Best 90s electronic music duo

lol what about Electronic

a singer and a guitarist? just concentrating on the hardcore knob twiddlers here.

Pretty indifferent about most of these now. Matmos to win for me.

telefon tel aviv

Boards of Canada

Is this still a thing? I get the - maybe hugely mistaken - impression it's all about solo knob twiddlers & superstar DJs these days. And was it a thing before the 90s?

No Basic Channel?

yeah it's probably probably a million acts who didn't make it through the highly selective idm filter i was operating at the time.

probably missing

Air or Autechre for me. Chemical Brothers by far the most popular at my school though so let's give them half a point.

rene et gaston

are there any other genres of music, or other art forms even, where two people performing pretty much the same function is a thing?

was kind of upset that Underworld wasn't included until I realized they were actually a trio...as is it's a tossup between the Chems and Orbital, but Orbital made the better albums...

Had anybody heard of Röyksopp in the 90s?

yeah they're a bit of a temporal outlier.

Duos (who supposedly share all the work) in other art forms: Gilbert and George, Jake and Dinos Chapman, The Coen brothers. Seems to be the exception rather than the near-norm it was for this particular genre at this particular time.

Oh, The Everly Brothers, the Righteous Brothers, Simon & Garfunkel, Hall & Oates, there must be a million singing duos.

Air Liquide and Mouse on Mars missing from the list...

I guess I'm gonna vote for 2LS, it's the only of these I really cared about even in the 90s.

Where is Mouse on Mars band?!

But it's already quite cruel making me choose between Autechre and Orbital.

(xp)

twitch and brainstorm!!

MoM omission - I blame wikipedia.

Also, didsn't The Orb and KLF consist of two dudes as well?

Orb had a buncha line-up changes, KLF not solely concerned with knob-twiddling.

But the thread title says nothing about knob-twiddling, it's misleading!

Sorry I got you here under false pretences.

A lot of these would have at least started off using hardware and there are economic and practical reasons why they might have paired up. Nowadays electronic producers tend to go straight to laptops which kind of encourages them to go solo.

A credible hypothesis!

BoC and Plaid are a toss up. The former made better albums, the latter better singles.

listened back to 'double figure' recently and it has not aged well

::head explodes::

I have so much love for FSOL and GC but then like, Orbital and the Chemical Brothers were embarrassingly important to me at the time. I just think BoC are too obvious to vote for. Oh my head hurts. I don't think I can make this decision.

Many of them I love, but only one do I adore.

Orbital ftw.

Had thought either boards of canada or autechre, but global communication have 'The Way' and also that remix of Azymuth, so going to go for them

Keep meaning to give B12 another go but never get round to it....most of the others on the list haven't dated so well or were just plain not good to start with

autechre

I kind of don't "get" Autechre, which is weird considering the 3 years of my life I spent listening to pretty exclusively IDM

Yeah, I've softened on them slightly, but my feelings on Autechre are pretty well documented.

I pull out Tri Repeatae every year or so and get really, really bored by about track 4. Though "Eutow" is still incredible. I wonder what I'm missing.

autechre, of course. this poll is basically my winamp playlist as a teenager, but autechre, unlike most of them, remain one of my favorite... duos.

Frogs, you might like either their earlier, more techno-y stuff or the melodic turn they've taken as of late:

Early:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wraDrKHP0tE

Recent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WJr3baPOtU

write in for Basic Channel

Mouse on mars for sure but sadface.jpg

Sadly lacking Everything But The Girl. Still. FSOL is best, second only in production skills to possibly the duo of Goldie and Rob Playford.

voting Plaid in lieu of Basic Channel

IMO it's hard to beat Bytes by Black Dog Productions aka Plaid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JhbXk-suKo

i'm predicting Daft Punk takes this despite lack of stanning in the thread

Also worthy of consideration:

Pan Sonic
Porter Ricks
Burger/Ink

LEFTFIELD

Is this still a thing? ... And was it a thing before the 90s?

I would say that Cluster and Cabaret Voltaire are two obvious forerunners.

clivilles and cole

kruder and dorfmeister?

Yeah, I've softened on them slightly, but my feelings on Autechre are pretty well documented

would be interested to read, where would that be?

plaid out of these but mouse on mars easy pick over any of them

haha none of the ones i was expecting to see are in the list, i automatically thought of male/female trip-hop duos like portishead, moloko etc

of these, b jaxx and it's not even close

Best 90s electronic music duo (non knob-twiddlers edition)

Maybe we can pit the winners of the two polls against each other in an ultimate showdown?

Voted Autechre but Matmos came close.

Got to be Global Communication. On-selon mi-mos and The Way (Secret Ingredients mix) are two of my all times of the 90s.

one of the problems with coming up with answers to this is i have no idea who was a duo and who wasn't, most of the time! 90s dance acts were shadowy, amorphous shapes hunched behind racks of equipment and frankly i wasn't looking at them when i was dancing.

Oh, this is so Matmos. Glad Mouse on Mars were missed, to be honest, or it would have been a heart-wrenching decision. Boards of Canada come second on this list, but there are a fair few that I like a lot.

Dynamix II (since the studio albums are 90s)

yeah so my pick as you might have guessed is autechre, by a country mile. after that orbital, and i'd prob hand the bronze to tls just for the fifth mission lp. honorable mention to most of the rest, sorry boc you could've been a contender but it was diminishing returns after the beautiful place ep.

Even Beautiful Place was 2000 though, wasn't it? I think of BoC as a 00s group, predominantly.

Would've said Orbital at the time but it's definitely Autechre now.

basement jaxx. ilm didn't exist in time for their debut obvs (and possibly not even for Rooty?) but i still recall the release of Kish Kash being greeted like the second coming on here bitd.

xxp i'm kind of amazed to find MHtRtC (quintessential boc lp imo) was as late as '98! i'd somehow retconned them into being contemporary with the other warp usual suspects (i did see them supporting autechre errr '96?, to be fair).

in '96

I definitely think of B0C as being second-wave Warp.

BoC.

internet tells me it was prob early '97.

I definitely think of B0C as being second-wave Warp.

Yeah, I remember when Music Has the Right to Children came out, I didn't really understand what the hype was about, since they didn't seem to be doing anything that hadn't been done in the previous 5 or so years. That album had exactly one track (the one with the chopped-up vocal bits) that sounded fresh and new to me. I'm still not sure why they became the poster boys for this sound, but whatever.

The past 2 or 3 times that I've dug out an Autechre album just to check that I still hate Autechre, I've ended up thinking "hey, this isn't so bad, actually." And today when I did it, I was all "hey, this actually sounds pretty cool."

At what point do I have the "Celine Dion on Pandora" moment where I have to admit "actually, OMG I think I like Autechre?"

daft punk still retain some cred.

global communication are prob the best here, tho why/how they are listed alongside a few of the novelty acts here is beyond me.

I still don't get Autechre, but I've not tried to get tham again in at least 7 years, so...

tho why/how they are listed alongside a few of the novelty acts here is beyond me

a duo, the same two from beginning to end, both knob-twiddlers, in the 90s. not sure who is really 'novelty' here except for the lol crystal method, who may have been big in the states at the time idk.

All I know Crystal Method from is "Trip Like I Do" and that ridiculous Spawn soundtrack, I don't think they were very big in Europe... They were like a second-rate US version of the Chem Bros, right?

Air has always seemed like a novelty act to me, but I guess most of you would disagree. Also, it's weird seeing them and Basement Jaxx listed as 90s acts, since most of their major works came out in the 00s.

my take:

Air: they built their career on a mountain of bullshit, then released one stellar album (Talkie Walkie)
Autechre: I never really cared about these guys
B12: see Autechre
Basement Jaxx: one of my absolute favorite acts up until Scars
Boards of Canada: Music Has A Right To Children is amazing but I feel like they are a direct influence on The Weeknd
The Chemical Brothers: one dip of quality surrounded by some of the greatest dance music ever
The Crystal Method: okay lol, seriously? I mean, I love "Keep Hope Alive" as much as the next person but come on
Daft Punk: ultimately, they never topped Homework
The Future Sound of London: I admire these guys more than I actually like them, if that makes sense; "Paupau New Guinea" is all-time tho
Global Communication: see Autechre and B12
The Grid: okay now you're just fucking with us
Leftfield: OVERRATED BULLSHIT
Matmos: I am embarrassingly unfamiliar with their music
Orbital: hands down, one of the greatest musical acts of the past 25 years
Plaid: see Autechre, B12, Global Communication
Röyksopp: they're pleasant enough but ultimately... eh
Two Lone Swordsmen: I know them by name rather than by music

okay now you're just fucking with us

yeah but you never know when someone's gonna go "i can't believe you left [act you've barely heard anything by] off this poll, they changed my life!"

