Minimal techno blowing up

fandango said:

I suppose I'm just dissapointed in general at how heavily massaged into existing preconceptions a lot of this music needs to be for actual dance music fans in the UK to not write it off from the word go. What happened?

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well, to be fair, minimal techno has been round for a long time. i remember feeling saturated and thinking it had become a bit samey, especially the 2 bar loop stuff. i also remember ben sims telling me how he'd tried to play a more eclectic set in germany (having a reputation for playing and producing minimal techno) and getting bottled by the crowd as a result. theres people in every scene, including the underground, who are totally conservative. i still love a lot of the music.

i'd also suggest that the maximalist thing will not last for ever. these things come and go with alarming regularity.

yeah, that's another thing I love about that Cassy mix (and wasn't expecting!) how it builds convincing bridges between the "minimal techno" that has been around for ages (not the really fast Sims stuff tho, it's more of a house mix) and the stuff which arguably hasn't i.e. Villalobos et al. which I think has been the source of more recent excitement (and debate, if not outright backlash, amongst old schoolers).

I also don't want to destroy all happy and uplifting music! (and I certainly don't mean girly music) I wish I'd not thrown that last bit in. I'm maybe still thinking of that mx in how it begins with the rumbling Shackleton tune alluding darkly to to 9/11 ... and then the horns of the next (totally upbeat!) track come fading in with the vocal "Keep keep keep the fai-i-ith". Beautiful.

I just want less goth, posey "darkness" and more genuine flirting with the apocalypse, more gravitas. How this ties in with Kompakt... I doubt I'll get back to that because it doesn't much... :slanted:

swears said:

Fandango: Couldn't have put it better myself!

Gek: Yeah, maybe people are getting confused between electro-house and minimal, there is quite a lot of crossover.

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I'm still pretty confused a lot of the time! But I suspect a lot of my favouring of microness over electrohouse is as much derived from extreme caution as taste, only so many hours, so much money etc... the former just seems to reward me more personally. I'm a home listener, not a DJ type.

Where have people gotten this ridiculous idea that there is some kind of minimal craze sweeping Europe from? I, too, I have read this on numerous blogs, forums, on-line magazines etc. etc., but to be frank, none of my experiences in real life support this in the slightest. I think the explanation lies with the fact that because minimal has been very fashionable with the hipster crowd and the reformed indie crowd for some time, and because these groups make up such a disproportionate share of the "pundit class", these groups' reality is interpreted as the reality.

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 have exactly one friend who's into minimal and he's, surprise surprise, a wannabe clothes designer.

And when that happens Ricardo Villalobos will probably be the "new Aphex Twin"... and Flat Eric will make a sudden comeback.

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Mr Oizo has been releasing quite a few records over the past few years, and they are usually very well received by a lot of folk.

Guybrush said:

Where have people gotten this ridiculous idea that there is some kind of minimal craze sweeping Europe from? I, too, I have read this on numerous blogs, forums, on-line magazines etc. etc., but to be frank, none of my experiences in real life support this in the slightest. I think the explanation lies with the fact that because minimal has been very fashionable with the hipster crowd and the reformed indie crowd for some time, and because these groups make up such a disproportionate share of the "pundit class", these groups' reality is interpreted as the reality.

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Now that is interesting. You're right; if one were to read only Sherburne, Geeta, and ILM, a person would be left with the impression that minimal techno is the heir to electro-house's ailing kingship. That's only in Europe, of course. North America is still firmly in the grip of the hip hop/r'n'b axis.

Guybrush said:

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 have exactly one friend who's into minimal and he's, surprise surprise, a wannabe clothes designer.

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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?

swears said:

I get this feeling in Liverpool too...where exactly are the minimal hotspots in the UK?

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fabric seems to have good minimal dj's playing every other week or so these days (i haven't been since i got back from berlin and don't relish the prospect tbh :slanted: ). the end also has the likes of dinky and some of the kompakt crew occasionaly. otherwise, clever music (run by mark henning) organises strictly minimal nights every so often, haywire has magda on board now, and the t-bar in shoreditch has minimal goings on as well.

as for the possible future direction(s) for the scene, i think a key point may prove to be whether or not the music retains a minimalist aesthetic. there are producers grouped under the "minimal" banner who aren't really minimal at all (as discussed by sherburne in his pitchfork piece a couple of months ago). it seems to me like the movement is becoming too diverse to continue to be categorised as a single scene.

