Best 90s electronic music duo

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

Basically, what I think managed to turn some non-dance heads to DP (at least here in Finland) was the catchy melody, the electro sound (electro being coded less feminine/gay than house, which I think was crucial why some people disliked house at the time), and the flashy but also artsy video of "Around the World".

disco is just early house, house is late disco

I think there are some differences (e.g. "Flash" is house but not disco) but they don't really rest in BPMs.

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

― Tim F, 4. huhtikuuta 2012 15:27 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― Tim F, 4. huhtikuuta 2012 15:28 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, you said "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", and I was just trying to say, not always. I mean, sure if you define "mainstream" as "rock audiences", but have to remember that back then dance music was the mainstream, at least in Europe. Back in the early 90s, almost all of my school mates dug dance music (including house), the ones who were exclusively into rock were much rarer.

Most Detroit and Chicago house sounds almost nothing like disco imo.

Tuomas, saying "for the most part" is an acknowledgment that there are exceptions to the scenario Tim stated

Well yeah, I wasn't disagreeing with that. I just don't get why he thinks "rock audiences" equals "mainstream". It's pretty obvious "Doop" was a mainstream hit.

Qualitative difference b/w people being into "Doop" or (say) "Here's Johnny" or "I Wanna Be A Hippy" and "taking (insert genre) seriously."

Taking anything seriously is basically a rock(ist) principle from the outset of course.

Musicist.

"Rock audience" doesn't equal "mainstream" BUT 90s rock audiences who didn't really engage with house would have been more likely to associate house with the primarily vocal stuff that was actually in the charts. Novelty dance hits are neither here nor there. Either way, 'Da Funk' would have a) gone straight into the mainstream and b) appealed to people who wouldn't have listened to Robin S or thought to check to out someone like Deep Dish.

I'm not sure why this is so difficult to grasp, or why people think about drawing arbitrary genre boundaries.

90s rock audiences who didn't really engage with house would have been more likely to associate house with the primarily vocal stuff that was actually in the charts.

And it's not even like anyone who didn't really engage with house automatically = a rock fan.

Thing is, one of the things I love MOST about dance music is that I don't know where the boundaries are, and I don't know what the names are. It's not that I don't think the differences are real, or that they don't exist - it's that I have no *map* for where disco - house - techno - rave - DNB - IDM begin or end or flow into one another. And I really love being thrillingly, gloriously lost, because it means that I have to take the music on its own terms, and not compare it to some internalised... *blueprint* of what "Dreampop" or "Post-Shoegaze" should sound like. (Sorry I keep reaching for those adjectives, it's just my particular patch of the forest floor that I know well enough to be able to defend it.)

I don't *have* to take (insert genre) seriously. I can take the music seriously, but I don't have to mentally place where it belongs in the same way I have to do with, well, rock music.

It's the place I go to get rid of the map, to go off piste, to just live in the glorious moment when you hit the play button of does it make me go "WAU!" or bore me after a minute and a half.

So it's just funny to me, to be in this glorious place where I'm so joyfully ignorant of the boundaries that I can run around like a child again - and see serious dudes bending over a map arguing about whether this track is Bobbins or Funky. I know they exist, it's just "haha, that's what I come here to leave behind!"

I'm trying to remember which ILX0r it was, that I had the conversation with - buttonholing Gareth or DC drunkenly in the back of a club or something - and discovering that what they meant by "dancefloor dynamics" and what I meant by "drone dynamics" were one and the same thing and that was a o_0 wow the universe is coming together Moment. But I know it makes serious dance music aficionados either laugh or rrrrrrrage when I say stuff like "oh, this techno record is pure dronerock!"

'Da Funk' would have a) gone straight into the mainstream

I'm just nitpicking for no real reason here, Matt, but I don't think it went 'straight into the mainstream'. IIRC I read about it 95 in Muzik, but didn't actually hear it until 96 (when it was taped for me by a Frenchman), and it wasn't until 97 that it actually got into the proper charts.

