the 21st Century so far

Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far...

I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the end of time.

Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit?)

So despite the enormity I thought I would give the entire list a listen, in both categories. (There's also a list of mixes). 

I got about a third of the way into the albums, skipping the ones I already knew. But then - as always seems to happen with such undertakings (e.g. the enormous playlists of an artist's entire discography that you might pull together yourself, or of a genre)...  inevitably the will to carry on crumbles away. It's just too daunting. It comes to feel like work. As a way of discovering things, it's not the way that the music you end up loving generally tumbles into your life. Especially not with dance music, which is most meaningfully encountered in a club and in the thick of a crowd. 

But I did hear some things I'd never heard that I really liked, along with quite a lot of things that were excellent but ultimately sounded like superior-sound-design updates of  sono-rhythmic ideas that existed in rawer form in the 1990s.  

As always happens with these canon-making pushes by publications, I was surprised by how few of the artists or works that I love figure in these lists. (And quite often when an artist I like did get mentioned, the track honored wasn't what I would have selected). 

But you know what - people are different!  

So much music - electronic, dance, everything else - came out in the 21st Century that entirely different cartographies and canons can be constructed that barely overlap with your own trajectory as a listener or personal pantheon. 

One new-to-me tune in the RA list that I really liked

Now if you know anything about where I'm coming from, in terms of what I like in dance music, it makes perfect sense that this is a tune that would appeal.   It's fresh and exciting but audibly in the tradition of "Party People". 

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I'm not sure how much this RA list is ultimately based on the votes of the contributors and how much determined by decree from above, but they did ask me for a list of nominations, albeit only in the overlapping categories of hauntology / ambient / conceptronica. This is what I suggested, which is unranked: 

ALBUMS

Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

The Focus Group – Hey Let Loose Your Love

Oneohtrix Point Never – Rifts

Belbury Poly – The Willows

The Advisory Circle – Other Channels

Mordant Music – Dead Air

Moon Wiring Club – An Audience of Art Deco Eyes

Rashad Becker – Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

The Caretaker – Everywhere at the end of time

Debit – The Long Count

Runners up (unasked for, I couldn't resist supplying)

Lo Five – Geography of the Abyss

Dolphins into the Future – On Seafaring Isolation

Lee Gamble – Diversions -  1994-96

eMMplekz – Rook to TN34

Roj – The Transactional Dharma of Roj

Hybrid Palms – Pacific Image

ML Buch – Suntub

Second Woman - S/W

Huerco S – For Those of You Who Have Never

Burial – debut album

patten – Mirage FM

TRACKS

Mark Van Hoen – Holy Me

eMMplekz – Gloomy Leper Techno

The Focus Group – Modern Harp

Oneohtrix Point Never – Physical Memory

The Advisory Circle – Sundial

Holly Herndon – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

James Blake – If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Burial – South London Boroughs

Belbury Poly – Caermaen

People Like Us – World of Wonder (Why We’re Here)

Moon Wiring Club – Mademoiselle Marionette

 

MIX

bit stumped here, I don't tend to remembrance mixes like other folks do, but then I thought, "oh yes, there's - 

The Arkiteket - The Deep Ark

And then when I saw their list, I slapped my forehead with a 'gah' and realized I really should have - and really would have - included this mix: 

Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo (Japan, 1980-86) - by Spencer Doran

And the follow up Vol 2 was great too. 

It's especially amnesiac of me given that in this big piece on Ambient / New Age as a phenom of the 2010s written for Resident Advisor, these mixes feature prominently (along with the Japanese interior music / 4th world compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 plus quotes from Doran in his Visible Cloaks guise). 

Talking of those who remembrance mixes, here's mixologist (and RA 2000-2025 contributor) Michaelangelos Matos's faves 

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Maybe, maybe,  I'll go back and finish that 2000-2025 albums list... do it in stages... then do the tracks... and maybe even the mixes. 

I already tried and enjoyed this mix which sounded intriguing from the write-up and mixologist Nono Gigsta's side reflections

https://soundcloud.com/gigstab/freerotation-2024-the-house-of-crocodiles-part-2-live-recording

Amid the near-infinity of sources out of which it is woven, this new-to-me tune jumped out particularly

Which itself contains a sample of - or perhaps more accurately, is a re-edit of? - something I dimly recognise (from being sampled elsewhere - some track on Reinforced?) but the source song "Misdemeanor" is new-to-me and quite delicious, sort of avant-ized Jackson 5

Less delicious is learning about the actual misdemeanor the artist would much later commit.... Wiki Fear strikes again, or at least, it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have read the offending entry 

Ah, Anon comes through in the comments with the ardkore jungle tune that samples Foster Sylvers - not 4 Hero and crew but M-Beat 

Here's another use (out of loads and loads in hip hop etc)

Here's a Misdemeanor sample-chain playlist

P.R.E.M. versus the C-word

Dale Cornish, not content with inventing the genre of "thug ambient", has coined another nifty name. In a recent tweet he announced: 

"Yesterday, in an interview for A Thing, I invented the term Press Release Experimental Music, whereby the promo blurb is 374 times more interesting than the bland music it's hyping up. "recorded in a cave in Belarus using rare AKG microphones" = sounds bloody boring though m8888"

Now, I know what you're thinking. 

You're thinking, "Dale, mate - it's been named. It's called Conceptronica."

And I admit, that was the first thing that popped into my head. 

But upon consideration, I decided they're not the same thing. 

They overlap, but Press Release Experimental Music is a purely pejorative term.

