(no subject)
A double birthday shout-out to flitterkit (yesterday) and night_work (today). Yay!
***
The other day, maxrobbin asked me to delineate between different styles of techno (and woe unto the person who regularly uses the word "electronica"). I gave him a basic, amateurish rundown of the differences between house, trance, ambient, and so on. The classification was complicated by the fact that techno has begun to resemble India's caste system; it seems that every artist that straddles the line between genres is assigned a brand new genre all his/her/their own. I joked that we were headed for a future in which there were only genres, and no artists.
As it turns out, the future is already here. A little bit of research demonstrated to me that my genre preferences are much broader than I had anticipated. I knew, for example, that I liked to listen to trance, acid jazz, and trip-hop. I knew that I periodically listened to electrojazz, 2Step, big beat, and synthpop. I'm familiar with gabber, though one doesn't really listen to it as much as vibrate along to the beat. But who knew that I also listened to breakbeat, Nortec, glitch, and braindance? Certainly not I, who had never even heard of the last three until recently.
This doesn't even begin to cover the permutations of ambient, the subgenre that first turned me on to techno. At least, I thought it was ambient. Most of the ambient that I preferred somehow became IDM; this is slightly dismaying, since an awful lot of IDM fans are regarded as music snobs (no comments from the cheap seats, if you please). I don't have to worry about being pigeonholed, though--the rest of the ambient I like has been reclassified as ambient dub, chillout, dark ambient, and illbient.
Add house music to the picture: obviously it isn't enough to say that I like house, so I'm obligated to specify that I enjoy hard house, acid house, jazz-house, dream house, microhouse, deep house, French house, hip-house, Chicago house, and prog house. In fact, I seem to have an affinity for prog styles in general--I used to think that I only liked it in passing, but apparently I love the stuff.
Some of the genre taxonomy is expansive instead of limiting. Calling something ambient house, for example, is cheating. The same goes for Detroit, which is really just a catch-all for any American techno that's more than fifteen years old, regardless of whether it came out of Detroit or not.
The reeducation continues: I thought I didn't care for Jungle/DnB, though apparently I'm more fond of it than I realize. Ditto for psytrance, which turns out to be more or less the same as Goa trance, which I could've sworn I didn't like. I'm not bothered by that, though, since trance runs neck-and-neck with ambient in my tastes (anthem trance in particular, as well as vocal trance, acid trance, Nu-NRG, and the ever-present prog trance).
Not everything is redrawn. I'm still secure in a limited tolerance for electroclash and futurepop, which is a relief. Neither of these really counts as techno, which seems to indicate that the musical quicksand is limited to techno proper. This is a further relief, as I don't have to start thinking up new genre names for pop artists.
Writing all of this out has put me in mind of Carolus Linnaeus, the botanist who created modern biological taxonomy (Homo sapiens, and so on). One of the reasons that Linnaeus bothered to pursue the system in the first place was that he wanted to prove that creation was static--he believed in nulla species nova, the idea that no new species could come to enter the world. His inability to reconcile his examination of the fossil record with his own ideas on creation eventually led to serious mental imbalance.
I don't know exactly what it is about human nature that drives us to sort and classify the world into tiny little chunks, but we've become unhealthily obsessed with the idea. Creativity does not emanate in discrete, measurable quanta. The more we try to control the creative impulse, the closer we get to losing perspective on the value of those impulses. It is as if we are in a candlelit room, viewing a portrait. We keep blowing out candles, trying to create the perfect atmosphere for enjoying the art. Eventually, we have so dimmed the room in our pursuit of precision that we are unable to see the portrait at all.
We can always take solace in knowing that the portrait is still there. The key, as with so many things in life, is simply to enjoy it, regardless of the lighting.
***
The other day, maxrobbin asked me to delineate between different styles of techno (and woe unto the person who regularly uses the word "electronica"). I gave him a basic, amateurish rundown of the differences between house, trance, ambient, and so on. The classification was complicated by the fact that techno has begun to resemble India's caste system; it seems that every artist that straddles the line between genres is assigned a brand new genre all his/her/their own. I joked that we were headed for a future in which there were only genres, and no artists.
As it turns out, the future is already here. A little bit of research demonstrated to me that my genre preferences are much broader than I had anticipated. I knew, for example, that I liked to listen to trance, acid jazz, and trip-hop. I knew that I periodically listened to electrojazz, 2Step, big beat, and synthpop. I'm familiar with gabber, though one doesn't really listen to it as much as vibrate along to the beat. But who knew that I also listened to breakbeat, Nortec, glitch, and braindance? Certainly not I, who had never even heard of the last three until recently.
This doesn't even begin to cover the permutations of ambient, the subgenre that first turned me on to techno. At least, I thought it was ambient. Most of the ambient that I preferred somehow became IDM; this is slightly dismaying, since an awful lot of IDM fans are regarded as music snobs (no comments from the cheap seats, if you please). I don't have to worry about being pigeonholed, though--the rest of the ambient I like has been reclassified as ambient dub, chillout, dark ambient, and illbient.
Add house music to the picture: obviously it isn't enough to say that I like house, so I'm obligated to specify that I enjoy hard house, acid house, jazz-house, dream house, microhouse, deep house, French house, hip-house, Chicago house, and prog house. In fact, I seem to have an affinity for prog styles in general--I used to think that I only liked it in passing, but apparently I love the stuff.
Some of the genre taxonomy is expansive instead of limiting. Calling something ambient house, for example, is cheating. The same goes for Detroit, which is really just a catch-all for any American techno that's more than fifteen years old, regardless of whether it came out of Detroit or not.
The reeducation continues: I thought I didn't care for Jungle/DnB, though apparently I'm more fond of it than I realize. Ditto for psytrance, which turns out to be more or less the same as Goa trance, which I could've sworn I didn't like. I'm not bothered by that, though, since trance runs neck-and-neck with ambient in my tastes (anthem trance in particular, as well as vocal trance, acid trance, Nu-NRG, and the ever-present prog trance).
Not everything is redrawn. I'm still secure in a limited tolerance for electroclash and futurepop, which is a relief. Neither of these really counts as techno, which seems to indicate that the musical quicksand is limited to techno proper. This is a further relief, as I don't have to start thinking up new genre names for pop artists.
Writing all of this out has put me in mind of Carolus Linnaeus, the botanist who created modern biological taxonomy (Homo sapiens, and so on). One of the reasons that Linnaeus bothered to pursue the system in the first place was that he wanted to prove that creation was static--he believed in nulla species nova, the idea that no new species could come to enter the world. His inability to reconcile his examination of the fossil record with his own ideas on creation eventually led to serious mental imbalance.
I don't know exactly what it is about human nature that drives us to sort and classify the world into tiny little chunks, but we've become unhealthily obsessed with the idea. Creativity does not emanate in discrete, measurable quanta. The more we try to control the creative impulse, the closer we get to losing perspective on the value of those impulses. It is as if we are in a candlelit room, viewing a portrait. We keep blowing out candles, trying to create the perfect atmosphere for enjoying the art. Eventually, we have so dimmed the room in our pursuit of precision that we are unable to see the portrait at all.
We can always take solace in knowing that the portrait is still there. The key, as with so many things in life, is simply to enjoy it, regardless of the lighting.