theo parrish s/d

TP doesn't come out that much. i want to see him too blunt!

ive seen tp once and he blew out the sound system at sonotheque, which has one of the best rigs (almost always poorly utilized) in the city

he plays so often in london, think he must have family here or something

blew out the sound system

this was a bad thing, btw

I need to go downstairs...SS 030 come hither.

from where i sit, calling house music utopian comes from feeling/experiencing the music, not some need to insert a philosophy or to explain that feeling away. it is amazing to me how much language fails sometimes. but really this thread was so much better when everyone was enthusing about theo parrish.

it's a search and destroy, we're allowed to say bad things about theo as well. for example, "saga of resistance" was as hamfisted a sun ra tribute as any other.

I am going to be uncharacteristically blunt, even by my usual standards, because I feel confident saying that theo doesn't get sun range. sure, theo may "feel" sun range, but that's no big feat. after all, I'm sure kenny g "feels" john Coltrane, just as ronan might "feel" underground resistance and vanilla ice might "feel" public enemy. but i'm certain that just as a white man from Ireland cannot truly understand the soul of a black man from Detroit, so too cannot a black man from Detroit truly understand the egypto-Saturnian soul of a man like sun ra.

and this is theft. I hate it when people release a track that sounds like it was produced, mixed and pressed by a deaf sloth, on single-sided vinyl- then re-release it years later. talk about turning shit into gold/laughing all the way to the bank.

xpost LOL

in fact, seeing as my wife is Egyptian (unlike sun ra), and her father is from alexandria, and thus (unlike sun ra) a true pharoanic African, and I myself am (unlike sun ra) a real-life Ra, that is, a father of pharoahs, I call bullshit on sun ra.

"if someone tells me they love trance, i actually tend to think of them as an idiot and stop paying any attention to them."

-- the table is the table

but what about tiesto?!?!? and PvD?!?!? they are so groundbreaking!!!!!

You know, i realised, there is only James Pennington and Toni Iordache. Other music fills in the gaps. But i like the gaps too

house music is ... transmolecularized ...

house music is.....good!

Still not as bad as the Dissensus thread. Must try harder.

"and this is theft. I hate it when people release a track that sounds like it was produced, mixed and pressed by a deaf sloth, on single-sided vinyl- then re-release it years later. talk about turning shit into gold/laughing all the way to the bank.

xpost LOL

-- blunt"

you must be nuts, that track is the jam.

it must be - theo parrish released it!

"it must be - theo parrish released it!

-- deej"

he has released a few stinkers: "Dreamer's Blue (Acid Guitar Version)", "Walking Thru The Sky (Liberation Mix)" (both with the same guy on guitar, maybe it is his fault??), and a few of the tracks on the Rotating Assembly album. really, i wish more people were as consistent as him, and as willing to try different ideas.

Do u guys like the Heath Brothers?

no really and it's the same with "When The Morning Comes", except that's a jam and I'll take the time to try and get the sound system to spout something that makes sense to dancers on this one.

i have found that the more fucked up the Theo record sounds, the better the dancefloor reaction. 1987 EP crushes it, as does WTMC and TMATWB.

or Let My Children Hear Music?

^ serious music:D

"if being confrontational isn't the way to go, what is? people are not committed to this music enough to go out of their way to learn about it on their own. the only way is for people to break through the deafening roar of the newest hype, and that doesn't happen by playing nice."

Clearly the only solution to this 'problem' is forceful, obnoxiously holier-than-thou indoctrination.

house is a feeling

of superiority

Clearly the only solution to this 'problem' is forceful, obnoxiously holier-than-thou indoctrination.

-- glynsync,

exactly. i can't stand that kind of attitude.

arguing on messageboards is saving the universe from shame

nothing in the world is better than a great night and a great floor, and imo, the music is only responsible for switching it from great to 'uhhh' when something just stinks up the fucking room. these things are usually mash-ups.

i don't know a lot about dance music or techno or house. trance is kind of too fast for me. i could probably 'get' it and enjoy it though. i love disco, pretty much all of it i hear: "underground," "cheesy/gay," "mainstream." i honestly haven't heard any theo parrish, sorry. :( the few revival disco nights i've been to in l.a. have been fun but a little hit-or-miss: too reserved/cool, too many clumsy beardos, (too much like pipecock ha!) that is until everyone gets drunk enough and/or the floor becomes crowded enough that it's all off the hook.

