IDM Mailing Archive

Just a brief comment: It was some time ago since I listened to their album, but I think I thought that there was some beautiful tracks on it. However the thing that made me most curious about that album was that it was co-produced (at least, I don't remember exactly) by Dan Lacksman. Those of you who are familiar with the european roots of electronic dance music will recognize Mr Lacksman as being a member of the bizarre electronic combo named Telex. Telex, along with Kraftwerk, YMO and Hideki Matsutake's Logic System formed the foundations of electronic dance music in my brain at least. Anyway, check out any pre-1985 Telex stuff. They used walls of modular synthesizers to create their simplistic pop music. Beautiful analogue sounds, indeed. Fortran 5 sampled some stuff from the album "Sex", which btw is a splendid example of Telex' sophistication when it comes to clean electronic sounds and analogue excellence. Fredrik / RND <f91-fid.nada.kth.se>

Sorry to dig up the Deep Forest thread again! i happened to see the Vaseline ad on TV the other day, was that Deep Forest muzak playing in the background? _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/ _/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/ surfing on sine wave

quoted 1 line deepforest-- some 1 PLEAZ review thee new album.

>>deepforest-- some 1 PLEAZ review thee new album.

quoted 4 lines a statement of fact:

>a statement of fact: >I own a (very small) record store where it is our policy to let people >listen to an album before purchasing it. I have yet to sell one copy of the >new Deep Forest. I sold plenty of the first one. Draw your own conclusions...

My short review: TELL THOSE DAMN BULGARIANS TO SHUT UP! Yabble yabble yabble. This album has some of the most annoying singing I've ever heard. The only relief is when they bring back the pygmies for a short period on one track. I've been a big fan of the Bulgarian Women's Choir for a long time, but the Deep Forest guys must have been bothering the wrong people on "Boheme" because they only succeed in making music that literally causes you to cringe. I believe that the only sample subjects they were able to find in the region were either vagrants, senior citizens, and/or victims of severe indigestion. 1/10 Track in the spotlight: "Ya Ya Ya Ya" with some geezer screaming "Yayayayayaya" for what seems like an eternity. Suggestion for Deep Forest III: Sample streetwalkers and loonies from the good ol' US of A. Construct a song centered around a "Coca chiva, what u want?" sample.

On Wed, 5 Jul 1995, Pete Ashdown wrote:

quoted 25 lines deepforest-- some 1 PLEAZ review thee new album.

> >>deepforest-- some 1 PLEAZ review thee new album. > > >a statement of fact: > >I own a (very small) record store where it is our policy to let people > >listen to an album before purchasing it. I have yet to sell one copy of the > >new Deep Forest. I sold plenty of the first one. Draw your own conclusions... > > My short review: > > TELL THOSE DAMN BULGARIANS TO SHUT UP! Yabble yabble yabble. This album has > some of the most annoying singing I've ever heard. The only relief is when > they bring back the pygmies for a short period on one track. I've been a big > fan of the Bulgarian Women's Choir for a long time, but the Deep Forest guys > must have been bothering the wrong people on "Boheme" because they only > succeed in making music that literally causes you to cringe. I believe that > the only sample subjects they were able to find in the region were either > vagrants, senior citizens, and/or victims of severe indigestion. 1/10 > > Track in the spotlight: "Ya Ya Ya Ya" with some geezer screaming "Yayayayayaya" > for what seems like an eternity. > > Suggestion for Deep Forest III: Sample streetwalkers and loonies from the good > ol' US of A. Construct a song centered around a "Coca chiva, what u want?" > sample. >