I thought you would like The Grid, Dan!

see!

How can you not love this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f0kXNdxjBk

Crystal Method in their prime was a total budget Chems ripoff but everyone who loves the Chems' big beat period should listen to CM's "Keep Hope Alive" at least once:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFqmz5NS1bM

"Busy Child" is pretty bad-ass too; actually their first album would have made an amazing EP

xp: I don't dislike The Grid but compared to EVERYONE else on this list, including groups I dislike/hate like Air and Leftfield, they are non-entities

(also everyone knows that The Grid was all about "Swamp Thing")

Autechre has the most interesting catalog of the whole list, BoC is the most accessible (for good reason), Plaid is skewwy for me: I get no real vibe from them, as they seem largely part of the movement rather than innovators themselves. They just can't seem to decide whether to be melodic like BoC or as boundary pushing as Autechre, so a lot of their songs always seem to start off with that jittering, goose-stepping IDM kinda thing before transitioning into melody. They're very stiff in concert, with even head nods minimal at best.

Death In Vegas also bears notable mention, ignoring their reggae remixes and Oasis collabs. "Rekkit" & "Girls" are masterpieces.

Oh come on, Air never did anything as trippy as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gocee0RWvho

The Grid never did anything as beautiful as this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcUrEn7xmNE&ob=av3n

(also everyone knows that The Grid was all about "Swamp Thing")

They'd already released two albums before Swamp Thing; I genuinely think you might enjoy some of the stuff on those albums, knowing your taste.

lots of good choices here but if I were to rank the best three albums any of these guys have made both In Sides and Snivilisation would be on it so I guess you know where I'm voting

though I would have voted Denki Groove if they were on the poll!! they've got the other one in the top three

B12 were about 1,000,000,000,000 times better than Autechre

seems unlikely but i will check them out when i figure out how to stop youtube giving me 100 videos about vitamin b12 supplements.

It is sort of funny how "out there" we all thought BoC and Autechre were, and you listen to it now and it sounds really basic (which is no bad thing in itself)

Kelpolaris if you think BoC are "more accessible" than Orbital, then you mad doggy.

wait, who thought BoC was "out there"? their entire steeze was immaculately crafted nostalgia bombs tied to awesome beats

Come on, nobody in Air ever made an Acid House album with Genesis P Orridge before either of them had ever heard any real Acid House, based solely on second hand descriptions thereof. How cool is that?

I never thought BoC were out there - like I said above, their sound felt pretty basic IDM to me when MHtRC came out, which is why I never understood what all the fuss was about. As for Autechre, they proved being "out there" wasn't necessarily a good thing; I still find their more abstract 90s stuff terribly dull.

(x-post to Tracer)

that's still out there. there's one BoC track that pretty much uniformly freaks everyone out - "The Color of the Fire" I think it is.

wait, that track freaks people out???????? that track is warm and inviting!

reading other people's reactions to Boards of Canada comes across to me like meeting a room full of people talking about how terrifying and sinister they find "Babe"

The one with the creepy girl going "I... looooove... you" with the sinister warbly synth bass?

Best creepy electronic music duo of the 90s = Coil

The one with the creepy girl going "I... looooove... you" with the sinister warbly synth bass?

I honestly do not think that child sounds creepy, nor does the bass sound sinister. The whole thing reads to me like an enormous warm blanket of sound.

no that's definitely the point where most people are like "okay, you should put something else on now"

Yeah, BoC definitely have creepy vibes, though they're most prevalent on Geogaddi.

little louie vega and kenny dope gonzales

^

also, i should learn not to say "we" when i mean "me"

People think that BoC sounds creepy when, like, Main records exist?

either way I always feel like BoC's music creeps me out like 20% as much as they want it to, "Color of the Fire" excepted. which is ultimately why I feel they're massively overrated.

"Best creepy electronic music duo of the 90s = Coil"

I guess coming into this stuff from the industrial area, where yeah Coil but also Laibach, Skinny Puppy, TKK, Severed Heads, SPK, Pankow, Tear Garden, KMFDM, etc etc etc kind of puts me in a different headspace when approaching BoC than most others but I can count on one hand the number of tracks I've heard from them from MHARTC on that I would consider "creepy" (I don't really remember the pre-MHARTC material; I've heard it like once or twice).

how about early drexciya - gerald "dopplereffekt" donald and james marcel stinson

in that spirt, what i find odd about this list is why it sort of seems predisposed to the album-selling, indie-friendly acts like chemical bros, basement jaxx etc. but with two/three more serious duos thrown in.

ultimately aren't there about a zillion 90s dance duos?

xxp - well BoC is more popular than all those acts, it's kinda like how Radiohead gets insane credit for being "experimental", when they're really just a kinda experimental act that happened to get very famous

it is debatable as to whether BoC is "more popular" than Skinny Puppy or KMFDM; it's way more accurate to say they have different audiences

Orbital out of these.

Röyksopp used to be part of Alania and Those Norwegians in the 90s, and weren't really Röyksopp until the 00s.

in that spirt, what i find odd about this list is why it sort of seems predisposed to the album-selling, indie-friendly acts like chemical bros, basement jaxx etc. but with two/three more serious duos thrown in.

i agree, <3 ledge and don't want to shit on this poll but ... maybe this should be called like "best electronic duo that had a video on mtv"

n/h

Kelpolaris if you think BoC are "more accessible" than Orbital, then you mad doggy.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, April 3, 2012 8:59 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I sort of regret that post as I was typing out, and trying to find, my thoughts and didn't have anything really of substance to say - save for that I typed more than a couple lines and clicking "submit" is so damn easy.

But yeah, as a casual listener these days BoC just demands so much less attention - especially MHTRTC. it's very "chill-out" whereas orbital I feel takes the infrastructure of accessibility and goes to length of convoluting it, which is sometimes disruptive. BoC songs are much more singular in their songs, thematically - each one has it's definitive vibe, whereas Orbital often comes across to me as seeking for, if not variety, a sort of desire to innovate within the confines of the songs themselves.

but i know what you mean - "little fluffy clouds" i bet has outplayed any BoC songs in a lounge/club by ratio of 2827309487:4, with BoC only being really out in the public eye with a soundtrack behind Spaced (Simon Pegg's v. good mid 90s comedy tv) and some episodes of Top Gun, or Top Ride, or whatever the fuck that car show is I'm not familiar with the name of.

I also derive this from fact that a co-worker of mine, in an old after-class job I had assembling iPad accessories, had - apparently - a juggalo friend who deemed BoC "joint music". I thought this was bullshit, thinking privately that the guy probably just liked RoyGBiv and the video for Dayvan Cowboy but turned out I ended up meeting the guy and he was a full-fucking-fledged fan, with the juggalo thing only preceding him in high-school days. yes, this is my testimony.

Orbital's Brown Album, and in particular, the "Lush 3-1/3-2/Impact/Remind" suite, singlehandedly won this indierock kid to the EDM dark side. I spent years scouring psytrance for more "Remind" like thrills. Their first 4 albums are all polished gleaming architecture.

I still have time for Autechre, Boards of Canada, Black Dog/Plaid, Reload/Jedi Knights/Global Communication, but Orbital is where it all started for me.

Oh, Wonky streaming on NME

"little fluffy clouds" is The Orb, not Orbital

fuck.

Tempted to start an "indie/guitar kids - where did electronic music start for you?" to see if Orbital or Chemical Brothers really was the gateway drug ppl claim.

