Best 90s electronic music duo

Lots of canonical electronic acts haven't put out a decent record in 10 years.

Lots of canonical electronic acts have had their sound utterly pillaged by hacks.

I don't see how that automatically revokes their canonical status, when they were so U&K at a certain time and place.

yeah, no. listening to time tourist (1996) and it's still very much warp circa 92/artificial intelligence: chillout room melodies, four on the floor beats with some added skitteriness. autechre got a little bit more "out there" than that.

i know!

i am kind of conservative sometimes in my tastes and i guess that's an example.

Masonic Boom - yes, that's true, BUT most of those have had time for elements of their sound to come back into fashion. I suppose the case with DP is that they've never really gone OUT of fashion, which Basement Jaxx decidedly have. They clearly have a sort of aura that most of these acts lack. I'm not trying to revoke the canonical status of those first two records, they're amazing.

I think a lot of DP's pull is down to the paucity of material they released.

Yes, staying so "mysterious" and keeping their output so low for so long helped keep the legend factor up and the spoiler factor down.

basement jaxx have made some horrible sounding records, that's my problem with them. at the time, they sounded fresh and exciting but every year that passes they get harder and harder for me to listen to. the hooks aren't as immediate as they used to be, it sounds overly busy, production is cluttered and it all sounds a bit dated to my ears

daft punk and air seem to have aged better, they're way less ambitious and just do the same thing over and over from different angles. i don't really follow this one daft punk album is better than the other stuff. they're all about the same if you ask me, they do their thing but they do it very well. i think the tour a few years ago proved that, i can't think of many other acts who have a body of work strong enough to put together an hour and half show with so many highlights like that.

b-12 and autechre had such different intentions, i dunno, electro soma is prob my most listened to record from both, but autechre are one of the few acts that can make me go 0_0 WTF. each time i revisit their stuff i hear it differently and the autechre in my life is in constant

anyway, it's probably between daft punk and autechre altho i like stuff from everyone here, apart from the grid and crystal method.

I think for a certain type of person Daft Punk are also year zero for taking house seriously.

But they also have much more of a big light show music of the future vibe to them (certainly now). "One More Time" and "Digital Love" notwithstanding I don't think they tend to be associated with pop.

Basement Jaxx ended up more pop but also started more house qua house, a kind of house that hasn't ever really crossed over properly. Having said that:

Basement Jaxx are at that 10-year point where they just seem hideously unfashionable and dated and incongruous up against the backdrop of current music.

Agree with this in general terms but I think Night Slugs, Numbers et. al. owe a shitload to early Basement Jaxx, even if it's largely unacknowledged.

This thread is actually quite amusing for showcasing a certain kind of ~dance rockism~ for lack of a better word, with all these references to "certain kind of person" and "dance artists with videos on MTV." I am finding that oddly hilarious.

I was at a bar a few weeks ago and "Digital Love" came on the jukebox and every single person sitting/standing around me went "what the fuck is this? this sucks."

~dance rockism~ is totally a thing. It's been around as long as dance. Various people who are anti ~rockism-qua-rockism~ and pro popism can be pretty ~dance-rockist~, which always amuses me.

I was on a "download loads of late 90s dance singles" tip the other week. You can't download Music Sounds Better With You from iTunes except as part of a compilation you need to pay about £8; so I bought a 2nd hand CD single of it! Not bought oen of them in forever.

I don't think you're really engaging with the point Tim made. House music didn't actually have a great deal of traction with indie-inclined audiences pre-1997 or therabouts and Daft Punk, and Da Funk in particular are a key signpost and maybe even turning point towards wider acceptance.

I'm talking specifically about house, as opposed to techno, hardcore, jungle/D&B, IDM, crossover dance, Krautier stuff. You could put disco in the same bracket as house there.

I mean there are still people who would be into some or all of those genres who don't take house seriously and they're not necessarily corny indie types either.

haha xxpost!

I think for a certain type of person Daft Punk are also year zero for taking house seriously.

Believe it or not I meant this pretty non-judgmentally.

