dance / electronic music EOY 2012 picks

i'm really pleased that pachanga boys' "time" seems to be a widespread favourite

it's 15 minutes long but somehow always ends before i expect or want it to

i was a little let down by shed's album. as much as i liked it, it didn't have the same heart-tugging effect on me that lone or ital tek or actress did.

i am excited to hear gerry read's album.

some off the top of my head favorites. feel like too many of them have already been mentioned, but if I left them off my list would be too short ...

secret circuit - nebula sphynx
locussolus - telephone
pachanga boys - time
todd terje - inspector norse
julio bashmore - au seve
erol alkan and boys noize - roland rat
anna lunoe and touch sensitive - real talk
storm queen - let's make mistakes
secret circuit - jungle bones (prins thomas bonus beat)
scandal - just let me dance (maxxi soundsystem remix)
dr. beat - gonnagetcha (jukeboxlovejam)
stephane deschezeaux - hold on
kraak & smaak - runnin'
factory floor - two different ways*
zoovox - transistor madness / summers madness (steve summers version)*
kolsch - opa*

blondes LP
john talabot - fin
luke abbott - modern driveway EP
untold - change in a dynamic environment 3

*these are all late 2011

That zoovox is good

xpost

I also meant to berate you people for failing to acknowledge Joakim's contribution this year. His remix of Charlotte Gainsbourg's Paradisco was excellent, his first official remix work in a few years. I'm sure some of you were pissing yourselves over him five years ago.

STARKEY - ORBITS

seriously guys this album is nuts

I also meant to berate you people for failing to acknowledge Joakim's contribution this year. His remix of Charlotte Gainsbourg's Paradisco was excellent, his first official remix work in a few years. I'm sure some of you were pissing yourselves over him five years ago.

why so aggro

"nothing gold" and the terje remix were pretty cool

joakim is always good. his two beats in space mixes are among the best, well worth checking out

romare - meditations on afrocentrism

seriously the worst title but I still listen to this all the time, really great

STARKEY - ORBITS

Albums

Silent Servant - Negative Fascination
Actress - RIP
Traxman - Da Mind Of

Producers that can be very proud of themselves

Mala
Burial
Kassem Mosse
Kahn
Kowton
Visionist
Beneath
Zhou
Evian Christ
Shackleton (not sure if his Drawbar Organ sessions counts as an album)
Raime
Steve Moore
Levon Vincent
Omar-S (quality not quantity)
LHF, especially Logos

Producers that can be very proud of themselves

^excellent

Albums:
Session Victim - The Haunted House of House
Roberto Rodriguez - Dawn
Ricardo Villalobos - Dependent and Happy
Jon Talabot - fin
Guy Gerber - Fabric 64

Singles/ whatever:
Reboot - Beautiful Parasite
Candi Stanton - Hallelujah Anyway (Larse Vocal)
Ray Okpara - Chi This Wonder Up (Rodriguez Jr. Remix)
Larse - Those of You
Balcazar & Sordo - Obsession
Mark E - Oranges
Kiki & Marco Resmann - Beggin for the Heat
Maceo Plex & Jon Dasilva - Love Somebody Else feat. Joi Cardwell
Finnebassen - Touching Me
Hunter/Game - Don't Feel the Presence
Todd Terje - It's the Arps
Kolombo - Feela (Demarzo Remix)
Maya Jane Coles - Watcher

good year

― Dick Townwolves (Captain Ahab), Monday, December 3, 2012 2:21 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark

really enjoying the session victim and roberto rodriguez albums, ty

and echoing the gordo taqueria luv

for some reason i hate the idea of something called 'hunter/game' on hot creations but that track is actually pretty great

this starkey record is hilarious

it's amazing. like a sci-fi bass opera!

Listen to the Luke Hess album everyone, best thing he's done and that's saying something.

romare - meditations on afrocentrism

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, December 3, 2012 9:00 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

I'll second this

what's not to get? who doesn't want to hear the soundtrack to a giant robot goose stomping down the street in celebration at having thwarted an insidious space attack?

― make like a steak and beef (dog latin), Monday, December 3, 2012 7:02 AM Bookmark

Well that description could very well put me off anything.

The thing about "Inspector Norse" is it's very openly cheesy and sounds almost as dorky as you do right now, but it's got this emotional undercurrent that isn't necessarily immediately apparent. It kind of feels like the awkward goofiness when someone's about to open up their feelings to you in a big rush out of nowhere with tears in their eyes but their still trying to make up their mind about it and you know something's up.

This thread really underscores how disconnected ILM has become from commercial dance music.

