Pinochet / Techno Pi
To my memory, this year’s most derided musical release had to be Damien Rice’s 9. A victim of his own success it wasn’t just the Irish who revolted, Pitchfork awarding the album a laughable 1.9 out of 10. I guess Damo can console himself that he ducked the treatment meted out to Jet in a peculiar review. Closer to home, Sinead and Twenty didn’t exactly greet Rice’s album enthusiastically either. It seems we’re endowed (burdened?) with a plethora of haranguing singer songwriters in this here Emerald Isle and I’m sure everyone is familiar with the backlash their ilk has encountered in recent times. It seems there’s only so much Emeral Angst listeners can stomach. I think it’d be reasonable to surmise that throughout music circles in Ireland if anyone bothered to worry about Rice’s album for a minute they’d feel a twinge of bitterness. Bitter because it seems like it’s the singular Irish record to gain coverage in respected international music editorials such as Pitchfork's this year.
Or was it?
Nialler9 (what does the 9 stand for Niall? ;) ) did trojan work in sampling the opinion of his readers recently regarding their favourite Irish albums of 2006. Interesting to me in the albums which cropped up in the final list of 20 was the absence of an album by Irishman Donnacha Costello, who is now based in Berlin. His album was rated an A on Pitchfork’s rival and even more high-brow publication Stylus Magazine. Of course one review does not an album of gold make, but it was an interesting anecdote from my traversal of year end review material on the int0rweb. It’s a pity we couldn’t wind back the clock and snatch that guitar away from the young Damien Rice and his bevy of near clones and thrust the tools of the electronic music trade upon them.
In recent years thanks to Moore’s Law and other advances in technology, the barrier to entry to Costello’s domain of electronic music producer have become almost as low as the logistics of picking up a guitar. Many teenagers have access to a PC in their home and the musical possibilities are right there before they even know they want to use them. Gone are the days when one requires access to specialised hardware to start experimenting with producing Electronic music, you can emulate most of the hardware of bygone eras in software at the behest of your mouse on your average laptop. This paradigm shift in electronic music has injected fresh impetus into a scene which many in the past considered a novelty, or questioned the integrity and staying power of. To say that techno in particular had a positively burgeoning 2006 would not be an exaggeration. Where in 2005 there was much talk of the crossover appeal to electronic music fans of traditional guitar and vocal acts such as Bloc Party, in 2006 we see the crossover circuit reversed with releases such as The Knife’s Silent Shout gaining widespread commendation and fawning praise from quarters unfamiliar with the techno elements it is heavily influenced by.
Sure there are more nascent, concentrated and buzz-worthy communities within dance music at the moment, in particular I’m tipping my hat to the sounds of breakcore, dubstep, and wrong music and its family which all had hugely exciting and well deserved success in 2006. For the moment, these communities remain dwarfed by the breadth and quantity of effort expended in producing (and consuming) the more established genre of techno. The sheer volume of releases of genuine quality under the techno umbrella expanded once again in 2006 and is currently at a level that even the most diligent of the scene’s professional journalists find difficult to keep pace with.
Ironically enough it was four years almost to the day since Eminem released "Without Me" and told the world "It’s Over / Let’s Go / Nobody Listens To Techno" that the world descended on Berlin for World Cup final weekend and many thousands of visitors across Berlin (and Germany as a whole) danced way past breakfast time to the sounds of a city positively teeming with techno culture like never before. I've dug out a couple of videos from the hard disk from that time this summer.
I managed to get some video in Berghain/Panoramabar before I realised they have a strict ban on still or motion photography to cosset the hedonistic atmosphere. I engineered to not get thrown out by the skin of my teeth, pretending to delete the videos from the phone while some staff stood over me! Video from inside this hallowed turf on the Internet is almost non-existent (unlike the fantastic clips available from the watergate club on YouTube and elsewhere) so I thought I'd share.
Queueing to get in, circa 5a.m.
The hair really stands up on the back of your neck just after getting in the entrance. This is when your jaw hits the floor at the size and character of the building and the noise upstairs.
Panoramabar floor, Berghain, Berlin at about 9a.m. Nick Hoppner DJ Set.
It’s impossible to overstate the embarrassment of riches Berlin plays host to on an average week. You could quite easily come back from a weekend there with a list of artist appearances you had to pass up due to an inability to bi-locate that would put to shame the list of electronic music producers your average world city sees in a month. There was a time not so long ago when I got the same feeling of there being something truly special and unique about a time and a location with the astounding volume and caliber of indie rock coming out of Canada. All those artists were bouncing off each other, collaborating, exchanging ideas and generally marking that time and place down as something more than the sum of its generative parts. A magical spark seemed to have involuntarily caught light and taken hold. This same phenomenon is at play in Berlin now and the intensity of the situation in Berlin is exponentially greater as the artists are largely performing and recording there as well as calling it home. They are tripping over each other on a weekly basis in their studios, homes and DJ boxes.
