I think you're forgetting that, despite the scene having become way more globalized nowadays, there's still plenty of differences between every local scene. Things are genuinely shit in some places. Some places don't even have a scene.

___________________
sempre contra a corrente do jogo

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec in any case i tend to feel that less explicit emotional content is better, because explicit emotion inevitably becomes a farce (armin's new album)

I completely, comprehensively, utterly disagree with "inevitably". You're taking an obvious failure in execution and curing the headache by cutting off the head. Explicit emotional music is frequently a farce. Solution: stop making it. The fact you'd say it "inevitably" leads to farce would indicate that it's actually more difficult to be overt and still credible and effective.

In my personal opinion, the progressive house of the mid-90s (epic house) was the most successful execution of overt emotional content without lapsing into farce or over-kill. Not only were the emotions maximalist but so was every aspect of production (for that time) and composition. This is actually why I think the epic house movement was so short lived: it was too difficult to make. Not enough producers had the talent to pull it off.

quote:

Originally posted by paulandrews Do you think the listener's response to that has to be lesser too?

I'm not particularly interested in the listener's response. I'm more concerned with the attitudes and values, and also the actual aesthetics of the music. I'm not ruling out the validity of minimalist music, and I'm not trying to discredit the reaction of people who enjoy it. What I am doing is attacking the ideologies behind minimalism's current dominance.

When you actually think about it, the control of what's cool and trendy in electronic music comes down to relatively few people. The actual majority of electronic listeners overwhelmingly prefer things that are not cool, or trendy. The massive success of Basshunter in the UK charts underlines the silent majority of people who love Scouse House and cheesy dance music despite the complete and utter media silence towards it. If you take a genre like jungle, it's still relatively popular within its own scene, but since a spell in the mid-90s it hasn't been the trendy genre and hasn't enjoyed the attentions of the media. Jungle isn't trendy, but dubstep now is. Dubstep gets far more coverage than jungle right now, even though jungle is a larger, older and more widely established scene.

In terms of the idea of emotion being uncool, this idea is being perpetuated very much by a small group of people. A few DJs, a few key labels, a few key websites. You have to wonder exactly how much of a shit people might have given about The Field had Pitchfork not praised him so highly. Minimal/tech-house/techno is actually not a huge scene. It doesn't have chart success, it doesn't sell in huge numbers and the actual number of people dancing to it outside its major centres is probably very low. In Berlin or London or wherever it might be very popular, but outside there you'll find it's probably no more popular than any other genre, and perhaps less.

This "less-emotion" aesthetic movement is in power largely because it keeps telling us it is. It never ceases to amuse me when Mixmag, who used to love progressive house when it was trendy, now can't resist sniping at the genre. The same mindset is true of the RA review I cited. The attitude seems to be that everyone who ever liked progressive in the 90s was actually wrong and couldn't see how cheesy and overblown their stuff actually was, where as minimal has shown us the way and is actually the right way to do things. The exaggerated rhetoric of the RA review, which is quite clearly talking shit by saying the compilation is "exactly the same as any number of 90s releases", is the aggressive ideology at work. The likelihood is that in a decade we'll have found a new aesthetic direction and we'll be looking back at minimal and making exaggerated claims about its deficiencies and failures in order to bolster support for the bandwagon its currently profitable to chase.

I'm not trying to say minimal is better or worse than 90s prog, or anything remotely like that. However, I can quite clearly see people voraciously attacking any music that in any way resembles 90s prog and using all kinds of propoganda to devalidate it and its contrary perspective. The more key people do it, the more it seeps down to the crowds, who accept this new ideology and asphyxiate anything that wants to be more emotionally direct, in the process destroying a valid form of musical expressionism under the false truth of it being "cheesy".

___________________
Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J In my personal opinion, the progressive house of the mid-90s (epic house) was the most successful execution of overt emotional content without lapsing into farce or over-kill. Not only were the emotions maximalist but so was every aspect of production (for that time) and composition. This is actually why I think the epic house movement was so short lived: it was too difficult to make. Not enough producers had the talent to pull it off.

i'm not sure, but I think you just proved my point:

i'm glad it was able to be explictly emotional and not become a farce.

but people don't make epic house anymore...

you're right - I agree that it is more difficult to pull off good music this way.

it's great that you have such admiration for it, but i think it's distorting your views somewhat...


I don't think the reason for its demise is a lack of talent but the result of changing values in the culture.

edit: also I am considering Armin's new album as a symptom of a greater societal epidemic. Maybe you take issue with that as a method, I can see why. But I am trying to look at this question of 'inevitability' as a collective generic phenomenon. Sure, there are exceptions, but the whole idea of 'genre theory' is to consider a thing as having its own sort of collective, generic life.

