Club Music in 2019

[thirdform]

Corsica is still a good venue but not for everyone I know

yeah i like it.

 

[pattycakes_]

Here's the last place I went

Giz a little review, la

 

[chava]

there is no improvisation. droid wants to talk about the tyranny of 130. that seems to be sidestepping the issue for me. I'd like to talk about the tyranny of the 4-4 time signature.

oh god no. improvisation is not the way to go. it always ends in egotism or technical showoff no matter how chaotic it present it self. what we need is new sequencing methods we can get enslaved to.

 

[hmg]

Giz a little review, la

I will, made notes, took names

 

[IdleRich]

You make a number of points there Third - some I kinda agree with, some I really don't

they don't escape reality, they get deceived into thinking they do.

Thinking you've escaped reality IS escaping it. For a while at least.

But you're totally right - if you're gonna question 130 then you should at least raise the issue of 4-4.

Not just the cleaner, the bar tender who has to get pummelled by monotonous berghain techno whilst being harrassed by etonian lads trying to be flirty. the cleaner who has to go into stinky toilets (club toilets are some of the worst in the world.) the person who has to clear out all the glasses. all the low level security who are rendered appendages to a legalised criminal syndicate. the woman sitting in front of the ticket scanner for 7 hours just pressing a button. fucking boring.

Yeeeeess... but also no. One thing I like about Portugal is that, in the places I go at least, it's often not like that. For example, last night I was at Le Baron in Lisbon which I've gone to quite often and in fact DJ-d at a few times. The first time we played there we chatted a lot to the bar staff and they were really enjoying the whole party. Afterwards a few of us ended up back at someone's house and the two guys who had been working the main bar were part of this small group. They were as drunk or whatever as everyone and in their view and everyone else's they had not been just serving the party, they had been part of it - although they had poured a few drinks and unlike virtually everyone else had walked out with more money than when they had walked in. And I think that this is much more common here, at least at the small venues. I just feel that here, looking back, there have been many nights where we've been having shots with the bar staff or door staff or owners or whatever. Admittedly not the toilet cleaners as far as I know. I suppose the thing I'm trying to say is that a lot of the venues here manage to get across this idea that they and their employees are a family and that they're all having fun putting on a party together and getting trashed while they do it.

 

[thirdform]

oh god no. improvisation is not the way to go. it always ends in egotism or technical showoff no matter how chaotic it present it self. what we need is new sequencing methods we can get enslaved to.

well, 9/8 is the time signature for a traditional turkish folk dance. so i suppose we could start making music in 9/8. but then everyone in house/techno will say it's undanceable.

 

[pattycakes_]

what we need is new sequencing methods we can get enslaved to.

What do you mean? Any ideas?

 

[pattycakes_]

well, 9/8 is the time signature for a traditional turkish folk dance. so i suppose we could start making music in 9/8. but then everyone in house/techno will say it's undanceable.

When you grow up listening to it it seems normal but when you grew up with 4/4 and a bit of 3/4 it's hard work. But you can get it with time

 

[pattycakes_]

Sure but that is not exclusive to the club and more than not requires being drugged or drunk to the eyeballs to achieve. I've had those transcendent moments more in isolation. nothings wrong with that but people make it to happen every time you go clubbing but 9 times out of 10 club nights are average. maybe the alchemy clicks once every three years, if that.

That's your own personal experience tho man. Don't forget that. I've had times where I only drank water and had the time of my life.

Not just the cleaner, the bar tender who has to get pummelled by monotonous berghain techno whilst being harrassed by etonian lads trying to be flirty. the cleaner who has to go into stinky toilets (club toilets are some of the worst in the world.) the person who has to clear out all the glasses. all the low level security who are rendered appendages to a legalised criminal syndicate. the woman sitting in front of the ticket scanner for 7 hours just pressing a button. fucking boring.

Most jobs suck though. Can't blame that on clubs. People don't have to work there.

no, i want to make the anxiety more intense. I want to purge rave of all its recuperated idealism. I want real music that speaks beyond the club. the binary is so old now.

Agree to disagree there. I believe good things can still happen in the right hands.

apologies raoul i was a bit pissed off with the local authorities telling me to monetise my accessibility disability troubles again.

Raoul?! No worries man. Hope you got it sorted

I think people should be mixing afrobeat with jungle with hardcore acid with electro with experimental broken electronics with italo with house with free jazz with flashcore in the same set. the technology is available to do it. People like blackdown criticised this approach back in the day of being disjointed, but if you make no room for the disjointed then there is inevitable standardisation and economisation

,

Here is where I agree with you 100%. And you know what, before ableton, before cdjs, I saw that shit happen with vinyl. Not a lot. But I saw it. People were much more creative when they were limited. As droid said at the beginning of the thread, most djs suck. Most fucking everyone in music sucks because its so easy to make shit that will get you a bunch of Instagram followers and fill a venue. You're happy, the promoters happy and the venue is happy. People are fucking lazy man. And it's nepotism. A country club. Everyone scratching each other's backs. You used to have to work fucking hard to even have a chance at a shot. Not no more.

as me and Luke have said. like who killed jungle, the djs or the producers? hard to tell isn't it. Droid leans more to the producers in the debate. i tend to lean more to the djs. but there is truth in both aspects. that's the dialectic after all

.

