![]() ![]() The blog house era gave us a lot of unforgivable music, but it also spawned some genuine bangers that remain fuckloads more fun than anything you’ll hear at a tech-house pool party in 2016. “In retrospect it all seems like some sort of musical puberty, slightly embarrassing and messy, but we were making it up as we went along rather than attempting to fit in,” Shaw says. Joy Orbison released ‘Hyph Mngo’ and everyone moved on to post-dubstep, where house mutations were the next logical destination for kids who had caught the club bug.Ī lot of people now might sneer at blog house or try to pretend they had nothing to do with it, but for plenty of us who heard Erol Alkan play ‘We Are Your Friends’ at Trash or saw 2manyDJs in a warehouse in then-derelict King’s Cross, the fun we had in that era is the reason we carry on going to clubs now. By 2009, the pills were crap and the neon dreams and carefree days were over. The abrasive bass and angular structures perfected by Justice were endlessly copied, resulting in club nights where DJs would play any old 128KB MP3 just to stay ahead of the curve, even if the music was basically unlistenable. As blogs raced to post the biggest tracks first so they could get to the top of the charts themselves, the quality control levels dropped to appallingly low levels. It was the beginning of what we take for granted now.”įor a period of roughly three years between 2006-09, producers making tracks in their bedroom believed they could be the biggest act in the world if they managed to reach the top of MP3 blog aggregator The Hype Machine. ![]() Blogs were essentially just digital fanzines but they could reach further, and rather than just enthuse about a record they had just found, they could post it – you could grab it and hear it, or play it in your own town that night. “These same people spent as much time online as in ‘proper’ record shops. “Blog house was what happened when people who ought to have been in bands spent more time in nightclubs than in venues,” says Jas Shaw, half of one of the era’s taste-making DJ duos Simian Mobile Disco. But this melting pot of lurid synths, compressed bass and big beats had one thing in common: it was the focus of an international network of music blogs disseminating DIY remixes and dodgy radio rips around the world. In Japan they played these tracks and called it “apparel electro”. A US contingent grew out of the Hollerboard forum run by Diplo, while Switch and Hervé weaved ghetto house with UK club music into a style commonly known as fidget. In Australia, Van She and the Bang Gang DJs fed off acts like Cut Copy and The Presets. In Paris, the Ed Banger and Institubes crews took inspiration from Daft Punk and French touch. For a country still recovering from NME‘s “new rock revolution” led by The Libertines and The Strokes, it was a breath of fresh air. DJs Erol Alkan, Rory Phillips and Nadia Ksaiba brought acts like Justice and 2manyDJs to the capital, all of them combining disco and ‘80s classics with noisy electro house. Some of it was dance music that mutated from the electroclash scene and trickled out from seminal London nights like Nag Nag Nag, Trash and Our Disco. It’s difficult to define what blog house was exactly, because it covered so many styles. In the summer of 2006 the Klaxons spawned nu rave, but the real youth subculture of the mid-00s was the music that DJs played after bands had finished: blog house.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |