theo parrish s/d

So that is how the palais schaumburg record was made while Moritz was in the Vacuum!

I don't remember if Theo's talk at Red Bull Music Academy has been mentioned, but it is worth watching.

hmm, i guess i didn't make it clear enough for you, mike.

one line of argument is that all that "our musicians" are doing is furthering the line of "our tradition". and musicians who are making bad music, that we don't like, are too far removed from "our tradition", and so they don't get it, they screw it up because they haven't been exposed enough to "our tradition" or "our community" or whatever.

the problem with this argument is that it doesn't explain how basic channel, who were djs, and involved in vinyl culture, and making what they hoped was a worthy part of the lineage of chicago house, detroit techno, dub reggae, etc, managed to make something that sounds completely different from all three of those things. you can't just pick up a basic channel record (even "lyot") and say "this is just an incremental step forward from ...", the way dazz and rick james might be an incremental step forward from earth, wind and fire or kool and the gang.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28731037@N02/

rate these people on a scale of 'radical subjective' to 'geircock'

goddamn djs look dorky

lol local h photo in there

Basic Channel was an incremental step forward.

Their claim to fame was that they took the dx100 and the 909 from detroit and chicago and loaded Todd Terry's Sp1200 with minimal synth and dub influences instead of NYC hip-hop/electro.

If you knew how the records were made you would realize that the leap you think they took wasn't that great.

And for the record they didn't really use an SP1200, it was a Studio 440.

And that isn't to say that they didn't make great records, but it isn't like they pulled their sound out of thin air. They built it solidly on the technical advances of black dance music in the 80's. The chord stab, the 909 shuffle, the dx bass, the breakdown of the song via acid...

why don't you follow that up by specifying how "you're only reading ILM dance threads for the LOLs", then we'll have had the 30-minute course in mike taylor posting strategies 101

if adventurous musicians (sun ra, joe meek, klaus schulze, kraftwerk, derrick may, chain reaction etc etc) can make music based on "imaginary worlds", why can't a fan base their listenership on the same?

They can. It's just that when it comes to convincing other people of the worthiness of the music, it's much harder if all the evidence that can be mustered is strictly personal, or worse still, a bunch of wild guesses. I guess that's really my bone to pick here.

i'm not so much interested in convincing other people of the worthiness of the music i identify with, much more being convinced about the worthiness of music i *don't* get

hence the famous "vahid 180": "please, prove me wrong about this music i don't like ..."

mike taylor posting strategies 101

1) obtuse rephrasal "oh, so you're saying basic channel invented the vinyl record?!?"

2) arcane technobabble ... too specific to rebut without serious research, sets up aura of expertise. sorry, i don't think basic channel sounds like todd terry, but since i didn't cite the fact that basic channel used a studio 440 where basic channel used a sp1200, does my opinion even count.

3) "oh, i'm only here for the LOLs"

4) pithy, condescending advice: "you should really get out more"

fair enough.

What Todd Terry did for dance music(and he wasn't the only one but his style is the hallmark for this) was to use a sampling drum machine to grab loops(1-2b bar drum phrases) and hits(one time shots "can you feel it") from so many places that he changed electronic dance music from being about programmed beats(the 808 programmed like a drummer) and synths(used to simulate traditional bass, keys, leads...) to being about a collage of sequenced audio. This is a fundamental difference from the way the the first waved of Detroit Techno and Chicago house worked.

Because he was working with sequenced audio he was much less likely to create chord progressions and key changes. Harmonically he mainly used short loops or more importantly, chord stabs to create harmonic movement. Because he has so many percussion hits and drum loops going, he didn't need to worry about writing real songs. Sampling was new enough at that point in time that you could still sell records strictly on the novelty of the technology. He released a lot of dogs, but he also dropped several gems.

The reason this is important is because the way you make a basic channel record is to take a sampling drum machine(preferably an older lo-fi one like a 440) and samples several examples of a synth playing a minor 7th chord with a quick attack and a short release.

From there you take the multi outs of the sampler and run them into a mixing board with a 909 and a Dx100 playing the bass part. What you do from there is record the basic tracks through your mixer to the in's of your multi track recorder. Once you have actually recorded the tracks you then run a snake from the outs of the recorder back into into the mixer and you process, eq, and mix from the board to a stereo recorder.

