James Blake, Mt Kimbie, CD/SD

oh no he dint!

<3

Oh great vahid's "home listening" rant again

xpost to baja

haha ok man if it makes u feel good inside troll up this thread

fwiw i love listening to hardcore dance music at home. i hate the idea that all home music has to be low-key or something

but obviously there are extra-musical concerns playing out here, so, yeah.

would lounge in a chillout room playing maybes

ok, first of all, this isn't about home listening vs hardcore dance. seeing as my all-time favorite label is mo'wax (closely followed by various ambient techno labels from UK / detroit) and i own more than 80% of the catalog, i think that's a bit of a red herring.

really, i'm just opposed to music that suxx.

truth is, these days anybody can slap some heavy grainy washed-out noise effects on a soft-baked, half-assed, underwritten pastiche of actual good music and then call it witch house, chillwave, post-dubstep, what have you. and people will just hoover it up the way they hoover up any sort of design whatever that references midcentury stuff (and i say that as somebody who has books on case study houses) or any sort of clothing whatever that is vaguely associated with heritage or americana.

so yeah, obviously some extra-musical concerns playing out here because i can't fathom how anybody could find anything intra-musical to like about this shit.

what i really want to do is precisely articulate why i think, say, mo'wax and boards of canada are legitimate expressions of this impulse and why

basically it just comes down to invention and novelty, i guess. and when i hear this stuff there's no shock of the new or anything, it's just like "oh, look, someone made a chillwave version of uk garage" and then i just get that same creeping feeling of lameness i get when i read interviews with these guys and they list their influences like "terry riley, grizzly bear, the xx, joker, todd edwards" OMG

that makes more sense. for me, i'd been checking out dubstep etc. for a few years, and i was interested but nothing really caught me, and it's not something i ever hear when out dancing (well, at this point there are a couple dubstep nights around here, but it's something you really have to seek out).

when i heard mount kimbie it was actually a revelation, i realized it was exactly the version of this music i'd been looking for. really musical, incredibly detailed, organic sounds. it's not really a surprise since i've always been a sucker for the artier "home listening" side of dance music, so if that's what offends you on a philosophical level, fine. but the "intra-musical" stuff is precisely what is so strong about this band to me.

so maybe i meant "that makes less sense"

so you like this music better because it's more musical

thanks geir

cause rap is just people talking over other people's beats, right?

the people want ART

ok "musical" is not a very helpful term, but i use it to mean tasteful (in a good way) and good at their craft, good at making everything have an effect, good at making decisions. i think i started saying that because drummers toss that term around to describe other drummers.

now just come on

tasteful?

http://m-a-g.org/mag/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Mount_Kimbie-Crooks_Lovers.jpg

^^ tasteless

you're tasteless

taking ten year old beat styles and make it quiet and fuzzy sounding = good decision! (financially, anyway)

not as tasteless as two white dudes putting a fat black lady in streetwear on their "look at us tweak the conventions of street music" album

http://i.imgur.com/UcH7z.gif

well, thanks for attempting a musical critique of mt kimbie but it's not reverb and wooze at all; it's crisp and detailed sounding. it's mostly cutup samples i think. and im a sucker for that

but i guess i'm being hypocritical because i always shat on 'art rap' in college (atmosphere, def-jux) and preferred mobb deep, three 6, etc.

i will say that i liked the eps better than crooks and lovers. i could see it getting old. that's the problem with these threads - not like i think mt kimbie is going to save music or anything. i just really like their sound design.

i dont know man, i wrote a really mean response but then deleted it; i dont wanna get into that. i think i admitted to being an 'indie dilettante' upthread and if that's what it's all about, fine.

i think BoC is good ref. point -- what do you like about them that you don't find in Mt kimbie? mount kimbie don't have that strong affective undercurrent, i don't think, for one

xpost oh yes let's go there -- people who like mt kimbie ARE RACIST

shocked it took this long tbh

she's black?

(honestly it just makes me happy that this thread is active, even if it's b/c of trolling)

hey baja do you like the actress album? i think i saw you say you thought it was overrated but still dug it a lot right?

I think this argument has crystallised why I don't think much of this album, it's not big or kinetic enough to work on the dancefloor but just isn't interesting enough to work as swoony headphone/bedroom music. It could do with being MORE melodic, if anything.

Honorable exceptions = Carbonated and whatever that Kompaktish one is towards the end.

i loved both actress albums

i agree that carbonated is the best track, but also the one that just sounds like an extra-fizzy, slowed-down version of a todd edwards track circa 2000

hmm i feel like there must be a lot of reverb on something like "before i move off" but maybe they just recorded that guitar in a parking garage or some other suitably desolate, urban, british location

i don't think "before i move off" sounds any crisper or more detailed than, say, a skream track. it's just like year 1 college acoustic guitar lesson behind a super quieted down skream track

btw thank YOU for attempting a musical critique

=D

"quieted down"

I don't see any good reason to put Mt. Kimbie, and the album in particular, at the centre of any post-dubstep vs whatever debate - it's a nice album, and I love a couple of the songs right now, but it's not a defining masterpiece or anything. Albumwise I don't think I've heard anything since Untrue that's worth having fights over.

it's the center of the debate because certain, uh, cultural outlets are acting like it's a defining masterpiece.