And I tend to think that in any movement of art, it's inevitable that the explicit expression or execution of an idea/genre moves towards farce if for no other reason than it begins to parody itself after a certain critical mass is achieved.


people are still making techno after basic channel (whose emotional content I consider to be 'implicit', but i don't think it's in any way a farce. atheus - deploy, quantec - metamorphosed, etc

Last edited by nefardec on Apr-14-2008 at 23:04

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec edit: also I am considering Armin's new album as a symptom of a greater societal epidemic. Maybe you take issue with that as a method, I can see why. But I am trying to look at this question of 'inevitability' as a collective generic phenomenon. Sure, there are exceptions, but the whole idea of 'genre theory' is to consider a thing as having its own sort of collective, generic life.

I'm not talking about a genre so much as a general aesthetic. You could use Armin as an example of what has become of epic/uplifting/vocal trance. Even then though, I'd take issue because the result alone is not proof of the theory. Just because epic/vocal trance did descend into Armin, doesn't mean it has to. You'd have to reperform the experiment to see if the emergent scenario was the same, and that's an impossibility.

quote:

And I tend to think that in any movement of art, it's inevitable that the explicit expression or execution of an idea/genre moves towards farce if for no other reason than it begins to parody itself after a certain critical mass is achieved.

But is that an essential property of explicit expression? I think it's somewhat naive to say that minimalism is immune to self-parody, because it is just as strong in character as explicit expression. The amount of "shit minimal" around would suggest that slavish copying of genre conventions is already well in effect, and it's not hard to see this mindless imitation for-the-sake-of-it as a grotesque caricature of the "real thing".

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec it's great that you have such admiration for it, but i think it's distorting your views somewhat...

I could say the same is true of you. It seems fairly obvious you aren't a trend-follower and you have genuine love of the music you play. However, you have the current establishment firmly on your side so your perspective is subject to constant affirmation by the movement you fit into. Imagine loving a style of music and then finding it suddenly come to power, with everyone important now "getting" your musical love. To you, this is the pinnacle of the musical experience, where your perosonal tastes perfectly align with the zeitgeist and you are living in that moment. You're much less likely to question the revisionism and propoganda of the ideology, even if you have no direct part in it.

___________________
Mixes:
> Maximum Elevation [Progressive House]
> DI.FM 26th Anniversary Guest Mix [Progressive House]
> Live @ Dance:Love:Hub London, 11.10.2025
> Higher Peaks [Progressive House]
> Dance:Love:Hub Afterparty (The Return) 23.11.24

Like these sets? Come see me play live at Kibosh in Manchester: https://www.instagram.com/kibosh.mcr/

Last edited by SYSTEM-J on Apr-14-2008 at 23:16

quote:

Originally posted by noikeee I think you're forgetting that, despite the scene having become way more globalized nowadays, there's still plenty of differences between every local scene. Things are genuinely shit in some places. Some places don't even have a scene.

Absolutely, but the opposite is true as well. Just because your podunk town has a scene full of posturer's doesn't mean the rest of us are suffering as well. I think it has much more to do with the parties people choose to go to. You would think there were two separate WMCs in Miami given the disparity in reviews. As usual the folks going to the big clubs to see the big jocks found themselves over-charged, ripped off, trampled on and marginalized, while those of us who stuck to the smaller parties thrown by like-minded people and with passionate talent had the time of our lives.

___________________

quote:

Originally posted by ******** Seplling don't demonstrate intelligence and educatoin - knowing does.

quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles I think this is a general trend that applies to more than just music. Unguarded enthusiasm and overt expression of emotion are out. Sarcasm, the appearance of apathy, and ridicule are in. Those are what get you cool points. Their translation into music becomes "subtlety." EDM is at a musical place similar to where classical was in the early 20th century, IMO. At that time the fashionable composers felt that it would be "kitsch" to keep using the emotional gestures of the 19th century Romantic composers (similar to how producers today view the excesses of '90s trance). They thought of the melodically rich compositions and sweeping arrangements of those compositions as "old hat," part of an outmoded era of music, quite similar to how that RA reviewer spoke about the new Seaman Renaissance compilation. It was uncool to write such "obvious" stuff anymore. They thought it was beneath them, childish, to attempt to "move" people with music -- or at least it become "uncool" to try to do so in an open and accessible manner. So what did they do? They started writing atonal and process music, purposefully divorcing themselves from any close relationship to the emotions of their audiences, and striving for originality by going "beyond" tonality. The EDM analogue to these atonal works are the complex, effects-laden but melodically sparse sounds adopted by so many "minimal" and tech-house producers. Going "beyond" the easy openness, enthusiasm, and frank expression of emotion that was so prevalent in '90s dance music.