I mean I'd say it was New Order -> 808 State for me after Technique. But that leaves out a lot of the electronic-goth-stomp stuff that I'd happily imbibe in the late 80s. But it's also that thing I've said before where I really didn't feel like there was a polarisation of electronic vs guitar until the mid 90s and, not having "got" IDM in the late 90s, I found myself on the wrong side of the divide when it opened up. For me it's a much more shifting thing than "guitar kids discovered indie friendly dance." I recognise there did become a polarisation but with hindsight it looks imposed rather than organic.

We've been through this before, also the point at which Select Magazine stopped covering St Etienne, Bill Drummond and Aphex Twin to concentrate exclusively on Blur and BritPop, I was too naive to notice the shift moving away but there was definitely a point where it had gone.

what about when j spaceman big upped photek in nme

(sorry, massively off topic now. I'll shut up)

Tempted to start an "indie/guitar kids - where did electronic music start for you?" to see if Orbital or Chemical Brothers really was the gateway drug ppl claim.

what got you into dance music?

It's just a weird question and no longer relevant because it has a rockist assumption as its starting point - that non-electronic dance music is somehow the default in music? Which is not even something we can *pretend* to hold culturally true any more.

As a white male middle class teenager in a small English town non-electronic guitar music was totally the norm. But that was 16+ years ago.

It's just a weird question and no longer relevant because it has a rockist assumption as its starting point - that non-electronic dance music is somehow the default in music? Which is not even something we can *pretend* to hold culturally true any more.

this is why my answer on the original thread was "Prince or Depeche Mode"

it actually should have been "Prince or Men Without Hats"

art of noise, "axel f" and herbie hancock's "rockit"

Yeah, the same with me, except that I was working class. Growing up in the early 90s, with MTV Europe playing club music all the time, and with Eurodance and house and trance and rave tunes being on the charts, there never was a time that I wasn't into dance music. I had an "indie" elitism phase in my late teens, but that was about which type of dance music was the best (i.e. underground techno and drum'n'bass, not the chart stuff).

(x-post to Nick)

yeah i got seriously bullied out of publicly liking electronic music when i moved to a wealthy all-white neighborhood

During my teens I moved to a place where the default music was country & western so listening to any kind of European / British music, guitar based or electronic was considered "faggot music" so YMMV.

it actually should have been "Prince or Men Without Hats"

― THIS TRADE SERVES ZERO FOOTBALL PURPOSE (DJP), Tuesday, April 3, 2012 7:31 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right on

ABSOLUTELY BASEMENT JAXX

Even if we don't include their pre-Remedy parties and DJ sets, which are among the best things EVER

Basement Jaxx were amazing but then they released Scars

also they are not Orbital

basement jaxx easily the most overrated electronic duo of all time, even "remedy" was 50% horrible

i'll admit that i too got sucked up by the poptimist madness of the fin-de-siecle but when you consider the difference between something like "jump n shout" or "samba magic" to "romeo" and "do your thing" it's quite sad

wtf no it's not, all four of those songs are awesome

I actually think all of the above duos are great. well, except for Crystal Method, but none have given me more pleasure or represented the LDN better than Basement Jaxx, so them.

"do your thing" is about as awesome as "cotton eyed joe"

both in terms of sound and concept

I don't think you are defending your point as well as you believe you are

Cotton Eye Joe is pretty crunk, imo

like basically you are being the dance music version of me on R&B threads going "this is terrible, it sounds like Ginuwine"

Late Great otm, who could ever want to listen to more than a tiny few Basement Jaxx tracks again? They've aged terribly. They have some genuinely embarrassing stuff too, lots of it.

voted for autechre, though I actually like their 00s stuff a lot more than their 90s stuff

What's that even worse one, after do your thing, had a novelty video?

i would rather listen to ginuwine than any post-rooty basement jaxx

i say this as someone who used to have the "lucky star" single

who could ever want to listen to more than a tiny few Basement Jaxx tracks again?

indeed, WHO? Clearly nobody here. Hmmm

I listen to them all the time FWIW

air

Who could ever deliberately misunderstand a rhetorical question?

Very UK centric list, this.

Who could ever deliberately misunderstand a rhetorical question?

Who would waste time and space asking one?

Are rhetorical questions?

No

Opinions a waste of time, why even post on a messageboard?

I think the "would you listen to much of it now / has it aged well" rubric is usually problematic but particularly so with electronic music where it seems to reward only stylistic bet-hedging.

Truly Basement Jaxx ended in embarassing territory but so did a lot of such acts and nothing they have ever done is a patch on the awfulness of "The Salmon Dance" - and yet I still think the Chemical Bros were (are) a fantastic act. See also Orbital and that hideous David Grey song.

With seveaal of these acts I think a lot of what made them great at some times is intimately bound up with what made them embarassing at others - not knowing where to draw the line makes you vulnerable to hideous errors of judgement but it also allows you to see possibilites others can't.

In terms of public perception Basement Jaxx now feel overdetermined by the guest star eclecticism of their third to fifth albums (though this is not to take away from the fact that Kish Kash is excellent) - it's very easy to forget that first and foremost they had a vision of house that was pretty singular.

Best exemplified by their 1997 and 1999 Essential Mixes I think.

In terms of public perception Basement Jaxx now feel overdetermined by the guest star eclecticism of their third to fifth albums

On a related note, I can't shake the feel that (bizarrely to me) a lot of people ignore the first two Chemical Bros albums and instead conceive of them as "Setting Sun" + "Block Rocking Beats" + Surrender.

I mostly agree with you, Tim, but I do honestly think the vast majority of Scars is worse than "The Salmon Dance"

also I can't really fathom that view of the Chems, but that's mostly because I hated Surrender and took them off of the trusted list after that album, even though I pretty much love Come With Us and We Own The Night

Truly Basement Jaxx ended in embarassing territory but so did a lot of such acts and nothing they have ever done is a patch on the awfulness of "The Salmon Dance" - and yet I still think the Chemical Bros were (are) a fantastic act. See also Orbital and that hideous David Grey song

well for the Jaxx that's really their whole aesthetic. the tracks you mentioned were one-offs, and c'mon, neither is really that bad

well for the Jaxx that's really their whole aesthetic.

What, bad music?

Anyway what about "The Test" and (the original of) "The Golden Path"? Or most of The Altogether?

I don't really know what "their whole aesthetic" refers to, but presumably it doesn't include:

- "Be Free" / "Samba Magic" - gorgeous textured latin-influenced deep house

- "Flylife" / "Set Yo Body Free" - slamming jack house

- "Lonely" / "Wish Tonight" - stunning percussive vocal garage

- "Razocaine" / "All U Crazies" / "Same Old Show" - mindbending ruminative yet thuggish drug-house

- "Missing You" / "Jump N Shout" - rigorous dancehall/house fusion

- "Bingo Bango" / "I Beg U" - epic latin house

My point is not that they covered lots of bases, but that none of the above sit easily with this popular notion of them as mix'n'match guest-star poptimists, which doesn't really start until Rooty and (properly) Kish Kash.

As with the early Chemical Bros, people seem determined to wipe out any legacy of Basement Jaxx as consummate track-centric producers crafting dancefloor bangers.

For pushing a consistent aesthetic throughout their discography:

Air
Autechre
Boards of Canada

For keeping the mainstream and my younger years interesting:

Basement Jaxx
The Chemical Brothers
Daft Punk

For their production values:

Matmos
Röyksopp

Anyway what about "The Test" and (the original of) "The Golden Path"? Or most of The Altogether?

well I like "The Test" quite a bit and most of The Altogether isn't pop. not saying they haven't made some bad music. I would just categorize them differently.

Very UK centric list, this.

aye well i'm a very uk centric person - or was in the 90s. electronic music wise.

B12 were about 1,000,000,000,000 times better than Autechre

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Tuesday, 3 April 2012 14:56 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, no. listening to time tourist (1996) and it's still very much warp circa 92/artificial intelligence: chillout room melodies, four on the floor beats with some added skitteriness. autechre got a little bit more "out there" than that.

