The scene without a name

[terry nutkins]

when asked "so what music do you DJ then" i find it's quite easy replying to people who know a bit about music (ie: a basic knowledge of genres/styles/etc)

it's when you're asked by work colleagues/relatives/friend's parents who don't know their LFO from their manilow that it becomes an absolute nightmare :-D

i challenge anyone to come up with a reply that doesn't make you sound like a prime tit

[ivan_smackhead]

who don't know their LFO from their manilow
:) *chuckle*

[Solid State]

If anything, (and this has probably been sugeested already, I dont know) I think it'll end up just being called the Cosmic Disco scene.

It sounds good, you dont need to know where the 'Cosmic' bit comes from to get it, and it does a decent job of summing things up.... a spacey, futuristic (and/or retro) disco-derived sound.

Doesnt really cover ALL the styles that tend to get played, but it's probably the single most convenient label... it gets messy once you try and cover all bases.

And 'Acid House' and 'Balearic' managed to cover lots of bases too.

Hope it doesnt happen, but I'd settle for that if I had to belong to a 'scene' with a shorthand name that people 'got'.

[moglostsoul]

i don't mind what you call it,

just as long as you don't listen to it on the bus at 8.16 a.m through the shitty little speaker on your mobile fucking phone

[Solid State]

i don't mind what you call it,

just as long as you don't listen to it on the bus at 8.16 a.m through the shitty little speaker on your mobile fucking phone

Word up Moglet!

Hows tricks?

[moglostsoul]

grand my good man, grand thanks

and thaself ?

[Solid State]

grand my good man, grand thanks

and thaself ?


battlin on, old bean, battling on! ;

[AshRa]

If anything, (and this has probably been sugeested already, I dont know) I think it'll end up just being called the Cosmic Disco scene.

errr I think that's already been taken some time ago hasn't it?

[Solid State]

errr I think that's already been taken some time ago hasn't it?

It may have been mentioned once or twice in the 70s, but hey!

[joe_melling]

"vari-disco"! (or something not as lame sounding)

sums up the 'anything goes' without having to pin it down to a certain handful of records. in my view its up to the promotion of the night to build on that description so that people have a vaugue idea of what to expect.


'disco' is what all this stuff i hear is called in my head, and i think its the perfect description (as long as it gets away from the afro wigs and puple flare, gloria gaynor loving perception - and that will be done by the people who actually 'get it')



___


sorry if this thread has moved on since trying to find a name, but i only got up to page 10 so far - and now i need to do some work :(

[mattm]

[QUOTE=joe_melling;271381]as long as it gets away from the afro wigs and puple flare, gloria gaynor loving perception - and that will be done by the people who actually 'get it')



Im not ashamedof some Gloria - If she was good enough for Moulton then good enough for me

That reedit on Phantom Slasher is awesome

[joe_melling]

ok then - swap gloria for any of the shit you will hear in a 'flares' themed bar on any given high street.

[Kiesnor]

I am noticing more and more when I look to buy new records that distributors and larger record stores have already decided on space or cosmic disco but no one decides on one or t'other.

May I suggest Spasmic Disco as the official title of this music. :rolleyes:

Go with the flow. :cool:

[Count Cookula]

Cosmilearic

It's proponents could then be said to have contracted Cosmilearia, for which there's currently no known cure

[bonusbeats]

bump

[ivan_smackhead]

christ on a bike, is this thread still going ?

[melodycrochet]

christ on a bike, is this thread still going ?

Sort of.... (http://www.djhistory.com/forum/showthread.php?t=28224)

[poor_impulse_control]

Slack disco

[586]

christ on a bike, is this thread still going ?


Harvey's WELL into this sound..

[machinesoul]

Is this the thread when Lurkster leaves the board, or have I got the wrong one?

[Rotter3*]

next room down the corridor - next to the fire exit fella...

[machinesoul]

next room down the corridor - next to the fire exit fella...


