Ah, now I begin to see where you're coming from.....

"There's loads of good minimal stuff coming out"

Yeah.

AND ?

I remember when 'I'm losing control' first came out. There was loads of good minimal stuff then, too.

Isn't this just a current trend ? I think so. And it is, frankly, a trend that is NOT really taking off in the UK.

Also, artists like Vogel/Hawtin etc have seen sales of their stuff cut to pieces of late. I don't think you're making the link I've alluded to between quality music and sales, to be honest.

If something is AMAZING, how will it become the benchmark if no-one outside of a small group of people have heard of it. It can't. End of story. It's all well and good sitting in a coffee shop in Berlin chatting about existentialism and how nice it is to be on the vanguard of minimalism but this is NOT going to sell more records, no matter how warm and superior it may make you feel inside.

I am making the point that it's all well and good for afficionados of certain sounds to get the new/cool stuff, this is always going to happen - but where on EARTH do first time buyers start ??

Also, I'd say that a LOT of the minimal stuff around these days pales in comparison to the early works of DBX, PWOG, Robert Hood etc. It's just MORE OF THE SAME. A lot of it is also very obviously influenced by Akufen, someone who did (for a while) do something different with the minimal style.

Kind of like Autechre. For a group who have strived so hard for an individual sound it must worry them that so many people now strive to sound exactly the same. Who ORIGINATED the sound, though ? THAT is who people will remember and thus Autechre will always be the masters.

I'm quite sad to see the emphasis being taken off 'hard' techno now that 'minimal' techno is in the pages of mixmag. It makes me feel many people have 'gone minimal' because the hard techno scene is basically boring them and they feel creatively stifled within it. This is BULLSHÃ*T. Techno is Hip-Hop as far as I'm concerned, you should be able to do WHATEVER THE FúCK YOU WANT with it.

If you are in the techno scene and feel limited creatively it's merely because your CREATIVITY is LIMITED.

Scenes ? Styles ? I've said it before I don't care for such classifications. It's ALL music at the end of the day.