Basement Jaxx are at that 10-year point where they just seem hideously unfashionable and dated and incongruous up against the backdrop of current music. There was a moment a few years ago when funky was straying into Basement Jaxx territory but it's largely swayed away since. But a lot of the acts in this poll were in that position a decade or so ago and sound relevant again now as sounds and approaches reoccur in different contexts.

But Basement Jaxx are a different era to most of the rest of this poll, they're a late 90s act who pushed on into the next decade rather than a late 80s/early 90s act who started winding down around 2000.

They also lack Daft Punk's feted deity status. Surprised there's still so much gloss around DP seeing as they haven't made a good record for 11 years and every variety of lowest common denominator hack has wrung just about everything out of their sound.

Matt DC OTM.

Lots of canonical electronic acts haven't put out a decent record in 10 years.

Lots of canonical electronic acts have had their sound utterly pillaged by hacks.

I don't see how that automatically revokes their canonical status, when they were so U&K at a certain time and place.

yeah, no. listening to time tourist (1996) and it's still very much warp circa 92/artificial intelligence: chillout room melodies, four on the floor beats with some added skitteriness. autechre got a little bit more "out there" than that.

i know!

i am kind of conservative sometimes in my tastes and i guess that's an example.

Masonic Boom - yes, that's true, BUT most of those have had time for elements of their sound to come back into fashion. I suppose the case with DP is that they've never really gone OUT of fashion, which Basement Jaxx decidedly have. They clearly have a sort of aura that most of these acts lack. I'm not trying to revoke the canonical status of those first two records, they're amazing.

I think a lot of DP's pull is down to the paucity of material they released.

Yes, staying so "mysterious" and keeping their output so low for so long helped keep the legend factor up and the spoiler factor down.

basement jaxx have made some horrible sounding records, that's my problem with them. at the time, they sounded fresh and exciting but every year that passes they get harder and harder for me to listen to. the hooks aren't as immediate as they used to be, it sounds overly busy, production is cluttered and it all sounds a bit dated to my ears

daft punk and air seem to have aged better, they're way less ambitious and just do the same thing over and over from different angles. i don't really follow this one daft punk album is better than the other stuff. they're all about the same if you ask me, they do their thing but they do it very well. i think the tour a few years ago proved that, i can't think of many other acts who have a body of work strong enough to put together an hour and half show with so many highlights like that.

b-12 and autechre had such different intentions, i dunno, electro soma is prob my most listened to record from both, but autechre are one of the few acts that can make me go 0_0 WTF. each time i revisit their stuff i hear it differently and the autechre in my life is in constant

anyway, it's probably between daft punk and autechre altho i like stuff from everyone here, apart from the grid and crystal method.

I think for a certain type of person Daft Punk are also year zero for taking house seriously.

But they also have much more of a big light show music of the future vibe to them (certainly now). "One More Time" and "Digital Love" notwithstanding I don't think they tend to be associated with pop.

Basement Jaxx ended up more pop but also started more house qua house, a kind of house that hasn't ever really crossed over properly. Having said that:

Basement Jaxx are at that 10-year point where they just seem hideously unfashionable and dated and incongruous up against the backdrop of current music.

Agree with this in general terms but I think Night Slugs, Numbers et. al. owe a shitload to early Basement Jaxx, even if it's largely unacknowledged.

This thread is actually quite amusing for showcasing a certain kind of ~dance rockism~ for lack of a better word, with all these references to "certain kind of person" and "dance artists with videos on MTV." I am finding that oddly hilarious.

I was at a bar a few weeks ago and "Digital Love" came on the jukebox and every single person sitting/standing around me went "what the fuck is this? this sucks."

~dance rockism~ is totally a thing. It's been around as long as dance. Various people who are anti ~rockism-qua-rockism~ and pro popism can be pretty ~dance-rockist~, which always amuses me.

I was on a "download loads of late 90s dance singles" tip the other week. You can't download Music Sounds Better With You from iTunes except as part of a compilation you need to pay about £8; so I bought a 2nd hand CD single of it! Not bought oen of them in forever.

I don't think you're really engaging with the point Tim made. House music didn't actually have a great deal of traction with indie-inclined audiences pre-1997 or therabouts and Daft Punk, and Da Funk in particular are a key signpost and maybe even turning point towards wider acceptance.

I'm talking specifically about house, as opposed to techno, hardcore, jungle/D&B, IDM, crossover dance, Krautier stuff. You could put disco in the same bracket as house there.

I mean there are still people who would be into some or all of those genres who don't take house seriously and they're not necessarily corny indie types either.

haha xxpost!

I think for a certain type of person Daft Punk are also year zero for taking house seriously.

Believe it or not I meant this pretty non-judgmentally.

It's as much about age as anything else. A lot of people my age were about about 14 when "Around The World" and "Da Funk" blew up, and before that were probably too young to really appreciate anything so remorselessly repetitive. And my sense is that Daft Punk's godlike status is actually amongst people my age and younger rather than amongst older people who might actually have been (old enough to be) sniffy about pre-1996 house.

I was at a bar a few weeks ago and "Digital Love" came on the jukebox and every single person sitting/standing around me went "what the fuck is this? this sucks."

it does suck! i have mostly always been a daft punk hater and this has only increased as their sound has been relentlessly mined by people of varying shades of awfulness, as matt says.

i had no idea b jaxx were considered unfashionable. i don't think anyone would argue that they've been even slightly relevant or acceptable post-kish kash but this happens to every dance act. their god period >>>> all these other acts' god period.

"red alert" along with armand van helden were year zero for me getting into dance music

A lot of people my age were about about 14 when "Around The World" and "Da Funk" blew up, and before that were probably too young to really appreciate anything so remorselessly repetitive.

even after over a decade of being immersed in dance music i still can't appreciate something as remorselessly, shittily repetitive as "around the world"

Well, that 98-01 period was when I first moved back to the UK and I had a television which got, like only 8 channels and one of them was MTV, and it was semi-revelatory, those Big Event dance videos which were on heavy rotation - Windowlicker, The Music Sounds Better With You, Sing It Back, Where's Your Head At, Cassius In The House - I'm trying to remember which were the big Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk videos that were always on. Red Alert! Ha, that was another one. It was just such culture shock, coming from New York.

It's obvious that there are going to be a lot of people who have that kind of nostalgia for that era, for those reasons. Those things were huge here.

I was being kind of facetious, but it is just funny to see ~dance rockism~ - I'm sure it's a thing. It is just funny, like perhaps these attitudes are inescapable, and you cannot escape the attitude by escaping the genre. Dance rockism could equally apply to srs dance people sneering at house music, or house people sneering at indie kids. It works all ways.

But we've been having this same discussion on ILX since the year 2000 or something. Sorry, I'm feeling nostalgic.

Could be, apparently I'm 2 or 3 years older than you, and I'd been into house music since the early 90s, so those tracks didn't feel like any sort of revelation to me, they were just some nice pieces of poppy house.

(x-post to Tim)

Ironically, the first person who ever turned me on to Around The World was the guitarist in an indie dronepop band, who was all "OMG, it's so remorselessly repetitive, it's like a house version of Spacemen 3" so you're not far off, Lex.

Screamadelica?

I mean, it wasn't until after Discovery came out that I realized that for some people DP represented the whole genre. Which felt weird to me, as in the late 90s/early 00s I was into rougher/more minimalist stuff, so DP never felt like "proper" house to me, more like poppy dance music with a house influence.

(xx-post)

House rockism.

Rock the House-ism.

So yeah, I guess I was a dance rockist back then.

lol/wtf @ "a house version of Spacemen 3"

one thing I have never thought about while listening to Homework is Spacemen 3

I don't think anyone who has endured years of Pipecock posts could credibly argue against the existence of dance rockism, and I don't think anyone is.

Who's Pipecock again?

It's best not to ask.

Be sure not to post his name three times in succession.

Could be, apparently I'm 2 or 3 years older than you, and I'd been into house music since the early 90s, so those tracks didn't feel like any sort of revelation to me, they were just some nice pieces of poppy house.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 11:58 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is pretty indicative though. The only way you could think of "Da Funk" as just poppy house is from the perspective of being way into house already, esp. "rougher/more minimalist stuff" which obv would never have troubled the charts.

