Let's talk about Derrick May

The Mayday mix is great. I love a DJ who plays around with the beat and mixes things up. Yes, he doesn't do smooth seamless mixing, but I don't think that's what he's going for. To me, the way he messes with expectations and toys with the listener/dancer is much more exciting.

Search that RA "Cosmic Twins" mix(May and François K) from a few months back if still in doubt.

BTW I mix pretty much exclusively with Ableton and it's STILL possible to trainwreck - trust me. But that's for another thread...

I like the Cosmic Twins mix, actually.

GF just told me derrick may sounds like "chocolate rain"

all i can say is "haha"

I was just loooking at my copy of Innovator. Has anyone collected those tracks in original full length mixes that I could torrent or d/l?

sometimes i think: this dude perfected music

Do his melodies move you? Is there something about how he programs beats? Does the textures he gets from his synths make you swoon.

^^^Emphatic yes to all

he did use a lot of basic synth sounds
but there are those flange-d out chord blasts that are like aggressive painting strokes, somehow sounding primal and stately simultaneously.

there is no music better than "it is what it is" or "nude photo"

Except Icons (Montage Mix)

no

was that youtube clip of May and Carl Craig performing Strings live posted on this thread? If not, go look it up.

What's the story with the unreleased May LP on wire's "100 records that set the world on fire" list? google is failing me.

tbh may records are all about the breakdowns

also strings has no bassline

do you think derrick may has copies of his records that actually stay on time

this is the perfect time of year for mayday

just my $0.02

Emporors new clothes music.

I've been attempting to hear the 'soul' in his music for 20 years to no avail, all I hear is tedious joyless keyboard demos forged by a great self-promoter with a deft knack for pushing a genre creation myth to people who desperately want dance music to be more than the sum of its parts.

that's because you're a cloth eared dunce

OTM

But to hark back to the OP's original question back in 2001 - " I just can't see why it was such a breakthrough, and why electronic music freaks still go wild for it. I hear people talking about "soul" when talking about May, which sheds no light for me."

I've read the whole thread and noticed that May's music is always referred to in the context of its surroundings, or in comparison other music of the time. If you were listening for the first time in 2014, unaware of the history etc surely its pretty missable?

yes yes, very interesting, say more about that

You know what I'm really enjoying about nu-nu-ilx is the influx of normals and challops, really shaking things up around here. Does raccoon tanaki have any opinions4u about Derrick May?

normals and challops

wow. back to lurking for me.

peace out bro!

damn, harsh. i sorta agree with you Willl. this post from top of thread is rad. bring back the old internet!!

This may be boring and obvious but: the greatest thing to me abt Detroit techno seems like a drawback when you're just listening to tracks back-to-back: the relative sameness and consistency of the instrumentation (The Roland sound, etc.). I know this has been beaten to death but I'm going to draw a parallel that reinvigorates your interest in the entire genre ;) That sameness allows a gifted DJ (like uh... JEFF MILLS) to do things w/turntables that are literally impossible with other techno and house genres. When the handclaps from one track are the EXACT SAME handclaps in another, you can build a set that is sneaky, unique, and utterly seamless. I feel weird saying this because I have a kind of "anti-seamlessness" stance towards most DJ music these days, but minimal Detroit stuff allows the DJ to be much more of a "musician" than almost any other genre (besides hiphop tunrtablists of course).

The parallel: the World Wide Web. In the very early days of the web, every page looked exactly the same. Gray background, left-justified. No images. That was the vision: every page was just a page among other pages, the "site" was the entire web itself, cross-referenced with everything else. Nothing with its own prominence or personality. The value was in combination, not isolation. I personally get very bored with Surgeon, Jeff Mills, Derrick May, Blake Baxter, etc. on a track-by-track basis but I got bored with individual web pages in 1994 as well - the WHOLE is what gets me goin.
― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 21 June 2001 17:00 (13 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

w/e

telling people they got tricked into liking something is always going to be a non starter

The Great Beige-ing

i like how racist early ilx was, thats p cool

i love listening to detroit techno on a track-by-track basis. sure the quality varies but for the most part i just keep hearing good to great jams, with seams visible because it's made for djing but that's part of the charm imo. the music here is not lacking something on its own.

racist how, lamp?

I've been attempting to hear the 'soul' in his music for 20 years to no avail

It's just cool music, who cares about 'soul' or mythmaking or whatever, i'll bet you like some pretty shitty music yourself, mr emporor

like, is it just a total buzzkill for you whenever somebody drops a derrick may track in a set, because he's so emporors new music?

Mike Taylor's posts about "you need to walk the dark streets of detroit to understand this music" = massive groan, head in hands

^^^ the kind of sh*t that still helps sell loads of Detroit and Chicago-based dance records in Europe and Japan, seemingly. This comes from what friends "in the know" have told me and i find it mildly depressing in this day and age. But this is a whole other tangent/thread.

Not to say that many of the Detroit guys haven't helped push this "only the world we come from could produce this music" viewpoint.

The value was in combination, not isolation. I personally get very bored with Surgeon, Jeff Mills, Derrick May, Blake Baxter, etc. on a track-by-track basis but I got bored with individual web pages in 1994 as well - the WHOLE is what gets me goin.

Yeah lately I've been hearing about this thing called a DJ mix or a DJ set..

My early posts in this thread were bullshit but no one else was doing much better really.

I'm kind of frontin because honestly, i didn't get into Derrick May for a long time (context: didn't arrive at clubbing age until early 00s) "Nude photo" and "strings" did weird me out and make me feel things but for the most part his stuff just went right through me. Certain tracks kept worming their way into my 'soul' and at a certain point I started listening to Innovator a ton and eventually it all hit me like "damn, those hats are sick, that synthstring lead in "is it was it is" is filling my heart with universal love, "r-theme" makes me imagine purple deserts and castles in a utopia on another planet, these drums overall make me want to dance/escape my body". Listening to his drum breakdowns brings such pleasure to me, such a good time.

brimstead your posts itt fill me with joy

^^^^^

lol i never know when people are being sincere around here (myself included), but thank you (sincerely)

sincere luv bruv

i think I'm increasingly w(e)ary of using anything other than the music itself and its effects as a basis to defend or criticise something.

Like stores about soul have zero interest for me but this is just really fucking ace music so let's talk about that.

otm

i think i used to like certain music for shall we say "sociological" reasons and i'm kind of over that these days

also basically w(e)ary of any stripe of broadbrush oppositionalism but that's a me-thing that I don't necessarily expect others to share.

thing is sometimes the conclusions from the sociologial reasoning aren't wrong, but they're maybe right for the wrong reasons?

People who want to talk about the magic of Derrick May are onto something essentially true and correct but they may then bullshit themselves or others about what the nature of that magic is.

As usual the issue isn't the music itself or our reactions to it but how that gets reduced to conversations.