Flashforward I!
Part 1 of 3.
In the Flashback! post, we walked through a little bit of the electronic music explosion of the 90’s.
That post stopped at the decade’s end, but the music didn’t stop; though for a few years, when my favorite local record shop’s “Electronica” section kept getting smaller and sparser (eventually vanishing altogether, with a few hardy critical-consensus survivors migrating back into the general rock/pop population – a taxonomic egalitarianism I approve of in theory, but do not prefer in practice nor personally observe) it sure seemed like an extinction event.
Of course, the shop itself only lasted a few more years; times were changing for them too.
Here’s some post-Y2K electronic tracks, divided into whatever-the-heck random categories I felt like dividing them into.
I tried to avoid repeating material from previous posts, which explains the absence of the artistic constellations orbiting around DFA, Italians Do It Better, and Morr Music, three labels which made big waves in the new millennium.
Ready then? Off we go!
***Space is the Place for Bass***
If Burial takes the listener underground, Scuba’s nom de tune hints at the deeply aquatic nature of the sounds on Triangulation, which can suggest steely low thrum, unfathomable pressures and pinging sonar (and occasionally, the fleeting glow of strange, beautiful lights in the cold darkness outside the portholes):
Scuba – Before
Shackleton’s Three EP’s brings some world music and acoustic-sounding instrumentation along on the expedition:
Shackleton – Mountains Of Ashes (Mary Anne Hobbs Mix)
So does Oneiric, by Scotland’s Boxcutter, though it also draws on drum and bass and other twisty 90’s roots:
Boxcutter – Skuff’d
And Martyn’s Ghost People sometimes crosses over into straight-up old-school techno:
Martyn – We Are You in the Future
***Glyph Reaches Detente With House***
Of the various electronic music dance forms out there, House was for many years one of my least preferred. Utilitarian in function and accordingly uniform to a fault sometimes, there have nonetheless been a few artists in more recent years to break through that wall with me.
Luomo’s Vocalcity did it simply by stellar sound design, with lots of deep dub-like seductive space:
Luomo – Synkro
Blondes make a cerebral variant aimed at the head as well as the hips:
Blondes – Elise
![Blondes - Elise [Official Video]](https://i0.wp.com/i.ytimg.com/vi/1IK61nxWWBY/0.jpg?resize=720%2C388&ssl=1)
***Germans Do It Better***
The robots in Kraftwerk somehow achieved “funky” via inhumanly rigid machine precision; but their more modern countrymen are not averse to engineering in just a little bit of rubbery bounce, or adding some texture via guitars or a human voice.
Ellen Allien & Apparat – Way Out
Moderat – Rusty Nails
It was a toss-up whether to include the original here, or the actually-awesome Tom Petty “cover”:
Booka Shade – Night Falls
Though, you can’t totally take the traditionally Teutonic tick-tock out of their techno, and thank Tod for that:
Closer Musik – Departures
Part 2 next week.
I tried to listen to Kraftwerk once. I do not remember the album. For some reason, listening to it left me feeling uneasy and a bit paranoid (no mind-altering chemicals were involved). It was a very strange experience, and not the sort of reaction I normally have to music. I did not want to repeat it, so I never got around to trying to listen again.Report
Interesting…Kraftwerk intentionally avoided almost any rock/blues (American, really) influence in their music. It’s more related to European/classical compositional traditions in the way its simple melodic motifs repeat. What I am wondering is whether the lack of “tension/release” – at least as it usually plays out in American forms – left you nervous – you were waiting for something that never came? (interesting side note – a German friend told me how disorienting his first encounter with the Velvets was – granted, he was drunk at the time – but that pounding drone, which has some blues roots, just completely did his head in).
What’s funny about the very German Kraftwerk was how popular they became, not just in the founding of hip-hop, but also amongst Latin cultures – my Cuban friends from Miami tell me that “Computer World” was HUGE in clubs there.
