Define Minimal

[DannyBlack]

What minimal actually is seems to have been lost in translation somewhere. The electronic music scene was recently flooded with blips and bloops and stripped down beats, for the most part- not good. It alienated people and made people greedy, my opinion, put the gun down. haha.

Basically, what I want to know is- what is minimal? When you take away the flourecesent coloured t-shirts and the emaciated late night sunglasses wearing elitists, what are you left with?

Why do you like it?

[djfilthmonger]

:lol:

[DannyBlack]

?

[The_Laughing_Man]

WHat I like only applies to the more experimental less mainstream end of minimal.

I like the looseness of the beat structure. High swing grooves and stripped quantisation for really slipped out, but difficult for crap DJ`s, beats.

I like the experimentation with sound and texture, something that has dissapeared in mainstream techno as a whole.

I like the return to the use of musicality, as opposed to mashing any discordant mess together. The careful use of melody in a minimal way. Interesting scales use and chordal structure.

I like the very high production values that seem to dominate. Techno seems to have lost it`s standards somewhere, whereas minimal as a whole, seems to have higher quality production values.

I like the slower speed. It allows more room to really build on the depth and texture of sounds, as they have more room to breath inbetween kicks. I like the fact that the groove is actually a groove, and not based entirely on enforcing the kick drum.
Also with much more room for the sounds, you can, if you like, if it`s your thing, make monumentally big kicks. Kicks that take up loads of room, that can really pound, and be "harder" than hard techno, dynamically, as they aren`t constrained by higher bpms closing up the room in the mix.

Mainly I like the experimentation and freedom minimal offers in production and listening terms. I like the fact that it seemes to have pushed artist who before I thought had painted themselves into a corner, or who had stagnated, had suddenly embraced the freedom to try new grooves and sounds.

I felt techno had become too splintered into subgenres, with too many blinkered fans only into that one very specific sub genre. Such as only into schranze, or loopy crap or whatever. It seemed to lead to in-breeding, a lack of experimentation, and fixed preconceptions on sound choice, structure and groove.

Minimal is a bit more wide open, it crosses into house, detroit, idm, and dubstep, so there is a lot more freedom to play around with sound, and as a whole, the audience seems to accept this too.

[a X cell]

What I define as "minimal" is the Minimal House.
There's no such thing as Minimal Techno saying Techno is already implying that it is Minimal.
If we look back in the 80s and beginning of the 90s, Techno was looking itself for an identity and if we follow it's evolution, it's simply a genre of music who evolved with the technology. Suddently you could have much more faster techno and harder because the sound quality was more decent, more sophisticated synths because you could actually get a nice sound with a software. What has become minimal is simply tech-house with a stripped beat and bleeps and bloop.

That's what I define as Minimal.

[The_Laughing_Man]

What has become minimal is simply tech-house with a stripped beat and bleeps and bloop.



That is the mainstream sound of minimal.
Equating that with the whole of the minimal sound is a bit like saying that all techno is like 2unlimited.

Stylistically minimal techno has absorbed glitch techniques and micro edits from IDM, as well as a really stripped down melodic structure. When done well, it takes out interim notes in a scale leaving the mind to fill in the blanks of a melody.
Textures are also stripped back somewhat, being reduced to fewer oscillators, yet the sounds are maximised with processing.
Grooves are pushed to more extreme swing.
There are so many stylistic and technical aspects that separate new minimal techniques from what hood was doing back in the day, which was minimal purely by instrumentation, rather than overall ethic.

It`s really difficult to make effective minimal techno, to take as much away as possible but still capture the essence. It certainly does, from a production perspective, make you look at how grooves, melodies and textures work, by the act of deconstructing everything.

[The_Laughing_Man]

The less educated like to bang on about Robert hood inventing minimal blah blah blah, but modern minimal owes more to people like Pan Sonic ans Sahko Recordings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mika_Vainio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sähkö_Recordings
"Techno" music that traces it`s roots to Musique Concrete and Industrial, and art music, rather than Detroits funk and disco roots.

There is a very good short doc by Bjork about modern minimalism that has a lot of relevance to modern minimal techno and the pursuit of purity and texture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpbGGb6ZzWg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz_7V7F6RrM

It also has a very rare interview with my fave (and I would say greatest composer of the 20th century) composer Arvo Part.

[Jay Pace]

Any type of techno / house that works around a less is more construct, with lots of focus on space, tone and texture.

I like the good stuff because reducing music down to barebones components puts a lot of pressure on those components to sound beautiful, and do something interesting.

For me, thats the beauty of it. You get a great idea beautifully presented.

Unfortunately you also get a shed load of crap, because weak ideas sound worse when they aren't masked by speed, distortion, compression and general background noise.

The new wave of minimal seems overly foccused on shuffly blop blip stuff, but that just seems to conform more to the "in sound" than any particular musical goals or purposes. There's heaps of copycats out there trying to sound contemporary, but amongst all the pap there are people putting out musically interesting, beautifully produced tracks that have groove, drive, and energy to them.

