still doing things in quite a strict way. Hell they play so many of their own records even, or their labelmates!

To be honest I think it's a welcome synthesis, the image and the coolness aswell as an almost old fashioned approach to making new music.

Coming from the sticks, I often find it very hard to explain these feelings to people who come from a London background. I once told a friend from London who is very clued-in on his stuff that I was working on a few mashups. His response: "Oh, isn't that a bit old-hat now?". This was about 2001 and I felt as though this attitude was quite typical of someone from the inner city. Sure, mashups were pretty big about then and that scene was dying, but for goodness sake they were (and still are in some ways) quite good fun - fuck what The Face says about it.

whereas kompakt too...i don't think they're trying to be commercial. and in fact a large part of their output seems to be very "faceless" still, very tracky. (just think of all that "neo-trance" stuff...if they really do succeed in making hipsters interested in trance, it will be the ultimate dance coup of the decade, i think.) but here you have a bunch of guys who basically spent a better part of the 90s making the blueprint for euro minimal techno and they're just bored now. (i mean, you hear mayer talk about it all the time in interviews.) so they started incorporating all the stuff from the 80s and 70s they loved (glam, pet shop boys, madonna...oddly enough all the stuff electroclash seems to disdain as too "obvious".) so there's been this odd bit of crossover where you could slot something like m. mayer's "amanda" into an electroclash set (even though it's a lot more dewy), even though you probably couldnt do the same for their earliest 12s (dettingers "puma" for instance.)

maybe the real difference between kompakt and electroclash is that germans, while they can be guarded and camp and funny, don't really do kitsch or irony.

It reminds me of a free party I went to a few months back where they played nothing but 4/4 techno all night. Nothing wrong with that, but this stuff was literally a bass drum echoing around the room non-stop for twelve hours. No melodies, the odd wooshing noise but there was absolutely nothing to get excited about. Oddly the London crowd were lapping it right up but by the end I did feel like there was some kind of practical joke being played.

Also - what good is a genre if the people listening to it and playing it are doing it simply out of irony rather than a genuine passion for what they do? I can understand one song or one band doing this - but a whole genre? For Pete's sake!

Paper Faces remixes...I meant

Yeah I think maybe part of the reason for that is that it feels easier to slot Tiefschwarz in with the later, darker, trackier stuff and JLC with, well, electroclash. If there wasn't an overbearing sound at the time of this thread there was not long after.

"This is before the start of the Get Physical thread, before the first electrohouse bobbins thread even."

The latter probably being my finest moment still. In that first 2004 thread people are listing stuff by Ewan Pearson, Black Strobe, Freeform Five, Tiga, Get Physical, Le Dust Sucker, Rex the Dog, Tiefschwarz... All of whom had already established their electro-house blueprints by the end of 2003 and yet (perhaps because the word itself wasn't used so commonly yet) it was somehow harder to see them as existing in the same interzone. And yet suddenly by the end of 2004 that's how it felt. Tiefschwarz's remixes are perhaps most key here in that it's hard to imagine them existing before the end of 2003 (which is when the "Kinda New" remix came out I think). That sense that they couldn't possibly be released before that point was the kinda thing that necessitated a terminological paradigm shift.

OTOH, this comment by Jacob re M.A.N.D.Y. and Sunsetpeople's "Our World (Our Music)" is also rather relevant here:

"The record that best epitomises electrohouse's 2004 shift from the sleazy faux-elitism and poncery of tracks like "Frank Sinatra" to big-room euphoria and classic rave peace and loveism. It's an unholy marriage of electrohouse rhythm, disco guitar and strings and hippiefied sentiment of one-world under an (electrohouse) groove."

Jacob also started this thread in December 2004: 2004: the year electro ate dance music and spat out the 'black' bits - discuss

Early uses of the phrase "electro-house" on ILM:

1) Sterling re Sarai in June 2003

"Why do white girls always hit the electro-house sound best?"

