Whats it like on the outside looking in?

straight

wings cru
I hope you all dont mind but I thought I'd break with tradition and not make a post on either burial or the definition of tepid house.

I'm speaking particularly to the americans there and trying (probably not very successfully) not to sound condescending. I'm involved with a night with a lot of modular/mad decent etc ties and have a few american/french DJs from their rosters in, many for their first UK tours. Quite often these guys are playing that would quite literally cause UK DJs to be torn to shreds and i can't help but wonder if US djs have any real idea on UK specific hit dance records ie what is an eclectic trip to down memory lane and what is festreing turd. Case in point, we had Flosstradamus/kid sister on last night (who were actually some of the nicest, most friendly guys we've had on and good god that girl is the sexiest woman i've ever met) from chicago, a town which has produced some of the most important dance music of all time and they played some terrible dave pearce fodder. ie faithless, benni bennassi, zombie nation and (horror of horrors) Alice deejay.

I apologise if i'm not putting this forward very eloquently as im still extremely pissed/hungover from last night and i dont think i've ver had more trouble getting a point out in my life.

What I'm trying to say is, what is it like looking in on UK dance culture from the outside? And I mean outside of the london continuum that is constantly disected on in here, mass consumption dance, does this exist in the US in any sort of simililar fashion? Or iam I just missing that this is just another symptom of the new ravey/ indie disco shame free hyper eclecticism thats currently taking over clubland?
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Quite often these guys are playing that would quite literally cause UK DJs to be torn to shreds

i take it you mean they are playing records that UK DJ's would get their heads kicked in for.

interesting question... I lived in the US for a long time, and i certainly would not have any clue as far as what an UK audience who have been living and breathing the 'nuum for 2 generations consider good or bad, and as to the difference between tasteful nostalgia and utter crap... would just hope what i consider to be good is universally accepted; and not to blow my own clarinette but this has actually always turned out to be the case. loads of people in different scenes that I'm not a native of have come up to me saying "oh that track is the shit in such and such micro-scene". when i drop some bhangra to a south asian audience for instance this happens. or when i play reggae to die-hard rastas.

but these days i ain't gotta worry cuz for the most part i play Kabuka, Genge, and Egyptian pop that no one's ever heard of before :D

shit taste, of course, like good taste, is also universally translatable...
 

straight

wings cru
yeah i'm pretty sure what they were playing was utter crap, its just they were really nice guys and a hot a-traks girlfriend so i was trying to think a bit outside the box

oh and zhao, cheers for upping all the potter/coulclough/liles stuff, much appreciated. ive had the good fortune to be at some of their preston performances and had potter hammering a 2000w system in an abandoned victorian swimming pool earlier on this year at an event i staged, any more is much apprciated.
 
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Gavin

booty bass intellectual
Dance music is not taken seriously in the U.S.; you have to play it tongue in cheek. It's all coming from the "cheesy party music so you can go nuts" direction, which is pretty much how "hipster" dance parties go. Always obvious stuff: Benassi, Fergie mashups, etc. It is pretty frustrating to go out and only hear music I recognize, but that's all people want to hear apparently.

Anyway, the Mad Decent people always struck me as coming more from a hip hop DJing perspective (maybe breaks?); I wouldn't be surprised if someone like Flosstradamus only started DJing dance music recently. House was always an underground thing in Chicago and it still is: many people living here don't know what it is let alone that it came from Chicago.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
In Detroit DJing techno is considered "too gay" for many people, esp. black people! Though Detroit does have an interesting subculture of raver burnouts and future raver burnouts that get some interesting DJs at parties now and again. You can actually go to a jungle night in Detroit/Ann Arbor, hear minimal techno, etc. But still, it's very culty.
 

adruu

This Is It
ive heard djs like that play some really corny corny shit. bizzare inc. and that. i dont get it, but i'm not 21 anymore...

the schtick seems to be nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. if i remember it and you remember it then everything is good.

it might pay off when they reinvent themselves.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
It's not nostalgia here though. Imagine if you will a land where almost no one listened to dance music until electroclash...


White people put yr hand in the air!

MV_Chromeo_crowd_H1.jpg
chromeo-flosstradamus-026.jpg
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
It's not nostalgia here though. Imagine if you will a land where almost no one listened to dance music until electroclash...
The electroclash kids in the uk knew nothing of rave and dance music history really. They were on the whole hugely prejudiced against dance music qua dance music. Hence the supposed ironic distance. When they started doing more pills and realised that this 'rave' thing was actually pretty good they had a hipster panic attack about being 20 years too late so they had to come up with nu-rave to try and make out they'd understood all along.
 
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hint

party record with a siren
ive heard djs like that play some really corny corny shit. bizzare inc. and that. i dont get it, but i'm not 21 anymore...

I think part of it is certainly down to Hip Hop DJs deciding to start dropping "dance" music, as mentioned up thread.

Don't underestimate the impact of Timbaland's recent work and tunes like Wes Fif's "Haterz", which to some people screams out "Hey! Nasty trance is alright, y'know!".

In the 90's Hip Hop DJs would also be playing the Funk and Soul that formed the backbone of the sound of the Hip Hop from that period, so perhaps it follows that in 2007 people "dig in the crates" for Trance, as crazy as that may seem to Europeans.

