What’s next for the underground?

What’s next for the underground?

12 May, 2008 | 2.43PM

• Section: Music News Topics: Beatport Blog
• Written by: Ben Raven

Is minimal really past its “sell by” date?

Is deep house moving things forward or taking things a step back?

It seems the underground is stuck at a crossroads, but whether the answer to the future really lies in the past remains to be seen.

An email from a friend with a telling line about the current dance music climate arrived in my inbox this evening.

He’s playing the second room of a Prinz Thomas gig in Berlin soon — not exactly an unusual occurrence here in this city of superior-choice partying – but his closing tagline said a lot about the current divide cutting a line through dance music’s underbelly.

“There won’t be a minimal techno record in sight,” his email read, predicting the musical menu on offer the following weekend.

It’s unsurprising that after the huge resurgence in minimal dance music that’s revived the scene so voraciously around the world over the past five years, that the inevitable minimal fallout is occurring.

Clicky, plugin-overloaded production trickery and laptop-produced tunes are coding an identikit formula for a lot of records tumbling from the minimal techno bandwagon and attracting criticism for creating a clichéd minimal sound .

It’s no surprise then that the underground house and techno scene is dividing again much like progressive house and house music did post-2000.

The underground’s biggest new names are more likely to be deep house aficionados like Nicky Curly, Sascha Dive or Johnny D and if you listen to the sets by Raresh, Pedro (aka Petre Inspirescu) or Rhadoo—the trio currently being billed as the underground’s strongest new DJing talent-- their DJ mixes are more often than not based around replaying old gems and lost classics from house and techno music’s mid-1990s (even if their own productions are valiant attempts at discovering something new).

The underground, it seems, is on mission to go back.

A mission, perhaps, to rediscover old deep or Chicago-style house tunes from labels like Strictly Rhythm, or as an effort to distance itself from minimal techno, the all-of-a-sudden uncool family member of dance music’s genre circle.

So what does that mean for dance music?

The bandwagon jumpers are jumping just as they always do, and the real minimalists will stick to their guns, just as they, too, always do.

Underground dance music seems stuck at a crossroads.

Where over the past five years the boom in software plug-in technology opened new possibilities for dance music’s creators, now those avenues have become over trodden and the scene is stalling on making its next creative move.

Dance music has always been a style obsessed with foreseeing the future.

To regress, like the indie rock scene has done for much of the past ten years, goes against everything its creators set about to achieve almost thirty years ago.

It’s an uncertain time.

But luckily mavericks like Ricardo Villalobos are continuing to innovate.

One thing is for certain: the beat of the underground will carry on and in a bedroom somewhere around the globe the seeds of a new strain to mutate the virus will be sown once again.

Just make sure your ears and eyes are on the lookout for this new sound wherever it may stem from.

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