Frankly, I still marvel at how prescient this 1981 song is, about the way we live today (and it’s a beautiful piece of music too):
Report
The two best Pandora stations (I know some of you don’t listen to Pandora at all) I’ve created in the last 6 months have been SBTRKT and Scuba. With both you’ll have to wade through the dubstep and trap, but it’s worth it.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like some of the trap, though. Deep down, at least part of me is just an 18 year old kid at a block party:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-mephVCRXIReport
I don’t use Pandora, but I was getting into using Spotify – but lately it crashes 30 seconds after it opens (I suspect the ads are involved somehow?) Anyone else having this problem? I already uninstalled/reinstalled the app but no dice.
RE: Scuba: I only have the one album (Triangulation) but I LOVE it. Burial is still tops for me, but Scuba’s not that far behind.
Plus, I was listening to it a lot when I was reading Watts’ Rifters trilogy, much of which takes place on the deep abyssal plain in the future, and Scuba was just perfect, since it does have the sort of “watery” (not to mention futuristic) characteristics I refer to above.
In a way, it made me think of Drexciya, if Drexciya was dub-and-jungle-derived, rather than Detroit techno/electro.
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but I was getting into using Spotify
I’m not a big fan of Spotify, but I thought this comment from Jason Isbell was interesting (from a NYT interview):
He used a single word, “evil,” to describe Spotify, the online music-streaming service. “I think Spotify is honestly just another one of Sean Parker’s ways of ripping musicians off,” Isbell said, referring to the Napster co-founder who has a stake in Spotify. His comic mini-rant about Parker was so expletive-filled that, to paraphrase Mary McCarthy, even the words “and” and “the” from it are not printable here. But the gist of his complaint is this: “People can listen to your album over and over on Spotify, and you don’t really make anything on it.” Report
@stillwater – I think Radiohead (or their management?) had some sort of Spotify commentary to the same effect recently – that the amount it pays the artist is VERY small.
Still, it seems an improvement over “zero”. I was using the free, ad-supported version. Depending on how often the ads come up, and what the royalty payment rates are, I don’t see what the theoretical difference is between that and terrestrial radio, except that I (and not radio station program managers/DJs) get to choose what songs I hear and when.
Isbell’s songs might never get on the radio, but I might choose to play them on Spotify.Report
Hey, that’s pretty good.
Disclosure: I have very little idea what “trap”, “juke”, or “footwork” are. All I know is that they are weird, and scary, and forbidden from setting foot on my lawn.Report
Huh, threading is screwy. This was meant to go to @chris re: Oiki vid.Report
As far as I can tell, “Trap” is dubstep with personality, whereas pure dubstep is a dance or house beat with oddly distorted bass, though there’s also “liquid dubstep,” which has personality too (I kinda like Blackmill). I don’t know. I’m too old.
Re Spotify: I don’t know if this is a related problem, but mine sometimes just won’t even play. It loads fine, it just doesn’t let me click play on any song. I’ve virtually given up on it, and not because of the royalties issue. Pandora is no better. It doesn’t help that their mobile version is so limited. Without paying, the mobile version is basically Pandora with less control.Report
I’ve been playing with electronic instruments since the early Moogs and ARP 2600. Kraftwerk, Can, Cluster, Eno, Wendy Carlos, Yes, Synergy, Nektar, Roedelius, Klaus Schulze/Tangerine Dream, all the funk and disco stuff. Bernie Worrell. Joe Zawinul and Weather Report.
House is just a braindead, homogenised version of what these guys were creating back then. often literally the same music, thanks to the miracle of sampling. Dub’s just house with different equaliser settings. I have heard all this stuff before, at least four times as the wheel has turned.
I would utter that old truism about “The more things change, the more they stay the same” — but nothing’s changed.Report
Dubstep is a unique brand of music.
And it wasn’t designed to be appreciated with your ears.
(although, artists can manage miracles).Report
Designed. That’s precious. Designed? Or copied by a particularly unimaginative puncher of cards for a Jacquard Loom who hasn’t composed a note of original music in his life but exhibits a command of the parametric equaliser, pruning off everything which doesn’t fit into Drum and Bass, dumping it into his cheap-ass sampler for later consumption by people as brain-dead as himself?Report
No kids on your lawn, I see.Report
Heh. If only there were kids on the lawn — and not these Young Fogies, still sampling Kraftwerk. Run along, you little bastards, dream up something original and quit wasting your childhoods.Report
Blaise,
Oh, yes, designed — but as with any design, you must
know the requirements to properly evaluate the design.
