House music coming back?

[ebbomega]

Troll != Annonymous. Why do people have such a problem understanding this?

if you think it's fun to throttle around on the dancefloor to "... jack had a groove.." then you clearly have terrible taste or simply lack the ability to recognize current, boundary-pushing music when it's set right in front of you (see cormac set).

What I'm sick of is Beatport DJs cycling their sets every week to give you the latest in "bleeding edge" music. What's the point of having nothing but new music in your set if it's stuff you won't even bother playing next week?

How about some music with staying power?

I've seen dancefloors go off to Mr. Fingers, Marshall Jefferson, and a host of other classic house names in the last year, so lick it. Jesus. And hair-splitting over house vs garage? Honestly by the time the 90s rolled around it was all just umbrella'd under "House" music anyways, and the "garage" name got appropriated by Speed Garage and UK Garij. Only difference in the 80s was that Larry Levan and all the guys in the Paradise Garage were a lot more disco-influenced. Other than that it was pretty much the same music coming out of New York as it was coming from Chicago. But that's okay, just keep believing that all music is made according to Ishkur's Guide.

Keep attacking house names that have been getting dancefloors rocking for the last 25 years. You won't look like a fool at all.

[ebbomega]

PS: Electro is hardly what's new in dance music. These days a lot of the influence is being drawn from Giorgio Moroder style beats, with the Beardo Disco and Italo revival that we're seeing courtesy James Murphy, The Glimmers and the like. Electro has been getting steadily cheesier and more pointless ever since Madonna released a Stuart-Price produced album. Same as it ever was: In order to go forward, you have to go back. Even electro was a revival of the Kraftwerk-infused sounds when it first came to fruition. So ignoring the history of the music is essentially blocking off an entire generation of influences.

I still can't believe you're knocking on Jefferson.

[tiedye]

Electro is new? My Parliament records beg to differ.



Afrika Bambaataa's 'Planet Rock' (early 80s) would also like a word in this matter.

[QuanNeur]

ha! cretin... accusing me of abiding by the ishkur guide! :-) he doesn't even have hiNRG properly documented, which, by the way, is what we trendy folk are calling italo-disco these days. even my mom can name-check giorgio moroder. it's all about baby's gang and bobby orlando now. take me back to 1985. *strikes a pose and falls over*

so this is totally nit-picky, I know, but I do see a distinction between house and garage, with garage being at the very organic, vocally, instrumental end of the spectrum. sure people in the UK have a different concept of garage (two step) but if you speak with north american eastern seaboarders that are into the NYC/jersey garage scene they will be quick to differentiate themselves from the "house" scene, which they see as being more commercial and driven by the physiology of the music (i.e. bass provoking a physical response rather than music provoking a mental acuity) anyway at the end of the day edm buzzword genres are quite regionalised.. you wouldn't believe what passes for "funky house" over here!

i will listen to the classics for a laugh or to try to understand the innovation behind them but I won't really for fun. dance music is driven by trends and the house music of yesteryear is the antithesis of timeless- it's totally dated and easily recognisable as such. I am a futurist! I want the future. give it to me now.

[tiedye]

Why should electronic music be different than any other form of music? We still listen to the blues, funk, jazz, classical, hip-hop, and classic rock of old. Why shouldn't we praise the past gems of dance music? It seems too limited for me not to.

"Old music isn't good because there's new music to listen to."

Fuck that. Music is where it is today because of the music that preceded it, both good and bad alike. We shouldn't just discard what we enjoy because somebody is putting out different stuff right now.

It must be nice having a list of 40 songs you're allowed to listen to. Saves all that hassle of having taste.

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by QuanNeur

ha! cretin... accusing me of abiding by the ishkur guide! :-) he doesn't even have hiNRG properly documented, which, by the way, is what we trendy folk are calling italo-disco these days. even my mom can name-check giorgio moroder. it's all about baby's gang and bobby orlando now. take me back to 1985. *strikes a pose and falls over*

How you can so quickly deride Marshall Jefferson as being old and then sing the praises of Bobby Orlando so quickly is beyond me. Way to just shoot your entire argument in the foot.

so this is totally nit-picky, I know, but I do see a distinction between house and garage, with garage being at the very organic, vocally, instrumental end of the spectrum. sure people in the UK have a different concept of garage (two step) but if you speak with north american eastern seaboarders that are into the NYC/jersey garage scene they will be quick to differentiate themselves from the "house" scene, which they see as being more commercial and driven by the physiology of the music (i.e. bass provoking a physical response rather than music provoking a mental acuity) anyway at the end of the day edm buzzword genres are quite regionalised.. you wouldn't believe what passes for "funky house" over here!

