commendation for outstanding service to human race: resident advisor

i'm really skeptical of mixes featuring 90% of the artist own material.

(unless the artist is daft punk obv.)

any guesses for who's on deck for RA #100?

My guess is Luciano (and I wouldn't be surprised it it was a lifted live performance), then Carl Craig.
I have a feeling they asked Ricardo first, but he would turn it down.

I like Luciano's live mixes more than his mix albums so that would suit me just fine.

damn, there are like only two (maybe three?) tracks from that herve & sinden podcast that were on their january essential mix ... dudes are hardworking

so #100 = Ritchie H
.. just starting it off now.
anyone heard it yet ?

Put a patch on him in that RA pic and he'd look like Momus.

Hah!

The comments thread on RA for this one is likely to be a trial I think.

Starts off a bit slow (hello, Richie Hawtin set) but comes into its own after about fifteen minutes.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/images/podcast/ra100-richie-hawtin.jpg

Beard is pretty sweet.

four tet is well worth hearing. very "dance" for him. the mixing's ho-hum, but the selection!

i'll second that. very 'groovy' selection. his mixing has come in for a lot of analysis but i think these people are missing the point.

Great new podcast: it's Laurent Garnier.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/podcast-episode.aspx?id=107

Dozzy's where it's at.

fuuuuuck garnier killed it!

absolutely killed it

i thought so. quiet village was very good.

What I've heard of the Appleblim mix so far is super great

these d-bags pulled a negative digweed review after protests from the record label and replaced it with a positive one, prompting the resignation of two editors

yeah, that's a shame. i got an email from that tami fenwick once and she seemed very nice

Appleblim mix is great.

That Digweed shit is pretty :/ but tbh never read resident advisor, just listen to the mixes which are generally all belters.

Yeah, really sucks. I guess this means I'll never receive the copy of Bionik that I won back in April and still don't knows the whereabouts about. :( And yes, Tami was nice in the email, as well. And from what I could tell, Jeremy Armitage seems like a standup individual nonetheless.

Wow, that's awful news. Tami was great to deal with back when I (briefly) wrote for RA, and I'm sure they'll miss her.

LOL @ this

i wonder how everyone would feel about this if a negative villalobos review got pulled down and replaced by the management

is that for real about them pulling a bad review and replacing it with a good one???? aren't people in uproar about it?

i wonder how everyone would feel about this if a negative villalobos review got pulled down and replaced by the management

just as ambivalent probably

There's an uproarious thread about it on the RA site.

Jeremy and Tami both resigned in protest - it was Jeremy's review that was pulled.

RA historically was much more of a prog publication than it is today - I get the impression that a lot of the shift towards minimal etc. was at Jeremy and Tami's behest. But the owners of the site and a lot of the readers are still total Rennaisance/Global Underground fans.

The Digweed review wasn't as negative and "biased" as a lot of the prog heads in the comments page make it sound - I've read much more critical reviews about Villalobos along the lines of "it's just the sound of flies and cicadas innit". But the sense of compulsory support for Villalobos one feels amongst these circles (and I definitely feel this) is more along the lines of a self-policing superego thing amongst critics. Negative Villalobos reviews don't need to be pulled because the critical hegemony in support of the guy does the job nicely.

Still, it's funny that the review very explicitly set up a Digweed vs Wighnomy Bros aesthetic choice - the fact that it was pulled and that Jeremy/Tami subsequently resigned makes the whole situation feel (fairly or otherwise) like a roundabout passing of judgment on the direction the site has gone in over the past three/four years or so.

how many villalobos reviews are there, anywhere? how many dance reviews?

it's barely even a discourse...

Well I don't know if there are that many more Digweed reviews than Villalobos reviews - both producers will usually get reviewed in almost all published dance music magazines and any dance music review website that hold themselves out as generalist.

I agree that it's barely a discourse, but within these circles I think there is definitely a tendency to succumb to Boomkat-style reviewing when it comes to Villalobos. By "Boomkat-style", I mean giving the producer the benefit of the doubt for every stylistic decision, with the only distinctions being between "must buy" and "must must buy".

It's a bit of a "voice of history" effect at work - until Villalobos releases something which ultimately is deemed to be not much cop by the critical consensus (e.g. a Be Here Now equivalent) it will be difficult not to second-guess any ambivalent critical reactions ("this track leaves me cold now but what about in six months' time?").

Todd Burns has taken over on editorial duties right? He should keep things on an even keel I would have thought... I would hate it if it went back to its Rennaisance/Global Underground beginnings (surely unlikely given the current climate).

I just wish Ricardo would go back to making poppier stuff again. I'd happily be part of a consensus opinion that stuff like 'Easy Lee' is super awesome and to be continuously applauded.

As for RA, this could well be an emotional response (to T&J's departure) rather than a critical one, but I find the site to be kind of joyless these days. The site may not be focused on prog anymore, but the bulk of the reviewers are mostly interested in the chewiest and most overbaked blog techno around so plus ca change really.

i wonder how everyone would feel about this if a negative villalobos review got pulled down and replaced by the management

just as ambivalent probably

-- Ronan

maybe i misread the vibe over in the RA comments box -- and i tuned out shortly after tim's post -- but it seemed to be setting it up as the soulless corporate entity vs the sound of underground house. i wonder how much of this elision had to do w/ a sense of minimal as underdog and prog/trance as "overdog". wasn't the tack of the pulled review sort of "minimalism is being co-opted by the mainstream!" boilerplate?

Presumably Resident Advisor is wholly reliant on advertisers to actually keep publishing so I'm kind of surprised this thing doesn't happen more often, on this site and elsewhere. Maybe it does and RA just dealt with this in a cackhanded way (ie spiking it after publication rather than before it).

