Techno/House Bobbins of the past

I do love a lot of what i hear in 2008!

Nocturbulous Behavior

This record Never gets old. I like it very much!

sorry but that is basically "i don't like this" masked as some kind of theoretical science.

If you and James Jamerson were to play bass together there would be no objective difference between what he can play and what you can play? Do you play as well as McCoy Tyner?

Music is a language. Is it too much to say that some people are expressing more interesting thoughts with it than others?

Do you honestly think that the guys that you blog about who can barely string a track together on a computer are going to be able to out do guys who can actually play music on real instruments? I listened to the first half of your chart and you realize that there is zero tonal movement in the entire thing. It is all based on either one chord stab or in the case of that loco dice track it is based on one single 2 bar piano loop(it is really a one bar loop but on the second pass he plays the last chord twice. I am not even going to get into the drums...

This is the musical equivalent of reading writing geared towards an audience with a 4th grade reading comprehension. If that is how you get your kicks that is fantastic. I don't like it, but I also don't like the writing in tabloids.

lol gospel pianist.

"none of these rock guitarists can sew a scout badge on".

Mike...none of that means liking or disliking the music is worth more/less.

If the best musician was the most talented then techno has nothing on classical music does it? Or at least, that's what a classical fan would tell you.

I can't believe I'm even having this argument. It's not a competition, it's music. Nobody "outdoes" anybody and the important reason music is "remembered" for me is if I remember it, not if some sweaty dudes on messageboards all agree it was the greatest technical feat of its era.

"This is the musical equivalent of reading writing geared towards an audience with a 4th grade reading comprehension. If that is how you get your kicks that is fantastic. I don't like it, but I also don't like the writing in tabloids."

not cos you find it right wing I presume

"Do you honestly think that the guys that you blog about who can barely string a track together on a computer are going to be able to out do guys who can actually play music on real instruments?"

What does this even mean? Do I seriously think the music I like is actually good rather than the music you like?

31 going on 15 Mike.

"Do you honestly think that the guys that you blog about who can barely string a track together on a computer are going to be able to out do guys who can actually play music on real instruments?"

YES!

What about ywngie?

Fucking Yngwie's techno tracks rule!

they are undre the name of Villalobos i Thinkj?"?/1/?!??!/!/1!

i am sort of sympathetic to mike's argument - you sort of wonder about guys like robag wruhme. could they make a "black water" or a "knights of the jaguar" if they wanted to? obviously the detroit guys know their scales and stuff, and so do *some* europeans. thinking like, alter ego and gang? they are quite musical when you get down to it.

but then the hole in mike's argument is that there's guys who *are* musically trained who end up making earhole-bursting noise, and guys with very little training (thinking justice here) who make stuff that's quite melodic. so how can we be so sure that like, marco carola or whoever doesn't play a mean flamenco guitar?

Make 'em sit a test.

Can they play "The Last Days of May" by Blue Oyster Cult or not?

maybe we're so busy punching easy holes in mike's argument that we're missing the tougher one: could the music stand to have a little more, uh, music in it?

yes. and more sweaty dudes on messageboards.

it could stand to have a little more music like a cardiac patient could stand just one more chest compression.

hmm i don't follow

i'm sure it's clever, but assume i'm sort of dumb and spell it out for me

To me, older tracks often just seem to have more life to them (even the kinda shitty ones actually). They breathe. There's less compression and less focus on the mid-range. I dunno ... maybe I'm just too much of a sucker for certain old school sounds ... 808 kicks, 909 claps, some 303s and shit ... whatever. It all just sounds right to my ears. Sometimes new stuff does too, but not nearly as often.

It's not necessarily a matter of musicality, but I do like some development going on (which can be accomplished through repetition, of course).

and musicality shouldn't be conflated with yngwie-style virtuosity.

one finger synth solos all day long

BY THE WAY

this remastered "jelly tones" is quite amazing. much more dynamic sound.

"moved by air" sounds particularly amazing

I am not out on some Geirist notion that melody is the most important thing music virtue or that you have to be able to play Dvorak in order to make good music.

The point I am trying to make is that a lot of the stuff getting lauded is working on only the barest musical cloth. I am not asking for huge solos and huge technical feats. Is it too much to ask for a chord progression? Is it too much to ask for a key change when you break into a new section?

