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

i dont know how to be alive on the internet or feel things except to frame them or say by pointing or imagining

sounds deep but what does it mean

a lot of people I know use frame when they wan to say "say"

why would you be surprised?

being eclectic has been a thing with hipsters since the 1920s

also if you think things are more eclectic now maybe it's because dance pop rap and rock largely sound much more similar now than in the 80s

also you're all free to say as much non-falsifiable stuff as you want but i hope you don't begrudge me if i point it out as such

seems to me the argument runs like this

a. i know a lot of people that listen to kanye, daft punk and best coast!

b. the Internet was invented when they were born.

QED

hm, yeah there has always been eclecticism with cosmopolitan arty types, but I still think it's much more blatantly wide-ranging now. maybe that's an illusion as old new material becomes more familiar, thus the new sources drawn from always seem more remote and unlikely, but I don't think it's just that... going to have to consider that one a bit. :/

still think you're way off on this, and a lot of it is on experience, but still. you're more likely to find a metal fan that's willing to also listen to rap or indie (or an indie kid that likes dance or hip hop, etc) than you used to. there were eclectic hippies, or postpunkers, or whatever, but they were the exception whereas it's the rule now

really?

i remember in the liner notes to pearl jam's first album they were sitting on a couch in front of a huge ICE CUBE wall hanging, anthrax working with public enemy, etc.

i think the internet had been invented by then, though.

sounds deep but what does it mean

it means that everyone lives their lives btw the worlds that might be and the world that is along the lines of if

idk that a lot of times maybe all the time things just end up refracted and half-remembered amalgamations of other things like every track on the new ital record for you was a memory of some other track from somewhere else and that the ideas we have in our heads are just other ppls ideas that we picked up and polished, that we cant escape them but we can put a border made of those things around our own gloss or dream or fever

like idk whats the value in being mystic or purposefully vague when addressing the weight of cultural memory and the expectations of half-experiences except to allow you to be make inarticulate gestures at all of this...

also since you are here what is the name of the titan or leviathan that lives in the ocean that people of nessus are at war with? this is really bothering me...

when you say this stuff like "you're more likely to find ..." i also want to ask WHERE?

like you have this big sample set that you can pull from that isn't just your personal experience. i have a personal experience too, and it doesn't really square with a lot of what's being said on this thread, at least not in a way that you can point at and say OH THE INTERNET DID THAT

lamp i think you mean ABAIA, EREBUS, ARIOCH or SCYLLA though i'm not sure which

what i like about ital's "hive mind" is that it seems like a personal vision, not just a gloss or reflection of an absorbed cultural memory

why is this a dichotomy though? I think a lot of "personal visions" are basically a closs or reflection of an absorbed cultural memory, I'm not sure how I would go about distinguishing the two really. maybe the failing is with me.

it means that everyone lives their lives btw the worlds that might be and the world that is along the lines of if

and all that was, all that will be and all that is may yet fall under the shadow of h1psters.

holy fuck this thread

no tim, i agree, that's why i said a misreading, i'm not going to fall into auteur fallacy or something like that

also lamp i understand what you're saying, it's all a continuum, etc

but as a fan of electronic music, i know that when i put on the ital album i'm like "WTF is this" and even though i can come up w/ refractions and amalgamations ("chemical brothers remixed by mark e") of things i have heard it is still something i have never really heard before, because maybe it only existed in his head.

whereas steve moore, i see a track called MOORE/MAJEURE and yep, it sounds like tangerine dream circa force majeure. i see an album under a photo of a yacht, and yep, it sounds like yacht rock. i see a photo that looks like the cover of an 80s sci-fi movie and yep, the track sounds like a john carpenter track, because what he's making is maybe a lot closer to something that is already out there.

this is what i was getting at w/r/t "personal vision" vs "cultural reference"

it seems to me that ital is doing a lot more amalgamating and refracting than someone like steve moore, who is basically just spitting back up the john carpenter / 80s scifi cheese vibe undigested

Oh okay that all makes sense.

I guess how I would tend to define this issue is that communities of taste maybe aren't as constraining as they used to be. This is about what you might call the social structure of taste rather than how open-minded people are (which I'm sceptical about trying to measure).

The fluidity of artist-identity on the web - where setting up an alter ego means making a second soundcloud page - means it's a lot easier to, say, set up a sideline in a second or even third genre, than when you had to work through labels and live venues and so on.

All of which comes down to the idea of investment, and whether our past habits of making a virtue of that necessity were a good thing or a bad thing. I suspect they were both really.

What I don't think changes - or at least doesn't necessarily change - is how interesting or unique or thoughtful or etc. the resulting musical product is. A half-hearted note for note tribute to one genre and a half-hearted mish-mash of various reference points are both half-hearted.