Thing is, one of the things I love MOST about dance music is that I don't know where the boundaries are, and I don't know what the names are. It's not that I don't think the differences are real, or that they don't exist - it's that I have no *map* for where disco - house - techno - rave - DNB - IDM begin or end or flow into one another. And I really love being thrillingly, gloriously lost, because it means that I have to take the music on its own terms, and not compare it to some internalised... *blueprint* of what "Dreampop" or "Post-Shoegaze" should sound like. (Sorry I keep reaching for those adjectives, it's just my particular patch of the forest floor that I know well enough to be able to defend it.)

Does your knowledge of terminology in the case of shoegaze et. al. interfere with your enjoyment of the music on its own terms?

So, No Pet Shop Boys then?

Hah, I had no idea it was that old.

I think genre boundaries don't really matter in terms of home listening, but they're important in clubs. Differences in dance genres tend to be rhythmic rather than sonic and they can make a big difference to the way you actually dance, physically, and it can be annoying if you turn up expecting one thing and get a whole night of another thing entirely.

They also matter when it comes to relatively nascent genres like funky (or funky a couple of years ago), when the music and the scene the people involved are still trying to work out what it is in the first place and you don't want it be crushed or eclipsed by some 50 pound gorilla of a sound that becomes the only thing people associate it with.

Which is kind of why I made such a big deal about Bok Bok, Jam City et al being distinct and separate from funky, because they always had the potential to become bigger and more talked about.

I don't have to mentally place where it belongs in the same way I have to do with, well, rock music.

this is interesting to me! there's a LOT of rock music that I enjoy that I don't even dare identify in terms of its genre/style/influences/"scene." it all just blurs together into this huge interconnected web of rock music to me, as with you and dance music.

As with the early Chemical Bros, people seem determined to wipe out any legacy of Basement Jaxx as consummate track-centric producers crafting dancefloor bangers.

by people i assume you mean felix and simon

Normally the importance of genre names is inversely proportionate to the rep of the artists - it doesn't really matter what genre label I apply to Aphex Twin b/c he has a recognised musical identity regardless. But if I'm repeatedly playing anonymous house track from an artist i don't know anything about then in my head it's e.g. a deep house record rather than a record by X artist.

Probably one thing that makes dance music pretty unique is the way in which you can fall in love with product while being ignorant of, and indifferent to, the people behind it. Rock, jazz, rap, modern classical etc obv all have scenes and sub-genres but it's very rare for the artist to be so backgrounded.

I'm like crut with rock to some extent but it's easier to be that way with rock and still get by in conversations, because you can talk in terms of artists not styles.

As with the early Chemical Bros, people seem determined to wipe out any legacy of Basement Jaxx as consummate track-centric producers crafting dancefloor bangers.

by people i assume you mean felix and simon

― the late great, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 1:22 PM (37 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, fair 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.

― Tuomas, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 1:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, I have this feeling too, though I think Josh Wink definitely does something different - 'Around the World' exists on a monotone, I guess, whereas 'Higher State of Consciousness' does that manipulative constant-rising trick. Which is probably why I prefer DP. Mind you, I only think 'Around the World' is kind of okay; the only DP track I unabashedly love is 'Harder Better Faster Stronger', which sounds to me like a bunch of fascist electro doozers. Though I also agree with MB that I never thought of DP as 'House'. I thought of them as electropop, which I guess is a broad genre in my head.

Also, not enough Matmos love on this thread.

where should I start with Matmos?

I would probably go with either The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast or The Civil War. I guess it is kind of unfair of them to be lumped in with these people, as they're primarily an 'experimental' duo rather than an 'electronic' one. Maybe.

Does your knowledge of terminology in the case of shoegaze et. al. interfere with your enjoyment of the music on its own terms?

Yes, I actually think it does, sometimes.

And it's not even so much the terminology itself, so much as knowledge of the structure, how genre works, how it intersects, what to expect from one genre as opposed to another.