Hard techno was full of crap as well, but amongst the mindless loopy chugfests there were some tracks that were just blisteringly raw and groundbreaking. Same goes for minimal. There are diamonds out there, no point dismissing the whole genre based on some deep v-necks, sunglasses and endless obsessions with whooshy white noise (stop it stop it stop it)

[MARK ANXIOUS]

The less educated like to bang on about Robert hood inventing minimal blah blah blah, but modern minimal owes more to people like Pan Sonic ans Sahko Recordings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mika_Vainio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sähkö_Recordings
"Techno" music that traces it`s roots to Musique Concrete and Industrial, and art music, rather than Detroits funk and disco roots.

There is a very good short doc by Bjork about modern minimalism that has a lot of relevance to modern minimal techno and the pursuit of purity and texture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpbGGb6ZzWg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz_7V7F6RrM

It also has a very rare interview with my fave (and I would say greatest composer of the 20th century) composer Arvo Part.

i actually totally agree. i got all the early pan sonic and sahko tracks and this was really developing way before hood. it was hood that 'made' the term commercial though. that's the first time we ever really heard an album described as 'minimal' in the press to my knowledge.

anyway, the definition of minimal, to me is the original idea of it. you take such small sounds and really develop them, but not obviously and in a kinda random way. modern day minimal is too obvious. that's why to me, much of it is a different genre entirely. not that i dont like it, i'm a music person after all, but i'm just saying it's not the true definition of minimal. funny what commercialism can do to a sound eh?!

[the_VOICE]

mark u should play a minimal set i defo check it out

[DannyBlack]

On the back of all of this info it would seem that the minimal movement of the last couple of years is meerly the tip of the minimalism iceburg.

[the_VOICE]

On the back of all of this info it would seem that the minimal movement of the last couple of years is meerly the tip of the minimalism iceburg.


yea Minimal is massive atm i do check some sets out from time to time tbh just two slow no feeling to the music :no:

[The_Laughing_Man]

yea just two slow

Then Dance Faster:roflmao:

[Loop]

Sorry to say it but Hawtin was calling Sheet One minimal(1993) and its still one of the finest examples.
Arvo Part is amazing btw. Check this one out - http://www.discogs.com/Arvo-P%C3%A4rt-Estonian-Philharmonic-Chamber-Choir-Tallinn-Chamber-Orchestra-T%C3%B5nu-Kaljuste-Te-Deum/release/896511

[The_Laughing_Man]

Sorry to say it but Hawtin was calling Sheet One minimal(1993) and its still one of the finest examples.
Arvo Part is amazing btw. Check this one out - http://www.discogs.com/Arvo-P%C3%A4rt-Estonian-Philharmonic-Chamber-Choir-Tallinn-Chamber-Orchestra-T%C3%B5nu-Kaljuste-Te-Deum/release/896511

If you are a fan of part you have to get this
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pärt-Symphony-No-3-Tabula-Fratres/dp/B00001IVON

Gil Shaham, one of the greatest violinists in the world playing Fratres.
The textures he gets out of the strings are like shards of glass being shot threw your spine. I through this into a Voidloss live pa in Poland once on a big soundsystem. It was incredible. Longest most rewarding breakdown in a PA I`ve ever done.

[akuma]

i think to a lot of people minimal means techno a few bpms down minus the compressed percussive loops and distortion....and plus heavily swung arpeggiated basslines and white noise. i think thats what i'd expect if i went to a night calling itself minimal. (not that i ever have cos i live in devon!)

whether or not this is minimal or not doesnt matter anyway. theres loads of other stuff out there that is quality..stuff on ostgut ton and shed etc

anyway minimal is dead now. alexis petridis said so in the guardian and he wears an £1800 jacket so is well switched on innit?

[aNaLpLeAsEr]

He looks like Mr Bean

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/contributor/2007/09/26/alexis_petridis_140x140.jpg

[SlavikSvensk]

i actually totally agree. i got all the early pan sonic and sahko tracks and this was really developing way before hood. it was hood that 'made' the term commercial though. that's the first time we ever really heard an album described as 'minimal' in the press to my knowledge.

but it's a bit apples and oranges innit? robert hood was part of a "minimal techno" sound that stripped the embellishments and extra matter off of the dominant hard and detroit sounds of the time. this has certainly played a role in the birth and development of today's minimal, largely through people like richie hawtin, who have bridged the two things. but i think that today's minimal is not so much a continuation of the path those fellas walked down, but a different path that takes in some of what they did alongside a pretty diverse set of influences.

i'm a bit skeptical of how important something like musique concrete has been to minimal, as i don't hear much of pierre schaeffer and other tape-music pioneers there. but i do think LM hit the nail on the head with sähkö, panasonic (got to be OG about it). i always felt the sähkö influence on glitch labels like spectral, which is an intermediary i guess. i'd also add some of the minimal currents in house music over the years to that pot.

[The_Laughing_Man]

Musique concrete is extremely important to minimal.

Musique Concrete is essentially about Acousmatic sound, and minimal is very much about that (at least the good stuff). Especially as the trend is moving away from purely synthetic sounds into more electroacoustic tones.

Abstract, tonally complex textures, acousmatically obscured from source, looping techniques etc. More prominenet in the Berghain stuff, but it`s a massive chunk of the root theory of mnml.