2004's Electro-House Classics

It... ate me!

eye of the tiger, mean machine steroid cowbell remix.

Blackstrobe's best work to date IMO, and shares the honour of best Kitsune Midnight release with Man With Guitar. The synths and drum programming in the middle breakdown is still enough to put a big cheesy grin on my face after 10,000 listens.

big chunky bold synthy almost bigbeat-ish goodness

While others were content to mine early 80s Italo for general vibe and analog synth sounds, Rex the Dog went straight for the jugular and imbibed the spirit of mid-80s Italo in all its bombastic major-key glory. His mix of Client's "Radio" best epitomises this reminding me of nothing more than Koto's "Dragon's Legend" with it's melodic overdose and seemingly endless sweetness and drama.

The record that best epitomises electrohouse's 2004 shift from the sleazy faux-elitism and poncery of tracks like "Frank Sinatra" to big-room euphoria and classic rave peace and loveism. It's an unholy marriage of electrohouse rhythm, disco guitar and strings and hippiefied sentiment of one-world under an (electrohouse) groove.

See also Beanfield - "Tides" (Carl craig mix)

I'd add the Tiefschwarz remix of Truby Trio - Universal Love to the list, but it was released in 2003, right?

303! Melody! Catchy insistent vocal sample! 3 distinct sections! Headman mix also pretty good! Can sound either dark or bouncy depending on context! What a tune!

The dub version of this track has a certain urgency about it that decimates any hope the crowd had of sitting still. Probably my favorite opener as it sets the pace for an unreal adventure into somewhere exciting.

Or, is it the bouncy shiny happiness and single-minded grooves of the Get Physical tunes?

And is Rex the Dog the only producer doing both?

13. DJ T-Phantomas-Just one killer sweaty clubby riff, the kind of riff that works a crowd into a big ball of dough, and then that ultra stretched breakdown where absolutely every effect and drumbeat and vocal sample seems lovingly crafted for months, then finally the drums roll and if you've not heard the track before, you then realise just what an absolutely killer riff the main hook is. the right DJ could absolutely DESTROY a floor with this record

when youre siting in that chromed centrifuge and its going faster and faster and you can hear it screech and fall apart around you and the operators voice is fading and your face caves in going through the sound barier, dont you just hate it? no you dont. because the light is so beautiful.

Another good (re)werk from Southern Fried’s party boy. The electro funk dreams of Arthur Baker freshened up for today’s dancefloor and it doesn’t get any warmer or more pop than this. The pulsing analogue keys, the video game bleeps and the snappy breakbeat make for as natural a new/old habitat for the Biz’s vocals as the Benassi head wrecking synths. It causes me to dream of skyriding through Neo-Tokyo and makes me want to pop my body, badly. The best part would be the changeup halfway through, when it becomes more urgent and, subtly, more sinister. Like there’s no escape. No matter what you do.

Two feet-rocking moments of exuberant, unashamedly campy, smart-pop dumbness. Too rude for primetime radio, they are riding high on the shortlist for anthems of the year, complete with silly haircuts and sillier videos. Mylo’s effort has a touch of Jacques LuCont in the strings and electro rhythms but where it shines are in the hints of tunefulness and the awesome hook. Mr Chasez goes for bludgeoning and hilarious lyrical delivery, a melody line that could’ve been nicked off ‘Cars’, handclaps and a guitar riff that remind you that the song’s just there to be enjoyed and the best unexpected extended dance break ever. Seriously, it’s like he achieved time travel mid-song (1982-1993).

The sound of nails being scraped nastily across digital blackboard. And getting louder and louder. Painfully brilliant.

http://purevolume.com/mamoth

i actually just heard this stuff the other day, pretty cool though.

yeh but he would say that

kalabrese - set me free (perlon)

ruede hagelstein - sweaty balls (freund)

p1e - 49 second dance (vinyl on demand)

krazy germans and their krazy vox n' synths!

Sends the original into a bruising trip through space, dipping sideways into the galaxy Discovery. Has a touch of Vitalic cream about it too. Surprisingly, the vocal survives the journey.

Because it was officially released this year and is as defining an electro-house classic as anything else you can name.

Nueue Luthersche Fraktur is the big chunky incessant techno-tinged one with these sudden lurches in pitch. That probably qualifies (and facking marvellous it is too I might add).

