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- Canada - Toronto & Southern Ont.
-- the END of KISS 92.5 FM
Pages (2): « 1 [2]
Interesting
http://webcast.newswire.ca/archive/rogers/JackFM.wma
Listen to seconds 27-30 - its the main beat from Armin's "Blue Fear"
...surprised I'm the only one who noticed that 
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| Originally posted by Time2Burn Sounds like dumb marketing ploy to me. WTF is Jack? they claim its some new fancy special music formatt. To me it sounds like the same old bs in a different package. When the hell is somebody gonna realize that the electronic music scene in Toronto IS economically viable and bring us a hip new cutting edge station that plays only the goood shit? |
i noticed it but then again swamper is a blue fear whore.
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| Originally posted by Plavka hmmm is it a coincidence that every radio station tarzan dan works at scraps their format? anyways, Z is trying to get a license to start a radio station in Edmonton with the same format. So Edmontoners, get ready for some bon jovi with your ja rule  |
(and lol@bon jovi alongside ja rule)
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| Originally posted by drgoodvibe you know what though, it is slowly catching on. Look how economically viable electronic music is in EUROPE. Its reached monstourous proportions over there. Eventually it will grow once its more accepted and more prevelant here in North America. Remember electronic music hasn't been around for a while compared to other kinds of music, and unfortunatly it doesnt beat with the pulse of a community, such as say rap or hip hop does. Rap is prevelant and popular becuase it "use to" tell the stories of how it was in the ghetto and stuff. OFcourse now its just rediculous but it did once strike a cord with a whole community. And rock and punk each in there rebellious nature capitalized on the mood of the people during times of unrest. Think about it, during the 80's there was the cold war, and a dawn of Star Wars type weapons being thought up, an extremely conservative government (Reagen), along with 80's pop being released. There was a void that needed to be filled and hence why Punk rose up. Same goes with grundge during the earlyl 90's. And now think about it.. grundge became extremely popular for 5 years and then died out pretty much completely. Now in this time of all kinds of music existing, there is no void to fill, so electronic music is going to be slow to grow, and we'll have lots of people who like poop, err i mean pop, and say electronic, or rock and something else.. I'd rather have a genre of music which has much more staying power, so lets take our time, lets not have the scene explode.. ... end rant |
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| Originally posted by Time2Burn Ya know what though? I gotta agree with ya... I think it's only a matter of time that the mainstream media will catch on. In the grand search for the dollah dollah bills and the already over saturation of pop means that record companies and music promotions will be on the look out for viable markets left untapped. You're right it happened with Punk, Rap, and pretty much every thing else. Soon enough multi billion dollar compannies will be throwing parties and names like Tiesto, Moby and BT will be house hold names.... Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.... |
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| Originally posted by drgoodvibe I think guys like Moby are already sort of house hold names. Think about Eminem felt the need to diss Moby and "techno" on one of his most popular songs. The odd thing about eletronic music is that its not the groups that have the notoriety, its the superstar DJ that does. I wish enough recognition was given to the producers and the bands that make the music as well. Eventually electronic music will reach the heights that it is like in the UK and Northern Europe.. Some how though I hope it doesnt get intensly commercial just for the sake of the almighty dollah. When i went to Ibiza, it was so commercial and had lost its underground hippy feeling. Though it'll make the music expand, and reach a wider audience something inside me wrenches at the thought of hearing the latest trance track 6/7 times a day on 103.5 .... |
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| Originally posted by Time2Burn I agree... my point was that I think it is actually happening or in fact has already happened .. say in the late 90's. Rave culture HAS been popularized to a certain degree since its early days in North America... People like Moby ARE house hold names. Trance, Jungle, House ARE generally known by most people.. whether they fully undestand each genre is another story. Granted it hasn't gone over board "yet" - depending on who you talk to; the hardcores still would argue that todays "scene" is commercialized garbage compared to the true roots of the culture. With benson and hedges (read rich ass corporate sponsors) throwing parties at the top clubs I would argue that in due time people will begin to recognize that Trance/Techno/House etc etc IS the SHIZNAT! I say give it 5 years and i could actually walk into work and tell my co workers that I'm going to see Tiesto on Wednesday and they'd actually know what I'm talking about. |