Yeah, you are being nit-picky. It's all House music. All of it.

i will listen to the classics for a laugh or to try to understand the innovation behind them but I won't really for fun. dance music is driven by trends and the house music of yesteryear is the antithesis of timeless- it's totally dated and easily recognisable as such. I am a futurist! I want the future. give it to me now.

You lose then. The only new music that comes out is coming by reinterpreting the old trends, and what made them fun. Happened with electro, which became electrohouse. Happened with Disco, which became French House. Happened with Garage, which became Speed Garage, happened with Ambient, which became trance. And so forth. If you forget the past, you ignore the future. Yeah, the trends come and go and change and the music changes with it, but to say that an entire era of music is shit is simply closing off an entire group of influences.

When I saw John Howard play about a year ago, he dropped all kinds of dance music from the last 30 years. Some of it was new Disco-Punk/Space Disco stuff, some was early 90s underground techno, some dated back to the 80s and even earlier. Every single track was a party-rocking song though and the crowd was eating it up. Not because they were standing around at the back scratching their chin (which you seem to think old music is only good for) but because it's fun music.

Hardfloor haven't really changed their style in the last 15 years or so. But that didn't stop them from destroying the Lotus back in November. Nor did it stop Abasi from throwing down tons of classic acid house and techno from the 90s afterwards (ask anybody that was there, the room was packed and bouncing).

Your position is a straw man. It's pointless because you yourself admit that those influences are still affecting dance music today. So what, you're all cool with the Italo revival but House revival OH FUCK NO, despite the fact that a lot of the 80s house music was borrowing a lot of its elements from the concurrent Italo scene? Yeah, k buddy. Keep reaching for the lasers.

[P.A.R.T.Y]

Originally Posted by QuanNeur

If i hear that moronic eddie amadour "..it's a soul thing.. blahblahblah" bull shit one more time then I'm going to puke. fortunately amadour is a brilliant dj but that track is CRAP and for whatever reason it is referenced endlessly by wannabe househeads that clearly have no understanding of the genre.

Yeah, the original Eddie Amadour " House Music," wasn't all that good, but the remixes that followed were amazing. On the other hand, I agree with you when you say that it is referenced endlessly by wannabe househeads that clearly have no understanding of the genre. After going through the you tube videos on this thread, I agree that most people here are out of their minds. 99% of the video on here feature the worst vocal house I've ever had the displeasure of listening to.
I've already asked people to up their game, but so far I'm fast forwarding and scrunching my face in disgust at the crap I've heard so far. Please, please post decent tracks.

[mapleleaf4ever]

WHAM BAM THANK YOU MA'AM!




and it's ebbo with the K effin' O!

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by P.A.R.T.Y

Please, please post decent tracks.

This coming from the person that brought up Deadmau5.

*sigh*

[tiedye]

Doesn't it all just go 'duh tsk duh tsk duh tsk duh dsk" anyways?

[QuanNeur]

ha! i didn't think my weak attempt at humour (re orlando et al) would be that easily misconstrued. leave it to you, ebbo, to take everything literally, i guess.

anyway, it seems you're twisting my words. "The only new music that comes out is coming by reinterpreting the old trends." duh! i would never contest this. the point is that mid-80's proto-house is so tightly bound and limited by the technology and techniques of the era that it sounds totally ancient. it's crude and base. great for the time, innovative, sure, but it sounds a bit tired these days.. it's archaic-- I don't think it makes for good party music. many DJs will mix these tracks in as only a gimmick.. people recognise them and get hyped.. it's like playing a christina agueliera track at a high school dance. "Ja-Ja Jack your body." woohoo. real music, please! oh and thanks for the history lesson, buddy. disco became french house, did it? great.