One of the real big tricks is to run the outs from the processors back into the channels of the board rather than you the aux returns. This allows you to adjust the eq and volume of the wet signal but more importantly, it allows you to route that wet signal into the other aux sends of your board.

I can go into the programming tricks for the DX100 and the 909 if you like.

The reason Todd Terry is important is because he was one of the main guys who completely destroyed the idea of songcraft in dance music. He wasn't the only one, but his work was a radical shift. What acid started, he finished.

This relates to Basic Channel because their gimmick was to take the 909 shuffle and the dx100 bass line and apply Todd Terry's sampling aesthetic to to it. You just don't realize it belongs to Todd Terry because they hid it underneath a shit ton of processing as I described above.

Or to make it even more simple, they don't sound alike. They do however share an extremely similar working process. When you understand how the process works behind the curtains you realize how incremental it all is.

I am not saying that to be condescending, I am just explaining why I have the opinion I have.

so whose tradition was todd terry respecting

I am not interested in arguing about who is real and who is fake or how one experience is more meaning for or important. All I know is that Detroit DJ's were the first to play at the UFO club and later the Tresor and they set the stage for the Berlin techno scene in the early 90's. Something was communicated between Detroit and Berlin.

Just like Detroit and Chicago had their antecedents, so did Basic Channel.

so whose tradition was todd terry respecting

That is easy, you should know for yourself. He was using a sampler like a NYC hip-hop DJ would cut and scratch between records.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JspJMW46n5k

haha i know about tt, ive played this in sets of rap and r&b before, im just trynna figure out how he navigates a world of conflicting traditions without pissing off the pipecock style gatekeepers

referring to 'just wanna dance' not 'weekend'

Do you think Todd Terry was worried about Pipecock when he made those records?

of course not, which is as it should be

i suppose this is just as retro as basic channel, but i think one of the best things to do with analog equipment is to string pieces of it together "incorrectly" so you have one synth acting as a filter for a drum machine or another synth. i suppose those inputs wouldn't be there if they weren't intended for use, but if you chain enough of them together you can get the richest sound palette for pads or filter sweeps or truly unique drum sounds. hook up a sampler and you are set.

Hiphop and house are 2 slight variations on the same concept. I dont see how you could consider them "conflicting" in any way.

Actually i'm really liking mike's current discussion. A much more careful and nuanced discussion of the transmission of ideas, "tradition" etc.

"Hiphop and house are 2 slight variations on the same concept."

And what, pray tell, is that concept, pipecock?

I'd be surprised to know that there was even a single concept for house or hip hop, let alone shared between them.

"Exactly. So whether a reader find something persuasive or not depends on factors such as the critic's awareness of the context the art was made in, their grasp of the idiom it is working in, their awareness of the purpose of the art and how it is intended to be consumed. These are objective matters where there can be a single right answer, or at least where one answer can be more right than another."

But they're not objective, good dog, because the argument is always the critic's interpretation of context, interpretation of idiom, interpretation of intention. Otherwise we'd find that learned critics would have hegemonic consensus regarding the relative value of different cultural products, whereas in fact (as per notions of humour), what constitutes "good" art gets more and more contested the more someone knows about art.

This is an epistemological quandary rather than an ontological one: the question isn't whether there really is a single "context" or "purpose" to art, but whether we can ever actually explain what that is without filtering it through our own experience, our own values, our own preconceptions etc. etc.

And there are so many factors that feed into a sense of the persuasiveness of someone's argument that it's very difficult to arrive at consensus - this is why we have politics. In politics, as in my example of the students, the more persuasive argument might be "objectively" wrong, because techniques of persuasion are precisely techniques of persuasion - they are not objective indicators of fact.

The conclusion that your argument leads toward is the fact that there is a generally accepted consensus regarding what constitutes a persuasive argument, rather than that there is a means by which objective "facts" about music can be established. I think it's very dangerous to conflate persuasion with fact - the danger of doing so should be readily apparent in the field of politics in particular. This is why we can describe something as "good politics" without actually supporting it or believing it. Likewise when people talk about legal judgments they might say that a particular judge's decision is "bad law" even though they support the outcome, or vice versa.

