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can we just not have a comp for every single impulsive idea that someone thinks of?

how many of these comps get finished, anyway?

and of those, how many do people actually listen to?

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.

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.

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.

The only reason I used the term EDM was to kind of narrow the talk from dance music (which is technically all music depending on how you want to talk about it) to what is considered mainstream dance music today. I mean I fsking love The Rapture, !!!, and the rest of them dancepunk goons but I wanted to talk about the way we think about stuff like electro house, trance, prog house, dubstep, etc. I don't really want to get into semantics about what "dance music" entails so that's why I'm trying to narrow it down to what we (admittedly unfortunately) call EDM. Basically -- we should step away from labels and talk about EDM as a form and aesthetic.

I haven't listened to the Glitch Mob album, but I'm going to say that I really can't get through a full listen of Discovery without skipping a few songs. There are albums that I can just sit down and put on and listen to all the way through, but Discovery definitely isn't one of them. I have this weird hypothesis that it has to do with authorship and how dance music approaches it differently than rock music but that's for another time. Daft Punk is a very singles-driven group and while they have basically made the perfect pop song, they can't really cut it when it comes to an entire album for me

I agree with you, but I feel like it's valuable to talk about the specific techniques to distill a form out of the huge amount of music we're barraged with so then we can talk about new music in terms of whether it is ACTUALLY boundary-breaking or if it's just a really well-executed statement of form. I think the reason why Skrillex is a taboo subject around here is because he doesn't do anything with the "form" of dubstep, however, he executes REALLY well in his little niche of brostep...which is a niche that none of us are interested in, it seems like. He's just not very complex if your approach in analyzing him is from the perspective of aesthetic value -- "wub wub wub" is cool for about 3 minutes before it gets grating. But from a sound design perspective, looking from the outside in (I'm not good at sound design by any means) Skrillex is pretty interesting, just in the sense that he is able to operate almost atonally and still be called dance music. (Though Huoratron does what Skrillex is trying to do like a million times better)

What do you think is "one sided" about the approach? I'm genuinely interested, because I think that a lot of modern EDM these days is "one-sided," as you say -- however, I think it's hard to justify an entire form as one-sided, mostly because in order to do that you have to 1. Define where dance music is trying to get and then 2. Define the approach to that aesthetic space as "one-sided." It's true that mainstream EDM lacks complexity most of the time, but I think that has to do with the "popification" of dance music (or the "dancification" of pop music) more than the form itself.

yeah, I'm just clumsily agreeing

I've already paid 4.20

AND IT FEELS SO GOOD

update: this album is now pay as you want/can! so feel free to enter zero in that box and grab it for an infinitely small amount!