IDM Mailing Archive

shawn travalent, feb 10, 1994:

quoted 6 lines While i very much enjoy his "Accident..." i

>While i very much enjoy his "Accident..." i >have found that Barbarella falls well short of the mark. Aside from the >single (i forgot the name) that i've seen on numerous samplers >the rest of "The Art of Dance" is mega-blah-house-tech-fusion. Perhaps i >enjoyed the playful attitude behind the work but little of the music really >moves me.Your thoughts?

sorry, i was out of town for a few days (these days it's the notorious german carnival, and if you're not into that, you better flee), so i got this only today. i'm afraid this exposes me as an incompetent judge of vaeth, but i haven't heard the barbarella album. from what i know about it and the concept behind it (..."barbarella"), though, it seems clear that it's *intended* not to be moving, but instead to be playful. am i right? if so, is this true for most techno music? i find that if *i* want it the other way round i often prefer classical music (don't tell me you can't move to that - you *can*, and don't tell me it's plain wrong - what is dancing if not playing). i realize this is not what most idmers seem to think. if dance music doesn't move, it's not profound, if it isn't profound, it's not intelligent? the fact that i can sympathize with *gabber* is because of its pure, careless, innocent playfulness, not diluted by superfluous complexities and alibi sophistication. pure punk, the sincerity of which i think is ...intelligent. there's even more to it. (stop, i'm digressing...) anyway, i just wanted to make a point in favour of playful attitude, so save your flames. this is a matter of personal affinity, of course, after all, i'm from a different techno community. but most techno stuff that is obviously intended to touch / move people, and does succeed often enough, leaves me quite cold. cybordelics' fairy tales is a case in point (if only 45 rpm, like it says on the label, were true!), it works so well with dave kelly - am i not intelligent enough to be moved? (i'm not being ironic, dave!) - back to vaeth: i'm not trying to run him down. i understand he's a nice guy, so have fun with him. i just find i'm too often disappointed with harthouse material, and with the fact that its popularity distorts the picture of what relevant parts of the scene here (D) conceive as intelligent techno, and in fact produce. (your thoughts?) ...the first part of peter pan (back to cybordelics) reminded me of ken ishii. *his* work (sorry has this been mentioned before? i'm rather new to the list) is an example of techno that does move me, most of all "samsara" on the "utu" release on +8. i fall for the combination of original caustic high frequency howling and microtonal sirening and all those ..."peoow"s, paired with melancholy static major-seven-like sunset-coloured chords, over sophisticated percussion patterns (in the case of "samsara", more hard than sophisticated). now, apart from his "pneumonia" on r&s there also seems to be a release, probably album, called "white" or so. does anyone know more about that or whether there's even more? second question: is this ken ishii identical to the ken ishii who plays the cello on steve reich's "music for eighteen musicians" (a must for all of you, btw)? (again, there's more from tokyo than harthouse's susumu yokota, though he's not bad, too.) ...another long-winded post from p.