Reynolds on planet-mu

i like this article, and i kinda like reading zoomed-in scans of magazines too for whatever reason (i guess 'cause you can only see one paragraph at a time, in large text, its easier to concentrate). havent listened to much dupstep, but i think he articulates well what i dont like about much of what ive heard (although im sure the same sentiments have been expressed here already - i cant really read the dubstep threads)...

I think IDM might be due a revival of sorts. The pendulum swing away from it seems to have reached it's furthest point. Six years ago I knew loads of people making IDM, now i don't know anyone who's doing it.

Need to change the name though. I hate that name, it sounds like an investment bank.

Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:

I think IDM might be due a revival of sorts. The pendulum swing away from it seems to have reached it's furthest point. Six years ago I knew loads of people making IDM, now i don't know anyone who's doing it.

Need to change the name though. I hate that name, it sounds like an investment bank.

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I can envisage a resurgence of the function rather than the style, certainly - there's quite a lot of stuff around that could plausibly fit under a 'music inspired by dance music that's based around home listening and auteurs rather than raving and scenius' banner, with electro, hip hop, techno and acid replaced by jungle, garage, dubstep, minimal etc...

Two things about the article - first, the bit about IDM (as it wasn't known at the time) initially going off in the opposite direction from ardkore and then making a wholesale about turn when jungle started getting critical acclaim is a standard view of things but it seems like a pretty big oversimplification if you actually start listening to things like Aphex and Mu-Ziq's EPs on R&S (or other stuff from that period) or the Black Dog's early breakbeat + synth riff stuff - there's a lot more in common with ardkore than many people acknowledge, and a lot more continuity with early drill and bass.

Secondly, I'm beginning to get a bit bored with all these "I barely listen to any dubstep these days but..." type generalisations: "...the remorseless fixation on turgid tempos and sombre moods, an ominousness as unrelieved as it is corny." Great, thanks...

<if you actually start listening to things like Aphex and Mu-Ziq's EPs on R&S (or other stuff from that period) or the Black Dog's early breakbeat + synth riff stuff - there's a lot more in common with ardkore than many people acknowledge>

Yes, we were influenced by Hardcore (i don't know anyone who called it 'Ardkore at the time) especially Don FM and all the white labels in Beggars Banquet and Troublesome in Kingston. Stuff like Acen and Dance Conspiracy made a big impression on me... also early Prodigy.

I remember trying to convince Dave at Fat Cat records in '93 to stock JungleTekno records... he pretty much poo-pooed the idea.

Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:

I think IDM might be due a revival of sorts. The pendulum swing away from it seems to have reached it's furthest point. Six years ago I knew loads of people making IDM, now i don't know anyone who's doing it.

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I could see intricacy and dense melody coming back as new trance and minimal wear out a bit more... but the eclecticism and pan-genre sounds around at the mo don't form the same kind of rigid pleasure-hegemony that IDM initially reacted against. Or do they? Perhaps eclecticism will become orthodox and people will move towards focused depth again... but currently it feels like a case of More Of Everything All The Time with micro-revivalism on the one hand, and macro global fusionism on the other.

haha

Slothrop said:

I can envisage a resurgence of the function rather than the style, certainly - there's quite a lot of stuff around that could plausibly fit under a 'music inspired by dance music that's based around home listening and auteurs rather than raving and scenius' banner, with electro, hip hop, techno and acid replaced by jungle, garage, dubstep, minimal etc...

Two things about the article - first, the bit about IDM (as it wasn't known at the time) initially going off in the opposite direction from ardkore and then making a wholesale about turn when jungle started getting critical acclaim is a standard view of things but it seems like a pretty big oversimplification if you actually start listening to things like Aphex and Mu-Ziq's EPs on R&S (or other stuff from that period) or the Black Dog's early breakbeat + synth riff stuff - there's a lot more in common with ardkore than many people acknowledge, and a lot more continuity with early drill and bass.

Secondly, I'm beginning to get a bit bored with all these "I barely listen to any dubstep these days but..." type generalisations: "...the remorseless fixation on turgid tempos and sombre moods, an ominousness as unrelieved as it is corny." Great, thanks...

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yeah aphex's early records were rave records and got played at raves, so did black dogs and autechres first records, etc.
those bangface guys do raves which cross actual raving gear with more electronica stuff.

I always hated the term IDM, although I loved the music.
When people asked me what music I was into, I would always just give a list of labels - Warp, Planet Mu etc.
I remember when I started listening to DJ Scud though, and Atari Teenage Riot, suddenly a lof of IDM seemed quite pallid in comparison. A lot of IDM music (included stuff I did myself) ended up being poor-quality aphex clones, - at least that's why I stopped listening for a while. Like a lot of people I know, I started off listening to Warp Artifical Intelligence, took in a lot of the new stuff for some years, then got really excited by DHR, Kid 606, and a lot more 'harsher' stuff by the turn of the century. Maybe IDM is due a comeback. What category would you put someone like Eight Frozen Modules in?

wonk_vitesse said:

Electronica seems a better term which is a clearer 'middle class' statement without the 'intelligent' insult.