I think your whole premise is totally bizarre. re-emergence of house music? do you live with your head in the sand? it never went away! but I suppose you've been too busy listening to your "classics" to bother paying attention to the plethora of high quality, cutting edge house music that's on offer just about anywhere you could be bothered to look. of course it references genres and styles of yesteryear. but thankfully it's not composed of undistorted 808 kickdrums and unprocessed juno-synth riffs like the crud you waste your time listening to. if you want to remain stuck in the past, that's great. have fun. I'll look to the future.

oh, and so you've seen hardfloor? you've seen john howard? woweekazowee, good for you, dude! you saw a couple German has-beens and a second-rate north american house DJ spin a few tracks from the 90s,did ya? well why don't we just chuck out all this edm stuff and go waltzing at the commodore.

I think PARTY has hit the nail on the head. this thread is full of crap music and does little justice to this so-called house music revival of yours. clearly, there is a misunderstanding about what quality house music is. but then again, this is vancouver we're talking about, where people actually get excited about DJs like Tall Paul, Roger Sanchez and Pete Tong. Laugh a minute!

[P.A.R.T.Y]

It's a spiritual thing..

[tiedye]

It's fucking music. You like what you like and there's no right choice.

[ebbomega]

Originally Posted by QuanNeur

anyway, it seems you're twisting my words. "The only new music that comes out is coming by reinterpreting the old trends." duh! i would never contest this. the point is that mid-80's proto-house is so tightly bound and limited by the technology and techniques of the era that it sounds totally ancient. it's crude and base. great for the time, innovative, sure, but it sounds a bit tired these days.. it's archaic-- I don't think it makes for good party music. many DJs will mix these tracks in as only a gimmick.. people recognise them and get hyped.. it's like playing a christina agueliera track at a high school dance. "Ja-Ja Jack your body." woohoo. real music, please! oh and thanks for the history lesson, buddy. disco became french house, did it? great.

Oh come off yourself.

True creativity comes when you are limited by the tools you have. THAT is what makes the music from the days of yore so brilliant... the fact that they had only the gear that was available at the time, but yet they still put out quality tunes that still get played 20+ years later.

oh, and so you've seen hardfloor? you've seen john howard? woweekazowee, good for you, dude! you saw a couple German has-beens and a second-rate north american house DJ spin a few tracks from the 90s,did ya? well why don't we just chuck out all this edm stuff and go waltzing at the commodore.

But yet they still get crowds going. You're missing the point here. It's not what's old or what's new. It's what gets people going - it's about the party itself. If the party has a combination of old AND new the more the better. But that's okay, slag off the examples I gave as second-rate and has-been. They were still killer parties, and if you can't see past your European superclubs to see music for what it is - art, to be connected with - then you have no concept as to what's going on in the music world despite having a pulse on what the top tracks on the Essential Selection this week are or whatever.

I think PARTY has hit the nail on the head. this thread is full of crap music and does little justice to this so-called house music revival of yours. clearly, there is a misunderstanding about what quality house music is. but then again, this is vancouver we're talking about, where people actually get excited about DJs like Tall Paul, Roger Sanchez and Pete Tong. Laugh a minute!

I am laughing. At how ridiculously narrow-minded you are. Deriding a style of music because it's old? Calling it crap? Sad man. Just sad. I'm sorry your attention span can't see past what's been released on beatport this week. Just because something's new doesn't make it good.

[QuanNeur]

OK, well we've obviously both got the daggers out and i think we could probably both admit that we're really talking cross purposes to each other now. This is evidenced by the fact that I agree with everything you said in your last post. (though I'll politely take exception to your "narrow-minded" comment, ha)

somewhat irresponsibly, I conveyed my opinion as an absolute one. To be honest, I do listen to lots of old music. In fact when I was at university I spent huge amounts of time trying to source old material and took to buying on eBay what I couldn't find via P2P. Larry Levan, Taana Gardner and Frankie Knuckles were on constant rotation at mine.

So just to be clear, I am not saying "old music is bad," far from it. but I do think there is a distinction between innovative music and good music. A lot of innovative music is really not very good. Hurley's Jack Your Body is a perfect example of this.. it's a bit of a naff tune, but it's use of stuttered "Jack" sample was pretty innovative and of course something that would be repeated in countless other tracks.

and as you know, a lot of proto and early house was quite limited by the technology available at the time, and it really shows. even if you compare the production quality of 2008 house to mid 90s house there is a discernable difference. now that we're not restricted by 16kb samplers and kludgey synth processors the range of possible soundscapes is far more vivid. So as a general rule I prefer modern music because I like heavily textured sounds.

also I think that true "classics" tend to have a time-less quality to them. Early house, owing to the production techniques used, is very much of a certain era. You can practically pinpoint tracks down to an exact year judging by synth timbres and high-hat colour.