I'd be a bit more worked up about being unable to trust any future reviews if I thought RA writers in general were very good at being able to crystallise why a record is good and bad, and with a few honourable exceptions they aren't.

I wouldn't agree really with that assessment Vahid, but Jeremy can probably explain his own review here I guess.

I think the most surprising/disappointing thing for me was how many people based their reaction to the idea that a review was pulled on whether they liked John Digweed or not.

I mean, the actual fact one was pulled seemed to be an afterthought as people debated the merits of JD.

Just goes to show how partisan it all is, to some people it's irrelevant what somebody writes, how it's treated, who's controlling a site, apart from 10/10 or 0/10 at the end to spew disagreement at.

That sounds quite pompous I guess but it is pretty sad.

Yeah exactly Ronan, I was astonished that so many people would immediately use the term "biased" just because they thought Jeremy didn't accept without question the reigning principles of prog.

If Jeremy's review had just blasted Digweed for being Digweed I'd maybe agree with Vahid's take, but Jeremy was pretty careful to note that Digweed's previous mixes were much more interesting, and that the specific problem with the new Digweed mix was how all the natural edges to the tracks had been smoothed out with ableton or whatever.

That accorded perfectly with my memory of Sasha's last big DJ mix so I understood perfectly what he meant. Really I'd be more interested in an honest to goodness mix of whatever prog producers are actually doing right now than a mix of minimal carefully edited to sound like prog.

What interests me is this idea that people aren't particularly respectful about the whole practise of reviewing things. Judging by RA that's the case.

I don't think it's right to just say "oh people have no respect for reviewers" blah blah blah, or to tell people what they should/shouldn't respect, I'm more interested in wondering if, for dance music, we're at a point where some new model for talking about it does more than the traditional review model. Or where some new way of using the net to discuss it is better, even say blogging or something.

Or I guess whether forums have just replaced the need for reviews entirely to the point that people don't actually have any respect for somebody doing a review, because why would they, everyone is literally a critic in that they sit down and type their opinions about stuff constantly.

Your last point is probably the key here Ronan - much in the same way that the democraticization of DJ mixing has made people less shy about micro-criticizing DJ mixes from name DJs ("I was disappointed that I knew all these tracks already"; "the mixing is only so-so" etc.)

What has surprised and disappointed me a bit lately (not connected to the whole RA incident) is how many people including established music critics seem to be very quick to dismiss out of hand the critical insight afforded by other critics e.g. "Oh, I find that writer to be very shallow / self-obsessed etc. etc."

Most of which seems to be an ad hominem strategy to avoid actually engaging with differences of opinion as they emerge. I mean, I think Pipecock's full of shit most of the time but I still can't resist trying to beat him point-by-point.

I think that's true, though probably a consequence of the sort of solidifying staleness of some of the rivalries/arguments if we're talking about just house/techno.

People think "I could disagree but I've done this already", that's how I feel a lot and other people too I think.

More than anything the RA stuff has made me think of some new ideas for dance writing and some that aren't writing at all that I am really looking forward to doing, I think the lack of conversations about clubs and clubnights is really kind of crazy.

Sometimes you read blogs (probably including mine lately!) and if you didn't know you might think that nobody actually played house/techno in clubs, that there were no clubs, no scene, no stupid parties etc.

Isn't that as much about the international nature of music writing though? Records are transferrable, club nights less so.

I feel it particularly being in a city which has not been the centre point of any interesting dance scene ever except mersh electro-house and Modular stuff, the club nights for which are kinda hard to write about positively (most dispiriting experience ever: seeing Booka Shade with a haircut house crowd).

I guess....but doesn't it seem weird sometimes when everything is so divorced from that culture? Maybe just things have been so serious and political of late that I want to read more gonzified takes...

can't be worse than seeing booka shade at ULU (the london students' union) at 9pm, finishing at 11pm, with a crowd of students treating it like an indie gig (ie stand still with pints in hands, act offended at people trying to dance)

xp

also 99% of critical conversations about dance music - and i include ilm in this with v few exceptions - are dispiriting exercises in dick-waving about how much you know/have heard. sick sick sick of seeing people reel off 100 names which might have influenced a record instead of talking about the thing itself

Club night reviews seem even harder than live show reviews to do well. And I've no real interest in reading live show reviews even.

Ronan u should be the gonzo Lester BAngs of dance writing. U can do it.

x-post responding to ronan: Oh totally, I'm so over the lineage handwringing that seems so in vogue at the moment.

I wish there was some sort of popular and good dance music at the moment that could totally escape this (e.g. the class of 2002 - "Take Me With You" etc. - that was the music that coincided with your own emergence as a dance music writer), that made these considerations seem utterly irrelevant.

But current commercial electro-house isn't good enough, and UK funky house isn't popular enough...

we don't need a lester bangs of dance writing ffs

well I am addicted to indigestion meds if that helps

I wish there was some sort of popular and good dance music at the moment that could totally escape this (e.g. the class of 2002 - "Take Me With You" etc. - that was the music that coincided with your own emergence as a dance music writer), that made these considerations seem utterly irrelevant.

yeah it's annoying! some vulgarity is needed, tho I do think this is where the clubbing comes into things.

btw ronan i was going to post on yr blog but i can't remember my blogger password, you still want to check out the dubstep scene? i'll let you know when i'm next going to a dubstep night if so

you don't need a blogger password! my blog is free for all to post on!

tbh i still haven't got to grips w/posting comments on blogs, it always seems to go a bit wrong