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I hate the term Electronica. It came out of marketing and record companies, it never came from the people making the music. I always thought that electronica was a name made up to sell Prodigy and Chemical Brothers records to Americans. As such, it was a catch-all term for any electronic type of music. So The Prodigy are electronica. The Matrix soundtrack? That's electronica too.

Surely the accepted parlance for this sort of music is Braindance?

I also hate both terms with a passion, a journo asked if we are heading up some kind of revival last week, I didn't know if to swear or just hang up.

DJ PIMP said:

More Of Everything All The Time

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and therein lies the problem with some breakcore artists - two much of everything sounds really flat cos theres no let up or respite which hasn't been crammed full of glitchy and bitcrunched detail.

regarding some of the releases mentioned in the article though, i am loving neil landstrumms album. i've been following his stuff for years with interest, even when he was considered more of a techno artist. even then his stuff was quite twisted and innovative compared to his peers, this coming at the time of the 2-bar loop minimal phase early this decade.

Amplesamples said:

Braindance

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For some reason this seems the saddest of the bunch. I picture a room of brains sitting on the floor like so much soggy grey porridge, pretending they can have a party without drugs, sex, or bodies.

i like electronica or even electronic music cos it can mean quite a wide variety of things from late prodigy to ryoji ikeda to aphex twin to some kinda electronic exotica black dog style thing, much more generous that idm which is a weird mix of incredibly tight fisted as genre name but also potentially open minded if it wasn't for the uptight people that seem to be the gatekeepers, usually americans.
So much terrible music passes for the genre of idm and so much great music doesn't, so much is just ignored. It's almost sometimes like the more advanced the programming tricks the better the record is deemed to be, which is quite ludicrous really.

Yeah but you get the same thing happening with other genres - there's no reason IDM should be immune from that kind of fallacy.

I remember years ago when Luke Vibert was doing stuff under the Plug name, he did the album Drum & bass for papa. At the time a few Warp people were calling it 'speed funk'. This was just before the term 'drill'n'bass' which was used as much as an insult as much as a descriptor. I always thought speed funk would stick as a name.

idm which is a weird mix of incredibly tight fisted as genre name but also potentially open minded if it wasn't for the uptight people that seem to be the gatekeepers, usually americans.

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Which americans? I'm just interested. I don't know that many American people, but I don't see why they are particularly seen as gatekeepers for the genre

DJ PIMP said:

For some reason this seems the saddest of the bunch. I picture a room of brains sitting on the floor like so much soggy grey porridge, pretending they can have a party without drugs, sex, or bodies.

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Agreed. Of all these names, Braindance is the one that most emphasises the nouveax-hippy smugness of (the worst of) this music. 'Braindance' sounds like the name of a record that ELP would make.

I really hated it when Colin Dale started using the term 'abstract dance' for detroit-y techno in the mid 90s. Because it's a literal oxymoron (dancing doesn't have a fixed, concrete meaning, so how can you abstact it?), it totally undermines any claims to intellectualism being made on the music's behalf.

It's indicative of the sloppy thinking that seeped into techno in the mid 90s. Really, a lot of techno producers had skim-read short histories of modernist art, and decided that 'abstract' was a synonym for 'intelligent' or 'progressive'. Meaning 'piss off oiks, this is not for you'

Wasn't Braindance coined as a bit of a parody of the AI / IDM labels?

Braindance was a joke made up by Rephlex to avoid answering the (boring) question "what kind of music is it?"

IDM was an internet mailing list run by a bloke from America.

I always just say I am into techno, and if it makes people think I like Rednex and 2 Unlimited instead of Mayday and Juan, what do I care?

Electronica would be the best term had it not been used by a load of American music journalists to describe big beat/Moby in the late 90s. I always used that term to refer to what others call IDM.

Personally I loved Autechre way more than Aphex Twin, by the late 90s they inhabited a far more interestingly liminal and nightmarishly abstracted realm, Especially on Confield and Chiastic Slide, their most gnarly micro-industrial/xeno-oriental works. Though they ran out of steam post 2001. I have little time for IDMish stuff now, I have to say, and am baffled by Reynolds repeated love for the stuff (predominantly the more library music-ish melodic end I suspect).

Electronic music is a pleasing broad description I find.

Err yeah that covers it. But why the sudden rush of posts in the last few months about the correct term for electronica/idm etc? Seems a bit weird given that few are actually claiming that anything vital is being produced in this field anymore.