theo parrish s/d

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.

he is from germany and he looks just like tiesto

it's rockist in the mark s sense of the work "rockist"

did you ever read the mark s thing about slash fiction?

if so, what do you think about this (warning, links to big PDF file) frank broughton-penned piece of fanfic about junior vasquez, gay black clubbers and the sound factory?

No I didn't! I'm sure it was good. he touched on vaguely related issues in his punk piece which I loved.

Will check that out! I am totally in favour of slash fiction.

My proudest moment as a music critic was when some slash fiction writer dedicated her story about Pete Wentz and the singer from P!ATD to one of my reviews.

"I'm not sure why techno-tasting requires such a last-canon-standing fortress mentality."

you are the keymaster. i am the gatekeeper.

Pipecock gets to be the Stay Puft marshmellow man.

that might have been the same piece. it was ostensibly about lester bangs, but had a big digression on slash fic. "thirty years of 'orrible noize"?

rise and sprawl of horrible noise

important reading for people who hate horrible progressive house

Tim F, I can't get into it heavily right now, but really, my hatred of most gay club music and gay clubs generally is not inspired by homophobia. Just dislike of the sound.

thoughtful argument

condescending post ^^^

sympathetic self awareness^^

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v204/day465/Soulstrut/megaeyeroll.gif

dope gif^^^

ban deej

"Tim F, I can't get into it heavily right now, but really, my hatred of most gay club music and gay clubs generally is not inspired by homophobia."

I didn't think it was. Okay I'm getting way off topic, but anyway:

I can understand why lots of gay guys are keen to distance themselves from what they consider to be the shallower or more myopic aspects of mainstream gay male culture. But I think in doing so they're often too quick to assume that they understand mainstream gay culture in all its depth and complexity (or, rather, its apparent lack thereof) merely by virtue of their being gay. As if, being into mainstream gay culture is the default position for any gay guy, and correspondingly one's distance from that scene is prima facie evidence of a certain level of critical discernment.

Whereas gay guys being into Kylie or progressive house (anyway most gay clubs actually don't play progressive house, this is a misnomer - in my experience gay clubs are more likely to play Freemasons-style vocal house, "club" mixes of pop hits, original versions of pop hits, hard house and electro-house before they are likely to play progressive house) is often a lot like any adult being into populist music: frequently they come from a prior position of rejection and have to "learn" to like this stuff.

Here's something interesting that the clever Angus Gordon wrote recently:

"...I still have a soft spot for the original SAW Kylie (note to younger readers: by SAW I mean not the torture porn franchise but "Stock Aitken and Waterman", ask your mum and dad), the Kylie who was more or less strictly for The Gays, the Kylie I saw perform at Mardi Gras (the only time I ever went, actually). In any case, "Better the Devil You Know" has always been my favourite Kylie song so in the end it was the only possible choice.

I thought then, and still do, that the music is quite striking, especially the harmony. Listening to sequence of contortions required to shift the key from the B flat major of the verse to the distant D flat major of the chorus ("a hundred times or more-ore-ore-ore!") you're struck by how weird SAW could actually be at times. No I'm not going to push some "they were more avant-garde than Stockhausen!" line, but for anyone who thinks they made paint-by-numbers pop this is a corrective. There's an even weirder example in "What Do I Have to Do", another song from the Rhythm of Love album that marks the high point of the Kylie/SAW collaboration.

I've also always found Kylie the most enjoyable to listen to of all the female singers with undeniably weak voices. She seems to find a way of putting her limited instrument to the best possible use, and this song is certainly an example of that.

Mostly, though, this one's about memories, my first tentative forays into gay life (in Adelaide! the glamorous Mars Bar! but still!), my learning not to be embarrassed by cheesiness. It occurs to me that the latter is a subtext in the whole "rockism" debate, there's an association for me at least between anti-pop sentiment and the closet. I wonder whether that's why some gay men become such ardent popists. It certainly always made me sceptical of the young gay men I would meet (they were often my students and would expound this point of view earnestly in their essays) who thought that their interest in indie music was some act of guerilla resistance against hegemonic gay culture. I quite liked hegemonic gay culture because of what it rescued me from, and I still do. And of course I still love Kylie."

ask your mum and dad - hate it when journos write this.

I think some kids might've been into Kylie, as well as the gays.

Both of yr points are correct.

lol don't EVER ban deej

As if, being into mainstream gay culture is the default position for any gay guy, and correspondingly one's distance from that scene is prima facie evidence of a certain level of critical discernment.

Thank you thank you thank you for articulating something I've been mulling over a lot recently.

As if, being into mainstream gay culture is the default position for any gay guy person, and correspondingly one's distance from that scene is prima facie evidence of a certain level of critical discernment.

Well exactly!

if there are really two sides to this debate (and i don't think there are because it's just not that simple), it seems like they could be characterized as "gatekeeping militancy" and "the militancy of being reasonable" (just as radical!). i think the truth is somewhere in the grey area and it's dependent on your own personal experience.

I think you're right about this debate tricky, but what a dispiriting opposition!

In some ways pipecock is the "truth" of nu-rockism - if the general critical position of, say, dissensus, pursues its gatekeeper mentality to its logical end it ends up with pipecock (the recent detroit techno thread on dissensus was interesting precisely for this reason).

I'm not sure why anti-reasonable militancy should have to be about gatekeeping.

Simon Reynolds talks a lot about how music fandom should be unreasonable, should be something like a religious experience that inspires you to be a musical preacherman (hence dividing the world into right and wrong, as pipecock does). But this particular notion of "preacherman" evokes the image of someone on the outside rather than the inside of the gate: it means iconoclasm on behalf of the future, devising new truths that have not been uttered etc. etc. Whereas the sort of gatekeeping that is being advocated here is totally institutionalized, however underpaid some artists from Detroit may be.

And this is the problem about gatekeeping per se: it's not about ripping it up and starting again, it's about defending the city from the barbarian hordes. It is always ultimately conservative and critically regressive.

If "the truth is somewhere in the middle" (i.e. not entirely on the side of "the militancy of being reasonable"), it's because the musical religious experience imparts a truth that cannot be generalized, a truth that often does not yet have an explanatory entry in the glossary of reasonable music crit. Ultimately the "militancy of being reasonable" reterritorialises these truths, can absorb and then reproduce (say) a reasoned (and of course reasonable) argument as to why Theo Parrish is important.

Gatekeeping militancy is what is left of the religious fervour when its truths have been reterritorialised. It is surplus militancy with no viable function except to continually assert whatever unreasonable notions it may have had that could not really be defended (the militancy of being reasonable can prosecute all its original reasonable decisions), or to wax nostalgic about the time when its fervour meant something.

(in political terms, obsessing over the lack of dues paid to detroit techno artists is akin to focusing obsessively on the "spirt of Paris 1968" - certainly useful and interesting and worth thinking about, but relatively limited in its capacity to serve as a basis for contemporary political positions or lines of inquiry)

(to be fair, my argument is kinda Bad-Hegelian in that I'm considering the usefulness of non-reasonable positions as being their potential contribution to reasonable debate - so I'm stacking the odds in my favour a bit here)

i agree that it's dispiriting and it seems like there can be reterritorializing criticism as well as reterritorializing music. the latter is unreasonable per reynold's definition (if i understand it properly), but it's fair because it is based on a kind of pure fandom. and if we're stacking the odds then i am going to vote for the meta/future every time at least until i find something more engaging. it is interesting that reasonable and unreasonable can coexist somewhat harmoniously though it reads like a paradox. and it seems that a lot of the time it is the case that the rhetoric around gatekeeping has less to do with music and more to do with the culture around music (and even american culture writ large -- did you see this?) so my binary doesn't seem to be correct although i am glad it sparked some insightful prose from you.

" it seems like there can be reterritorializing criticism as well as reterritorializing music. the latter is unreasonable per reynold's definition (if i understand it properly), but it's fair because it is based on a kind of pure fandom. and if we're stacking the odds then i am going to vote for the meta/future every time at least until i find something more engaging. it is interesting that reasonable and unreasonable can coexist somewhat harmoniously though it reads like a paradox."

