Sasha

He's probably the kind of guy spinning dull and sophisticated music for a job, whilst putting on "Reign In Blood" when he gets home.

he has the worst song titles of any dance producer i know. (admittedly my knowledge of his contemporaries is limited, so school me if you wish.)

I'll just come right out and ask. Maybe Tim you might be able to give it some European context for me? Would I actually know any of it?

I thought it was the same as tech-house for a while but it isn't is it.

“Once it had a name it was all over.” The “genre defining” microhouse article written by Phillip Shereburne that appeared in The Wire #203 attempted to unite several rather thorny strains of house music which had been quietly insinuating themselves into European and American minds (and ears) for almost four years at that point. Even Shereburne seemed genuinely overwhelmed by the number of “inputs” which made up microhouse: mid-90s Relief, Chain Reaction’s abstract dub, Matt Herbert’s musique concrete house, the Mille Plateaux glitch crew.

A genre which can include the sparse-unto-starved knife-scored “funk” of Thomas Brinkmann’s Ernst 12”s, the lush Teutonic-highlife of Isolee’s “Beau Mot Plague”, and the plusher refugees from the clicks and cuts underground has to be one of the most all encompassing genres of all time. Or one of the most overstuffed and ill-defined.

In reality, it’s a bit of both. Microhouse is a neologism that means everything and nothing all at once. If it can cross all of those boundaries, then ostensibly it’s telling me nothing about a record I’m about to buy. So as a Rough Trade/Other Music-style genre classification it fails. Yet there are enough similarities between the artists covered – at least in mood and/or process if not end result – that it tells me everything I need to know: this is house music stripped of its baggage. No retro-Salsoul orchestration, no “big room” rush effects, no relentless builds, no bullshit. Shereburne’s basics – rhythm, soul, and silence – have always been the foundation of house music (although I’m a little fuzzy on the “soul” part.) But now, more than ever, they’re being explored as an end in themselves rather than a mannequin to tart up. “Deep” no longer equates with(...i stalled there.)

ronan, it is sometimes very much like minimal tech-house. see the andy weatherall mix on force tracks fer instance.

I use the term 'microhouse' but I don't really believe in it. About the only music I'd say it fits perfectly is stuff on Perlon and Luomo's album - the idea of house under the microhouse, with all it's invisible particles suddenly transforming into a riot of activity. For me what the broader 'microhouse' scene signifies is a significant but impossibly broad rejuvenation/refashioning of house as a whole, fundamentally changing the ratio of ingredients that have traditionally made up house.

I remember Andy saying when he wrote about Kompakt that if house took the pop out of disco to make it more relentlessly- dancefloor based, Kompakt tried to resurrect the discards. I don't think this can be the basis for a definition of microhouse vis a vis house (there's lots of thoroughly minimal microhouse and utterly poptastic house) but I think it's that dialectic - dancing vs other (eg. pop) - that microhouse explores... how many uses can house serve that are not *just* (but may include) dancing? As such it's not intelligent-house or prog-house but outsider-house, whose range is much less confined than the former two because it doesn't limit its experiments to the "experimental" - it embraces the popular too.

Where do pop-microhouse and pop-house differ? I think that with pop-house you tend to get a comfortable covalent relationship with the song and the house groove - the "top" and the "bottom" of the song are left relatively undisturbed so that they can just do their thing (often brilliantly). With (the best) pop- microhouse things are much more mixed up. On something like Closer Musik's "You Don't Know Me" the groove is the pop song and vice versa. This is why some of it resembles the electro- house craze, because the latter does the same thing pretty much, only with a much narrower and more specific historical and sonic basis.

What makes MRI's new album such a headscratcher is that much of it comes closer to openly courting the original and unproblematic dancefloor-basis of house... it's harder to see where it's mixing up the ingredients. And that's where it starts to approach Sasha-material, for Sasha's materials are always expertly measured and applied from a dancefloor perspective. But maybe the difference is that MRI don't take a dancefloor- focus for granted, and their investigations in that direction sound deliberate rather than interpellated.

Ronan, Herbert is sort of microhouse so if you've heard him that's one example, but it would be misleading to assume that most of it sounds anything like that.

Historically it's based in a scene within Cologne, Germany, pretty much kick-started by Wolfgang Voigt (Gas, Mike Ink, Studio 1 etc.). His stuff from the mid-to-late nineties - sorta Basic Channel/Chain Reaction style abstract house thump - perhaps set the outer-limit in terms of how bare/empty house could be. What's happened since is a colonisation of the space that left, with an exploration of all the other things house could be, though a fair amount of it still sounds like Voigt. A lot of the labels are still based in Cologne (Kompakt, Perlon, Ware, Playhouse maybe) but the scene has obviously spread a lot, though I would still characterise it as largely very German.