When my pro-class struggle student gets a good mark, it's not because she's "right" but because she has engaged in the essay writing equivalent of "good politics".

Tim, there are facts and there are politics about the facts, and what you wrote (which is very interesting) has very little room for the former. I once read a letter to the newspaper arguing that the reason Japanese drivers had so many accidents on NZ roads was because they weren't used to driving on the left. Very persuasive, a good argument against the racist anti-Asian driver sentiment floating around at that time. It could even have changed a few politicians' minds. Just one problem: they drive on the left in Japan as well.

The same applies to records. Either Basic Channel made music in an isolated bubble, or they took various strains of other music and synthesized them, or there was some complicated mixture of the two things going on. Phil Spector either wrote 'To Know Him is To Love Him' about his dead dad or he didn't. My point is simply that these things actually happened - there is only interpretation going on because the critic lacks crucial information; not because context, idiom, intention and a host of other factors are indefinables from the get go. My mum thinks 'To Know Him is To Love Him' is a sweet love song. I dunno whether to spoil her fun by telling her the facts. Or to put it another way: yes, there is Rashomon-style interpretation, especially in a field as nebulous as music, but if Kurosawa had filmed the incident properly, we'd know who was the killer

"They can. It's just that when it comes to convincing other people of the worthiness of the music, it's much harder if all the evidence that can be mustered is strictly personal, or worse still, a bunch of wild guesses. I guess that's really my bone to pick here."

I dunno, I mean I think often factual/biographical information is really useful in making a particular point but I think often a "shared fantasy" is as useful a way to "get" music.

Like, Vahid's story has made me want to check out Sun Ra much more than anything I've ever read about Sun Ra!

When we discuss music in a forum like this we're effectively sharing strategies of reception: you try to explain your relationship to the music which you think others might identify with (and, as per vahid, I love reading other people's strategies even if I don't click with the music they're referring to).

X-Post Good Dog, surely what you're saying though is limited to biographical facts-about-music rather than a qualititative determination of the music itself though. Yr Basic Channel ultimatum doesn't help us to say whether a review that celebrates the music's evocation of isolation or a review that celebrates its sonic continuation of the techno tradition are more "right".

Alternatively, does the fact that "To Know Him Is To Love Him" was written about Spector's dead dad mean that it is not a love song, esp. when so many singers have performed it as if it is one?

Yes, there are facts, but a determination of meaning and value always involves an implicit hierarchy of facts. For example, you might argue that the "fact" of Spector's intention is more important than the "fact" of the intention of the singers of the song. But what are you basing this on?

Tricky said:

"i think it is dangerous to explain away intuition, but here we are discussing it and it's generally a positive thing so there you go. it is hard to do effectively without parable i think."

Yeah I think the key part of this is "explain away". The danger you're pointing to in the discursive position is the belief that because something can be put into words it can therefore be exhausted by words. The fact that consciousness is like a language doesn't mean that consciousness is only language.

Having said that, I also think that what we refer to when we talk about "intuition" - especially the experience of music - is always already linguistic and discursive. This by dint of the fact that the music we listen to does follow certain rules (e.g "what constitutes a house track"), and we're engaging with those rules.

"i think i should have said "sometimes language creates claustrophobia" because it involves choices that ultimately flatten out complexity."

I'm reading this as meaning two alternative things (both correct):

1) That by trying to explain how the music works we're tying the experience of it down in concepts, concepts which do act to reduce the complexity of our experience because they subsume difference in sameness (in a prosaic sense: no kickdrum acts in precisely the same way in any two different tracks, yet when we talk about the kickdrum this difference or particularity is suppressed in the name of their shared commonality).

This is the sort of thing i mean by the vanishing horizon of identity between our experience and our articulation of that experience. Conversely (as per my point above), even "intuitively" we recognise the commonality between kickdrums because our ears apply a language that looks for commonality amongst pure particularity. We are already abstracting the experience of music before we try to find words to explain it.