And it’s plain as day that you don’t understand the requirements
(which is not surprising, as you lack the equipment to properly
evaluate the sensory data).
The composer’s been known to write an opera or two, so…
I’m certain you don’t know the guy very well, though you
presume to speak about him as if you do.Report
Who’s sampling Kraftwerk in this post? I simply used them as a contrast against more current German electronic music. The whole point is that these guys usually don’t sound much like Kraftwerk.Report
What bullshit. Music isn’t designed like some shipping container for a flat-screen television. Eno’s already done it with Music for Airports, which is a sight more evocative than all the two-bit emulators who’ve slavishly emulated him since.
Here’s my prediction: the cool kids will reject this generation’s derivative bullshit and intelligent people will be laughing at it for fifty years, for the same reason they’re laughing at disco today. Hip-hop at least retains the mic and some sense of originality. I’ve seen it come and I’ve seen it go and it happens once a decade, with the predictability of Kant’s colon.
Yeats was the only poet who really understood the musician:
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.
Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.Report
Who’s sampling Kraftwerk in this post? Martyn. Straight out of late 70’s – 80’s Man Machine era Kraftwerk, with overtones of all that Tangerine Dream Atari era stuff, Optical Race, etc.
What’s new in anything there?Report
Eh, I can hear traces of Kraftwerk-style melodies (as well as the arpeggios and drum rhythms of Kraftwerk’s Detroit descendants) in that Martyn track, but that’s not surprising – after all, Kraftwerk might as well be Robert Johnson or Howlin’ Wolf when it comes to electronic music: so foundational that you’ll hear them everywhere, in tributes and homages both good and bad, both consciously-inspired and clueless.
But more to the point, “sample” has a pretty specific meaning – more than just “inspired by”, “sample” means a decontextualized-then-recontextualized clip taken directly from a prior source.
DJ Shadow samples David Axelrod et al (with a lot of manipulation/processing involved).
I don’t hear anything in the Martyn track that I can clearly identify as being directly sourced from Kraftwerk, though as I noted in my original description, it’s clearly (and likely intentionally) a throwback.
As always, YMMV. This is merely another collection of tracks I enjoy, and wanted to share.Report
Blaise,
So then don’t fucking call dubstep music. I won’t gainsay you.
If you needs must call it prurient, i’ll snicker and snort.
but, in truth, its a cool trick in psychophysiology.
Your hubris astounds me at times — daring to say based on
one technical demo that someone cannot create real music.Report
@blaisep @kim – language, please. Don’t make me go all Conor on an MD post, that’d be ridiculous.Report
You guys will have to add “No dubstep” to the rules.Report
Given that we’ve determined that no one knows what dubstep is, it seems like “No dubstep” could be used for just about anything.
“Michael Bolton? No dubstep!”Report
For a while there in the 90’s, -step or -core was getting appended to everything all the time (hardstep, techstep, breakcore, etc).
My friends and I used to amuse ourselves by making up new genres.
Sillycore.
Boltonstep.Report
Very true, it was a real scandal.,sort of step-core-gate.Report
“No religion, no politics… no dubstep”Report
wubReport
I was at the club, having drinks, and they started playing Skrillex (no dubstep) . . .Report
Given the way some of the kids I saw at sxsw reacted to dubstep, I’d say that “No Religion” covers it.Report
My friends and I used to amuse ourselves by making up new genres.
Sillycore.
Boltonstep.
“As we neared the center of the Earth, we got our first glimpse of it’s Bolton core.”Report
My point should be pretty obvious. I welcome kids onto my lawn and into my tune stack. I seek them out. Every year creates a fresh crop of 18 year olds and I relish the opportunity to see and hear what they’re doing.
