I’m always so impressed with how well the australian chip scene works together!
I wish I could hang out with y’all more T_T
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The feeling is mutual, bruv. :3
Another day another duller
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i was about to post “i’d like to start a ‘reappropriating old early 90s house music sounds to make political arguments about importance of nightlife and youth culture in the inner city’ movement a la what a club vaporwave would be” but then i remembered the lo-fi house movement. but is that not club vaporwave and just empty nostalgic posturing w/ ironic titles instead??
i’m 21 and wasn’t around to take ecstasy and kiss strangers to bobby konders - this poem (peter daou remix) but i understand it as a song. i’ve only raved maybe twice in my whole life and wanna do it every other weekend.
this thread can be about dj’ing and playlist curation right its all the same. its “ur” music idk
what an EDM show or event is expected to mean is so sad
um holy shit yeah i’ve been looking for that essentially since I started listening to house music
the closest i’ve heard has probably been DJ Sprinkles (terre thaemlitz) and octo octa
lo-fi house is mostly just empty nostalgic posturing because the people that are making it are a bunch of white kids with nothing to say about the music they’re appropriating? which can also be said about a lot of vaporwave but that’s another topic for another time
I think the only way you can actually make those political statements though is to do a kind of fourth wall breaking thing and have like, spoken-word monologues or “field” (city) recordings comprise a significant part of the pieces, and maybe channel the source samples like a moody piano line or an acid bass and forgo percussion entirely
because otherwise it’s too identifiable as just “house music”
I hope I’m wrong about that
i think you can still make statements and house it up at the same time! i did a dj set at a sustainability fair under the name “dj whole foods” and played jungle wonz and things with bird samples and animal noises.
spoken word and vocal samples is probably the way to go though. mess kid - assembly line is a song i really like where the only words spoken are “wake up… put my shit on… it’s time to go to work… assembly line…” and then its crazy techno shit. a place in a pro-union or anti-automation dj set probably
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yeah I definitely think you can do both! but making house music “political” or even making a statement at all probably requires either fourth wall breaking stuff inside a track or multimedia stuff outside it
like house music as a form is codified too much to make a statement through purely formal means imo
ok yeah i’m reading a bunch of dj sprinkles interviews and thinking about stuff and now i feel sad. i wish there was a book about “bro” mutations of music and dance bc i just remembered NON WORLDWIDE and the brogue wars in particular
“Beware of creating emotional dissonance by putting ha crashes over songs that don’t require them. Educate yourself to know the intention of the music you play and listen to.” - skyshaker lebeija
i just googled “was tiesto poor”
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holy shit this mix
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https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/01/23/going-hard-bassweight-sonic-warfare-the-brostep-aesthetic/
https://www.its-her-factory.com/2014/01/bro-gemony-dubstep/
http://www.its-her-factory.com/2017/05/chill-pop-feminine-excess-a-sign-of-the-times/
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do you think this is specific in any way to house or does this apply to much dance music in general?
i think a large portion of my oeuvre is predicated on this* not being true for instrumental dance and dance-adjacent music
*this is taking the seed of your quote and pushing it to its extreme
I should have done a better job of saying this, but I was talking pretty specifically about how house music has kind of proliferated especially in pop circles
with dance music in general I would think that codification is pretty reliant on the relationship between the listeners and the physical and social spaces the music is placed in. so I’m ending up at the incredibly boring answer of “it depends!”
the broader the space that the dance music is trying to fill, the harder it is to ascertain any kind of message (political or not) from it, I think. I always saw the ideal dance music performance as a big shared experience between performer and audience, where the audience’s reactions would change the songs that the DJ or performer would cue up organically
so when the space is smaller, it’s easier for everyone within the space to pay attention to the details of the performance, which makes it easier to deliver a more complex message through said performance. like burial is ostensibly “dance” music, but the space it’s trying to fill is incredibly intimate - the only people he needs to speak to are those wandering the streets at night at 3AM. so he’s afforded the resolution to say something much more complex I think
with house music that space started off small because it was oriented around LGBT and PoC, but as with any counter culture as soon as someone discovered it could be monetized (madonna, then disclosure) the goal then became “make the space as big as possible” and the ability to make coherent, complex messages was lost and replaced with a kind of hypergeneric “uplifting” “vibe”
I hope any of this makes sense
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this makes a lot of sense
i guess it just kind of brought up in my mind the same sort of doubt about using my music as a largely isolated language that communicates more with itself and with my feelings than it interfaces with ideas that could easily be communicated in english (by me. i’m sure a writer could do it)
are the stories of my music completely inaccessible? or are they somehow self-evident
I think the story of every piece of music is self evident and the question becomes how much work is required to understand it, which isn’t particularly profound in itself, but I need to remind myself that every once in a while because I’ve been having trouble writing stuff
put another way - I’d rather spend a lot of time with your music and see you at the end of it than spend 3 minutes and see every other fucking lo-fi house producer
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When I lived in Amsterdam I used to go to a club called De School and it is probably my favourite place on earth to exist in. Being in there and seeing whoever do an amazing acid house set or whatever was kind of tangential to the really vital and energetic sense of urgency in the moment of “being in the club.” I think there can be a really emancipatory element to club culture for lots of different folks. De School had gender neutral bathrooms and was open enough and well designed enough that you could always find your own space to dance and enjoy music there. Being an embodied person in that space, being an ungendered blob in the fog sheltered by the noise, was really important for me in a time of my life full of intense loneliness and gender dysphoria.
Spending time there was such a nice feeling, and it left me with loads of revelatory moments which I’ve drawn upon as a political person interested in making change in the world. A club recently started in Dublin run by some cool young queer folk and the first time they did it I had never felt so comfortable and at home since moving back to Dublin months prior (and I haven’t felt it since).
I guess what I mean to say is that dance music, for me, is inherently political. Compared with other forms of music, its goals are usually really clear: make people dance, and the kind of bonds you can make on a dance floor feel nearly as close to organisation and concatenation and solidarity as any type of protest or action I’ve been to.
Anyway, quickly came here to gush about getting my first drum machine today. It’s an MFB Tanzmaus and this is the very first thing I made with it: https://soundcloud.com/aidanwall/six-shooter
PS, Here is some recent rave-nostalgia driven dance music that I’m really into: https://soundcloud.com/raveselekts/a1-tommy-holohan-subaru
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i shoulda raved more when i was younger
but i was too judgmental and also a jerk so
now i’m 30 going on 60 and i go to sleep at 10 PM unless i’m playing on my switch, at which point i stay up to the late hour of midnight
i’m going to listen to everything in this thread
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All dance music is explicitly political folks
I’m trying to upload old stuff I never quite deleted or developed further.
This one’s about appropriation of a looped santor.
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It was a snow day here so I decided to record a mix of various odd and not-so-odd seven inch records I’ve accrued over the years. This mix not only features a rupert the bear b-side but also is bookended with two different versions of the same song, because… I can?
anyway, might interest some of ya, weird folk, lo fideltiy things, punk burgeoning and electronic fuzz and hmmm, again, rupert the bear.