Actually I am going to order it. Need a couple DVDs from there too...

-- B.A.R.M.S. (b4rim4_...), December 2nd, 2004.

BARMS (and everyone else interested) I've got all five mixes back online @ http://www.helsinki.fi/~jjmvanha.mix.html

Like Rex the dog remixing Depeche Mode circa "construction time again". Ok, not that great (it's less euphoric than your usual RTD remix), but still good.

(winmedia file btw)

enjoy (in spite of "mixing" skills)

I'm not sure if this tune is 2005 (but i just heard about it a few weeks ago):
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Y Control (Tommie Sunshine Brooklyn Fire retouch)

GET THIS TRACK NOW! I don't know anyone who doesn't like it, and everytime i've mixed it into a set people have gone ape.

I miss 2004 electro-house.

2. Spektrum - "Kinda New" (Tiefschwarz dub)
Maximalism, dirty rave romanticism style. Tiefschwarz chuck in every fx known to man from swooshes to stabs to rattles to whatever. Listening to it sounds like four records wrapped up into one but without ever spinning off into messy. After it's thrown you this way and that for four minutes or so the dreamy little vocal comes in. The whole package reminds me of nothing so much as Happy Hardcore except replacing the euphoria with a kind of driving melancholy. So really, more like a slicker version of old school hardcore than anything else, and that can't be a bad thing.

― Jacob (Jacob), Thursday, October 21, 2004 12:42 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

FOREVER

WE. ALL. LIVE. AND. DIE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDNMoGFH1S0

SO MANY GOOD TIMES

agreed. just read this thread. i got pretty sick in july 2005 and am not sure i ever recovered the same genuine hunger for all of this after, at least not to the same extent even though i had a few years of clubbing and writing after that.

listening to "phantomas" now...still sounds pretty good. this music feels like it was the best balance of really fun clubs and actually technically interesting tunes.

also, this:

85. Kelis-Trick Me (Tiefschwarz Mix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krwVk0lv-KQ

need to start playing this again...

the bit where the strings drop out is just so fucking CLEVER. nothing changes and yet everything changes. this music had such a sleek controlled intensity to it.

this music feels like it was the best balance of really fun clubs and actually technically interesting tunes.

yeah, esp. that moment pre-"minimal" as a thing, there was a sense of populism and experimentalism (or if not experimentalism per se then certainly a privileging of both expansiveness and idiosyncrasies) coming into alignment for a while. I guess some would decry it as a middlebrow middleground but I miss that sense that tunes like "Kinda New" worked simultaneously singalong-anthem and club-banger and architectural-wonder.

From that point on it felt like mainstream dance music went through a progressive (re)decoupling of these qualities such that now it's all, like, David Guetta on one side and Motor City Drum Ensemble on the other. And both sides can make great music but I prefer when these impulses were all intertwined.

Another thing you can see in this thread is that it was a time of relative (let's call it) "innocence" where it was very easy to engage with what was hot without having to immerse oneself in scenes fully or get all historical about it. Which is maybe why (my sense is) quite a lot of people got into dance music through this stuff.

xpost ha ha Ronan I don't even know what you posted but is it MANDY's "Our World (Our Music)"??

that dj t remix of vince, "superworld"!

i can remember downloading get physical vol 1 on dial up off the one person on slsk who had it and it took fucking ages, then being blown away by how every single track was brilliant.

and yeah the dance threads here were a lot more all encompassing then. ilm was a smaller place. nobody locked threads at night etc.

I think it's just that you were younger then.

Although I do agree that minimal ruined everything.

Which is maybe why (my sense is) quite a lot of people got into dance music through this stuff.

would kind of hesitate to say something like this cuz wasn't it more, y'know, our age? i'm sure there's an equivalent now.

ha xps

dunno, i loved dance music for a good few years after and went clubbing regularly, and also for a few years before. i do think this era was best.

i still go clubbing um semi-regularly, i haven't quite retired yet, and it was definitely regular until at least six months ago - i also think 04-06 were the best, but that really is to do with the fact that i had just moved to london and made lots of new friends who went raving

Yeah I'm not talking about me personally getting into dance music - 1999 was really my big year for going to raves, and I've never again gone clubbing as much as I did in 2000-2002 - but my sense was that a lot of other people did at that time, that it was time of relative "approachability".

