House Is A Feeling

Yeesh the time flies by, three weeks since a post is shameful. Thanks to the people who mailed me to ask if I was posting or who found the site for the first time, it makes me realise I should get off my lazy ass and post.

I guess most of you are totally familiar with the choices a full working week gives you. You either party and life becomes just work and play, or you force yourself to do creative things outside work. What’s crazy is how much of the brain work actually takes from you. In a busy month I find myself abandoning books for the newspaper on my commute, and a wall builds up around blogging and music.

Then I have a day where I’ve got more time and suddenly I check the music sites, listen to promos, and remember how I managed update almost every single day at one point, and that house and techno is actually good. The human brain doesn’t need a lion tamer to become docile, just a 40 hour week.

So I’ve chosen option A of late, and been out quite a bit lately, being very stupid. The most recent highlight was seeing Marcus Worgull at 512 on Kingsland Road on Sunday. I’d never been to 512 and I thought it was a really good club, just a simple square room. Like plenty of good clubs it was good because at no point did you have to think about it. Nothing got in the way.

With someone like Worgull I always have a bit of faith before going in, which I guess is a credit to Innervisions, you just sort of feel those guys will be good DJs. He played a quite steady set of house and some disco, and some older housey stuff too. It was quite funny at around 2 or 3am to hear “Elle” by DJ Gregory mixed into that awesome old Francois K remix of Moloko’s “Forever More”, felt like somebody plugged my ipod in circa 2003! But since I love both of those records I wasn’t complaining. I’d forgotten how powerful the Francois K mix is.

After that I saw a little bit of Londoner Casper C in house mode, and there things became a bit hazy, I know there was Johnny D played though. Then it was onto some truly awful club playing unidentifiably shit music, before a stumble home.

One thing I’ve noticed about London is that despite the wealth of stuff that’s on in clubs and pubs the parties that happen in somebody’s flat or apartment are even crazier than somewhere like Dublin, and you can often spend a weekend out and about without seeing any DJ or even hearing any particularly great records. Obviously the parties with good music are better, but the stupidity scene here is very well engrained!

That was that for last weekend, this weekend not sure if there are any techno related plans, but who knows which way the wind will blow. Lately the most simple beginning can end with the below neighbours whacking a broom against the floor, as if oblivious to the fact that their Sunday afternoon screaming ranting arguments are just as disturbing a soundtrack to some as techno at 7am.

More posts soon. In fact, another one in about 2 hours. (edit: maybe a bit longer than that!)

I don’t know what it is, but certain sounds or instruments used in some records can really make you feel a certain way, or remember certain things.

Of course that sounds quite vague, so I’ve picked out Vincenzo’s “Jack Ain’t Back” and Russ Gabriel’s Old School Remix of “L’Aurora” by Poppcke and Alex Niggemann. I’m not singling them out because they’re two utterly mindblowing records, but because they are both so vibey, so evocative. The Euro-Detroit bleeps are an imitation of older stuff I’m sure, though we could probably argue all day what the specific source is.

But isn’t there something about the actual synths used in these tracks that just really gets you? I know when I hear “Jack Ain’t Back” I feel a sort of instant nostalgia, but it’s nostalgia for when? For whenever it came out? For the last time I listened to it or played it out? It’s not really easy to tell. There’s just something about the actual sound that makes me think of summer, those optimistic grooving squelches seem to open up all sorts of possibilities. It’s just really wide eyed house music, which is quite rare.

Both of these records are pop music to me, just a total sugar fix. But they seem to distill a lot of the electric buzz of great dance music and a lot of the atmosphere of great clubs. into just a few minutes Maybe it’s just a sound I particularly like, but I suspect other people might get this feeling from these tracks too.

There’s nothing utterly shocking about either track, but they do have a simple bit of magic, they’re just so quintessentially house. For me the Vincenzo record has long ceased to be just the sum of its parts and become a lifelong favourite. It’s not an all-time classic or won’t make many lists but I know I’ll be listening to it for as long as I live.