The difference between older dance music and today is that the guys making the old stuff had a background in "real music." Larry Heard was a drummer, Juan Atkins was a bass player, Jeff Mills played drums in his high school jazz band, Mike Banks was a session keyboard guy... That is the thing that nobody wants to bring up about all the old school legends, those guys were musicians.

That was the beautiful thing from R&B-->disco-->Chi house/Detroit techno-->minimalism. Right around the turn on the 90's is where things started to get to stripped down and abstracted. I love BC and Dan Bell as much as anybody, but when their legacy is the default approach is when things go too far. The history of house and techno was to take disco and electro and italo and make those forms more streamlined and functional.
When you have that kind of musical background you can do stuff like that and make it work.

The problem these days is that people don't know anything about music and they get one chord stab or loop and they just layer some facile drums over it and a couple keyboard vamps and call it "deep house" or whatever.

I love ear candy as much as the next guy, but there has to be some music underneath it. The new return to deep it only a surface return, the underlying musicality which makes the old records relevant is missing.

If you want to know what is missing from today's music you just need to listen to those old disco records. There isn't a lick of Yngwie in an old Salsoul, P&P or Prelude record. At their best they were good tunes fleshed out with good performances and solid production. The nu-disco stuff is at least trying to bring this idea back into dance. I would like to see somebody try to reclaim techno in the same way.

And what is sad is that I am not even asking for Yngwie. I am asking for the musicality that your average teenager has after he has played in a few cover bands. I am not even asking for polyrhythm, weird chord progressions, inversions, and weird ass extended chords. Fuck, I would be happy if I could even get some I-IV-V.

you get the sense that people were somehow trying harder back then.

my biggest fear is that minimal is going to put house & techno on the same road to nowhere that drum'n'bass went when it reacted against "excessive musicianship".

The problem these days is that people don't know anything about music and they get one chord stab or loop and they just layer some facile drums over it and a couple keyboard vamps and call it "deep house" or whatever.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN

"you get the sense that people were somehow trying harder back then."

perhaps if you look back at the seminal records that now stand out you do, but surely plenty of "knocked out" records back then too, even amongst the classics.

I'm not claiming dance music isn't different or it never changes. I think now you have a lot more artists doing a lot "smaller" work, if that makes sense. I quite like this, because I like the sense of dance music as this sum of all those parts, a sum you make yourself, or each DJ/fan makes themselves.

Also I really hate the cult that rises up around the really auteuristic producers and the same rhetoric that seems to grow on them like mould, like on this thread.

Obviously the fact you can make the music with a laptop rather than expensive hardware has a big effect on this. But then I think if more people are able to try and make some music than before, that's a good thing, if others are willing to buy/listen to their music then I don't see any harm.

I think where I differ majorly from you, Mike and others, is that I don't hear something and think "the musicianship in this is amazing", as a first impression. Though of course I fail to see how sound design is not musicianship, or how there's "real music" etc etc. Some of this stuff is pretty conservative.

Also I don't believe that there's a firm or permanent connection between great musicians and great music. As Vahid said, sometimes guys with great musical skills make very boring records. Making music is surely about composition and ideas, which is not the same skill as being able to physically play an instrument.

eg any half decent guitarist can play most Beatles songs, but it was the idea not necessarily musical talent/skill that led to the success.

Also it is utterly, completely ridiculous to just assume nobody working in minimal stuff or whatever you want to call it has musical training or is a musician, or fling out stuff like "they know nothing about music". Just unfounded and silly.

Tons of these producers are musicians and have musical backgrounds. I know because you see it mentioned or discussed endlessly in interviews.

And how is all of UR's back catalogue utterly "musical"? They have released plenty of stuff that is very tracky and disposable, that nobody is going to pick up and listen to as an independent work. There are plenty of those records that don't seem particularly musical, unless I'm missing something.

Also above all, I don't really understand disliking one approach to music by default. I love UR records and Chicago house, but I also have been enjoying minimal and now the housier stuff (which isn't just neo "deep house", nobody is satisfied with calling it that anyway) as much as I've ever enjoyed music.

And I still think a lot of this is just making a big complex theory out of a really strong dislike for a type of music. It's not the end of house and techno just cos you don't enjoy it.