well for one BoC took an existing trend and took a deeper look at the roots. oh hey, this new-fangled beat electronica stuff actually has some roots in 70s electronic soundtrack and library stuff, why don't we amp up that element and see what happens. that's relevant. fuck, that's how stuff like UK garage gets invented in the first place, right?

this is just making an existing beat science appropriate for play in starbucks. thanks, but no thanks.

things i like about this song specifically: the rhythm guitar hook, the feeling that every single sound has been labored over, how they mix that huge, conspicuous reverb with the close & dry sounds in a very distinctive way, great cut-up vox.

what's an equivalent skream track i could listen to (seriously)?

xp

umm how about "midnight request line"? also if you want a mix of huge and conspicuous reverb mixed with close & dry you could try "night" by benga & coki, i think both of these tracks might have made a small stir in the dubstep scene but you might have missed them if you were busy listening to, i dunno, deerhunter or something for your reverb fix.

and yeah, sorry to act like the frankfurt school is still relevant or whatever and maybe that's a way more affected position than "i remember listening to bass clef, burial, and loefah a lot at the time, but we had both come from different musical backgrounds, and both loved material like xiu xiu and steve reich" but at the same time ILM is my cultural outlet and frankly i'm tired of this sorry "my personal taste and poptimist outlook trumps any reasoned debate over the dialectics of culture" attitude, come on people, our generation can do a little better than that.

i dont know man, i wrote a really mean response but then deleted it; i dont wanna get into that.

please do!

it's WORTH getting worked up over stuff that's IMPORTANT

i'm interested in the uk dance scene but don't have any stake it, my only exposure is through internet shit. no one i know irl is fluent enough in it to talk about it, much less get worked up. so i understand that defensive/purist attitude (personally i save it for new orleans second line music, which no one really knows or cares enough about to have a decent message board argument), but in this case it's all a bit abstract from my pov.

xp
you're kind of all over the place here though. do you want us to talk about cultural dialectics or just admit the music "suxx"? also, that quote in your xp second paragraph, is that from something or a paraphrase? I haven't read any interviews with Mt Kimbie so I honestly have no idea what their stated influences are.

"midnight request line" is obv way more danceable that mount kimbie, but also way more boring

it's the center of the debate because certain, uh, cultural outlets are acting like it's a defining masterpiece.

Just out of curiosity, who? (I've only heard the album because a couple people I know online raved about it, and I have little sense of its context, both in terms of the scene from which it comes and the way it's been received.)

ok

the vituperation you're responding with seems to suggest something beyond an academic and personal, aesthetic investment in the music -- you're claiming higher moral ground because you dislike a particular record, and you've implied that mt kimbie -- acting as an example of a larger phenomenon -- represent a quasi-imperial, white takeover or re-appropriation of black music. by extension you're implying that you are somehow sticking up for an oppressed minority by dissing mt kimbie on a messageboard. i dont know your background, but that's a bullshit stance, and if nothing else, reveals some weird insecurities on your part, possibly related to the fact that ilm is your cultural outlet, which seems to indicate that you have no friends

I don't think it's just me projecting my insecurities when there's articles out there entitled "mt kimbie takes duubstep over the brostep hump"

oh and I have friends btw

actually I'm quite popular and only hang out with hot chicks so I'm not sweating it ;-)

haaa ok, i can agree with you that that article is execrable. "However, Mount Kimbie's sound is no paint-by-numbers dubstep affair; it's deceptively complex" uhhh ... i guess people do forget that it's really really hard to take just a bassline and a drum track and make it bang. i can see finding their a little cluttered especially compared to leaner step/techno tracks.

but that doesn't mean i can't, or don't, like their music. anyways i feel like im becoming the damn mt kimbie spokesman or something so i gotta sign off of this thread

xp - Ok that headline is nonsense. But I don't think many readers of the article would come away thinking Mount Kimbie are proper dubstep any more than BoC are proper techno.

"proper dubstep" probably should have been in scare quotes there.

James&B: *ahem* I guess the only thing he's got in common with the genre is that he sampled it all over the CMKY EP, Aalyah, Kelis and alsorts feature on there. I've seen him DJ a few times now and fuck me he can play a set. He throws curve balls all over the place but makes them work somehow. I mean every time I've seen him he's played a diffrent Beyonce track mixed with a diffrent Coki track and made it sound not only good but fucking brilliant and a shit load of fun. When you hear his stuff next to Outkast and Zomby it all somehow fits and joins the dots. Its juts a but load of fun. His music hits sposts outside of that context to. He just make massive meladramtic tracks that move floors. Joker moves floors in a more obvious way James Blake twists it up a bit and when you ballance all that energy out just right James Blake's twisted vision is one hell of a dude to have in your record bag. Plus he's got way more than just that going for him, some kind of vocal thing is on the cards no doubt... So you ilixor dudes will be moaning about him again in a few years when p4k review his album in 'THE FUTURE!' ;) I'll chat about Mount Kimbie if this thread lives longer I was to bored by the convo you peeps where taking to bother with that angle.

maybe this is a conversation we need to have: is music that is marketed / promoted under bullshit premises necessarily also created / received under bullshit premises? and does any of that matter?

hey jimi try not posting when high, thx

no and no

xp