The terminal decline of intellectual dance music

luka

Well-known member
I really do not understand how can people consider cold and emotionless music as equivalent, I think in case of AE it's a similar region of nuum that grime is coming from.
Might be cold but I would not say it's empty or insincere just because it's a bit autistic and not so directly expressing emotions.
IMO IDM tends to be dysfunctional in how it's dealing with emotion, but still AE wouldn't even be on top 10 autistic electronica, quite the opposite.
Can you draw up your top ten autistic electronica for us please?
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
I was just listening to 'Cosmic Pulses' yesterday!

I loved it actually - a good way to go out (his last composition, right?).

I thought I'd have a trawl through Karlheinz (but only the stuff involving electronics - limited appetite for all that tiddly-bong percussion, sour agitated orchestral palette stuff) so made one of those giant playlists that you never listen to all the way through because it would take 2 and half days.

but right now I'm listening to things like West Street Mob "Break Dance - Electric Boogie" and was actually wondering aloud (to the ever patient missus) about a different path my life could have taken if I'd got a piece of lino in 1983 and had a 'go' in some shopping arcade. Bought a can of aerosol.

I don't think "music for the body" is any less cerebrally appealing than "music for the mind", there's always a structure to contemplate, and equally there's very little "music for mind" that doesn't pull at our physical being on some level, there's a bodily element even to ambient I think

classical music is full of rhythm, it's not danceable in the late 20th Century popular music way, although you could dance to it if you had a mind to - it's only the mores of classical music consumption that demand the audience consist of serried ranks of static upright bodies in formal clothing.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I was just listening to 'Cosmic Pulses' yesterday!

I loved it actually - a good way to go out (his last composition, right?).

I thought I'd have a trawl through Karlheinz (but only the stuff involving electronics - limited appetite for all that tiddly-bong percussion, sour agitated orchestral palette stuff) so made one of those giant playlists that you never listen to all the way through because it would take 2 and half days.

but right now I'm listening to things like West Street Mob "Break Dance - Electric Boogie" and was actually wondering aloud (to the ever patient missus) about a different path my life could have taken if I'd got a piece of lino in 1983 and had a 'go' in some shopping arcade. Bought a can of aerosol.

I don't think "music for the body" is any less cerebrally appealing than "music for the mind", there's always a structure to contemplate, and equally there's very little "music for mind" that doesn't pull at our physical being on some level, there's a bodily element even to ambient I think

classical music is full of rhythm, it's not danceable in the late 20th Century popular music way, although you could dance to it if you had a mind to - it's only the mores of classical music consumption that demand the audience consist of serried ranks of static upright bodies in formal clothing.

In Turkey you have light classical songs, sharki which are danceable. In india they call this semi-classical. The sharki form mutated into later arabesk, about as proletarian as turkish music gets, much more than turkish metal or psychedelic rock before that. I wager had England and America industrialised comparitively later on we'd also get strange forms that aren't all that divorced from classical. But I don't know.
 

polystyle

Well-known member
[all those things like boards of canada, mouse on mars, GAS, kid 606, illbient, basic channel, phoenecia, mille plateux, ultramarine, casino vs japan, oval and herbert]

Found this grouping interesting in and of itself ...
you were discog'ing them being from the same period was the link ?

I mean hey BOC - made a world onto themselves ,
sounded good last night while we were packing up and came across -

Same for Gas - the Koln ness of it all Wolfgang and the label. Immersive

Casino Vs Japan they had a moment, somewhat next to BOC ( same time miles down from BOC's highs )

Basic Channel Boom what a next gen palate chaser when they came in

Illbient Jeez ... memories of the mico rave scenes downtown, holed up in M Gira's former rooms on E 6th. Some good things - but also spawned that one guy .

worlds behind worlds !
 

Woebot

Well-known member
one of you called a record i did 'ambient with beats' and it fucking wounded me.
ah ha! ok, now we're getting to the bottom of this.

dear @other_life i'm very sorry your 'ambient record with beats' was pilloried.

if i had heard it i'm certain i would have enjoyed it. it's rough having people being rude about one's work i agree.

for the record, if it wasn't clear) i don't not count myself as one of the wall-e people. i'm super phyzikal - swimming, cycling, rowing on my rowing machine. lean and lithe (or at least within my BMI hotspot ;)) - and i ASSUME that everyone on this board is also a healthy specimen. @luka doing his yoga etc. ESPECIALLY you dear chap @other_life . GABBA GABBA WE ACCEPT YOU.


so it's not like i'm talking about self-hatred here - or even board self-hatred - i'm talking about all those mysterious blahs out there who aren't like US wonderful people. who always like their ambient music WITHOUT beats :cool: straw-men to a man.

anyway. even if it's a point that's done to death i like to think that there's enough interesting ideas in there to merit reorganising the big chunky yellow bricks.

in many respects it's the same way that i appreciate middle class people slumming it.

or white people wanting to dress and behave like black folks.

or americans fetishising indian philosophy.

or women dressing as men.

intellectual music with beats is an attempt, even if always a little clumsy, to unite.
 

