genre fun

Transferred from Low Earth Orbit, originally posted 2011.02.08 14:01. I've hardly listened to what I below call liquid beat, liquid pop, color pop, or techwave for quite a while, but I still like the terms pretty well — except for "techwave," which I still think seems more like a synonym for electropop in general than the dark music I intend as its target. "Garage fusion" still works for some things too, but "bass music" seems to have gained the largest acceptance among the artists in that realm, so as a more general descriptor (for bass-led, dubstep-descended dance music that doesn't necessarily have garagey rhythm) that's fine with me. Still really like the term "dub garage." Carrier by Sully and Routes by LV and Josh Idehen, released since I originally posted this, contain great examples of dub garage.

Most exploratory musicians, at least of those I’ve read interviews of, seem to shy away from labeling their work within a narrowly defined subgenre, in order to avoid pigeonholing themselves. This is, I think, the correct attitude to take, and I probably will want the same for myself if I get around to releasing music. Despite this, I find labeling songs/albums into subgenres a perhaps inordinately pleasing pursuit. The funnest part of this, for me, is inventing new genre names (see here*) with which I try to encapsulate the spirit of the tune or album more exactly than existing labels can. This sometimes helps me draw new, intriguing connections between works that I otherwise might not consider together. The most satisfying names are fairly broad, so that an artist’s whole oeuvre could sit within one of these genres and still be rewardingly varied. Here are a few examples that you’re welcome to adopt if you’re so inclined:

• Perhaps the most useful one I’ve come up with, for my own conceptions of electronic music, is liquid beat. This encompasses the Dilla/Flying Lotus/Brainfeeder/Glasgow spectrum of psychedelic, enveloping music that is usually rhythmically grounded in hip hop. I like it because “liquid” seems to me the best term to describe the timbral qualities of such music, while “beat” refers to its somewhat commonplace label of “beat music” and carefully avoids narrowing it into a specified type of rhythm or tempo — since this can vary from a slow hip-hop/dubstep pace to a faster, housey 4x4 pulse. Such variation is heard in Flying Lotus’s meisterwerk Cosmogramma and on Newworldaquarium’s depressingly-named The Dead Bears. Liquid beat overlaps with other genres, of course: hip-hop itself, synth-funk, the “wonky” and “purple” varieties of UK bass music, and chillwave, which I prefer to call:
• Liquid pop. Chillwave tends to have a similar sort of amniotic sense as liquid beat, but with a more pop/rock-based structure, often including vocals and guitar as main elements (not that liquid beat excludes either of those), hence “liquid pop.” To me “chillwave” isn’t really evocative of the actual sound of the music in the way that “liquid pop” is, although the two parts of the word do evoke the beach fixation that crested in 2009, so content-wise it works all right. I prefer “hypnagogic pop,” yet that seems too close to “dream pop” in connotation, and I think of dream pop as more airy in texture, whereas liquid pop is more watery (duh). (And “glo-fi” makes me think of lo-fi rave-inspired music, like Pictureplane, which doesn’t work for most chillwave.) The term “liquid pop” can also veer outside of what’s labeled as chillwave; the best example here that I know of is Caribou’s Swim, an album that Dan Snaith has explicitly described as being inspired by swimming and as an attempt to create a kind of aqueous dance music. Whereas a lot of liquid pop (the chillwave side of it) is relatively lo-fi, Swim is anything but. (Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, since Swim is the danciest record Caribou has made [I think], maybe liquid beat is a somewhat more apt descriptor for it.)
• Color pop is another broad term that can also easily overlap with liquid pop. It refers to pop/rock-based music that contains a wide variety of usually warm instrument timbres and is often somewhat experimental while keeping within an easily listenable pop framework. I think that Vampy Weeks’s Contra, Yeasayer’s Odd Blood, and MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular are all good examples of this. I came up with the term because labels like “indie pop” and “psych pop” didn’t really capture what I felt was a common spirit among these albums. There’s a lot of 70s/80s pop/rock that could probably fall under the spectrum (ha) of “color pop” too, and such music has provided quite a bit of inspiration to contemporary color-pop bands.
• I think I might have come across the term post-funk in some writing about ESG, but I forget. I’m pretty sure I read it somewhere, at any rate, as opposed to having invented it out of thin air like the above names. Anyway, because it combines “funk” and “post-punk,” it seems the perfect term to describe bands that dwell in the intersection of those genres. ESG, Liquid Liquid, A Certain Ratio, 23 Skidoo, and some of the no-wave groups like James Chance and the Contortions are a few of the OGs of post-funk, while !!! is a suitable fin-de-siècle example. Definitely one of my favorite genres of all time. (Of all time!)
• The Knife’s Silent Shout and Fever Ray have given me hell in my attempts to figure out a genre name for them (a sign of musical genius, I would contend). Their timbres are definitely techno-based, but Fever Ray is sometimes percussionless, so they’re not straight techno, but they’re not ambient either because there is a lot of percussion in Silent Shout … and Karin Dreijer Andersson’s voice is fundamental to both, of course, and not in the fragmented way that vocals tend to be used in dance music, but in a more narrative way, pulling it in a more pop direction … but it’s definitely not pop, it’s way too spectral … maybe Gothic something? My current candidate is techwave, a conflation of “techno” and things like “darkwave” and “coldwave,” but I’m still not entirely satisfied with it, because it could easily also refer to techno + new wave, i.e. modern synthpop/electropop, without the haunted character that is so prevalent in Silent Shout and Fever Ray. The albums have atmospheric similarities with the very contemporary wave of gothic music like “witch house” and Demdike Stare, but with a much more technoid sound palette, I think. Witch tech? Sure, whatever.
• The term “dubstep” is a conflation of “dub” + “2-step garage,” and in this capacity it more readily describes its very first apparitions — dubby, darker versions of 2-step garage tracks, or original tunes with the same kind of sound (shuffly-skippy garage rhythms married to welling sub-bass etc) — than the halfstep that emerged via FWD» and DMZ as dubstep’s mainline rhythm. But now that dubstep’s meaning has morphed quite a bit — though I think most open-minded steppaz still place both halfstep and the old garagey tunes, as well as a lot of other kinds of music these days, under the dubstep umbrella — I find a separate term for garagey dubstep useful. I call it dub garage. This is basically of the same provenance as “dubstep” itself but leaving the “2-step” and keeping the “garage.” El-B’s pioneering dub tracks and the old Horsepower Productions LPs (Quest for the Sonic Bounty is more halfstep) fall into this category, and with the resurgence of interest in garage rhythms in the last few years, a lot of “future garage” can also be considered dub garage, as it often retains the depth and darkness of dubstep.
• Meanwhile, staying inside the hardcore continuum, in the last few years there’s been a lot of mixing of rhythmic ideas from dubstep, garage, grime, house, techno, jungle, dancehall, etc. Some of the artists exemplifying this (and this is only a small fraction of those worth mentioning) are Ramadanman, Untold, Martyn, Pangaea, and Cosmin TRG, and labels such as Hessle Audio, Hemlock Recordings, and Night Slugs are in the middle of this melting pot. Understandably, there’s not really been an attempt to give such music its own genre. Sometimes dubstep is stretched further and further to try to accommodate it all, sometimes it’s lumped in with basically the whole ‘nuum as “UK bass music,” but because of certain commonalities within this interzone, I think it’s possible to give it its own name. For this I have settled rather happily upon garage fusion. By this I intend to mean that such music is a fusion of garage, genres descended from garage (grime, dubstep, bassline, funky), genres related to garage (house, and, further on, jungle and techno) and/or unrelated kinds of music, so that it has room for the enormous variation that has already been produced as well as for endless as-yet unexplored directions. (Of course with a definition this wide, latter-day dub garage easily falls under the garage fusion umbrella.) Garage fusion is the most exciting music out there for me at the moment because, just as has been the case at other confusing times of mutation in and around the hardcore continuum, its possibilities seem infinite. To allude to my opening point about the avoidance of pigeonholing, I know that giving a vein of music so vital and nebulous a label at all is of dubious merit, even understandable as dangerous or restricting — as one of the commentators on the abovelinked Blackdown post remarked, “as soon as it’s gotta name it’s over,” and I agree with that in spirit. However, and let’s hope I’m right about this, I sincerely doubt that this tiny blog’s semantic maneuvers pose much of a threat to the continued health of these kinds of music!

* just click on the page to keep refreshing it; warning: can be rather addictive