Partly because I have one of those annoying minds like a database which is always trying to categorise things, if I know there are ways to categorise them. And trying to figure out which box to assign something to can actually spoil your enjoyment of the thing-ness of the thing which goes beyond categorisation. (And although I'm too old to get caught up in tribal identity these days, there was that time in my 20s where I spent 3 years arguing with a bandmate over whether a certain band was Post-Shoegaze or Grunge, ergo whether it was ~OK~ to like them - sheesh!)

But there's also the problem with genre getting used as a shorthand for "if you like artist X, you will also like artist Y." And unfortunately it never seems to work for me that way. That, according to what DC said, which makes sense, if one person is defining dance genres according to the beat, and I'm trying to discover music that works for me based on texture and sound, and it really doesn't matter to me where the downbeat goes, so long as there's a synth that goes "wub" then that makes communication problematic. (e.g. 10 YEARS of ppl telling me, "you like Aphex Twin, you like Amnesiac era Radiohead, therefore you *must* like Autechre and me going "I'm sorry, but I just DON'T.")

I like being *able* to come at this music with no preconceptions of whether I'm supposed to like it, so I can utterly fall in love with the portomento on an arpeggio. And I don't like this sense of expectation that I *have* to like Artist Y, because they are in the same genre as Artist X.

It's really freeing for me. Like going on holiday. The last hiking trip where I tried to follow the inclined tramway from Portreath to Redruth and got very lost, and asked a farmer "Am I in Redruth?' and he said "No, mate, you're in Illogan." And I said thanks and walked off, and he shouted after me "Do you want me to tell you how to get to Redruth?" And I just said "Nope, I'm enjoying my walk through Illogan now." It's fun being lost sometimes. If you lived there, I could understand wanting a map, but I'm on holiday.

This thread is going to make me dig out old Daft Punk CDs now.

If I end up digging out Basement Jaxx tunes, I'm actually going to hit someone ;-)

Autechre vs Orbital vs Matmos for me - excluding Matmos because like emily implied they are their own thing and not quite appropriate to the terms of this poll plus it makes life easier. for sheer irrational pleasure and muddied depths i'm going to vote for Ae altho obv Orbital's shiny pop thrills have thrilled me more, on another day in another mood it might be them.

okay I really don't know how I managed to get this far into my life without actively seeking out Matmos stuff

This thread is going to make me dig out old Daft Punk CDs now.

I did the same - I'm always struck by how ridiculously boring Homework turns out to be, since I like many of the tunes on it!

Soft Pink Truth first album is a good place to start for Matmos, even if it cheating a bit as its Drew Daniel solo.

I probably have one of the first 1000 pressed of the Matmos debut. My favorite is the second album Quasi-Objects, which is rubbery fun in the Mouse on Mars sense, but begins their exercises in conceptual sampling. The later albums veer too far to the later to engage me in the same way.

this thread is full of people who act like dance music is a small genre which exists on a peripheral level to the albums made by basement jaxx, chemical brothers, etc etc, etc etc etc.

They also lack Daft Punk's feted deity status. Surprised there's still so much gloss around DP seeing as they haven't made a good record for 11 years and every variety of lowest common denominator hack has wrung just about everything out of their sound.

there are prob more good records influenced by daft punk than any other artist on this thread. and bangalter can hold his head up high in terms of legacy. he has at least, AT LEAST, five records that do the pop-dance thing in a far more satisfying way than anything mentioned on this weird thread.

there are prob more good records influenced by daft punk than any other artist on this thread.

setting a pretty low bar there IMO, though otherwise you're right.

i don't ever need to hear discovery, HAA or half of homework ever again

roule and crydamoure OTOH never seem to get old, not does their ultra hard ultra tracky early shit

the question of ratio is always an interesting one. i mean autechre did some of my all time favorite music between amber and LP5 but then followed w 10 more albums of progressively more boring wank

ditto chems and 2LS

global communication never did anything bad, did lots of pleasant stuff, but only a few really mindblowing things (early reload on evolution, early jedi knights, "take me with you", etc)

plaid sucked as a combo - barring a few tracks and remixes, sorry dog latin - but as part of black dog and solo as balil, tura, atypic, etc they were stunning