Vincenzo-Jack Ain’t Back (Déssous)

Poppcke/Alex Niggemann-L’Aurora (Russ Gabriel’s Old School Mix) (Moonpool)

So I’ll be playing at this tomorrow if you want something to do after Field Day. It’s free in and runs from 10 until 5am or so, I’ll be downstairs in the club room. Also there’ll be an afterparty somewhere nearby from 5am until 10 or so, just drop me a mail if you want details of that.

Are you going? I think all I’m sure I want to see is Richie Hawtin’s set, which I’m hearing (from unreliable sources) could be a lot longer than the two hours promised. As for the other stuff I’ll just take it in.

It’s just occurred to me, and people might find this funny, that I’ve only seen Richie Hawtin play once, and that was in 2003 in Cologne playing back to back with Ricardo Villalobos. Even though I keep a blog and write about minimal (or whatever we call it) I don’t actually have any particularly strong feelings about Hawtin, I never download sets, I haven’t heard any of his mixes. I don’t like M_nus much, that’s my only real opinion on the guy.

Yet I reckon I’d enjoy a set, I mean, why not? Anyway if you do go along maybe I’ll see you there, it seems literally everybody I know is going to be at this. Lineup details here. What will you be checking out?

From the Sun.

“After Bob Marley died in 1981, black music started becoming aggressive.”

“On Sunday I overdosed on violent lyrics in black music. The state I was in, I was a menace to society.”

What do you think of “new disco”, or whatever people call this music now?

I have to say since moving to London I’ve really started to dislike it. I mean, sure, I hear a few records in this style I like, for example John Daly’s remix of Toby Tobias on Rekids but it seems to be used as aural wallpaper over here, it runs the risk of not standing for anything, just being conveniently slow enough to dance to without much effort.

On a bad soundsystem or god forbid, at a party in the early hours, it’s just so soporific and grooveless. The funny thing is, I’ve seen Prins Thomas and Jonnie Wilkes from Optimo DJs play ultra slow sets of disco and reggae and anything else thrown in and thought it was amazing, intense and very serious. Maybe it’s just somebody playing all newer stuff in this style never sounds like anything more than a warm-up set to me. Maybe I just see terrible new disco DJs.

What do you reckon? I can remember enjoying “I Feel Space” and I used to buy Prins Thomas and Blackbelt Anderson stuff quite a bit a few years ago. Prins Thomas’s “Goettsching” is still an all time favourite as is Reverso 68’s “Piece Together”.

The other thing is that some of the old records mixed in get very predictable. I like being out and not knowing what a lot of the music playing is, or more importantly, the entire club not knowing. I guess I like when reactions to tracks people know are physical rather than mental too. With too many new-disco DJs the tracks you don’t know, on Rong, or Eskimo, or whatever are the filler for dropping ones you could probably do without ever hearing again.

I mean, what am I missing?

The older you get, the more there is to look back on, and the more there is to forget.

And of course, the older you get, the more cynical you become. A friend’s older brother once quipped every “night out” makes a dance music fan more cynical, their field of vision narrower, until eventually they just like one four word genre. It was like a gypsy’s curse. The fact that it was delivered on some random Sunday night in summer at about 5am tells me how long ago it was, how little I probably believed it then.

I still don’t think it has to be that way. But sometimes looking back at years spent listening to dance music. It’s like surveying a smoking battlefield, it’s hard to tell where there were triumphs and where there were only wastes of time, or whether it was all a waste of time. I look back at the last 8 years or so (some of you may look back even longer) and often wonder what I got from it all, or what united all that time. What’s the end result of all those minutes and hours turned into days and nights consuming this odd functional music voraciously?

Ultimately it is a tiredness of sorts, if not a cynicism. All the records and parties and sounds are your own journey, and eventually you feel like you’ve travelled it. It’s a mental weariness, a sort of stoic mechanical feeling. What’s interesting is that techno itself seems to give birth to sounds that match this feeling, to vague suggestive records that are less “for those who know” than “for those who don’t know anymore”.

Shed’s “Shedding The Past” brims with these feelings. It’s the dead eyed sonic shards of a life lived in techno, the story of somebody else’s path, their journey through countless scenes and sounds, years and days. It’s at times ambient, at times anonymous, almost always ambiguous, brimming with the paradoxically nihilistic identity that says feeling nothing can still be the most powerful feeling of all.

