6.5/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6XfRWVZvms

Flipped through "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" by Bill Brewster, and see that there is a chapter devoted to Balearic. Some of it was the same as it was in the article that I read for the Physical Therapy post, but it expands in a bit, and brings other genres under the umbrella.

Another quote that I like, that I think captures a certain feeling:
"Played badly, Balearic can sound like a kitsch wedding DJ; done well, it can make you listen to songs with fresh ears. 'Afredo [recall, Ibiza, posterguy for Balearic attitude] used to play a couple of U2 tunes...and to hear those when it's seven o'clock in the morning, the sun's coming up and you're in an open-air club absolutely off your tits - whoah! - they just sound so fabulous. I'm sure people could stick 'em on now and say "well it's just a U2 record," but I can listen to them and still get a shiver" --- similar feeling to owner of a lonely heart. I think that moment in Detroit solidied that song, and that approach, in a way that I would like to build on. the trouble is that, unless balanced with a solid groove from which to break into something like that at 7AM, you need some solid technical chops, or else you would come off like a wedding DJ.

Going back to the song that was chosen - Belgium New Beat is one of the genres that is also under the Balearic umbrella. "New beat is a reaction to disco, New beat is completely soulless -- it's sterile music created to dance to and nothing else...a music burglary that left only rhythm and a cast, churning dance throb." It sort of feels strange to lump in with Balearic, which seems airy and free and light in its anything goes approach, but I read this as Balearic in a different direction -- "with suhc a balletic, decerated dancefloors, DJs would often pitch records right down, lending a druggy weightless feel to the music." Going back to an early definition that Brewster gives of Balearic: "Balearic is an attitude to music more than a specific style or location. Or, as dance music writer Frank Tope quipped: It's pop music that sounds good on pills."

And going back to Balearic, the idea is that you take anything to make the mood, without getting too bogged down in if the genre labels fit together. In the case of this song, Brewster writes:
The record is a steely piece of machine aggression and ominous minor-key synths that clocks in at 135bpm. However, press 33 instead of 45 (with the pitch control at +8) and it turns into a 105bpm heroin groove, with the four-on-the-floor kick drums hitting every second swinging beat. There are drawn out rhythms and crashing subsonic explosions where before there was only speed." As this 'trick's popularity spread, "DJs plundered their collections with a finger on the speed button, finding all sorts of weird surprises" Also funny: "But new beat ensures house received a arm welcome in Belgium (most Belgian clubbers thought house was just fast new beat). More importantly, it laid the groundwork for the looming hardcore techno revolution. Even as it championed new beat, Boccaccio was becoming the foundry room from which European techno would be hammered out).

That was a lot of re-typing. I am glad to have a name to give to this type of music -- I would previously just refer to this as something sounding like Front 242 (which I think I even mentioned in last night's post) -- or maybe group the slow BPM and throbbing mechanical base under gothic or industrial -- but the idea that you are taking music that has so many layers and slowing it down to see what lies between is something, or letting each mono-note of the sequencer be felt more in isolation is really what makes this so interesting. I'm surprised that Bill Brewster didn't talk about how the very fact that technological developments in electronic music -- that there could be so many fast notes that could be slowed and observed in isolation -- made it so that changing to 33 RPM would actually become something new. If these weren't made from a sequencer, then there would be a pitch change within each of the notes, and this would sound like just a slowed down song, because each note would clearly lead to another. It is so 1 and 0 / stripped down.

Songs which I have heard before, so I can't choose for a post, but which I am glad to reframe under this sort of umbrella:

Front 242 - Don't Crash is very high up there for me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bB8aGUB6LQ (oddly, I heard that 'hey poor' song in a bougie grocery store, gus', which was strange?)

Severed Heads- Lamborghini- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaOAEstv0R4 -- I don't know that this would fit in with Belgium New Beat, but I got a collection of versions of this single at RS94109, and I always thought playing the record at 33 instead of 45 sounded better. Revisited the record tonight, with balearic approach in mind.

Enola Gay is another one that I like to play slow, and I think I actually tried out in the only Dj performance I did last year for Evan's birthday! --- Brewster writes "...while slowing others, like OMD's 'EMOLA Gay' down to 33, turning electronic pop into heavy-legged drug funk.'

As mentioned in the YouTube comment, this approach to slowing down I think now is something we see a lot with vapor wave, to give these funky crooning pop songs a sinister ghost-like reframing. I think that the impact of doing the slowing down for New Beat is different - stripping down to core elements to make simple and emphasize a "new beat' beneath the existing beat, which is meant to be danced to. Vapor is more slow to the point of unease and haunting, a glitching sludge. I dont think you could call the sequencer-driven songs sludge. Again, too 1 and 0.

ALSO: now, I am not sure where, if at all, there is a line between Electronic Body Music (EBM) and New Beat would be. Seems like these youtube comments have an idea. I think I would use interchangeably. Nice to have something besides 'goth' and 'industrial' -- which both carry so many different meanings.