Fathoming The Depths of Electro Sounds

originally published June 13, 2007

As a child, I never clapped along with the music in church because I couldn't stay on beat. I've danced - and by "danced" I mean "violently dislodged every limb from my center of gravity as music played" - a grand total of perhaps 10 times in my life. (This figure includes a few bouts of gyrating to Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em in my living room when I was six.) I prefer bars and concert venues in which I can sit comfortably for hours on end, rather than sweaty dancefloors. But almost every new album I've enjoyed in the last six months has been an electronic dance record.

As nuanced and rewarding as Califone's Roots & Crowns is, for instance, Swiss house producer Kalabrese's new album Rumpelzirkus logs more time in my stereo. I now combat my downstairs neighbors' infinite loop of Bush's "Glycerine" with Kode9's spine-massaging dubstep missives rather than Wolf Eyes' junk-heap assaults. And the only recent indie-rock album I have immersed myself in, Panda Bear's Person Pitch, draws liberally from the back catalogue of seminal German techno label Basic Channel.

Get Past The Beat

More importantly, dance music is boring its way into the indie community's collective consciousness. Of course, numerous electronic acts have crossed over in the past. The Orb enjoyed mainstream exposure after collaborating with Primal Scream. The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx have produced bona fide pop hits by soaking their beats in an aesthetic of cartoonish abundance. After IDM - Intelligent Dance Music, the oft-maligned genre of downtempo electronic music designed specifically for home-listening - exploded in the mid-1990s, packs of discerning, omnivorous listeners embraced artists like Aphex Twin, Autechre and Mouse on Mars. More recently, conceptual albums from Matmos and Matthew Herbert have found broad audiences. And the DFA label's palatable take on 1980s avant-garde disco remains both intriguing and commercially viable.

The difference between the current crop of dance acts, like Trentemoller and Booka Shade, who score MySpace hits and enthusiastic blog posts from people who've never identified with club culture and past crossover artists, is that the average dude on the street won't immediately see why these new groups make music good for anything other than dancing. The protruding funk- and dub-derived bass lines, anthemic synth hooks and militant 4/4 beats that pervade generic trance compilations and popular archetypes of techno are also present, albeit in more developed forms, in albums from hip labels like Get Physical and Modeselektor. In order to enjoy the pure musicality of Ellen Allien, electronica-phobes will have to wade through plenty of off-putting semantic baggage.

Increasingly, though, mainstream listeners are listening against the grain of their prejudices. Late last year, a New Yorker-style cartoon circulated throughout the internet and ribbed dance music's expanding demographic. In the center of an apartment full of trust-fund hipsters, a bespectacled, scarf-wearing gentleman chats up a smiling young woman who looks as though she were transplanted from an Urban Outfitters catalogue. "I prefer the Lindstrom remix," one says to the other, referring to the ubiquitous space-disco producer.

Just Like Metal?

So why the sudden spike in interest in electronica among casual listeners? First, let's remember that the unspecialized sectors of the music press, from the New York Times to Pitchfork.com, latched on to another often marginalized genre - heavy metal - last year. And although the first wave of metal bands to garner headlines outside of their subculture in 2006 were experimenters like Boris and Om, more traditional metal artists soon gained unexpected amounts of exposure. Over time, the uninitiated grew to appreciate the genre at its most generic.

The popular explanation for metal's resurgence is that noughties indie lacks the grit and energy that characterized the '80s and '90s rock underground, that the aesthetic pioneered by The Replacements and Pavement has grown too Sufjan-ized to satisfy listeners' desires to rock out. Blogger The Impostume [http://theimpostume.blogspot.com/2007/03/warning-if-you-want-theoretical-rigour.html] argues, however, that contemporary indie rock's most alarming deficiency is its dearth of "meaningful" content "that subordinates bright, effective, clued-up knowingness to just actually knowing something, which subordinates range to depth." He goes on to posit metal bands and their fans as one of the coalitions who will wage "the impending, multi-faith war on indie" music and culture, and he casts a range of other genres that "lack 'coolness'" as brothers in arms. World, dubstep, folk and jazz, he insists, will join metal in forging a "New Solemnity," an ethos that resists pop's dizzying but ultimately unrewarding "kaleidoscope" of "experiences."

