teengirl fantasy, miracles club, mi ami, 100% silk and the rise of HIPSTER HOUSE: S/D

one week!

yeah LA has a pretty vibrant scene. all the big cities do ime.

Saw Teengirl Fantasy over the weekend. They were good, some people danced.

there are parties up and down both american coasts with live djs throwing down live house music (of the erm purist sense or whatev) i cannot speak for the landlocked

yeah that statement about LA is just hella fucking RONG. LA and SF hold it down in a real (albeit different) way in terms of house music. with parties like Icee Hot, Tormenta Tropical, Donuts, and tons of others, SF has been pretty rad the past few years, even with the weird pseudo-functioning [kontrol] stuff slinking into the background.

in sf it seems to now be all about No Way Back, every time i see the lineup it makes me v v sad that i moved away

No Way Back has had some great guests. But I should mention, lots of folks enjoy themselves at 2 Men Will Move You, too... next one nov. 12! http://2menwillmoveyou.tumblr.com

sorry, had to do it ;)

I thought the LWE interview was interesting -- I appreciate the fact that there's a seriousness to what they're doing. But mainly I was struck by how far removed Brown seems to be from any kind of dance-music culture whatsoever. Which is fine -- just odd. Statements like this I found just bizarre:

"Because as you know, or you may not know, the dance world is very strict and very cut off. It’s much like the hip-hop, rap world; there’s a strain of people making that kind of music and they want to be famous. They want to be rich, and they don’t want to go through the underground channels, which makes total sense to me."

I realize that the indie/noise/rock world can be kind of cloistered, but still, to make a sweeping claim like that in 2011 seems really strange to me. Like, maybe she needs to get out more, or, you know, read LWE and RA.

Yeah, I guess what strikes me as odd about a "we exist in opposition to mainstream dance music culture" stance is that so much dance music already self-defines in those terms.

It's like some jazz musician saying "we want to make rock that's not like Nickelback."

Simon Reynolds uttered the phrase "hipster house" yesterday.

GAME OVER

http://pitchfork-cdn.s3.amazonaws.com/content/Teengirl-Fantasy.gif

xpost.
ya, he's been reading this thread for a while. this was posted already
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2011/10/house-arrested-odd-upshot-of-emergence.html

reynolds otm here -

that ethos was always particularly strong in Britain, and indeed one the things that turned me off house for much of the 90s... the fidelity, the purism .... and above all the epigonic narrative of decline that everyone who gets into this music, at whatever point in the timeline, seems to buy into... the location of "Better Days" in the rear-view mirror, rather than just around the corner

"the dance world is very strict and very cut off."

What's most baffling is how oblivious she is to how quickly they've been accepted by the dance world. Interviewed by LWE, covered by Resident Advisor & promoted by Phonica - most new, connected dance labels would kill for that acceptance.

That Reynolds para on house just strikes me as 'Reynolds renders irrelevant anything he doesn't know much or care about pt. 3485'.

I think sr really likes 100% silk actually.

I think it's more house as a concept he's been wringing his hands over for some ten years.

In my day they used to be forward-looking...

Ten years? Even when you add some it's out by some years and then some.

Xpost Well sure that's the underlying point, but as a matter of practicality sr seems to object less to past-mining by either underground indie hipsters on the one hand or will.i.am on the other.

No sr was very enthusiastic about house circa 1998 / 1999.

and indeed one the things that turned me off house for much of the 90s... the fidelity, the purism .... and above all the...

...four on the floor kick and offset open hi hats

Very enthusiastic is a bit strong. For a couple of seconds he admired Green Velvet and some early micro-house pups. Later he would admit Villalobos was kinda interesting, but would never achieve popular club success and therefore lacked that certain frisson he was looking for. Now he's deigning to sniff at 100% Silk. Some acts yes, House as a concept - not since 88.

It's been a while since I read Blissed Out (the collection of early essays), but I seem to remember the piece on house in there being this confused analysis of stuff like Phuture, Lil' Louis and DJ Pierre through a post-punk (NME) theory-nerd framework (as was the style at the time). In some ways, SR admiring a perceived post-humanist/post-soul aesthetic in Chicago house, on the other hand, being dismissive of the genre in part as conceptually lacking (iir). Really a massive jump then to Gen X where dance music at large is theorized as a medium coded as embodiment, drugs, enthusiasm, vibe, 'the massive', etc.

Yeah in the beginning of Gen X he cringes at his early treatment of dance music.

Jedmond I was thinking more of when he was really into Basement Jaxx and Body & Soul.

oh my boys as an animated GIF!! fuck yeah. it just makes me want to fucking hang out with them RIGHT NOW.

i've never been to Two Men Will Move You, but i think that's because...wait, did Alexis used to have something to do with it? i really *like* Alexis in an inter-personal way, but the way she promotes herself makes me absolutely ill, for some reason. that said, Primo is a fucking amazing man who has let me into his parties for free when i've been very very broke, so perhaps i should just check it the fuck out.

