Musical Recession ~ Uninspired musical Quagmire and the soon death of Electro house?

So currently in terms of Electronic music I am finding it especially hard to find music that I feel warrants me playing in a set. Personally techno and progressive house does not inspire me as much as it used to and I have been leaning back towards electro house of late. Here is where my quagmire begins. 90% of the Electro that I can find scouring through music on beatport and record stores is uninspired, cash cow bullshit. To find the ten or eleven tunes that moved me enough to warrant adding them to my library I had to sit on my computer for a total of three hours, over four sittings. I am not a music producer; I don’t have the patience for computers. But I swear to god (beatport especially) the redundant rhetorical wank of music that has filtered into the genre of electro house sounds so generic. I’m sure that if you played the top ten off Beatport in a set and then claimed you produced all of these songs, nobody would doubt it. You might get looked at blankly by an obtuse punter and then have your head beaten to a pulp for using “Generic disco whistle” sample number 403 five hundred times. But I’d believe it. This has happened to genres before, everybody remembers……hard trance….UK hard dance.By the time 2005-6 had come around the genre had become so popular worldwide that the music had in fact eaten itself. Pioneers like Scott Project, Lee Haslam, Guyver and Yoji Biomehnika, had the personal sounds ripped and destroyed by other producers that by the time they had developed and then re directed their sound this genre was swimming in itself, everything sounded the same. Its true pioneers in fields are just that, trail blazers, mashing out a walking track for others to follow, but in terms of producers they didn’t blaze a trail per say, they just created something for other lazy producers to cut, paste copy and re-release.

The same thing has happened to Electro house and the coloration between the two fields is unbelievably similar, Now even more so in production. Electro house is the 2008-20?? Rave generation. Spawn out of a few little clubs, and then out to side stages on major festivals falling eventually onto the main stages. The thing is most electro house songs being released could be sped up to 145 beats a minute and with a slight change of drum patterns be hard trance. Trek’s “Out my bitch” (even though I love this song) has unparalleled similarities to Bitch Project M-Dry. Laidback Luke’s production “My G*O*D “ is the Tiesto’s “Traffic” of 2009 slowed down to 132 beats. Listening to a mix last night on a commercial radio station I felt I was listening to a Master Kaos mix whilst under the influence of tranquilizers.

The thing is music especially electronic is like the very records and CD’s that they play on, a revolution. In both contexts of the word. Something comes along in a genre and it becomes a “Revolution” and insights the masses to listen, then eventually it becomes a revolution, much like a 45 spinning on a technics, it revolves around and around and around, until the end que track is slowly diminishing away. It’s harder now to find quality electro because I feel the genre has reached the end of its evolution and revolution. I’m more inclined to play it currently, happy to sit on my computer for hours to find five quality songs, wondering what the next Revolution will be ……”Polka House”?

2 Responses to “Musical Recession ~ Uninspired musical Quagmire and the soon death of Electro house?”

  • Love the article!!
    Electro house is a dieing genre imo. But more recently we’ve seen elements from other genres being combined with it, to make a hybrid. Electro sounding prog tunes, which im really digging. I think thats where its all heading – not following straight and basic genre restrictions to create music, but instead drawing on influences from as many sounds/genres/styles as possible!

  • Alex Butler

    Great article mate. I feel exactly what you’re saying. The problem has been made worse with digital downloads, being that when somebody had to actually fork out money to put a new tune to vinyl and then distribute it they thought twice about whether the tune was really worthy of going on sale or had this tune already been released.

    All we can do is hit the computers and create our own sounds and make sure we continue to ‘pioneer’ our sounds so that other don’t suffer the same fate.

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