2) That there is an experience of "disenchantment" at work when we do convert the experience of music into (pure) language. What felt like an evocation of "soul" becomes mere technique, what felt mystical becomes "merely" material. This creates a "flattening out" because everything becomes "merely" immanent, a function of good music qua music rather than good music as expression of something else, something higher, nobler etc.

Again I think this is real, but the sense of disenchantment is caused as much by an underlying contempt for the material as it is the by the disappearance of spiritual - that is, if we didn't identify value solely or primarily with the spiritual (or "soul", or "genius", or "self-expression") then we wouldn't crash so hard when these spectral presences turn out to be chimeric stand-ins for material things.

What we need in music criticism (esp. dance music criticism) is a more animist attitude to the "stuff" of music - a recognition that what we think of as spiritual is bound up in material things, that the two are in fact practically and even conceptually inseparable. E.g. a recognition that a good kickdrum can itself be "spiritually"* moving in and of itself, rather than because it reflects some "truth" about the music's creator etc.

*except, of course, that this sense of being moved is not even formally divided into the physical and spiritual, the two are one in the same.

Like the guy who dissed trance back a few posts ago: I could give him my perspective, play him X, Y and Z, ideally transport back in time to 2000 and take him out, and with luck he'd get it.

if you're talking to me, well i actually quite like a fair amount of trance, but this whole idea of there being "proper" trance vs... stuff that you don't like but others do (and is therefore inferior)???

i like tiesto and sascha and shit dude

whatever, drunk, sorry. can we nuke this thread or something?

no.

here is something i wondered about. could theo parrish ever do this (make sure to watch from 1:30 to 2:30, it is quite raw in a leni riefenstahl sort of way)? could jeff milss do this? and if so (or if not) is it because of some property of their music? and is that property an objective fact or a subjective perception?

i mean, i am willing to argue vs jacob pretty far here but i *do* think there is some grain of truth to what he's saying. it's not entirely the audience ... there is something about particular types of music that makes particular things possible, or at least more likely to happen. i am thinking of other stuff, like bop and the jitterbug and the lindy. in an alternate universe could people have done the jitterbug or the lindy to old-timey music, or did jazz have to happen first?

reminds me of the old interview with mondrian:

interviewer: "we understand from your piece entitled "broadway boogie woogie" that you find american jazz inspiring?"
mondrian: "yes that is true"
interviewer: "what is it you love, is it the sense of freedom and improvisation or is it the buoyant spirit of the american negro?"
mondrian: "no, i love that the dancers always move in steps that are at right angles to each other"

^^ ok that is made-up but that is the real gist of the interview

well, exactly, that ties in with your point about old school detroit's distorted interpretations of certain aspects of pfunk/kraftwerk etc..

could theo parrish ever do this

i think a lot of pipecock-esque people would argue that "this" is what never should have happened to dance music; i.e. conflict over so-called legitamacy/relavance of early 90s uk hardcore and stuff

here is something i wondered about. could theo parrish ever do this (make sure to watch from 1:30 to 2:30, it is quite raw in a leni riefenstahl sort of way)? could jeff milss do this? and if so (or if not) is it because of some property of their music? and is that property an objective fact or a subjective perception?

I guess it depends on what part of the video you are referring to. Can they do large gigs with lazers and television cameras, yes, they can and have. If you are talking about the part where Tiesto gets off the decks and jumps around like a monkey to get the crowd pumped because he put his stamp of approval a completely predictable breakdown, I don't think they would do that.

I think part of it is just the cultural difference in showmanship. As a DJ who came up in Detroit you would not dare do that because that is not the criteria that you are being judged on. The crowd itself is very fickle and demanding, and you colleagues are keeping an eye for any slip. In Detroit your show would come from how far you can push your technique and still keep the crowd. Jeff Mills would be too busy juggling records to ever have the time to wave his hands in the air during an anthem.

Would I stake my life that Mills or TP would never do this, no. However, I would be very surprised to see this kind of behavior from either one of them. I don't think they would express themselves in that way if the music had moved them. I also assume, and this is just MY guess, they would view that as being beneath them. That is the province of a certain kind of DJ and I think those guys view themselves as being a little more sophisticated than that.

IOW Detroit doesn't breed a performance aesthetic where you can be sloppy and just jump around on stage and be a rock star because you have a certain amount of press. Detroit isn't interested in your persona, they spent good money to see your ass and they want every pennies worth.