Not a criticism, it seems reflective of a broader trend (in the music itself as much as anything else) over at least the last 7 years or so.

how do you mean?

always love a tim not-criticism

One component of this issue being the almost-ghettoisation of commercial dance music - e.g in Melbourne the commercial radio stations that used to play a lot of it can satisfy the Friday night driving crowd just as well with all the clubby R&B and chart-pop, rendering "proper" dance music slightly redundant.

So commercial stuff flies under the radar much more than it did back when the demarcations between dance / r&b / pop were more clearly drawn.

always love a tim not-criticism

― r|t|c, Monday, 3 December 2012 10:56 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah I do this a lot I guess. Trying to pre-emptively ward off people taking a more extreme and narrow interpretation of what I'm saying. It usually doesn't work :-/

Well as someone who spent a lot of time listening to bloghouse and dubstep, modern pop dance bores me to tears / just makes me want to cry.

Give me my grouchy techno records.

At least from an American perspective, it seems really odd to call commercial dance music "ghettoized", where it has more of a platform than ever. But hell, you can add "Bangarang" to my list.

Vahid, basically that there is near zero overlap between the music I tend to hear at mainstream clubs (whether straight or gay) and the music listed in this thread.

This wasn't the case in equivalent threads say 8 years ago.

But the likely reasons for that are a lot broader than just "this is what today's ilxors listen to now".

Another factor is internet culture making it a lot easier for people to hone in on stuff that sounds populist without actually being so (Funkystepz remixes being a good example of this).

Yeah I guess the US is trending in a different direction - though the "platform" that dance music has there is still more tenuous than the platform it's always had elsewhere.

Going to an EDM night makes 28 feel ancient, its so blatantly music for 16-19 year olds.

right, i see that

xxp I don't think that's even true anymore. So much has changed in the last few years.

And it can never go back to how it was at this point. The very fact that you have a whole generation kids, way younger than even Josiah describes whose first exposure to pop music is EDM means that they'll be attached to electronic music in some respect their whole lives, which has never been the case in the US before.

Yeah, I guess that was more the feeling at the last brostep show I went to, I would never dream of going to one of those all ages raves.

more intriguing imho is the extent to which ilm is disconnected from populist *deep* (and "deep" i guess) house - Hot Creations, Maceo Plex, Finnebassen, Tale of Us etc

I'm pretty sure Hot Creations and Maceo Plex at least are pretty popular around here?

Uh, I should probably mention that Harry Fraud is probably my favorite "electronic" producer of the year. And I probably listened to a Fat Trel mixtape more than any of this stuff.

But not really sure where the line between IDM/trap and actual rap is anymore.

really now

You tell me, I'm disconnected from all these kids and their new fangled ipads and such.

i mean, i wouldn't necessarily expect a whole thread about, say, "Benediction", but apparently there's not even a single *post* about it

X-post I listen to the rap station and they're playing Taylor Swift and I get a little disoriented.

For real though, if I had to do a blind listen between a Shigeto track and a Harry Fraud instrumental I might not know which is which.

getting back to relevant markets, what tim says sounds right enough to me though admittedly i'm sorely wanting for casework out in the field. (i'm assuming wanted/bob sinclair is a decent example of what's being discussed?)

http://www.capitalfm.com/on-air/andi-durrant/andis-playlists/friday-23rd-november/
http://www.capitalfm.com/on-air/andi-durrant/andis-playlists/saturday-24th-november/

i stick this show on sometimes (a jackin early adopter pleasingly btw) but it might as well be snapshots from mars for all i'll ever encounter it again

http://www.kissfmuk.com/fnk/2012/12/01/tracklist-301112/
http://www.kissfmuk.com/kissbassmix/2012/11/28/tracklist-281112/

viz the tracklists of these kiss shows and you can see how easily it dips into uk treble n bass and not only eurobloghouse and edm

i mean, i wouldn't necessarily expect a whole thread about, say, "Benediction", but apparently there's not even a single *post* about it

― Mind Taker, Monday, 3 December 2012 23:32 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

OTFM. i actually stopped myself from posting about this cos it became more interesting to see how far the silence was going to go

you know, i don't even try to have the encyclopedic view of dance music i used to. i basically get the hardwax new releases rss feed and pick stuff off of it based on my own narrow interests in trad acid house and detroit-rooted techno. not sure if that means anything about anyone other than myself, pretty sure it doesn't.

i dig a lot of stuff in that vein of populist house but for some reason "benediction" doesn't do it for me

harry fraud is dope and producers who started in an instrumental/dance music/beat scene/etc context do seem to be getting more work with vocalists, but if this stuff is filtering into 'mainstream' rap and r&b, it's happening pretty slowly? i can definitely think of examples, but only a few.

xp