Many thanks

[slim]

a little narrow in its focus possibly, yet still a well written and thought provoking article:

probably worthy of its own thread in its own right this, but it does contain some thread relevant thoughts

Today, subgenres are more likely to be objects of identification, more lifestyle brands than true subcultures.


from http://www.de-bug.de/texte/5129.html


Philip Sherburne: From Glitch To Blog House

Digging through the DJ charts, the results aren't terribly surprising. Carl Craig is all over the place, as is Theo Parrish. Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers represent the more mainstream end of the spectrum, while Justus Koehncke has disco on lockdown. Larry Heard is representing Chicago's deepest. Richie Hawtin, Pan Sonic's Mika Vainio and the Kompakt label are there as well, assuring that minimalism never goes out of style. Oh, maybe I should have clarified one thing, though. These aren't 2007 playlists; they're charts from a decade earlier.

From Carl Craig's remix of Faze Action's "In the Trees" to the Sähkö records on the wall at Hardwax, it does occasionally feel like we're back in 1997 all over again. Minimal techno still rules (except now it's just called "minimal.") Acid and classic deep house are so deeply entrenched, it's like they never went away. Recent remixes of Cybotron's "Clear" remind us that electro is less a genre than a kind of rhythmic time capsule orbiting the earth, beaming back coded data at regular intervals.

What's going on?
French house, which in its cellophane gloss might have once seemed the most disposable of genres, has spawned an entire subculture worshipping at the base of Daft Punk's pyramid. Dubstep is a relatively recent development, but as it slouches towards an increasingly standardized form, it often seems to spring from the same place that brought us the "neurofunk" of drum 'n' bass's darkest moments, late in the '90s. So many of the subgenres that sprang up in the last 10 years, meanwhile — glitch, electroclash, UK garage — have disappeared more or less without a trace.

What's going on? Is it simply a case of the old adage, "The more things change, the more they stay the same"? Is electronic music — always thought to be as mercurial as the energy coursing through its circuits — more conservative than we thought? Do old habits simply die hard, or does the current state of things suggest a kind of musical Darwinism, proof of the survival of the fittest? (I'd like to believe that the continuing existence of Tiësto can't be accounted for by a theory of musical evolution, but hey, every ecosystem has survivors we wish had gone the way of the Dodo.)

Time-Capsule Express
Electronic dance music is no spring chicken. Chicago house is over two decades old; Cybotron's "Clear" is 24 this year. The UK's acid house explosion and famed "Second Summer of Love" will celebrate their 20-year anniversary next year. (If you really want to put things into perspective, consider this: Kraftwerk's Autobahn is closer to the end of World War II than to the present day.)

Some of this isn't that surprising: last year's brief buzz around "nu rave" reminded aging partiers that their youthful past is receding as quickly as their hairlines. Even before that, acid's perennial revivals have long been a reminder that electronic music's penchant for the new can just as easily be turned into a retro fixation. (Uwe Schmidt brilliantly skewered this idea with his fake compilation Acid Evolution 1988-2003, which purported to collect examples of acid's development across a 16-year span. Schmidt recorded all the cuts himself, though — and in 2004 at that.)

Daft Punk, Pole und Porter Ricks
What's more surprising is how many things that might feel comparatively recent turn out be 10 years old already. Here's a shortlist of pivotal 1997 releases, many of which I'm betting feel much more recent — at least, that is if you're like me, and the timeline of everything that happened more than six months ago is as tangled as a DJ's headphone cord: Daft Punk's Homework, Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, Carl Craig's More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art, Porter Ricks' self-titled first album, Doctor Rockit's Music of Sound, i-F's "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass," Moodymann's Silentintroduction, Squarepusher's Hard Normal Daddy, Wolfgang Voigt's Studio Eins CD, and the Kompakt 1 compilation on Profan. (Actually, that's even a bit older: it came out in December '96.)

Hot on the heels of all those records come a slew of 1998 releases that probably don't feel nine years old, either: Pole's debut album, Thomas Brinkmann's Studio 1 Variationen, Bola's Soup, Autechre's LP5, Miss Kittin & the Hacker's debut EP, Drexciya's The Quest, Sun Electric's Via Nostra, Herbert's "Around the House," Theo Parrish's First Floor, and Plastikman's Consumed.

