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came across this interesting little article on minimal...
What is minimal? by Philip Sherburne
Whither minimal? Once a niche proposition, now an increasingly bulky subset of house and techno-- at least in name-- the genre is suddenly ubiquitous. A year or two ago, when Ubercoolische.com launched its not-so-gentle parody of the minimal trinity (Ricardo Villalobos, Richie Hawtin, and Magda), bringing the world the unforgettable slogan "Magda make the tea," it felt like an inside joke for Berlin clubbers and sad sacks who fantasize about club life in Berlin. But these days the word is everywhere, from I Love Music to Mixmag, a magazine that spent years pretending that German dance music didn't exist. And right on schedule, a minor minimal backlash is in the works, giving the kerplunkers their come-uppance with rhetoric of "real" musical values and resistance to formula. Even Kompakt, long one of the labels most closely affiliated with minimal house and techno, is getting into the anti- act: the press release for John Dahlbäck's new EP (as Hug) reads, "Here comes the new HUG! A massive alternative to the enormous flood of similar sounding 'Minimal Techno' records where you often can't differentiate between the 'original' and the 'imitation,' HUG is real music that one feels and needs."
Imagine a rock band using the same language to deride disco, or an underground rapper decrying "manufactured" mainstream hip-hop, and you'll realize how surreal this turn of events is. Rockism rears its head in the strangest of places. Now it's led disco's children to indulge in some of the same arguments that fueled the "Disco Sucks" backlash of the late 1970s.
If ever there were any doubt that "minimal" had jumped its rubber squeeze-toy shark, the news that OM Records has released Electrolush, a compilation of "the very best of minimal and electro nouveau," is surely the red flag over the surf. OM, for the uninitiated, is a San Francisco label specializing in deep house, "soulful" hip-hop, and downtempo; it's fair to say that accessibility is one of its defining traits. That's not to say that OM is without its merits-- for every Kaskade, the sugary pop-house star, there's a Rithma or Lance DeSardi, West Coast producers of deep, focused house grooves. (Ok, maybe there's a Rithma or Desardi for every four Kaskades.) But you don't have to be a defender of the label to agree that there's something weird about supersaturated OM suddenly sticking up for minimal techno; it's telling that they still feel the need to counter "electro" with "lush."
Something, clearly, has changed in dance music's cultural capital; a genre once relegated to junk-bond status is suddenly trading briskly and entering markets unimaginable just a few years ago. Indeed, it's difficult to pick up any dance music compilation these days without stumbling upon tracks from Dominik Eulberg, Trentemøller, and Robag Wruhme, along with even more esoteric fare. Even Misstress Barbara, traditionally a devotee of "the mainstream end of stadium/club techno," as Discogs.com bluntly puts it, got into the act this year with a mix whose press release trumpeted Barbara's brave move into hitherto unexplored genres. Can you guess at the tracklisting? Let's see, there's Donnacha Costello, Argy's "Love Dose" (Luciano mix, natch), and dark horses Alex Under, Sebo K, and Move D. Plus Nathan Fake's "Dinamo" (did you need to ask if it was Eulberg's mix?). Oh yeah, and Trentemøller-- twice.
None of this is a bad thing: Minimal's increasing popularity is good for fans and artists alike. Especially artists. The only way a musician making 12" singles with pressings in the low-to-mid four figures can make any money is to license tracks to comps and mixes. Indeed, we should be happy that Eulberg finally has enough money to install solar panels in his Black Forest cabin, and hope that the music programmers on "The O.C." take notice of the trend. Far beyond scene politics and petty partisanship, the issue here is the slippage that the very word "minimal" has taken as it shed its clicks and cuts for an unprecedented amount of buzz.
The irony, of course, is that most of this music really isn't minimalist at all, neither in terms of sound selection, rhythmic construction, or-- and often, especially-- arrangement. In fact, some of the key musicians currently identified as the vanguard of the minimal march-- Pantytec, Matt John, Dominik Eulberg, even Trentemøller-- boast some of the most unpredictable, dizzyingly detail-intensive, and convoluted tunes out there. How did this come to pass?
Sound design lends some credence-- or at least convenience-- to the term. Much current minimal favors the truncated samples, reduced bitrates, and general proclivity for clicks and pings that characterized the flourishing of a "microhouse" sensibility six or seven years ago. But hardly all of it: Areal, with its roster of Basteroid, Metope, and electro-pop darling Ada, boasts some of the heaviest-caliber analog weaponry around, so gloriously overdriven that it could fry iPod earbuds with a single filter sweep. Areal's tagline is "Tech-Electronic Minimalism," despite its confidently maximilist sound, which helps shed some light on the enduring run of minimalist rhetoric. From Minus to Underl_ne, from Kompakt's dots to Perlon's subtle-but-stark graphic identity, there's no shortage of labels that have intentionally utilized minimalist signifiers to stake their aesthetic claims.
