Shallow electropop and electroclash

IdleRich

IdleRich
DELETED COS POSTED BY ACCIDENT with most of it missing, what I meant to say in its entirety is... as follows:

The descriptor "shallow" is not intended here as any type of insult cos I love this stuff, I just put it there to explicitly spell out how it is very much a yang to the deep electro yin. How they are connected (or not) but different.

It does seem that in the 2,000s in London they - I mean electro and electroclash - were both (coincidentally) in the ascendancy, at least as regards nightlife; in the other thread I mentioned Wang, Scand and Haywire as three heavyweight and great electro allnighters*, but at the same time you had Trash and also Nag, Nag, Nag as the latest incarnation of glammed up make-up heavy androgyny (I wonder if that will ever come round again), and their chosen soundtrack was a sex-positive sleazy-cheesy electro pop, typically delivered by bored monotone female voices saying something like "I love black leather it's so boring and sexy, wrap me in clingfilm on the motorway, lick my mechanical tits, such my electronic dick... oh yeah and let's take drugs".

For me - and with hindsignt - electroclash was really not from any kind of dance-music tradition, but rather was derived from the sort of electronic pop you could hear (or used to be able to hear) on the radio, only given an extra slice of what very conservative people imagined to be utterly depraved filth and a few tougher beats or whatever to rock the floor. And it was very effective, albeit arguably in limited way.

My feeling was that people into "proper" or "real" electro viewed electroclash with the same affection that they commonly reserved for anal warts. And I can see that there was something about the situation - in which these two types of music, these two scenes that really had very little in common except for their name and (maybe just about) the occasional shared palette of noises, found themselves sort of competing for the same (head)space as, though moving in totally different directions, they passed through it at exactly the same time - that might annoy the rather serious people who felt the scene that they had been into for years was suddenly being invaded by indie kids with pierced dicks telling them that their po-faced way of treating the music seriously and reverentially was all wrong.

So, in short, I'm saying that electroclash was not really a dance-music scene, at least to start with, it was more for people who liked "proper songs" and who wanted some proper songs that they could go out and dance to so that, just maybe, they could finally get rid of that annoying feeling that those idiots who liked stupid music with no words and which was based around repetitive beats were actually partying harder and having more fun than them even though Keith Richards was their hero.

So... electro was a storied and important scene as old as house and hip-hop themselves. which was still producing ice cool bangers and which was played and repped (either as a whole set, or just dipped into at times) by some of the world's greatest and most legendary DJs such as Stingray, Andrew Weatherall, Idle Rich and even Paris Hilton herself, while electroclash was just an anal wart on the genitals of music itself, consisting of tunes which at best were plastic rip-offs of far superior techno or electro tunes and which more normally were simply shit... end of story?

I say no, cos there was a little bit more, like I say, Dave Clarke remixed Emerge and surely there were others like that that were an abortive attempt at some kind of cross-pollination. And I reckon there were some electroclash tunes that were good in their own right... I remember I kinda taught myself to beat-match with Felix da Housecat - Silver Screen cos it had that cymbal (I think) crash on the fourth beat and I remember thinking to myse "If I can just get that noise to line-up then it will work!" for about ten hours a day, day after day after day....

Vitalic - La Rock 01 blew my head off when I started listening to it in a record shop and this massive grin spread across my face. I caned my copy of that so many times it is completely, utterly destroyed... sleeve and record look as though someone has scraped all the information and colour from it and then stamped it a few times for good measure. I mean, pretty much anything I own looks like that after a few days, but my first copy of that Vitalic EP looks as though it was recovered from a cupboard in the Mary Rose (an open one that exposed all the contents to the elements in fact...), truly if a millennial saw it they would probably say something like "I thought that vinyl records were not mass-produced until the 20th century?". And around the same time I bought that I remember seeing Bubble Metropolis on the wall of some record shop and being intrigued by all the quotes from the staff in the shop... a debate about whether it was the greatest electro EP ever, or simply the greatest music ever... or in fact was it just the greatest thing of any type that had or would ever exist. But when I got it home I definitely preferred Vitalic.

Whatever, there were some good tunes, there were some good DJs (Errol Alkan probably needs a thread to himself) and there was a lot of fun to be had I seem to remember. I'd like to hear what others think... any good ones I've missed? Do you agree that it was based more on electronic pop than other dance music, and if so, what was proto-electroclash? What else crossed over? What happened after that to electroclash? Just say some stuff about it guys, please...



*One of the few times where the old saw about waiting ages for one to come along, and then three arrive at once, is actually quite literally true.
 
