Electro

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Yeah, I've got that anthology of old club writing from The Face, and it's quite fun to watch them trying to get a handle on hip hop, electro soul, avant-disco, house and the whole shebang pretty much as it happens, in an era before everything was minutely documented and dissected on the internet. Particularly because it's The Face so they want to have some sort of take as quickly as possible regardless of whether they've really figured stuff out yet.
 

droid

Well-known member
Unmentioned so far; Booty Bass. Super fast 150+ ghetto electro.


Saw Assault a couple of times. He started doing fairly straight up Detroit electro before moving into this stuff. Fun music, but gets a bit wearing. Obvious parallels with tons of contemporary stuff.
 

droid

Well-known member
There's also the late 90s crossover with Electronica/IDM, that was a big thing at one point.

 

luka

Well-known member
One thing I love about it is how clear and bright the sounds all are. Synths come in and they're as light as air, they float over the brittle drums. And there's all this echo (I'm thinking of drexciya here perhaps) that adds to that feeling of spaciouss.

On the opposite end of the spectrum it feels totally constricted, all the sounds artificial and airless.

And also the emotional strangeness of electro. It sounds inhuman, so even when it has human emotion it feels processed into some other zone of existence.

it can be very haunting. i think it's ghosts of trans-europe express.. the riff, for want of a better word. obviously sometimes its simply lifted like in soul sonic force or play at your own risk but other times it's just echoed like in Al-Naafiysh. elegiac. synths aspiring to string sections. etc etc.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
You could make a strong argument that a good chunk of postpunk synth stuff fits into the electro mode via Numan.


Lines were blurry in the early to mid80s. I have this collection of a German music mag that ran a "dance" column from 82 till 89, and the guys reviewed stuff like electro, new wave, italo-disco, hi-nrg up to early chicago house all under the umbrella "dance".

also great that this mag had ads from 12'' singles-specialist schops and mailorders, perfect for pop-music archeology.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
One also has to state that electro (a lot bc of the breakdance craze) was very popular from 83-till 85/86, there were top ten hits like the following in '85:


or (a bit chees'ed up) theme songs for TV shows or superbly successful movies like the following bits:



 
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firefinga

Well-known member
Per droids comment above about electro evolving and permeating through music, it survived in the south and became bounce music, arguably even trap is an evolution of electro, right?

Not only in the south, we, the old grumps, remember that stuff called "Booty Bass" which was and is still being produced in places like Detroit, droid mentioned it already. Basically, sped up "classic" electro. There was a small hype in the late 90s in places like Germany for this kind of stuff. Music critics neglected it mostly though, (possibly bc it is purely hedonistic and could be perceived as "sexist" by middle class liberals = music critics, bc it was and still is very popular in stripclubs and such - so I heard).

The UR camp however always kept electro somewhat alive, in the early 90s they had the odd electro track here and there on their techno releases.

And there were the Hip Hop crews who went on with the electro sounds well into the late 80s, early 90s like 2LifeCrew.
 

firefinga

Well-known member

droid

Well-known member
Yeah, I cant stand that tune! Caned to bits.

That Lonny & Melvin 12" is, to me, the height of Dutch electro, though it is quite atypical in its emotion.
 
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