ILM'S TOP 77 TRACKS of 2010

So ... I like a lot of electronic music, but all the dance-nerd debate in this thread has gotten pretty tiresome.

Peace.

i think its p much over? weve drawn the lines iirc

ive already mentioned several characteristics that map out over historically-accepted 'smart ppl music.'

― *kl0p* (deej), Friday, January 28, 2011 1:06 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

is this what you mean: these ppl dont like rapping, highly value texture or intricacies or high-concept 'influences for influences sake'.

i guess i might agree with that, to an extent. i'd say that "smart people music" is a construct in american culture and that it does often include those characterists. it's also often averse to metal, punk, pop in general and/or rock in general. the construct flexible and varies from subculture to subculture, individual to individual - but yeah, it exists, and what you mention is part of it.

while i think it's good to question that, i think it's super lame to sneer at music because you assume it might appeal to people who might harbor such ideas. it's worse to sneer at people whose tastes happen to intersect with the parts of the "smart music" construct you have issues with.

oh wait, it's over? never mind. [gathers crayons]

In the collage there's a tiny part that says, "Yin Jim, W. Lester Duo, and the Bones of a Dead Coyote." Is that related to the song "Yin Jim vs. the Vomit Creature"?

NH: There's this psychic agent team for this one cause who are against the other group of agents who are trying to control things. Both sides are trying to control freedom, yin and yang. One side is lead by Yin Jim and he has a fucked-up sidekick named W. Lester Duo, like a snake-oil salesman. They're heroin addicts. Everyone's a heroin addict in the future. He's waiting for Yin Jim to come back from copping. Yin Jim's out with the Bones of a Dead Coyote, the coyote spirit that's Yin Jim's master, you see what I'm saying?

Sort of.

NH: Two guys and a dog. It's a kid's story. One guy's a Parker Stevenson kind of guy, and the other's...

JH: Like Sancho Panza.

NH: But weirder even. They're walking on the beach on the way home. These other agents are looking for these life-giving crystals. Reanimating crystals. It's a classic sci-fi image, you know what I mean?

Most assuredly.

NH: These agents from the other side who are fighting for world domination, but more like controlling people and systemizing everything, they attack Yin Jim and the Bones of a Dead Coyote because they think they've got the crystals on them, but the crystals are at home and all they've got is heroin. Back home, W. Lester Duo can't wait anymore so he starts looking around for the stash and he finds the crystals. He thinks they're heroin. Since Yin Jim's been waylaid by these other agents, he goes ahead and does it up. Cut back and the Bones are just laying there because Yin Jim's been taken away. He has to be in the vicinity so there can be a strong psychic bond to animate him. Yin Jim's concentration was broken by the agents interrogating him about where the crystals are. W. Lester Duo does so much of the crystals that it makes him puke. The crystals come out with his vomit and goes down into the sewer system and this sewage-vomit creature rises out of the San Francisco Bay. Meanwhile, Yin Jim gets beat up and hit so hard that it releases some psychic anger and reanimates the Bones, who run to W. Lester Duo, who's laying in the bathroom all fucked up. The coyote passes on the energy, because they're all psychic agents. Psychic warriors. You know what I'm saying?

I follow you.

NH: So they rescue Yin Jim. They find out what happened and W. Lester Duo's like, "Gee, I'm sorry, I didn't know it was crystals. I thought it was heroin. " Yin Jim's like, "Do you know what you've done? You've created the Vomit Creature that's terrorizing the city." They do battle with it, vanquish it, but not until after it kills a bunch of people on Broadway and Columbus. Trashes City Lights bookstore. Goes into the Garden of Eden, starts rampaging onstage, kidnaps one of the girls, who they accidentally kill during the battle. You know, "It's a close shot, but I think I can get it. Oh, shit. Missed." They give her a shot of the life-giving crystals so she's alive again, but she's all fucked up. This go-go dancer who's really sexy but she's cut on her tits so they're flapping around and she's full of bullet holes, covered with Vomit Creature marks that can't be removed. Then they go into a bar, Mr. Bing's, to celebrate another day in the secret psychic service. Now it's four people - the go-go dancer, the zombie, Yin Jim , W. Lester Duo, and the Bones of a Dead Coyote.