"making a virtue of necessity" sounds to me like a good way of thinking about the idea of "post-internet" whateverr

a lot of the artists were always pretty open-minded, late great, but I think fandom is more open-minded now. although you're bringing up plenty of good exceptions. and I mean, you could say babyboomers in the 60s were pretty eclectic in their influences: rock n roll, folk, blues, rnb, country, and then even moreso going into psychedelia and prog.

I generally go with the assumption that art will always be a product of the various forces around it, so of course the Net is going to play a large part in shaping what's out there now, and not just wrt eclecticism. but interpretting it all is def a matter of projecting a bit - resonant projections maybe, but not anything for which one could always pull up the satisfying evidence you would want. I don't like to approach art too rationally, interpretation is more a vaguely poetic extension of the larger something it's all a part of (that is, I don't have much faith in the rational as far as exploring art goes, I don't think you can be reductive about it)

lamp i think you mean ABAIA, EREBUS, ARIOCH or SCYLLA though i'm not sure which

scylla was the one i was thinking of - i cant really remember much about them but i knew their names were references to other things although i thought more obscured than that

and all that was, all that will be and all that is may yet fall under the shadow of h1psters.

that darkness @ noon

fwiw i think the primtive neural pathways release (now on cassette!) is really good, even as much as its a pastiche or 'unsophisticated' in the way that it lifts and winks. like i mean the actual songs are emotionally appealing to me, i like their 'vibe', the way they unfold as familiar bits unexperienced yesterdays

yeah i don't mean to be shitting all over this stuff, there is a lot of sweet eye candy on that steve moore tumblr and i own and enjoy the com truise album so what am i on my high horse for anyway

What I don't think changes - or at least doesn't necessarily change - is how interesting or unique or thoughtful or etc. the resulting musical product is. A half-hearted note for note tribute to one genre and a half-hearted mish-mash of various reference points are both half-hearted.

otm

new 100% silk joint, perhaps a bit undigested compared to ital but vibes for days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3QKWDPZTUU

sfv acid 12" probably my fave 100% silk thing after magic touch

Fort Romeau album is fantastic, a real step up in the sound quality stakes and more than capable of hammering a sound system

100 Percent Silk Goes Abroad: A Documentary

http://beta.indiegogo.com/silkdoc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKR17YYfDQ

new album out by Cuticle. i like the weirdness!

not really feeling the vocals though.

New Mi Ami album (Decade) is out on 100% Silk. Anyone heard it?

sorry, i'll answer just as soon as i've finished spending my entire life listening to dolphins into the future

I challenge one of you hipster house lovin' hipsters to make a POX or Spotify playlist of the good stuff, cuz I have a feeling there are some real bangers here but I can't find them

i wouldn't really know, but i wouldn't be surprised if hipster house is set up specifically in opposition to bangerism

well you're obviously not a tru hipster. banger = anything that's good. as in, "did you hear the new kindness album? it's chock full of bangers, mate"

(please please, don't take the thread *there*)

Fort Romeau did a mix for Mixmag the other week, nice ground but familiar tracks. They mention he was/is La Roux's tour drummer.

http://www.mixmag.net/music/mix-of-the-week/motw-fort-romeau

Needs more bangers imho.

Fort Romeau album is fantastic

amen

^ i have been listening to this fort romeau record constantly for months now, did not expect it to become one of my faves this year but dang

anyone check out the new mi ami thing yet?

i guess i need to give it a closer listen. my first impression of Fort Romeau was that it was pretty straightforward and not terribly unique stuff, but a few friends have been recommending it.

Anyone mention the Pharaohs EP on Silk yet? "Flutter & Moan" is great.

Love the Fort Romeau too, gorgeous background music in the best sense.

where did you get the record? i only have the mixes. haven't looked illegally.

http://soundcloud.com/stereogamous/light-asylum-stereogamous

Ooooohhhh. Light Asylum are sort of late 80s goth industrial pastiche with a heavy Grace Jones influence?

So yeah, catnip.

Stereogamous managed to make that even gayer.

And of course the only way to buy this is on a limited run 300 clear vinyl pressing.

Cool thread. I'm pretty late to this conversation, but I'll add a "few" thoughts:

The Ital interview where DM-M name-drops Glass and Riley and Reich is for me the “key” to “understanding” HH. I’ve always thought the “official” narrative of house’s composition (i.e. 90% disco/funk/electro + 10% Kraftwerk, as found in Generation Ecstasy, Wiki, every mainstream music publication) to be simplistic and reductive, and that minimalism (‘70’s variety), krautrock, industrial, punk, post-punk and psych were also important influences at the time (coincidence isn’t correlation, I know, but the aesthetic affinities between house and these other genres are just too damn numerous, and the cultural cross-pollination in the early ‘80’s was rampant). To the extent that HH music in general is openly brandishing these minimalist influences, and also to the extent that “proper” house itself originated from said influences (even if only second-hand via Kraftwerk), I think you can view HH as a sort of “revivalist”/”back-to-the-roots” movement, albeit a contentious (some would say “revisionist”) one. I think that this “argument” over the genre’s origins (and the subsequent implications for house’s “meaning”) is largely what’s driving the debate in this thread re: HH’s current “aesthetic place” relative to “mainstream” house. Many of the tracks linked to this thread are blatantly pushing the ‘70’s/stoner/psych/minimalist influences of Glass/Reich/etc., which explains why they’re mostly “droners” instead of “bangers”. This particular aesthetic embrace also reopens all of the classic fault lines in house: black/white, gay/straight, club bangers/armchair tracks, the joy and uplift of the vocals/the cold grind of the beat, and the mechanical, hypnotic repetition of the sounds, etc. Generally speaking, this thread is a testament to the "dislocation" that results when a previously “buried” influence in a genre is brought to the fore and featured prominently (i.e. HH musicians might also be embracing any number of the other “buried” influences that I mention above, and the conversation doesn’t change much if at all).

