So another year's diary heads towards obsolescence, presents are bought for nearest and dearest and we here at Real Groove mark off the time by summing up the year that was in music. 2008 has been an interesting year as far as techno and house are concerned. As an inevitable backlash to the rise of minimal that was suddenly branded as big and cool in 2007, house music made a proper comeback this year. It's not a necessarily fair comment to say that house music was foundering before that, because further inspection of some of the keys players this year (label Drumpoet Community, producer Sascha Dive for example) reveals a success achieved in 2008 but groundwork that stretches back many years.
Some producers who had been steadily pumping out harder techno seemed to catch the house bug in 2008, injecting techier shades of house into the scene. Others who had always straddled the divide further blurred the lines with slow-mo cuts hovering around the 115bpm mark, too synthetic to be house music but just not quite techno. Most appealing to me were the proliferation of cuts from Berlin steeped in the funk and raw soul of Detroit. Making no bones about their influences, people like Motor City Drum Ensemble have released incredible Detroit house without actually having been there. There have been some poor, lacklustre releases in this vein as well and a good deal of bandwagon jumping as happened the year previous with every man and his dog scrambling to get out a dry, spare minimal track, often forsaking any real quality or longevity in the process. One can't help but feel that house will suffer a similar fate next year as people clamber to find another genre to champion and exploit. This is very much conjecture anyway as the only difference I've noticed is the amount of column space minimal techno and now house receive.
The other big shift I've noticed this year is the emergence of the dubstep/techno crossover as a bona fide genre, which I touched on in last month's column. The balls-out grimey side of dubstep I can leave, but when people like Shackleton, Peverelist, 2562, Martyn, TRG, Headhunter and Scuba start tooling around with techno rhythms over dubstep percussion my ears prick up like those of a Doberman Pinscher. To say that the influence has been mutual to both camps is an understatement. Not only are we hearing albums like Headhunter's impeccable debut Nomad come out peppered with tracks of a 4/4 variety, but several of the dub techno guard are either trying their hand at dubstep or enlisting the help of some of the aforementioned producers to remix their tracks. To that end the always on point Quantec got 2562 under his A Made Up Sound guise to remix his recent Ray Of Hope release. The result was quite simply astonishing, and as with Brendon Moeller remixing Appleblim and Peverelist's Over Here a little earlier in the year it looks like the exchange is working both ways. I wouldn't be surprised to see this rather specialized end of the dubstep genre outlive the UK garage influenced side as the scope of possibility appears to reach a lot further with the convergence of these outwardly disparate genres.
Lastly and more on a personal taste tip I recently discovered a producer that has rekindled my love affair with ambient music. Bvdub from San Francisco has been producing for a scant two years, but the quality of his productions beggars belief. Knocking out eleven releases (and more on the way) in a little over a year, his presence has been been felt on the deep techno and dub techno thresholds, though his music is equal parts – often more, of ambient. Not only that but the ethereal nature of his tracks are so emotive it nearly hurts.
2008 – A year of quality
*****
There has been much to love about the crop of releases this year with a real evolution shown in various aspects of clubland.
Silverbeat's Top 5
Bvdub – Where to Now
Seth Troxler - Aggression
Argenis Brito - Imminent
Q-Tip – The Renaissance
Guy Noir – Delusion EP
Classic Listening
Mike Shannon – Possible Conclusions to Stories That Never End
No comments:
Post a Comment