House Is A Feeling

It seems Beatport is a mortal enemy for a lot of people in techno these days, but while I agree it lacks any real character or the sense of knowledge that you associate with really great record stores, I’m not sure it seeks to hold those traits. Beatport is not a cultural hub like many of its physical predecessors, it’s just a gigantic virtual warehouse of digital music.

As such what it does to dance music is crystal clear: it gives people hundreds more opportunities than ever before to make the one and only decision that truly distinguishes a “good” DJ from a “bad” one: “do I like this piece of music”.

No matter how many filters or DJ charts or “cool” labels or artwork or names you recognise you see when buying records, no matter how new or old the store, no matter how creaky the racks or quick the server, no matter how rude the staff, no matter if you play vinyl, CD, cassette, or laptop, no matter if you break your back to find a record or if you’re sent it for free, no matter if you don’t eat lunch for three days to buy it or you’ve just won the lottery, the questions for a DJ buying records in those soul searching few seconds before the walk to the till or the click of the mouse remain the same : is this a record that I enjoy? Will this record work on the floor? Will people I enjoy playing for like this record?

As such I don’t really worry that Beatport or any other site is making people buy worse music or a narrower selection. There are filters all around us nowadays for music, blogs, stores, messageboards, but the most significant and most utilised filter is the ear. People choose to buy what they want, and the more choice the better. In any case, one certainty of an age where record buying is centralised to major stores (Phonica, Beatport, Juno, Decks) is that people will buy more music from different labels, it’s simply easier to get.

Whether that’s a wider range of actual sounds or styles is a matter of personal opinion, though certainly it’s easier to get records from further away places, hence perhaps the growth of some of the European and German sounds in the mainstream in the UK and Ireland.

Buying records is a pretty long winded process for me, and I assume for most people. I tend to open up Phonica and the German site Decks.De and read their descriptions of stuff and listen to it there, then I also have Beatport open and find stuff digitally. If it’s not available digitally I’ll order the vinyl and convert it. I highly recommend this to anyone who plays MP3s or buys them, as one thing Beatport does lack is any useful information about artists or labels. In this sense, the charts are probably its biggest asset.

And sure, you can blame some strawmen for buying entire top 10s. I assume it does happen, but is it massively different to people buying the vinyl versions of mix compilations back in the day? There are layers of gravitas in the way different people approach DJing, and some people just are bombarded with tracks, don’t have the time to dig, and want to hear the best ones they can.

Having said all of that, I still don’t believe that anyone except a tiny, miniscule minority would buy a DJ chart without listening to the tracks in it. And that’s the crux, Beatport isn’t controlling anyone. People listen, and then they buy. The new infrastructure for buying and selling music that’s emerged in the last few years isn’t exerting control over anyone either. It’s a free market and everyone may buy whatever they want. If there’s facet of the whole DJ charts thing I would criticise Beatport for, it’s the fact that the DJ charts are the only real filter on the site, the only source of information about the releases.

Still, they are not always a bland selection of huge hits, in fact they differ fairly considerably from artist to artist. There’s such a volume of them that you regularly see charts from DJs who aren’t even particularly big names. I recently found some great music as a result of Chaton’s recent chart. He’s not a major blockbusting figure in techno but as someone who runs Plak, a Swiss label and record store, I figured there’d be some good stuff in his chart. And having checked it out I picked up, amongst one or two others, a record by the French producer John Thomas, called “Sexy Motion” and released on his own label, Ethique.

This guy was off my radar even though he’s been around for years, so I’m happy to have found him. I’m really enjoying Thomas’s sort of sound at the moment, there’s a touch of Cajual/Relief in there but it’s perhaps not quite as abrasive. There are some really nice DJ tool type house tracks knocking around at the moment, it’s a style that Luciano was playing in that Silo Club set, one of the best unofficial mixes to do the rounds in ages. Having heard that set it doesn’t surprise me that Luciano (who plays Dublin’s Tripod sometime this autumn, Irish readers) is in John Thomas’s top friends on Myspace. Thomas’s style is very similar to what the Chilean has been playing.

I don’t know if it’s a new thing (a new old thing!) or something that’s emerged after minimal, but I think a lot of DJs are playing more simplified “beat music” at the moment, tracks with really pronounced bass drums and minimal (not that type of minimal) loops. Basically just really raw choppy house music. A good example from the past would be Minimal Man’s “Make A Move” on Trelik (2000), which unfortunately I can’t find anywhere. This record is one I instantly recognised in the Luciano Silo Club set, I assume it is just in my brain from being played a lot in clubs when I was 18 or 19 (around 2001/2002). It fits right in with this.

Check out the stream below of a slightly older John Thomas track for a taster of what I’m suggesting. Perhaps I’m wrong on this but it’d be interesting to hear how others feel. I lately find myself leaning towards tracks with quite straight and heavy 4/4 beats (though the radio shows tend to be a wider range of well, everything), not out of puritanism, just for the freshness of this approach and how you can really work a DJ mix with this style. It’s a truism by now to say that all dance music is minimal, but this approach, where less is more but the beats are still big, is quite refreshing.

Beyond the more overtly deep stuff being done on Deepvibes (whom I can’t find any online resource for) or Liebe Detail (to name just two labels) that I’ve discussed before, maybe there’s a rawer more peaktime house sound creeping back into European clubs too. And that’s a good thing, well, if you like it!

John Thomas/Oliver Micheli-Big Bones (Static Drum)

PS: And if you really despise Beatport, or just want some healthy competition, I know that Word and Sound’s MP3 store is set to return very soon in a bigger format than before. It’ll be called “What People Play” and there should be some involvement from myself when that goes live, I’ll keep you posted.