It's been 130 years since the invention of the phonograph, of course. The gramophone, forefather of the Technics SL-1200MKII, is 120 years old. The market for recorded music has been around for over a century now. Ten years isn't that long, in the grand scheme of things. But enough has happened in electronic-music culture since 1997 that any attempt to gloss the last decade will inevitably feel like an absurd generalization. The paths of electronic music's many subgenres feel as tangled as the subplots of a 19th century novel. And far beyond mere aesthetic form, the technological and cultural underpinnings of the way that people experience and consume music have probably changed more in the past 10 years than they did in the 30 or 40 (or 50) before them.

Nevertheless, a cursory comparison between 1997 and 2007 does reveal certain developments in the genre that might not essentially seem self-evident — in spite of the fact (or maybe because of it) that they stare us in the face every day. But they reflect important shifts in electronic music — and perhaps even suggest the outlines of the shape the music will have taken by 2017.

Futurism Ain't Shit to Me
It's safe to say, at least for the time being, that electronic music's futurist impulse has run its course. From Kraftwerk and Cybotron through Chicago house and Detroit techno, electronic music has always rooted itself firmly in a futurist continuum stretching back to the beginning of the 20th Century. Acid house began with a project called Phuture, after all, and throughout the '90s, electronic music generally mirrored Western culture's technological optimism, secure in the belief that advances in hardware and software were creating a better world one circuit at a time.

New subgenres were often the result of new pieces of gear or novel developments in software. Electronic music's futurist impulse probably peaked around the turn of the century, though, with the glitch phenomenon epitomized by Mille Plateaux's Clicks + Cuts compilations. Glitch emphasized the sound of the tools themselves: the stutter of a skipping CD, the whir of a sluggish hard drive, the clipping of a sample chopped to a mere sliver. Even glitch music's fetishization of the error, which might at first seem to run counter to a vision of techno-perfectionism, ties directly to the original Futurist movement, emphasizing the beauty of machines running of their own accord, with minimal human intervention.

The club of the future
Since glitch, however, self-conscious futurism's influence has waned, from the design of album covers and flyers to the nomenclature of titles, labels and artist aliases. Software tools increasingly mimic classic hardware synthesizers and drum machines; new hardware synths themselves are likely to be contemporary replications of machines that became obsolete years ago.

I'd argue, in fact, that glitch lost its progressive impulse as artists turned away from the project of creating a new musical vocabulary out of digital tools, and began reconfiguring the clicks and pops into the familiar grammar of house and techno. And as the DJ's trade slowly but surely goes digital — that is, as it shifts from a practice based upon playing vinyl records to one utilizing only digital files — the most popular digital DJ applications, like Final Scratch, Serato Scratch, and Traktor Scratch, remain dependent upon the turntable.

Sonically speaking, the current moment looks backwards as well. Ricardo Villalobos talks in interviews about "the club of the future," where pure sound reigns supreme, but the rest of the culture, plugged into iPods playing back files compressed at 128kbps or worse, seems to have lost interest in the compact disc's forgotten promise of "perfect sound forever." If mashups were a result of the democratization of tools that allowed on-the-fly reconfigurations of pop music, today's "blog house" phenomenon embraces simplicity, foregoing traditional notions of audio craftsmanship in favor of DJ mixes incorporating low-fidelity MP3s and unofficial remixes made from low-resolution files grabbed off Myspace.


cont....

[slim]

....

....

Think Globally, Act Locally
Perhaps Europe wasn't that different 10 years ago, aside from the recent explosion of discount airlines. I wouldn't know: 10 years ago, even the biggest U.S. cities could wait a long while before international talent, or at least international "underground" talent, passed through town. But that's a thing of the past. The electronic-music scene in Austin, Texas or Buenos Aires may not be what it is in Berlin, but an ongoing consolidation of tastes has shifted the emphasis from local scenes to a global marketplace. London's Crosstown Rebels has a residency in the dreary border town of Juarez, Mexico—and that's just one example off the top of my head, out of thousands of labels and thousands of cities. Look at any DJ's calendar on his or her Myspace page, and it's likely to present a mish-mash of languages and time zones. The Detroit/Berlin techno axis has gone from being a straight line to a flexible wire connecting innumerable points on the map.