Feel free to prove me wrong with stats but my sense is that before that house in mainstream terms really had meant handbag house and similar for the most part (and before that, klf, italo house, technotronic etc.) - i.e. pretty songful stuff.

By and large everything that's popular in any genre, bar the occasional exception, is pretty songful stuff, though.

So it seems like a pretty moot point.

Also, it's weird seeing "Around the World" being described as "remorselessly repetitive". It was more like a pop hit, at least to me and my friends at the time. It had a sung chorus and a catchy melody and all! I mean, just a year or so earlier, "Higher State of Consciousness" was a sizable club hit, so "AtW" didn't exactly feel remorseless.

Feel free to prove me wrong with stats but my sense is that before that house in mainstream terms really had meant handbag house and similar for the most part (and before that, klf, italo house, technotronic etc.) - i.e. pretty songful stuff.

Mostly yeah, but you have to remember that stuff like "Poing" and aforementioned "Higher State of Consciousness" were also club hits, with videos on heavy rotation on MTV Europe and all.

This is why people hate when I get on dance threads, isn't it? Hahaha.

Because I don't know where the genres begin and end, I don't even particularly think of Daft Punk as House, I think of them as French Touch, when I guess French Touch is all the electro-tinged stuff that came along after Daft Punk, that DP influenced? (I don't know, I'm probably doing the equivalent of something I'd shout at myself for, for conflating Shoegaze and Dreampop.)

And it's not that DP sound like S3 - they don't, at all. But it's the idea of something as repetitive, as comprised of interlocking pieces, endlessly repeated ad absurdum, that it was meditative and transcendent in the same kind of way.

But I've given up trying to convince anyone else of the dance / drone interface long ago. Never mind.

I also am wilfully, and happily, ignorant of the sometimes fascistically patrolled delineations between genres, which seem to rest on minute differences in BPMs half the time. "Minimal", "funky", etc etc, are just adjectives to me, not nouns.

Also, it's weird seeing "Around the World" being described as "remorselessly repetitive". It was more like a pop hit, at least to me and my friends at the time. It had a sung chorus and a catchy melody and all!

^ this, it seems a baffling choice to illustrate remorseless repetition

House : French Touch :: Rock : Shoegaze

By and large everything that's popular in any genre, bar the occasional exception, is pretty songful stuff, though.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, April 4, 2012 12:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My point being you could hardly call "Da Funk" songful except in the loosest sense. And it crossed over to non-clubbing audiences in a manner "Higher State of Consciousness" never did.

No that parallel makes sense and ESPECIALLY makes sense when you get into 00s house - Kompakt, Border Community and what have you.

But yeah in 96 or 97 the general view of house would have been something like 'Show Me Love' so Daft Punk's take on it would have been weird and novel enough to wrongfoot people and draw in a different audience, including people who wouldn't have been seen near an indie record or a house record.

(xpost mad defensiveness going on here)

Nick is right that the majority of big dance hits were probably songful stuff, but in the early 90s there was still a novelty value to electronic dance music in general, which meant that a lot of weirder shit managed to cross to the mainstream as well. For example, back in 1994 this was a top 10 hit in many European countries (#1 on the British singles chart):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvLDm8821jQ

Yes, "Doop" which is beloved of rock audiences everywhere.

It's amazing the lengths people will go to to disprove a fairly uncontroversial point!

haha MB I wasn't trying to discount that sort of crossover appeal; it's just something that I'd never think of, as a fan of the Spacemen 3 (admittedly one who did not live through that time when S3 and house music were new & exciting developments). When someone suggests house music to me my base assumption is usually that it will be more repetitive than Spacemen 3, so it seems funny to me that yr friend used S3 as a reference point for explaining how repetitive Daft Punk are. Especially wrt "Around the World." Now that I think about it, I could see how you could make a case wrt "Da Funk." The one-note bass and the quiet drone that comes in toward the end.

brb going to mash up "Da Funk" with the vox from the S3 version of "Rollercoaster"

I also am wilfully, and happily, ignorant of the sometimes fascistically patrolled delineations between genres, which seem to rest on minute differences in BPMs half the time. "Minimal", "funky", etc etc, are just adjectives to me, not nouns.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, April 4, 2012 12:19 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

NB. I can't think of a single example of genre delineations based on "minute differences in BPMs".

Unless, like, you think the difference between disco and house is a minute difference in BPM.

"red alert" along with armand van helden were year zero for me getting into dance music

This, only I guess technically they were year zero for me coming out of the closet regarding my love for dance music, despite having been all about it for basically the entirety of the 1990s.

there is no difference between disco and house imo

Basically, what I think managed to turn some non-dance heads to DP (at least here in Finland) was the catchy melody, the electro sound (electro being coded less feminine/gay than house, which I think was crucial why some people disliked house at the time), and the flashy but also artsy video of "Around the World".

disco is just early house, house is late disco

I think there are some differences (e.g. "Flash" is house but not disco) but they don't really rest in BPMs.

Yes, "Doop" which is beloved of rock audiences everywhere.

― Tim F, 4. huhtikuuta 2012 15:27 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's amazing the lengths people will go to to disprove a fairly uncontroversial point!

― Tim F, 4. huhtikuuta 2012 15:28 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, you said "that before that house in mainstream terms really had meant handbag house and similar for the most part (and before that, klf, italo house, technotronic etc.) - i.e. pretty songful stuff", and I was just trying to say, not always. I mean, sure if you define "mainstream" as "rock audiences", but have to remember that back then dance music was the mainstream, at least in Europe. Back in the early 90s, almost all of my school mates dug dance music (including house), the ones who were exclusively into rock were much rarer.

Most Detroit and Chicago house sounds almost nothing like disco imo.

Tuomas, saying "for the most part" is an acknowledgment that there are exceptions to the scenario Tim stated

Well yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with that. I just don't get why he thinks "rock audiences" equals "mainstream". It's pretty obvious "Doop" was a mainstream hit.

Qualitative difference b/w people being into "Doop" or (say) "Here's Johnny" or "I Wanna Be A Hippy" and "taking (insert genre) seriously."

Taking anything seriously is basically a rock(ist) principle from the outset of course.

Musicist.

"Rock audience" doesn't equal "mainstream" BUT 90s rock audiences who didn't really engage with house would have been more likely to associate house with the primarily vocal stuff that was actually in the charts. Novelty dance hits are neither here nor there. Either way, 'Da Funk' would have a) gone straight into the mainstream and b) appealed to people who wouldn't have listened to Robin S or thought to check to out someone like Deep Dish.

I'm not sure why this is so difficult to grasp, or why people think about drawing arbitrary genre boundaries.

90s rock audiences who didn't really engage with house would have been more likely to associate house with the primarily vocal stuff that was actually in the charts.

And it's not even like anyone who didn't really engage with house automatically = a rock fan.

Thing is, one of the things I love MOST about dance music is that I don't know where the boundaries are, and I don't know what the names are. It's not that I don't think the differences are real, or that they don't exist - it's that I have no *map* for where disco - house - techno - rave - DNB - IDM begin or end or flow into one another. And I really love being thrillingly, gloriously lost, because it means that I have to take the music on its own terms, and not compare it to some internalised... *blueprint* of what "Dreampop" or "Post-Shoegaze" should sound like. (Sorry I keep reaching for those adjectives, it's just my particular patch of the forest floor that I know well enough to be able to defend it.)

I don't *have* to take (insert genre) seriously. I can take the music seriously, but I don't have to mentally place where it belongs in the same way I have to do with, well, rock music.

It's the place I go to get rid of the map, to go off piste, to just live in the glorious moment when you hit the play button of does it make me go "WAU!" or bore me after a minute and a half.

So it's just funny to me, to be in this glorious place where I'm so joyfully ignorant of the boundaries that I can run around like a child again - and see serious dudes bending over a map arguing about whether this track is Bobbins or Funky. I know they exist, it's just "haha, that's what I come here to leave behind!"

I'm trying to remember which ILX0r it was, that I had the conversation with - buttonholing Gareth or DC drunkenly in the back of a club or something - and discovering that what they meant by "dancefloor dynamics" and what I meant by "drone dynamics" were one and the same thing and that was a o_0 wow the universe is coming together Moment. But I know it makes serious dance music aficionados either laugh or rrrrrrrage when I say stuff like "oh, this techno record is pure dronerock!"