Yes, i thought of the same analogy recently as well. EDM was like the micrography of the whole classical music, starting with the more raw but romantic music, developing into more epic and bigger compositions (romantic), passing through more experimental phases (impressionist, expressionist) ending in atonal musicless obscurity.


Now i understand that "emotion" is a subjective first-person experience making the whole thing very relative. Although, i tend to have some crypto-platonist aesthetical belief (yes it is a belief) which says that :



"If we play various pieces of music towards a crowd and ask them to rate the emotionality of those pieces of music, and this crowd has no preconceptions, previous attitudes, stereotypes and beliefs towards the sounds which are played to them, is it quite possible that we will end-up in a statisitical normal distribution, in which all subjects would have agreed on what is the most emotional towards what is the least emotional" ( a bell curve).


That is, there are some "universal aesthetics" in music, which don't neccesarily have a metaphysical/mystical (platonic) explanation (e.g. the highest emotion reflects a platonic/godly ideal), but maybe result from hard-wired evolutionary processes. This would mean, that, a combination of notes rated to be of "high emotionality" from our sample, would be considered to be of "high emotionality" from the general population as well, and this, regardless of the instrument which plays them. E.g. I consider this track to be of "high emotionality", and if one leaves behind preconceptions, attitudes, stereotypes and beliefs towards (post) rock (which could be negative, e.g. i listen only to EDM, rock is crap and hence i perceive this to be crap as well), most would consider this track to be highly emotional (i played this track to many people with many different musical preferences and all agreed to this, but still i need a largel sample):

whole-track:


Explosions in the Sky- "Your Hand In Mine"

http://www.explosionsinthesky.com/m...rHandInMine.mp3


IMO, these simple chord progressions would still sound beautiful, even if they are played in a piano, in a violin or in a saw-synth etc. Plus, this is modern rock so i would like to add tha the "lack of emotion" is something that IMO characterises EDM and by no means modern music as a whole in general.



IMO, deep/tech house and minimal have magnitudes of emotion but they are low, i really mean that. I doubt that anyone is going to cry or feel really happy and full by listening to any of the tracks listed in Nefardec's list. Yes, these sounds are cool, primal,moody hypnotic sounds,so yes, they tend to evoke some basic emotional response, but i don't thing that the emotion they evoke are of high magnitude (see my first post). Simply because they don't have substantial melody. I tend to like these deep sounds myself but i never got goosebumbs by listening to a Timewriter track because they are not melodic enough, or to be more precise, because they don't have enough melody! I like them because they are really basic and hypnotic.


I also thing that many kinds of music are more of an "acquired listen", and by saying this, i mean that, in the same way that thoughts, beliefs, stereotypes and attitudes for something can make us hate it, in the same way these same internal representations can make us love it. That is, simply because "minimal" is considered to be:
"cool",
"more experimental",
"it has a more mature crowd",
"it is more elegant",
"it is more futuristic" etc...

these propositions can readily distort the emotional experience one has and indeed make him/her really love it! This is an acquired aesthetic and i agree that it happens all the time towards all forms of music (towards EVERYTHING actually!) but, despite such environmental influences, i still thing that there is a more basic universal aesthetic core.

quote:

Originally posted by Clovis Absolutely, but the opposite is true as well. Just because your podunk town has a scene full of posturer's doesn't mean the rest of us are suffering as well. I think it has much more to do with the parties people choose to go to. You would think there were two separate WMCs in Miami given the disparity in reviews. As usual the folks going to the big clubs to see the big jocks found themselves over-charged, ripped off, trampled on and marginalized, while those of us who stuck to the smaller parties thrown by like-minded people and with passionate talent had the time of our lives.

And lots of fake moustaches.

quote:

Originally posted by PETRAN I doubt that anyone is going to cry or feel really happy and full by listening to any of the tracks listed in Nefardec's list. Yes, these sounds are cool, primal,moody hypnotic sounds,so yes, they tend to evoke some basic emotional response, but i don't thing that the emotion they evoke are of high magnitude (see my first post). Simply because they don't have substantial melody. I tend to like these deep sounds myself but i never got goosebumbs by listening to a Timewriter track because they are not melodic enough, or to be more precise, because they don't have enough melody! I like them because they are really basic and hypnotic.

well, people are different I guess. These things tend to affect me more, whereas I get turned off from really gushy stuff.

