IDM Mailing Archive

Granted, my knowledge of Goa/psychedelic trance is rather limited (Hallucinogen, Juno Reactor, Etnica, but no comps), but I really fail to understand the animosity it engenders. From _Wire_ contributors griping about how the genre is overrunning the UK club scene, to usenet "Goa is shite" posts, to these recent list submissions: From: "Otto Koppius" <o.r.koppius@student.utwente.nl>

quoted 1 line I'm all for a broad definition of idm, but I draw the line at goa.

> I'm all for a broad definition of idm, but I draw the line at goa.

Tom Tonger <tom.tonger@uni-koeln.de> wrote:

quoted 3 lines IMO, this concept is why people who like decent music, as we on

> IMO, this concept is why people who like decent music, as we on > this list do, usually don't like melodic stuff to dance to. anyone > here who likes goa? no. exactly.

The consensus seems to be that Goa simply doesn't qualify as intelligent dance music. As far as I can tell from my years of lurking and listening, IDM used to mean "abstract dance music", encompassing the emerging ambient techno and trance genres, all distinguished most prominently by the exclusion of lyric vocals. Anything from the Black Dog to Goa's acid house progenitors was fair game. Of late, the range of intellects represented by IDM seems to have attenuated to the reflexive mocking wit of recent AFX, Paradinas, or Squarepusher. There are a lot of things to fault in Goa trance. The casual orientalisms of the cover art promise world spanning influences, mystic moods, or at least ethnic tourism, but rarely deliver on any of these counts. Anyone who has played with sequencers knows how easy it is to produce cliched trance. And the inevitable 4/4 kick sounds utterly naive after the asymetric, syncopated, and fractured beats of the jungle influence. But within these formulaic contraints, there is still room for textural innovation and towering contrapuntal layers. Where Autechre (who I adore) dislocate the listener by forcing her to focus on the permutations of too little, Hallucinogen achieve this by an overload of modulations. It takes skill to make a minimalist track work, but also to make a maximalist track retain an unmuddy intensity for it's duration. Oops, time to go. I'll add more later, but in the meantime, I'd love to hear of any diva-free jungle or jungly IDM with the layered melodic intensity of goa. Any suggestions? D.S. Roy aka ersatz@hal-pc.org Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Picasso