Kelley Polar - Love Songs of The Hanging Gardens (Environ CD05)

hahahahahaha...and i thought i was an arrogant asshole! First of all, I like Kelley Polar because I was working in a record store when the first Metro Area 12"s started coming out. I had been playing Morgan Geist's "I Want You" since 97?ish and was already a convert to his skills. When I saw the KPQ record come in, I picked it up and loved it. The sound on that record is undeniably "House". I like Kelley Polar because his music SOUNDS GOOD, and that's enough for me. Second, who the fuck are you to say anyone likes anything for the "wrong reasons"? If they like it, they like it, regardless of their reasons. You are in the minority here thinking that Kelley Polar is IDM. I think that's your point, though. You want to be edgy and unique in your opinions, i assume to try to carve out some space in the bloated critic circle jerk.

So, your highness, what are the "right reasons" to like Kelley Polar? I bet Mike (Kelley) would like to know too.

I guess if you can't support your theory with specific tracks from KP that are IDM, then this argument is pointless. Go ahead and post a segment of a KP track that sounds like IDM. I'm willing to listen to your reasoning.

cos i like the packaging, cos i saw a photo of someone involved who looked cute, cos i read in a magazine that that genre was cool, cos someone wrote a really ewnthusiastic review on a blog that got me hyped. etc etc

i think what that says about me is that i am a bit of a knob, but not really any more of one than anyone else.

i havent heard this, but the other kelley polar stuff on 12" always sounded like lush symphonic....disco-house. this is obviously wrong, but for some reason, this thought will perturb not one jolt throughout the whole time i buy or listen to the record.

oh, i agree entirely. sorry about the unfortunate phrasing.

frankly, biz, i am not particularly interested in why YOU like KP, at all. you are free to like kelley polar for whatever reasons you want, and that's cool with me, because i like kelley polar, too.

i am more interested in what the public critical response is going to be - and i think i have a right to be, because that's what critics do - they put their reasons for liking or disliking things into the public record, for the rest of us to pick over and agree with or disagree with.

(if you want to ask who i am to judge other people's reasons for liking/disliking things then you can start calling every university humanities department and every newspaper and start calling for the resignation of all their art critics and lit critics and cultural critics, good luck)

when i say "wrong reasons", i guess i am interested in how the critical response (haven't read the pitchfork review yet, can't wait to) is going to pan out. i have a suspicion that a lot of reviews are going to make a big deal of the disco/pop elements, and make a big deal of KPQ's place in house / microhouse when really it's another record pushing the same IDM buttons as the junior boys was a year or so ago.

if my suspicion doesn't pan out, well, then i'll look like a jerk and you won't have any reason to get all het up under the collar.

i don't know? i'm not trying to be normative or anything here - i'm just wondering what it means - how people end up w/ larry levan CDs instead of chic CDs. why don't people start w/ the canon? should we resist the formation of an alternative snob-disco canon? of an alternative snob-house / snob-techno / snob-electronica canon? didn't we already fight this battle years and years ago with "intelligent jungle", and is microhouse just "intelligent jungle pt 2" or not?

i'm not sure why the question offends so much.

also dan, i gotta disagree w/ you about placing the KPQ and sylvester on the same plane. it just wouldn't work for 95% of the populace (or more). you are just saying KPQ = disco (when most people would probably say something like "this sounds like soundtrack music ... you know, like for a videogame or movie or something ... is this like orbital?") because you understand KPQ's specific place in the continuum/flux of the evolution of house music / electronic music and not because of any sort of really strong formal similarities.

The SPIN Alternative Record Guide was my bible for a couple of years, which means I heard a Captain Beefheart album long before I heard a Led Zeppelin album. Led Zep not being in the book mistakenly indicated to me that they weren't that interesting.

I think everyone should give the canon a try, if they like a specific genre. But for some people, perhaps these pitchfork readers, what they like about Arthur Russell is his qualities that are divergent from the more mainstream disco. It sounds like you want to berate someone for liking "Let's Go Swimming" but not "YMCA".

But there's already a well formulated alternative disco canon, at least as of the release of Disco Not Disco.

The Sylvester comparison isn't specific to disco in general, but that song in particular, a meloncholy electronic disco song that is more of a late night ballad then a dancefloor stormer. And I think there are very strong formal similarities, if you don't know that song, check it out.

-- Ronan

Ha - it's like, how many books does he has to be the focus of until he gets there?