house nights are the most fun though, even though i don't actively seek it out for 'listening time.' that's my loss. i don't know what kind of house they usually play, but it's fun as hell to dance to, and the floor is racially mixed, which is a breath of fresh air (i probably go to all the wrong clubs).

all of this is totally off-topic, sorry.

house is a feeling

-- haitch, Friday, July 18, 2008 1:09 AM

of superiority

-- haitch, Friday, July 18, 2008 1:09 AM

i LOL'd for real

i have found that the more fucked up the Theo record sounds, the better the dancefloor reaction. 1987 EP crushes it

Agreed, I love that record. I also love the fact that he made it on his uncle's casio keyboard and a kawai drum machine when he was 14. The best part is that the distortion comes from a short in the wire that he jiggled when he wanted the sound to change. That is fucking brilliant.

I am loving the ilx hand wringing the last few days. I check in once or twice a day with a bucket of popcorn and some jujubes to see what happened. It's better than the movies.

blunt, can i borrow "deaf sloth" as the name for a record label? it's too good to let evaporate. :)

listening to the new theo mix on rbma that he did for sonar and its weird. he mixes james brown into savage project and then gets into post-punk disco and then latin music ??? i have not been to witness to theo's sets but is he usually that eclectic ? i hate that term but you know what i mean.

yes, sometimes

check it: http://www.allphon.com/tracklisting/theo.php

wow, that's a wealth of knowledge right there. thanks for that link. i need to catch up on this guy's sets, the tracklistings look great.

it's not as nice as the old twoplayer theo shrine (RIP) but it'll do in a pinch

IIRC you can look at twoplayer.net and forcefield (amazing arnold) on the internet archive but the formatting never looks quite right.

"yes, sometimes

-- moonship journey to baja"

when he is at his best, IMO. some of his more "house" sets are very nice as well, but he can string together some wildly divergent records better than just about anybody out there that i can think of.

this is up for debate but i always think of "these days & times" 1 and 2, listened to back-to-back, as the quintessential theo mix.

if you want a straight house set "contemporhythms" is great. i think i mentioned it upthread, maybe?

"this is up for debate but i always think of "these days & times" 1 and 2, listened to back-to-back, as the quintessential theo mix."

that is a good one. "eclectic aesthetic" is another great 2 parter, along with the "live @ demf" ones.

"if you want a straight house set "contemporhythms" is great. i think i mentioned it upthread, maybe?

-- moonship journey to baja"

what is funny to me about that mix is that is it probably one of the most straightforward house sets, but it still has a bunch of disco and jazz stuff in it. for another good mostly house one, his set with rick wilhite is pretty much classic.

I really dislike the casual hate directed towards gay clubbing on ILM.

Not every club has to have some musicologist-approved manifesto cum playlist. Sometimes it's really fucking nice to be at a club and not know the name of the anonymous diva house track playing, or "worse still" get down to a sped up gay house version of Sugababes' "About You Now" (this is choice, people who know, get on it). And not really care either way because you're busy trying to catch the eye of the really cute guy dancing five meters away who has a wicked shy smile.

Yeah, lots of gay clubbing involves clubbing for reasons that aren't strictly to do with a reflective pledge of allegiance to the black detroit continuum or even the greatness of Villalobos or whatever. Lots of gay clubbing is about cruising for sex, or taking drugs, or getting shitfaced with friends, or being able to sing and dance along to camp pop hits, or just to lose yourself in a crowd of likeminded people.

None of these things is a constant defining feature of what I look for when I want to go out and dance, and gay clubbing forms a minority (although still substantial) component of my clubbing. But I've clubbed for all of the above reasons at one stage or another (and some of them heaps and heaps of times); people who think they're illegitimate reasons distracting from a proper appreciation of quality music just have the wrong attitude towards social behaviour and really should stay in their bedrooms.

True, I could wish that gay clubbing was a bit more dynamic musically. The Freemasons have done a marvelous job this past two years but they've become a bit of a crutch for DJs. Something like Joey Negro's "Make A Move On Me" should be just a standard track in quality-terms rather than a stand-out. But then some of the most impressive nights out from a musical perspective have been at gay clubs: DJs who have a perfect ear for the just right mixture of schlock and cheese, or (conversely) DJs who have been keen to reconnect contemporary gay clubbing with some of the feel of Chicago house - though usually the result is closer to second wave (Green Velvet/Cajual/Radikal Fear) than first wave; or some of the finest (because sly and sexy) deep house and vocal garage nights i've been to. And one of the biggest dancefloor revelations I've had in the past few years was hearing the Freemasons remix of Beyonce's "Ring The Alarm" for the first time on New Years Eve at a rather unassuming gay bar.

