Ian Van Dahl

the lack of responses to this surely show what a rockist institution ilx is! i don't know what those CTCL people are complaining about. kravitz, the strokes, pole, chicane, eminem, british sea power and all that other rockist stuff gets answers but not this!

The worst album I've heard this year that was made by Jonathan Davis or any of his extended family.

haha gareth now you see the pain!

I hate Ian Van Dahl by the way, it's just so bad, totally based on one melody at a time=the key to shit dance music.

Zzzzzzzzzz...

i think what interests me in particular is the fact that it seems to be a music of absence rather than presence (not in a shoegaze or trance or electronica) way, but that of a 'full' music with a hole at the centre, a lack of core. on certain days this can seem wistful or melancholic, but on others just horrible - the complete triteness, the almost complete lack of emotionality other than signposted surfaceness. i find it strange how sometimes it makes me cringe, and on others it seems to represent life

IVD, of course, are not actually particularly good at this game, the europoptrance game, but they are perhaps one of the most well known, and therefore can be used to get the idea across better. i would be interested to here more of this stuff that came from poland or russia rather than the euro heartlands of belgium and germany. somehow a misreading of a misreading would seem somehow evenly more poignantly trite, signposted emotion/unemotion. the russian music played in the internet cafe on holloway rd gets some of the way there...

"oh tell me why.." ..do you produce such shite inane tracks..about building castles in the sky...fuck offffffffffffffffffff

Why do Kiss100 and radio 1 playlist utter shite like "dee dee" and Ian Van Dahl?

MELTDOWN ! all kiddie pop euro trance

i mentioned ian van dahl on another thread, gareth. do pay attention. basically i agree with you. but in re Eastern Europe: if the charts on MTVE are anything to go by, this is not the sort of thing they go for at all in that part of the world

now, go post on my undertones thread. ;-)

Castles In The Sky and Will I are of course really, really bad bubblegum poptrance. But that doesn't matter that much, after all no self respecting DJ will ever play it (at least the radio edit/original mix) so the chances of having to endure this 'in the wild' in any DJ set are minimal. The Wippenberg remix of Castles In The Sky however is seriously worth looking for - it transforms a flatly produced, cheesy and boring song into a huge hands-in-the air euphoric anthem with one of the best buildup-release sequences ever.

I didn't expect Ian Van dahl to be welcomed with open arms here, but I'm surprised it's not appreciated a little. Maybe it's too obvious, too Costa del Dol (not enough Ibiza), too eurovision. But I have to say Will I is one of the great records of the past 50 years.

Thanks to it I'll never need to listen to the Joy Division box set again, except as light relief. No wonder it's ignored by most dj's in their sets, everything else is revealed as vapid, transitory fluff next to it's Beckettian bleakness. It's a great wall of sound reminiscent of psychocandy JAMC and like all walls you want to knock it down to see what's on the other side. But all you're going to find is the absolute loss of betrayal, betrayal of love as an ideal. It's romantic too as it postulates that the ideal is worth holding onto and finding again, the death of love is not death. It's genius is to take the essential pathos in all great dance or disco and distil it to it's purest component. Any extended remixes are superflous, it say's it all in 2"40. Really after releasing it they should have given up, it's their Guernica or Rites of spring. I can't wait to hear Mark Kozelek do a cover version of it.

Never see them in the same room as Alice Deejay, do you?

Robin to thread!

I don't mind Ian Van Dahl. Okay, he's pretty crappy, and the only way I can think of "Will I?" as good is by thinking how much worse the subsequent single "Reasons" is. But there's elements there that I sort of like - most likely the Fragma-ish parts, although the contrasts between the sweetness and the wasp swarms is sorta interesting.

contrasts between the sweetness and the wasp swarms is sorta interesting.

hmm, back to tha shaun imrei early 90s style? mentasms'n'divas reprise? terrorize - such a feeling, elevation - can you feel it, not sure about the ones he wrote for Sonia and Leeds United though!

Castles in the Sky is great and that remix especially. I started a thread about it some time ago. It really is all about the climax and the bass drop with the voice just lilting away, in the sky as it were.