And then of course I do think the sample in that eddie amadour track is a bit crap and so when people quote it as some sort of matra in support of house music I think it a little misjudged. Then there's also the fact that I am a bit of a house music snob because I spent so many weekends dancing at stereo in montreal to serious house. And of course there's the fact that I say silly things like I did in the previous sentence which make me appear to be even more of an aloof cow. (at least I know it?)

So with that out of the way, I'll knock myself down a few notches by freely confessing that I am a superclub junkie and spend many weekends dancing away to music that is ocassionally of dubious quality with many people who care little about the music and more about drinking, drugs and pulling. But I don't reach for the lasers.

[ebbomega]

Heh. The humility card has been played, and so I'll reciprocate.

I do understand a lot of what you're saying... rough around the edges quality and less production value... yes, this is definitely true of a lot of older music. The stuff that has staying power though (tbh I try to find this type of staying power in new music as well as old) is the stuff that taps more into the dance centers of the brain and less into the trends of the time. That's why you see so many old styles being revamped and reinterpreted so often in music. That's why remixes are so popular in dance music culture. I'm still hearing remixes of Spin Spin Sugar and Plastic Dreams that still make me move too. But that's not to say that it lessens the originals at all.

Not to slag on new music, but I find too often (and this has been true as long as I've been in the party/rave/club scene) producers shelve creativity in favour of clean production value. This is IMHO swinging too far in the other direction, and this is what generates what I've referred to earlier in the thread - the Beatport track-of-the-week syndrome... DJs that spend far too much time trying to find the latest and greatest technologies in dance music and ignore the creativity that makes music art. I realize it's entirely possible, particularly in the realm of EDM, to have entire careers built off simply furthering the techniques and technologies involved. Mainly because a lot of the people who listen to EDM aren't looking for art and are more looking for somewhere with a simple beat and easy tunes to get fucked up to. But these aren't the ones that interest me, because it lacks connection with the audience. That's not real, that's just being fucked up. There's a thin line and it's hard to distinguish while drunk/high sometimes, but it is a very real line.

Again, it's about time and place. Setting. Sometimes the setting calls for something new, innovative, revolutionary. Sometimes it calls for trend-of-the-week music. Sometimes it calls for a classic anthem for everyone to sing along to. And sometimes.... and this is where I get most impressed by DJs... it calls for an older song a lot of people may not have necessarily heard before, but will LOVE. That is called "education" and it's every bit as important for DJs as it is playing the brand-new-track that nobody's ever heard before.

IMHO, YMMV.

[manousos]

Originally Posted by QuanNeur

...Then there's also the fact that I am a bit of a house music snob because I spent so many weekends dancing at stereo in montreal to serious house. ....

during Angel's reign, when the club consistently found itself in Muzik's top 5 list of the world
'sup Rich

no more john howard

please

[matéo]

that is some long ass shit to read.

[dj_soo]

*pokes head in*

I'd still rather hear some good hip hop

*leaves*

[rawb]

IVE NOTICED A LOT OF MID 90s REPRESSINGS AND REWORKINGS (CRYSTAL WATERS, MIGHTY DUB KATZ, ARMAND VAN HELDEN). I HOPE THIS MEANS A RETURN TO FUN HOUSE>

THIS ELECTRO BEEP BOP BOOP SHIT WAS GREAT FOR A WHILE BUT REALLY IN THE LONG RUN ITS NOT SUSTAINABLE.

[ebbomega]

Thanks for mentioning Crystal Waters, rawb. 100% Pure Love was the last song I heard before I left home today, and now you got it stuck RIGHT BACK IN MY FUCKING HEAD.

[crookedking]

when i think aboot crystal waters i think aboot the price is right.

[Foxglove]

Thought I would throw my 2 cents into this thread.

Some house tracks that are pretty funky and are not the least bit blippity bloppity

Alfred Azzetto - Colors
House Of Glass - Disco Down (Antoine Clamaran Remix)
Electricano - Harmony Of Soul
Uppfade - Friday Loops
Cherry Moments - Lovebombs

[Funkytad]

Old School house rules! Blackbox, CeCe Penniston, Crystal Waters, M-People...

[Sykonee]

Hercules! Hercules! Hercules!