mini-extract from new section of Energy Flash on the rise of retro-dance
on
this subject, there are some great tunes on the new Z***by record, inventive and totally distinctively his style. But
also quite a few pastiches e.g. the drum and bass replicas "Overdose"
and "777". Which, as drum and bass replicas go, sound terrific. But like with the Eski pastiches... one can't help wondering "why?"
which picks up on a quote Howard from the group said:
“I could drop our song with Eliza Doolittle, "Neighbourhood" by Zed
Bias and "Saved My Life" by Todd Edwards and no one could name what
decade they’re from.”
Martin's response: If the fact that your sound is indistinguishable from music made over
decade before doesn’t scare you shitless as an artist, I’m not sure
we’re on the same page here.
He further proclaims:
We need to reject this kind of neutered brainwashed thinking and build
something vital for this era. Something totally built by, owned by - and
unique to - 2013. Who are you, 2013?
Because this is sorta my issue with all the big “post”/“bass” guys, now
playing housey tech mixed into techy house with additional retro anthem
bashing, the guys who build up the DJ hierarchy which ends in Disclosure
headlining your festival.
I keep thinking this…
In twenty years time, these DJs will be in their 40s and their kids will
be old enough to ask them: “Dad, what did the music sound like when you
were the biggest DJ?”
... Music should be essential and it should be unique: of its time, for its time, belonging to its time. You where there. “Were you there?” “Yes I was there.” “Where were you in ’92?” “I was there too.”
Great music is the cultural journal of record of its time, the
soundtrack to generations. ’66, ’77, ’88, ’93, ’99, ’03, ’06 – if you
read this blog you should pretty much instantly be able to tell just
from those numbers what movements blew up then. Depending when you were
born you’ll go misty eye’d to “Strings of Life” or “Valley of the
Shadows (31 Seconds)” or “Spirit of the Sun (Steve Gurley mix)” or
“Midnight Request Line.” They define a time and a place.
I don't mind Disclosure, but of course I agree with Martin's thrust here – how could I not, it's basically the "atemporality" syndrome he's railing against
"listening to this album for the 5th time now...after readin everyones thoughts on it on tumblr... i’m not trying to like it … i’m trying to understand why people like it
cos between all the sheep i believe that their r genuine people that
love this album…so i go through the tag…and every body is getting all
crazy about this touch song. and i listen and just listen, not judging, allowing the music to do its thing and it starts and it feels like i’m in this 1970s AGAIN! anybody ever
see the movie FLASH GORDAN? no…of course not how about the original
planet of the apes movies?? still no?? cool ummm the episode of south
park where kenny sniffs cats and ends up on that boob planet??yeah
that!!…well it starts off as u are transported to these worlds via some
whack interstellar tube thing u even hear that weird wind sound u end up
in this cave with this weird echo voice and then all of a sudden there
is this old dude just sitting on a chair singing and this singing is not
bad…not bad at all…very stop motion animation type stuff then bam!! u
on the mother f12king love boat!! in the lounge area and the bands
playing and then the lights go down and the smoke machine kicks in and
the band is totally psychedelic man(google george clinton and the
Parliament funkadelic)!! and then u are transported and now you are the
stop motion singing robot dude trapped in a cage and it fades out. and as i write this and listen to my words i can’t help but appreciate
the production value and talent that daft punk has…i mean all that in
8mins but still…still its so in the past its so retro…it feels
unoriginal…its so 1970s disco era…its good…but its not new…its not the
future…its the pasts future its the dreams of the 70s pushed on to us…i
want something new i want to move forward…i want our generation to leave
a impact…our now fashion is late 80s early 90s bright colors chunky
chains beanies animal prints and aggressive make up GOOGLE TLC!! …we are
a generation that have nothing to claim as our own…who wants to say
they are part of the reality tv generation? not me!!.60s flower power.
80s had people power.even the 70s had disco 90s had grunge and i’m not
talking just music …look at your dashboard this generation has tried to
be all of that but we never try to make our own style. who are we?"