I wasn't there. Don't know the stories. But some things just burn out. For the amount of time it burned there's a serious vault of music there though. Jeez. A few years and enough music to fill a thousand raves.

now you can say they are doing this in deconstructed club, but they aren't really. that's just nelli fertado edits over noise or hardstyle. it's quite bait.

Again, lazy shit. See above.

I'm talking about something far more bipolar and schizophrenic. like darkside hardcore sampling absolutely everything to give you a disorienting experience. that's what I want to see in club music today.

I'm all for being disoriented. And I wonder if our current state of worldly affairs will lead us to something fitting this description at some point? It wouldn't be anything new, but it would be better than berghain/dettman conformist, conservative 'ohhh let's play a playful 80s house/ragga jungle track at the end of our set to show how eclectic we are' shit.

 

[chava]

What do you mean? Any ideas?

Either a techno version of the wild style juxtapostions of Ariel Pink (Huerco S came close on his first album, though mostly in sonics and structure less sequencing ). Or some "new monotony"/mechanichal aesthetic. But spare me for anything resembling the EBM/Wave/Industrial direction which now has infected techno to such a degree we really need an cleansing program.

Maybe something like this (I regard this as a techno track):

 

[chava]

Or a new purging of the "limitless" technology that is now in everyones hands and making them dirty. A new puritan paradigm, Arte Povera Electronicca. When Robert Hood was dismissed as calvinist puritanism in Energy Flash it was correct, but we need to go further and become real iconoclasts. The Internet can have all the limitless entertainment, but the club must become a protestant church, as close to Taliban without outright banning music.

 

[pattycakes_]

Do you produce at all chava?

For a few years I've had some ideas about midi stuff that I haven't seen implemented anywhere yet. Midi fx exist already but there's so much more that could be done. The stuff I'm thinking of is closely related to the those kinds of non linear rhythms in that (dope) ndagga track. One of the more fiddly aspects of using midi sequencing is breaking free of the grid. You can apply swing of course, but that tends to be a set it and forget it, linear and repetitive throughout the track thing. I've never seen a sequencer have automation for swing amount for eg. Why not? When you hear live percussion you're hearing constant timing shifts pushing and pulling against the pulse. A lot of sequencers have humanise functions which put some randomness into your midi but I've never heard one that didn't sound like a computer making a bad facsimile of human feel.

When you hear someone play say, a darbuka or tabla theyre playing all those rapid fire micro notes where the fingers kind of spray the skin. It's a powerful technique and not easy to sequence in midi unless you're very patient. I'd like a sequencer where you could put in the basic backbone of your beat, eg a simple tresillo, and then have a another non destructive midi effect sequencer layer on top. It would treat each midi note as a highly editable event with a lookahead buffer so say you wanted the spray to fade into the main hit of the note, you could determine how long the spray would take to reach the hit. And you could have parameters to adjust the space between the micro notes of the spray and intensity of them. A bunch of other parameters like adding a little chaos so they're not all perfect/uniform etc. There are tools out there that can do some of this, even ableton has a bunch of stuff that can almost get there but not quite. But that's per channel rather than per note. So every note in your sequence would be affected in the same way, unless you really got in there and automated the fx on and off, and by that point you've spent so much time fucking around trying to get 0.02 seconds of music done that you lose focus on what you're actually trying to accomplish. That's why each note = an event is important. Afaik nothing has the lookahead function. A bunch of other ideas too.

I'd really like to make music that breaks away from the rigidity of the grid. I'm OK on percussion so I could always record myself playing some of that stuff. But there's a whole other level to be explored when you put those kinds of rhythms into a sequencer and mess with them in ways no human could.

 

[pattycakes_]

Or a new purging of the "limitless" technology that is now in everyones hands and making them dirty. A new puritan paradigm, Arte Povera Electronicca. When Robert Hood was dismissed as calvinist puritanism in Energy Flash it was correct, but we need to go further and become real iconoclasts. The Internet can have all the limitless entertainment, but the club must become a protestant church, as close to Taliban without outright banning music.

Big fan of brinkmann but I don't think the dance floors would buy it man. Not on any significant scale anyway. Maybe your average Ivkovich fan would be down but I could imagine a bunch of confused/alienated ravers. If you ask me, make it approachable and slip in the clever stuff under the radar. Loosen them up before trying to blow their minds. The ndagga is a better direction IMHO.

 

[chava]

Big fan of brinkmann but I don't think the dance floors would buy it man. Not on any significant scale anyway. Maybe your average Ivkovich fan would be down but I could imagine a bunch of confused/alienated ravers. If you ask me, make it approachable and slip in the clever stuff under the radar. Loosen them up before trying to blow their minds. The ndagga is a better direction IMHO.