i guess u could say that i prefer music that feels more balanced in its deployment of 'smart music' constructs than this does -- obvi i like various types of 'smart music' too but it makes me cynical when i feel like stuff gets a pass for doing something that doesnt strike me as particularly interesting but its culturally coded in the 'right' way

aka, agree 2 disagree

want to see royal trux movie

ok - this argument has dragged on to the point of tedium, but I'm going to inject my two cents anyway...

I think maybe the reason we have these disagreements is that in the US, dance music is largely an underground and fairly insular thing, not unlike metal. We don't really have dance hits here. When Americans experience dance music, it's at raves or rave-oriented clubs, it tends to be more hard-edged, more mind-altering, altogether crazier in its general vibe.

So the consensus dance hits from the UK mystify us to a certain extent because they come across as much lighter, more urbane, more laid back. It's kind of like "that's it? how do you party to this stuff?" Doesn't mean it's bad, it's just hard for some of us to get why a certain track might be the best when there is so much out there.

Then when some Americans start to latch on to some of the popular UK tracks, we get our backs up because they maybe come across as dilletantes who get all their music through the internet rather than going to clubs and parties.

I know a lot of this is probably based on unfair assumptions, but maybe it explains a bit why we get stuck on this topic.

dilletantes who get all their music through the internet

I prefer to call it critical distance...

As an American, I don't think I'll ever really understand the role of dance music in British popular culture or the UK class system. Thankfully I can try to screen those out and just listen to music.

Yeah, I suspect that a lot of the music that might be considered "relatable" by Americans, would be seen as low class in the UK.

I prefer to call it critical distance...

― Pauper Management Improved (Sanpaku), Friday, January 28, 2011 4:08 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

LOL

Then when some Americans start to latch on to some of the popular UK tracks, we get our backs up because they maybe come across as dilletantes who get all their music through the internet rather than going to clubs and parties.

i think this is exactly it, plainly stated. problem is the privileging of one type of appreciation/form of engagement over another, the dismissive and unnecessary "dilettante" sneer. most people don't go to clubs, and thus have a different angle on the function and value the dance music they do encounter. so what? they vote in polls and publish criticism and help define the canon. so what?

do i get pissy when people who obviously spend basically no time engaging with rock music & culture pick a (to my mind) boring and obvious rock band to praise to the rafters? do i complain when they base their choices on musical aesthetics that have absolutely nothing to do with rock as i understand and engage with it? when they don't go to shows and don't support local bands and don't understand regional scenes? fuck no. they can like what they like, and if they think the hold steady = the best shit ever, well more power to them.

just hate the border policing shit. "you aren't from around here, so you couldn't possibly understand. be better if you just shut up and go back to jacking off to your jeff mangum poster lol."

^^^ obviously something about this gets me riled

my impression is that I think UK critics and people have a much greater appreciation for US pop/dance music than most US critics do, but whenever they try to do things along similar lines, they send it back here, the intelligentsia crowd...

let's say that the stuff deej likes is 50s rock stuff, not just Elvis, but also Chuck Berry, Sun Records stuff, blues & soul, stuff that the collegiate crowd tended to dismiss in its day as "vile teen bullshit", but in the UK this stuff was taken seriously, had a huge impact on the larger culture, and infected a lot of the art schools, including perhaps ppl like Lex, and when they started making music that reflected that stuff, they became the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so on, bands that entered America and maybe not being instantly embraced by the intelligentsia, but became a key part of the counterculture...