Usually, the best dance music scenes are those where musical and non-musical factors converge, where people are too intent on having fun to become furrow-browed amateur musicologists, but the music is just too good for them not to take notice of it and want to follow where it's going. What we can call (for want of a better term) the German house continuum of this decade was great for as long as it was too restless and too populist to really care about questions of lineage, purity and manifestos. The reemergence of these questions in the past twelve months is to mind a direct consequence of the crisis of direction besetting the scene.

Undoubtedly no stern producer's manifesto could endorse something as silly (and brilliant) as the Freeform Reform mix of Freeform Five's "Strangest Things" - one of the best of 2004's run of preposterous electro-house anthems. A manifesto just wouldn't have made sense and wouldn't have been necessary at that point. But then, "Strangest Things" is much closer to gay club music than anything that'd usually get talked about on this thread. Ironically, Ewan Manifesto Pearson's greatest achievement remains his most gay club moment - his remix of Freeform Five's "Perspex Sex", a record that has more in common with Mousse T than it does with the Belleville Three.

All of which is why I have rather fashionably shifted my allegiance to UK funky house this year - a music that has and needs no manifesto; a music that is undoubtedly enjoyed by most of its audience as just great club music to soundtrack their drinking, partying, drug-taking and cruising (albeit of a straight variety); but also a music that is so good that it's impossible not to drop everything in a frenzied search for the identity of that one great track.

people who think ... just have the wrong attitude towards social behaviour and really should stay in their bedrooms

tim i agree with you 100% on that post but you have to remember this is the internet

"Lots of gay clubbing is about cruising for sex, or taking drugs, or getting shitfaced with friends, or being able to sing and dance along to camp pop hits, or just to lose yourself in a crowd of likeminded people.

-- Tim F"

good for it, i care as much about that as i do straight clubs based on the same principles: not at all. there are an innumerable number of clubs of all types that play terrible music to people who don't give a shit, they are are equally worthless.

on what criteria

"tim i agree with you 100% on that post but you have to remember this is the internet"

Yes, well, if I had to make one criticism of Phil's Pitchfork column, it would be that it appears to take at face value what people on the internet say about dance music culture (although Phil avoids endorsing the notion that ILM's current handwringing is justified).

But re pipecock's most recent post, I agree with Ronan on this general point: a dance music crit discourse that defines 90% of how people actually use and engage with dance music as "worthless" is ultimately a self-hating discourse, basically trying to destroy dance music qua dance music. I.e. it's rockist in the mark s sense of the work "rockist" (the ideas about music it pushes ultimately undermining everything good about the music it purportedly seeks to defend).

Wine tasting doesn't derive it's legitimacy from outright dismissing the worth of every person who goes to the pub after work. I'm not sure why techno-tasting requires such a last-canon-standing fortress mentality.

This is not to say that the public is always right, or that the populist move is always the correct one, or that elitist attitudes are by definition incorrect. But I do believe that any kind of useful aesthetic position has to be engaged in some sort of critical dialogue with populism, even if it's a strained, convoluted or tenuous dialogue. The public isn't always right (if only because the public is always in contradiction with itself, often many times over) but they're always onto something, even if they have difficulty articulating what that is.

I can't agree with people who would choose to devote themselves to (say) Kitsune over Liebe*Detail or Planet E (to leave people's continental preferences aside), but I recognise that they're onto something when they feel some connection to a scene which still notionally believes in fun and pop hooks (the problem with Kitsune stuff is more in the execution than the idea: rather than fun and pop hooks you get "fun" and "pop hooks". They get it right more often than they appear to from the outside though). It's not coincidental that this scene really began to gather steam in 2006, just as the drive towards tastefulness kicked into gear again in house and techno.

Outright dismissing the decisions of entire audiences and scenes means you miss out on the phronesis (practical wisdom) that any scene can impart at least in small portions. I could never identify as a gay clubber but I think the insight that gay clubbing has given me is pretty invaluable, and it ultimately changes the way I approach all dance music.

By the way, I reckon the San Sebastian Planet E 12 inch is pretty fabulous - one of my favourite dance tracks of the year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el_LVfoDC-I

sadly, this is even more absurd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJJTVcSEp-s

Tim F for president

ha ha that is awesome. i would totally hang out with tiesto. he reminds me of a really smarmy grad student i know who is apparently like america's greatest kant expert under 30 or something like that.