From the opening intro drones to the cold techno of “Another Wedged Chicken”, and the rough mechanics of “Flat Axe”, this is a record which makes that inhumanity you’ve been feeling feel more human. “The Lower Upside Down” is a rope ladder from reality to a dazed dreamworld, before “Archived Document” makes you feel that sense of subcultural belonging once again, with a set of zpoken affirmations rhymed off that seem to roll back the years once again, to make you feel you’ve been here before, you’ve never left. “That Beats Everything” shatters the crystal ball, the only typical Ostgut-Ton moment on the entire record.

After that, it’s stepping back into space again with “Ithaw”, a sort of Berghain dubstep which pulses mournfully, a record that seems a paean to tiredness, to the burn out at the end of the day or night. Then just when it seems the towel has been thrown in, “Estrangé” explodes. The penultimate track on the record is the sound of dusting yourself off, of emerging soaked in sweat and shattered after all those years, all those records, all those parties, all that information, and finding the path once again.

It’s a call to arms, a slice of steely euphoria that makes electronic music seem like as bold a badge of identity as ever. You hear this and you know you can doggedly resist the end of the night, and stave off the end of it all.

Check out my latest roundup for Word and Sound’s digital home here.

So I checked out T-Bar last Friday for Ralph Sliwinski (though can’t be sure if he actually played) and then the Scala on Saturday for Secretsundaze featuring Cassy, Ame, and various others.

Friday was a strange night, the first time I’d been in T for ages but I can’t say I really got into it after enjoying Bart Skils and Anton Piete’s “The Shining”. Still, it’s always surprising how much loud dance music of any kind grabs you even when you’ve only been away from clubs for a month or so. It’s just that intangible feeling of the club, of a shared experience of music you like. You can’t replicate it really.

I mean, I can remember the dates and the records played from nights I went to 7 years ago, but I can never remember exactly how good I felt or how much fun I had, or the specific way a full club actually feels. That’s why we go back I suppose, we just lose that memory. It’s the same with DJing, when it’s amazing I find myself telling myself to try and remember it somehow, to store it up. You can’t though.

The problem is, when you forget, in busy times or bad times, you can’t just flick a switch and remember what a great nightclub feels like. You have some falsified mental memory of clubbing, but it’s not instantly available. So if you’ve not been in a club in a while, then go to one! Don’t forget!

Anyway enough preaching! Friday was a good start to the weekend even if it didn’t blow me away, but Saturday was better. The Scala is a bit weird. As an old cinema it reminds me of clubs in Dublin, those old buildings with endless stairwells to crash in whose high ceilings and weird shaped rooms seem to scream “I wasn’t meant to be a music venue!”. There’s a nice side to wandering around somewhere like that, like a big house party, but sometimes you crave one vast open dancefloor.

Soundwise I thought everything seemed quiet and muffled until about 3am or so, but I stood in several different places. Musicwise Cassy was far and away the best. That was the first time I’d seen her and it was just a nice lean set of bodily focussed house music,  a really determined selection. It’s hard to see her not becoming massively popular (or should that be even more popular) by the end of the year, especially with new productions coming out.

After that it seemed like a combination of the Secretsundaze guys and maybe Ame (apparently a secret guest on the night, but it was too smokey in there to tell) played till 6am. This was the next best part, I guess it’s nice when a venue thins out a bit and you can lose yourself a bit more. There’s something edifying about staying until the end of a night at 6am, before you’re dragging yourself out crying. All night parties are ideal but I have no problems with 6am.

Once Secretsundaze was over we headed to a secret wooded location in East London (my flat) where I played for a while for some friends through speakers with the sound quality of two biscuit tins. It was just a few friends but I did play the new Innervisions by Ame, Dixon, and Henrik Schwarz which is really brilliant and so good to mix (more on this soon, I may review it.)

If you’re a golf fan, (what sport could be closer to techno?) suffice to say that Padraig Harrington had probably teed off by the time the night ended. I can remember UR’s “Transition”, probably playing Marshall Jefferson’s “Mushrooms” about 5 times, the Acid Jesus remix of G-Man’s “Quo Vadis”, Robert Dietz’s ultra-warm “Backseat” on Cécille, a “Rose Rouge” remix or two, and just about everything else I own. Then sleep came.