I do, however, expect some originality from these kids. That’s my right as a listener, not to have to endure yet more derivatives of derivatives. I don’t much like cover bands unless they have a new take on an old standard. I want something new and fresh. More than want, demand.
And Glyph, the selection’s getting awfully thin on the Originality Front. Too much sampling and not half enough creating. Musical collages, badly assembled with inferior source material and a complete lack of the essence of art itself. Designed music — for whom? Predictable music for predictable people.
This sampling business will all end very badly, as surely as the Prog Folks ended up getting laughed at for putting technique above songwriting and the Disco People for their Barbie Doll House brain dead copycatting and the New Wavers for their bad haircuts and click tracks. Compared to what I’m hearing out of house these days, disco sounds like a marvel of complexity.
Some things remain true in music but as surely as my generation turned its face away from the diddly-doo Love Love Me Do of Predictable Music made for Predictable people, the cool kids are going to get a gut full of the Predictable Music of our times. People want a real drummer with a real heartbeat. You can pull everything out of music but the musician. Thereafter, it’s just tick-tock.Report
“Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”Report
Given that we’re about 40 years into the Age of Sampling, it seems to have some staying power.
Also, I hear a lot of stuff that strikes me as genuinely original from the last 5 years or so, particularly in the electronic genres. Sure, it has influences, but who doesn’t? I mean, you’ve read your Bloom, right?
Though since you want music from Byzantium, perhaps you really are looking for perfect originality. Good luck with that.Report
“Hey look, we found birdsong samples!”
… it actually was pretty good, for video game music.Report
I think my favorite sample ever was from a ghost.
It was left on an answering machine.
…. so fucking creepy.Report
I’m on record as enjoying a good BP rant, but that wasn’t your best work. It felt uninspired; a rehash of earlier, better rants.
So you don’t hear anything original here; fine. Not for you, then. There’s a whole world of music out there; get thee to the cutting edge, wherever ye may find it.
Post some of it back to us.
If the music posted here today evinces only incremental movement forward, as well as links and debts back to its forbears, this is not only to be expected, but beautiful; being part of the musical tapestry, the weave – as ideas and motifs and inspiration are passed forward and around and through and across – is in fact part of what I call attention to several times in the text of the OP itself, and an idea I have returned to again and again in these posts from the first.
Where things connect; where they cross.
You want sui generis? Let us know when you find it. All ears.
Seriously, I’m not being snarky.
Besides, everyone knows electronic music attained perfection in 1974, it’s a scientific fact.Report
I’ve been cutting tape and playing synths and sequencing and sampling for all of those 40 years. When it comes to Staying Power I’d like to hear some new bleeps and bloops.
Back in the day, I used to have a little program called Acid Music Studio. It’s still around and everyone understands what an Acid Loop is, even if it isn’t played in Acid. My kids liked to play with it. It’s easy to set up, just set the tempo, drag in a sample, set to iterate for as many cycles as you’d like, put in a bridge, go back to the original, pepper each loop with other samples. When it got boring, pull out 12 bars of it, substitute another sample. They’d take my keyboards, use it as a trigger for yet other samples, away they’d go, instant DJ. High school kids in the basement with their friends, dancing away. They’d have me cut chunks out of music they liked, some of it pretty obscure, and they’d use them.
It was a form of House Music, I suppose. My house. My basement. Dad’s samplers and keyboards, rigged up so his kids could play with them.
Nobody ever thought it was original music, though.Report
I think my favorite sample ever was from a ghost.
It was left on an answering machine.
…. so fucking creepy.
I don’t always get contemporary poetry…Report
My complaint is not with you, Glyph. You’re seeking out new and original stuff. Some of your selections are excellent and none of them are bad. My complaint is the Dragon Frog, who seems to think I’m some curmudgeon trying to get the kids off his lawn.
1974 was a pretty good year for electronic music. I’d like to hear far less of 1974, in Anno Domini 2013. There’s a difference between building upon the past and serving it up as leftovers.
