"I wash my nose/And I'm ready for my love affair": the silliness in techno thread

marc houle - 'techno vocals'

would be alright if the track were actually good.

green velvet's silliness is part of his appeal, for me at least. maybe samim's 'heater' belongs in this category too?

'Power of American Natives' - DJ Dag

That is one of the silliest techno tracks - a real Eurocheese techno pioneer number.

I agree, but wasn't the tune by Dance 2 Trance (which DJ Dag was one half of)?

"where is dag?"
"he is in the laser room"

on the 69 comp carl has that one song where he wants his chicken noodle soup

(not the R+S album, the cd comp of the old stuff on planet e)

I like Shez Satan, which is like this too

'The Power Of American Natives' isn't intentionally humourous tho is it?

Ha! I met Dag a couple of times @ the Technoclub (Sat nites at the Dorian Grey, downstairs in the basement of the Frankfurt Airport) in the late 80s-early 90s in my days hangin with the Talla / Sven Vath crowd.

He was a DJ there. Tall. skinny. goofy guy with a real hangup on Native American iconography. He wanted me to send him SOMETHING, like a Cleveland Indians cap or something, so... uh... that's not tongue-in-cheek.

the dOP (related heavily to noze, collaborators and friends) guys have really silly lyrics on that track "Dopamen."

"Simple/
like a mouse on a nipple".

it IS NOT mouth on a nipple. that's what i thought, but no. they meant mouse. which is really fucking absurd, and kinda gross. that track is big killa tho.

yeah 'Techno Vocals' was one of those ones last year where i would look at someone's top ten list for the month and not be able to take any of it seriously because of the inclusion of Marc Houle. what a shite track.

I agree, but wasn't the tune by Dance 2 Trance (which DJ Dag was one half of)?

-- Tuomas,

Aha yes Tuomas, I stand corrected.

i've not heard the und or int'l pony stuff but the noze tracks seem different to the green velvet / 'shez satan' idea, which is more OTT funny. can't quite articulate why though.

'heater' is maybe more along the lines of this: Does anyone know a song called "Poing" by Rotterdam Termination Source?

Green Velvet/"Shez Satan" = camp overperformance of quite serious stuff.

Noze/Int'l Pony = straightfaced underperformance of very silly stuff.

nice description of the difference between the humour in green velvet and the humour in noze et al, tim.

the international pony album was one of my favourite albums of 2007 but, conversely, i generally can't abide overt humour/wackiness in music.

Tim, OTM

(i think that's the first time I ever have written otm in my life)

I love humour, even in the most serious stuff, but it just doesn't translate to music for me. Usually I think it ends up stupid, Noze, Int. Pony, and und don't do much for me, because unlike something like say The Grass is always greener, they don't have production that makes up for it. That's just my opinion, too often it's the silliness that is the track, if you don't like that, there's usually not much that can be done.

http://www.discogs.com/release/931520

Actually, most VonStroke fits this bill.

but are these artists good because of or despite of their silliness?

TBH, this is one of my favorite things going on in techno. Everything mentioned so far (that I've heard— Nôze, Green Velvet, a couple Int'l Pony tracks) is full of great hooks, is serious enough as dance music, and brings the FUN. The Houle track was great as a pisstake for all the Minus-heads, though I'm not at all surprised to see them hating it just the same.

I thought 'Shez Satan' was Carl Craig (more than a little touched by the shadow of Green Velvet)?

Quite a bit of the vocal German techno stuff actually aims for the dead centre of my dichotomy: is something like Superpitcher's "People" underperformed or overperformed or both? Straightfaced or camp or both? Serious or silly or both?

If you circled "both" three times you get a dollar.

This kind of thing strikes me as these producers (self-consciously) reaching back towards an older definition of camp: when the cultural product seemed camp because it was kind of overblown but didn't seem to know it, and where this quality of "not knowing" is precisely the origin of the product's affective power - "deadpan camp" rather than "theatrical camp"... except of course that the producers do know what they're doing, they're aping the appearance of not knowing.

This BTW is very different to, say, the disaffection of electroclash monologues etc. where you know that I know that you know that I know that you know exactly what's going on.

Detroit Grand Pubahs, the Kool Keith of techno has rights on this thread.

DPB are different again: silly underperformance of silly stuff but you suspect that they're serious about it.

It's overperformance. He's like that everyday, too!

Actually the problem here is that he has two different vocal styles - I was thinking of "Sandwiches" etc. but a lot of his other stuff (or, like, that Tom Jones style Lotterboys track) is closer to the Green Velvet / "Shez Satan" lineage.

BTW I believe you blunt. I would not be surprised to meet Green Velvet and discover that he was just like his records either.

. Everything mentioned so far (that I've heard— Nôze, Green Velvet, a couple Int'l Pony tracks) is full of great hooks, is serious enough as dance music, and brings the FUN. The Houle track was great as a pisstake for all the Minus-heads, though I'm not at all surprised to see them hating it just the same.

Well, fun and humour aren't always interchangeable. While noze and int. pony are fun, I can't think of techno vocals as being fun, more wry and sarcastic, and as an aside, I think marc houle is probably one the worst techno producer out there, aside from "items and things" a really great track.

I was thinking earlier about Auf Dem Hof by Kalabrese: So fun and yet serious without taking itself too seriously (i.e. quirky without trying to be comic). Nevertheless it outright delivers, deserves a thread in itself, also a lot of perlon stuff of course.

BTW I believe you blunt. I would not be surprised to meet Green Velvet and discover that he was just like his records either.

Actually I believe he's become an evangelical Christian.

Sorry, first para was a quote, second para was my comment

Well, he could be like "The Preacher" in real life.

Or conversely he could become an actual preacher, complete with green hair and various stage antics.