But then, I guess it gets back to "Disco as a widespread mainstream pop phenomenon" vs. "Disco as a precursor to later developements in underground dance music."

yes! except what i wonder is: how divergent is arthur russell really? is there more melancholy in "let's go swimming" than in "i will survive"? is "kiss me again" more minimalist-psychedelic-dub-freaky than (the temptations) "papa was a rolling stone"? more hermetic?

i have been browsing meltzer's "aesthetics of rock" lately and am wondering when the companion volume for disco/rap/house will be written.

anyway i want to ask the similar questions about kelley polar.

the very definition of "INTELLIGENT" music?!?!

i guess what is fascinating about kelley polar is that it plays w/ genre in an unexpected direction - instead of the usual IDM tricks (electro w/ references to musique concrete, jungle w/ references to gabba + grindcore) we have this sort of mid-tempo electronic album (the reference to PLAID upthread was spot-on) that references disco in the way autechre integrates influences like xenakis or zoviet france, or arthur russell integrates terry riley - i guess a corollary to what i am saying is that this is different in the way that early jungle artists incorporated ragga and the way deep house artists incorporate gospel + jazz music.

i think i agree with this. but for some reason it doesn't seem interesting to me. i feel like he got there by doing a relief of what's already been done when you can't always turn things around. there's a reason why you can pull genres together in certain ways. he's using stuff as a base when they don't have the appropriate qualities for that. he could do it, but he doesn't know how tweek it or relate it. the effect is stuff its not transformed, just misplaced and you can feel exactly where it should be. everything about this feels miscalculated to me. and i feel like i can tell what he's going for, but maybe I just don't get it or it is truly novel and gotta get used to it.

my favorite tracks (maybe revealingly) are the least "dancey" - i think if one song on this album is truly exceptional, it's "matter into energy". i like the way the drums in the first third sound like sensitive jazz-drummer comping, suddenly, when the keyboard trills show up at 1:20, the drums resolve themselves into this widely-spaced electro smurf, same thing happens at around 2:45, where the song really really begins to sound like incunabala-era autechre, except w/ romo references.

I'm not really sure what liking an IDM album (KP quintet) for the wrong reasons (thinking it's disco-house) says about the listener or kelley polar,

jeez, i don't know why you've been wrongly accused?

you're talking about "mood" and I'm talking about sound. I Will Survive is a wonderful and heartfealt song, and great fun to dance to. Let's Go Swimming is a total mind-fuck of a production. The fact that these both come from something called "disco" goes a great distance to showing the breadth of "disco", but I couldn't imagine two more dissimilar songs.

Let's agree to disagree and bask in our co-love for this album.

Who has the Morgan Geist Re-Edit from the Love In..Promo 12"? Please, for the love of god, YSI that bitch.

I think this thread's sort've undervaluing stuff like SINGING and LYRICS and and and

tho I dunno, maybe people should start talking about luomo again. I'm the present, the true lover . . .

1) neuromantic! (ha ha yes of course I'd say this); and

2) late-period 4 Hero

I think if you combine the two you're given the precise latitudinal and longitudinal co-ordinates for this album (including the Plaid resonance, which is like an unacknowledged genetic stain on both sides, like a scoundrel whom both your great-grandmothers had an affair with).

Tim's 4 hero comparison is a good one, especially on "Cosmological Constancy".

I realize that this adds nothing to the discussion about how this album should be classified, but I feel the need to register how bonkers I am going over this album.

Cred Disco
----------
Giorgio Moroder
Chic
Larry Levan
Donna Summer
some Soul Jazz comp...

Pop/Mainstream-to-cheese Disco
------------------------------
Saturday Night Fever OST
Boney M

Leftfield/Rediscovered Disco (& Italo-Disco)
--------------------------------------------
Disco-not-Disco compilations
Arthur Russell (rereleases)
I-f - Mixed Up In The Hauge
Morgan Geist - Unclassics

Tim, there's absolutely a disco canon, but nobody talkes about "albums". Sure there were great disco albums, but that was never the point. Hell, I'd say many disco canon albums are just compilations anyway.

re: fandango's list...

I'd say Unclassics is absolutely anti-canon. That was the whole point. Songs that never made it, that weren't necessarily hits, either big hits in the 80s or retro hits today so much.

Because I think these issues - which records to buy, where to start - are the reasons that fewer people check out the canon w/ a genre like disco.

That was probably the question I was answering (in a roundabout way) :)

http://disco-disco.com/
http://www.discomuseum.com/

But you have to think about the way people think about disco as well, how much of it is based on the label, and therefore I come back to what I said about compilations. And I'm not talking about recent compilations, but even of the moment stuff from Salsoul or Prelude, "special full length versions for DJs" double LPs are pretty standard fare.

An album like this might give you a lot of hits, but how many people would think that it represents a "canon?" "Canon" connotes that the music has a general critical approval and I don't know as that many people would associate a mainstream disco hits comp with this.

These are ubiquitous comps with massive critical approval. I'm sorry Tim, maybe I don't get at what you're getting at. I mean, here's a weird analogy...which is more "canon", the Count Five or Music Machine's LPs or their hit singles as compiled on (and "canonnized" by) Nuggets?

If anyone asked me about the disco canon, I wouldn't suggest the Phreak LP or a Change LP or something, but send them to any of the many defining compilations, as mentioned above some vintage, and some new.

when did disco ever have general critical approval?