And if anything is a threat to house/techno at the moment it's that the currently popular stuff is too backward thinking, that purism is so casually back in fashion, not with you guys of course, but a lot of people don't seem too interested in doing something majorly new.

also I really hate the cult that rises up around the really auteuristic producers

i think this is a good point, that's sort of what we're doing here. picking out dudes from 10 years ago who didn't really have a *scene* around them. like dan curtin. nobody else makes music like dan curtin.

but where/who are the auteur house/techno dudes nowadays?

i didn't really finish my thought ... not fair to compare auteurs like carl craig and ken ishii to a scene based around scene-y sameyness.

do you mean that today is scene-y sameyness? just cos I obviously disagree.

today's auteurs: ricardo certainly, not sure who else. there are plenty of producers who do individual work but aren't necessarily in that culty auteuristic place.

what I think adds a twist to this debate is that Detroit stuff and German stuff is becoming quite mixed. For instance take a listen to Dan Bell's latest podcast, full of Federico Molinari, Johnny D etc. His first release on the reformed Elevate Recordings is by Baaz from Chaton's label in Switzerland.

Similarly my friend saw Patrice Scott recently and said he was playing Radioslave and plenty of Euro stuff.

I don't know what Mike thinks of Keith Worthy/Patrice Scott etc though.

Seems like minimal and etc. is guilty of any crime you can care to name:

1) Too melodic
2) Not melodic enough
3) Unnecessarily complex
4) Boringly simple
5) Fussy and overproduced
6) Facile and underproduced
7) Obsessed with remanufacturing the past
8) Ignorant of dance music history

I'm not sure how these things can all be true at once - but I guess it would make perfect sense if I was (or even knew IRL) a "cat".

i dont understand how you can hear a techno track today (or ever) and know whether or not the artist has any musical training just by listening to it.

that sounds like some mysticism about the process of 'musical training' from someone whose understanding of theory is pretty cursory in the first place

but how can i know? i cant. maybe you are very highly trained

"Seems like minimal and etc. is guilty of any crime you can care to name:

1) Too melodic
2) Not melodic enough
3) Unnecessarily complex
4) Boringly simple
5) Fussy and overproduced
6) Facile and underproduced
7) Obsessed with remanufacturing the past
8) Ignorant of dance music history

I'm not sure how these things can all be true at once - but I guess it would make perfect sense if I was (or even knew IRL) a "cat".

-- Tim F"

i dont know anyone who comments on the amount of melody in mnml shit being "too much" or the music being "underproduced", so i dont know where those came from. but some of the other apparent dichotomies you mention are very easily explained:

"3) Unnecessarily complex
4) Boringly simple"

this one is the drum and bass problem. the act of producing the sounds has become unnecessarily complex, while the results are boringly simple. before, a beat track could be made with an 808, it didnt take much time or effort but you got a functional track out of it. these days, people spend many hours on their DSP-athons trying to make some subtley different sound and then put it out in a simple track that is in no way interesting. this is the same thing that has plagued drum and bass, those guys spend crazy time on their bass sounds and then whack them over a boring as hell beat with a predictable buildup. it is mainly interesting to other producers (which is seemingly everyone in DnB these days) and people who dont remember when jungle tunes could actually have interesting stucture, rhythm, etc. the same is happening with techno and house music now. harder styles of techno were guilty of this as well, but they were never as mainstream as mnml and "deep house" are now which is why it is a bigger problem at this point in time.

"7) Obsessed with remanufacturing the past
8) Ignorant of dance music history"

this one is great because it is a non-argument. in fact, the only person i have seen really argue that mnml/"deep house" things are obsessed with "remanufacturing the past" is Ronan, who seems to just make this shit up out of nothing. the real criticism of this music is right along the line of what Display Name said: "The new return to deep it only a surface return, the underlying musicality which makes the old records relevant is missing."

i don't think anyone wants Yngwie type musician wankery nonsense in techno music (well, except for Squarepusher fans i guess) but trying to make a track that is melodically rewarding is not equivalent to that. however, i do feel like most of the DSP wankery IS the equivalent of Yngwie, straight up technical garbage with no soul in it. i do think that the Beatles comparison is apt: they made good MUSIC, it may not have been particularly technical but that wasn't the point. the problem is that so few producers even ATTEMPT to approach their music like that.

