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

some of the comments appended to Andrew Ryce's Trap article at Resident Advisor tickled me:


Sheeeit! another subgenre raises its head..... like a blackhead going full on pustular.

I have Now Thats What I Call Trap, on MOS in heavy rotation......

Andrew ,The Guardian will be contacting you soon as the UKs go to expert on North Americas hottest new scene.Please contact Idris Elba for the documentary vox pop.

I call bs on a bs article, about bs tracks, played at bs festivals by bs jocks but then again, I am 43years old.

To the editors, please stop infantilising this site! the interweb is brimming with digital faeces, why do you feel the need to contribute?

Smilies and Trap music Fuckever!
Leave this stuff to Sherburne and Reynolds, if and when it does develop.......digital drug noise is so nineties

and more sensibly


Trap def. has its qualities if you don't have a problem with stupid, full on and energetic dance music. I must confess that I sometimes like the idea behind it all more than the music itself, but I can't deny there are som really cool trap(y) stuff out there.

Someone compared the trap movement with UK hardcore back in the 90s. I would even go as far as comparing it to the first wave of house music in the 80s. The raw energy is there, the young age and background of the producers, the cheap equipment (or probably illegaly downloaded), the uneven quality of the output and the movement around the music. There are of course differences but I still see it as very much the same thing.

and




I'm a long-term junglist and trap 4 me is 'hiphop finally got dancemusic'. I enjoy every bit of it. It's got the same fire and badness as raggajungles amen tear-out's. Music does no have to be serious. Fck the haters- move on. Let's mash in some more jungle in this soup + ragga and distored sound of hardstyle and that will be be gold.

the article itself raises a lot of interesting issues:

is this the first time that a genre has emerged that is like a slightly-distorted-mirror-image of an already existing genre, on which it is fully parasitic, right down to having the exact same name as the original genre? (at least drill 'n' bass was a nomenclative tweak on drum 'n' bass). A para-genre, existing besides the real-thing but without really interacting with it.



is this the first time that underground dance music has so totally followed the lead of commercial mainstream black music? because trap, or trap-py styled street rap, is about 60 percent of what you hear on stations like LA's Power FM, from artists like Tyga, as also picked up on for certain tracks by Nicki Minaj and Rihanna

the other thing (as per the previous post about the frozen idea of "contemporary" in sonics across the musical spectrum) is this question of  how different it really is from all the Dirty South rap of the early 2000s or even late 1990s -- something Ryce points to without necessarily intending to through  his description of Lex Luger's production style as "like a satanic Mannie Fresh"

I listen to Power FM regularly in the car and often hear things that make me go "oooh, that's cool,"that's modern sounding , "oh yes yes yes, it's 2012, for real". But then recently I heard something that made me really go "ooooh gosh": it felt  so advanced, so strange and off-kilter in its groove structure.

It took me about half a minute before I realised it was Ludacris's "What's Your Fantasy" -- one of my favorite street rap tunes of the early 2000s! Released in September 2000 in fact, twelve years ago...


Still and all, it's good stuff, the real-deal original trap, and the secondary-parasitic internet version of it - not retro but nowtro


shame about the lyrics, yes, but then if the sound is in a sense arrested, then you'd perhaps expect the social consciousness to be equally retarded