r4c7
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N.E. U.S.
Downstate wrote:

EDM is basically the term for generic shit electro house kind brostep shit aint it ?

cos if its actually decent electronic (dance) music it would be classiified as what it actually is, ie - techno, tech house, breakbeat, dubstep etc etc

basically if its uninspired shit they play on the radio (and paris hilton has probably got on her playlist) then it can be classified as EDM to let us know that its utter rubbish

TRUTHS

It is used as a more generic term for electronic music, without counting things like ambient, because that isn't dance music. If you get into elctronic music, you may see it is a common term.

spacetownsavior
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San Diego, CA

Guys, EDM was just a term I used so that we didn't have to get way into genre semantics. If EDM as a term bothers people, then stop using it, I guess? I don't see what makes the term EDM so offensive in and of itself other than "mainstream" artists using the term, and if that's the single criteria for usage or not, that's kind of narrow minded. If you want it to go that way, that's fine, but I find the discussion really uninteresting unless you're tying it back to what today's music sounds like so just keep that in mind.

AndrewKilpatrick wrote:

When did I say dance music DIDN'T do all those things? I just said it is more potentially limiting, and limited in reality, than other forms of music...I'm not say ALL dance music is limited, though if we are getting into a genre debate, when it gets to a point its not limiting itself it'd be difficult to class as dance.   And I know music is subjective, I was being subjective as it was my opinion

See, this is where my weird thesis of authorship and participation comes into play. I guess the only formal (formal as in "form"-al) limitation when it comes to popular conceptions of dance music is the rhythmic aspect -- it would be hard to use an irregular time signature and continue to call yourself "dance." But other than that, I don't see what limitations exist that are inherent to the form.

The thing that raises dance music above most other music for me is the relationship between the artists and the audience. You talk about how the function of dance music is limiting, but I'd say that the function liberates the form, because all dance music, by virtue of inviting its audience to DANCE, is collaborative in nature. When you hear about DJs talk about song selection, you always hear stuff about having to pick the right song for how the audience is interacting with the mix -- if it's too mellow pick an intense song, and vice versa, I feel like this can extend to the composition of the music itself, where the songs are composed WITH the audience in mind, not despite them.

This may seem limiting on the outset, but when you consider the kind of feedback loops that can occur when both the audience and the artist are factors in the equation, it gets a lot more compelling. You can make an argument that lots of other music is made with the audience in mind, but that relationship is one-sided -- the audience doesn't really get a voice in this situation. It's this invitation to collaboration that makes me feel like dance music is a lot more than just an attention-grabbing form. At least in principle, anyway. Most EDM these days seems like it's being made by people who wanted to be rock stars but spent their time in Ableton/Logic/Reason instead.

Russellian
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Harrisonburg, Virginia
spacetownsavior wrote:

Most EDM these days seems like it's being made by people who wanted to be rock stars but spent their time in Ableton/Logic/Reason instead.

This, though it's not always such a bad thing. There are some artists out there that only use laptops and music production programs to make amazing sounding music. Again, there are always exceptions, but you're right. With the lowered barrier of entry that the internet and lower-priced programs and/or piracy have caused, more and more non-exceptional artists are flooding the scene in an attempt to be just like their idols. That's where you get shitty mashups, covers, and remixes that become popular as fuck: because they're familiar.

Meandering bullshit aside, a lot of shitty people are flooding most genres of music and the internet is just making it easier. There are just as many (if not more) amazing electronic/EDM artists out there now, you just have to wade through the septic tank that is the modern music industry to get to them.

Decktonic
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Westfield, NJ

There's some great electronic music coming out recently. One of the nice silver linings of electronic music entering the mainstream is that people are more open to the idea of hearing it outside of the club, and so there are some artists that are using electronic music  to make stuff that you can both listen to laid back as well as dance to. Obviously these artists are few and far between, but isn't that the case with all great music?

Anyway some recent stuff to check out is "Trouble" by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and "Juicy Lucy" by Jupiter. Both albums that I loved from start to finish. Going a little further back, "In Ghost Colours" by Cut Copy and "Idiosyncracies" by Kris Menace (2 CDs!) were also great. You just have to know where to look!

spacetownsavior
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San Diego, CA

Oh yeah -- I've totally listened to all of that. I'm trying not to focus on the bad and I'm a huge fan of all of that music, it's just not stuff you usually hear when you hear people talk about dance music smile

shitbird
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hey, any you guys seen my friend Molly?

sugar sk*-*lls
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nashville,tn

a little to the party on this, a couple quick points: looking at the history of music from a longview, most of musical history is well pre-history. but all cultures have music regardless of how ughh "primitive" they are. this music is if not more, at the very least ceremonial/religious/communal and involves dance.  the notion that music that is not innately danceable is a new idea. you can trace it back to a divide plato hammered to death and western classical music took to its logical conclusion: the whole senses vs the intellect debate. melody represents the intellect while rhythm represents the senses/body. the intellect is superior and is obstructed by the senses-especially pleasure. lots of holes in this but...its held up for a long while. the rub the op is talking about is a modern take on this classic notion. only now we the throw the cultural associations into the mix, i.e. what kinds of people stereo-typically listen to a kind of music and where, factors in as much as the music itself. whatevs...at the end of the day its all just subjective arguements

thebitman
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shitbird wrote:

hey, any you guys seen my friend Molly?