That's was not a dancefloor destroyer, but a dancefloor clearer. His early Soul Center stuff is excellent, kinda 'meta' funk/techno, I adore the second album and Brinkmann in general, definately the smartest guy in the biz. Every interview he does is as mind altering as his music.

Go slow:

 

[chava]

Do you produce at all chava?

For a few years I've had some ideas about midi stuff that I haven't seen implemented anywhere yet. Midi fx exist already but there's so much more that could be done. The stuff I'm thinking of is closely related to the those kinds of non linear rhythms in that (dope) ndagga track. One of the more fiddly aspects of using midi sequencing is breaking free of the grid. You can apply swing of course, but that tends to be a set it and forget it, linear and repetitive throughout the track thing. I've never seen a sequencer have automation for swing amount for eg. Why not? When you hear live percussion you're hearing constant timing shifts pushing and pulling against the pulse. A lot of sequencers have humanise functions which put some randomness into your midi but I've never heard one that didn't sound like a computer making a bad facsimile of human feel.

When you hear someone play say, a darbuka or tabla theyre playing all those rapid fire micro notes where the fingers kind of spray the skin. It's a powerful technique and not easy to sequence in midi unless you're very patient. I'd like a sequencer where you could put in the basic backbone of your beat, eg a simple tresillo, and then have a another non destructive midi effect sequencer layer on top. It would treat each midi note as a highly editable event with a lookahead buffer so say you wanted the spray to fade into the main hit of the note, you could determine how long the spray would take to reach the hit. And you could have parameters to adjust the space between the micro notes of the spray and intensity of them. A bunch of other parameters like adding a little chaos so they're not all perfect/uniform etc. There are tools out there that can do some of this, even ableton has a bunch of stuff that can almost get there but not quite. But that's per channel rather than per note. So every note in your sequence would be affected in the same way, unless you really got in there and automated the fx on and off, and by that point you've spent so much time fucking around trying to get 0.02 seconds of music done that you lose focus on what you're actually trying to accomplish. That's why each note = an event is important. Afaik nothing has the lookahead function. A bunch of other ideas too.

I'd really like to make music that breaks away from the rigidity of the grid. I'm OK on percussion so I could always record myself playing some of that stuff. But there's a whole other level to be explored when you put those kinds of rhythms into a sequencer and mess with them in ways no human could.

You're probably onto something, but honestly I think techno (or broader: electronic dance music) is a subset of sequencer logic, and still should submit and explore that. It is not devoid of possibilities especially if you use the acousmatic part as well in the sequencing (as in dub delays). As you write emulating advanced percussion you will probably get lost in the editing process as well. But ok I'm not of the 'nuum tradition...

The Ndagga stuff works for me because these are just blinding musicians and Mark Ernestus is a genius mixing the stuff. It is worth checking out live as well btw. I don't think you can or should 'compete' with that by doing midi-edits. It just ends up being to constructed for my liking.

If you just the bassdrum as an anchor (Surgeons term) and then let things flow around it, I think you can get the 'live' / organic feel as well. It is also somewhat a rationalization for myself not being able to do complicated stuff. I always been intimated by musicians, as it is obviously an inborn talent which I do not have. I did start fiddling around the last couple of years however and put up some loops and things on SC last year; here's one example (sorry for spam):

 

[thirdform]

taliban techno is something i can get behind but people will just start talking over it surely? this is the big problem with abrahamic religions i want to make the darkside godly rather than devilish.

 

[luka]

99 times out of a 100 being a musician is a huge handicap when it comes to making good music.

 

[pattycakes_]

here's one example (sorry for spam):

How dare you!

The thing I'm talking about would actually be real quick to use. Quicker than anything that exists aside from actually playing the thing. Convincing too. It's not exactly revolutionary. If you know the vst multifx sugabytes effectrix it would be like that for midi instead of audio. Simple gui. Visual feedback. Drag n drop fx with plenty of shit assignable to midi controllers.

 

[thirdform]

You're probably onto something, but honestly I think techno (or broader: electronic dance music) is a subset of sequencer logic, and still should submit and explore that. It is not devoid of possibilities especially if you use the acousmatic part as well in the sequencing (as in dub delays). As you write emulating advanced percussion you will probably get lost in the editing process as well. But ok I'm not of the 'nuum tradition...

The Ndagga stuff works for me because these are just blinding musicians and Mark Ernestus is a genius mixing the stuff. It is worth checking out live as well btw. I don't think you can or should 'compete' with that by doing midi-edits. It just ends up being to constructed for my liking.

people just tend to take a darbuka loop in 'experimental/deconstructed club' (i hate those terms) and work with that. i must say the results to me don't sound too satisfying.



whereas the flutters in this consciously being evoked as a dub effect tend to fit the electronic template far more for me.

 

[chava]

99 times out of a 100 being a musician is a huge handicap when it comes to making good music.

I guess this is the established truth in avantgarde circles ~geniale dilettantten etc. (I tend to agree). But it gets blurred when you apply 'producer' or engineer instead of musician.