2 Men Will Move you has been called "house music for people who don't like house music," so I guess that makes us a "hipster house" night?? I did play the Magic Touch 12" last time around.

We love Alexis, but 2 Men is just Primo and myself. Viv from High Fantasy and VinSol will be guest DJ tomorrow night. I'll be back Nov. 12. </spam>

SR is right about lots of things, obv those UK soulboys are all utter dickheads, but behind it all he's never really got house has he? like he simply doesn't like it...it's not about the negative backward looking side of it, he doesn't actually like the essence of house itself.

which essence of house is that, i tend to get that different people have different views on it

not sure that really invalidates the point but sure, there is no set in stone definition of house but you could use that argument to ridicule anyone saying anything whatsoever.

wasn't trying to invalidate the point, just wanted to which essenceof house you were referring to

*know which

i think people are arguing - and i agree - that SR did not and continues to not 'get' any house before rave and hardcore came along, i think even he himself said something along these lines in one of the articles linked to upthread. and not that i am in a position to talk about THE ESSENCE OF HOUSE but you could say that pre-rave house is the essence of house in that it came first and directly influenced a lot of other strands of house that he does enjoy

and he definitely seems to be ridiculing most backward-looking or retro house that uses the pre-rave style as a template

Most people I know who are really into house strike me as total living-in-the-moment types, maybe it's easier to exaggerate the Pipecockian bores because they make a disproportionate amount of noise on the internet.

^^^^ An important point.

I think a lot of sr's baggage comes from defending hardcore when everyone in the dance media was joining the "back to house" movement circa 1992. That basic division still informs a lot of his thinking. I don't think it's a case of not "getting" house - his pieces on Body & Soul were basically celebrations of that utopian element Deej refers to upthread - so much as tending to use old arguments as blueprints for current circumstances.

Pretty much all critics (myself included) do this.

four on the floor vs breakbeats...it was a case of choose your battle lines, draw it in the sand and toe it.

Funnily enough hipster house, whatever that is, reminds me off HipHouse wayyy back in the day. Where the lines got blurred between house, breakbeat and hiphop. God how that shit fucked the purists off but damn could you dance to it...Just ask Betty Boo.

There's some fairly U&K diffs between Betty Boo and 100% Silk though! Probably a closer analogue would be early Saint Etienne.

There's some fairly U&K diffs between Betty Boo and 100% Silk though!

a 20 yr gap will do that, though i should qualify that i was only talking about the similarity in names...Hipster house and Hip house and have never heard of hipster house before this thread.

Though after all this time, i still figure if four on the floor kicks, the main sonic signifier of house, is all you got driving the back beat, they may as well not be there because all they're doing is acting as a metronome and a sync point for shit DJ's who can't beat mix anything else.

think that is the single most wrong thing i've ever read on ilm.

heh...yeah after all these years i can't believe i'm still toeing the breakbeat line.

four on the floor vs breakbeats...it was a case of choose your battle lines, draw it in the sand and toe it.

this sounds like a such a sad state to be in... where i grew up the more technical househeads (in terms of footwork) were also all big into breakbeat

Amanda Brown interview re: 100% Silk

http://nofearofpop.net/2011/11/feature-amanda-brown-100-silk/

virtually no one was talking about the resurrection of classic house music

I think this shows we're talking about a lot of different people coming from a bunch of different places. Or maybe that shows the boiling over point of classic house resurrection, something that people within dance music had been talking about for some time. It's hard to put a number on it but like, Frankie Knuckle's mixing Hercules in 2008 was the moment I thought classic house music resurrection became the topic of the moment.

It kind of depends "which" classic house doesn't it. You could probably make a claim for any year you wanted. There was a pretty huge adonis-style chicago revival circa 2004, for example. And then massive records like "The Sun Can't Compare" in 2006. But maybe "blind" was when the idea became apparent to people more divorced from dance currents.

this sounds like a such a sad state to be in...where i grew up

...it was junglists vs househeads and never the twain shall meet

There seemed to be a natural progression from the middle of the decade till now where disco revival gave way to house revival.

but there's always anomalies, I remember retro acid-house parties in NY in 2002 or whenever.

but I guess it's also about whether it comes from within modern threads of dance culture or without, or to what degree does it reach out.

i think the hipster house thing has more to do with classic house and/or techno becoming influential outside of dance culture tho, not sure this is even really catching in other areas of the dance music world outside of maybe john talabot playing a track in one of his sets (could be wrong about this tho, things change fast etc)