Jess (and before him Sheburne) correctly identify the multiplicity of sources that feed into the music. The trackiness of Relief-style Chicago house *is* a big source I'd say because it's the main prior example of house that is very abstract but sacrifices none of its "house"-character (the rhythms still swing sultrily - in general it's still sexy - cf. most "big room" prog). There's also a big IDM influence though, not least because a lot of the practitioners (eg. some Jan Jelinik, Vladislav Delay as Luomo) are IDM-artists themselves. So there's also a strong influence from glitch/clicks & cuts, and in fact if you pick up Clicks & Cuts 2 you might notice that a good proportion of it is microhouse (it should be noted that Force Inc. set up the Force Tracks label to specifically deal with this link, though they call it "click-house"). And then there's the fascination with pop songs.

It's that proliferation of sources that distinguishes microhouse from Mr. C-style tech-house, which is a pretty straight combination of normal house with Detroit techno. But some "microhouse" sounds very very close to "tech-house" (Sascha Funke's "Drei Auf Drei", for example).

Some big-names: Herbert; Isolee (maker of monsta-hit "Beau Mot Plage"); Luomo; MRI; Pantytec; Michael Mayer; Matthias Schaffhauser; Hakan Lidbo; The Modernist.

Hope that helped.

oh, i think they're there...it's just that they're hovering in this bizarre middleground where it's reaching for this discoball grandeur yet retains all the little pop, chortles, clicks and whirrs, not to mention the clipped percussion. (crafted from all those microscopic samples...something which can't be said for sasha style house is that the sampler is microhouse's secret weapon...no matter how "big" it gets these guys are masters of micro-managment.) the interesting thing - or hopefully the interesting thing - will be seeing how the programming advances of the last four-six years are integrated into an environment which could very easily trample the details into submission. (the voice samples on the first mri track, for instance, sound sliced from a masters at work track with a razor then sent spinning, stuttering and shuddering through a chain reaction echo chamber.) i can't imagine dancing to much of superlongevity for instance.

and of course, ha ha tim, you haven't read the entire piece [because it sits unfinished in bits and pieces around my notebooks], but the mri "section" [now verging on 5 paragraphs...it needs trimming] does deal with the "breakdown" of the microhouse paradigm vis a vis "the big room sound." it's helpful to remember that cologne's techno scene is ostensibly the birthplace of this sound, and if we look back to the early "scene" [trans atlantic, stucture, even profan and studio one], it was quite unashamedly dancefloor based...yet the draw of the "experiment" was too strong to ignore [cf. basic channel for the most obvious example of something similar going on in berlin at roughly the same time.] i think it's forgotten because so much of that stuff owed more to techno than house...microhouse owes as much to jeff mills as marshall jefferson.

i like the phrase: i use the term microhouse but don't really believe in it. i suppose i don't either, because most of the above (and every word i seem to write about the "genre") seems a rather desperate effort to throw a net around an impossible large, wriggling, hydra-headed mutant genre. it's as if all the (non london rave/pirate radio) best parts of techno/experimental electronica/neo- dub have coalesced around this All Holy house beat. kompakt came (ostensibly) out of cologne acid; luomo came (ostensibly) out of chain reaction; daniel bell, richie hawtin and others have come out of detroit; artists like jan jelinek can float between ~scape and klang elektronik. it's a helluva time to be a dance music fan, really.

I agree - hence "harder to see" rather than "missing". I certainly don't think it is in any way a bad thing; the dancefloor tracks tend to be my favourites, and furthermore I'd hate to try to enforce some division between dancefloor and non-dancefloor, as if microhouse is too good to shake yer booty to (more booty- shakin' please!)

the interesting thing - or hopefully the interesting thing - will be seeing how the programming advances of the last four-six years are integrated into an environment which could very easily trample the details into submission.

You may be slightly under-estimating (or I might be over- estimating) the ability to perceive detail (and the potential delicacy of detail) on the dancefloor. Even without drugs most of my really emotional experiences on the dancefloor have been caused by the sudden sensation of a hundred doors opening as I begin to suddenly discern the brilliance of the interlocking minute particles that make up the music.

it's interesting to track the press mentions of this "sound" as it developed. the january 2000 issue of the wire has an interview with matt herbert and rob young's epochal (for me anyway) "glitch" essay. in the herbert article (by kodwo eshun) there's repeated mention of "minimal" and "minutae" but no neologisms as such. in the glitch essay however, young uses both the phrase "crack house" to describe artists like theo parrish, jurgen paape, and cristian vogel (super_collider is definitely a missing link in the m-house lineage), as well as "microfunk" to talk about snd, autechre, and monolake. (but then he goes on to talk about some banal kim cascone deal with music that probably was never there to begin with.)

i can tell i'm obsessed with this "genre" because i'm hearing it everywhere: today in the car i was listening to the "live" version of "sex machine" from james brown's album of the same name. there's a point somewhere in the middle where the band drops out but the groove keeps going, augmented by an occasional scratch of guitar and of course jb's vocal yelps which could easily be glitched up samples. it's 2 minutes that's so klang/perlon/kompakt it's scary.

