theo parrish s/d

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

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3096/2480557434_c792c75bb7_b.jpg

wow, I just realized that this video has been viewed more than 20 million times. The more I check this guy out the more I think he is a genius.

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

five million plays!

The Spirit of Detroit:

Being pissed off because you work in a factory, you have to drive everywhere and the weather sucks.

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

-- good dog, Saturday, 26 July 2008 02:45 (5 hours ago) Link

Surely this is exactly missing the point, of both Rashomon and of thinking about music? The thing is that there is no "proper" objective interpretation, either of the events in Rashomon, or music.

yah this is basic undergrad history stuff :-O

Hello philosophy 101!

xxpost

let's give jacob the benefit of the doubt: he probably screwed up by picking that movie. he maybe should have said, "if we'd had cameras everywhere in downtown dallas we'd know who killed kennedy" or "if there'd been a security camera outside the gate, we'd know who whether OJ killed nicole".

although i guess again, it's pretty clear that even with these two cases you'd run into problems pretty quick. "the tapes were doctored!" or "we know who pulled the trigger, but that's not the same as who was responsible" etc etc

Conspiracy theories are obscuring the truth about Detroit techno!

packaging and promotion of the music

what packaging and promotion? I've never seen an ad or a blurb for Tiesto in my entire life, yet he sold out a 10,000 capacity venue in Dublin quicker than any artist has ever done.

there is no packaging and promotion, just nothing! it's mystifying.

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...

this is kind of insane......isn't Tiesto actually one of the more successful dance DJs in the US anyway?

someone needs to make godwin's law for dance music with "tiesto" instead of hitler.

"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"

you paid 2 and 6 for the tram home and still had enough to buy dried figs and ginger beer

Entertainment can sometimes be hard when the thing
that you love is the same thing that's holding you down.

...and is making you wear a ball-gag.

(sorry! couldn't resist the S&M overtones of vahid's last post.)

despite the RA connection, jeremy and I are not actually the same person...

Anyway, pipecock, just so you know I wasn't implying that parties in detroit are like that, I was implying that parties of detroit fanatics outside detroit quite often are...

For me the hinge of this is that I feel that to enjoy dance music, and most importantly to enjoy NEW forms of dance music as they emerge, you have to TRY to enjoy them.

I can quite happily say that I don't enjoy french nu-rave electro because I've been to a lot of parties, listened to a lot of the music, and genuinely tried to have a good time. I'm happy doing this because I don't believe that what has gone before is a good predictor of what may happen in the future. That's why I place no value in an Aristotelian approach to "working out" what makes good music. Surprise and innovation is always possible, change is always possible. So if your entire framework for approaching music is based on history, you negate the possibility of change. For example you really enjoy disco you could infer that it's live musicians and gay new york culture that create great music, and therefore shut yourself off from ever enjoying techno.

So while a shared culture can create a scene and create great music, if LISTENERS adopt too dogmatic an adherence to one cultural interpretation of what's good, they shut themselves off to a huge amount of possible great music and fun/inspiring/emotional nights out in clubs. And despite not having any skills in that area myself, I'd hazard a guess that one of the things that can cause stagnation in artists is this exact same dynamic (e.g. Masters at Work).

I'm not sure that's the exact same thing as "subjectivity" but to frame it in terms of positive cliches, you could say that what the two have in common is having an "open mind" and "listening without prejudice". I'd really prefer not to have to rule out 90% of what's out there because it was made in the wrong city, with the wrong equipment and most importantly by the wrong sort of people with the wrong ideas about music.

To explain about Rashomon: I genuinely think Kurosawa took the easy road by choosing not to film the murder of the samurai. Compare that strategy to (an really amazing documentary) called Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, which is about whether a stripper got raped down in Florida (or not). The film ends with actual videotape footage of the incident, and the stunning thing is depending on their politics and perspective, half the audience will come out of it saying it was rape, and the other half will say it wasn't. Even though they watched the same piece of footage. So that’s the hard road, depicting the messiness and contradictions and complications even of 2 minutes of human interaction, and the subjectivities which arise out of that; the easy road is to present the memories and lies of your characters as if they actually happened to make a point, and nowhere daring to approaching the thing which contradicts your point entirely: the dead guy on the ground.

there is no packaging and promotion, just nothing! it's mystifying.

I would watch the Privilege promo video on dudes website and tell me this guy doesn't know how to promote himself.

http://www.tiesto.com/

Do you think those billboards, banners, TV interview ect just happened spontaneously? You can't get to his level without having that kind of machine behind you. It just doesn't happen.

That being said, I researched him last night and now I am kind of fascinated. Everything he does is well executed and extremely populist. There are no rough edges, nothing dangerous, nothing accidental. It doesn't require any connoisseur taste, anyone can walk in with no knowledge of club culture and have a good time. The light shows and stage design are amazing, everything LOOKS good.

It is kind of awesome in its own weird way. If you wanted to be a rock start DJ you could not do it better than Tiesto. I don't care to participate in what he is doing, but I will give him 100% credit for executing a vision.

As far as stereotypical European listeners I meant European listeners in a racial/cultural sense. I was including North American listeners in that statement as well. Sorry if I wasn't as clear as I should have been.

No I'm not giving the guy credit, I just genuinely am telling you there's not really a bombardment of coverage for him, I haven't seen the website but for instance, if U2 are playing somewhere here there are ads on the radio etc.

For a guy who sells out these huge venues, I guarantee you tons of people have never heard of him, and I don't mean my grandma or something. His success is hugely disproportionate to his fairly small level of fame.

I suspect, and this is just a theory, that he's actually biggest with under 18s.

I always imagined his music to be like Paul Van Dyk, kind of po-faced and boring, but then I heard some track he did that was basically that standard pirate sea-shanty music you'll hear in cartoons or movies done as a big 135bpm trance/hard house tune. It was called "I'm A Pirate".

A friend of mine worked with the sort of Clear Channel mega-promoters in Dublin and had to work at a Tiesto gig, and he said it was like a ninth circle of hell in terms of fans literally chewing their faces off and having to go to first aid.

Or rolling around on the ground breaking bones by kicking walls etc.

tiesto = rock
detroit techno = rockist

No I'm not giving the guy credit, I just genuinely am telling you there's not really a bombardment of coverage for him, I haven't seen the website but for instance, if U2 are playing somewhere here there are ads on the radio etc.

You don't need a bombardment, you just need to narrowcast to the people who are interested. Dude has 386,714 myspace friends. How underground can you be with 20 million youtube plays on a single video? If you search through his videos on youtube his 3 minute pop singles have 4-7 million views each.

That is part of what I find interesting about this guy. How does his promotion machine work? How many people work for him? How many people rate him as the one token dance artist they will show up for, how many of them bring their friends? I am not interested in the music at all, but I think the way he markets himself and runs his business is really fascinating.

A friend of mine worked with the sort of Clear Channel mega-promoters in Dublin and had to work at a Tiesto gig, and he said it was like a ninth circle of hell in terms of fans literally chewing their faces off and having to go to first aid.

Or rolling around on the ground breaking bones by kicking walls etc.

Part of me finds this depressing but the other part of me thinks that Throbbing Gristle couldn't get this kind of reaction. How do you you channel that kind of energy?

whites are a beastly race with an insect mentality; it is natural for them to engage in such nasty displays of mass groveling

j/k