@ swears and gek re: the "evil" "unsettling" aspect of minimal: they are undoubtedly there in many tracks (i'm thinking in particular of michael mayer's remix of adolf werner's "der grundton", roli widmer's utterly bizarre "pilleli and puelverli", a lot onur ozer etc) but for me, this is not the most interesting aspect of minimal. i reckon it works best when it is minimal - long sets built from slowly unravelling tracks, where the beauty of the textures is given the space to be appreciated, and where the endless repetition seems to suggest the infinite.....i also enjoy the tension between the extreme un-funkiness of the clicks, crackles and glitches used to build the tracks (the "hey, this sounds a bit like autechre" feeling), and the undeniable groove the best producers conjur up("hey, but i can dance to it!"). this is felt very strongly, for example, in many of the tracks on akufen's my way and uusitalo's new album, where the first minute or so is spent finding the groove, with lots of possible directions in which the track could progress, before the beat kicks in. a similar thing happens, but in reverse, on carl craig's remix of rhythm and sound's "poor people must work", where the downbeat is threatened towards the end of the track, before finally prevailing. of course, this tension between the abstract/experimental tendencies of the sound and the context the music is designed for (clubs) becomes weaker as you listen to more of the stuff....

swears said:

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.

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Dunno. They've got an awful lot of stock for a boutique. I will say this, Trance seem to have the largest numbers of mixes/comps in my local HMV. Of course, I'm in Canada, so what does that mean really.

Who online is bigger than Juno?

Someone upthread said something about nu-French house and it got me thinking. Minimal techno seems to me to be the German equivalent of the Roule/Crydamoure/Fiat Lux/ French house from 7 years ago (holy shit! 7 years!). Groovy looped phrases filtered/tweeked just enough to keep the listener interested. The difference is the starting point, Sven Vath's techno instead of Cerrone's disco.

Guybrush said:

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 have exactly one friend who's into minimal and he's, surprise surprise, a wannabe clothes designer.

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Well if we're just speaking from personal experience then I'd have to outright disagree with you on that one. Let me lay out for you what I know about the dance scene in the following 3 big UK cities.

1. Birmingham - Traditionally very trance and prog orientated (home of Godskitchen and Sundissential) but people have been moving increasingly towards a mix of "electro-house" and minimal. See recent huge outdoor events featuring MANDY, Booka Shade, Jeff Mills etc.

2. Leeds - A plethora of nights featuring either strictly minimal beats (I'm talking the real stuff here, Magda n that) or cross-over (Paul Woolford, Konrad Black). There are numerous clubs hosting this stuff on a weekly basis. There's virtually no other dance scene.

3. Glasgow - You can't say that Richie Hawtin and Alex Under playing at The Arches next month isn't minimal hitting the mainstream. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in a city thats home to Soma records and the associated techno/house nights to go with it.

If you reached Global Gathering at the beginning of the summer you would have witnessed the Bedrock tent playing all kinds of minimal sitting right alongside the more established genres (and note even Digweed's spinning minimal these days). Global must be the most mainstream dance festival the UK.

swears said:

Gek: Yeah, maybe people are getting confused between electro-house and minimal, there is quite a lot of crossover.

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I'm unsure about this splitting of hairs between "electro-house" and minimal. Fair to say much of what's termed minimal is in no way sonically minimal, but I think thats beside the point. For something to go mainstream a subsection of sound gets labelled and then promoted. I think in the case of seeing "minimal" on a flyer, that encompasses "electro-house" (not a term I frequently hear I have to say). Being realistic about this, does it matter to the clubbers? Get Physical would be viewed by most people who are actually dancing to the stuff, as very similar to Perlon. Or infact they wouldn't think about it at all. The thing that matters is that its not one of the overblown dinosaur genres, which are seen by most people my age as un-hip in the extreme.

Chef Napalm said:

North America is still firmly in the grip of the hip hop/r'n'b axis.

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Like many other Europeans I use "dance music" as a vague catch-all term that includes, among countless other genres, techno, house, dubstep, jungle, trance and so on ad infinitum, but not r&b, dance hall, hip hop etc. This might seem illogical, but the genres are rarely mixed on the same dance floors and as a dj you have to approach the different crowds quite differently (generally, "urban" nights are more hits oriented), so it makes sense if you accept the fact that the outskirts are very blurry (to me, hip-house is dance music but Baltimore Club is hip hop ). The use of this term was fiercely debated on an ILM-thread a while back.

The trance I was thinking of is not the "credible" Kompakt variety or what have you, but the super-poppy kind that mostly falls under the radar of Dissensians and its peers but is HUGELY popular in the rest of the world, try this Wikipedia entry for more info. I would include chart-trance like Cascada and Gigi D'Agostino in there too.