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| Originally posted by drgoodvibe true enough, if what your seeking is to make the genre just simply more popular and accepted by the masses, then big corporations like B&H are doing the job right, I have to admit, the party @ revival was absolutly fantastic and will go down as one of the best ever. I think some of the best parties i've been too were goldclub parties for sure! I hope it just doesnt take a turn for the worse. In all honesty it would be nice to walk into work and tell your work mates your gonna see tiesto and actually have them know, but its going to be way far off in the future thats for sure. |
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| Originally posted by ryanm I agree with everything that you two are saying but IMO I don't think the electronic scene will ever pick up here as it has in other places in the world. The problem (especially in Toronto) is that we live in a very economic and corporate society where people go to work and then go home. I mean look at downtown Toronto after regular business hours, many days the city is empty and baron. Sure they're are many of us who understand and feel the emotion in certain types of electronic music but the majority of our society doesn't. These corporate people are very much like robots, they come to work then go home to be in they're big houses, with family and then go to bed to wake up the next morning to go back to work. Many of these people are more concerned with owning things rather than partaking in social events that create memories that they will have forever but this is the result of the society we live in. You won't be sucessfull unless they have a big house, or a fancy car. It's a very unatural human process IMO and I think people should place mor empahsis on enjoying they're lives the way they want too. so that's my two cents |
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| Originally posted by drgoodvibe I agree whole heartidly.. but then you see examples like NewYork which is even more corporate then t.o.. I mean thats the money capital of the world and yet some of the worlds best clubs and parties are there. Its a shakeup of attitude that this town needs possibly. Most of the city is minorities now, and first generation minorities who werent born here who have kids that were possibly born somewhere else, frown upon having there kids run around the city at all times of night. Its hard in that respect. |
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| Originally posted by ryanm But you can't compare NYC to Toronto. You're comparing the city that never sleeps to Toronto and that just doesn't work. I mean NYC is the immigration capital of the world, it has been around for 450 years and thus has a population of 28 million in the NYC greater area. And although they do have great clubs, I wouldn't say that NYC is like any place in Europe in terms of electronic music. What I mean is that electronic music is not popular as Time2Burn and you wish it to be. And I would think that Toronto actually has more of an underground scene than NYC but I could be wrong. |
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| Originally posted by drgoodvibe no way t.o could have a better underground scene then NYC.. you said it yourself t.o shuts down.. whereass NYC is the city that never sleeps. I totally agree though, t.o needs a whole lot more people in the end. I dont wish electronic music to be anything, I want it to evolve on its own. In honesty I could care less wether it became mainstream or not, or wether it became more widely accepted. I know what I like, and what i'm into, and the fact that there is still a community for it is enough for me. |
He he he ... I was surprised when I heard the kiss 92.5 was gone, ha ha, not like I listen to the radio anyway... btw ... friend told me that the hosts of 92.5 on the last day sweared 
lol wish I heard it myself
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| Originally posted by torontotrance toronto radio sucks ass |
Dersuuzala from the gsc forum:
this article is from salon, saw it on another forum - it's a great read. probably belongs in the music forum, but i put it here so more people would see it.
It may not be on the radio, but it's the most influential -- and unifying -- force in pop music today.
By Andrew John Ignatius Vontz, 6/19/2002
In 1997, at the height of the so-called big beat invasion, I walked into a Foot Locker store in Beverly Hills to buy a new pair of shoes. I may have been looking for some Air Max 95s. At some point, house music came thundering over the in-store sound system and strobes began to flash. I dropped whatever sneaker I was holding and waited for smoke to billow into the room while everyone pumped their fists in the air and danced.
Instead, everyone kept shopping.
Five years later, the big beat invasion is a distant, failed media meme. As exemplified in the work of Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers, big beat was electronic music squeezed into the familiar, easily digestible song structures of rock music. The DJs knew how to party and some of them even looked like rock stars, like Liam from the Prodigy (you know, the "Firestarter guy," the one with the weird mohawk?).