Anyone at either night on Friday or Saturday? What did you think?

The latest “Month In Techno” column by Phil Sherburne makes for gloomy reading. I’ve felt a bit this way lately but I held off writing a blog post about it because I figured it was a personal mood, not the wider mood in techno. As regards writing I’ve wondered about what’s the point for ages, and bored you all with my posts about it!

Last week I posted this on ILM: “Maybe forums have just replaced the need for reviews entirely to the point that people don’t actually have any respect for somebody doing a review, because why would they, everyone is literally a critic in that they sit down and type their opinions about stuff constantly.”

What do you think? Are you feeling depressed about dance music? Or at least about dance music on the net?

I love tons of new releases, I’m still buying as much as ever. But I don’t enjoy talking about dance music online anything like I did a couple of years ago. Something new needs to come along to replace “minimal” as the hyped genre and the genre people love to hate. Not because it’s musically bereft (the term means nothing musically anymore) but just to blow away the cobwebs. It’s been a long time since people had something new to argue about.

As a result the the tiny patches of internet reserved for dance music discussion are looking a bit too weatherbeaten. But is the internet representative of anything wider? I’m not so sure. You could frame any downbeat article in the last 20 years with negative world news stories, no matter what you were writing about. And musically I think dance music has been quite strong this year, albeit without too many big gobsmacking ideas.

I also have to say as much as I enjoyed the article and am glad somebody had the courage to actually stand up and ask some questions, I think some of Phil’s comments seem a bit too hasty. For instance: “A party culture (and drug culture) predicated upon parties that never end can only result in a music that thumps dully away without surprise or meaningful variation.”

I mean, how do you go from writing about minimal for so long to this? I’m not saying somebody should be a lifer, just that if you really believe the above, then surely all dance music ever made would be worthless? Why would a longer party mean less meaningful music, when people have been having hedonistic parties to techno for years upon years? When did the music lose its meaning? Why?

I sometimes feel that it’s purism that’s paradoxically in vogue at the moment, with half of the techno world spending the last year or so falling over itself to denounce laptops, minimal, drugs, and rely the kind of lazy dismissals that a jazz or classical critic would use to eviscerate every techno record ever made.

The manifestos collected from producers at the end of the Month In Techno piece feel like more of this suffocatingly dull trend to me. Isn’t it just completely depressing to see so many producers rhyming off criticisms of dance music that most people would have thought were dead and buried, eg it’s not made with “real instruments”, people who like it take a lot of drugs, it’s easy to make etc etc.

And these criticisms are coming from inside the genre! It’s practically self hatred. All I’m saying is I’m glad most of the producers quoted make records that are more interesting than their manifestos. I mean, this probably seems very harsh, but I just wish people in dance music could talk about in ways that acknowledged that sleaziness, questions of inauthenticity, drugs, and hedonism were all intrinsic irremovable parts.

Dance music is not about “hard work” or “real instruments” or brainy manifestos, it’s much harder to pin down than that. As a writer I know how maddening that is, but this is why so many of these rules that are imported from outside the world of electronic music for these manifestos just don’t work for me.

In the middle of all the straitjacketing, Cristian Vogel grabbed my attention with the best manifesto of the lot, the only one that seemed challenges the reader rather than slot them back into a familiar groove. The cryptic brevity of his words says more than Matthew Herbert’s entire autobiography.

Vogel’s manifesto also serves as a good answer to the questions of why there might be a crisis in all these online techno discussions, because ultimately it doesn’t mean anything, because the more discussion there is the more the meaningless hits you. That’s not to say we should all give up, but we’re living in a gigantic sea of opinion now, it’s got to be disheartening from time to time, especially if you’re a journalist.

“Cristian Vogel (No Future, Tresor)
http://www.no-future.com/vogel_microsite/

Techno music is not important; it is nothing.

Techno music can strive to be as empty as possible.

Techno music can be poetry about the ecstasy in the universe.

Techno music should give awareness, not take it away.

Techno music is too good at describing our cyclic existence.

DJs should strive to enlighten.

Techno music needs to be kind and rest.”