2) Me re Rex the Dog and "Rubicon" on 30 May 2004:

"I actually think Koehncke tracks like "Lucienne" and *especially* "Station 18" are more Metro Area-like than "2 After 909" and "Timecode", both of which strike me as attempts to take the sound of the former tracks and fuse them with a big, bold and kinda french electro-house sound somewhere between Rex The Dog and "Rubicon" (actually they wouldn't sound out of place on a Daft Punk album either). What makes these tracks so special is that they're so uncompromisingly pleasure-focused, combining quite a few of the most melody-centric, blatantly anthemic strands of house music over the last few years."

3) Me re the Mei Lwun Uno Records mix in August 2004:

"Towards the end it veers closer to proper electro-house (like a more subtle version of the transition on the first disc of Le Future Le Funk) but after the divatronics of the first two thirds it works magically, a really anthemic finish."

So by August i was acting like it was really obvious and widely understood and historically established what this term referred to.

The more electro and the less clash, the better.
Thus Fischerspooner >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Green Velvet.

no

hell no

I kinda miss it.

Yeah, me too. In Australia it never really went away completely though... it's still sort of here, only it's divided into two strands - one slicker and housier than it should be and the other much more punk, cheap, 8 bit and deranged than it used to be, eg Bad Art:

http://www.myspace.com/baaaadaaart

Listen to 'I Wed Myself'

sample lyrics - "Hello Lydia. This is Bruce Devastator. You may know me from the group, 'Bruce Devastator and the Teenage Stonehenge?'"

So this was the one electroclash thread I never posted to?

In terms of recent history, this all roots back - as most interesting things in modern dance music do - to electroclash.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/01/to_anyone_who_came_of.html

have to say, it was the so called electroclash scene that got me re-listening to electronic dance music, which now makes up for 75%+ of my listening pattern these days, so i'd agree with that statement.

After all this, I still listen to "Day Job" by The Fitness.

In terms of recent history, this all roots back - as most interesting things in modern dance music do - to electroclash.

This is the truism that isn't true anymore.

It wasn't true in the first place!

It was true a few years ago for definite.

The part that interests me is how electroclash, despite getting a lot of knocking from indie and rock types, kind of wound up setting the stylistic tone for craploads of indie and rock all decade long.

Ronan so wrong.

The part that interests me is how electroclash Electronic instruments, despite getting a lot of knocking from indie and rock types, kind of wound up setting the stylistic tone for craploads of indie and rock all decade long.

teh fix

How so wrong?

Actually Mackro I'm not even thinking of instruments or sounds -- I'm thinking of peoples in skinny jeans and Vans and American Apparel asymmetrical dresses pulling hipster-trash looks at basement parties, or the way the audience at a CSS or LCD show kinda looks/feels more like a 2001 electro-night crowd than anyone would have guessed back at the time

I.e., if I were trying to imagine a general "indie" vibe to shorthand the decade, it wouldn't look that different from electroclash 01. Especially M.I.A.

I think Ronan is talking about dance music (specifically house and techno) which I has (in its more respectable forms) finally thrown off the electroclash influence in the last 18 months or so.

Mind you a lot of current dance music is still in this lineage.

10 We chew.
20 We digest.
30 We shit it out.
40 We retain a little.
50 We move on.
60 Goto 10.

Actually Mackro I'm not even thinking of instruments or sounds -- I'm thinking of peoples in skinny jeans and Vans and American Apparel asymmetrical dresses pulling hipster-trash looks at basement parties, or the way the audience at a CSS or LCD show kinda looks/feels more like a 2001 electro-night crowd than anyone would have guessed back at the time

Well, again, this can be more generalized in other genres too. Fashion and music are becoming less respectively tied to each other, in the context of genre.

If you removed everyone from, say, a Justice show and put them all in a blank warehouse, would you be able to guess what music they were into (early tour-shirt wearers aside)?

