Originally posted by Sand Leaper
I don't, and when I went to see Calibre and Dub Phisix earlier this year, loads of people around me didn't either.
Your experiences don't coincide with mine. And setting that aside, drum 'n bass is designed to give you the option of dancing tempo, whereas these trance records don't provide it.
fredjan
quote:
Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Your experiences don't coincide with mine. And setting that aside, drum 'n bass is designed to give you the option of dancing tempo, whereas these trance records don't provide it.
An actual quote from someone in this forum:
"You dont dance to super fast music, you just shake."
btw, agreed on drum & bass - you dance to the funkiness of the bass.
Sand Leaper
quote:
Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
And setting that aside, drum 'n bass is designed to give you the option of dancing tempo, whereas these trance records don't provide it.
Getting that option with drum n bass and not getting it with trance owes to the difference in rhythms that are employed, not the actual tempo. You could dance in half time regardless of whether a track runs at 170 or 130, as long as the rhythm is syncopated appropriately for it. Case in point:
But anyways, the slowing down of tracks compared to the Harthouse era was an inevitable consequence of dance music becoming mainstream. Frenetic tracks like Sven Väth used to play to a MDMA-frenzied crowd at Omen aren't going to be compatible with crowds when dance music is no longer a niche music for the select few. Thus, it's no wonder you "can't mix" (I still believe you can, if you're a DJ who is creative enough and willing enough to take risks) this stuff with anything that is released these days. The music is no longer produced with that kind of mindset.
I personally wouldn't pitch these records down, partly because dance music is generally so slow and plodding these days as it is, partly because I think a DJ who is worth his salt doesn't need to homogenise all of his records down to the same tempo range and partly because it's good to be reminded of the era this kind of music represents in the year 2012.
dj christian
From the excellent Cari Lekebusch
Would sound a bit better slowed down.
Magnetonium
I strongly disagree that original classic trance is mostly 150-160 BPM. Anything that fast is typically called Hard Trance, and there's plenty of that in mid-late 1990s. A lot of it can easily be confused or otherwise associated with hardcore, happy hardcore and eurodance/italo-dance. Much of early trance 1988-1995 is unknown or underplayed, and was not meant to be spun on a dancefloor. First original dancefloor-friendly trance hits were all in 120-130 BPM range, and it didn't take long for faster trance to develop. From 1994 on there are countless hard trance EP's, compilations and mixed albums.
This is the most typical high-quality trance, at around 125 BPM. From 1992.
Hard trance that started picking up in late 1993, mostly 1994/1995:
1994 / 155-ish BPM
SYSTEM-J
quote:
Originally posted by Sand Leaper
Getting that option with drum n bass and not getting it with trance owes to the difference in rhythms that are employed, not the actual tempo.
I'm well aware of that.
quote:
But anyways, the slowing down of tracks compared to the Harthouse era was an inevitable consequence of dance music becoming mainstream. Frenetic tracks like Sven Väth used to play to a MDMA-frenzied crowd at Omen aren't going to be compatible with crowds when dance music is no longer a niche music for the select few. Thus, it's no wonder you "can't mix" (I still believe you can, if you're a DJ who is creative enough and willing enough to take risks) this stuff with anything that is released these days. The music is no longer produced with that kind of mindset.
I don't really agree with this at all, for numerous reasons. Firstly, as Magnetonium points out, an awful lot of records from that era were much, much slower - this strain of ultra-speedy trance was something of a minority, and it's no surprise most of the tracks mentioned thus far are associated with one label. Additionally, in many genres of dance music the tempo would markedly increase over the course of the '90s, and high tempos didn't stop the likes of Tony De Vit ascending to popularity and genres like hard dance enjoying widespread appeal. I think this perspective simply romanticises a particular strain of trance/techno that became self-indulgent to an untenable degree. I think people voted with their feet and 150+ was simply ludicrous and unworkable, even to underground crowds.
Sand Leaper
quote:
Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
I don't really agree with this at all, for numerous reasons. Firstly, as Magnetonium points out, an awful lot of records from that era were much, much slower - this strain of ultra-speedy trance was something of a minority, and it's no surprise most of the tracks mentioned thus far are associated with one label.
I could name a bunch of other ultra fast tracks from various German and European labels. The fact that only Harthouse was mentioned so far is just due to the fact that it was arguably the most famous one of them all, and its ties to Sven Väth.
quote:
Additionally, in many genres of dance music the tempo would markedly increase over the course of the '90s, and high tempos didn't stop the likes of Tony De Vit ascending to popularity and genres like hard dance enjoying widespread appeal. I think this perspective simply romanticises a particular strain of trance/techno that became self-indulgent to an untenable degree. I think people voted with their feet and 150+ was simply ludicrous and unworkable, even to underground crowds.