The qualities that make up this techno culture are novel, multifarious and worthy of benchmarking. 2006 saw attempts to pry open the tightly rolled phenomena by documentary film makers on a couple of fronts. Maja Classen’s film Feiern saw DVD release (available here, official trailer.) last month to wide acclaim. In the film Classen captures a balanced, sober and melancholic study of participants in the production and consumption of Berlin’s techno culture featuring conversations with Ewan Pearson, Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos and many ordinary punters who have indulged in Berlin’s 72 hour parties. The film which has the minor title "Stories of Excess, Destruction and Tenderness" is not to be missed by anyone with even a passing interest in dance music and the temptation to pursue it to its logical conclusion near the edges of the physical and mental limits of party. The tagline of the film is a soundbyte from Ewan Pearson’s contribution: "Don’t Forget To Go Home". For some excerpts I cut from the film see, Funf, Vier, Drei, Zewi, Eins. The other documentary, now in post production and due for release in 2007 is Speaking In Code which will feature a fly-on the wall look at a day in the life of Modeselektor amongst its wares.
Next week I’m off to Berlin for five nights over New Years. Having been there for the first time this summer, I couldn’t wait to return. The clubbing is compelling enough, however the city offers a myriad of opportunities outside its musical forte for fans of travel to explore. A trip to London taking in a night and early morning at Fabric this year to see an M_nus label night featuring Richie Hawtin, Magda et al only served to confirm in my mind the uniquely appealing character of Berlin as a city in general and also more specifically as a place to party. Eating out, service and of course the indigenous beers there are of a stellar standard and everything is so low cost you’ll find yourself doing double-takes at your bills for the right reasons.
For readers with an interest in music I urge you to get there to sample what’s on offer at your earliest convenience, you’ll be forever impressed with the experience as everyone I know who's been seems to be. I know many people may see the intertwined drug use that goes along with the party scene a barrier to entry. Whether you choose to opt in or out it’s not an issue and you can absolutely partake and appreciate the experience while straight, all that’s required is a commitment to lose yourself on the dancefloor and the fortitude to confuse your body clock for a few days!
To In Fact, Ah sign off for 2006, I'd like to mention some of the best new techno I managed to digest during the year. Techno is generally not packaged and distributed in the familiar album format, so for the casual listener compilations/mix CDs are a great way to skim the genre. In that line, try:
Luciano - Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi Vol. 2[Featuring Donnacha Costello]
Cassy - Panoramabar 01
Michael Mayer - Immer 2
Kiki - Boogybytes Vol. 1
Magda - She's A Dancing Machine [Featuring Donnacha Costello]
Kompakt - Total 7
Perlon - Superlongevity 04
Matthew Dear as Audion - Fabric 27
Various - Post Office Special Argentina Madness
Studio Albums:
Motor - Klunk
My My - Songs For The Gentle
Booka Shade - Movements
Ellen Allien & Apparat - Orchestra Of Bubbles
Donnacha Costello - 6x6=36
"Singles" to try:
Hearthrob - Baby Kate
Booka Shade - In White Rooms
Magda - Staring Contest
Marc Houle - Bay Of Figs
The release which set most tongues wagging this year in techno was from the the incumbent in the throne of high techno devotion, Ricardo Villalobos. Last month he released Fizheuer Zieheuer, nominally a single, it clocks in at 37 minutes. To say this piece of music is sparse would be an understatement akin to saying Santa is a generous bloke. There are three elements to the whole 37 minutes. Drums, horn (sampled from a rendition of his native Chile's national anthem) and a hi-hat. After that, there really isn't anything else in this track. The 37 minutes is spent tweaking and morphing these three elements through the electronic grinder, changing their tone and moving them in and out of phase with each other to dizzying effect. I don't see contemporary icons of any genre labeled as genius as often as Villalobos is by commentators within and without of their genre. This experimental work is certainly fitting of that tag. This thing grows on you and rewards a few listens before judging . You soon become totally hypnotised by its spell and crave to listen. Enthralling and bewitching new detail emerges every time. Implicitly something as audacious and 'out there' as this composition has its detractors who will say its cachet is built of smoke and mirrors but I can't lend any weight to their argument in this case. It is the killer release of 2006 and will stand the test of time in my humble opinion.