Certainly the more aware you are of dance music history then the more likely you are to be jaded or at least circumspect about current developments (e.g. see vahid's posts upthread). But I also think that different constellations of music are more likely to act as entry points than others.

Although I do agree that minimal ruined everything.

I think it's probably overdoing it to blame minimal for the loss of populist electro-house eden, given that post-04 anti-populist tendencies probably have been taken up more enthusiastically by minimal-hataz than by minimal-boosters.

Especially considering the minimal-hataz argument was that alieninsectnoise percussion was cliche....let's listen to deep house/70s loops. Of course now it's 90s edits are cliche....lets listen to 70s edits. Part of the reason I love late Luomo is because he suggests a parallel universe where macro and electro house merged, and continued being popular with no shift to anti-populist/immersive tendencies.

Yeah this is definitely a golden era, gonna make a playlist of all this stuff this weekend. I suppose that shortly after this moment the scene split in two really? With the Get Physical crew and associated labels getting more minimal and the post-Vitalic end racing off down the frankenhouse path. But I get the feeling that the latter would have happened anyway.

Like it's amazing how big the kick drums sound on a lot of these, even a lot of straight ahead house for the next few years felt like it was still filtered through a minimal prism, and that's only really changed again over the last couple of years.

(That's me excluding commercial high street electrohouse from the equation as well)

Even commercial high street electrohouse of this era was quite good as i recall!

I miss this period. Wasn't even going clubbing that much but just as a listener this was my last big scene-driven vinyl-buying binge. More Ewan Pearson, Black Strobe, Rex the Dog and Tiefschwarz remixes than I knew what to do with.

It worked so well with songs, this sound. So many great remixes of people like Depeche Mode.

Didn't Justice ruin electro house?

I always took the Dur-Dur-Durrr mix along with erotic discourse as the time when it became who could play the most extreme breakdown, which lead to an arms race in harder and harder stuff. (like romal flugels Geht's Nocht)

But I think that 2004 electro house was the perfect venn diagram of backroom producers seeing the mainstream turn to their sound, with an aesthetic that went towards an acceptance of being a pop star and not clinging to an idea of the underground as being more 'real'.

gonna make a playlist of all this stuff this weekend

Make sure you share that Spotify link with us.

this thread was a big deal for me at the time, because while I knew I liked this stuff / had just turned 21 so could go to clubs / was throwing parties at my school & trying to pick out more interesting music than the other kids throwing parties, this provided, like, narratives & explanations for what I was hearing (cross w/ microhouse, getphysical blog posts, etc)

my big big mix from this era tho was the get physical 2nd anniversary one. i remember sitting in my car (lol i know) late at night having some kind of revelation listening to those panning chicago house snares rap across my brane.

blah i meant skykicking blog posts lol. confused name with url. anyway THANK U ILX DANCE NERDS

these tracks remind me of great endless Wednesday nights at We Are Electric at Cabaret Voltaire in Edinburgh - pretending i didn't have work the next day

I always took the Dur-Dur-Durrr mix along with erotic discourse as the time when it became who could play the most extreme breakdown, which lead to an arms race in harder and harder stuff. (like romal flugels Geht's Nocht)

this is fairly wild in its innaccuracy, i'd say chronologically as well as the rest.

i mean

1. that remix sounds nothing like the flugel track.
2. the flugel track predates it by how long...a year? possibly longer, maybe even 2 years?
3. there is no breakdown in geht's nocht as far as i recall.
4. erotic discourse from another time as well.

Thanks to this thread I've ordered the first 2 Areal compilation mixes. I've also spent the morning playing P Sherburne's Schaffel mix. Hopefully I will be able to give my say on the death of this music when I'm sober. It will undoubtably mention Ricardo Villalobos...

"Rocker" not "Geht's Nocht" was the start of the harder/faster arms race but it wasn't really a race at that point.

No, that race didn't start until "Rocker" was playing in almost every Australian hairdressers. And even then I think it kicked off two separate races - harder/faster & cartoon/noisier.

for Ned

Bobbins 2004 'No Permission Asked' Spotify Playlist

Some 18 years on, I still enjoy the Freeform Reform Dub of “Strangest Things” so much. Listening back I was startled to realise that they wait precisely six minutes before allowing the chorus refrain to play out in full. For such an archetypal maximalist anthem it’s secretly a masterclass in restraint and pacing, each exciting new vista simultaneously an oblique circumvention.