'Da Funk' would have a) gone straight into the mainstream

I'm just nitpicking for no real reason here, Matt, but I don't think it went 'straight into the mainstream'. IIRC I read about it 95 in Muzik, but didn't actually hear it until 96 (when it was taped for me by a Frenchman), and it wasn't until 97 that it actually got into the proper charts.

Thing is, one of the things I love MOST about dance music is that I don't know where the boundaries are, and I don't know what the names are. It's not that I don't think the differences are real, or that they don't exist - it's that I have no *map* for where disco - house - techno - rave - DNB - IDM begin or end or flow into one another. And I really love being thrillingly, gloriously lost, because it means that I have to take the music on its own terms, and not compare it to some internalised... *blueprint* of what "Dreampop" or "Post-Shoegaze" should sound like. (Sorry I keep reaching for those adjectives, it's just my particular patch of the forest floor that I know well enough to be able to defend it.)

Does your knowledge of terminology in the case of shoegaze et. al. interfere with your enjoyment of the music on its own terms?

So, No Pet Shop Boys then?

Hah, I had no idea it was that old.

I think genre boundaries don't really matter in terms of home listening, but they're important in clubs. Differences in dance genres tend to be rhythmic rather than sonic and they can make a big difference to the way you actually dance, physically, and it can be annoying if you turn up expecting one thing and get a whole night of another thing entirely.

They also matter when it comes to relatively nascent genres like funky (or funky a couple of years ago), when the music and the scene the people involved are still trying to work out what it is in the first place and you don't want it be crushed or eclipsed by some 50 pound gorilla of a sound that becomes the only thing people associate it with.

Which is kind of why I made such a big deal about Bok Bok, Jam City et al being distinct and separate from funky, because they always had the potential to become bigger and more talked about.

I don't have to mentally place where it belongs in the same way I have to do with, well, rock music.

this is interesting to me! there's a LOT of rock music that I enjoy that I don't even dare identify in terms of its genre/style/influences/"scene." it all just blurs together into this huge interconnected web of rock music to me, as with you and dance music.

As with the early Chemical Bros, people seem determined to wipe out any legacy of Basement Jaxx as consummate track-centric producers crafting dancefloor bangers.

by people i assume you mean felix and simon

Normally the importance of genre names is inversely proportionate to the rep of the artists - it doesn't really matter what genre label I apply to Aphex Twin b/c he has a recognised musical identity regardless. But if I'm repeatedly playing anonymous house track from an artist i don't know anything about then in my head it's e.g. a deep house record rather than a record by X artist.

Probably one thing that makes dance music pretty unique is the way in which you can fall in love with product while being ignorant of, and indifferent to, the people behind it. Rock, jazz, rap, modern classical etc obv all have scenes and sub-genres but it's very rare for the artist to be so backgrounded.

I'm like crut with rock to some extent but it's easier to be that way with rock and still get by in conversations, because you can talk in terms of artists not styles.

As with the early Chemical Bros, people seem determined to wipe out any legacy of Basement Jaxx as consummate track-centric producers crafting dancefloor bangers.

by people i assume you mean felix and simon

― the late great, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 1:22 PM (37 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, fair point.

Also, it's weird seeing "Around the World" being described as "remorselessly repetitive". It was more like a pop hit, at least to me and my friends at the time. It had a sung chorus and a catchy melody and all! I mean, just a year or so earlier, "Higher State of Consciousness" was a sizable club hit, so "AtW" didn't exactly feel remorseless.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 1:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I have this feeling too, though I think Josh Wink definitely does something different - 'Around the World' exists on a monotone, I guess, whereas 'Higher State of Consciousness' does that manipulative constant-rising trick. Which is probably why I prefer DP. Mind you, I only think 'Around the World' is kind of okay; the only DP track I unabashedly love is 'Harder Better Faster Stronger', which sounds to me like a bunch of fascist electro doozers. Though I also agree with MB that I never thought of DP as 'House'. I thought of them as electropop, which I guess is a broad genre in my head.

Also, not enough Matmos love on this thread.

where should I start with Matmos?

I would probably go with either The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast or The Civil War. I guess it is kind of unfair of them to be lumped in with these people, as they're primarily an 'experimental' duo rather than an 'electronic' one. Maybe.

Does your knowledge of terminology in the case of shoegaze et. al. interfere with your enjoyment of the music on its own terms?

Yes, I actually think it does, sometimes.

And it's not even so much the terminology itself, so much as knowledge of the structure, how genre works, how it intersects, what to expect from one genre as opposed to another.

Partly because I have one of those annoying minds like a database which is always trying to categorise things, if I know there are ways to categorise them. And trying to figure out which box to assign something to can actually spoil your enjoyment of the thing-ness of the thing which goes beyond categorisation. (And although I'm too old to get caught up in tribal identity these days, there was that time in my 20s where I spent 3 years arguing with a bandmate over whether a certain band was Post-Shoegaze or Grunge, ergo whether it was ~OK~ to like them - sheesh!)

But there's also the problem with genre getting used as a shorthand for "if you like artist X, you will also like artist Y." And unfortunately it never seems to work for me that way. That, according to what DC said, which makes sense, if one person is defining dance genres according to the beat, and I'm trying to discover music that works for me based on texture and sound, and it really doesn't matter to me where the downbeat goes, so long as there's a synth that goes "wub" then that makes communication problematic. (e.g. 10 YEARS of ppl telling me, "you like Aphex Twin, you like Amnesiac era Radiohead, therefore you *must* like Autechre and me going "I'm sorry, but I just DON'T.")

I like being *able* to come at this music with no preconceptions of whether I'm supposed to like it, so I can utterly fall in love with the portomento on an arpeggio. And I don't like this sense of expectation that I *have* to like Artist Y, because they are in the same genre as Artist X.

It's really freeing for me. Like going on holiday. The last hiking trip where I tried to follow the inclined tramway from Portreath to Redruth and got very lost, and asked a farmer "Am I in Redruth?' and he said "No, mate, you're in Illogan." And I said thanks and walked off, and he shouted after me "Do you want me to tell you how to get to Redruth?" And I just said "Nope, I'm enjoying my walk through Illogan now." It's fun being lost sometimes. If you lived there, I could understand wanting a map, but I'm on holiday.

This thread is going to make me dig out old Daft Punk CDs now.

If I end up digging out Basement Jaxx tunes, I'm actually going to hit someone ;-)

Autechre vs Orbital vs Matmos for me - excluding Matmos because like emily implied they are their own thing and not quite appropriate to the terms of this poll plus it makes life easier. for sheer irrational pleasure and muddied depths i'm going to vote for Ae altho obv Orbital's shiny pop thrills have thrilled me more, on another day in another mood it might be them.

okay I really don't know how I managed to get this far into my life without actively seeking out Matmos stuff

This thread is going to make me dig out old Daft Punk CDs now.

I did the same - I'm always struck by how ridiculously boring Homework turns out to be, since I like many of the tunes on it!

Soft Pink Truth first album is a good place to start for Matmos, even if it cheating a bit as its Drew Daniel solo.

I probably have one of the first 1000 pressed of the Matmos debut. My favorite is the second album Quasi-Objects, which is rubbery fun in the Mouse on Mars sense, but begins their exercises in conceptual sampling. The later albums veer too far to the later to engage me in the same way.

this thread is full of people who act like dance music is a small genre which exists on a peripheral level to the albums made by basement jaxx, chemical brothers, etc etc, etc etc etc.