House and techno have, in many ways, conquered the world. The subgenres, or at least the names, may differ—earlier in the '90s progressive house seemed like an imperial power, while today the nebulous entity called "minimal" is the colonizer—but dance music's 4/4 formats have undoubtedly been the winners in establishing global disco dominance in the past 10 years.

The Internet has certainly been pivotal in the streamlining of global tastes, and not only for the way it spreads information: the growth of P2P networks and now digital retailers like Beatport has finally disconnected dance-music culture from vinyl's physical prison, making the music universally available around the globe. A few years ago, an aspiring DJ in South America would have been hard-pressed to build much of a vinyl collection, between the limited range available in local shops, the prohibitive exchange rate and import duties, and the astronomical cost of mail-order shipping. Today, virtually every new release, and plenty of back catalogue as well, is available at the click of a button.

A global techno monoculture
There is, of course, a downside to the phenomenon, as scenes homogenize and what used to be special about individual places disperses to the winds. (In 2007, could you really say that there's a "sound of Cologne"?) That some members of Detroit's techno community grumbled about the predominance of European artists in this year's DEMF lineup is partly due to Detroit's infamously insular attitude, but it also underscores a sensible distrust of what increasingly looks like a global techno monoculture.

At the same time, however, techno's globalization has gradually worn down the traditional relationship between the "center" and the "margins." Enabled by technology and telecommunications, artists living in Chile, Argentina and other Latin American countries have recently joined the global techno conversation, touring Europe and finding a level of recognition that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. More recently, electronic-music scenes in Eastern Europe and the Balkans have seen their status rise on the global stage. In a recent interview with England's The Wire magazine, Ricardo Villalobos spoke at length about up-and-coming Romanian artists like Raresh, Rhadoo, and Petre Inspirescu; with extensive Ibiza bookings, European gigs, and releases on established labels like Cadenza, that trio is proving that geography is but a state of mind and a stamp in the passport.

Funk carioca is a global phenomenon
Indeed, scenes and sounds that were once strictly local affairs now have no problem connecting with niche publics anywhere on earth. When I visited São Paulo in 2002, it was virtually impossible to find any recordings of Rio de Janeiro's funk carioca music, despite the fact that the cities are mere hours apart; returning home to the U.S., web searches and P2Ps proved far more useful in exploring the genre. A few years later — thanks in no small part to musical polyglots like Diplo and M.I.A., who have gone out of their way to promote underground Brazilian dance music to listeners living outside Brazil, funk carioca is a global phenomenon.

Grime and dubstep have followed a similar trajectory as they've found a geographically dispersed audience outside their origins in urban London. Both subgenres have presented themselves largely as locally specific scenes. But thanks to an online infrastructure — including forums, streaming radio, and of course Myspace — that UK garage never enjoyed, grime and dubstep have captured local imaginations in a way that two-step never did. Of course, it's hard to quantify this kind of interest: sales for most grime and dubstep records remain pitifully low outside the UK. (Even Burial, whose debut album generated an avalanche of critical approval in the US, only sold 291 albums there, according to the sales metrics aggregator Nielsen SoundScan.)

One of Our Subgenres Is Missing
Electronic music is often characterized — and just as frequently criticized — for its tendency to splinter into ever narrower styles. But I would suggest that the idea of genre remains stronger than ever in electronic music. Sure, genres continue to mutate, just as dubstep and grime gradually evolved out of UK garage. But think of the proliferation of styles within garage that existed around the turn of the century — 8-bar, 4-beat, breakstep, and many more I can no longer recall. Grime and dubstep, meanwhile, seem to have remained essentially grime and dubstep, and while certain descriptors arise to denote stylistic differences between certain camps — "half-step," for instance, to describe the more sluggish end of dubstep — they remain mere descriptors, not the battle flags that subgenres once were.