(i love the album, well most of it anyway -- the first five or so
tracks I could live without, it starts to take off with "Giorgio By
Moroder" and then just gets better and better - but the above strikes me as a perfectly defensible and understandable reaction -- "it's 2013 ferfucksake")
Random Access Memories hovers at the perfect convergence point between Retromania and Energy Flash. Here's my New York Times piece on how Daft Punk fell out of "digital love" and down an analogue time tunnel .
Featuring cameos from Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers and Paul Williams....
Nostalgic both in sound and in theme (songs about lost futures - "Giorgio By Moroder", "Contact" with its sample of the Eugene Cernan, the last man to set foot on the Moon's surface - songs about memory and loss like the gorgeous soft-rock/AOR Todd Edwards-sung "Fragments of Time"), Random Access Memories seems to be a deliberate attempt to turn back time. It's consciously conceived as a near-total flashback to analogue modes of being. Not just to the methodology of pre-digital recording (live musicians, etc) but to the promotional strategies, the cultural economy of anticipation and delay that characterised the Analogue System
Even Daft Punk’s business strategy could be construed as a
throwback. When their contract with Virgin expired several years ago, they
could have self-released their own album to their huge fan base via the
internet, as Radiohead did with In Rainbows in 2007 and My Bloody Valentine has
with m b v earlier this year. But instead the duo signed with Columbia, the most
major of major labels, which Thomas Bangalter praised in the interview as “the first record company,
the inventor of the 33 rpm record”. Comparing the record business in its
Seventies and Eighties heyday to Hollywood’s studio system, he sounded
wistful for the era of “sonic blockbusters” like Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours or Off The Wall, albums that everybody heard or at least heard
about. “Pop culture is the monoculture,” he argued. “Today
the only monoculture is brands.” Using the marketing muscle of an entertainment
conglomerate like Columbia/Sony, Random Access
Memories tries to swim against the historical tide of popular culture’s
fragmentation into niche markets and micro-genres.
"Recently,
though, it feels like this habit of retrospection has gone into
overdrive. House music, in particular, seems to ache for its past –
although precisely which bit of it isn’t quite clear. Re-pressings of
long-coveted twelves, extensive reissues of label and artist
discographies, and selectors carving an identity out of the bricolage of
lost classics ensure that youngsters are more clued-up than ever about
every obscure corner of their lofty inheritance. The internet is central
to this: the fact that a forgotten Roy Davis Jr. production is no
longer consigned solely to dusty bargain bins in necrotic record stores –
that it is, in fact, just one “related videos” click away – makes
cultural archeology a more viable and accessible pastime than ever
before.
"The effects of this shift on the creative output of the present are,
frankly, mixed. Of course, the ways in which old records are revived and
recontextualised can feasibly cause fresh sparks to fly, and an
aesthetic focussed on the past isn’t necessarily moribund... It feels
like the scales have tipped somewhat. And while I love early 90s New
York house, jacking acid tracks, primitivist 808 workouts and the rest
as much as the next dance music anorak, the proliferation of homages to,
and watery imitations of, these styles made by young producers today is
both fatiguing and depressing.
"It’s almost as if, confronted with the genius of their forefathers at
every turn, young artists are struggling to imagine novel forms for
house music beyond the boundaries already drawn. Instead, intuiting the
house music mantra that not every stylistic break needs to be a radical
one, they settle for variations on a shrinking pool of themes, trying on
past genre-configurations like so much costumery, reinforcing old, safe
values rather than attempting to forge new ones....
"My gut feeling is that house music,
in the broadest sense, could do with a sturdy voltage to the chest
right now."
Angus then goes on to praise Mark Fell and Vessel for going against this retro-reverential tendency.
Certainly on the reissue front it's striking that you have had in just the last month or two:
curatorial repackaging and re-presentation of the unjustly forgotten: Strut's This Ain’t Chicago anthology of early UK house(check out compiler Richard Sen's oral history over at Neufutur magazine, an in-aptly titled publication in the case of this particular story!)
individual artists giving themselves the Legacy Treatment as regards even relatively recent output: DJ Q's The Archive, Pinch's MIA 2006-2010(both great, by the way)
while hipstahouse seems to be going from "strength to strength"