Whereas Conceptronica is actually value-neutral (no, honestly it is -  many assume it's a brickbat,  others a big-up, but it's neither). 

Under the umbrella of Conceptronica, you would indeed find a swathe of stuff where the press release was way better than the actual music.

But you would also find a swathe of stuff where the press release and the music were just as good as each other and mutually enhancing. 

And you would find yet another swathe of stuff where the press release was turgid and pretentious such that the music would be much better off without that framing - and in that sense is 347 times better than said press release.

And - we're not done yet - there is another subcategory (and in truth this probably was something the C-word had in its sights, as a target) and that is the swathe of stuff where the press release (interesting in its own right) and the music (also interesting, "stands up by itself") are both fine and dandy, but there doesn't seem to be any actual relationship between the themes, critiques etc asserted in the framing bumf and the actual sonic events that comprise the work. 

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Apropos of this, recently I came across a bit of Mark Fisher writing that prefigures the conceptualization of conceptronica, although not actually being about music, per se. 

"What's interesting - and this has a direct bearing on some of the disputes about abstraction and the [hardcore continuum]to which I will return in a post that's been germinating ever since the UEL event - is the way in which Burial's music conducted affects and images so powerfully, so lucidly, without the mediation of the (facialised, biographical) individual or its self-understandings. (How different is Burial's abstract art - so painterly, so precise in the images it produced - to so much of what appears in galleries, with its overthought, overconscious, nulanguage meta-rationales, while 'the work' induces no ideas, no affects, at all.)"

K-punk here is slagging off art-art, not art-tekno -  visual art, gallery art. 

I am curious what Mark would have thought of the Conceptronica phenomenon - he seemed both amenable to That Kind of Thing (e.g. wrote about Ultra-Red I seem to recall, Mille Plateaux agit-proptronica) but on the other would have been reflexively suspicious of the self-curatorial turn in modern music I'd have thought (given his swipes at e.g. S. Youth etc). 

Recently also realized that the seed of conceptronica, which I've used on and off as a term since 2006,  can be traced right back to Energy Flash and the chapter called "Fuck Dance, Let's Art", in whose opening section the idea of the museum as space of non-vibe is aspersed: 

By the end of 1995, a new zone of music-making had emerged out of the ruins of ‘electronic listening music’: a sort of post-rave omni-genre wherein techno’s purity was ‘contaminated’ by an influx of ideas from jungle, trip hop, all over. Not particularly danceable, yet too restlessly rhythmic and texturally startling to be ambient chill-out, this music might be dubbed art-tekno, since the only appropriate listener response is a sort of fascinated contemplation. Imagine a museum dedicated not to the past but the future, where you marvel at the bizarre audio-sculptures, let your ears wander through the sound-installations, and boggle at the noise contraptions as they go about their pointless, captivating tasks.

One of the earliest events dedicated to this new omni-genre, the Electronic Lounge, was actually situated in the bar at an art gallery, London’s ICA....

But here it's cast as art-for-art's sake experimentation, music without social energy behind it or a social function... whereas conceptronica is very much purposed with a polemical or even didactic point, is in some cases an activist attempt to reconnect experimental music and Society. 

amnesia shredder

I really enjoyed Another Life and Amnesia Scanner are nice guys with an interesting line of patter

But this is a pretty devastating slag-off of their new "EDM-adjacent" effort Tearless here by Robert Barry  for the Quietus

"If I'm honest I think what I liked about them was that they basically sounded like Skrillex but were somehow less embarrassing to namedrop. I mean, fuck it, 'Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites' is kind of a tune in a rather crude, brash, dumb sort of way. That first Amnesia Scanner record, when it comes down to it, is no less dumb. But it is a lot less colourful and playful. It's a kind of po-faced Skrillex....

"...  their new album sounds uncannily like a Limp Bizkit B-sides collection.... The likes of Korn and Papa Roach always seemed to thrive on a particular kind of impotent acting-out, a carefully cultivated image of transgression pieced together in the most sterile laboratory conditions. Wacky haircuts and red-faced gurning. There was a lot of foot stomping. But at least, I guess, they could be bothered to try and look like they cared."

I dimly remember someone doing a very detailed structural-musicological analysis comparing nu-metal and .... not EDM precisely, but brostep - and concluding that they were more or less the same thing.



Here's a counter-(re)view, from Chal Ravens, for Pitchfork, that is more positive if still not exactly making the record sound like a lot of fun really.

"Where Another Life felt bright and alert, shimmying towards oblivion like lemmings in a conga line, Tearless is burned out and overwhelmed. This is ugly music, even at its most melodic. The shadow of nu-metal and hardcore hangs over tracks like “Flat,” a collaboration with metalcore act Code Orange, where busted electronic drums and shredded guitars recall Deftones and Nine Inch Nails. On “AS Tearless” a chant-along punk riff is torn to pieces by distortion.... 

"... Aside from those sharply focused highlights ["AS Acá", "AS Going"] and a brief climax of power chords and blast beats on “AS Labyrinth,” the atmosphere is claggy and subdued. Tearless ends as it began, in slow, exhausted strides. “You will be fine if we can help you lose your mind,” sings a distorted, uncredited voice on the final track, a lighters-in-the-air lament for the party at the end of the world."

I suppose it's the ultimate strategic-slumming move in the hip taste game - to not just hone in on the kinds of dance music that are most demeaned as "it's just the new heavy metal" (gabber, hardstyle, etc - lumpen-rock-like in fantasy heroics, mid-freq blare, speed, punitive splattersthetic, trashy pulp graphics, puerility) but to go all the way across and directly interface with metal and its descendants directly.