Obviously the metaphor fits awkwardly at best, but its the best way to kind of convey what I've gathered from what I've read in the last ? years about the transantlantic exchange of dance music...if that makes sense...?

great post, and a clarion to us all to be more positive about others' aesthetic choices. personally, altho I've tried to keep it to a personal perspective on the music, while trying to understand why stuff I don't get is liked, I know I've fallen foul of the 'live and let live' ethos. o ke$ha you make it so hard for me :(

that was an xp to contendo but drugs a money intimating that lex is in his 60s is awesome :D

lol waht?

that's not what I said at all

I know it was a metaphor, just imagining a young teenybopper Lex getting all prickly in Dick Dale's defence

lol awesome

YES! will be walking around with that image all day!

this is the only post I will ever make with this DN

know what you mean tho; i get the impression that the clubs in AUS and the USA where this might be played are not as banging as those here, can totally imagine the snobby unfun mentality too. it's pretty frustrating to see those outliers being used as a stick to beat night slugs with when it, and similar nights here, are as banging as you obviously want dance music to be - really heavy on ghettotech, chicago house, bits of mainstream hip-hop and r&b as well as juke/grime/uk bass. night slugs' first ever tagline back in 08 was "gutter house".

We definitely do have nights like this in Melbourne - a mixture of the precise things you identify here lex, plus the dancier end of (post)dubstep, a bit of dancehall, reggaeton, kuduro et. al. and sometimes an enticing reference to uk funky on the flyer (in adherence to some arcane rule I've observed they do play "Rass Out"). The audience for these nights is in part overlapping with the post-dubstep crowd generally but with an additional dollop of the more party-starting internationalist aesthete-connoisseurial type* (if I thought the word had meaning I might even use "hipster", though not perjoratively) - basically the kind of people who would have gone to Favela Chic in Paris four or five years ago (and maybe still go?), switched on to M.I.A. early etc. Then there are also nights that are actually like Favela Chic in full (i.e. remove the moody stuff (most of the grime etc.) and make the whole mix a bit more pop) (I'd have to think about it to root out any exceptions but on the face of it I suspect that the "party-starting internationalist aesthete-connoisseurial type" is a staple at any club night that promotes itself as crossing over multiple styles and musical cultures)

The last time I went to such a night (the first type) they didn't play "Wut" but obv I could imagine it in that setting. Lots of Joker et. al. Night Slugs can do well in a setting like that as well as the more full-fledged post-dubstep nights which won't tend to play the other stuff but increasingly are like 90% "uk bass".

The (post)dubstep audience itself isn't terribly unitary in feel - in Australia it's really been formed by refugees from, respectively, drum & bass, the harder danceable end of IDM (Tigerbeat 6 etc), and then from the end of 2007 a massive influx of former minimal listeners. The fact that well into 2009 the scene remained only fitfully danceable (beyond dubstep's habitual skank move) doesn't mean the audience was one disinclined to dance generally.

All of the above can then be subsumed within the broader category of "arts uni students, post-students and young professionals", which can then contrast against groups outside of that in subtle ways. The R&B and hip hop played at a club night like the one I'm describing at the top can be substantially similar to the stuff played at nights directed at self-identifying R&B/rap nights, but whereas the latter will play dancehall and reggaeton a bit, in Australia it would never play kuduro or grime, because that would clash with the American sensibility the night is trying to invoke (it seems counter-intuitive, but also correct to me, that dancehall and reggaeton actually assist in creating that sensibility).

I find it interesting to trace the historical development of this kind of thing, what people were dancing to 5 years ago vs what they're dancing to now. I have too many friends in too many splintered off areas now to draw hard and fast conclusions but obv there are types of nights I myself like more or less.

