For Loidis’ sake let 2025 be maximal
Plus Wookie, Seefeel and more
It's not like 2024 has been without its share of bad news. But, amid the ongoing shower of political / environmental / imperial shit, one piece of musical news really made me shudder this year: the return of 2000s minimal.
Let me be clear: I am not against minimal music. Minimal with personality is fine: Robert Hood's Minimal Nation, early Plastikman, Basic Channel, Isolée - records where life seemed to lurk among the minimal grooves. Some of Isolée's music is plainly absurd - see Jelly Baby / Fish - and this is a wonderful thing.
But, as someone who lived through the 2000s minimal boom, this was rarely the case back then. Villalobos made some brilliant records; I loved Alex Smoke, on Soma; some of Hawtin's output was great; Magda’s fabric mix…
On the whole, though, there was a wild overemphasis on production, whereby 99% of musical effort went into polishing the mix. It wasn’t exactly polishing a turd - I WISH it was polishing a turd - more polishing a stone. Which makes for a very shiny stone. But a stone, nevertheless. This is the era when I briefly went off dance music. It was too cool. Not enough fire.
This brings us to Loidis' One Day, anointed as one of the albums of the year by everyone from Pitchfork to Resident Advisor. I am not saying that an album lots of people clearly love is bad, particularly given that people whose tastes I respect admire the record.
One Day clearly has its qualities, then. But those qualities just don't interest me. To quote the RA review, “One Day pulls off a sly trick throughout. Leeds [Brian Leeds - aka Huerco S. aka Loidis] mimics the lossy compression and audio degradation favoured by the clicks 'n cuts set, only this time using stem separation software and creative resampling that falls closer, he said, to hypermodern genres.” Which is undoubtedly impressive. But to what end? What's the point here?
In the RA interview that accompanies Loidis' recent podcast he talks about the inspiration behind One Day. “Here we are, two decades removed from the '00s, and the prevailing trends in dance music are more and more maximalist. I missed restraint, subtlety and sensuality.”
Which is fair enough. I see lots of restraint and subtlety in Loidis' work - sensuality not so much - but that doesn't get my blood pulsing. Did we get into electronic music for restraint? Really?
Slick production tricks don't preclude emotion. Just look at the best pop music. But what does One Day make you feel? Anything? A finely polished nothing? The records sounds to me like a far-too-basic Channel, dub techno with all the creases and wrinkles washed out, an ultra-conservative work. OK, One Day was made in reaction to what Leeds saw going on in electronic music. But to do so he went back 20 years, which doesn’t feel exactly progressive to me.
Leeds himself calls Loidis’ output “dub mnml emo tech”. But dub itself was never conservative and on One Day it feels like the genre has been reduced to some very basic signifiers - low bass, echo - without paying heed to its radical spirit.
Here's a question. Pop music has long borrowed the best from electronic artists, be it jungle breakbeats or dubstep bass rattle. What could it borrow from One Day, one of the most acclaimed dance music albums of 2024? There's nothing really there to borrow. Should dance music exist just to serve pop artists? Of course not. But it is a question worth asking.
(And again, I'm not picking on Leeds. People love this record for their own good reasons. It's comfortable, maybe. It's nostalgic. And that's fine. Don't get angry if you like One Day. You win! You get to enjoy an album I have struggled through in order to give it a chance. And I actually like the fact we can disagree on it.)
There are three big misunderstandings in dance music: that faster is more danceable, that heavier is more credible, and that minimal is cleverer, or more sophisticated, in some way. I can't agree with any of them.
But if I am against minimal, what is the alternative? Logically it has to be maximal, which sounds like I am making a smart-arse joke or just trying to annoy Leeds. But really I am not.
I am not really sure what Leeds means by the maximalist trends he mentions in the RA interview. Pop edits maybe? Clattering BPMs? That's not what I mean. Maximal for me is classic hardcore. Ragga jungle. Todd Edwards. Daft Punk's Discovery. 2-Step hi-hats. The Richard D. James album. PC Music. Basement Jaxx at their early best.
Maximal also finds its reflection in some of the best electronic music of 2024: Xylitol's Anemones. Burial's Dreamfear. Nikki Nair's Snake. Verraco’s Breathe… Godspeed. Jlin's Akoma. Olof Dreijer's Coral. Hodge's Free. Shanti Celeste's Ice Cream Dream Boy. Gyrofield's These Heavens. Blawan's BouQ. All of these are maximal in their own way. Sometimes they have maximal sound; but more important are maximal ideas and maximal emotion. Maximal life!
Take Burial's Dreamfear EP, each side of which sounds like 12 different songs crammed into one, some plainly very silly indeed. As I wrote back in January, “Dreamfear moves from an ambient intro to phantom hardcore break, deviates off into dirty trance, breaks down into near silence, builds back up with a thunderous electro momentum and ends with arpeggiated techno that reminds me of Underworld.”
