Friday Cheese: Before The Drugs & Pretention Took Hold... May 21, 2010

Techno music has always been this weird, spastically hyper-evolving thing – Cross ADHD with a sped-up version of evolution, and you get a pretty good idea of how the genre behaved, especially in the early to mid 90’s. Always desperate to maintain some veneer of staying on the cutting edge, as a whole, techno music shattered into a splazillion different sub-genres. With the desperate need to remain “niche”, vast Costco-size tubs of pretension were slathered all over virtually every facet of the music & its practitioners. And one of the worst offenders were those flouncing about under the banner of “Intelligent Dance Music”, as if everything preceding it (regardless of musical genre) was somehow moronic dance music. When techno got too chipper, too much visibility, these snobs packed up their “smart drinks” and settled down to layering strange noises and deep-sea recordings of blue whales having the equivalent of a post-chipotle-burrito gastrointestinal meltdown over other noises.

Sometimes it worked… oftentimes it was bafflingly dense, a barrier set so high that god forbid, the masses wouldn’t trample on their lawn, and usually both on the same album. For me, the best example of this was always Future Sound of London. With a danceclub hit under their belt (Papua New Guinea), it was as if they reflexively spazzed out in later albums, desperate to put distance between accessibility and themselves. Of course, this made them “pioneers”, and they reveled in this newfound status by making even stranger and stranger albums (not necessarily bad, mind you).

Before all of that took hold, however, they made dance music. Fun dance music, accessible dance music. Take a listen… I personally think it’s held up better than much of their later efforts.