And yes, I do expect more sui generis from music. I expect to hear something original. It’s entirely possible to build original stuff from samples, my quarrel isn’t with sampling. I’ve been at this for a long time. Danger Mouse’s Grey Album proved sampling can transcend these hackneyed little pump-n-dump Disco Refrains. I’d like more of that sort of thing and less of this Predictable Music, thanks.Report
The post I replied to was an absolute, exquisite gem of curmudgeonly condescension, from its opening That’s precious to the wrap-up calling anyone who presumes to enjoy a genre of music you don’t brain-dead. Impotent my-generation-did-it-all-better resentment, distilled, crystallized, cut and polished to a perfect sparkling gem. Perhaps this is not who you are – but it is what that comment is.
Dubstep is for dancing to – and it is hella fun to dance to. If you don’t dance, consider that dubstep may simply not be for you, rather than standing at the edge of the dance floor shouting “Stop enjoying yourselves, dammit!”Report
Oh, Frog. What is dubstep? Who invented it? Could it be that dubstep is as I have said it is, merely the same old Jamaican-oriented stuff only with Moah Bass? What is unique to dubstep, that you should rush to Kim’s defence?
No, Froggie, it takes more than a big ol’ subwoofer to create something new and fresh. I have patiently soldered together several crossover networks and know this is not true. Perhaps you have some evidence to the contrary, demonstratin’ the error of my ways.Report
Dragonfrog,
dubstep was designed for more prurient interests than that.
Not that creating music that lets people have more fun
isn’t likely to make the dancing better too (adds spice).
Blaise,
Dubstep is perhaps the most confining of musical genres of
the modern day. I don’t like sonnets, myself, but I know
folks that swear by ’em. Give the musicians credit, if they
can even make something halfway decent within those
constraints.Report
That dubstep traces partial lineage to, and shares certain elements with, Jamaican music, doesn’t make it indistinguishable from that source. Ska isn’t reggae isn’t dancehall either (to name three forms that are far more closely related).
Differences in production methods, rhythm pattern, and even tempo, are enough to offer fruitful ground for new exploration, else my Beach Boys and Ramones albums would be interchangeable.
Have Marty McFly to take a Scuba record back to Lee Perry or King Tubby or Scientist, and see if they’ll spin it on their sound systems.
(Actually, they might, they were forward-thinking guys, plus stoned as all hell; but I still maintain there’s a difference in what they started, and what these guys are doing now – again, cross-pollination from various sources – the “dub” elements + the “step” elements – means that dubstep is something else; similar to how rock and roll is neither the blues nor country/western, though it contains elements of both parents).Report
That’s okay. I was only being a jerk about it. Dubstep is definable. All I wanted to complain about was the difference between creating and recycling. Both have their place. Seemed germane to the topic of electronica, to say I’m hearing too much 1974 in 2013. Still think it’s a valid complaint.Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3a6QrXYAoA
No Dubstep! (I think this is actually considered trap, but I dunno for sure).
Not 1974, but a Twix commercial circa 1988.
Or:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GvSMb0y8vE
My brain hurts.Report
So as near as I can tell from here, Trap seems kinda like the US equivalent of Grime – that is, faster dubstep-derived or -related music, with hip-hop style rapping (rather than reggae style toasting) over it.
(And if that Diplo tune ISN’T sampling Yello’s “Oh Yeah”, I’ll eat my hat).
(I don’t wear a hat.)
Which is making me remember ghetto tech/house (DJ Assault and the like).
Which is making me remember Miami Bass (DJ Magic Mike and the like).
Now my brain hurts.Report
I CREATED A TRAP STATION IN PANDORA. I HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO IT ALL DAY WHILE I WORK. I DON’T EVEN NEED ANY CAFFEINE. I AM WIDE AWAKE. WHAT?! I’M NOT YELLING!Report
PLEASE let there be a Trap DJ or MC named “Ackbar”.Report
Ask, and ye shall receive:
https://soundcloud.com/thevoiddubstep/bass-whistle-dj-ackbar-trapReport
I’m not sure if it’s awesome or depressing, the way the internet illuminates the fact that any stupid joke I make actually exists somewhere for real.
