this is really good....




but I am having difficulties in establishing in my mind in what ways precisely it is different from the music being made circa 1998-2000


these are also really good....

but again I am having difficulties in establishing in my mind in what ways precisely they are different from the music being made circa 1997-2000

they are different, but it's the gloss and thickness of the music mainly, the size of the production, an illusion of expense (rendered meaningless because everybody can access that level of deluxe now)... perhaps increments in the intricacy of detail and sculpting

but substantially, at the level of structuration, of bones - this is a music that has already been and gone, that had its Moment....

its return (embraced, apparently, by young people, by young people in America particularly) as if it were new, with seemingly no awareness that it actually is a return... a reversion to a superceded stage

speaks to the disappearance of  the dialectic in dance music (aka FWD>>>, aka the modernist logic of supercession)

and its replacement by a new anachronic logic - "two steps back, one step sideways" (two steps sideways if you're lucky)

which counts for the uncanny feeling of contemporaneity and recapitulation,  nowness but not newness, when listening to things like Disclosure

(but of course I'm recapitulating myself here, aren't I... dunno, just get freshly amazed-fascinated-perplexed-disoriented by the phenomenon, each time I collide with it)