It's as much about age as anything else. A lot of people my age were about about 14 when "Around The World" and "Da Funk" blew up, and before that were probably too young to really appreciate anything so remorselessly repetitive. And my sense is that Daft Punk's godlike status is actually amongst people my age and younger rather than amongst older people who might actually have been (old enough to be) sniffy about pre-1996 house.

I was at a bar a few weeks ago and "Digital Love" came on the jukebox and every single person sitting/standing around me went "what the fuck is this? this sucks."

it does suck! i have mostly always been a daft punk hater and this has only increased as their sound has been relentlessly mined by people of varying shades of awfulness, as matt says.

i had no idea b jaxx were considered unfashionable. i don't think anyone would argue that they've been even slightly relevant or acceptable post-kish kash but this happens to every dance act. their god period >>>> all these other acts' god period.

"red alert" along with armand van helden were year zero for me getting into dance music

A lot of people my age were about about 14 when "Around The World" and "Da Funk" blew up, and before that were probably too young to really appreciate anything so remorselessly repetitive.

even after over a decade of being immersed in dance music i still can't appreciate something as remorselessly, shittily repetitive as "around the world"

Well, that 98-01 period was when I first moved back to the UK and I had a television which got, like only 8 channels and one of them was MTV, and it was semi-revelatory, those Big Event dance videos which were on heavy rotation - Windowlicker, The Music Sounds Better With You, Sing It Back, Where's Your Head At, Cassius In The House - I'm trying to remember which were the big Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk videos that were always on. Red Alert! Ha, that was another one. It was just such culture shock, coming from New York.

It's obvious that there are going to be a lot of people who have that kind of nostalgia for that era, for those reasons. Those things were huge here.

I was being kind of facetious, but it is just funny to see ~dance rockism~ - I'm sure it's a thing. It is just funny, like perhaps these attitudes are inescapable, and you cannot escape the attitude by escaping the genre. Dance rockism could equally apply to srs dance people sneering at house music, or house people sneering at indie kids. It works all ways.

But we've been having this same discussion on ILX since the year 2000 or something. Sorry, I'm feeling nostalgic.

Could be, apparently I'm 2 or 3 years older than you, and I'd been into house music since the early 90s, so those tracks didn't feel like any sort of revelation to me, they were just some nice pieces of poppy house.

(x-post to Tim)

Ironically, the first person who ever turned me on to Around The World was the guitarist in an indie dronepop band, who was all "OMG, it's so remorselessly repetitive, it's like a house version of Spacemen 3" so you're not far off, Lex.

Screamadelica?

I mean, it wasn't until after Discovery came out that I realized that for some people DP represented the whole genre. Which felt weird to me, as in the late 90s/early 00s I was into rougher/more minimalist stuff, so DP never felt like "proper" house to me, more like poppy dance music with a house influence.

(xx-post)

House rockism.

Rock the House-ism.

So yeah, I guess I was a dance rockist back then.

lol/wtf @ "a house version of Spacemen 3"

one thing I have never thought about while listening to Homework is Spacemen 3

I don't think anyone who has endured years of Pipecock posts could credibly argue against the existence of dance rockism, and I don't think anyone is.

Who's Pipecock again?

It's best not to ask.

Be sure not to post his name three times in succession.

Could be, apparently I'm 2 or 3 years older than you, and I'd been into house music since the early 90s, so those tracks didn't feel like any sort of revelation to me, they were just some nice pieces of poppy house.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 11:58 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is pretty indicative though. The only way you could think of "Da Funk" as just poppy house is from the perspective of being way into house already, esp. "rougher/more minimalist stuff" which obv would never have troubled the charts.

Feel free to prove me wrong with stats but my sense is that before that house in mainstream terms really had meant handbag house and similar for the most part (and before that, klf, italo house, technotronic etc.) - i.e. pretty songful stuff.

By and large everything that's popular in any genre, bar the occasional exception, is pretty songful stuff, though.

So it seems like a pretty moot point.

Also, it's weird seeing "Around the World" being described as "remorselessly repetitive". It was more like a pop hit, at least to me and my friends at the time. It had a sung chorus and a catchy melody and all! I mean, just a year or so earlier, "Higher State of Consciousness" was a sizable club hit, so "AtW" didn't exactly feel remorseless.