And I might even be “wrong” about the origins of house in a very literal, pre-Internet way, but the “kids” making HH had and continue to have all of the above ‘80’s underground influences laid out for them side-by-side on a platter via the ‘net. Any dots that weren’t explicitly connected in the first place can be joined so easily that, for all intents and purposes, they might as well have been from the very start. As mentioned upthread, HH obviously facilitates conversations about both house’s “DNA” and the contemporary dissemination of aesthetic information. I’ll just throw in that I “like” a number of these tracks, but generally agree that much of the HH above feels “hesitant” and “detached”, as opposed to driving and loud and exuberant, which is I think due to the shift in the music’s emphasis towards the more “subdued”, “theoretical” influences of minimalism (and possibly some of the other “buried” genres I mention.

/unhinged rambling

Seems reasonable.

Well, except of course for the weak link between electronic minimalism and house.

There's maybe another explanation which would be to consider the hardware of 80s house and whether certain affinities and connections were being transferred between those two formations technologically. I remember a story that Lil Jon's crunk productions had so many 'rave' sonic signatures from presets. Instruments that make their own relations, etc.

That said, I don't know much about Glass and Riley and Reich, etc. Always struck me as academic, although clearly Arthur Russell moved between those worlds.

"Well, except of course for the weak link between electronic minimalism and house."

Yeah, the link between minimalism and house is a weird but interesting hinge. There are several ways to look at this relationship: According to the “official” history of house, there is no direct link at all (that I’ve seen presented; this obviously doesn’t necessarily mean that such a link doesn’t exist). From this traditional perspective, you could possibly argue that the minimalist influences were smuggled in via Kraftwerk/postpunk/electro. You could also pull back from the house scene a bit and look at the larger, more general context of “underground ‘80’s music” in which minimalist aesthetic ideas were freely circulating in a number of orbits. Seen from this larger perspective, the “relationship” between minimalism and house makes a lot of sense, but of course raises the question of “validity” with regard to the scope of the context being referenced. And then there’s HH, which has put these two genres together in a fairly seamless fashion, at the very least confirming (in my mind) their aesthetic similarities. (I’d also like to not get too hung up on minimalism per se, because I think this discussion can also be applied to the other “outside”, “unofficial” influences that I mentioned in my original post).

Regardless, to the house “purists”, the juxtaposition of these genres may seem like just another ridiculous “postmodern” hybrid that has no relevance to the actual origins of house. HH producers, however, may feel an aesthetic kinship between these genres that renders irrelevant (in a pragmatic way) the predominant, received history of house. So where does that leave HH in 2012? In a real sense, the “documented” history clearly doesn’t matter to the extent that people are going to make the music they want to make, with all of the aesthetic tools at their disposal, “gatekeepers” be damned. The question, then, is whether or not HH is “legitimate” (and does it even matter?). In the Ital interview, DM-M seems to be staking a claim for the historical legitimacy of his music as “proper” house by claiming minimalism (and its "offspring" krautrock/post-punk/etc.) as a part (albeit obscure) of the “true” narrative of house (perhaps at a second- or third-hand remove, however). How important this legitimacy is to listeners, and how this legitimacy may affect the “seriousness” with which his music is taken by critics are open questions. Personally, I think minimalism, industrial, postpunk, krautrock, etc. are “in there somewhere” with regard to the aesthetic makeup of house, and I think HH is “legit” house (whatever that means). Still, I’m one of those “noise”/”postpunk” guys who’s been drifting closer and closer to house and techno over the past twenty-odd years, so caveat emptor & etc. That being said, I’d like to see the narrative regarding the origins of house open up a bit so that a conversation regarding “legitimacy” doesn’t pop up every time house switches aesthetic gears, but that’s probably unrealistic.

I think its pretty safe to say that all these guys came to house via the DFA and the various balaeric diggers one encounters via beatsinspace route who have been drawing the dots between house and kraut for a good decade. Add that to design school theorising et voila. i dont see the need for all discussion around its genesis, cool kids always need to dance every 10 years or so

True. I'm 100% sure that no one actually "needs" to discuss any of this crap, ever.