Woebot

Well-known member
[all those things like boards of canada, mouse on mars, GAS, kid 606, illbient, basic channel, phoenecia, mille plateux, ultramarine, casino vs japan, oval and herbert]

Found this grouping interesting in and of itself ...
you were discog'ing them being from the same period was the link ?
it's how i divided up my record collection when a few years back (after extensive meditation) i pulled it together in groups. that always made the most sense.

Screenshot_2.png
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
I gave up on genres entirely a while back, and now use the genre tag as a place for the record label. It makes life much easier.

UK Techno... where do you even start there? Regis, Surgeon, but lumped in with Luke Slater?
 

Woebot

Well-known member
I gave up on genres entirely a while back, and now use the genre tag as a place for the record label. It makes life much easier.

UK Techno... where do you even start there? Regis, Surgeon, but lumped in with Luke Slater?
yoikes. so now i'll have to justify this! this thread is a minefield! this is only so i have some order to the crates in my study. i would spend a whole day looking for a record - sometimes missing it the first time round the horn. so i had to organise it.

uk techno - what's in there? things like the black dog, the moody boys, a guy called gerald, the aphex twin, ART, B12, WARP, The Holy Ghost, TFSOL/Jumpin&Pumpin etc
 

woops

is not like other people
did kid606, knifehandchop etc invent EDM? once his name was around kid606 started sounding like chemical brothers
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
I thought EDM was from people like Steve Aoki? Very different from IDM.

Kid606 and Knifehandchop were firstly never really more than a fringe movement, and secondly; something I would class as some kind of painfully ironic post-breakcore that died a death very quickly.

...and this is exactly why I stick to record labels as a method of organising my stuff, lest I become trapped in over-analysing sub-sub-genres until I starve to death.
 

Dusty

Tone deaf
I'm more than happy to hear a theory of how they connect. I always saw them as disparate scenes with different actors and different goals.

What arists are you referring to when you talk about EDM? To me the name conjures up stadium-filling names like Skrillex with his brostep wobble, Deadmou5 and David Guetta with their progressive house.

A million miles from the punk aesthetic and intent of Kid606, knifehandchop and their ilk (Doormouse, Sickboy, Drop the Lime)
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I really do not understand how can people consider cold and emotionless music as equivalent, I think in case of AE it's a similar region of nuum that grime is coming from.
Might be cold but I would not say it's empty or insincere just because it's a bit autistic and not so directly expressing emotions.
IMO IDM tends to be dysfunctional in how it's dealing with emotion, but still AE wouldn't even be on top 10 autistic electronica, quite the opposite.

A lot of IDM is too warm for me. Stuff like Arovane for instance. Too many melodies with no funk or grit. It's precisely Autechre's lab coldness which makes them good. This kind of music, whilst enjoyable, I can only listen to in small doses.



And too much emotion can often be just as insipid as too much nuance. It's always about striking a fine balance.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
did kid606, knifehandchop etc invent EDM? once his name was around kid606 started sounding like chemical brothers

no, edm was trance/prog for the 00s generation with electro house influences.

observe:

98:
09/10:
also making the cheesy trance influence apparent.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
You're right about chemical brothers though, they did have some proto-edm prog things in their catalog.


Awful music really.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I think Mouse on Mars, BoC etc were less faithful to dance music even if Autechre tried to escape it. And I think that's where Reynolds' orthodoxy breaks down for me.

Mouse on Mars/Jan St. Werner in particular I think truly made an avant-pop. All crinkly, crumbling, groaning, glitchy, intense, rough as fuck, smooth, emotional, aggressive, masculine, feminin, melodic, atonal.

Someone on ILX said way back in 2012 that their impact will only be appreciated (retro)actively and I wish that was the case. All the knobheads like A. G. Cook were jizzing over 2010s Maxd Martin/Stargate, without of course (naturally being deplorable goldsmiths filth) having the knowledge to realise that the Germans were doing that shit in the late 90s/early 00s.

I hope now that the likes of Carl Stone plundertronics has taken off that we will get a reappraisal of this german electronic which it is too easy to dismiss as indietronica, but indie is not a German thing. @other_life

I don't know if it's that my taste is just on a higher level than most, or if the band is just well tuned to my individual sound-interests. Personally I think time will show, and in 20 or 30 years it will be a lot easier to tell that these guys were doing something completely unique. Kind of like how Radiohead fans find out about CAN and realize the truth. About as contemporary as it can get, on some of their prior releases and at times on Parastrophics. Completely different strata.
― dojo, Sunday, 4 November 2012 18:00 (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink
Lol, dojo, I love Mouse on Mars and it's great to see someone so passionate about them, but I don't know if it's that my taste is just on a higher level than most is a statement likely to get you crucified on ilx.
― emil.y, Sunday, 4 November 2012 18:11 (eight years ago)
 
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