What: Lo-fi house's shining star
Where: Sweden
Why: Disruption may be valued in the tech industry but in the music world, the old guard don't like their conventions messed with. Even in the world of dance music, which is now more corporate than anyone raving in the 1990s in Detroit, Chicago or Peckham could ever have thought.
So when the genre tag "Lo-Fi House" started to be used by a clutch of artists who named themselves and their tracks with pop culture references, such as Ross From Friends, DJ Boring's Winona and DJ Seinfeld, it drew ire from the dance establishment.
The youth didn’t care. This new generation and the sound they were making was embraced on all corners. Another reason the dance oldies were none too happy? These new artists didn’t value high-fidelity above all else, preferring to rough up their electronic productions with distortion.
Swedish producer DJ Seinfeld is the microscene's most popular artist; he's played at clubs around Ireland more than once already. And there's a reason. Beneath the less-than-shiny exterior, there are songs with rich feeling. U, a six-minute song that will feature on DJ Seinfeld's album Time Spent Away From U samples Bob Geldof talking about grief and is emotionally more resonant than any ironic genre tag would have you believe.
You have to hear these...
Brian Eno with Kevin Shields – Only Once Away My Son
This collaboration was concocted by two artists known for their way with sonics for a US cartoon cable TV station Adult Swim’s singles collection). Where Eno is known for making serene, Shields with My Bloody Valentine is known for making ears bleed, so it makes sense that the two met in the middle for this track where Eno’s ambient tones are met with roars of drone.
This would have been a better choice for the the soundtrack to BBC's Blue Planet II trailer than Hans Zimmer and Radiohead's collaboration.
Metro Area – Miura
Morgan Geist and Darshan Jesrani's run of 12-inch releases from 1999, which were subsequently packaged into a full-length Metro Area LP in 2002, contained some of the finest dance music to come out of New York in at least a generation. Even now, tracks such as Miura, notable for its simple "uh-oh uh-oh" vocal sample and its spacious beat with slight delay, still work in clubs. They have a timeless quality informed by the 1970s' and 1980s' NYC club culture that proceeded it, and with the album now remastered and re-released on vinyl to mark its 15th anniversary, there's no better time to give it a reappraisal.