No single genre of electronic music since has received that kind of mainstream attention. Apart from a handful of anomalous acts with catchy signature sounds, like the Chemical Brothers or Moby, both of whom appear to have broken through for good, you won't find electronic music on American charts and you won't see electronic music videos on MTV.
Madonna just doesn't count.
For the past decade, the mainstream and electronic music industries have tried to turn electronic music into a pan-cultural worldwide phenomenon. Globally, this effort has been indisputably successful. Electronic music is pop music in Europe. Kids play with Roland Grooveboxes, not Stratocasters, and dream of being the next Paul Oakenfold, not the next Paul McCartney.
But not in the States, even though house and techno were of course invented in Chicago and Detroit. Electronic music -- dance music -- did have its moment in the mid '90s. And American record companies signed acts, MTV aired some Chemical Brothers videos and Billboard created a dance music chart.
But then the commercial prospects seemed to fizzle all at once. Serious electronic music fans turned against the acts that were promoted to major label status. And at the same time, the record-buying populace decided that they preferred teen pop, jiggy hop and nu metal. How definitive was the flop? On his current single, the biggest-selling act in pop music, Eminem, slams Moby and points out that no one listens to techno.
He's wrong, not just because the techno underground flourishes, but because while no one was listening, electronic music truly attained commercial success in America -- TV commercial success. And soundtrack success. Indeed, you can't turn on the television or go to the theater without hearing electronic music.
Famously, every song from Moby's last album, "Play," was licensed for commercials or soundtracks or both. The French post-house duo Daft Punk act as shills for Palm computing and the Gap. And although you couldn't name a track by the house act Dirty Vegas, you've probably heard their music in a commercial for Mitsubishi automobiles.
Meanwhile, every weekend, thousands of kids across the U.S. strap on leg-swallowing JNCO raver gear, pull on fuzzy backpacks, adorn themselves with kiddy candy jewelry and head to sports arena massives -- giant raves featuring dozens of DJs and sometimes as many as 50,000 partiers. In some parts of the country raving has become as much a rite of passage for teens as high school football games and trying to get laid at the prom. Consequently, an entire generation of Americans has grown up dancing all night and hugging strangers.
Substantial, globally influential electronic music scenes flourish in New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. Many feel the latter city has become the epicenter of the electronic music universe because of its proximity to the mainstream music industry and because of its proliferation of clubs, massives, festivals and illegal one-off events in a multitude of electronic music sub-genres.
Mix CDs from the top DJs who play these clubs sell well, if not well enough to earn gold certificates. Paul Oakenfold's 1998 release "Tranceport," for example, sold 222,000 copies and a recent independently released continuous mix by relatively unknown New York DJ Louie DeVito has sold 315,000 copies according to the Village Voice. Electronic music is even starting to catch on in the heartland, where cutting-edge DJs pack clubs in Kansas City, Mo.
And finally, with the success of Radiohead and groups that use electro-beats, elements of turntablism and loops, electronic music production techniques have now become the norm in rock music. The digital and computer-based recording equipment long used by electronic artists is now the industry standard in pop music as well. In this respect at least, Americans are now listening to electronic music almost every time they turn on the radio or television. - - - - - - - - - - - -
In April, at the Coachella music festival in Southern California, Microsoft passed out thousands of glowsticks bearing the X-Box logo during a set by British progressive trance/tech house duo Sasha and John Digweed. So if American corporations are so fond of electronic music, why don't we hear it on the radio? See the videos on MTV? And popularly speaking, will the music ever amount to more than sonic cotton candy for watching movies, shopping at the mall and waiting for "Survivor" to come back from a commercial break?
Part of the problem is that electronic music still faces the same old prejudices that have plagued it from the start. You've heard them all before: Electronic music is repetitive; it's empty fluff; it's soulless; the people who make it play with computers, not instruments. Because these criticisms continue to come up after more than a decade, it's worth addressing some of them. As with all other genres of music, of course, there are good electronic music tracks and bad ones. Whether you like an electronic song or electronic music in general is wholly dependent on context. Just as a certain intellectual context makes it possible to appreciate John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen, so dancing is the key to the electronic aesthetic.
