Beats don’t mark time, nor are they marked by time – they just groovily pulsate your sensual experience, making your aliveness reverberate joyously in recognition.

The difference between house and techno

So I’m sitting here listening to Gorje Hewek’s Vous Lhiem, and suddenly it strikes me, around 48:36: none of the layers here would be out of place in house music, just like their groovy interplay would be right at home, so why does this still feel like techno to me? There’s layers, loops and grooves in house and in techno, what is it that makes me want to call something housey or technoy.

Well, it could be something like this: techno uses stuff to make loops and layer them, and a lot of nice techno uses grooves for that. House uses loops to groove, and layers them if it enhances the groove. [Shorter: techno loops grooves, and house grooves loops.]

Apart from that (which is nothing like an ironclad law) anything’s possible of course, and it all depends on taste and influence and mood and expression and suchlike. The stuff that the techno guys loop is often artificial or concrete or abstract and not explicitly groovy, but it becomes groovy because the layering of the loops is hypnotic and that’s a very deep groove. The loops that the house guys groove are more often organic or come from a simpler artificiality that tried (and failed, gloriously) to mimic organic sounds: venerable 303′s belching clouds of acid vapour while attempting to sound like two hands, clapping. Also therefore techno depends on hypnotic layering, which determines the structure of the tracks: there’s no room to dig in to lyrics, choruses and so on within that framework, so instead it just keeps looping and shifting, minimally, to stay in a zone that’s fit for enjoyment by humans. The structure of house stays a bit closer to already developed forms of call and response, verse and refrain and all that, which have proven themselves to groove throughout the ages.

But always this: either you work towards layered looping (with groove as a very welcome side dish), and thence into hypnosis/trance; or you go towards groove (with some smart loopy layers to smarten stuff up) and from there into the sexytime.

And now that I’ve said that of course I don’t give a cock what you call it (housetechnobreakstrancegospeljazzecstasy), but it still feels to me as if those two are different directions, and it might be possible from there to feel into some potential palettes of expression and movement and energy, which would be fun. Worked for Kurt Koegel, and worked for me when he taught me about them (those palettes of somatic movement in contact improv he put together are awesome and freeing and comfortable and very very nice).

New policy: dump any draft.

Yes it’s true, I can draft however much I want but it’s been shown that I will not edit drafts into audience-friendly form on my own. Maybe later, or when I get enough complaints (hellooooho?). So here goes! Relax, read, enjoy, wonder WTF I’m on about this time, shoot me an email or a comment and I’ll feel invited to elucidate.

In some strains of neo-advaitic theory absolutism and/or nihilism is way too prevalent to feel healthy anymore. Particularly useless if making use of enlightenment for healing is attempted. Looking at you Byron Katie. (Isaac Shapiro I’m holding out hope for, smart dude that.) Also a so called enlightened world view that forgets who it is that spends all this time doing all this stuff that it (the view i.e.) busily keeps declaring illusionary or irrelevant is sort of cutely dumb.

But I seem to be getting on the scent of a fullness-transcendence that is an alternative to the emptiness thingy that advaitics teach. (-> explain fullness …)

Maybe a third kind, something to do with how awareness and body/fullness are the same – sounds blindingly obvious, but it’s hard to re manifest the feeling – it’s the androgynous third to the male emptiness / female fullness thing, sort of a purer creativity that doesn’t need the coming together of male and female to create.

How ‘you’ can do something to ‘get’ differently enlightened – if retraining your system isn’t doing something we need to talk about the definition of doing. Simply getting your system to stop perpetuating production as a means of evading the Being Here Now is an excellent activity, and if you tell me I can’t do that you’re probably confused who you’re talking to.

Somabile: carried by the body, as all this bullshit is after all, how could that hang together let allone carry itself by itself?

New subtitle from:… jjgo.

I’d be way more willing to offer myself (??? maybe make me active and the guru the sacrificer? to be edited) to a guru if I felt he had a feeling of humility and was willing to get close to me and give me stuff. (This means that I’d still be very unwilling to do that, it’s just that it seems like such a surreally dumb thing to do to me now.)

vereniging voor herintroductie van uitstervende woorden: kukelen.

I don’t know if dykes are more likely to be attracted to the side of me that I would most like to be attractive for, and I don’t know how much ms. neighbour identifies with her bisexual tendencies, but I’ll tell you that if she came and told me, to my face, that she’d like to maybe chow down on some pretty rug again sometime soon, I’d totally egg her on. (did you notice how I said ‘egg’? Yeah okay more witty than funny.)

Include sound clips, e.g. Jordan with the subtitle, there was something in the latest savage lurvecast, and that one percussion line in Votono was really cute. Would probably make the blog a lot more engaging.

Why I like to preach – how it could even be a valid urge.

The state of the techno.

Panno, a mix by Gorje Hewek (from last Sunday): check the symphony orchestra accompanying the torch song singer; the bossa nova piano and attendant stompy groovy combo, from 11:23; the soulful Rhodes trickling around the close harmony crooning from 15:00; and again later on hurrying along below the cinematic strings. And yes it’s still techno, as far as I can tell, not that I care, because this is too likable a sound to worry about that. You’ll have to hear the rest for yourself, but check that you downloaded the whole thing (83 Mb) because it seems the deepmix crew is doing some server related eh, maintenance.

Comparison

The Star Shrink Shooters – Tanz-Demokratur: Extrawelt’s slutty big sister, the one with the swagger in her electro-booty.

What I heard today.

AMD -  Bigfish
Everybody luuurves a 303, e.g. AMD and I. Very clean compositions, very clear palette of old skool acid sounds, varied and layered with care, with a minimum of hegemonising melody and no arpeggio to be found, and even some major key chords. Not adventurous at all, but really mindful and convincing. But while listening I wondered “can psytrance be safe, and still be psytrance?” – well of course it can, safety isn’t so much the issue as superficiality. At least this is authentic. Maybe safe, but not shallow.

Troll scientists – Useless Science
Seems like the second part gets better than the safe (and regrettably shallow) first half, more fun and more energetic, to say the least.

Ott – Skylon
I’m really more bothered than I anticipated by the feeling that dub as a style has really been appropriated by a bunch of trippy white dudes, that making dub today is an anachronism and a slightly silly pastime, that it’s like a historical reenactment, that the original dub style was in a way musically quite narrow in its expression, and that it seems pointless to try to force non-dubwise musical ideas into a dub sound, but that the compositorial ‘vision’ of the inventors of dub is far from exhaustedly explored, and that it makes more sense today to do this in dubstep, dubtechno and the true ambient (which is not chill), as opposed to trying to keep the dubzombie shambling on by repeating the exact same sounds (however delicately produced).

Oxycanta winter blooms
Gooood. The true ambient, with some cheesy intrusions from the chill side and some annoying ones from glitchy parts, but a lot of space, a lot of beatlessness, and a nice vibe of bubbles contentedly floating along, taking all the time they need to pop.

Tipper – Relish the Trough
Tipper is the kind of overwhelmingly masterful producer whose music is too good to listen to – it’s like the ongoing realization of just how good it is, overwhelms the power of the music to convey its own musicality; so partly it makes me impatient with myself: ‘stop slobbering and just listen and enjoy’, but on the other hand a sort of jadedness sets in: ‘yeah, it doesn’t really matter what he’s trying to sing anyway, ’cause it’s gonna sound awesome anyway, so why bother’.

Not straight ahead at all.

Not straight ahead at all, but rather, as I was listening to it, quite queer (but still very much ahead) is Haltya’ recent CD Book of Nature.

Rainbow Funkster: George Clinton as he shakes with the chills in his fever dream, imagining himself as a technoviking. There’s even a track called Mothership.

Sub Signals vol. 1 is as if a mob of gently grizzled kings amble towards you, carrying kerchiefs and towels filled and glowing with soft gold. It’s like these producers sifted and polished and reheated and sublimated and cured these purest nuggets of dub, also as a gesture of affection towards Gaudi.

Lega – Cartoon Studio: Yellow Dock [2007] (206 Mb) (02h:30m)

Playing right now on deepmix: very acoustic, natural, soundscapy and minimally symphonic. Unfortunately also contains that Cesaria Evora remix I’m not wild about, but that’s only a short bit.

Get it here.