"Thomas D. Cox, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 01/08/2007 08:48:09
PM:
>
> i like minimal straight hats and kicks as much as the next man, but to
> me theyre most effective when mixed up with other beats and rhythms.a
> minimal acid cut sounds good all the time, but it REALLY sounds good
> when youre mixing it into some weird electro or disco cut. too few
> people are out there switching up the rhythms. detroit deejays are
> usually good for that kind of thing though, derrick may, shake, and
> theo parrish are extremely notable cats who will play all sorts of
> different rhythms and make the "boring" techno beat sound so good
> because of the juxtaposition.
>
> tom
I agree 100% with everything you're saying here Tom. Seems that the
Detroit guys mentioned have a hell of a lot of "boring" techno to work with
then. ;-)
One of the reasons I sort of exploded over this topic was a combination of
hearing a bunch of tracks that had "clever" glitchy edits over basically
the same boring "boom tsk" and seeing, on a message board, people fawning
over Jeff Milligan and this video of him
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9I8VXgiGqF4
granted it's not an entire set and I haven't heard/seen an entire set by
him. It's impressive at first viewing and people thought that what he was
doing was "sick".
I just don't see it as that big an achievement. He's just dropping things
in and out within the beat. Eh? I don't get why that's so amazing. He's
working 4 decks but if all your tracks are "boom -tsk" then where's the
risk? Yes, he's fast but so what? There's fast and then there's dextrous.
Shake, Mills, Young, Hood, etc. are dextrous if not also as fast and their
music pushes and pulls and undulates.
The beats change up, different moods come in and go out, the sounds of the
rhythms change.
I get the impression, from the majority of "minimal" sets I've heard and
from the majority of tracks released with this tag - that djs in the style
of the Detroit guys are the exception to the rule within the "minimal"
sound. That "boom -tsk" is the order of the day and what you will
encounter most of the time.
MEK