The most important thing to remember about the most globally prevalent strains of electronic music, house and trance, is that the purpose of both is to keep people moving on a dance floor. That repetitive four-four beat is supposed to be repetitive. At the same time, that steady kick drum leaves room for endless rhythmic variance and progression, just like the four-bar blues structure leaves room for endless innovation in rock.
Empty fluff? Yes, there's plenty of that in electronic music. But so what? Some of the greatest rock songs, from "Blue Suede Shoes" to "Yellow Submarine," have been deliriously fluffy. And an aversion to brainless meringue hasn't stopped millions from buying Garth Brooks or Destiny's Child.
As for the charge that electronic artists are not musicians, computers and digital tools are merely that. The music does not write itself. The artist, however, does enjoy a few advantages that he or she might not get with traditional instruments. Because electronic music is usually (but not always) digitally based and is frequently created on computers, it is unusually elastic. Electronic musicians compose with palettes of sound limited only by their imaginations and their patience. If they want to drop some tablas into the middle of a song or use a sample of breaking glass as the rhythmic basis of a song, their dream is often only a double click away.
A related problem is the ongoing confusion between DJs and the people who actually make electronic music. Although more and more high-end DJs are releasing full-length albums of their own work, such as Timo Maas' "Loud," the most prevalent form of electronic music on the market today is the continuous DJ mix, which approximates a live set, with the DJ picking tracks by other artists and mixing them together.
A DJ is still best appreciated as a live performer. When top DJs perform at clubs or massives, even the most educated listeners in the audience probably won't recognize many of the tracks, because such DJs often drop ultra-rare records that are made available exclusively to them months ahead of the listening public. DJs of this caliber also often use dub plates, records that will literally wear out after a very limited number of plays, which they produce themselves or are floated to them by the best producers in the world, and which the public might never even be able to buy.
All but the most savvy of electronic music consumers, then, are clueless about who the people are who actually produce this music, how they do it, what they look like, what they wear, how they party or any of the other details that make celebrities out of rock stars. A slightly larger number of music listeners and consumers know the names, styles and techniques of top-tier DJs.
DJs don't speak. Most don't produce their own full-length albums. When they perform, their only motions are precise hand movements and brief shuffles to record bins that are obscured from view and confined to a 5-foot square area. There are no David Lee Roth jump kicks, synchronized boy-band dances, Michael Jackson moonwalks or Janet Jackson ass-shaking.
For American consumers, this is a problem.
The average American listener is used to going to performances featuring vocalists and instruments that are recognizable and produce the kinds of sounds that they've spent decades listening to. They expect these sounds to be accompanied by the visual spectacle of singers, rappers and dancers on stage doing their damnedest to entertain and otherwise get them fired up. To people who have only experienced music this way the concept of the electronic music DJ and the dance experience must be utterly perplexing.
If you're used to live music as entertainment -- in the sense of watching performers make spectacles of themselves as they create music while you passively consume the sonic byproduct of their efforts -- then enjoying electronic music requires a shift in aural expectations, synthesis, digestion and physical participation. While there are certain branches of electronic music, such as the intelligent dance music created by producers like Boards of Canada, that are made for listening rather than dancing, by and large electronic music is made to make people dance. And when you dance, the DJ takes you on a journey, but he or she is usually not the focus of your experience at a club or festival or wherever you hear the music. Dancing is.
Most Americans still have a hard time relating to this.
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Call it the soccer problem. America remains pretty much the last country on earth that doesn't really care about the sport. (And even the unexpected success of the U.S. team at this year's World Cup is unlikely to change that permanently.) As with electronic music, you could argue that we don't really like it because it doesn't really jive with our cult of individualism. We believe that history is made by great men and women, whether in politics, sports or the arts.
In spite of their homogeneity, rock and hip-hop are still the music of the individual. And both rock and hip-hop, with their alternately boastful, self-deprecating, uplifting and emotionally self-destructive lyrics, masquerade as the music of the rebel. The fact is, both genres have been bought and sold and recycled so many times that it's hard to connect with most pop music on an emotional level. Who feels the pain of some multimillionaire who had a bad childhood? Still, the ideologies espoused in pop music are far more in line with the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, me-against-the-world myth that dominates America's vision of history, a kind of romantic ideal perhaps best embodied by the image of Ted Nugent hunting elk by his lonesome with a large gun. And for the most part, electronic music, without words, cannot forge this ideological connection to American listeners.