"nights directed at self-identifying R&B/rap fans" I meant.

huge dick dayo fan ftw

i cant get over how lol it is that these dudes spun w/ rob thr33zy

tim f's description probably fits in chicago as well although im not sure how many tigerbeat6 fans we ever had. the stuff about dnb dudes & that "party-starting internationalist aesthete-connoisseurial type" seems right on tho. id probably be better at arguing abt this stuff if i could get into the anthropology of it better.

i think a basis for me being all uergh about it is i get a sneaking suspicion a lot of djs who do dance nights secretly want to be playing this stuff instead & feel obligated to play house or rap out of necessity

'i get a sneaking suspicion'

again? from what? like. isn't it possible that djs who do dance nights like this stuff AND house AND rap?

the guys I know who do this stuff have a rap night on Thursdays, a House night twice a month, and produce their own shit in the nebulous space b/t house and 'this stuff'.

i mean. come on, deej. i'm actually totally down with your interest in the anthropology of dance scenes and how music interacts with social bullshit and the distinctions between populism and 'connaisseur' whatever. but it's really hard to try and tease out ideas when a substantial part of yr arguments are this sort of "i don't know these guys, but here's what I think about their tastes/motivations/etc."

(Although, if we could start calling this stuff TROJAN HOUSE I would be v. amused. They sneak it into house sets and then BAM! Snobby undanceable electronica takes over!)

i feel we need to adequatly tackle class, race, and gender to really understand this one

Of the three main sources of dubstep fans I think aggro-IDM is/was the smallest. I probably should have mentioned breakbeat also - stuff like Tipper, Tayo, Stanton Warriors. All of which used to be massive in Melbourne certainly, and a lot of fans of that stuff switched over to dubstep about four years ago. But I think drum & bass has been by far the biggest influence on the "feel" of those nights (in part because it also influenced the feel of breakbeat nghts), and while that's starting to change a bit there's still a strong drum & bass sensibility.

I used to go to a lot of drum & bass nights circa 2000, even though the music had (relatively speaking) fallen off by that point, those nights had the advantages of being relatively uncrowded (unless a big name UK dj or producer was playing), uncaring about dress code and with music that you could dance to incredibly energetically by yourself for four hours without anyone thinking twice (I had rather muscular legs that year) - sort of the very opposite of a "chinstroking" scene. It's almost impossible to stroke your chin to 00s d&b, or at least it was until the rise of the Instra:Mental sound. Conversely, the 2-step nights I went to in 2000 were pretty international aesthete, on account of the music never having an organic self-sustaining fan base here.

What I think of as "post-dubstep" (or "uk bass") has elements of that drum & bass heritage, elements of the international aesthete, elements of post-minimal "woah check that sound design" etc. etc. All of which makes it very difficult to detangle in terms of "what type of listener etc etc"

There was an idiot poster called pollywog who used to haunt the dubstep (and at times funky) threads, who would insist that breakbeat was the secret father of dubstep and basically the unacknowledged origin of all things good in UK dance music. Which is totally wrong but I've always thought "yes I could imagine how that would make sense to a particular person."

Breakbeat has been written out of dance music history somewhat now, but when you think about its relationships of proximity with 2-step, hip hop, techno and house and the way it drew on all of those things circa 2001-2003 (esp. via bootlegs), it's not a bad historical comparison point for uk bass.

what's really struck me about this scene here is that it can have a completely different slant depending on which particular dj is playing any given night, and that can be almost random, and down to whatever they happened to be into before this scene existed (or whatever they're into as well as this) - wifey, for example, always feels like the midpoint between night slugs and the heatwave (reggae/dancehall), and they'll get people like marcus nasty and funkystepz to play as well as slackk, hot city, r1 ryders. then you have tactile and hessle audio where the main past influence is berlin mnml. 8bitch and rustie are def ex-idm heads. mr beatnick, ahu, eglo records etc come from a skewed hip-hop/funk background. night slugs are way more US-influenced than any of the above, given their fondness for proper house as well as juke/r&b/rap. so "uk bass" really consists of a number of overlapping mini-scenes who coexist under one umbrella - but it's all by accident rather than design. then you have the bristol lot and the glasgow lot who are different again...