The symmetry provided by the link of the Chilean national anthem to the track and the celebrated passing of Augusto Pinochet this year surely gives Villalobos cause for a wry smile when he drops this track at 8a.m. on a ballistic dancefloor in Berlin. After all, it's the home he adopted and is a major contributor to the social fabric of having fled Chile as a three year old child with his family following Pinochet's overthrowing of Salvador Allende's government in 1973.
Thank you Augusto.
tags: music, techno
Published by Paul.
Or was it?
Nialler9 (what does the 9 stand for Niall? ;) ) did trojan work in sampling the opinion of his readers recently regarding their favourite Irish albums of 2006. Interesting to me in the albums which cropped up in the final list of 20 was the absence of an album by Irishman Donnacha Costello, who is now based in Berlin. His album was rated an A on Pitchfork’s rival and even more high-brow publication Stylus Magazine. Of course one review does not an album of gold make, but it was an interesting anecdote from my traversal of year end review material on the int0rweb. It’s a pity we couldn’t wind back the clock and snatch that guitar away from the young Damien Rice and his bevy of near clones and thrust the tools of the electronic music trade upon them.
In recent years thanks to Moore’s Law and other advances in technology, the barrier to entry to Costello’s domain of electronic music producer have become almost as low as the logistics of picking up a guitar. Many teenagers have access to a PC in their home and the musical possibilities are right there before they even know they want to use them. Gone are the days when one requires access to specialised hardware to start experimenting with producing Electronic music, you can emulate most of the hardware of bygone eras in software at the behest of your mouse on your average laptop. This paradigm shift in electronic music has injected fresh impetus into a scene which many in the past considered a novelty, or questioned the integrity and staying power of. To say that techno in particular had a positively burgeoning 2006 would not be an exaggeration. Where in 2005 there was much talk of the crossover appeal to electronic music fans of traditional guitar and vocal acts such as Bloc Party, in 2006 we see the crossover circuit reversed with releases such as The Knife’s Silent Shout gaining widespread commendation and fawning praise from quarters unfamiliar with the techno elements it is heavily influenced by.
Sure there are more nascent, concentrated and buzz-worthy communities within dance music at the moment, in particular I’m tipping my hat to the sounds of breakcore, dubstep, and wrong music and its family which all had hugely exciting and well deserved success in 2006. For the moment, these communities remain dwarfed by the breadth and quantity of effort expended in producing (and consuming) the more established genre of techno. The sheer volume of releases of genuine quality under the techno umbrella expanded once again in 2006 and is currently at a level that even the most diligent of the scene’s professional journalists find difficult to keep pace with.
Ironically enough it was four years almost to the day since Eminem released "Without Me" and told the world "It’s Over / Let’s Go / Nobody Listens To Techno" that the world descended on Berlin for World Cup final weekend and many thousands of visitors across Berlin (and Germany as a whole) danced way past breakfast time to the sounds of a city positively teeming with techno culture like never before. I've dug out a couple of videos from the hard disk from that time this summer.
I managed to get some video in Berghain/Panoramabar before I realised they have a strict ban on still or motion photography to cosset the hedonistic atmosphere. I engineered to not get thrown out by the skin of my teeth, pretending to delete the videos from the phone while some staff stood over me! Video from inside this hallowed turf on the Internet is almost non-existent (unlike the fantastic clips available from the watergate club on YouTube and elsewhere) so I thought I'd share.
Queueing to get in, circa 5a.m.
The hair really stands up on the back of your neck just after getting in the entrance. This is when your jaw hits the floor at the size and character of the building and the noise upstairs.
Panoramabar floor, Berghain, Berlin at about 9a.m. Nick Hoppner DJ Set.
It’s impossible to overstate the embarrassment of riches Berlin plays host to on an average week. You could quite easily come back from a weekend there with a list of artist appearances you had to pass up due to an inability to bi-locate that would put to shame the list of electronic music producers your average world city sees in a month. There was a time not so long ago when I got the same feeling of there being something truly special and unique about a time and a location with the astounding volume and caliber of indie rock coming out of Canada. All those artists were bouncing off each other, collaborating, exchanging ideas and generally marking that time and place down as something more than the sum of its generative parts. A magical spark seemed to have involuntarily caught light and taken hold. This same phenomenon is at play in Berlin now and the intensity of the situation in Berlin is exponentially greater as the artists are largely performing and recording there as well as calling it home. They are tripping over each other on a weekly basis in their studios, homes and DJ boxes.