Okay now I'm not sure if I follow! Do you mean music can be reterritorializing insofar as it shores up a bulwark of tradition around something previously radical (or perhaps rather it establishes rules and regulations around something previously lawless/undefined?)... Like, um, the notion of "detroit techno classicism" comes into existence at the precise moment that there are 2nd gen producers making "classic" detroit techno - music as fandom as music crit essentially.

Re stacking the odds: I sort of meant that any attempt to rationally schematize the relationship between the reasonable and the unreasonable in thinking about music is impliedly importing reasonability as one of its standards. The problem with trying to move beyond using the "militancy of being reasonable" as the final arbiter is that if, as you say, "it's dependent on your own personal experience", then it becomes hard to distinguish between admirable religious fervour and "opinions4u".

Conversely, the other thing I was thinking though is that what i might call future-faith (which i want to vote for too) only retains its power and attraction if we think of it as a response to a divine vision or visitation - in fact the term reynolds uses which is even more appropriate than my substitute "preacherman" is prophet - which implies both some kind of miraculous experience (touched by God) and a kind of shutting down of one's own subjectivity - the prophet does not merely see the future, they speak with the voice of the future. Put music into the role of the divine here, and the prophet should be someone whose entire thinking about music is scrambled by the experience of the music they are advocating on behalf of (like a Saul --> Paul transformation).

Whereas what passes for faith-based criticism most of the time (by which I mean pipecock etc, not Christian Music Monthly) reads more like (conservative) theological criticism wherein the truth was always already known. This kind of music fandom may be fervent ("x is genius, y is fake" etc.) but it never sounds surprised... every permutation of good and bad in music can be interpreted in such a way as to affirm the beauty of God's plan as set down in canon law. i.e. more simply put it finds its role model in sermonizing.

I think any music crit which adopts the master/slave dialectic as its starting point is ultimately not going to reveal much of interest. I can appreciate that future-faith almost necessarily involves a certain partiality, but that partiality should be a form of devoted conviction that renders everything else irrelevant, rather than a relational arrangement where by X derives its value from not being Y.

e.g. advocates of Detroit techno are at their least interesting when the advocacy seems to boil down to the circular argument "this is great because European dance music is awful." A partiality that extends from a hatred of other stuff is unconvincing to me because it suggests that the qualities of the good stuff were somehow insufficient to be considered persuasive - the use of the stick inevitably suggests that carrot was not enough.

"And it seems that a lot of the time it is the case that the rhetoric around gatekeeping has less to do with music and more to do with the culture around music (and even american culture writ large -- did you see this?)"

Yeah it's been all over the news here as well - pretty much any news w/r/t to the US election is considered news in Australia.

The broader point you're making is absolutely spot on, I think.

"Do you mean music can be reterritorializing insofar as it shores up a bulwark of tradition around something previously radical (or perhaps rather it establishes rules and regulations around something previously lawless/undefined?)"

kind of. the example i immediately come up with is dfa reterritorializing chicago or nyc house (i mean how exactly did indie transition to house? and what does this mean w/r/t contemporary house (the "real" thing). i said pretty much the same thing about dj t, too). there's also edit culture or contemporary house via trance. it's not just the shoring up, but the literal change in (reterritorializing, maybe i am using the word incorrectly) tradition. i think this is one of the things that bugs the gatekeepers insofar as it steps on (is unfaithful to) the original tradition/culture. changing of the guard and whatnot. if you see what's popular as inferior yet it gets all the props, it is just going to fuel the ire.

"music as fandom as music crit essentially"

yes.

and i think detroit techno was classic from the beginning. :D

"The problem with trying to move beyond using the "militancy of being reasonable" as the final arbiter is that if, as you say, "it's dependent on your own personal experience", then it becomes hard to distinguish between admirable religious fervour and "opinions4u"."

"personal experience" is really quite a bit of shorthand, isn't it?