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Growing up in the Eighties, you couldn’t help but be touched in some way by the birth of dance music. Chart hits by the likes of Black Box, S’Express and M.A.R.R.S. are probably responsible for many a current dance music producer discovering the genre. As a listener, I’m no different. Those songs paved the way for me getting into the likes of The KLF and Moby in the early nineties, and my deep passion for more esoteric techno and electronica which really started in earnest with Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman.
Between 1994 and 1998 I really immersed myself in techno and all its spin off genres, accumulating a collection of albums, 12” singles and mixtapes which has lain dormant for over a decade. Not being the most gregarious person, I never really went to clubs, at least not the types of places that would play the stuff I wanted to hear, and instead just listened at home intently.
Over the weekend, perusing the contents of my iTunes shopping basket I noticed a couple of Underworld mixes of Spooky’s ‘Schmoo’ which I’d tried to track down back in the day to no avail. Listening to those two Underworld remixes this past week – and the intriguing new Toykult album a week or so ago – has once again encouraged me to listen to whatever dance music I’ve had lying around in my iPod and I’m even contemplating heading loftward to dig out more old CDs.
So I’ve found myself trawling through my Orbital singles collection, reminiscing about how good songs like ‘Halcyon and ‘Sunday’ are; listening to Plastikman’s edgy minimalist techno on Musik (the track ‘Marbles’ is ten minutes of spiky acidity) and delving into stuff salvaged from a couple of old compilations – The Science Behind The Circle and The Serious Road Trip. Artists as diverse as David Holmes, Laurent Garnier, Egebamyasi, Higher Intelligence Agency, Loop Guru and Andrew Weatherall have graced my eardrums, bringing with them a range of genres from urgent acid house through to chilled-out sounds incorporating Indian samples and percussion.
Feeling that warm and slightly fuzzy feeling of rediscovering something long forgotten, I even went out and bought Mixmag. Mixmag seems to be the only surviving dance music magazine; my old favourite, Muzik, seems to have bitten the dust many years ago. What surprised me the most was that it really hasn’t changed at all.
Sure, there seem to be less proliferation of genres as things like jungle and garage have moved out of favour, but essentially the key cornerstones of club music – techno, electro, chill-out / ambient and house – are all there. And modern dance music doesn’t sound that dissimilar to how it did when I was an avid listener, as evidenced by the eleven free tracks I downloaded from the Mixmag website (the key track of which was Rex The Dog‘s Yazoo-sampling ‘Bubblicious‘). About the only thing different from when I bought dance music magazines was a proliferation of pictures of half-dressed, sweaty girls in clubs and a rather odd – and unnecessary – fashion section.
I find dance music really hard to write about hence why I haven’t really focussed this week on any particular artists or tracks. My wife says this is because it all sounds the same, which I totally disagree with. This week I feel like I’ve resolved my issues with dance music and I expect I will be listening to much more over the next few weeks. Right now, after a week of largely instrumental music, I think it’s high time I listened to some singing again.
Back when I was making music, I adopted the moniker Scanlines and recorded several tracks that had a techno vibe. Among the last tracks I ever recorded was this one. It’s sat on my hard-drive since about 2001 and no-one’s ever heard it before. Enjoy.
Download : Scanlines 'Polarity Flicker' / .mp3 / 5.1mb
I’m currently listening to Narcisstika by Toykult, a band I’ve never heard of before. They briefly started following my tweets this week, so I thought I’d check them out. Reverbnation have been giving their new album away and I thought ‘What the hell? It’s free’. Described as ‘rock electronica’, it reminds me of bands I used to listen to like Cubanate or Parallax who melded heavy guitars with electronics to fantastically bleak effect. Electronic sounds have come a long way since those two bands adventurously deployed them, the effect of Narcisstika being a sequence of edgy, jarring beats, twisted sounds and warped vocals all melded together in a rapidfire blur, as best illustrated by my favourite, ‘Automatic Addict’. Get a copy here.
Gang Of Four are listed as one of Toykult’s influences, and coincidentally I bought their classic Entertainment! album this week. Gang Of Four, along with bands like Wire, The Pop Group, Mekons and others, epitomised the post-punk sound which has had a strong bearing on modern bands like Franz Ferdinand. True UK punk really only lasted a couple of years (it’s a shame no-one bothered to tell Sham 69), rapidly fragmenting into a sound that incorporated other influences. In Gang Of Four’s case that influence was a combination of arty knowing and funk – their lyrics read like a dystopian Nietzschean self-help book while their basslines wobble around like a punk-weaned George Clinton.
The Rumble Strips, whose debut album Girls And Weather failed to live up to expectation and just reinforced the narrow-minded view that they were Dexy’s clones, have returned with a confident new album, Welcome To The Walk Alone. The album is glossily rendered by producer du jour Mark Ronson with plenty of strings and less emphasis on the horn section that made the Dexy’s comparisons so easy. The effect is something I can only describe as how Elvis Costello might have sounded if Phil Spector had ever produced an album for him. For all the strong new material, my favourite song is ‘London’ which I first heard at an NME gig in Northampton a couple of years ago.
I should give a quick plug to Those Brave Airmen, a four-piece band formed by some of my old school friends. Their MySpace page includes four of their songs, which are anthemic heavy guitar tracks with a grungey vibe. My wife, who is something of an expert on such things, says they remind her of a band she used to like called Live.
Finally, I’ve been listening to So Damn Happy, a live album by Loudon Wainwright III which effortlessly blends together emotional, folksy numbers with more humorous tracks. ‘Heaven’ has the audience in stitches, detailing as it does a debauched vision of the afterlife while ‘Primrose Hill’ movingly recounts the depressing story of a homeless London busker. I don’t know how Wainwright can so easily blend together such apparently conflicting themes, but he does and it’s brilliant.