When was the last time you heard anyone seriously dispute the differences between "microhouse," minimal techno, and minimal? The terms that do arise — like "fidget house," to describe the kinetic style of London producers like Switch — by and large fail to stick. And as techno and house continue to blur, it seems that fewer and fewer people are interested in differentiating even between those two major pillars of electronic music. Today, subgenres are more likely to be objects of identification, more lifestyle brands than true subcultures. Whatever we're to call the movement encompassing Ed Banger, Kitsuné, and rock remixes, it seems less a subgenre than a promiscuous, post-genre approach.

Back to an era of subgenres
Increasingly, for producers within a given scene, a single idea or two seems to dominate the conversation every season. Two years ago, it was the blippy chaos of minimal techno at its most color-free; today, it's shoomping house chords borrowed from Carl Craig that animate producers' imaginations. A few years ago, each of these formal shifts might well have spawned self-identifying subgenres, with message-boards to back them up.

But today, the most durable styles — house, techno, trance, drum'n'bass, dubstep — hew to specific tempos and rhythmic signatures, even as they allow seemingly infinite room for variation within those norms. Murkier subgenres like IDM and downtempo feel almost quaint. (Have you checked Hyperreal's IDM list lately? Once an active, vital place, today it feels like the online equivalent of a ghost town waiting for its last few residents to die off.)

Perhaps it's a sign of the times: given political unrest, economic instability, and a global sense of dread, maybe we simply don't have time to parse the differences between microhouse and minimal techno, or between Schaffel and a swung 6/8 rhythm. Is this only a temporary phenomenon? Who knows – which direction the pendulum swings next depends upon the course of technology, the health of the music industry, and even geopolitics. Perhaps come the year 2017, electronic music — now downloaded directly to flash drives implanted in our skulls — will have regained its futurist impulse, and we'll be back to an era of subgenres that are famous to 15 people. Whatever the case, I'm betting Carl Craig will still be on top of the charts.

http://www.philipsherburne.com

Philip Sherburne 115

[Count Cookula]

He writes well and is surprisingly* up on his House music for a Supercentenarian

* Perhaps not so surprisingly given how old and over House is :bolt:

[ivan_smackhead]

House...is...over...?

TERRY !

[Brad V]

"vari-disco"! (or something not as lame sounding)
then people would be like "oh you play very disco". I like stuff that's very disco, Gloria Gaynor AND the Village People. They are very disco. :-D

[Phil Potter]

interesting reading & all that fellas but it's already been decided..."BOTTOM GRAPES"!

[melodycrochet]

interesting reading & all that fellas but it's already been decided..."BOTTOM GRAPES"!

excellent choice! A fine vintage

[Left Turn Clyde]

Italo, Cosmic and Nu-Balearic were featured in The Guide (in The Guardian) yesterday, so it looks like you guys have finally made it. Phew! ;)

[Rotter3*]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/music/story/0,,2288865,00.html#article_continue

[baleariksoul]

"Who needs a Balearic DJ when you've got an iPod Shuffle?"

Ouch... :neutral:

[SDC]

Adult rock comes to mind....

Or how about CACA, short for Contemporary Adult Cosmic Action.

CACA in portuguese means SHIT!

AHAHAHAHA

[paul huge]

very interesting read all this, but its always had a name its "acid fuckin house" always has been and always will be with not a 303 at 125 bpm in sight, maybe a bit misleading to some of the young uns but at the end of the day its still acid house more of a vibe/feeling/party than a genre

[FunkHunt]

what about, instead of music labeling, dj "labeling" ? For sure i will go out to listen a dj that i know is very good despite of the music genre he plays. Thats what moves me. Pointless to know the style as a genre, "oh i went out last night to a BOTTOM GRAPES party, it was very nice. Need to buy some BOTTOM GRAPES music, can you recomend me some artists?"

I think is much more effective and better for both music and Dj (more then ever) to go out seeking a certain dj that is very good and plays great music. Better then go out for a BOTTOM GRAPES night and the dj is really boring.

After all, we want to dance to the music, in a full dance floor guided by the dj skills and taste.