So electronic music remains invisible. But at the same time, it's the sound that keep everyone cheering at monster truck rallies and baseball games, dancing on the weekends and cruising the Gap. Whether we know it or not, we love this music. Advertisers wouldn't use it otherwise.
Will Americans ever admit it? Probably. For a number of reasons that have largely been overlooked by champions of electronic music in the popular press, electronic music's success in America has taken longer to happen than it has in Europe. But it can happen. Here's why.
The omnipresence of electronic music in advertising and films continues to prime listeners. Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By" was only an import record when it debuted in that Mitsubishi commercial with the woman dancing in the front seat. Weeks later, it was playing on commercial radio, identified by New York DJs as "the song from that commercial."
Further, like the fans of Phish-style jam bands who chronicle every move of their favorite groups and follow them across America, the electronic music listenership is loyal and dedicated, and until this music is everywhere, they will travel to find it wherever they can, turning on others along the way. When the music industry finally wakes up from its decade-long slumber and wraps its tendrils around electronic music, the fan base will already exist to ensure its commercial success.
There remain two problems: Electronic music songs mostly don't have lyrics, and electronic music artists don't have public images. But just because the music doesn't have lyrics doesn't mean that it's not smart or complex.
Further, electronic music is constantly evolving. Even critics who get this aspect of electronic music fail to understand that some electronic music artists and DJs who are hugely popular aren't content to continue to pump out the same styles of beats over and over. A review in the June 6 Rolling Stone criticized Sasha and Digweed for spinning undynamic, heavily repetitive tunes at a show in San Francisco.
This San Francisco performance happened to be the same weekend that I saw the duo at Coachella. Over the course of the past year, I've noticed that a lot of trance producers and DJs have shifted from the histrionic, arpeggiated synths that have dominated progressive trance for the past several years toward a far more stripped-down sound that relies on broken kick-drum beats, long, minimalist builds borrowed from the tech-house genre (as often heard on Digweed's own Bedrock label), tribal hand-drum samples, and strange, simple breaks in lieu of snare roll orgasms.
This is the kind of music that Digweed has been spinning and producing since at least the time of his 2001 Global Underground performance in Los Angeles, so to criticize him for not playing the same records that they did in 1996 is to fail to understand that these artists aren't the Rolling Stones.
More generally, what some critics of electronic music don't (yet) understand or acknowledge is that the absence of words provides the opportunity for narratives that transcend the boundaries of language to be built in much the same way that narratives are built in jazz and classical music. Trance, house and jungle, for example, all use builds, instrumentation and sampling to greater and lesser degrees to create powerful transporting narratives. In this way, dancers in such disparate locales as the Moroccan desert, the beach in Tel Aviv, Ibiza, the Ministry of Sound in London and Giant in Los Angeles are all able to connect to the same track. Language and image are no longer barriers; the only musical language that matters is the language of tension, release and dynamism implicit in the construction of electronic music.
Ultimately, then, the factors that seem to be holding back electronic music from succeeding in America are some of the same reasons that its widespread commercial success may very well be inevitable. Record companies don't understand why mass groups of strangers get off on congregating in dark rooms to dance their asses off to records made by invisible artists from around the world. Sooner than later they will -- or, in the grand tradition of the record industry, they'll simply buy a record label that does.
What corporate America can't completely commodify or sell, though, is the experience of hearing this music on a dance floor surrounded by people who are going off. At its best, the electronic music experience brings together people from all walks of life to celebrate and move to the same unifying rhythms. And that is its power, especially in a Balkanized era of global strife, terror and paranoia. The beauty of it is that it is born again every night in dark rooms, open fields, beaches, forests, warehouses and desert dunes around the planet -- wherever people mass around sound systems and celebrate to the pulse of electronic music.
^^^^^^^^^^ wow great read!!!
It's about time....that station had too many problems and too much shitty music. The new one is prolly gonna suck too. oh well. Let them try.
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