A fascinating article by Philip Sherburne over at Pitchfork on track times and their possible heraldic properties. Mr. Sherburne’s column “The Month In Techno” is truthfully the only thing I regularly read at Pitchfork. He really seems to have his thumb on the pulses of scenes on both sides of the pond, not to mention that he’s a great writer. Ordinarily he's spot on with his reviews of records, performances and whole scenes, although I really think he’s missed the mark ever so slightly with this one.
As Mr. Sherburne pointed out about halfway through the piece, extended track times are nothing new in dance music. The original 12” version of disco classic “I Will Survive”, one of the (if not THE) most recognizable disco tracks of all time, lists a running time of 8:02. Acid house standards like Steve “Silk” Hurley’s “Jack Your Body” and Jamie Principle’s “Your Love” both clock in at over 6 minutes. Even radio-ready stadium techno the likes of Underworld’s “Born Slippy.NUXX” (9:44) and The Prodigy’s “Voodoo People” (6:28) tend to sprawl a bit, although both tracks were issued hideously executed “edits” that were little more than fades at the break. Long tracks are the rule in dance music, rather than the exception. Villalobos’ proposed 44 minute single, though, takes the standard 10 minute extended mix, turns it on its head and kicks it in the crotch.
Mr. Sherburne proposes three possible reasons for such dramatic jumps in track times; firstly that due to the extended lengths of parties, tracks are being extended in a proportional manner; secondly that the relatively new digital media are allowing electronic artists the freedom to expand and fill said media with sound; and, finally that laptop sets are allowing DJs to test unfinished tracks, thereby introducing a degree of improvisation. Each of these reasons is equally plausible, and the reader can definitely see the logic underlying Mr. Sherburne’s conclusions. I find it interesting, and a little worrying, that only reasons indicating the growth of the minimal techno aesthetic have been presented. I would presume to suggest a forth, not-so-positive suggestion.
I should preface this by pointing out that I am mostly not a fan of Kompakt/Perlon/Get Physical/Bpitch/Systematic/Areal minimal techno. I say mostly because whenever I come across a release by any of these labels I feel compelled to listen in the hope that I will like it. Sometimes I do, but mostly they go back in the rack. I can quite understand why the music press likened the work of these labels and their associated artists to the minimalist works of Frank Stella, Samuel Beckett, Carl Andre, and Robert Bresson. The music is stripped down to little more than percussion or a single looped phrase, a single element of which is then varied ad infinitum, and in my case, ad nauseum. The good stuff develops an infectious groove that changes just enough to keep the listener interested while managing to maintain the repetitiveness that keeps things…well…groovy. Unfortunately, the tracks that achieve this delicate balance are few and far between. I can’t really explain why the vast majority of these tracks don’t appeal to me other than to say that I find the majority of them too…tasteful. They’re like of-the-moment audio wallpaper; like Eno/Orb ambient for the new millennium.
When I read in Mr. Sherburne’s column that Ricardo Villalobos is contemplating releasing a 44 minute single and Perlon’s Sammy D is playing bits of some 20 minute opus out at parties, I immediately flashed back to when I first heard Goldie’s hour-long abortion “Mother”. I wrote in an earlier post about defining moments; “Mother” was, for me at least, the death knell of jungle/drum ‘n’ bass. After that every thing with an Amen-derivative break sounded pretentious and vain. It wasn’t until I read Simon Reynolds’ Generation Ecstasy almost a year later that I had any kind of inkling as to why that was. It was that drive towards the “progressive” ("intelligent" is the word that Mr. Reynolds favors), that need for deeper meaning in the music in lieu of visceral reaction to it, that had precipitated the release of “Mother” and eventually leached the vibrance from drum ‘n’ bass. Of course, Mr. Reynolds saw the signs earlier (as detailed in the book) but the end effect was the same. After reliving the horror, I started to wonder if 44 minutes of Villalobos is going to sound like 10 minutes of passable minimal techno bloated with 34 minutes of "progressive" self-importance. Has minimal techno, by all accounts a vibrant and exciting scene, been bitten by the progressive bug? I sincerely hope not. As I said earlier, Mr. Sherburne has immersed himself in the scene and he knows far more about it than I do, but where he sees manipulation of new media, I see the studio gimmickery and mellotron noodlings of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Genesis, Pink Floyd and their ilk. Where he sees the infinite possibilities for improvisational sound manipulation, I see that scene in “This Is Spinal Tap” where the band takes the stage at a festival, minus guitarist Nigel Tufnel. “We’re not about to do a free-form jazz , uh, exploration in front of a festival crowd, are we?” asks bassist Derek Smalls. They did and hilarity ensued. Let’s hope that a half-hour minimal techno track doesn’t become it’s own joke.