As always, a little history helps clarify things. As I wrote in an essay for Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner's Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, it's unclear exactly when the term "minimal" crept into techno's vocabulary; as early as 1992, though, Simon Reynolds was referring to the work of Detroit techno pioneers like Derrick May as "elegantly minimalist," in contrast to the rough-and-tumble productions of the UK's breakbeat 'ardkore movement. Also in 1992, a user on the rec.music.reviews newsgroup, archived by Google, can be found referring to a "minimal bleep style," and by 1993 a poster to the alt.rave newsgroup, attempting to make some sense of electronic dance music's proliferation of subgenres, uses "minimal techno" to describe the work of both Detroit's Carl Craig and Finland's Säkhö label. By 1994-- the year that Robert Hood released his "Minimal Nation" EP on Jeff Mills' Axis imprint-- the term seems to have caught on as a general descriptor for any stripped-down derivative of classic Detroit style.
I'd say there have been four slightly asynchronous waves of minimalist dance music so far, setting aside for a moment the inherent minimalism of early house and hip-hop, which took the aesthetics of reduction and repetition as givens. (Punk and no-wave were often plenty minimalist themselves, both in a literal sense and often in relation to classic Minimalism as well; Glenn Branca or Swans have much more in common with Steve Reich than your average Perlon release.) The first wave saw artists like Mills, Hood, Hawtin, Paul Johnson, and Daniel "DBX" Bell reacting to the stripped-down intensities of early house music, focusing specifically on those qualities facilitating frictionless, streamlined grooves. The second phase overlaps with the first, as Basic Channel-- promoters of the Detroit-Berlin connection-- move from groove-based house tracks to ethereal, almost ambient cuts that read like a death mask of techno, preserving its features but hollowing out the form. Wolfgang Voigt in his Mike Ink guise and the Profan and Force Inc. labels, among many others, follow suit in varied but related European responses to a largely African-American electronic music.
By the mid-to-late 90s, minimalism becomes more self-conscious, as Mille Plateaux's Clicks + Cuts series theorizes an aesthetics not only of reduction and repetition, but more crucially of replacement: The swapping out of drum machines and synthesizers in favor of truncated samples and digital approximations of house and techno's traditional sounds. It's a meta-minimalism, if you will, reaching from Pole's flickering Waldorf filter to Thomas Brinkmann's knife-cut needle skips. Perlon, founded in 1997 and largely inspired by Baby Ford, falls into this schema as well, but this is precisely where the picture begins to blur. Despite the finely whittled sounds favored on early Perlon releases, its aesthetic has always been equally focused on discombobulating grooves and psychedelic eruptions, though never exclusively so: Markus Nikolai's Back, drawing from UK deep house and Michael Jackson, is practically a pop album.
Which brings us to the current flowering, in which "minimal" might mean anything from Motor's flywheeling EBM to Villalobos' electro-acoustic astral journeys, from Mobilee's focused rave tools to the Wighnomy Brothers' entropic bubble and spark. (Even BPitch Control gets tarred with the minimal brush, though aside from Ben Klock and occasionally Sascha Funke it's hard to hear much restraint in BPitch's overdriven electro.) Minimal has jumped from the Berlin underground to UK clubs like Fabric; Villalobos and Luciano both have residencies in Ibiza. London's Crosstown Rebels and Glasgow's Soma have both incorporated minimal as an important part of their repertoires. And so on, and so on, and (in the style of Robag Wruhme), s-s-s-s-so o-o-o-o-o-nnnnnn. It all gets lumped together as "minimal," regardless of how tenuous the relation to traditional minimalist aesthetics. (Especially in the woodchipping chaos of Eulberg and Wruhme, I often think that this stuff should be called "busy beaver music.") Not the end of the world, perhaps; but if we're committed to the accuracy and specificity of the language we use to describe music, it bears examining.
The problem, insofar as there is one, is that no terms have come along to supplant "minimal," and it's come to mean as little as "progressive," a genre misnomer if ever there was one. Let's face it, some genre tags simply suck: Witness IDM, a name so powerfully lame (and lamely powerful) that it birthed an entire movement of lackluster music to fit the desires of an internet mailing list. Other appellations manage to transcend their signifiers, much as Banana Republic dropped every last vestige of Indiana Jones hats in its transformation into Business Casual Inc: It's been a long time since hip-hop had much to do with "a hip to the hippy to the hop," but that hasn't slowed it down-- if anything, it's been a boon. The durable genres-- the universalist ones-- create their own realities apart from those suggested by their names. I'd imagine that part of indie rock's perpetual navel-gazing-- sorry, meant to say soul-searching-- has to do with that pesky "i"-word, which automatically circumscribes a value system that hampers aesthetic risk-taking.
Maybe we can live with "minimal," and in 20 years, when minimal has its own Billboard Hot 100 and a video-music mobile-telephony network dedicated to it, we'll look back on this column as quaint. Or far more likely, the term, reflecting the currently specialist, niche-oriented quality of the music, will have a limiting effect. It's the first time in a long time that what is quaintly called "underground" electronic music has the potential to attract a wider audience. Maybe not Jay-Z wider, but hopefully more ample than the four-digit sales that your average techno CD enjoys today. Hell, DFA just commissioned Baby Ford for a remix. Baby Ford was once a major-label artist; now he (sort of) is again. We can have our Maximum Rock 'n' Roll debates about the perils of the majors 'til we're blue in the face, but we can at least accept that it's an interesting, and promising moment for techno. And what we choose to call it-- and more importantly, for how we actually think about it, and what we ask from it-- might have some measure of effect on its prospects.
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