dance / electronic music EOY 2012 picks

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

link me to some of this stuff plz

HudMo coproduced "Mercy" but it doesn't make it dahnce music anymore than his solo stuff or with TNGHT is rap music.

x-post I read Resident Advisor, FACT, XLR8R, Little White Earbuds, download off of Dat Piff, and listen to the radio about twice a month.

If it doesn't get through that screen I'm probably not going to hear it. Maybe that's sticking my head in the sand.

I guess my "mainstream" is my limited exposure to rap Twitter and the mixtape sites.

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

this is another one i just barely picked up, but it is definitely delivering so far

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?)

Yeah arguably a variety of remixes of "I Found You" fill this role, I'm not even sure if the Bob Sinclar one is the biggest in terms of club omnipresence (I don't really feel like trawling through every purported remix on youtube). The 2011 equivalent might be house remixes of "Rolling In The Deep", I think, though to be more precise the 2012 equivalent of those is this remix of Tracy Chapman's "Give Me One Reason" which I hear quite a bit but haven't had a chance to ID yet.

If I was going to argue against myself i'd point to stuff like the Calvin Harris/Florence Welch single which gets played alongside this kind of thing but also has a separate unlife as a pop song.

x-post Like I consider Azealia Banks to be "mainstream", but I'm living in my own bizarro world.

yeah there's definitely a distinction here between internet-famous and irl-famous. in internet-land there's a definite sense of 'anything goes' for rap and r&b beats right now.

this romare thing is really cool, thank you friends.

tracks:

mr beatnick - sun goddess
tod terje - inspector norse
fudge fingas - untytled
linkwood - secret value
christopher rau - iris
andres - new 4 u
andres - hart plaza
dj sprinkles and mark fell - complete spiral
magic mountain high - b1
B.D.I. presents compassion crew - Paper Tears

Albums:

vedomir - vedomir
smallpeople - Salty days
The Reboot Joy Confession - Absolute III Way Harmonious Enterprise

x-post Like I consider Azealia Banks to be "mainstream", but I'm living in my own bizarro world.

― Josiah Alan, Monday, December 3, 2012 3:51 PM Bookmark

fwiw, Az. Banks (or at least "212") gets played on the dance station here, which makes a lot more sense than if the rap station were to play here. but yeah, bizarro world.

i was going to say something like "i listen to commercial stuff, like butterz and night slugs!" but then i realized i would be outing myself as bizarro world too

My local rap station became the dance station, and then just started playing pop of all varieties. Still has all the ad drops about playing the "best in hip-hop" though.

Still its Southern Wisconsin, its not like Chi where you can pick between 5 or 6 different options.

The best in hip-hop is apparently Justin Bieber, David Guetta and Chris Brown.

isn't it?

there are a couple of commercial dance stations here, i will say that they sounds more like commercial dance 10 years ago than "underground" (i.e. boutique) stuff from today sounds like underground dance of 10 years ago.

but maybe that is just my cloth ears speaking.

like the guetta and sinclair of today sound more like the guetta and sinclair of early 2000s than the tresor records of today sound like the tresor records of early 2000s

obviously commercial dubstep throws a wrench in that formulation