They also lack Daft Punk's feted deity status. Surprised there's still so much gloss around DP seeing as they haven't made a good record for 11 years and every variety of lowest common denominator hack has wrung just about everything out of their sound.

there are prob more good records influenced by daft punk than any other artist on this thread. and bangalter can hold his head up high in terms of legacy. he has at least, AT LEAST, five records that do the pop-dance thing in a far more satisfying way than anything mentioned on this weird thread.

there are prob more good records influenced by daft punk than any other artist on this thread.

setting a pretty low bar there IMO, though otherwise you're right.

i don't ever need to hear discovery, HAA or half of homework ever again

roule and crydamoure OTOH never seem to get old, not does their ultra hard ultra tracky early shit

the question of ratio is always an interesting one. i mean autechre did some of my all time favorite music between amber and LP5 but then followed w 10 more albums of progressively more boring wank

ditto chems and 2LS

global communication never did anything bad, did lots of pleasant stuff, but only a few really mindblowing things (early reload on evolution, early jedi knights, "take me with you", etc)

plaid sucked as a combo - barring a few tracks and remixes, sorry dog latin - but as part of black dog and solo as balil, tura, atypic, etc they were stunning

b12 and BoC both really good and i own almost everything by both but both also seem kinda redundant? like if BoC hadn't existed someone else would've put radio phonic nostalgia over beats and if b12 hadn't existed wed still have kirk de g

i'm just gonna vote chems not because i like them better than the rest of my shortlist but because they're the only ones to have put out credible bangers recently (escape velocity!!!)

I can't remember you ever saying anything about Orbital but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say you don't like them very much??

Yeah Chems do amazing credible bangers. I sort of wish they'd turned into anonymous producers after Come With Us. And especially anonymous remixers. Adore their remix of Kylie's "Slow".

orbital is okay but to me pretty whatever. like i have no problem w orbital but to me they blend in with a lot of competent progressive techno from that era, like leftfield, underworld, speedy j, etc

is there anything in that style you're super-into or is it all just competent?

i guess i feel about them the way i do about like pantha du prince - pretty, but ultimately that focus on baroque, uplifting ethereal harmony always makes me feel like its insubstantial

uh, i dunno. that's a good question. what else is like orbital? something like "smokebelch ii"? i'm super into that.

the martian? UR's high tech jazz? derrick may? stacey pullen? kenny larkin? ken ishii?

to me the stuff from orbital i like best ("chime", "belfast", "halcyon") sounds a lot like detroit-derived techno scrubbed of the appealing grit and weirdness

then once you get to "in sides" it turns into kitchen-sink electronica vomit IMO

but yeah, i can listen to and enjoy green and brown, they're quite nice, but i'll always grab one of those aforementioned artists instead, i suppose for somewhat rockist reasons

similarly i always really dug fahrenheit 303 but it just makes me want to listen to voodoo ray or tricky disco or mr fingers instead

etc etc etc

a lot of orbital has that post-industrial drum sound and programming that sounds badly dated too, kinda ends up sounding like meat beat manifesto or belgian new beat or something (speed freak and steel cube come to mind)

a lot of orbital has that post-industrial drum sound and programming that sounds badly dated too, kinda ends up sounding like meat beat manifesto or belgian new beat or something

haha i'd say that's one of its appealing points of distinction!

eh, i can't really hang with that for whatever reason, maybe because my sister and i went through a simultaneous industrial phase in high school that involved lots of KMFDM and thrill kill kult and even worse wax trax stuff than that - i even bought that big wax trax box :-(

i even have deep problems w/ DHS, which everyone else praises to high heaven

at one point in high school i used to tell people my favorite band was 1000 homo djs

no more industrial music for me

i should probably go to a goth club at some point in my life again while i can still pass for late 20s, but i'd have to drive up to LA to do that, i think

roule and crydamoure OTOH never seem to get old, not does their ultra hard ultra tracky early shit

Think I love Crydamoure more, on the whole, than Daft Punk, tho Discovery remains untouchable.

Excluding post-2000 output it's got to be Orbital

Incredibly I've never heard an Orbital album. I'm assuming the earlier stuff is more detroit-y/bleepy? What should I get?

I didn't realize that Plaid wasn't always synonymous with Black Dog Productions... oh well. Mbuki Mvuki is great.

mbuki mvuki is like a sandwich of two parts cheese and one part shit

anything hurts my ears, next two are riple, perplex makes kirk de g sound like herbie hancock but they get points for trying and they're way ahead of him, he still sounded like b12 at this point and wouldn't get to this type of breaks and synth until like 97, so that side on balance is 2/3 cheese 1/3 shit

summit reminds one of "prime united future organization" which is a different sort of ripe, scoobs in columbia i never liked, yak and bouncing checks are awesome, we're 50/50 at this point but we i count the good ones each as x2 cause i'm an optimist, so again 2/3 to 1/3

on bytes the ken downie tracks slaughter everything else, though this was not the case later

the alternate tracks from this period on disc 1 of trainer are uniformly awesome though

I didn't realize that Plaid wasn't always synonymous with Black Dog Productions... oh well. Mbuki Mvuki is great.

This poll was about duos, and The Black Dog/BDP was a trio consisting of Plaid + other guy. When the Plaid guys went back to being duo, I think the third guy kept The Black Dog name, so it's now his solo project.

"post-plaid black dog is execrable and worse than current plaid, which is merely pointless, in a worse way than stereolab, but not much worse"

-- pitchfork magazine

allmusic is nice and says "an interesting blend ... with the free-form structures of film soundtracking" which is a nice way to say sounds like music for viral ads on vimeo

their coup de grace is "the results of which are intriguing although rarely crucial" though i would strike "rarely crucial" in favor of "mostly unlistenable"

I kinda liked the Black Dog album that followed Spanners, Music for Adverts or whatever it was called. It was a collection of short and pretty vignettes, like Satie for the IDM crowd or something. Nothing mindblowing, but pleasant background music. I haven't been paying attention what The Black Dog is doing these days, though.

even their bangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm2tRqdchIs

are really twee

tuomas you must be trolling

Huh?

check out this contemporaneous interview where he talks about brian eno, jah wobble and mozart in the same paragraph

http://www.theblackdogma.com/tbd/2008/08/archive-dog-bites-back-interview-with-dj-magazine-28-08-96/

more like music for nerds amirite

As opposed to the trio Black Dog and Plaid?

eh its about degrees

it all gets a little too on the sleeve when a beat poet guests on your album, this album is like just the bongos

i'm talking about the album after the music for adverts one, that has the beat poet talking over bongos and didgeridoo, and i was trying to say the adverts one sounds like just the bongos

it is in "poor taste" if you will

IMO the Music for Adverts album actually sounds less nerdy, because it doesn't have the complexity and IDM tweakery of the Plaid-related stuff. Like I said, just pleasant vignettes.

(xx-post)

Well yeah, like I said, I have no idea what the Black Dog guy did after MfA.

i think that lack of sonic attention just makes the conceptual side of the work jut out at me

anyway i was wondering if anybody had heard dj c's "mad again" and if they thought it was triumphant postdiploism or merely eccentric postjaxxism

http://soundcloud.com/mashit/dj-c-mad-again-du-ting-mix

there's an awkward kind of poseathon section at 1:30 and i don't think they would ever slide that far from actual dancing but its got the same production quality

the term "bouncement" is suspect

this is all a bit too arcane for me, but...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72ZAMCzjxrk

spaghetti western

it's kinda pastiche to my ears

pastiche maybe, but it doesn't sound a damn thing like its inspirations. and the transformation c. 3:40 is one of the most amazing moments the 90s produced, genre notwithstanding

they're kinda like a techno version of tortoise

do not say such terrible things

i mean yeah, w the insistent subtleties, but listen to the way the bounceback echoes complete the melodic phrases in the 2nd half, so nice

and tortise never jammed half as hard, unless remixed by sensible people

negative jamming going on here but still one of my fave ae mixes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkHIVu06Nh8

I really like Plaid, or big chunks of their first three albums at least at least (wildly inconsistent), but I don't think you can deny the tweeness, or at least the playfulness. I mean bits of Not For Threes sound like they're actually trying to make their equipment sound like a petting zoo.

Agreed.

So many fine electronic music duos here! (but not The Crystal Method) - Based on 90s work alone, tho, I think these would be my POV+1

Boards of Canada - my vote; their 90s shit was dope & MHTRTC can't really be topped here imo
Air - early singles + Moon Safari are all-time
Autechre - def the best overall 90s career arc
Daft Punk - Homework, I mean..
Basement Jaxx - not as good as Homework, but nevertheless quite good.
Plaid - if these guys are underrated, they shouldn't be.