The qualities that make up this techno culture are novel, multifarious and worthy of benchmarking. 2006 saw attempts to pry open the tightly rolled phenomena by documentary film makers on a couple of fronts. Maja Classen’s film Feiern saw DVD release (available here, official trailer.) last month to wide acclaim. In the film Classen captures a balanced, sober and melancholic study of participants in the production and consumption of Berlin’s techno culture featuring conversations with Ewan Pearson, Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos and many ordinary punters who have indulged in Berlin’s 72 hour parties. The film which has the minor title "Stories of Excess, Destruction and Tenderness" is not to be missed by anyone with even a passing interest in dance music and the temptation to pursue it to its logical conclusion near the edges of the physical and mental limits of party. The tagline of the film is a soundbyte from Ewan Pearson’s contribution: "Don’t Forget To Go Home". For some excerpts I cut from the film see, Funf, Vier, Drei, Zewi, Eins. The other documentary, now in post production and due for release in 2007 is Speaking In Code which will feature a fly-on the wall look at a day in the life of Modeselektor amongst its wares.
Next week I’m off to Berlin for five nights over New Years. Having been there for the first time this summer, I couldn’t wait to return. The clubbing is compelling enough, however the city offers a myriad of opportunities outside its musical forte for fans of travel to explore. A trip to London taking in a night and early morning at Fabric this year to see an M_nus label night featuring Richie Hawtin, Magda et al only served to confirm in my mind the uniquely appealing character of Berlin as a city in general and also more specifically as a place to party. Eating out, service and of course the indigenous beers there are of a stellar standard and everything is so low cost you’ll find yourself doing double-takes at your bills for the right reasons.
For readers with an interest in music I urge you to get there to sample what’s on offer at your earliest convenience, you’ll be forever impressed with the experience as everyone I know who's been seems to be. I know many people may see the intertwined drug use that goes along with the party scene a barrier to entry. Whether you choose to opt in or out it’s not an issue and you can absolutely partake and appreciate the experience while straight, all that’s required is a commitment to lose yourself on the dancefloor and the fortitude to confuse your body clock for a few days!
To In Fact, Ah sign off for 2006, I'd like to mention some of the best new techno I managed to digest during the year. Techno is generally not packaged and distributed in the familiar album format, so for the casual listener compilations/mix CDs are a great way to skim the genre. In that line, try:
Luciano - Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi Vol. 2[Featuring Donnacha Costello]
Cassy - Panoramabar 01
Michael Mayer - Immer 2
Kiki - Boogybytes Vol. 1
Magda - She's A Dancing Machine [Featuring Donnacha Costello]
Kompakt - Total 7
Perlon - Superlongevity 04
Matthew Dear as Audion - Fabric 27
Various - Post Office Special Argentina Madness
Studio Albums:
Motor - Klunk
My My - Songs For The Gentle
Booka Shade - Movements
Ellen Allien & Apparat - Orchestra Of Bubbles
Donnacha Costello - 6x6=36
"Singles" to try:
Hearthrob - Baby Kate
Booka Shade - In White Rooms
Magda - Staring Contest
Marc Houle - Bay Of Figs
The release which set most tongues wagging this year in techno was from the the incumbent in the throne of high techno devotion, Ricardo Villalobos. Last month he released Fizheuer Zieheuer, nominally a single, it clocks in at 37 minutes. To say this piece of music is sparse would be an understatement akin to saying Santa is a generous bloke. There are three elements to the whole 37 minutes. Drums, horn (sampled from a rendition of his native Chile's national anthem) and a hi-hat. After that, there really isn't anything else in this track. The 37 minutes is spent tweaking and morphing these three elements through the electronic grinder, changing their tone and moving them in and out of phase with each other to dizzying effect. I don't see contemporary icons of any genre labeled as genius as often as Villalobos is by commentators within and without of their genre. This experimental work is certainly fitting of that tag. This thing grows on you and rewards a few listens before judging . You soon become totally hypnotised by its spell and crave to listen. Enthralling and bewitching new detail emerges every time. Implicitly something as audacious and 'out there' as this composition has its detractors who will say its cachet is built of smoke and mirrors but I can't lend any weight to their argument in this case. It is the killer release of 2006 and will stand the test of time in my humble opinion.
The symmetry provided by the link of the Chilean national anthem to the track and the celebrated passing of Augusto Pinochet this year surely gives Villalobos cause for a wry smile when he drops this track at 8a.m. on a ballistic dancefloor in Berlin. After all, it's the home he adopted and is a major contributor to the social fabric of having fled Chile as a three year old child with his family following Pinochet's overthrowing of Salvador Allende's government in 1973.
Thank you Augusto.
tags: music, techno
Published by Paul.
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