I refuse to get the album because I think the whole project is a really explioitive neo-colonialist hunk of shit. The idea of taking all these voices and decontextualizing them and then placing them within a feel good "multi-cultural" context is really problematic, especially since the perpetrators are French and in no way make reference to the very real relations of power that france has and in many ways still has to North Africa and the continent in general. Further, because there is a real attempt I think not to place these people in their own very contemporary moment but to "primativize" them and through them, I think I'm safe in saying, that we're supposed to have some experience of immediacy or connectedness to our tribal roots. I bet there's even quotes from Carl Jung on the liner. I think that if ambient techno want to discriminate itself from new-age music it should seperate itself from new-age ideology- as far as I'm concewrned I'd shelve Deep Forest in the bin with Kitaro and Yanni. In general, one of the reasons why I'm interested in new techno is its utopianism and also its lack of sentimentality. In reaction to the dismal years of grunge rock which was supposed to be the voice of my generation. Grunge it seems participated in a sort of nihilist parody of Punk which at least took its despair as a sort of political statement where grunge thought that it had enough distance from politics that it didn't have to worry (which I think it did- i.e. it was a marketing invention based on "local culture" of the Seattle area, whereas punk was a problematic consequence of real cultural reactions (both progressive and reactionary) to class violence. But just in general, I think recent techno in general, and in its relation to technology has a generally hopeful outlook, which I don't embrace as universally good, but at this moment when there is so much cultural cache to despair and hip ambivalence, I think that it is a really important resource... even the repeated references to ufo's etc particiapte less for me as part of that quasi-mysticism and more as a general urge to see some possibilities in what we simply can't explain for the moment, but may with some work understand in the future. I really can's stop laughing at the samples on the black dog "spanners" for instance which really show a sort of everydayness to this whole phenomenon and at the same time capitalize on its fascination. Again, in relattion to Techno-pop, which I still have a certain relation to (I believe the term is eighties-damage), the new work seems to lack a sort of sentimentality which sort of bled of "new romanticism". I see a sort of criticality in Terre Thaemlitz (even if there is a sort of pessimism as well) but also a sort of critcal position in the choice of samples on the last three (or four if you count colours) CV albums- which I think by the way are the best work they've done in a long long time (especially conversation and International Language). The KLF (and related projects) has also made a sort of politcal statement out of their samples but I think it is really more facil than what I see happening in CV. Actually, I wonder if anyone else has some thoughts on where I might find more material to back up some of my ideas on this. Sorry this is a long post, but I'm rather excited to have somewhere to put these thoughts which have been brewing a while. It seems like a lot of traffic on this list is just footnoting new material and I've been getting a lot of good suggestions, but I think this music, being intelligent gives a lot to think about so I'm hoping some of you will be amenable to pursuing some of this. I guess I still haven't really posted an introduction to the list, but I guess you get a better idea of what I'm thinking about and who I am from this than from my vitals and top ten CD's anyway. Seamus Malone redye@amanda.dorsai.org ________________ __ ][ ]E (C ]H ]N ]E _____________________________________ d e s i g n - m u l t i - m e d i a (7 1 8) 3 8 3 - 6 9 8 8

I agree with most of the points Seamus makes, and am not suprised, as it is pretty much what i expect anyone who is critical is going to uncover (new-agish paradigms, neo-colonialism as the approach to indeginous musicks, and general opportunism). Why is it that, moreso than many other visual/aural products/genres, one can really easily spot these commercial elements by the covers? I listenned to parts of the Deep Forest LP when it came out (the first one) and was dumbfounded that, try I might to not judge a book by its' cover, the design elements of the cover betray the bland commerciality of the album. That's what got under my skin about "Enigma" as well, the music was something an ad exec would cut and paste together at that moment in the 'scene' as I saw it. I want to not find my intuition to slag the record for its' cover right off follow through, but when I heard the music, it was exactly what the cover made it seem. There is no mystery in techno-related cover art it seems. One exception sticks out: the inside cover of the AI B12 lp on Warp. Watercolor/gouche is totally left-field as a visual for entirely electronic music. That's like putting a Raushenberg on the front of a country&western LP: mysterious and reality-bending. Sorry to spew across this bandwidth, but I gotta mention that while I like Dead Can Dance, they had also always bugged me for being sort of a neo-colonial filter for Eastern European music to the gothic crowd. I couldn't get my goth friends to listen to my old lps of the Bulgarian state singers or 16th century harp music, but they'd go buy it on 4AD. Go figure; is a hip label necessary for people to cross national boundaries and check out other cultures' music? <sermon mode off> David Chandler - chandler@nethost.multnomah.lib.or.us (503)301-3011 grep -i casio goodwillbins >> mystudio ; grep -i atari goodwillbins >> mystudio ;