In any case, this was a thread about emotion, not a specific kind of emotion

trance produced now a days still has plenty of emotion in it. maybe u dislike what trance is now a days or u are too old to be listening to trance, but it still has as much energy as it ever did and gives u a great feeling inside, atleast for me and i know alot of other ppl too.

___________________
AustralianGQ

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec I think the most emotional dance music provokes emotions you already have rather than attempt to force their own upon you. There is a lot of dance music that presents emotion in a very roundabout way, like trance music that uses classical melodies and fake string sounds, obvious breakdowns, huge buildups, vocals, etc... that's really easy for most people to get into because it is a sort of social sign for emotion what i am interested is more a basic emotional response in the guts, visceral, one which is arrived at and intuited rather than adopted or mimicked. (everyone reach for the lasers!) For me this basic emotional response is instinctive, unconscious. I don't listen to music to change my mood. I change my music to fit my mood. I drown myself in it. related to drowning and to what i find emotionally/spiritually important in dance music are these words from mircea elidade's "the sacred and the profane" I find this immersive quality in dub techno and deep house for instance, or the thickly layered, undulating formlessness that is detroit techno. It provides a return to a basic emotionally mutable state (the water). a 'framework for freedom'. In the midst of this sea of possibility, emotions surface and take form

Ok, i just red your post. Adding to my previous post...yes...you have right there. Deep and dubby techno produces a basic response but it is not emotional. It is a feeling deriving-as you say-from the sound's mimicking of ambient environments. This,(and as i said in my previous post) reflects universal hard-wired pre-given processes that exist in the human brain, namely, that the sounds of water/air/sea etc. sound pleasant because, through out the evolutionary history, the human brain is evolved to interact with and live on such environments.


IMO, (as you said?), what these genres do is to "trick" the human brain by evoking somthing "pseudo-archetypical" rooted on instinct and biological predespositions.

I want to discriminate between a feeling and a more elaborate emotional experience though. A feeling could be something more simple and abstract, e.g. a pleasant feeling. An emotional experience is a more elaborate reaction comprised of both physiological determinants as well as feelings and cognitive processes, resulting in the phenomenological experience of "emotion", or, happyness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust (these are probably the basic 5 ones-hence "pleasure" is part of happyness but it is not equal to it). When i'm talking about emotions, i'm talking about such elaborate phenomenological experiences not just any feeling. My theory is that even these more elaborate experiences/responses can be evoked by universal information hard-wired in the brain. Hence a specific note-sequence could, up to a certain extend, evoke such an emotional experience. Why? Because it could possibly mimick language processes such prosody.


Since IMO you need a note-sequence to do that, i doubt that genres such as tech-house and minimal techno can carry emotional information, since they lack a note-sequence in the first place. Their sounds can be pleasant or moody or hypnotic (e.g. various feelings) but not emotional.

Last edited by PETRAN on Apr-15-2008 at 01:22

PETRAN,

it's interesting that you make that distinction, because I had the same realization just a few hours ago as I was waiting for the train.

The basic response is definitely not the same kind of emotion.


I was thinking to myself whether or not it was in fact emotionless. The kind of music I was describe is rather meditative, and meditation is generally anti-emotion. Emotion clouds the meditation. Eliade, in that passage I quoted describes the reverse of the 'flood/deluge' (immersion) as the creation of form (emersion). I think emotion is related to this concept of creating a form from the formless. This is why I think melodic forms and structures carry emotions.


But in all my personal experience meditative music becomes rather emotional. It's not an instant emotion that someone would get from a Power Chord, but it's an emotion arrived at from the repetition.

We have to define emotion here for this thread to be useful. I mean, ambivalence, Loneliness, Boredom, Anxiety, Depression, etc can all be emotions that might correspond to minimal techno. They're not the same as 'Euphoria' obviously, but they are nonetheless emotions.

In any case I think euphoria can build from repetition. (eg 808 state - the extended pleasure of dance, ricardo villalobos - 808 the bassqueen) tracks like the villalobos and jam & spoon - stella give me a certain kind of building reverie that is far stronger than the sugar high I could get on epic trance. simple dub techno tracks like atheus make me feel like i'm flying. it's a euphoria that stems from the freedom


also if it makes any sense, I really like music that inspires a sense of wonder and mystery. wonder is an emotion, right? i definitely aim to create that sense of mystery in my own composition

as you said, I believe melodic sequences are related to human language. Aril Brikha's Ex Machina is a great example of an emotional melody that 'speaks'

However, there is plenty of emotion to be found chord changes over time.

Chopin's Prelude, is a great example.