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shakahislop

Well-known member
i was very happily watching autechre in belgium in about 2005, eyes shut and into it, and my mate absolutely refused to watch them and kept telling me that erol alken was on another stage, that 20 minutes of autechre was enough and we were missing erol alken, and he won and we went to the other stage. i've still not seen autechre and i can't remember anything at all about erol alken
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I did get introduced to some real good stuff by electroclash... like this*



Based on this (although come to think of it, I knew this already but you get the point)



And this uses the amazing riff



From this amazing epic monster (though it doesn't come in for ages, so if you don't know it already you should listen all the way through and learn)




*completely unrelated to everything else in the thread, but I loved this fantastic comment under the Bucci Bag song " I heard this at a nightclub when I was 18 and there was no Shazam so I had to remember the lyrics and type it into YouTube" - it's impossible not to be at least a little nostalgic for those days when you really had to hunt down a tune to figure out what it is... none of that just "point it at shazam" when we were young, you actually to remember as much as possible of the lyrics using your very own brain, and then you had to type it - with your fingetrs! - longhand into a search engine! People these days don't even know that they are born, imagine if they had been faced with a task like that, they would just give up straight away, probably never know what the tune was! Can you imagine that! Though, when you think of it, it was probably only a few hundred years before that that youtube itself was invented, can you imagine that? I guess the only tune that existed at that point was Greensleaves so finding things wouldn't be such an issue, the bigger question is how did people find their way around before googlemaps? Do you think they could
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
Electroclash was such a turning point
Brought the indie kids to the club

Me
So I short, I'm saying that electroclash was not really a dance-music scene, at least to start with, it was more for people who liked "proper songs" and who wanted some proper songs that they could go out and dance to so that, just maybe, they could finally get rid of that annoying feeling that those idiots who liked stupid music with no words and which was based around repetitive beats were actually partying harder and having more fun than them even though Keith Richards was their hero.

Well we're kinda saying the same thing here - and so obviously I agree, up to a point. I reckon it was not the whole story though, cos people like me were going to these nights as well as nights that were part of more established scenes. Although maybe I was a rarity in that I would go almost anywhere... I suppose having moved from Nottingham which was relatively restricted in terms of options, I was so overwhelmed by choice that I wanted to do everything. We would literally open Time Out and look at everything that was on (at that time it was a really pretty good list of a million different nights in a million different styles) and almost roll a die to decide where to go. Probably we might say "Oh we did reggae last week, roll again" or "This is finishing at three so let's go to two places tonight" but until we had established favourites and knew what was going on it was random like that.

In the Deep Electro thread, I think it was @catalog who said something about how he had never known about Wang and I didn't reply, leaving anyone reading to fill that gap by thinking that the reason I knew about it and he didn't was cos I had been plugged into some kind of underground information network, a living pulsing nervous system which automatically relayed any important up to the second bleeding edge info directly to a very few of the most important renegade production nodes - such as myself - who were deemed vital to the continued survival of any venture that sought to exist in the subzero chill of Hackney clubbing.

In fact it would be closer to the truth (by which I mean, this is what happened) to say that I read about Wang (think strictly, as with Neu! it had an exclamation mark - Wang!) in Time Out. I don't think they put it there every month (though of course they may have submitted the info regularly and not been accepted - if you were promoting a clubnight it was always a fraught moment when you opened the new Time Out to see if your thing had been allowed through the invisible wall to acceptance and you had been granted the crucial space with three or lines of heavily edited basic info that could prove the difference between roadblock and totally, completely dead).

One week I saw this intriguing looking night with a stupid name and... "One room of electro, one of dub and one more... in a recording studio in Hackney?" and decided on the off-chance to give it a try and... that was the end of my brain cells I guess.

Back to the main point, I did introduce a few indie kids to Wang! and as a rule I think they tended to like it, but that was a drop in the ocean compared to the effect that electroclash had in suddenly getting indie kids to take ecstasy etc What was the ultimate result of that do we reckon? What happened next and so on? If anything...

ps I found this picture from the last night of Wang! where they took a picture just outside the door of a few of the people who were still hanging around I guess (careful @Mr. Tea, I don't want you to cry when you see this).


WangLat.jpg
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
i was very happily watching autechre in belgium in about 2005, eyes shut and into it, and my mate absolutely refused to watch them and kept telling me that erol alken was on another stage, that 20 minutes of autechre was enough and we were missing erol alken, and he won and we went to the other stage. i've still not seen autechre and i can't remember anything at all about erol alken
There could definitely be a whole thread about Errol. When I moved to London he was doing Trash in some tiny venue, his USP was doing air-guitar to tunes with guitar on them, shouting over the mic that Dancing Queen was the greatest tune ever made as he finished every night with it and just playing "weird" stuff for a so-called indie night. Hip-hop and soft metal, but stuff that was fun and which sort of made sense - it felt as though you could sort of go "His taste is like this, and that song does fit that". He was leading a one man campaign to make going to clubs where they played guitar music fun, when surely everyone knew that what you were supposed to do was decide whether you liked Manc stuff - in which case you walked around like a badly injured great ape all night, moving to the dancefloor to do it when they played charlatansrosaisesmondays etc etc and glowered at everyone else at all times - or if you were a cloth boy/girl - in which case you ignored everything not by the smithspulpsuede etc and walked around trying to look skinny (tricky if you're not) and gay and chat up girls.

