> a lot of house music does seem (to me) to be gettting > a bit too polite of late.
this i agree with, but there's ALWAYS been that lame, watered down crap that gets filed under "house", maybe you're just noticing/hearing it more or in the shops Ken ? There's probably more house labels than techno, (hard to imagine but... ha ha). House has broader appeal and also more commericalized trends than techno (a broad generalization, but one I think it for the MOST part true..). > Even though I have enjoyed virtually > everything I've heard from Geist and Jesrani et al, I do think > that they have contributed rather a lot to a trend of too clean, > rather tame and 'uneccentric' house. Sorry Ken I gotta take issue with this offhand comment... THey didn't 'contriubute' to it, they created their own sound! They made something original out of older inspirations and spawned an army of immitators... some intersting but most IMHO weak by comparison, or not different enough from M.A. to hold my interest. I also find Metro Area anything BUT "uneccentric"! So the first time you heard them could you really say that? All the varied roots you can hear in their tracks, i think the combo of all those sounds is truly eccentric, as eccentric as the weirdo 'lost tracks' they play if you've ever heard them DJ out. When they dropped these Metro Area 12"s one at a time there was nothing else quite like it (new) on the dance music market... w/ live instruments combined with deep funky electronics yet didn't sound noodle-y and silly, nothing that was made in the last decade anyway. It's just sewn up so tight... Now it's taken a couple of hard-fought years of their sound honing and now that they have found some exposure and a 'sound' all their own, people will label it a trend, which is too bad, Metro area was so eccentric people has difficulty categorizing it, which is often a good sign IMHO. Just as a point of comparison: Jeff Mills got blamed when he did this around the time he clicked solidly into 'that Purposemaker' sound for awhile, and series of first 3 to 5 12-inches on that sublabel and then everyone complained that techno was all going into 'that purposemaker sound'. OK, but the one think I don't think is fair to do is BLAME the innovator (in this case Mills) for all the purposemaker copycats! Some producers made careers as making purposemaker 'cover tracks', ha ha.. sad but true. It's one thing to be inspired, it's another (and a fine line in techno to be sure) to make copycats. If you don't like the tight production values that you can hear in MA (not raw enough) all I can say is Morgan's productions have *always* had that sharpness and precision, even on his old Metamorphic and Environ and Clear records, when it was more techno than house. His production values have been consistently high throughout, and his ear for melody as well I think few have it quite like that. There is plenty of raw house stuff out there too, it's just that (in my experience) there's not a lot of it that shows the same kind of quality you hear with Metro Area. I am of course a huge fan of chicago jackin' trax, love em!!! but for me there's not a lot of raw or really unique house coming out (of chicago right now anyway) that was the way it used to be. New generations of producers aren't as constrained as the founders were, and you get a lot of stuff made on computers and not a lot of 2nd and 3rd generation house producers are selling their iMacs for RZ-1's, etc. ;) > Which is why I've somewhat gone back to much older > material which displays a roughness simply because that was > all that was possible at the time (I'm talking pre-1990) from > the technology available. Also, what new stuff I buy has to have > some sort of edge. I do share your desire for uniqueness too, but i don't feel like house needs to be underproduced or 'rough' to have it. Not as a sole trait anyway. on the previous points (many others commented on too): About the whole 'electro house' genre, I think as most silly over-labeled genre names go, (microhouse? techhouse? hardhouse? househouse???) they are coined by journalists who need to sell in headline in the "here today, err wait, i've got a different career tomorrow" world of dance music journalism. (save for a few of the quality writers, Tom Magic Feet, Mr. Sicko and a handful of others who have been into the music longer than flavor or magazine of the month ;) herion house is the stupidest yet... can we please let that die, it was a silly term by a bad writer and the music has connections to heroin except in the writers own veins. I thought it was buried years ago. If you're trying to categorize Theo Parrish: yes it's difficult and that's why it's so good. I know it's natural to want to label things when communicating verbally (in an email list for example) but putting a big magnifying glass over every artist and trend is a sure way to burn it up from too much sunlight/exposure. Let it breathe! peace, Matt MacQueen