Timbaland's engineer has gone on the record to say that they used a loop from this tune to trigger the filter / gate in Timberlake's "My Love":

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straight said:
Quite often these guys are playing that would quite literally cause UK DJs to be torn to shreds

So true about the nature of UK crowds... I once got heckled for dropping "Flat Beat" when warming up for Carl Craig :)

Didn't one of the overseas Dissensus members once remark on how strange it is that in the UK a tune like General Levy's "Incredible" could be considered cheesy / played out? I'll do a search...

EDIT - here it is: http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?p=88767&highlight=incredible#post88767

ripley said:
rosebeast said:
So far I've only heard the more commercial stuff like "incredible" being played out

heh. Can I just say, as an American, that the idea that that song is commercial is totally mindboggling.

(I get it, knowing how Jungle happened in England. it just never happened here like that)
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Dance music is not taken seriously in the U.S.; you have to play it tongue in cheek. It's all coming from the "cheesy party music so you can go nuts" direction, which is pretty much how "hipster" dance parties go. Always obvious stuff: Benassi, Fergie mashups, etc.

That sounds a bit depressing! Although friends of mine who live/lived in Chicago say there's a pretty strong d'n'b scene there at the moment - strange that one of the birthplaces of US dance music should be invaded by what's essentially a British sound (or maybe it isn't, I dunno).
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Dance music is not taken seriously in the U.S.; you have to play it tongue in cheek. It's all coming from the "cheesy party music so you can go nuts" direction, which is pretty much how "hipster" dance parties go. Always obvious stuff: Benassi, Fergie mashups, etc. It is pretty frustrating to go out and only hear music I recognize, but that's all people want to hear apparently.
Maybe similar to 'hipster' parties in the UK and their selection of R&B and Hip-Hop = it tends to the obvious through a lack of knowledge or a fear of drifiting too close to appearing to actually like it. But that audience doesn't represent the entirety of dance music at all.
 

Gavin

booty bass intellectual
That sounds a bit depressing! Although friends of mine who live/lived in Chicago say there's a pretty strong d'n'b scene there at the moment - strange that one of the birthplaces of US dance music should be invaded by what's essentially a British sound (or maybe it isn't, I dunno).

Please ask yr friends where they go for that stuff. That goes for anyone else that knows the hotness in the Chi.

It can be depressing, but those nights can be fun too if you're in the right frame of mind. I'd like to go out and hear something a bit more ambitious sometimes though!

There are a couple clubs here that basically play whatever's hot in UK/Europe now... have European DJs tour -- I think it's like Erol Alkan now. Kompakt dudes roll through now and again.
 

straight

wings cru
i think most of the mad decent lot are coming from a hiphop background but getting into harder electro, french style and if im to believe turntable lab that whole sound is pretty much killing it at the minute. The more i think about, maybe the french are to blame then. The low point of my year was at the friday night at sonar when justice pummelled us with souless (ed) bangers nad then played 'moving on up'. I almost cried I was so depressed at the state of supposedly progressive electronic music. Well, it might have had something to do with a gram of mdma a day 3 days in a row.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Yeah, Straight, I think this is an interesting question because I've noticed something from posting on Dissensus.

Americans have NOTHING like the "continuum"--there's just no one who cares about most of what you calls call the 'nuum over here. The people who do like certainly do not have a monopoly on DJ nights in the U.S. Actually, one thing I find kind of hilarious is that the Brits here will rag on any U.S. DJ who does pay some respect to the "continuum" and write them off as vapid hipsters. Well, I hate to break it to you guys, but the only people who are keeping Acid House alive are gay people and hipsters!

Straight people in the U.S. dance exclusively to the top 40 (remixed by DJ Scribble or some shit) hits and maybe your odd hip-hop track.

By the same token, Americans who are into soul music would laugh their asses off at what passes for Brits as "soulful" or as "soul vocals"...
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
In the US wasn't it always the west coast scene that was closest to British rave? Hardkiss / Exist Dance / Hallucination et al. Particularly as there were big elements of psychedelia and breakbeat involved. Also the Burning Man crew - although that would tend towards the traveller / trance circuit I guess.

The thing about the 'numm such that it exists is that it's a phenomenon - it just happens, it's not really conscious in a sense that people try to preserve the 'nuum, except Burial maybe...
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Please ask yr friends where they go for that stuff. That goes for anyone else that knows the hotness in the Chi.

It can be depressing, but those nights can be fun too if you're in the right frame of mind. I'd like to go out and hear something a bit more ambitious sometimes though!

There are a couple clubs here that basically play whatever's hot in UK/Europe now... have European DJs tour -- I think it's like Erol Alkan now. Kompakt dudes roll through now and again.

If you don't mind gay clubs, I'd suggest any one of those for better music and more fun :D
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
In the US wasn't it always the west coast scene that was closest to British rave? Hardkiss / Exist Dance / Hallucination et al. Particularly as there were big elements of psychedelia and breakbeat involved. Also the Burning Man crew - although that would tend towards the traveller / trance circuit I guess.

The thing about the 'numm such that it exists is that it's a phenomenon - it just happens, it's not really conscious in a sense that people try to preserve the 'nuum, except Burial maybe...

See, this is where you're getting too specific again. No, the west coast scene was a bunch of dudes dropping acid and taking pills. Most of them gay.

Burning man? A bunch of 19-year-old stoners who have probably never even heard of "traveller"...

In America, I reiterate in this thread, "raving" is like the least cool thing you could ever do.
 
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