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Follow-up to an earlier post about Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Dance Music: Did I forget to mention the guy is funny? Below are some examples of his Lester Bangsian blurbs explaining different genres*:
Acid Breaks! This and Chemical Breaks (and Big Beat, I guess) are the most favorite genres of action movie trailers, sports highlight reels, corporate powerpoint presentations, and spastic TV ads featuring people doing something extreme like driving really fast while birdwatching. I can't listen to this anymore without getting silly images in my head of jumping in the air, pausing while the camera pans around me, and then resuming kicking some guy in the head. This is part of the "electronica" wave of mainstream acceptance in the late '90s.*...which had to be retyped--note to all using Flash or the like: those formats are good for some things, but no one will ever quote you or find your words through a search engine on the Web if you hide them in the stinky folds of a proprietary format. Simple html pages are the way to go.2 Step Garage. God, this stuff is so fucking boring! Retaining the idiotic basslines of Speed Garage, the hiccuping staccato beats of that derivative Top 40 schlock that dares call itself RnB, and even worse: the endless crooning by "guest" popstars (hence all the "featuring" accolades in playlists), divas, and whiny narcissists who like to think of themselves as just too damn cool to be listened to by you. The only good thing about 2-Step is, unlike Speed Garage, it won't be used by invading alien armadas to their high councils as grounds for turning the Earth into a giant ashtray. [This is mostly true but expect a mix of "good" 2-SG on this page soon. --ed.]
Hard Acid Techno. Here we go: the genre that reveals all the awesome destructive power of the little silver box [Roland TB-303, dispenser of the squelchy "acid sound" --ed.]. Hard as fuck acid techno. Acid that'll kick your ass so hard you'll be shitting shoes for a month. This is the kind of music everyone listens to before doing something destructive. Sports teams listen to it before a big game, politicians listen to it before a speech, armies listen to it before they go to war, kids listen to it before they clean their rooms. I bet God was listening to it before he made humans.
Here's my first stab at mixing some analog music (from vinyl) for a downloadable mp3: the Tuxedomoon Mini-Mix [.mp3 removed]. It's approximately 18 minutes, a 17 MB file. I realize this favors broadband users, and I'm sorry, I've really been trying to keep my pages surfer-friendly. Just consider the mix a bonus to the online music-crit below (yeah, I know, right).
Tuxedomoon was a kind of art-punk-cabaret band that emerged from late '70s San Francisco, specifically the scene around the Mabuhay Gardens and the Deaf Club: what band member Blaine Reininger called "our own Belle Epoque." Principal instruments were bass (that's a pun, sort of--the bassist is Peter Principle), sax, violin, keyboards, and rhythm box. Adjectives used to describe the band would be "innovative," "psychedelic" and "angsty." Three vocalists alternated on the singing chores and all sounded tortured, or suffering from post-breakdown ennui; all members were accomplished musicians downplaying their talent at the height of garage band streamlining. The band flowered during the postpunk era with a recording contract on the Residents' Ralph label, then relocated to Belgium before eventually drifting apart in the mid-'80s. In this selection I've somewhat slighted sax-and-keyboarder Steven Brown's contributions in favor of violinist Reininger's, but I love both. Here's the track listing; all songs are by the band unless noted:
"Volo Vivace" from Half-Mute (1980). Jazzy chamber music anchored in organ-and-synthesizer gloom. Principle's ultracool bass, playing counterpoint to a sequencer, supplies the rhythm."Incubus (Blue Suit)" from Desire (1981). Trippy scifi lyrics sung by Reininger, and you gotta love that beatbox.
"Crash" (flip side of Ralph 45 rpm "What Use") (1980). With its flailing drums, repetitive piano refrain, and filtered acid guitar, this is like proto-breakbeat techno. Never made it onto an album, but this is one of my favorite TM tracks. Guest guitarist Michael Belfer resurfaces on Reininger's solo LP described below.
"Birthday Song," from the Reininger solo outing Night Air (1983). Very '80s noir. Steven Brown's charmingly almost-inept sax makes an appearance here.
"Next to Nothing," 1977 rehearsal recording (from the Pinheads on the Move compilation, 1987). Singer and performance artist Winston Tong popped in and out of the TM lineup: his emotional vocals are featured here. The raw use of the analog synth here is inspiring, from the lurching, stop-and-start notes underneath the vocals to the ending where the sound hisses away in ever-rising square wave increments. Gives me chills.
Bruce Sterling, on his blog, steers us towards Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Dance Music, which definitely merits a moment or two of your time. It's a handy manual to all the different electronic dance genres, where you can hear samples and go "Ah, that's what Nu Style Gabber sounds like!" On the other hand, it's a novel and fairly persuasive form of criticism. Ishkur makes no bones that this is his take, and by combining a flowchart taxonomy with written argument and clickable soundbites, he's made a formidable first draft of pop music history.
I like the way he includes Dub as a forerunner of House (along with Disco); that's a little less America-centric than the usual version, which has NY djs moving to Chicago and reinventing disco with more electronics. (Curiously, Hiphop is treated as sui generis--under "Breakbeat"--when it also had a strong Caribbean influence, e.g., DJ Kool Herc.) He gives Techno short shrift, though, treating it as a genre for boring purists when it in fact has interpenetrated and informed almost all the other styles. It's interesting the way he divides early 90s breakbeat rave techno into Rave, which becomes the progenitor of Hardcore, and Breakcore, which spins off Jungle and Drum & Bass, but mysteriously, Rave never intersects with the "Techno" timeline and Breakcore never intersects with the "Breakbeat" timeline.* Also, I'm not sure I understand the distinction he makes between two 80s styles: EBM (Electronic Body Music, posited as a forerunner of Goa Trance) and New Beat (a Hardcore antecedent). When I hear both I just say "Belgian."
One style new to me is Speedbass, which sounds like a cross between Noizecore and what Ishkur's calling Experimental Jungle (AKA Drill'n'Bass). It seems very DIY and upload-oriented (see website at www.speedbass.net), and while it's a bit more chaotic than my usual around-the-house fare, it's hard to resist anything with repeated samples of whips cracking and Hollywood extras crying out in fake pain, for example, DJ Tendraw and the Gypsies Dog's "Vocal Tripe (I'm Gonna Hurt You Mix)."
*If I was going to collect a genre in depth (meaning spending a fortune tracking down 12-year-old vinyl and dubplates) it would probably be the one Ishkur calls Breakcore. The energy and sheer creative nuttiness of that particular musical moment has never been duplicated.
There's a nice mix of video game and game-related music over at the cuechamp. A good chance to hear artists frequently plugged here, including 8-Bit Construction Set and Monotrona, as well as punchy electro tracks such as Knifehandchop's "Ryu vs. Sakura," with samples of a Real Don Steele-type announcer (from "Streetfighter Alpha 3") yelling out stuff like "Select your fighting style!" and "Beat'em up guys!" Below is the playlist; it's a 22MB file so you probably need broadband:
1. super mario brothers - london symphony orchestra
2. video computer system - golden shower
3. bmx kidz theme - input 64
4. saucemaster - 8 bit construction set
5. ah, enemy - monotrona
6. ryu vs. sakura - knifehandchop
7. manhunt (rephlex manhood remix) – lords of the dance
8. computer games - yellow magic orchestra