Jess I will respond to your wise comments when I get back from uni.

(*unless of course tim is just channelling my grandmother, who wouldn't stoop to saying "ass" or "acre" and would merely say "don't be wise." to which we would sniggeringly thing, does that mean we can be stupid? did you know she once called filene's basement [us clothing store] felini's basement. i'd love to see what was in felini's basement. did i mention i'm also drunk. i love you all.)

The etomology game is a fun one, perhaps with this particular strand of music more than others due to the fact that microhouse represents an implosion rather than an explosion. Which is not to say its creative horizon has narrowed - quite the opposite - but rather that most of the artists involved have come from such different directions, and it's only been over quite some time that they've come to be considered as part of the one "scene". So what's been interesting is how the terms used have become progressively vaguer ("microhouse" being the epitome of this) as they've had to expand to cope with the incoming traffic.

I like "crack-house", but only if it's posited as being the end of a certain spectrum (Perlon?), the other end of which is "smack- house" (eg. the post-Basic Channel woozy stuff you get on Kompakt).

tune in via the web
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/

banging epic prog dance !!!!!!!!!!

fuck this track playing now is good ! it has weird spiral sounds and epic house trippy tip

what is it?

the album 'airdrawn dagger' flits between leftfield/orbital and er, mike oldfield, but its generally okay (if it had come out a year or two earlier than it had it wouldve done better and been more popular)

01. Mathew Dekay - Beautiful Monday
02. ID
03. Ulrich Schnauss - ID
04. Panoptic - Surface
05. ID
06. Maurice & Noble – Hoochie Koochie Man
07. Amber - Anyway (Steve Porter Remix 2)
08. Timo Maas - Unite
09. ID
10. P.Diddy feat. Kelis - Lets Get Ill (Deep Dish Remix)
11. ID
12. Dave Gahan - Dirty Sticky Floors (Junkie Xl Dub)
13. Bjork - ID
14. ID
15. Junkie XL - Red Pill, Blue Pill (Main Mix)
16. Nirvana vs Adam Freeland - Smells Like Teen Sprit 2003
17. Sasha vs Underworld - Cowpander (Junkie XL Edit)

I'm listening to it right now, three minutes in - some of my favourite tracks of the moment to look forward to (Amber, Dave Gahan, Nirvana).

And re: Airdrawndagger - judging from the shitload of great Junkie XL remixes/singles (the prog ones, not the big beat ones) in the last few months, I've come to the conclusion that mr. Tom Holkenberg was responsible for all the good stuff there (Cloud Cuckoo et al).

Xpander report Sasha will release an album: Involver as part of the Global Underground compilation series.

This is an album of exclusively recorded remixes/ recreations by Sasha from other artists [Felix Da Housecat, Ulrich Schnauss, Grand National etc] tracks.

Sasha - Involver tracklisting

01 GRAND NATIONAL - TALK AMONGST YOURSELVES
02 SHPONGLE - DORSET PERCEPTION
03 PETTER - THESE DAYS
04 UNKLE - WHAT ARE YOU TO ME?
05 THE YOUNGSTERS - SMILE
06 SPOOKY - BELONG
07 UNKLE - IN A STATE
08 LOSTEP - BURMA
09 FELIX DA HOUSECAT - WATCHING CARS GO BY
10 ULRICH SCHNAUSS - ON MY OWN

Xpander also have a new interview with Sasha

Billboard report this album will be released on June 22nd [in the US] by Global Underground.

In the UK, Sasha - Involver has a release date of June 14th.

*i think*

Found my 2 disc Northern Exposure: Expeditions in a box and drove around listening to it for a couple days. It’s good! It prompted me to buy his Global Underground 13: Ibiza mix when I spotted it for 3 bux the other day and it’s probably even better for being a bit less trancey.

I don’t know what he’s up to these days; his old chum Digweed put out a four hour album several years ago which was vv good. Both these guys are better than Oakenfold as far as the trance Mt Rushmore types go, I listened to Tranceport recently and the cheese factor was wild.

i still have a lot of time for his 2cd set of remixes/film soundtrack.

https://www.discogs.com/release/1307527-Sasha-The-emFire-Collection-Mixed-Unmixed-Remixed

Didn’t know about this one, but the trance folks haven’t received much press post-GU glory days, they fell outta style twenty years ago. Tho I feel like there are so many artists inspired by that sound coming up now. The best of that bunch I’ve heard is Long Island Sound.