Ooookaaaayyy...
fandango:
Rock audiences get a slating but honestly I think conservatism is rife across the board in a lot of ways. "Dance" enthusiasm for innovation seems just as much trickle-down spoonfeeding as your archetypal NME reading kid sometimes.
Yes, this is very true a lot of the time, but I think being a purist in a particular genre that you want to see develop is preferable to being somone picking the most obvious accessable stuff out of a musical buffet.
I'm still unconvinced that electroclash (which I'd say was for a while a "good thing") didn't in the end simply birth el-retro-clash (Cut Copy = ugh. I'd like to ban cliched vocoder use for the next five years)
I had the feeling at the time that it would be more of a starting point for various new things and mark a move away from sampled breaks and beats. But then of course it was just submerged into a general "I <3 the 80s" in popular culture.
the Klaxons just fucking suck.
Yes, this cannot be stessed enough. And minimal techno shouldn't need to dress itself up in indie rags to cross over.
i.e. Bodyrockers) might actually be more open-minded than people intently focusing on the "next big thing"
I think a lot of that Bodyrockers stuff is a watered down 9th generation product of electroclash anyway. (And they're such a bunch of gel-haired Topman-shirted meatheads ...ugh.)
The argument however does stand up, when you look at the chart success of say, UK Garage & proto-Grime (which I'll admit to innocently loving the 'hits' of, but passing me by completely as a 'movement' at the time) which was innovative, successful but widely disliked for the appearance of flashiness (hello sexy-funky-house fans???) and probably having the wrong colour skin to be validated by certain sections of the media.
Yeah, and I think that was a class thing as well, middle class England seems to want something to relate to now, "normal" blokes like The Streets and Artic Monkeys. Minimal is sort of a blank canvas, I'm not sure if that's a recipe for commercial success or failure.
... and Flat Eric will make a sudden comeback.
Ha, my fave No.1 ever, had a little garage swing to it don't you think, (dunno if that was an American or UK influence though, a lot of French house has that swing to it.) and Oizo's two albums are great too.
gek opel:
To pick upon Fandango's last point... tis that dynamic sense of evil that I love about minimal music most... its a juvenile thing I suppose, but I just love it when I hear some dark, pulsing, febrile, alien textured piece of music, be it Dubstep or (proper) minimal (or indeed Scott Walker, but that's another story...)
Yes, there is potential for unsettling, insidious vibes to this stuff, much creepier than the grrrr scary goth/metal/pseudo industrial stuff Aphex was spoofing with "Come To Daddy".
Guybrush:
The most popular dance sound with all of my dance friends and dj-colleagues still is trance, trance, trance ... and then: big-room house (Steve Angello-style rather than Blaze-style).
I get this feeling in Liverpool too...where exactly are the minimal hotspots in the UK?
Chef Napalm:
Trance, huh? That's pretty shocking to me considering the lack of output. I buy most of my records from Juno and when you compare the number of trance records released in the last eight weeks to the number of minimal/micro records the numbers aren't even close. I wonder is that because Juno is based in the UK rather than the on continent? To what do you attribute the discrepancy?
Hmmm...Isn't Juno more of a hipster online record store anyway? One step less obscure than Boomkat. Perhaps Trance DJ's can just walk into HMV or Virgin and pick up what they want.