Best 90s electronic music duo

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

b12 and BoC both really good and i own almost everything by both but both also seem kinda redundant? like if BoC hadn't existed someone else would've put radio phonic nostalgia over beats and if b12 hadn't existed wed still have kirk de g

i'm just gonna vote chems not because i like them better than the rest of my shortlist but because they're the only ones to have put out credible bangers recently (escape velocity!!!)

I can't remember you ever saying anything about Orbital but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say you don't like them very much??

Yeah Chems do amazing credible bangers. I sort of wish they'd turned into anonymous producers after Come With Us. And especially anonymous remixers. Adore their remix of Kylie's "Slow".

orbital is okay but to me pretty whatever. like i have no problem w orbital but to me they blend in with a lot of competent progressive techno from that era, like leftfield, underworld, speedy j, etc

is there anything in that style you're super-into or is it all just competent?

i guess i feel about them the way i do about like pantha du prince - pretty, but ultimately that focus on baroque, uplifting ethereal harmony always makes me feel like its insubstantial

uh, i dunno. that's a good question. what else is like orbital? something like "smokebelch ii"? i'm super into that.

the martian? UR's high tech jazz? derrick may? stacey pullen? kenny larkin? ken ishii?

to me the stuff from orbital i like best ("chime", "belfast", "halcyon") sounds a lot like detroit-derived techno scrubbed of the appealing grit and weirdness

then once you get to "in sides" it turns into kitchen-sink electronica vomit IMO

but yeah, i can listen to and enjoy green and brown, they're quite nice, but i'll always grab one of those aforementioned artists instead, i suppose for somewhat rockist reasons

similarly i always really dug fahrenheit 303 but it just makes me want to listen to voodoo ray or tricky disco or mr fingers instead

etc etc etc

a lot of orbital has that post-industrial drum sound and programming that sounds badly dated too, kinda ends up sounding like meat beat manifesto or belgian new beat or something (speed freak and steel cube come to mind)

a lot of orbital has that post-industrial drum sound and programming that sounds badly dated too, kinda ends up sounding like meat beat manifesto or belgian new beat or something

haha i'd say that's one of its appealing points of distinction!

eh, i can't really hang with that for whatever reason, maybe because my sister and i went through a simultaneous industrial phase in high school that involved lots of KMFDM and thrill kill kult and even worse wax trax stuff than that - i even bought that big wax trax box :-(

i even have deep problems w/ DHS, which everyone else praises to high heaven

at one point in high school i used to tell people my favorite band was 1000 homo djs

no more industrial music for me

i should probably go to a goth club at some point in my life again while i can still pass for late 20s, but i'd have to drive up to LA to do that, i think

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

Think I love Crydamoure more, on the whole, than Daft Punk, tho Discovery remains untouchable.

Excluding post-2000 output it's got to be Orbital

Incredibly I've never heard an Orbital album. I'm assuming the earlier stuff is more detroit-y/bleepy? What should I get?

I didn't realize that Plaid wasn't always synonymous with Black Dog Productions... oh well. Mbuki Mvuki is great.

mbuki mvuki is like a sandwich of two parts cheese and one part shit

anything hurts my ears, next two are riple, perplex makes kirk de g sound like herbie hancock but they get points for trying and they're way ahead of him, he still sounded like b12 at this point and wouldn't get to this type of breaks and synth until like 97, so that side on balance is 2/3 cheese 1/3 shit

summit reminds one of "prime united future organization" which is a different sort of ripe, scoobs in columbia i never liked, yak and bouncing checks are awesome, we're 50/50 at this point but we i count the good ones each as x2 cause i'm an optimist, so again 2/3 to 1/3

on bytes the ken downie tracks slaughter everything else, though this was not the case later

the alternate tracks from this period on disc 1 of trainer are uniformly awesome though

I didn't realize that Plaid wasn't always synonymous with Black Dog Productions... oh well. Mbuki Mvuki is great.

This poll was about duos, and The Black Dog/BDP was a trio consisting of Plaid + other guy. When the Plaid guys went back to being duo, I think the third guy kept The Black Dog name, so it's now his solo project.

"post-plaid black dog is execrable and worse than current plaid, which is merely pointless, in a worse way than stereolab, but not much worse"

-- pitchfork magazine

allmusic is nice and says "an interesting blend ... with the free-form structures of film soundtracking" which is a nice way to say sounds like music for viral ads on vimeo

their coup de grace is "the results of which are intriguing although rarely crucial" though i would strike "rarely crucial" in favor of "mostly unlistenable"

I kinda liked the Black Dog album that followed Spanners, Music for Adverts or whatever it was called. It was a collection of short and pretty vignettes, like Satie for the IDM crowd or something. Nothing mindblowing, but pleasant background music. I haven't been paying attention what The Black Dog is doing these days, though.

even their bangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm2tRqdchIs

are really twee

tuomas you must be trolling

Huh?

check out this contemporaneous interview where he talks about brian eno, jah wobble and mozart in the same paragraph

http://www.theblackdogma.com/tbd/2008/08/archive-dog-bites-back-interview-with-dj-magazine-28-08-96/

more like music for nerds amirite

As opposed to the trio Black Dog and Plaid?