Electronic Music
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La LL
Generally Delightful
Shitty version.
Plip
Cardenal de Catalunya
Not sure I can completely sign that.
If you look at the early electro, it has more roots in hip hop and breakbeat more than anything else. Electro as a genre went also through a great deal of changes, and if you look at where it is now, it bears more resemblance of techno. Such artists as Drexciya, Blackstrobe (inactive, but Ivan Smagghe and Arnaud Rebotini still produce quite a lot of their own stuff), Apparat, Ellen Allien etc. have been, and most likely will be for quite a time to come, a living example of artists combining both techno (using this in a more general term) and electro.
What comes to Swedish House Mafia.... those three enthusiasts decided in late naughties that it might be a riveting experience to slaughter electro and house, and in the aftermath to create their own pet Frankenstein called electro-house. That sickening creation still turns me inside out and makes my ears bleed. They, for me, killed two great genres and then resurrected it as one big piece of failure. The amount of popularity they got through selling out is beyond me, and now every 15 to 20 year old associates either House or Electro with those three little pigs.
Interestingly enough, both Sebastian Ingrosso and Steve Angello had remotely successful careers before going apeshit. Their collaboration, the Sinners, was straightforward tech-house / prog house with a good detroit-ish vibe to it. Steve Angello's releases between 2003 and 2005 were gold, especially his first ever release "Voices" which was an enormous hit in 2003-2004. Then when they were gradually establishing themselves, everything went south. Swedish House Mafia has nothing to do with neither house or electro. It's just puke.
Trance and House were decent on their own as well throughout the nineties, until people the Dutch decided to add their own little flavour to it (Yes, Ferry Corsten, Armin van Buuren and Tiësto - I am talking about you) by ruining the genre completely. It turned from beautiful melodies and smart drum-machine use into over-compressed, super-saw filled and overly sweet blue bloody stilton. I still am gobsmacked by how much people can destroy simple things and turning them into abominations of them earlier selves.
Then indeed came the Americanization of electronic music, mainly cheesy trance and overly shit "house" and "dubstep" produced by the above praised Swedish House Mafia, Tiësto and Skrillex. The whole thing just exploded and a new market, for overly produced crap with little similarities to the original genres, opened. Now every teenager with glow sticks thinks Tiësto's the best thing ever happened to trance. WRONG!!!
I still think of those listening to trance as sort of simpletons, musically speaking. That's only due to not being able to understand slightly more difficult and abstract sound patterns. The fact that you don't have to process the music you hear, because it has been made so easy with little snares here and there, repetitive synth key patterns, a strong kick either emanating from Fruity Loops or Logic accompanied by a weak hi-hat and 'beautiful' female vocals, is somewhat boring and far from being creative on any scale.
All in all, electronic music in general is in much weaker state than it was say 10 years ago and it's heading towards utter oblivion. Luckily there still are smaller labels and artists out there that produce high end stuff for the music's sake and not solely (emphasis added) for their pockets' sake.
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La Furia
Legion of Doooom
I know what you mean about Electro, but the modern use of the term actually comes because house DJs in the late 90s/early 00s had electro influences - most notably Daft Punk, who for all the good they did, also inspired the likes of Guetta and SHM. So yes, I know what electro actually means, but it's all but dead today, with house, techno and breakbeat having divided it and the term becoming used to describe loud and fast house music that has nothing to do with the original use of the term.
Honestly, I think you are being a bit harsh. I like Swedish House Mafia for what they are, they are pop musicians who make dumb, arena dance music, and it works when you are at the gym or a party. They do a far better job at it than hacks like Afrojack or Skrillex who have one trick they rely on, or Guetta, who is really the same as SHM except even more beholden to the American pop industry.
As much as I agree with you about Dutch Trance, I respect Armin van Buuren even if his music gets tiring very quickly. He still produces Dutch Trance, meaning it's over-saturated and sweet, but the sheer quality of music he produces (without it all being clones of itself like some of his rivals) means he at least sets his own agenda instead of always following the most obvious trends like most of these arena DJs do. Tiësto and Ferry Corsten don't even have that going for them, their only progress in the past few years has been to most their music even more simple and loud to appeal to the "house" crowd.
There's still much more complex, independent stuff out there though. The best place to start is Resident Adviser's Top 100 DJs over DJMags list.
Honestly, I think you are being a bit harsh. I like Swedish House Mafia for what they are, they are pop musicians who make dumb, arena dance music, and it works when you are at the gym or a party. They do a far better job at it than hacks like Afrojack or Skrillex who have one trick they rely on, or Guetta, who is really the same as SHM except even more beholden to the American pop industry.
As much as I agree with you about Dutch Trance, I respect Armin van Buuren even if his music gets tiring very quickly. He still produces Dutch Trance, meaning it's over-saturated and sweet, but the sheer quality of music he produces (without it all being clones of itself like some of his rivals) means he at least sets his own agenda instead of always following the most obvious trends like most of these arena DJs do. Tiësto and Ferry Corsten don't even have that going for them, their only progress in the past few years has been to most their music even more simple and loud to appeal to the "house" crowd.
There's still much more complex, independent stuff out there though. The best place to start is Resident Adviser's Top 100 DJs over DJMags list.
Plip
Cardenal de Catalunya
I wasn't exactly patronizing you on use of the term, as you're a smart chap and know its meaning perfectly well. I was merely venting out on people in general who misuse the term on a constant basis, as it's somewhat frustrating to hear some young hot shot using the term while murdering it completely. I still am, however, of the belief that due to the Germanization of electronic music, especially electro, a lot of artists reinvented the genre and gave it life in form of being more industrial, dirtier and more distortion based than its bigger brother (which luckily is still alive and kicking btw!).
I've never liked Swedish House Mafia, and always have thought of Ingrosso and Angello being better on their own before the whole party anthem boom. The fact that the guys were deluded enough to think that they were (there were plenty of interviews) actually creating a new genre that had elements of House in it (Jack built it!) was the last straw for me. Besides, reinventing the wheel hardly deserves any credit, since there were plenty of electroclash tracks, which sound far better than the crap these three produced.
But then again, this is just my opinion on the matter.
I honestly just got bored the new line of overly cheesy trance. Sure, it was all fun and games around 2002-2004, but then again that was it. The genre really became incredibly repetitive and full of acts that sounded exactly like the one previous to it. I lost my interest in trance around early 2004 and haven't looked back since. Not sure what's going on within the genre, but I doubt it's anything of revolutionary nature.
Btw, here's a treat.
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E
estranged
Guest
I mostly agree with what's been said over the last couple of pages, but nobody in their right mind should consider SHM as pure electro. SHM didn't even start electro house, guys like deadmau5 were incorporating electro into their sets way before SHM emerged. Trance music has been on the decline for a while, but it's not all doom and gloom, a lot of producers are sticking around and evolving the genre and keeping it alive. Trance music keeps changing because the audience keeps changing, tracks that used to destroy the dance floor 4-5 years ago no longer cut it. Trance tracks these days are riddled with Techno grooves and a lot of electro influences, some would say that's destroyed the original trance sound, some would argue that it's kept trance music alive. Novelty wears fast if you restrict yourself to 140 BPM and keep using the samples just to keep it consistent with it's original roots, you have to try new thins. I don't know about the state of Electro music nowadays since I don't really listen to it, but Techno is anything but dead, it's stronger than ever before, especially with the rising popularity of tech house. Plus there are a lot of pure techno DJs around these days still.
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