Feel free to prove me wrong with stats but my sense is that before that house in mainstream terms really had meant handbag house and similar for the most part (and before that, klf, italo house, technotronic etc.) - i.e. pretty songful stuff.

Mostly yeah, but you have to remember that stuff like "Poing" and aforementioned "Higher State of Consciousness" were also club hits, with videos on heavy rotation on MTV Europe and all.

This is why people hate when I get on dance threads, isn't it? Hahaha.

Because I don't know where the genres begin and end, I don't even particularly think of Daft Punk as House, I think of them as French Touch, when I guess French Touch is all the electro-tinged stuff that came along after Daft Punk, that DP influenced? (I don't know, I'm probably doing the equivalent of something I'd shout at myself for, for conflating Shoegaze and Dreampop.)

And it's not that DP sound like S3 - they don't, at all. But it's the idea of something as repetitive, as comprised of interlocking pieces, endlessly repeated ad absurdum, that it was meditative and transcendent in the same kind of way.

But I've given up trying to convince anyone else of the dance / drone interface long ago. Never mind.

I also am wilfully, and happily, ignorant of the sometimes fascistically patrolled delineations between genres, which seem to rest on minute differences in BPMs half the time. "Minimal", "funky", etc etc, are just adjectives to me, not nouns.

Also, it's weird seeing "Around the World" being described as "remorselessly repetitive". It was more like a pop hit, at least to me and my friends at the time. It had a sung chorus and a catchy melody and all!

^ this, it seems a baffling choice to illustrate remorseless repetition

House : French Touch :: Rock : Shoegaze

By and large everything that's popular in any genre, bar the occasional exception, is pretty songful stuff, though.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, April 4, 2012 12:11 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My point being you could hardly call "Da Funk" songful except in the loosest sense. And it crossed over to non-clubbing audiences in a manner "Higher State of Consciousness" never did.

No that parallel makes sense and ESPECIALLY makes sense when you get into 00s house - Kompakt, Border Community and what have you.

But yeah in 96 or 97 the general view of house would have been something like 'Show Me Love' so Daft Punk's take on it would have been weird and novel enough to wrongfoot people and draw in a different audience, including people who wouldn't have been seen near an indie record or a house record.

(xpost mad defensiveness going on here)

Nick is right that the majority of big dance hits were probably songful stuff, but in the early 90s there was still a novelty value to electronic dance music in general, which meant that a lot of weirder shit managed to cross to the mainstream as well. For example, back in 1994 this was a top 10 hit in many European countries (#1 on the British singles chart):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvLDm8821jQ

Yes, "Doop" which is beloved of rock audiences everywhere.

It's amazing the lengths people will go to to disprove a fairly uncontroversial point!

haha MB I wasn't trying to discount that sort of crossover appeal; it's just something that I'd never think of, as a fan of the Spacemen 3 (admittedly one who did not live through that time when S3 and house music were new & exciting developments). When someone suggests house music to me my base assumption is usually that it will be more repetitive than Spacemen 3, so it seems funny to me that yr friend used S3 as a reference point for explaining how repetitive Daft Punk are. Especially wrt "Around the World." Now that I think about it, I could see how you could make a case wrt "Da Funk." The one-note bass and the quiet drone that comes in toward the end.

brb going to mash up "Da Funk" with the vox from the S3 version of "Rollercoaster"

I also am wilfully, and happily, ignorant of the sometimes fascistically patrolled delineations between genres, which seem to rest on minute differences in BPMs half the time. "Minimal", "funky", etc etc, are just adjectives to me, not nouns.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, April 4, 2012 12:19 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

NB. I can't think of a single example of genre delineations based on "minute differences in BPMs".

Unless, like, you think the difference between disco and house is a minute difference in BPM.

"red alert" along with armand van helden were year zero for me getting into dance music

This, only I guess technically they were year zero for me coming out of the closet regarding my love for dance music, despite having been all about it for basically the entirety of the 1990s.

there is no difference between disco and house imo