See this is interesting to me because while I can totally see where you're coming from -and a lot of it WAS wallpaper- I still have a massive soft spot for a lot of this stuff, particularly kompakt
In my head it's the last stand, really of truely modernist techno/house that wasn't interested at all, sometimes to a fault, of referencing the past. The last moment too when the weirdos with direct links to the original late 80s rave and techno scenes - Wolfgang voigt, Sven vath etc etc - were still calling the shots before the baton got passed to attractive and well groomed graphic designers in Berlin. A final high water mark when new house and techno records were pushing things forward but still absolutely about dancefloor impact rather than urghh "deconstructed" takes on the dancefloor
Etc etc.
But of course it's not coincidental that I was going out loads in the mid 2000s to this sort of music.
It's almost embarrassingly obvious to say, but your personal golden age of music is always gonna be the music you listened to loads with your mates when you were young and having a wicked time and doing loads of drugs. There's no objective handle you get on this, I don't think, and nor should there be. It's all meshed into the overall moment when you were at your personal peak.
Sorry to bring him into this but this is why I don't buy someone like Joe Muggs. No one can be that enthusiastic about new dance music at 40 years old. It cannot possibly mean to you what it did, you cannot possibly engage with it in a way that makes it mean what it once did. And that's ok, as long as you admit it. Someone like Joe Mugs is invested in claiming that everything is still AMAZING when we know that it is not psychologically possible for it to be so
i mean the thing with Muggs is he made a smart subcultural decision (at least initially!) to escape the hippycore he was into before it ended up
here.
The thing however is that these investments of capital from then onwards have meant he has to convince himself he's always down with the cool kids. Luckily and somewhat ironically enough for hin, the cool kids are now into hippycore, but precisely when the job of the music journalist is largely being rendered surplus to requirements by capital - hence our boy Christou Mackintosh being slated by hin, which was really just a pining for a lost golden age of music writers where a nebulous originality was de rigueur. The problem with Joe however is he should probably admit that he himself contributed (at least in the area of dance music) to this dumbing down, consumer guide style of writing — not that he is the worst offender or anything, but there is really no harm in being truly partisan, and at least in music, being ideologically blinkered to varying extents. Lord knows prejudice in music is one of the safest ways to express it, much more than politics and organised religion. It is prejudice which to an extent fuels transcendence. I like Andy Weatherall's adage that originality comes out of bad approximations of previous styles - through mistakes in other words. This is why I want our boy to pick fights on twitter and write another book after that — but I fear he's left it somewhat too late. Ah well, c'est la vie.
I would, however, disagree about techno, at least until the mid 2010s. If anything the return to simple manipulative emotions of the trance and tech house eras has killed the majority of contemporary techno. Techno works best when it is primitive complexity, a 909, 303 and maybe some shuffle, bleeps, electro lines, etc. If you listen to any hör Berlin set today it's in a way harkening back to 1999 stadium trance and hardstyle. Of course the cologne boys were proper weirdos, but I feel like by the time the first Kompakt releases that weirdness was being lost. Can you really say M. Mayer is as weird as 90s Jammin Unit? There's just no chance, and then Wolfgang voigt going on about how he really liked T Rex and Scritti Politti in RA and fact interviews in the 2010s, fer fuckssake! I say this whilst unhealthily loving most of the music that lot put out until superpitcher and co. came around, but ironically the last stand of modernist dance music was not techno, not even original dubstep but that much maligned subgenre, brostep.