Say, did anybody listen to the linked Tom Petty “cover”? Quotes, since it IS a cover – it’s Petty’s melody and lyrics, sung by someone else – but the music is that Booka Shade track, straight-up. So it’s also sort of a mashup.
A coverup. A mashover.
Whatever it is, it rules.Report
I just did… that was… well, I knew the “original” Booka Shade song, so that made it… I dunno, this makes me wonder how many other songs we can throw over electronica.Report
Hmmm…as I’ve said, I see House as descending from disco, and dub from reggae; that there has been miscegenation between them in the time since doesn’t therefore mean that Dub=House. And though it’s probably my least favorite form (tending to the same unvarying 4/4 thump into infinity) House can still be effectively used as a frame and/or crossbred for other things.
“They’re all the same” applies in broad form to any dance music, which by its nature must have a function – that is, its rhythms must be neither too fast, nor too slow, nor too unpredictable, so that dancers may dance to it. But beyond that, I’m not sure how useful it is. There is a fair amount of variation in the emotional responses the artists are trying to provoke, and the means by which they do so.
Electronic music is by definition one of the younger artistic forms we have; if we haven’t exhausted exploring our much older (and more rarely-versioned) drums and pianos and guitars, in all the time we’ve had those tools, then I doubt electronic music’s exhausted its possibilities and variations just yet.Report
Disco — jeez, where to start? You couldn’t dance to rock music any more. Jazz had become terribly cerebral but it had begun in the dance hall and remained danceable for decades. Rock and roll began in the dance hall and had moved out to the stadium. You can see what happened to rock, in miniature, in the Beatles.
Dance music still held on in odd corners of the landscape. Two of those corners were the gay clubs and African clubs, really only found in New York City at the time.
First the gay clubs: Bowie, Queen and Jobriath were doing some interesting and highly danceable things in the rock business. For those of us who liked dance music, even heteros like me, the gay clubs were something of a refuge from the violent nonsense down in the rock clubs.
But the African clubs attracted much the same audience. James Brown and Fela Anikulapo Kuti had been great admirers of each other for many years. Ghanaian High Life music, King Sunny Ade — all over West Africa, young men were climbing into the ramshackle bus into which Bob Marley would later ride through Babylon.
Disco was both things, African on the one side and gay/weird/anti-rock on the other. Prog had pushed the boundaries of technology, with the sequencer, allowing the primitive synths to be controlled with programming of a sort. In those days, the sampler was in its infancy but a good tape editor could do wonders, creating loops for the Mellotron and its follow-on technologies.
The first eight-bit samplers were great. They first appeared in broadcast technology, press a button and play a station identifier or a ten second ad. As the samplers improved, they were connected to the sequencers through MIDI and thus were born both the second iteration of disco, house, d&b and all the rest of these distinctions without difference. The only difference was their choice of samples.
I’m sick of house in all its incarnations. It’s sterile. It’s lost any vigour it once had. A click sample is not a substitute for a human heartbeat. It’s just that simple.Report
As someone who’s expressed dismay at dubstep’s very existence, I’ve slowly been discovering artists who are considered dubstep whom I actually enjoy. One reason for this is that “dubstep” broadly is evolving really fast, so that there are a lot of different sounds, some of them really new, some of them familiar, that now fall under that label.
I mentioned Blackmill earlier. He definitely has a feeling of sailing, or perhaps just floating, on gentle waves. Here’s one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAFjgpuWREM
And another:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeaGUfZM5hs
And what is I believe his “hit”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDI6HTR9arA
If I was mistaken to wave my hand at dubstep, it’s definitely a mistake to dismiss electronic music altogether as over and done with.Report
Chris,
But it’s such a pretty psychophysiological solution!Report
Having listened to those Blackmill tracks, here are my thoughts (I KNOW – you were waiting on tenterhooks! )
1.) They are very pretty/soothing – in fact, they sort of remind me of a couple artists I put in next week’s post that are not considered dubstep AFAIK. Which leads me to:
2.) It occurs to me that I may not really know what “dubstep” is – see, the top 4 tracks on this post (Scuba, Shackleton, Boxcutter, and Scuba, as well as the aforementioned Burial) were all described to me as being dubstep – yet I don’t recall that “wub-wub”* sound that people use to describe/disparage dubstep being too prominent in them (but I definitely hear it in Blackmill)
*A similar comical vocalization can also be used to describe/disparage Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized.Report
I would never have thought of either Scuba or Boxcutter as dubstep. I haven’t listened to much Shackleton, so I couldn’t say there.