I guess my point is, since the complete dissolution of actual raves in this country, the ravers are now just mixing in with the other folks, so it's harder to guess what a dance crowd "looks like" anymore, if we're forking into this side-thread.

xposts. The most interesting things in dance music in the 21st Century have absolutely nothing to do with electrohouse and this is certainly no new development.

electroclash even, lol, freudian slip.

The most interesting things in dance music in the 21st Century

such as?

http://www.rwdmag.com/upload/t2300.jpg
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2007-04-05/music_vibes-1.jpg
http://www.crisco-connection.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/retardo.jpg

http://www.outlar.com/images/artists/TheoParrish1.jpg

http://assets4.pitchforkmedia.com/images/image/31023.efdemin.jpg

http://a818.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/13/l_8970beef56be272fd56eeb27966f2ef9.jpg

http://medias.ados.fr/people/7/6/7669/Reinhard-Voigt/photos/11432.jpg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radioassets/photos/2007/1/4/12434_2.jpg

http://www.dissonanze.it/images/foto_luciano.jpg

The chap three pictures up looks a lot like Mike D.

Ah, tis Reinhard Voigt. Not that I actually thought it was Mike D.

If you want to keep posting pics of people who defined dance music post 2003/2004 by all means go ahead, but don't think that contradicts anyone. I mean, Efdemin? We're talking one year of "influence" at best and that's one average album and some great DJ sets.

Also Nabisco otm. And anyone denying Kompakt met electrohouse/electroclash halfway at times is closing their ears....

"and that's one average album"

Finally someone admits it.

Hell, I'm even hatin' on his universally recognized hit.

I never liked "Just A Track", not because I think it's heresy or whatever, I just don't think it's a GREAT attempt at what it's trying to do. "Lohn and Brot" is amazing but I'm sort of mystified as to how the rest of the Efdemin record (and Pantha Du Prince for that matter) was so popular last year when it kinda seems exactly what Dial have been doing for as long as I can remember.

I don't mean that in a snobby way either, just it says something odd about 2007.

from that linked Guardian blog:

feminism (Chicks on Speed)

bwahahahahaha

anybody else think the current lumpen "haircut house" and "up front house" owes something to the fact that electroclash upped the "liveness" stakes in dance music? even if programmed in a blisteringly banal way, all those drumkit sounds have a kind of live rockness to them that i can't imagine pre-electroclash

of course electroclash also (somehow) includes people like dj hell, who doesn't ever sound "live" so eh

to my mind, electroclash's innovation was that it was the first post-rave dance music that explicitly used old sounds rather than new ones (note this is different from trad new york house, for instance, which never STOPPED using old sounds in the first place). this is not to say that electroclash wasn't future-oriented because i think it was, but that retro pastiche became a strategy for a whole galaxy of barely connected people, sounds, scenes; what was so thrilling for me was that if everything is current again, if every sound of the recent past is fair game, you get way more eclectic DJ sets and way more mixed-up stuff. this was necessarily futuristic in a dance music world that had become so specialized and segregated. of course electroclash quickly adopted its own narrow touchstones but the energy of it had a really positive impact i think.

jim, a text-based list would've been fine. only recognised one of them anyway - and interesting tho he may be i can barely stand to listen to his stuff most of the time.

includes people like dj hell, who doesn't ever sound "live" so eh

altho a lot of his 90s stuff kinda does (at least in terms of roughness and some unpredictability in the sequencing) no?

oh.. i wouldn't know!!

If you want to keep posting pics of people who defined dance music post 2003/2004 by all means go ahead

The point was that the people in the pictures were releasing music before and during electroclash and had nothing to do with it, or were parts of strains of music that have nothing to do with electroclash (e.g. UK garage).

I can't be bothered having this discussion again.

Cool, I wasn't really doing anything beyond wtfing at there being people on the planet who still think the word electroclash can have anything but a pejorative sense.

This was like the 2001 Justice and Uffie for me.

"on the planet"