On Thu, 6 Jul 1995, Gibo wrote:

quoted 24 lines I think that if ambient techno want to discriminate itself from new-age

> > I think that if ambient techno want to discriminate itself from new-age > > music it should seperate itself from new-age ideology- as far as I'm > > concewrned I'd shelve Deep Forest in the bin with Kitaro and Yanni. > > In general, one of the reasons why I'm interested in new techno is its > > utopianism and also its lack of sentimentality. In reaction to the dismal > > new-age ideology isn't much different from the hippie nonsense of the > sixties; it shares its basic themes, its total incoherence and its > self-serving sterility. (imho) in the Sixties, we had a lot of cultural > change but nobody had anything even remotely resembling a clue; despite its > massive unrest and the real changes it's had on American life, the only really > valid model for understanding that period is a four-year-old's temper > tantrum. (add hippie mysticism and you get a Tantric tantrum, but I'm > off-topic already.) > > **HOPEFULLY**, our generation is learning something from the past which > we can apply to the future. and hopefully, techno, et alia, expresses > this. the whole idea of continually needing to create new sounds and > styles if you're going to be heard on the dancefloor places a high > premium on innovation. (though the whole x0x fetish seems to defeat > this.) it's a stark contrast to the more nihilistic styles our > generation has created in gangsta rap and grunge, both of which consist > of little more than placing your own personal spin on the music you grew > up with.

I'm not sure about this. A lot of ravers I know are totally apolitical, into personal expereience- even when raves have a lot more potential than any social trend in a long time to become a new form of collective experience. They are into neo-primativism and fail to see how excitiing the fact that this *hasn't* happened before is, that they are at a unique juncture in history. My Ex who is a twelve years older than me sa id when I took her to her first rave- this is what we were trying to do in the seventies (more disco than hippy) but we were never this good at it (and sited alcohol as fucking up the scene and getting in the way of dancing etc). In a word they participate in a quest for immediacy when what they have found imho is the real pleasures available in mediation- totally medieated music (re-corded re-mixed re-cycled) and consciousness.

quoted 3 lines (much bandwidth conserved and text deleted...) >

> > (much bandwidth conserved and text deleted...) > > > Sorry this is a long post, but I'm rather excited to have somewhere to > > put these thoughts which have been brewing a while. It seems like a lot

quoted 9 lines you raised a lot of good points, but in no particular order. I'm totally

> you raised a lot of good points, but in no particular order. I'm totally > amenable to discussing this stuff further, and I hope > other people are too, but the words "bandwidth," "waste" and "edit" come > irresistably to mind. > > my advice is this: you're clearly into writing about this stuff. if these > thoughts are brewing in your head, organize them into specific articles > beforehand. it would make reading them and responding a lot easier. >

Actually, for all my apologizing I've been on lists like Marxism or Film Theory where this would be a short post. I actually use and get a lot out of posting my ideas off the cuff and getting some response- seeing what gets latched onto what is clear to me but seems complicated to others with different backgrounds- before I write to publish. To plug myself a wee little bit, the special issue of P-Form (performance art magazine) on theory and practice I edited is due on newsstands next week or so. There is an article by Ultra-red of the LA ambient space Public Space which is really fantastic, the rest of the book it was taken from should be up on my web page (or Terre Thaemlitz offered to post it too- this guy is Terre's friend I mentioned earlier) when I get a scanner and can OCR it in the next couple weeks. P-form is reachable at randolph@merle.acns.nwu.edu or they have a web page- can't find the URL. Seamus Malone redye@amanda.dorsai.org ________________ __ ][ ]E (C ]H ]N ]E _____________________________________ d e s i g n - m u l t i - m e d i a (7 1 8) 3 8 3 - 6 9 8 8