That being said, I am referring to an older time when all these guys were young and everybody was super competitive. There were 20 guys for every slot and for every guy who got a gig there were four other guys who were world class themselves. It was every bit as competitive as hip-hop was in NYC.

There has always been the guido club trash that listened to top 40, but there was also a time when techno and house were the populist sound of young black people in Detroit. That culture is where all of these guys came from. All the guys we talk about are the ones who decided to make a career out of it, for each one of them there were 15 other talented guys who got real jobs and had kids.

i know this isnt really what the conversation is about, but you make detroit sound really not very fun

actually mike that is not at all what i'm getting at!

i was wondering whether the music of theo parrish could inspire such a reaction from a crowd that size. there certainly seems to be something about the type of music that lends itself to that sort of ecstatic crowd spectacle and response.

i am not that interested in what tiesto is doing, although i am certain that theo parrish and jeff mills could jump around like a monkey too, and i'd hardly think less of them for doing so. i am more interested in the crowd dynamic, of 10,000 europeans (it looks like that anyway) pumping their fists in the air together to techno music.

that seems very antithetical to the sound of theo parrish or the sound of jeff mills. but is that just prejudice? could "the bells" do that? or "ebonics"? how about "condor to mallorca"? what about an ugly edit?

i mean, what is it that makes a tiesto concert seem so much like a scorpions concert? is it the crowd? is it "the culture"? is it the sounds? what would that sort of crowd do if jeff mills was on the stage playing "stringent"?

DJs should be too busy earning every penny to have fun!!

so obvious that no one clicked on the flickr i posted up thread ...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28731037@N02/2681084736/

!!!!!!!!!

they look so young

figured pix of overrated euros fit in well with our theme

didn't u see that i posted video from that show on noize board?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oykuuy1TLTw

pt 1 is sick too

actually, this is the best way to see it:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4275660658800832791

i know this isnt really what the conversation is about, but you make detroit sound really not very fun

Oddly enough that wasn't the case. If anything it was more fun because the bar was set so high that you had to be a good DJ in order to play out on a regular basis. You went to a gig and the DJ was working from the moment he hit the decks. Everyone there had a hard week and came to party. The DJ played hard and you partied hard. It was a fair exchange.

It was a lot better than a room full of people who don't give the shit about the music. A demanding crowd is at least paying attention to what you are doing up there.

That Daft Punk video is nice!

so this thread is turning into us complaining about shitty djs? jesus

i mean, what is it that makes a tiesto concert seem so much like a scorpions concert? is it the crowd? is it "the culture"? is it the sounds? what would that sort of crowd do if jeff mills was on the stage playing "stringent"?

That crowd would leave. :)

I have seen footage of Mills doing those kind of gigs and the presentation is completely different. It cuts from Mills working in a booth to shots of vast crowds being zapped by blue and green lazers.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=U8g8C4F7y6s
http://youtube.com/watch?v=mTwyzE4CJlY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Xy7MnlAjm84
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VHBKF1GHMKM

It really isn't about Mills being a cool guy so much as it is a documentation of himself as a performer. The Tiesto stuff seems like it is calculated to make him appear like a star. I think the difference is that Tiesto is actively trying to work the same social dynamics that makes rock music work. When I saw the video you posted the first thing I though of was the Rolling Stones well past their prime trotting it out yet again just because they were the Stones. I also think that Tiesto is playing a music that is specifically designed to tweak the ears of a stereotypical European listener. Melody over rhythm, lots of synths in the same frequency ranges as electric guitar ect...

Here is a cookie Deej, relax.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSX_r0u3uzE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHsCGRP6dtM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sukNJwO94UY

so ppl dont like the music. he could be playing anything up there as long as he did his monkey dance?

I think people do like the music, in fact I think it is intentionally geared towards them as commercial pop. I also think that the packaging and promotion of the music plays a huge role beyond what he is actually doing up there. Do you even see a mixer in that clip vahid posted?

step to enchantment:D

I can't believe I am spending my Friday night researching tiesto on youtube. I like this one, it is some epic next level shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZmE3fUKU5U