Made me mad? Sent me to sleep more like!
It's nearly always the case that the things that are touted for their supposedly superior musicality, are actually - on inspection - rather meagre, musically speaking.
Especially when compared to the alleged hoi polloi of the day.
Far more startling melody-dissonance clashes and harmonic strangeness to be found in the jungle tekno of the time.
(And we won't even mention the rhythmic shortfall).
But I am preaching to the choir here, no doubt!
"Mondrin" - I assume there's an "a" missing here?
I liked the title of their second full-length effort, which was three years a-comin', Time Tourist but not sure I ever listened to it.
Yet like so many IDM-ers they had a perfectly solid pre-career doing hardcore
Like this moderately entertaining bit of novelty bleep-acid
This one even has a breakbeat-y groove and a mentasmic synth-smear
This has a piano vamp and a nice curl of diva vocal
A blippy chugger with a fairground Waltzer-like riff
Moderately bangin'!
But then within a year or so, they opted for restraint and politesse
from a less-good titled EP Retreat from Unpleasant Realities
5 comments:
Yeah, that early-mid 90s take on shiny Detroit techno wasn’t particularly interesting. All sibilant top end and no real heft.
I had a colleague who used to play this stuff at work in the late 90s and it really dragged on at album length.
this is a terrible take im afraid
nah, the precision-engineered top-end sibilance is what makes that music stand out above the likes of German trance, which was ploughing similar furrows, albeit without the American soul lineage predominating. I am always inclined to wonder, however, whether 'no heft' is already importing a punk vocabulary into music that isn't trying to solve the same problems. A lot of first wave Detroit techno isn't aiming for weight in that sense - it's quite light and elegant (whilst being relatively moody). It's aiming for cyclical repetition and an austere, melancholic futurism fuelled by the contradictions tearing apart the Motor City - automation, deindustrialisation and the destruction of a highly skilled, somewhat privileged, Black 'labour aristocracy'. Once dance music starts assembling its own historical logics, those incipient sonic attributes that are later purveyed by UK appropriations of the Detroit blueprint can become positive values rather than necessarily serve as deficiencies.
Second and Third Wave detroit techno, where hard jackin' minimalism reigned supreme, is of course another story.
Yeah no b12 are musical geniuses that's why they've been following the same detroit techno ripoff formula with zero variation for 30 years
re: anon above
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