Boy Sent From Above, on the other side, goes even further, slaloming from grimey electro to 1980s breakdance, church organ drone, Axel F funk and furious tekno. Maximal here means the overabundance of ideas and sounds in Burial's work. The result of which is totally ridiculous. And totally brilliant.
Consider also Nikki Nair's Snake EP, which brims with punk spirit, anger, joy, drama and radical self sabotage. Or Blawan's beautifully unhinged BouQ EP, whose genre-free malingering makes a compelling argument for escaping the techno circuit.
Consider, too, Gyrofield’s These Heavens. RA's review of the record
- which I very much agree with - explains, "[Gyrofield] practically undergoes a full villain arc in 23 minutes, staging a shift from tones so crystalline you'd be forgiven for thinking they were beamed direct from the Pillars of Creation, to mottled drumfunk hissing and heaving under the weight of menace." Now THAT'S my kind of record. 23 minutes of shifting tones and musical druidery.
Of course this approach can go drastically wrong. Basement Jaxx's third album Kish Kash is an absolute mess of poorly judged ideas, rammed up against each other in ways that don't work. But, if Kish Kash is a mess, at least it is an interesting one, a victim of over-ambition rather than endless dead polishing.
So Merry Christmas to Brian Leeds and happy new year to all his fans. Brian: you have made a (probably) very good album of a music I don't like.
But this isn’t really about you, Brian, and I didn’t start this Substack to write about music I don’t like. So, please, for my sake, as 2025 rolls around, let's keep things maximal and leave excess polishing to brass rubbers, coin collectors and magic lamp genies. Here's to 12 months of more inspiration, more ideas and more life, to combat these troubling times.You know it makes maximal sense.
PS Talking of which, I will be naming the Line Noise album of the year in the next newsletter / podcast, in case you’re wondering.
Some listening
(Sorry, there’s not much this week as the Christmas slowdown looms.)
Seefeel make it all sound so effortless: a few captivating noises; the hint of a melody, add a little nebulous atmosphere; and leave to stir. It worked back in the early 90s, when Seefeel would routinely blow my young mind; and it works in 2024, when I’ve heard thousands of things like this that never quite hit the spot in the same way. Writing about it feels almost pointless, like trying to trace patterns in sun-lit fog. So have some factual detail: So Shall You Be comes from Squared Roots, a new EP of songs from the band’s Everything Squared sessions, and the standard is sky-scrapingly, relentlessly high. Seefeel only release a fraction of the music they record; can it really all be this great?
Salt & Pepper is apparently part of a “rebirth” for Garage legend Jason Chue aka Wookie, the producer of probably my favourite UKG album of all time. It doesn’t entirely sound that way, with the song being not that far from a remake of Chue’s classic Scrappy, from drums to synth melody (listen at 1.40 if you don’t believe me.) I really don’t care though because A) I could listen to Scrappy 150 times a day and B) the producer and featured singer Tom Dunne have added enough that is different and inspired to the song to make if fly, from the dramatic beat switch two thirds in to Dunne’s silky vocals, which fit Wookie’s production like a Moschino glove.
Angel D’Lite - Cloud 69 (Tim Reaper remix)
Angel D’Lite + Tim Reaper = a heavenly, hazy roller straight out of the LTJ Bukem school of ambience, tinges of reggae lifting OFF into sub bass-assisted break nirvana.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise - Aphex Twin special with Jim Butler (Disco Pogo)
I got all up close and geeky about Aphex Twin in company with Disco Pogo’s Jim Butler, the editor of the new book: Aphex Twin - A Disco Pogo Tribute. We talked about our favourite Aphex myths, Richard James’ enduring appeal, Wolfgang Tillmans and the power of the Jockey Slut archive. I’ve also written three chapters of this book, which is surely the perfect Christmas present.
Line Noise Presents Nitsa 30 - Episode 9 with Latineo
As part of our ongoing series of Line Noise episodes to celebrate Nitsa’s 30th anniversary, I spoke to M8NSE, Felipe and Colomba from Latineo, a FLINTA collective created by queer migrants from Latin America in Barcelona that aims to be a safe space for dancing for women and non-conforming individuals. In a wide-ranging conversation we talked about the rise of Latin Club (for want of a better name), what the club space means to Latineo, creating safe spaces, anthems, their Nitsa parties (of course) and so much more
The playlists
The end is nigh! The end of 2024, that is. And that means you need to get your best albums and songs lists in order. Should you want a helping hand, I have my Spotify list of the best music of 2024 - in its last few weeks of being updated, like a knackered old horse about to be shot - and that old faithful playlist of the best new music of the last four or so years. Follow them, who not? (And, just for the record, I love horses. Please don’t shoot horses.)