I think he's right to draw out that common thread between a lot of stuff that's out this year. But when he tries to make it into some big inter-decade pendulum swing, rather than relating it more closely to its direct predecessors like dubstep (which even then would be a problematic binary to set up in some respects)...
"Until quite recently, electronic dance music, by and large, had always been under the sway of minimalist aesthetics. The key terms-- as praise terms for fans and critics, and ideals for producers and DJs-- were "deep," "dark," "stripped-down.""
Wasn't a lot of his championing of the nuum based on the fact that it celebrates poppy/maximalist/'feminine' musical traits as much as their opposites? Both sides have a 'fissile coexistence', he called it. You can't really lump most of two decades of music-making onto one side of a binary just in order to make a point about the other side...feels like a crowbar job to me. But then all this excessive coinage usually does.
