House Is A Feeling

An artist called John Daly, hopefully named after the large golfer above, brings a really surprising change of style to Plak Records, one of the many Swiss labels I’ve been blogging about (great t-shirts on their website!) Where Plak is normally dark and heavily dubbed and seems regimentally clanking and miserable (that’s a good thing!), the A side on this release, “Skydive” sounds incredibly like Moodymann in his familiar endless loop mode.

With jack in the box style percussion and melancholy deep house keys, this is a record that seems set for a lot of play this summer, well, at least anywhere that DJs can get away with playing during sunrise. The other side has “Broken Juno”, which is more techno but equally great. If you like the track, support Plak and buy the 12, the other side of the MP3 on Word and Sound, or a t-shirt!

There’s so much referencing going on under the banner of “minimal” from all these labels, that lots of timeless styles are often touched on. As I always say, most of the best house music at the moment, period, is being made by the labels people think of as “minimal”. I guess this is quite well known by now, and a lot of people in dance music now check the minimal labels as a rule.

However I always feel that records like “Skydive” could miss an entire audience who would really find them amazing. There must be many Moodymann fans who don’t care about minimal house and even more who have never heard of a smallish label like Plak. It’s not as though they’ve courted that sound or those people before.

And that’s where the DJ or blog comes in I suppose. Big name DJs are on the circuit enough to pick up records from each other by word of mouth, and then they redistribute them to their fans. It’s really easy to get entrenched in a scene or your own dislike of the aesthetics of a type of dance music (or any music) to the point where you ignore releases that have the wrong type of title or something, I know this because I’ve done it myself. This is why it’s right to demand the highest standard from people who are paid four figure sums to come and DJ for you. It’s their job as much as anything to connect you with what’s going on in dance music beyond your own local scene. Of course the net makes this easier, but the best DJs are still leaders.

This is why I always think that if you genuinely want to make a go of dance music and DJing, you must consume as many perspectives as possible.. As I get older I’m probably less good at this, I don’t download as many live mixes as I used to, but then I have a more concrete idea of my own taste now (probably a dangerous thing, the next step is old fart “I am always right” territory!). But I do still find myself downloading a set or watching a big DJ and thinking “yep…I am completely clueless!”.

If I didn’t I suppose there wouldn’t be much fun to music. I mean, does anyone ever really “catch up” when there are hundreds of releases every week? I’d love to listen to more of a million different things, old and new, but there’s only so much time in the day. If you can be an expert on O.1% of even the tiniest microgenre of music you’re doing pretty well.

I also think that it’s actually quite fascinating that so many dance singles are released and fired off into cultural orbit every week. I mean there are literally thousands of them, more than you could ever imagine! Good records, bad records, records that took months to make, records that took an afternoon to make, house records, techno records, fashionable records, stoic records, whatever!

Nothing unites these records, they are made and released into a fiercely competetive market, the factors for a record’s “success” are nebulous at best, and thousands are lost, drifting somewhere in the musical galaxy or gathering dust in garages for aeons. Who knows where they all end up? And even more interestingly, where they might reappear in the future!

Technorati Tags: Techno, DJing, House Music, Minimal House, Plak Records, Switzerland