True, it was inevitable for this development to take place after pushing it with nosebleed antics for so long. I don't think using hard house as an example of accepted high BPMs in the mainstream really holds water, though, as it never had anywhere near the mainstream popularity trance and house would go on to have later. I can't remember hard house doing it anywhere near as big in the charts as the tunes from the Cream/Crasher superclub ascendance would do consistently (apart from maybe TdV - Burning Up, which wasn't particularly fast), and certainly not on a global level ("hard house" in the US, for instance, was a different genre altogether by guys like DJ Bam Bam).
Finally, this "voting with the feet" is more or less exactly my point. Trance, techno and house all generally slowed down as exposure increased, because the bigger (read: mainstream) crowds responded to it. I'd argue that the reason the "underground" rejected the higher tempo records was not that they were fast in and of themselves, but because they were recycling cliches and beating the same dead rave horse.
SYSTEM-J
quote:
Originally posted by Sand Leaper
I don't think using hard house as an example of accepted high BPMs in the mainstream really holds water, though, as it never had anywhere near the mainstream popularity trance and house would go on to have later.
There were a few years around 2000-2003 where you could walk into any British supermarket and buy a hard house compilation. There might not have been many commercial hits (apart from watered down nonsense by the likes of Public Domain) but the scene was big enough to be called a mainstream part of clubbing.
quote:
Finally, this "voting with the feet" is more or less exactly my point. Trance, techno and house all generally slowed down as exposure increased, because the bigger (read: mainstream) crowds responded to it.
Again, I refute the notion that these genres slowed down. I reckon quite the opposite happened, actually.
lostpsyte
quote:
Originally posted by fredjan
An actual quote from someone in this forum:
"You dont dance to super fast music, you just shake."
btw, agreed on drum & bass - you dance to the funkiness of the bass.
I was at a party recently that had a dnb/gabba room and plenty of people were dancing. It was quite difficult to keep up that sortof energy for long but it was refreshing too. Also Some of the dnb parties I've been to people just dance at half tempo as well.
Sand Leaper
quote:
Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
There were a few years around 2000-2003 where you could walk into any British supermarket and buy a hard house compilation. There might not have been many commercial hits (apart from watered down nonsense by the likes of Public Domain) but the scene was big enough to be called a mainstream part of clubbing.
I'd wager that this would be utterly dwarfed compared to the success of a tune like Cafe del Mar or a Hed Kandi house compilation, especially on a global level. What hard house compilation series was even remotely a patch on the offerings from Gatecrasher or Renaissance? None. What big stars, apart from Tony de Vit (who died before truly making a mainstream impact) did UK hard house have to push its big tunes to the mainstream on the level of a Paul van Dyk or Paul Oakenfold? Tidy Boys? Lisa Lashes? Anne Savage? Nah.
quote:
Again, I refute the notion that these genres slowed down. I reckon quite the opposite happened, actually.
Fine by me. But then I will continue to assert that the increase in length of Richie Hawtin's new stylist-advised haircut and the simultaneous decrease of BPMs in his DJ sets are not just a coincidence. :thepirate
SYSTEM-J
quote:
Originally posted by Sand Leaper
Fine by me. But then I will continue to assert that the increase in length of Richie Hawtin's new stylist-advised haircut and the simultaneous decrease of BPMs in his DJ sets are not just a coincidence. :thepirate
The tempo drop in techno (and associated genres) can be very precisely located at around 2005 when the minimal explosion happened, and clubs that had been playing banging techno one summer were suddenly clicking along at 125bpm the next. Dance music had been hugely popular for years by then, and was in fact suffering a dramatic decline in mainstream success. The tempo drop was actually part of an aesthetic reinvention, a cleaning out of '90s values which included speedy, MDMA-fuelled tempos around the 140bpm mark. And are you really linking the Hawtin-lead mass slowdown to the increased popularity of dance music brought about by brands like Hed Kandi or Gatecrasher?
The way I see it is that dance music generally sped up across the '90s, reaching an apex around the millenium. The tempo rise flattened out in the early '00s as general stasis set in, and then dropped off rapidly around 2005 when there was a general mass overhaul. This trend had little to do with popularity - after all, the rave scene in Europe was massively popular around 1993-1994 when these Harthouse tracks were being released. Eurodance was smashing the charts, raves were ubiquitious and dance music spearheaded youth culture. The scene may have become more ruthlessly commercialist in the second half of the decade, but by 1994 it was certainly way out of the underground.
I will, however, admit that there could be a strong correlation between average follicle length and tempo in dance music. The one complicating factor is those psy hippies with their day-glo dreads.
