WHO IS REX THE DOG? (ideas, NOW)

Here's a tune released by Moby in '94 that Tim has yet to hear I suppose :
http://www.discogs.com/image/R-20506-004.gif
(that's Horses by Voodoo Child on NovaMute)

(yesyes i know it's jx, i'm doing a funny)

Mike Jones, obv.

pictures NOW!

Woo, eee! Just putting the finishing touches to our remix of 'Marblehouse' by The Knife. The new album by The Knife 'Silent Shout' is another triumph of synthesizer, melody and words. The Knife are the leaders and if you get one album this year, this is it. (Until we release ours, then you could please get that instead...)

maybe it is paul oakenfold.

Ties in with a thread I never started about decline of British dance music/producers, climate change and usurping by Germany etc.

hmm, i dunno, i think 'i look into mid-air' still stands up really really well. 'frequency' isn't so much dated as...v v closely associated with the time it came out cos it was played so much, rather like 'rocker'. i don't know if my problem with the royksopp rmx is that it's dated so much as just...boring.

i think barima may be right about the knife rmx.

basically i favour his maximalist approach, and in the face of so much intricate minimalism dogging (ha) dance production elsewhere, he stands out. as usual 'dated' is a given (see also 'Rocker' as Lex says). but i'm not bored of the 'Heartbeats' remix because i haven't heard it much lately (but then i'm not bored of the original mix either - song of the decade!).

MFA and Fake would be up there too re Brit producers of course. if there's a point where Rex's style correlates a little with MFA's maybe it's that 'ravey' aspect of 'Rinse Time'. But I think Rex could do something more like 'Mandarin Girl' and would LOVE to hear that.

Is Pete Heller still making tunes? After that thread where Ronan went mad for Mayer playing 'Sputnik' he could do v well!

And again I wonder where Medicine 8 are (for that true RETRO 2002 techpophaus sound). Maybe I should google them right now and find out.

I dispute you need to particularly dense or multilayered to be textually interesting though.

Then don't bring it up at all - it's made you look like a backpedaller. No one actually said anything for you to dispute on this point anyway, tho' I find multilayering does so much for me - to stay on topic, Rex gets so much out of the Mylo mix by using so many passages and a palette of sounds that repeat listening is guaranteed simply because he doesn't bash most of the ideas into the ground in the first 2 minutes and repeat them for the next 5.

I personally feel the handful of sounds approach can only be done right by a select few. Rex's Prodigy remix does it well. The Micronauts were pretty good at it. Cagedbaby's (second) Van Helden remix is also a good example and I'd be remiss if I didn't compliment the early Get Physical releases for doing this excellently, but I'd be hard pressed to say it's any better than multilayering because so the returns are too inconsistent. I think Stevem's mindset appears similar to mine in this regard.

Ewan & Al are pretty high in my top producers list even though they get together about once a year and are Scottish. Probably a little too black-sounding for the current electro scene too ;-).

I quite like the Rex the Dog remix of Royksopp but I don't think he's a very good producer really, I liked the original well enough that I think the vocal is a fairly key component in it anyway.

Also there are tons of maximalist producers that are far more prolific and at this point probably more popular than Rex the Dog, whatever your opinion of them, the point being "minimal" dominance is not utterly outright, even if the lines between minimal and electrohouse are a little blurry occasionally; Huntemann, John Dahlback, Tomas Andersson, Tekel, Black Strobe, Lutzenkirchen, Boys Noize, the MFA (definitely not minimal, unless minimal is being used to mean "dance music I don't like", as is so often the case) Duoteque, Linus Loves, Williams, Tiga.

For the record I think pretty much every single one of the above is better than Jake Williams whose brief stint in the sun is pretty much over even if the Royksopp mix gives him a tiny shot in the arm..... and I don't even like John Dahlback!

I wasn't referring to solo Pearson, but I guess I should stop referring to Carl Cox as Ewan Pearson from now on...

