No Man In A Box!
These days, it becomes harder to box artists into pre-fabricated categories. Whereas in the 90ies it was crystal clear that Blake Baxter stood for House and Dave Angel or Jeff Mills for Techno, in our postmodern or decadent or maneristic age of dance music, it has become quite confusing.
Could anyone put James Holden and his Border Community in a box? Trance or ultra poetic innovation?? Or Radio Slave? Just an old fart of a Minimal producer or a genius of hynotic Pop-remixes?? Or Noze? Cheesy Wannabee Pop heroes or authentic underground artists with a disposedness to refined melodic infiltration??
So, yeah, boxes don’t make much sense anymore, uh? Not even to mention Justice and the whole Ed Banger posse like SebastiAn or Simian Mobile Disco. Although here, we could at least and wholeheartedly say: overhyped (but sometimes still quite, well… ok).
So even though club music seems to be “very dogmatic and almost unchangeable” - as Ricardo Villalobos pointed out in a really cool Groove Magazin (the bible of German club music enthusiasts) interview - it indeed has come a long way. Even Villalobos with his reduced-to-the-bones approach would probably be the first one to acknowledge that. Simply because although he is seen as the most rigid minimalist, it is him who uses ideas from gypsy CDs or samples even by our alltime favourite Johann Sebastian Bach to give his see-through structures some colour and light. Apart from his hypnotic grooves of course.
So club music nowadays becomes much more that just that; CLUB music. It has reached a level of differentiation - and we are not talking about the usual “progressive” House and other shit like that in case you didn’t notice - that makes this “genre” probably one of the most interesting (if not THE most interesting) in today’s “popular music”.
To come back to James Holden again, when we heard his mind opening poetic and for long stretches rather beatless set on Sonar Festival 2007, there was not a single Poom Tchak that we did miss. And no categories needed either. Now I could say: just a musician and his music. But that would make things to simple. I prefer to say: a very strong position in contemporary music.