So that was Trash, but he was kinda learning to do mixing and scratches and if you went regularly you could literally see him improving from week to week cos he would sort of work out a trick (this is how I remember it anyway, kinda seems weird that I would, maybe ti's false memory syndrome or something) of how to put together two records. I almost wouldn't say that he was learning to scratch, it was more like he learnt a particular sequence of movements to put together, I dunno, let's say Dancing Queen Whole Lotta Love (CCS version)I and then every week he would do that same thing... and you could actually hear him getting better and more adventurous. Pretty interesting actually. Unless I've just made it up, in which case totally mad.

But yeah, that stuff.. but then electroclash came along and he got big at the same time and he played more and more of that and less and less Abba. One of my best friends from Uni lived in Oxford and he loved hearing the descriptions of Trash (his favourite band back then were Manic Street Preachers) and one time I was in Oxford and my friend was all excited cos Errol was gonna play at The Bullingdon Arms or something, and we went and it was just a really dry set of straight-forward of electro house. Something had been gained and something lost too.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Oh, one thing I meant to say was that I always think that the rise of electroclash caused or was intertwined with the rise of so-called Bastard Pop ie that thing where they hammer together two tunes to make a new one. That description doesn't really nail it though, it wasn't one song with a sample of another, yer standard bastard pop banger (and they were all bangers) was two songs both getting pretty much equal billing and with the whole thing switching from one to the other and back a few times. Maybe all over the beat from one. Still doesn't sound that new, and I guess it wasn't, the only thing about it was the audaciousness of taking two massive hits that everyone thought were untouchable and using them to make a tune that was double-massive or... look at my below attempt at post-modern potted history writing...

static chchggggg... fade "Sampling as we know it today had its roots in hip-hop parties where you had djs using the good bits of records and then... ***imagine a fast-forwarding effect going through all that stuff everyone knows and then it pauses with a grinding sound and a BBC type voice says "by now sampling was established as a legitimate part of the recording industry a process during which an artist would ask for permission from the original creator and agree on a payment deal for the sample and.".. more fast-forwarding... "these tunes seemingly totally ignored the framework of sampling that had been painstakingly created from its piecemeal growth to create exciting new pop tunes that apparently rode roughshod overthe rules" and now an effect like a record being scratched out or maybe a tape breaking or something.

So I still don't really how they got away with it, but I guess they did. And at the same time you had that Soulwax mix that every single person in the world - well, actually maybe dissensus types were too cool, but everyone else - had. Like you would go to someone's house and see it "oh is that yours?" "No that one belongs to my flatmate, I think this one... no, that's my gran's copy. Well, one of mine is round here somewhere" and that had loads of things on it which were effectively bastard pop by default and Errol was also doing something similar at the same time... and you would hear a dj and you'd think "Ooh this is a good mix" and then next week you would hear the exact same thing on the radio and realie it was not the dj it was a new single. Anyway for a few months they were absolutely red hot... shame that there was an unstoppable avalanche of them for years and years.

The first one that I remember was this one (@Leo the other day you put up that kinda electro-bootleg thing with MJ Blige on one side and, I think it had Witney on the other, it reminded me of this) Houston meets Kraftwerk.



I believe that Girls on Top was Richard X, either way they then went on to have a huge hit with the Gary Numan one that was number one in UK, but as I remember it that one did have to be re-recorded as they couldn't clear the sample or something.

Not sure, maybe these are the two versions





Anyway, I don't really remember any of the other ones specifically - which probably tells you something in itself; a whole genre (if we're gonna be incredibly generous to the point of dishonesty) with song after song appearing week after week, and the only two I can remember are the very first one I heard and the one that was a massive number one. When you think about it it probably takes quite a lot of skill to take some of the biggest brash pop tunes of all time - Crazy in Love, Blue Monday, Smells Like Teen Spirit, Get Ur Freak On and so on and on and on - and make something completely unmemorable out of them.

So I gotta say that, as a rule, I was not a huge fan of bastard pop, but it does need to be mentioned here.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
@IdleRich I hadn't heard the term 'bastard pop' - I thought they were just called 'mash-ups' at the time?