Suck on this Rex fans (and Jacques fans), about as good as pop electrohouse gets I think....

http://s56.yousendit.com/d.aspx?
id=1VER2N1GF42Y322VD91Q2JY7NY

in this list only MFA are British right? i'm still amazed that they ARE British!

i can't actually fault Rex as a producer, other than understandably prone to formula (like so many inc. JLC) and not really fitting in with the continental trend(s), in that there are things about that i would love to see co-opted with whatever passes for a British take on electrohouse if that's even workable as a concept.

Ronan why are you being so anti-Pearson anyway? Only six months ago you were saying he buys all the same records as you!

I was going to put together some sort of rambling thesis about being more into that hinterland where electrohouse and minimal house meet these days - Eulberg, Gabriel Ananda and friends, rather than the full-on pop electrohouse. But then that track Ronan linked to PWNED MY ENTIRE WORLD and made me realise I was wrong.

Also on a completely unrelated tangent I think a lot of people are put off unnecessarily by the term 'minimal'. So much plip-plop isn't actually minimal in the slightest - something like Swat Squad's Monsterism is actually really complex and involving. And don't even get me started on the awesomeness of Ihre Personliche Glucksmelodie.

(Who are these bands from Japan you keep talking about anyway? And why do I get the feeling this might be a slightly different proposition here?)

i'm still intrigued by the fascination with minimal-complex now. when i say minimal these days i mean minimal-complex usually - this was basically the definition of microhouse anyway (Brits didn't seem to want to make that either), although a lot of what i heard really just seems sparse and monotonous without progressing much. that was what put me off, as i went in the other direction really (pop?).

Although it's probably unfair to pick on Herbert cos there's a litany of British producers who have the same stifled rubbish attitude, check any Freaks interview from when people actually cared about them, laden down with snobbery and attempts to stake a claim to whatever heritage is never theirs anyway. I guess these guys have a complex cos they'll never be from Berlin or Chicago or Detroit but still, it's a very real phenomenon, the snobby British producer/DJ!

still it's the vocals that really put me off. i haven't heard the original royksopp tune but i have a feeling it's awful.

The only snobbish thing he's said that I can remember is a complaint about Tiefschwarz-alike tracks and, well, he had a point there!

Maybe you don't really get this - it's never going to be pop in the way Rex The Dog or JLC are. And maybe it is monotonous, but isn't dance music *all about* throwing yourself into the monotony and waiting for the WOAH moment to smack you sideways?

But often, in order to like it/get it, I have to hear it as a current equivalent to old dance tracks that WERE pop and even hits. Hence 'Mandarin Girl' becomes like an '05 'Pacific State', or 'Gazebo' or 'I Feel Space' an '06 'Energy Flash' or 'Amphetamine' because of that sinister aspect (but minus techno hardness, and obv. empthasis on 'texture' rather than just 'mad sounds' - which does seem like the only step forward). Maybe it's not a good comparison and perhaps tired to even mention age-old anthems, but they do seem to have that same spirit about them, just approaching it in a different way, because they HAVE to surely. It's been a while since you can impress people by sound alone (think dance ran with this as long as it could which was a pretty long time it turned out), in recent years it must be more about what's done with the sounds.

So Rex won't impress so much because the production lacks this 'sophistication' comparatively, but it's still damn fine entertainment. Argument reminds me a little of 'artcore vs junglism' or whatever - when DnB got more jazzy, melodic and sophisticated and you could still dance to it and it would often still awe you but others complained it had lost something or other too. Not that electrohouse is 'coffee-table' of course (not that I've ever had a big problem with that anyway), but I do get that feeling with some tracks - and this is crossing into the 'Gazebo' threads more now, as that's a track that to me seems both 'coffee-table' and clubby (but so were numerous late 90s DnB tracks, and also other genre tracks from this decade that I love that are big on melodic/textural richness albeit older e.g. Duplex 'Late Night Cycling').

Things have certainly developed anyway, and continue to. And that's good.