EDIT: I'm not questioning minimal's dominance on the dance scene as we know it, I'm just saying that I think this dominance is much less apparent if you steer away from your usual sources of information and clubs. In other words, for every minimal night someplace, somewhere, I bet you can find five "maximal" ones.

wooooh! where the hell did this 2-page thread suddenly spring from?!

i'm listening to a lot of minimal right now, triggered by the Sleeparchive thing, and moving through some of those Sähkö re-issues - Mika Vanio tunes from '93 that just sound totally now.

And check that Andy Stott track 'She's Gone wrong' - a perfect blend of 808 beats and serious bass-weight - best shit i've heard in months. there's a nice 4-tracker by Gez Varley (original LFO bleep pioneer) on a sexy minimal tip too.

i'm not too confident that it'll take-off in the clubs where i live (Bristol, UK) but would love to hear some of this stuff on a system. maybe i should convince the fam we need to holiday in Berlin this year...?

swears said:

Hmmm...Isn't Juno more of a hipster online record store anyway? One step less obscure than Boomkat.

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Erm... pretty far off the mark with Juno there. It's a massive faceless music-selling machine. No agenda or opinions... justs lists and lists of releases, with clips of every track on each (rather than cherry picking the "hits").

They stock just about every kind of "popular" music nowadays. Anything that sells, basically. They have a Hardstyle / Happy Hardcore section, for crying out loud!

swears said:

Sounds awesome, will check these out. What labels?

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The andy Stott track is the b-side of the Nervous EP. the label is Modern Love (modern-love.co.uk)

The gez varley ep is on Sahko off-shoot Keys Of Life (www.sahkorecordings.com). the track 'nemesis' is a particular favourite of mine - its that ambient/drone feel over 4/4 kick - the sort of thing that could never be confused with electro-house.

swears said:

Villalobosclash! Awesome. Plus it would be a total break from rock, as a lot of the electroclash stuff had a punk/new wave influence, whereas 'lobosclash (heh) could take it's cue from elsewhere...I'm not sure exactly, that's why it could be interesting.

And yeah, it is making headway into hip dance nights like Fabric and the like but you have to remember that's like becoming a big fish in a small pond.

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God, It's not made headway, it's become the mainstay of their Saturdays now. It's not growing much in London, just humming at the same kind of level as it has for the past few years. Spain is another story. It's absolutely everywhere you turn, as far as clubs are concerned. That's a good thing, btw. I had a blast when I was last in Barcelona (actually staying with Phil Sherburne, who's a man in the know) and began to thoroughly enjoy house music again as a result.

minimal techno probably got the biggest response at sancho panza at this year's Carnival, it seemed to me. it's never going to get into the charts, but i think it could quite easily become the stock 4/4 music that people take drugs and dance to.

it's weird that the berlin minimal sound has had greater success on big dancefloors than the cologne, kompakt sound: the latter, to me, is much poppier and more fun (although i still love minimal tech)! may be people are just doing a lot of ketamine nowadays.

i remember when andew weatherall ( i think) played some schaffel at fabric 3 years ago or so, and pretty much the whole place stopped dancing. madness.

Nick Gutterbreakz said:

The andy Stott track is the b-side of the Nervous EP. the label is Modern Love (modern-love.co.uk)

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Alternatively, here.

'salright. I prefer this.

This discussion is interesting to a New Yorker like me because it seems so cute that minimal has any likelihood of breaking in the UK. Here, a tradition of tacky prole trance spanning a couple of decades (and all the boroughs) was enough to send indie-minded listeners running to acoustic indie-folk and similar genres, never to look back. Even the Junior Boys' decent reception here isn't enough to truly pique American "hipster" interest (the real commercial demographic driving force behind what breaks in the U.S.) in microhouse as a genre: to the target market here, it's just another record with blips and beeps that P4k endorses, therefore it is ok despite the blips and bleeps.

So here in the US minimal will always be for uberhipsterdweebs who find themselves too cool and discerning for the DFA, and yes, probably doing k. Nothing could be more gauche to the staunch Matador/Kill Rock Stars/Sub Pop indies than this set. Mute is the only label that might be able to swing it stateside, but they're too busy with The Knife and Goldfrapp to care.

God I hate genre names. There should only be two, "kick-ass" and "eh"

Just give me a killer beat and somthing to move me, like Julie McKnight's vocal on "Finally" by Kings of Tomorrow.

Or that Baby-D song... Let Me Be Your Fantasy