Maybe I don’t know what it is, either. If you read reviews of a lot of bass-heavy electronic stuff today, you’ll see the phrase “post-dubstep,” along with a plethora of “____ dubstep” (Blackmill is “liquid dubstep,” whatever that means). I don’t know what post-dubstep is other than bass-heavy electronic stuff that people don’t consider dubstep.Report
I should have said “top 4 artists” rather than “tracks”, since in many cases I did choose tracks by each artist that were either catchier/more accessible (that Scuba track isn’t too far from trip-hop) and/or had videos, so they are not always the most representative.
If they’d had videos, I would have gone with one or both of these Scuba tracks:
Report
I’m pretty sure this is the apex of electronic music.Report
It was a fine release.
There’s no apex to any sort of music. Currently, in terms of electronica, the most solid thing I’ve heard recently is Baths, Obsidian. Miasma Sky.Report
I like that Baths track! Never listened to them.Report
It’s him not them. Will Wiesenfeld, a curious little prodigy.Report
Also much digging of these two charactersReport
Blaise, have you listened to Beats Antique? I’m going to see them in November, I believe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q3IJW-aHLI
or Little People?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkwPVkPbWzU
or Tokimonsta?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qn5MRov_OI
or When Saints Go Machine?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8uht6FFReE
I don’t have a real grasp of your taste, but I thought I’d throw out some broadly “electronic” or sample-heavy stuff out there and see if I hit the target with at least one.Report
I liked the last FB a lot, but I gotta be honest, the newest one I find a bit dull. It might be me, but no matter what time of day I play it, I either fall asleep, or get impatient with it. It’s a great-sounding record, but I’m just not feeling it.Report
Beats Antique is a clever bunch. I like them for much the same reason I like Les Claypool et al. There’s an archness, a sense of humour to all of it. Borino, a vision of some demented Turkish mehter band, stiff marching moustachioed gennemens beating on big drums, blatting on bizarre little trumpets and duduks, parading towards the town square, with a horde of little kids marching along behind them, laughing and screaming.
Little People/Laurent Clerc is pretty enough stuff, trip hop is my soundtrack for coding. Offal Waffle is wonderful.
Tokimonsta is chill, which comes and goes in my tune stack. This is the sort of thing I’d want to hear in a good bar, accompanied by a double Hendrick’s Gin and tonic.
When the Saints Go Machine is new to me. I seldom drift this far towards pop. My tastes in pop demand a little more muscle but I get the sense I ought to listen to more of them before making up my mind.
The finest electropop tune ever written. Played it a fair bit, myself.Report
Here’s something that kinda hangs in the same space as Beats Antique.
Pentaphobe – Kitten PigReport
wg, that’s pretty cool. Thank you.Report
Pentaphobe is new to me. Lots of interesting Middle East influenced stuff drifting into American dance.
But it gets sorta odd, in my ear, I can either put my brain into Western mode or Arabic mode, smarmy weepy old shaafi stuff. A billion people know this tune, “The Story of My Life”, Kitab haYati
There’s some Arabic electronica, but it inherits more from Bollywood. Pop stars like Tamer Hosny sorta fits the bill along those lines. There’s this little bit from a comedy “Giza Street” which kinda shows how the old stuff has transformed.Report
Just gonna drop this off here. I don’t have any special affection for electronic music over other genres, but this is one of the best albums I’ve heard in recent years.
Nicolas Jaar – Space Is Only NoiseReport
Playing this now, thanks! This was one that I had on my eMusic queue, but didn’t get to before I cancelled my subscription.Report