i feel we need to adequatly tackle class, race, and gender to really understand this one

― goole, Friday, January 28, 2011 3:06 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, that's the thing. and there's no reason to go there, no one wants to hear it, thread would go clusterfuck almost instantly. so instead, there's all this weird edging around. probably better, as deej suggested a while back, to just shake hands and walk away.

leave tim & lex to slicing up angels so they fit better on the heads of pins

i kid...

so "uk bass" really consists of a number of overlapping mini-scenes who coexist under one umbrella

Yeah the sort of insistence on aesthetic individuation feels really strong here, and is also more viable because of the tendency to play music from different genres, adjustments to the ingredients changing the feel. One common element is the insistence on an enunciated aesthetic in the first place, which carries over here as well.

There's one night here that is going for the aesthetic mix of Wifey - minus getting funkystepz to play though of course ;_; - for example.

To an outsider those nuances are prob. the equivalent of differences between the kind of audience for a Villalobos set and the kind of audience for a Superpitcher set.

One common element is the insistence on an enunciated aesthetic in the first place

idk - i think this is obv the case for night slugs (and a reason why they've succeeded), but even then it's almost more to do with the visuals and imagery than a lack of musical variation. the wifey vibe can differ enormously from one night where the guests are funkystepz to another where they get trc and burgaboy in.

(both night slugs and wifey began life as bassline house nights, which is prob important.)

No I meant the visuals etc too! Which Wifey has also. My sense is that this emphasis on aesthetic, on vibe which can't be reduced to the music being played, is necessary as a counterweight to the fact of the musical diversity of the DJ sets.

e.g. by comparison the most "straight" dubstep nights (the ones in a post-DMZ through to Benga and Distance and Skream mould) usually have a very limited aesthetic - a name referencing bass or heaviness, but that's it, otherwise the posters advertising the night will be basic black and white print, no pictures etc. Very much "does what it says on the tin". Which is true for drum & bass by and large also.

Or compare with trance nights, which sometimes will use "futuristic" (in an illustration and typeface on the front of a sci-fi novel sense) font and imagery in their posters but not in a way that would allow you to distinguish one night from another.

vibe which can't be reduced to the music being played, is necessary as a counterweight to the fact of the musical diversity of the DJ sets.

yes this is exactly it. i don't think wifey has it to anything like the extent NS does though (though obv wifey isn't a label). when i interviewed kingdom last year (and even this answer feels a bit out of date now - it was 10 months ago) he said:

“Bok Bok and I were talking about this just now – we haven’t put our fingers on it yet, but there’s this sound aesthetic that’s unspoken but seems to be shared by a group of people; and it’s not closed off enough that you can make a good name for it. Some of us did a Ustream two nights ago – it was Ikonika, Jam City, Girl Unit, Bok Bok, Manara and myself – and though we were all playing different records from different genres, there was still something indescribable about the sound we were doing. I guess it’s open-minded global club bass music with a hint of oddness, and a sense of restraint while still being pretty wild? Oh God, that’s like the worst description ever.”

(he also said that when he's djing he's aiming for "this big, female epiphany moment, you know? I want there to be a fucking booty club moment", lol - OBV going for ~smart~ and ~nerdy~ boys there)

The question at the heart of these different approaches is "how do I create allegiance?" One way is to create allegiance to a specific sound, which is fine if you're a relatively purist club night . But if you've got a diverse, multi-genre sound which itself is liable to change, then you have to create a logic (or the sense of a logic) or sensibility underlying the music that the clubber/listener can identify with, that will make them trust you enough to put their ears and body under your charge on the regular notwithstanding that they're not certain what you're gonna play.

(he also said that when he's djing he's aiming for "this big, female epiphany moment, you know? I want there to be a fucking booty club moment", lol - OBV going for ~smart~ and ~nerdy~ boys there)

I think one of the reasons that these debates can get more heated and confused than they need to be is that we're all (unwittingly at times) operating with these largely uninterrogated notions of the nerdy boy or chin stroker or etc.