Listeners with eclectic tastes have long eschewed pop's immediate pleasures for the challenges posed by a wide range of "difficult" genres. Record collections that connect the dots between Ali Farka Toure, Terry Riley, Kraftwerk, and Charley Patton have never been uncommon among music junkies who crave depth. According to The Impostume, indie rock's stock is plummeting among "serious" listeners, and general listeners who previously found sustenance in subversive, challenging indie are becoming more omnivorous in order to find musical nourishment.

Headbang! At The Disco

Enter dance music in its myriad forms. Mysterious UK producer Burial attracted attention from all corners of the music world with his eponymous debut, which was released in the US in the fall of 2006. As the first full-length dubstep album, Burial introduced thousands of American listeners to a scene that's been fermenting in England for a few years. The record's echo chamber of seismic bass lines (the "dub" part), trippy UK Garage rhythms (the "step" part, derived from two-step), and futuristic synthesized effects redolent of both sci-fi film scores and Joy Division's seething guitars affected listeners in the most visceral of manners. Like Sunn O)))'s queasy drones, Burial's music is a physical presence. And just as Sunn O))) has reminded many a former metalhead of the redemptive qualities of bone-crushing music, Burial channels the immense power of a rumbling club.

Like metal, electronica grabs you first through albums that induce vivid sensory overloads. The technically precise, at times fussy records that exist deeper within the genres must be approached with more discipline. The mechanical intricacy and exactness that lie at the foundation of Gui Boratto's Chromophobia (out now on Kompakt) preclude the possibility of tracks like "Mr. Decay" emerging as radio hits, even though they capture the expanse and glorious peaks of New Order's biggest singles. Boratto's romantic keyboard leads are his strongest suit - when the beat drops out and the lead melody is the only sound left (which happens often), the torch-waving, heart-melting radiance of each hook grows epic in scale. These melodies shoot for immortality, as though they were humankind's last ever keyboard lines. More reserved listeners will admire the pitch-bent, reverb'd piano in "Gate 7," which suggests a collision between Lee Perry and John Cage. At once exuberant and meticulously crafted, Chromophobia's currently my favorite record of the year.

Sensory Overloads

In his first LP, titled From Here We Go Sublime, Boratto's labelmate The Field (AKA Axel Willner) packs every song with stadium-sized drums and aerial melodies worthy of Robert Wyatt. A Field song doesn't have a "good part" - the whole track is an infinitely looped "good part." His methodology - sample the most life-affirming 10-second melodies you can dig up and ride them until they sublimate into some euphoric higher plane - is simple enough that From Here could have been a boring album. But Willner's a superb editor, pairing the most complementary timbres and knowing just when to say "when" at every turn.

From Here also stands to receive more mainstream exposure than any electronic album this year: it's as immediate and melodic as any of Four Tet or Caribou's indie-tronic concoctions, and it's already been reviewed widely and positively. So more klutzes like me are sure to catch on and listen to The Field while folding laundry or eating a turkey sandwich.

Truth be told, though, From Here We Go Sublime is too sweeping - too, in the Kantian sense, sublime - for me to enjoy at any level deeper than an affirmative gut response. And I like it on many of the same grounds that I like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless or Rafael Toral's Wave Field, which is to say that I've simply found qualities in a minimal techno album that I've enjoyed in albums from a number of other genres. Which is precisely why predilections against electronic dance music - which has since its birth translated the tropes of blood-and-flesh creations into post-human contexts - can always be traced back to careless listening. Whether they make house, ambient techno, dubstep or even throwaway neo-lounge music, electronic producers rummage as deeply and broadly through the history of pop music as hip-hop deejays or hyper-referential rock groups like Tortoise.

And by lending new and visceral qualities to old forms, artists like The Field preserve generations of musical history as effectively as the most dedicated ethnomusicologists. And maybe get kids like me to shake a leg.

Phillip Buchan

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing a piece? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis at music@flagpole.com.