mm-kay, this has been bothering me for some time: again and again i see the
specter of "us-against-them-ism" come up on this list, where "we" are the
IDM cognoscenti and "they" are the heathens not yet touched by the hand of
the DSP god. (i might add, it's an ambivalent evangelism, because no one
seems sure whether "we" want "them" to find out about this stuff or not.)
gil, i'm not slagging you, but i had to speak up as your post does fall
loosely within this terrain.
facts are: IDM is NOT some mightily obscure nether-genre that no one gets.
aphex and autechre are all over the press. schematics get more and more
play. squarepusher was a big player on college radio for a while there. i
could go on and on... but really, my point is to lighten up. IDM barely
exists on its own, is a sort of "virtual subgenre" carved out at the
intersection of a score of other subgenres - it's just one fuzzy bit at the
intersection of a Venn diagram.
some IDM intersects with downtempo. some with dub. some with house. but
what i'm really trying to stress: don't get so caught up in the
particulars! if you want to explain it to someone who you suspect doesn't
know about it (or thinks all e-music is simply "techno"), fine! drop some
names of labels and artists. do a weird little beatbox. ask'em if they've
seen oval's armani commercial. i'm pretty sure they'll get the point.
cheers
p
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 22:54:40 -0500 (EST)
To: IDM list <idm@hyperreal.org>
From: Gil Yaker <gyaker@fragment.com>
Subject: IDM is not downtempo
Message-ID:
<Pine.LNX.4.10.10012171207460.26445-100000@nowhere.fragment.com>
Okay, this keeps bugging me and it has finally come to a head. I'm
looking
for comments from the list, especially from people who get a chance
to
spin records in public...
How do you differentiate what you play (if it is what we commonly
refer to
as IDM) from what most people commonly refer to as downtempo? Let
me
backup and say that for the sake of this question, downtempo is
music
that's classically dubby, jazzy, or hip hopish in feel accompanied
by
jazzy or ethnic melodic or harmonic content - which is to say that
it is
NOT the product of computer/DSP driven
sounds/environments/techniques.
yadda yadda...
So I was at an xmas party the other night (and this happens to me a
lot:)
where lots of music discussion abounded. Everyone was talking about
the
major types of underground dance music, house, techno, trance, and
d'n'b.
of course the thread of who's a dj, what do you play, where do you
play
comes up. Depending on my mood and crowd I answer things
differently. For
less knowledgeable people I have to say I spin downtempo, b/c if the
music
you play is NOT to dance to, then it's downtempo <g>.
Recently tho' I've started to say that I spin experimental
electronic,
which we all know is not technically true, but to orient people to
the
fact that I spin music that's NOT strict downtempo, but still not
created
with the dancefloor in mind, and the fact that i'm sure if people
heard
glitchy stuff they'd be like WTF, sort of justifies this term.
Anyway, I'm sure a lot of the readers on this list don't give a
rat's ass
what other non-IDM-listening people think. Fair enough, but it would
be
nice to think that this music doesn't have to exist so independently
of
everyone outside of its following. I've just always wondered about
how you
approach it casually without saying it's like the aphex twin :)
-Gil
philip sherburne * business solutions * ask jeeves
5 1 0 - 9 8 5 - 7 8 8 5 w * 5 1 0 - 6 0 4 - 5 4 7 4 m
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org