Dude, we're trying to keep this Mario-at-a-Rave thing shroom free. Imma go rage now. You ruined our new image.

ilkae
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montreal, qc

"Want a vision of electronic music's future? Imagine crap trance riffs and recycled one note basslines stomping on a human face, for ever."

http://thequietus.com/articles/09188-em … onic-music

r4c7
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N.E. U.S.
ilkae wrote:

"Want a vision of electronic music's future? Imagine crap trance riffs and recycled one note basslines stomping on a human face, for ever."

http://thequietus.com/articles/09188-em … onic-music

That's when you delve into genres like garage or IDM which is still pretty underground and pure. There will always be niches of good music, like this place for example.

spacetownsavior
Offline
San Diego, CA
sugar sk*-*lls wrote:

the notion that music that is not innately danceable is a new idea. you can trace it back to a divide plato hammered to death and western classical music took to its logical conclusion: the whole senses vs the intellect debate. melody represents the intellect while rhythm represents the senses/body. the intellect is superior and is obstructed by the senses-especially pleasure.

The thing is, I don't think the two need to be separate, or have ever needed to be. I don't really need to intellectualize my dance music to enjoy it, at the same time, I don't always need to dance to my intellectual music to enjoy that either. I'm saying this as someone who has enjoyed literally all of his music sober (even at raves and the like). It's fun to dance! But it's also fun to sit back and think about how everyone is kind of feeding off each other, etc.

I really respect people who are attempting to do both -- that's why Burial is so good to me, and Flying Lotus' stuff is amazing as well. You're supposed to move, but it works just as well statically. The problem everyone has (imo) with "EDM" is that no one really dances anymore; you're just supposed to pump a fist for an hour or two, and if you're too shy to do that, you can get out your camera phone and make a shitty recording of the DJ. It's stopped being a collaborative experience and come back to being a "worship the DJ" show, which SMH and Deadmau5 have pretty much locked down (although admittedly, deadmau5 says some pretty smart things for being massively famous).

As far as chiptune is concerned, the problem I have with a lot of dance-tune (please don't use that ever) is that most of the music doesn't have any staying power. I'll listen to a lot of dance-inspired chipmusic and "get it" with one or two listens because a lot of it is trying to be that EDM it's so inspired by -- the problem here is that if I wanted to listen to EDM, I'd just listen to EDM! I like dance-inspired chipmusic that's channeling something that you don't usually get in more produced stuff; I feel like the distinct sounds that come from these game systems set me up for a certain aesthetic that is lacking in a lot of chip-dance.

SketchMan3
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NC in the US of America

I started listening to the Chiptune station at Digitally Imported, thinking I'd get to hear my favorite vgm tunes. But there was too much noisy dance music (at least, what I consider to be noisy dance music), not enough melodic video game-style music, so I switched to GOSU Radio.

But now I listen to DI Chiptunes again. I can appreciate it a bit more now that I'm a little deeper into the chipmusic scene.

I listen to them both.

Frostbyte
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I like writing dance stuff on the gameboy because I am good at it, I listen to it, and I enjoy it. It's just a platform for making the music I like with the sounds I like.

basspuddle
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washington
thebitman wrote:
shitbird wrote:

hey, any you guys seen my friend Molly?

Dude, we're trying to keep this Mario-at-a-Rave thing shroom free. Imma go rage now. You ruined our new image.

Damned funky grandmas.

ant1
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uhajdafdfdfa

are you trying to say that THE PURPOSE of music is dancing?????

sugar sk*-*lls
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nashville,tn
spacetownsavior wrote:
sugar sk*-*lls wrote:

the notion that music that is not innately danceable is a new idea. you can trace it back to a divide plato hammered to death and western classical music took to its logical conclusion: the whole senses vs the intellect debate. melody represents the intellect while rhythm represents the senses/body. the intellect is superior and is obstructed by the senses-especially pleasure.

The thing is, I don't think the two need to be separate, or have ever needed to be. I don't really need to intellectualize my dance music to enjoy it, at the same time, I don't always need to dance to my intellectual music to enjoy that either. I'm saying this as someone who has enjoyed literally all of his music sober (even at raves and the like). It's fun to dance! But it's also fun to sit back and think about how everyone is kind of feeding off each other, etc.

agreed, the divide is total bs. neuro-science has shed some light on the subject.... music is not a singular experience as we intuit it to be. rhythm, timbre, melody, pitch, harmony are processed extrapolated in different areas of the brain. might help explain why some people are drawn or repelled by certain aspects. for example in the middle ages scales/harmony where all the rage, these days timbre and rhythm get all the attention