See I kind of agree but I also think that this part of the scene has collapsed into cliches and copycats amazingly fast. Instra:mental and d-bridge kind of lead the way, with the autonomic podcasts and stuff, but then all of a sudden you got an army of copyists all doing "super deep" dnb that's really just pads and a lack of snares, and what's worse is that they are so concentrated on being deep and the polar opposite to the pendulum/clipz/tc end of dnb that their tunes are afraid to appeal to the floor in any what whatsoever. Good stuff, but it needs an edge, some ruffness, a little bit of floor appeal and maybe a tiny bit of fun? (all imo off course)
That said, there's some great stuff in this area, dbridge, Instra:mental, Bop, Oak, Dissident, June Miller etc. The new Alix Perez album is pretty good too.
Well yes, that's true to a certain extent; but that's just the whole post-internet monkeys-with-cracked-sequencers effect though; sort the wheat from the chaff and you'll still find a bigger yield today than you might have a few years ago, IMO
And a lot of this stuff really
does work on a floor; the bassline on that Blocks and Escher tune for example takes no prisoners, even though you mightn't admittedly get much of a sense of it through a crappy youtube clip! The same with that Dan Habarnam tune, I get great reactions whenever I play that out...
Have you heard any Rockwell? I have really high hopes for him, even though I'm not entirely sure if "minimal" is the right word to describe him...
The story goes that until he started writing tunes about two years ago he had a record collection that consisted entirely of ringtone jumpup, and that as soon as he started to write tunes and found how boring it was to make music like that had a damascene conversion; to this day he feels somewhat embarrassed any time anyone asks him about photek or futurebound or anything pre-2000 because he's literally never heard 99% of it...
Not much of his stuff on Youtube yet though -
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"Tribes"
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"Underpass"