I would also have ranked Mouse on Mars & maybe Kruder & Dorfmeister among these prob

Incredibly I've never heard an Orbital album. I'm assuming the earlier stuff is more detroit-y/bleepy? What should I get?

you really should hear a couple. Orbital 2 is their first "classic" album and yeah it is more straight acidhouse/detroit, but way more complex than their early works. Snivilisation and In Sides are more symphonic and experimental, and IMO those are the ones they'll be remembered for. You should probably pick up one of those three tanuki

thanks!

I think genre boundaries don't really matter in terms of home listening, but they're important in clubs. Differences in dance genres tend to be rhythmic rather than sonic

just a massive no. this, like a horribly large chunk of the stuff upthread, is just incessant pandering to some normative midpoint between all genres.

you don't have to be a purist to acknowledge that purism is a large part of dance music and that lots of great dance music is born from its ideals.

Lots of great choices here. Would've gone for Ae but felt TLS needed a vote.

Plaid haterz can go suck a fuck tbh.

gross

love that autechre/tortise track so much!
haven't heard it in years.

the late great is saying all the things I know to be true but try to deny about late-period artists. the guy who still releases as "the black dog" has some mixes on his site that are by far home listening "dark" stuff that I kind of like but I really have little to no interest in his original work :/

that collection of early black dog stuff from the last few years was good

chez & ron

just a massive no. this, like a horribly large chunk of the stuff upthread, is just incessant pandering to some normative midpoint between all genres

Yeah I mean the worst of this stuff (looking at you late Chemical Brothers albums) is appalling for this sort of self-conscious middleground positioning but at the same time "is this technically deep house or minimal?" is not the sort of question that really matters if you're just vibing out to something at home.

you don't have to be a purist to acknowledge that purism is a large part of dance music and that lots of great dance music is born from its ideals

Yeah I kinda acknowledged this in my point about scenes like funky as well.

chez and ron is a great answer

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

missed this as i was offline.
have to say the gang i listen to the most out of this lot has to be FSOL, hence the count of one they will probably get in this.
oh, and as for the grid, the best thing they ever released was the remix by global communication.
total ambient perfection that fits in very well with the global communication vs chapterhouse album.

autechre bc (even tho this sounds a little weird due to their 'dour' image) i've had more fun diving deep into their catalog than with anyone else on the list. a lot of it appeals to me immediately but a big part of this is evaluating and re-evaluating and re-re-evaluating albums. the nerd in me loves this stuff. fer instance, i'm still not sure if i like tri-repeatae all that much and it was the first one i heard!

orbital get a respectable 2nd place nod. and i probably like 'in sides' more than any ae release tbh.

Anyone interested in latter day Black Dog should check out Radio Scarecrow.

Very respectable digital techno for nerds with a dubstep influence ie catnip for me.

The chem. bros wins for me

power,precision and grace with acid friendly touch.

as a trance hater rock guy in 90's isra(trance)hell ,the chems, along with aphex,
prodigy &meat beat manifesto were my electronica of choise

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

pff

yes

if this poll was done on ilx ten years ago daft punk takes it over basement jaxx w/ autechre maybe not even getting third over boc right?

i never vote in any of these polls, despite commenting.

WOT NO MIKE N RICH but really I couldn't let this stand:

haha none of the ones i was expecting to see are in the list, i automatically thought of male/female trip-hop duos like portishead, moloko etc

― lex pretend, Monday, April 2, 2012 12:23 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Portishead were 3+ people! (Barrows, Gibbons, and Utley, and maybe MacDonald.)

if this poll was done on ilx ten years ago daft punk takes it over basement jaxx w/ autechre maybe not even getting third over boc right?

Sounds about right. I didn't really see this result coming at all, there are one or two Autechre tracks I've liked but generally I find the early stuff pleasant but not particularly interesting whilst not really able to find a way into anything from Tri Repeatae onwards.

whereas i only deeply love the stuff from LP 5 onwards. the problem with the poll is that Ae are some prog/avant crunchy head music for me - "head" isn't the right word, what i love about the later stuff is its physicality of sound - but comparing them to say anybody making genuine dance music is a category mistake really

Yeah, it's not an unexpected result, given the commenting. But still. It feels kind of unfair that people went for the head music over the dance music. (Though despite all the cavilling on the thread, it was about "electronic" acts, not about "dance" acts so there you go.)

there is plenty of "dance" music i wd choose over "head" music depending on what day it is but it didn't appear in this poll really

Well it's a bit stymied by being specifically and only duos.

(And I'm not just saying that because I think Mr Twin would have wiped the floor with Autechre.)

Be an interesting one that - I kinda feel like a lot of aphex records haven't dated so good tho

That's not a poll I would trust myself to make.

Aphex Twin or Autechre pick only one:

o Aphex Twin
o I am stupid and should have rusty nails driven through my eardrums, but I prefer Autechre

perhaps SAWII is timeless but yes, some of his later, more famous records haven't exactly held up

I rest my case.

the aphex twins were the best electronic music duo of the 90s

I still encounter people who still think "they" are two people.

I rest my case.

what is your case, exactly?

the aphex twins were the best electronic music duo of the 90s

Yeah its probably actually the later 90s stuff that hasn't help as well

that was supposed to say "hasn't held up as well"

exactly, I do feel as though Autechre will probably hold up better. with Aphex, I'm hearing a lot of really cool or unique ideas that aren't really that much fun to listen to

I'm probably in the minority in thinking RDJ's post-2005 acid techno turn is the best stuff he's done

I'd agree with that. I enjoy the analord stuff way more than his 90s stuff, which hasn't really aged that well for me.

iow drill n' bass was a bad idea

even though he did it 1000x better than anyone else excepting squarepusher, maybe

aphex twin could've stopped after doing both volumes of the selected ambient works and it would be enough to place him over autechre

Best 90 electronic music duo: THE FINAL BATTLE

re analords, I mean:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2F-GF3Hx7s

the bit around 2:40 is one of my favorite AFX moments

Flim and the Richard D. James Album are still all-time for me.

Flim, yes, but RDJ really hasn't held up for me lately

We played I at record club a few months ago and I loved it, though the two of us who knew it well agreed that it sounded far less radical than we remembered.

I don't give a monkey's if a record sounds radical, I care if it sounds beautiful, or moving, or if it makes my ears sit up and go boy howdy. All of which RDJ does.

wow @ results, really thought one of the bigger names would take it. also the crystal method got a vote, arf.

haha who voted for The Crystal Method

I guess we won't know

I don't give a monkey's if a record sounds radical, I care if it sounds beautiful, or moving, or if it makes my ears sit up and go boy howdy. All of which AE does.

dere u go.

i didn't vote but if i did it would've been chems

lol results

I pull out Tri Repeatae every year or so and get really, really bored by about track 4. Though "Eutow" is still incredible. I wonder what I'm missing.

― Estimate the percent chance that a whale has ever been to the moon? (frogbs), Monday, April 2, 2012 11:56 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Alright, I decided to crank it in my car and I think I figured it out; where do you go from here?

onwards and upwards

envane is a nice lead-in to chiastic slide, if a bit more dancefloor friendly (kinda) than that or tri repetae; if chiastic is too weirdly crunchy then skip on to lp5.

chems really snubbed

Right on - will do. I have their first two as well and generally enjoyed them but now I'm starting to realize why they're spoken of so highly here. The music on TR really feels monolithic at points, especially on headphones, but given more space it's incredible just how much there really is to *hear* on it. My problem is that I'd focus more on the abrasion of it, especially up front (still don't like "Stud", by the way). Besides maybe Aphex Twin I haven't really heard anything like this so yes I'll be on my way to checking those out!

guys guys

i forgot funkstorung

Funkstörung was a German Autechre whose work was at least half remixes of Wu Tang, Bjork, etc...right?

yeah, I think they had like two singles/videos that had some minor hype and some interesting packaging design but all their best work was remixy stuff

Nah I rate their (all original) appetite for disctruction album, autechre esque but with a stronger electro vibe, real rapping n everything.