i have no problem with some beat tracks, but that is not the sum of techno. Ronan said "I think now you have a lot more artists doing a lot "smaller" work, if that makes sense. I quite like this, because I like the sense of dance music as this sum of all those parts, a sum you make yourself, or each DJ/fan makes themselves." and that is pretty much the Richie Hawtin point of view on dance music: everything is subservient to the will of the person stitching the music together. this to me is extremely uninteresting, the idea of "song" is thrown out the window, the "producers" are reduced to sound designers. of course Ronan also said "Though of course I fail to see how sound design is not musicianship" which is pretty much ridiculous. and his claims of "purism" and "conservatism" because we dont see the emperor's new clothes only show how ludicrous most of his arguments are anyway. i still cant figure out how that guy gets any gigs writing about dance music, his inability to grasp anything outside of what is "cool" right now is ridiculously limiting.

I've been enjoying the discussion so far but this - i still cant figure out how that guy gets any gigs writing about dance music, his inability to grasp anything outside of what is "cool" right now is ridiculously limiting. - seems meanspirited. Not to mention the fact that the majority of published music criticism tends to revolve around a parochial view of the 'contemporary', so as an attempt at a personal attach, it fails. It's a bit like saying 'I can't believe this guy who is a music journalist is a journalist writing about music'.

anyway, can people go back to talking about cool old records I can check out?

but even amongst people who are tied up in strictly the modern, Ronan is the only one who pushes these ridiculous lines of argument. it confounds me. i rather enjoy debating with other people like philip sherburne, the mnmlssgs guys, etc. but talking with Ronan is just ridiculous.

you enjoy "debating" with people who doff their cap

what ridiculous lines of argument? what arguments are you referring to?

I think plenty people on this thread would agree with what I'm saying, which is simply that whether people like/enjoy music is one of the most important things about any record, and in my opinion outweighs how difficult it was to make classically speaking.

as a result I reject all of these divisions between hardware/software, old/new etc.

I'm not even partisan about this, I don't rabidly insist new music is better than old. I just insist that there shouldn't be a hierarchy.

It actually annoys me sometimes that other people can't be bothered to argue on threads like this because I can remember ILM when somebody questioning the idea of subjectivity or somehow acting like it can be overruled would be shot down in a matter of minutes.

I can remember ILM when somebody questioning the idea of subjectivity or somehow acting like it can be overruled would be shot down in a matter of minutes

yes, me too. i know exactly where you are coming from, but i think the argument makes sense to me when i think about the issue of "musicianship" as sort of a red herring, or a mt / pipecock language way of wondering whether the balance hasn't swung a bit toward excessively tracky in the last few years.

i mean, this line of thinking should be OK, right? and for once, i don't really follow tim here. it seems to me that pipecock and mt's arguments seem pretty focused here.

I definitely agree that there's a good discussion to be had about what the point between that Beatles example and the Ywngie thing is. Or about how traditional musicianship fits into techno.

But we won't have it if this becomes just a vehicle to say "this music is crap and worthless" or even "this person is crap and worthless" as some seem fond of doing.

I really love the deep house mix of The Way Love Goes by 10 City. They give you a 16 bar intro to mix into, then you get a stripped down version of a real song, then you get a 16 bar tracky break to mix out of, and then more song and then finally the outro.

I don't have a problem with tracky, what I have a problem with is DJ's and producers who have become so lost in an incestuous scene that they have completely lost sight of the rest of the musical spectrum. We had the same issue 10 years ago during the hard techno era. Tools are a great way to add variety and to get from one song to another. However, they shouldn't be the entire set.

This kind of imbreeding leads to feeble music and the same exact thing happened to IDM about 8 years ago. Once you remove the sonic window dressing and the scene aspect of it, there is nothing there. It can't go anywhere because it can't express anything beyond a 2 bar loop. It is like trying to tell a story with a fraction of a haiku.

don't know about that
is it impossible or
just a bit awkward

That is a whole Haiku, I am asking you to do it with only one of those lines.

5 or 7 syllables, take your pick.

LOL picky pedant

that's 5 AND 7

so lost in an incestuous scene that they have completely lost sight of the rest of the musical spectrum

warning, extreme subjectivity at work