Typically, actual nerdy boys don't tend to go to clubs in the first place! And I think "chinstroker" cuts across most sounds and scenes, and can always be contrasted with the full-fledged participant actually getting down to whatever's playing on the dancefloor. To be clear, even when dubstep was not very danceable it wasn't dominated by chinstrokers, more weedsmokers.

At most we can maybe talk about certain types of clubbers being somewhat self-conscious wrt the "fucking booty club moment" - the fact that Kingdom is saying this is what he's going for, for example. I don't think this is ironic at all (let alone a bad thing) - I said this re Classixx dj sets:

"until the sound is so ridiculously utopian that half the fun of being on the dancefloor is simply acknowledging that you're all participating in a somewhat cheesy reenactment of drug-enhanced bonding (which makes them sort of like the Moonbootica to Aeroplane's Get Physical)."

in my opinion, Classixx : "e" music :: Kingdom : booty music

"self-conscious" not in terms of being embarrassed, more "self-aware"? More "this is like a booty club moment", rather than that be something that you have without thinking about it.

I'm always v. self-aware in that sense.

possibly it's a dj's job to be self-aware like that? they are self-aware so we don't have to be.

To be clear, even when dubstep was not very danceable it wasn't dominated by chinstrokers, more weedsmokers.

secret reason that dubstep died (ie dubstep itself got grosser and lairier, appealing to a more commercial crowd, while post-dubstep splintered off and went down its various avenues) = smoking ban.

I'd believe that!

possibly it's a dj's job to be self-aware like that? they are self-aware so we don't have to be.

this is true, but I think audiences can be self-aware as well. Like, that Henrik Schwarz edit of MJ I youtubed in the Schwarz thread - there is amongst the audience an element of self-awareness about that stylistic negotiation as well as in Schwarz's own head, half of the enjoyment is the frission of going to see Schwarz and getting MJ, but MJ filtered through a Schwarz sonic sensibility.

There is no entirely un-self-aware audience, there is no "noble savage" listener, but I think the more purist or the more de-aestheticised a listening context (so, like, a single genre dj set, or conversely a dj who is playing "commercial dance hits" to people who dance to that stuff regularly) the less prominent or noticeable the self-awareness becomes, because there is less of a sense of a stylistic negotiation at work. Conversely, any kind of stylistically diverse DJ set - esp. if it's promoting an underlying sensibility - will enhance

Of course at the very extreme end of self-awareness you get, say, a DJ/Rupture set, where part of the intention seems to be reminding you that the music you're listening to is not organically yours, or a Night Ripper album, where the music itself is deprived of its organic self-image.

I think in a desire to distinguish ourselves from that kind of thing we can sometimes tend to overstate the unselfconsciousness of our own dancing experiences, in the same way that in a desire to reject the label "ironic enjoyment" we might over-emphasise the absolute dumb earnestness of our enjoyment. This is an issue I've been thinking about a lot over the past 5 years or so, and I've retreated substantially from the position I used to take of rejecting wholesale ideas of ironic enjoyment et al.

would say that i'm a bit (only a bit) irked by how ILM can love 'Wut' so much more than the Not Annoying stuff Hud Mo did in 09 especially Overnight and FUSE.

but then i never started threads about or hyped those tunes particularly so nm

Tim and lex- Loving this exchange between you two.

And lex that Kingdom interview is <3<3<3. Was great to re-read it just now.

Yeah there isn't much of a diference between those hudmo bits and wut. I've heard rooms full of people sing the melody to fuse its even a little less clumsy than wut its got a bit of a groove going and it doesn't outstay its welcome. I really like both btw. Its prob just a case of timing I think people where more ready for wut to drop plus it had a good load of weight behind it with press and all that, half the people that heard wut prob never heard fuse.