[Red Rack'em]

Nearly 1 year on and not much has changed apart from nu disco becoming even more proggy and people having to re edit AOR as there's no disco left.

I miss the heady days of tunes being based round real bass guitar samples, delay and woosh noises. Now where's that arpeggiator...

[Left Turn Clyde]

Nearly 1 year on and not much has changed apart from nu disco becoming even more proggy and people having to re edit AOR as there's no disco left.



:-D Have we had any ELO re-edits yet?

[Red Rack'em]

no doubt soon...

[Brad V]

:-D Have we had any ELO re-edits yet?You guys are sooooooo far behind. A1 girls: http://www.discogs.com/release/1202167

[Red Rack'em]

You should be worried that you know that brad..

[tom_m]

I've just been replying to the following quotes on the gatecrasher thread and thought I'd raise this as a new subject.

One of the conclusions I've made on my travels is the fact that because there isn't a name for this whole Disco, Boogie, Cosmic, Space, Balearic, Electro-Funk, Re-Edits type vibe, a lot of younger people, who really like it, having stumbled upon a one-off night, go away without being able to explain what they've just been listening to, and not knowing where else they can hear this music.

There's no doubt that this has stifled things somewhat. During recent years I've seen some really good nights go under because local support has dropped off and there haven't been enough people coming from outside the immediate area to sustain the night.

On one hand, it's quite good that there isn't a name, but on the other, this hardly helps things grow. When I weigh it all up, I think it would be beneficial if there was a name that was used to describe the groove based approach we're taking.

This would help people identify these type of nights and encourage them to travel. It's fine for us, who use these forums, to keep track of what's going on, but the majority of people rarely go near sites like this, and they're hardly going to find out what's happening on a more underground level by reading Mixmag.

I think back to specialist scenes like Northern Soul and Jazz-Funk, where people thought nothing of travelling 50 miles or further to hear the type of music they were into. There was a network of clubs that benefited each other, with people from, say, Leeds travelling to Nottingham, or Brummies heading to London and Manchester etc etc.

This is what's missing from todays underground, but, I'm sure, if a younger age group became more aware of what's going on we'd see plenty of travellers. They'd certainly bring a fresh energy to everything.

I really believe that something's just around the corner, and that there's going to be a real movement towards 'our music' in 2008. As I said in the other thread, there's definitely been a noticeable increase in people in their early 20's coming up to me to say how much they like the music I'm playing.

I'm often asked the question - what is this music? But there's no quick answer and I have to reel off a whole heap of 'genres', which only confuses matters.

I'm very interested to hear what other peoples take on this is?

Really interesting post. I probably count as one of these people although at 27 i'm probably tipping towards the 30 thing. Being a Northener i knew of Electric Chair and when i came across Electric Elephant and was in need of a summer holiday things fell in place. From there i discovered Lowlife and a whole host of types of music that felt really right and have now completely sucked me in to a new forum, new nights, new names etc etc and for me its really really exciting. It's like a whole treasure trove of new music and i've been busily downloading mixes like the lowlife NYE and getting excited all over again.

To answer your question i'm not sure it needs a name, to me it's just disco, but having gone through lots of different types of electronic music in the last 10 years or so (mostly of the much darker and moodier persuasion) i appreciate that its much more than that with house, funk, soul, pop etc all thrown in. I think getting a bit older and feeling the amazing vibe at the parties i've been to recently are the two things that are really turning me on to this kind of music. Happy music, funnily enough, makes people smile and talk, really dark music, although often really beautiful, tends not to have the same effect on a night out :)

Loads of my friends are now really into this kind of music and parties like lowlife and cosmic disco all of them around the 25-29 mark, feel among the younger in the crowds at the lowlife's but there's so many of us smiling and cheering that i think you're probably right about the energy. Everyone has been really friendly too which makes such a nice change from a lot of the nights i used to go to (apart from that kermit character, mean!)

Anyway, interesting thread

:cool:

[Go Bang Brighton]

When I weigh it all up, I think it would be beneficial if there was a name that was used to describe the groove based approach we're taking.


Greg could of hit the nail on the head already.

Groove Based does it for me.

Ta