Be Excellent To Each Other

Not so long ago I heard a few bits of dance music which I quite liked and wondered what sort of style it might be considered to be.

It tends to lean rather to the bass and low frequencies and be fairly minimal. If you get some cymbals in there they're pretty tight, subdued and restricted. Often more clicky. Usually likely to gradually build up toward the end of the track.

See if you can come up with anything.

Yeah that's definitely dance music.

Dub step?

Stuff like 'Burial' maybe?

Less shuffly than Burial. We're talking 4 to the floor but not necessarily that heavy. Strict mechanical repetetive beat. Quite hypnotic.

Kind of like this sort of thing http://blip.fm/~sxoeo

Drat, I'll have to wait until I'm home to listen to your example.

It goes "Dum tk dum tk dum tk dum tk" and maybe has a bit of "unununararrunununarararr" over the top at times.

Sounds like what they've been calling "minimal" [techno] these days, but used to be known as "tech-house".

Some form of house probably although to be honest I have never really been good at differentiating (i don't think I've spelt that right but I gave it a good go) between differnet genres of dance music. It's good though.

Yep. Description made it sound like dubstep (Burial isn't really dubstep). Now I'm playing the song, it's definitely mnml.

No dubstep is 4/4. And this has the traditionally mnml build.

Example.

mnml? Seriously?!

y

I don't invent the names!

Have now listened. Yeah, it's minimal techno. If it was faster it would be hard trance though, the drum sound is common to that I think.
Not bad.

ARGH! I am now incredibly physically tense. It feels like my back muscles are going to tear my spine clean out.

Minimal House (I refuse to use the 'proper' name) is, at the same time, the best and the worst thing that ever happened to house music.

Because it's generally so fucking boring that it made a load of people go in completely the other direction and write some insanely bouncy, happy stuff.

Throughsilver I think you'll find a lot of, if not all, dubstep is 4/4. IT's just the beats have different accents in comparison to your trance style stuff. [/pedant]

I'm not sure it's minimal house you know. Practically everything I've listened to on youtube has been far too complex for what I was after.

I've never understood dance music. You know how some people can't 'get' jazz? I can't 'get' dance music. I tried listening to that but I just find it annoying. For one thing part of the beat sounds like an electrical pulse and kind of hurts my ears, plus it just doesn't sound 'nice/good/interesting' etc to me.

It's not that it doesn't elicit some kind of emotional response - it does, but that response is more like an irritation, almost anger. Maybe it is because if someone is going to pull up beneath your window at 2am and play really loud music through their rubbish car speakers, that's what they'll be playing.

Take more drugs.

There's a dance music for everyone.

Yes, definitely minimalist. My friend was churning this stuff out last year and he often forced me to listen to it for my opinion which was normally "I turned it off after two minutes as that was all I could stand"

How can you say that Mimi!

I agree 100% with what Mimi has said here.

You wouldn't understand.

Dance music is good to dance to! But I find some strange intellectual appreciation in the strictness of form in the minimal stuff I've listened to. But yet none of the minimal stuff I've got as a result via searching youtube has really sounded the business.

Also dance music covers a huge variety of things. Even stuff going back centuries! In fact I'm pretty sure Dance has been with us since the dawn of time.

Aye, some of my favourite dance music isn't electronic at all. Equally some of my favourite electronic music is undanceable

Tosh. You're not drinking enough Heroin smoothies.

Actually I'm totally in the other direction to this, I love dance stuff but can't really listen to rock. I can stand it for a little while but sooner or later most guitar band stuff will leave me cold and wanting somethig with odder sounds or just the lead singer to shut up (the same goes for R+b too).

Given my musical tastes are planted firmly in blues music, it's not surprising that I'm not overly interested in something that doesn't have an immediate human touch to it.

(I also don't think Dancing is a particulary great thing to do to music, either. If you need to flail about to music to make the music enjoyable...)

What do you dance to? White noise? The hoover?

I don't. Mainly.

The shrieks and cries of his vanquished enemies.

Yeah, soz. Should technically have just said 'dubstep doesn't have a house beat'.


Tried some Minilogue or SND?

Minogue? OMD?