Not remotely electro(clash), but I remember this one going down a storm at Trash, and it's probably still my favourite of the ones that came out around that time:

 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
i was very happily watching autechre in belgium in about 2005, eyes shut and into it, and my mate absolutely refused to watch them and kept telling me that erol alken was on another stage, that 20 minutes of autechre was enough and we were missing erol alken, and he won and we went to the other stage. i've still not seen autechre and i can't remember anything at all about erol alken
On the plus side, at least you were saved from lifelong inceldom.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Coincidentally I was listening to this the other day, which I remember from Trash - or if not Trash, then 333/Mother Bar, somewhere like that.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
vitalic, miss kitten and dave clarke had grounding in the techno scene and were doing that kind of sound prior to this electroclash wave (same with felix da housecat.) check sharkamix - clashback from '94 or so, it's basically chicago techno with a nutty 80s electro two note riff, cracking stuff.

Fischerspooners emerge also was a well constructed pop song, with that 160 bpm intersection between kraftwerk and jungle.

but other than that? Erol Alkan was totally shit and I'm not going to defend my fellow Turkish compatriot here, he made Disclosure sound like Herbie Hancock. Disgusting music, disgusting dj, deeply irredeemable records from top to bottom. I was going to say he was the Skrillex of his day, but actually he was much worse, more like the deadmau5 or even David Guetta. Skrillex despite his cartoonish music was and is a technical wizard with amazing production chops. Alkan cites Weatherall as a pivotal influence but I just don't see it, like Four Tet he's one of those cuddly indie immigrants in music, the ones who love reading Zadie Smith like to listen to.

Could never get with Peaches either, music for new york hipsters with smelly armpits.

Proper EBM like front242 is much darker, it's not at all to do with gothy sex dungeon, it's subject matter is more about religious fundamentalism, bad drugs, fascism, domination, etc etc. That stuff is cringey in the extreme. The Miss Kitten Frank Sinatra song was so successful because she precisely took the piss out of that sort of suck my electronic transformer dick before it even become famous.

Dubstep, for all its faults, was better than that shoreditch nag nag nag rubbish.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
that whole scene also birthed bands like Caribou and Hot Chip which got shuvved down our throats when dance music was still recovering from its decline as a cultural force in the early-mid 00s (funnily paralleling developments now.)

Now those are bands which deserve to get shot. I'll forgive weatherall's indie predilections because it's more the 80s idea of post-punk funk, but noone else. + andy was still playing Nigerian funk, turkish psych records etc. But indie dance people in general deserve to be locked in a shed with Chelsea dickheads till they torture each other into insanity.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's not even like i care all that much for the indie kids appropriating house, techno and electro, which are 99% codified in 2022 with very little room left for interesting creative misappropriations.

But i dunno, why don't these people who make a stringent point about not being crude cock rockers take influences from oh I dunno, basa nova/MBP, electric Miles Davis, timbaland style rnb? It's always this obsession with the 80s, and basically a very codified version, they're about 5 mm away from just being Phil Collins.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
vitalic, miss kitten and dave clarke had grounding in the techno scene and were doing that kind of sound prior to this electroclash wave (same with felix da housecat.) check sharkamix - clashback from '94 or so, it's basically chicago techno with a nutty 80s electro two note riff, cracking stuff.

Fischerspooners emerge also was a well constructed pop song, with that 160 bpm intersection between kraftwerk and jungle.

but other than that? Erol Alkan was totally shit and I'm not going to defend my fellow Turkish compatriot here, he made Disclosure sound like Herbie Hancock. Disgusting music, disgusting dj, deeply irredeemable records from top to bottom. I was going to say he was the Skrillex of his day, but actually he was much worse, more like the deadmau5 or even David Guetta. Skrillex despite his cartoonish music was and is a technical wizard with amazing production chops. Alkan cites Weatherall as a pivotal influence but I just don't see it, like Four Tet he's one of those cuddly indie immigrants in music, the ones who love reading Zadie Smith like to listen to.

Could never get with Peaches either, music for new york hipsters with smelly armpits.

Proper EBM like front242 is much darker, it's not at all to do with gothy sex dungeon, it's subject matter is more about religious fundamentalism, bad drugs, fascism, domination, etc etc. That stuff is cringey in the extreme. The Miss Kitten Frank Sinatra song was so successful because she precisely took the piss out of that sort of suck my electronic transformer dick before it even become famous.

Dubstep, for all its faults, was better than that shoreditch nag nag nag rubbish.
Though, ironically, I think one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more succinct summary of the thirdist aesthetic than "suck my electronic transformer dick."
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
vitalic, miss kitten and dave clarke had grounding in the techno scene and were doing that kind of sound prior to this electroclash wave (same with felix da housecat.) check sharkamix - clashback from '94 or so, it's basically chicago techno with a nutty 80s electro two note riff, cracking stuff.
I was saying the same thing roughly - that Dave Clarke was a representative of the more serious side of the divide who fucked with electoclash (by doing that mix) and gave that song some kind of veneer or respectability to some I think.

Miss Kittin and Felix did dive more deeply into that scene in a way, but they were never so intertwined with it that they were dragged down with it when it sank.
 
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