Introducing: CNNBL GLXY!
On New Year’s Eve, I dreamed I would wake up New Year’s Day and post something to Disco Workout every day. Instead I woke up and realized it is time to rethink The Blog from the ground up.
When we started this thing wayyyy back in 2007, MP3 blogs were still relatively new. It felt exciting to be part of this new, developing subculture which blended the fandom of ‘Zines with the curatorial nature of DJing in a shared, immediate, global space. There was a great camaraderie among the earliest music blogs, a respect for each which came in part from the collective sense that we were all part of a scavenger hunt for the best un- and re-discovered gems.
Things have changed in 2010. A Hype-rank-obsessed culture of promo-driven remixes and mashedup re-edits of remixed re-edits has rewarded producers whose music sounds like “music that blogs write about.” So much so that our inbox sounds like an echo chamber still reverberating with the sounds of 2007. It’s great to have all this music being made, but it’s gotten harder for us to figure out what to write about that feels new, and that isn’t being covered elsewhere. Which is probably healthy for the internet, but we’re having a bit of une crise d’identité.
So we’re due for a rethink. And we are rethinking. So bear with us if we blog slightly less for a while as we sort it out.
Speaking of the “bear with us”, Bearbaby moved to Portland and started a band with her boyfriend. And it’s fucking GREAT! Here’s a description, in her own write:
Hi blake
So here is the Mp3 for turquoise girl. I attached purity of children also (??), just in case:)
So, here are a couple “thoughts” about us/our band/the future…
We’re interested in apocalyptic themes.. we like to take a casual, but reflective perspective towards the use of media in peoples’ modern lives. A lot of the lyrics are about how people can be shut off from thinking in the modern world and tend to repeat what media outlets or corporations tell them. But, there tends to be a theme of hope, where the main voice or character is not satisfied with society. But most importantly we’re more into the aesthetics and textures of music instead of giving music an overt meaning. It’s more important to give someone an emotional experience. Incorporating sounds like telephones and breaking glass is part of a musical exploration that we enjoy doing in “CNNBL GLXY.”
I am interested in making music that is both confrontational as well as melodic. I particularly enjoy Throbbing Gristle’s portrayal of violence through dark industrial textures. But, I also enjoy incredibly catchy, yet progressive rock such as ELO, Todd Rundgren and Can.
Austin has been incredibly influenced by the free forms of Miles Davis as well as Terry Riley. He makes instrumental electronic music as well as dirty rock and roll in other side projects.
We use a combination of electronic and non-electronic instruments…..
Portland has been a really accepting and experimental town. It has been great for breaking monotony. There is a wide variety of musical acts playing right now and we feel hugely inspired by the passion and honesty of this musical scene.
We are looking forward to doing live shows as soon as we complete our EP sometime by the end of this month. We plan on creating a cacophony of raucous melody and sound.
Thnx blake
Sarah
I couldn’t be more excited or proud-i-er to be the first to introduce the planet to CNNBL GLXY!
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MP3: “Turqoise Girl” – CNNBL GLXY
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MP3: “Purity of Children” – CNNBL GLXY
CNNBL GLXY is brand new and perhaps a little bit lonely, so you should really strongly consider befriending them.
Thank you so much!
Sounds great!
An Open Letter to the Editors of The Disco Workout.
Re: New Years Day Revelations.
Welcome to 1980.
1979 was the year disco hit its peak, its first peak, in retrospect. At the end of the seventies, disco had hit such commercial saturation that it fueled a backlash throughout middle America. Disco was a dirty word.
Such vitriolic fervor did not exist in Europe, and under the retronym Italo, disco continued its restless beat–albeit highly synthesized (the eighties were the future, after all). Stateside, disco continued in the underground through clubs like the Paradise Garage and the Warehouse, each giving birth to a new sound, Garage and House, respectively.
House, being a simultaneous revival yet antithesis of disco, moved so far from its origins that the “rave scene” ended up looking more like the mosh pits of punk rock than discotheques it originated in. Eventually (lets say 1995) it burnt out and soulful, disco-influenced house crawled back into spotlight. By the late 90s, the modern production techniques of house combined with the savvy sampling of key disco sounds created a sound collectively known as “the french touch”. It too, went quietly into the night (a less violent death than disco received, to be sure) as house simply morphed into a general house sound, combining Roland drum machine beats, disco loops, tribal drummings, synth basslines, and soulful vocals. Enter 2005. The blog era.
Circa 2005, high bandwidth internet was becoming so ubiquitous that finding new music on the internet was no longer a tedious chore of fruitless searches via peer-2-peer or torrents. Blogs, which could only hitherto emulate music magazines in that they could write reviews, could now surpass them in that they could actually contain the very thing they were describing–the mp3.
This, combined with the proliferation of illegal music software, made house instantly accessible to everyone. No longer the purview of the DJ-turned-producer, any kid with a laptop could now make professional sounding dance music. With no record crates to dig in, most turned to whatever was new and un-sacred that they could get their hands on–like blog music. Indie rock tracks got chopped into pieces and distorted–the result, electro house.
At first lost in the sea of “electro bangers”, disco house was rediscovered by those who wanted to revive the sounds of the french touch era just a few years earlier. Some producers had slipped into obscurity; others, like Kris Menace and Alan Braxe, had never left. In any case, the blogosphere pointed its attention to what would be called “nu-disco”, a combination of the highly polished synthetic productions of Italo Disco a la Kano et al, and the later dancefloor sensibilities of the french touch. Thus we have DiscoWorkout, and Johnatron’s EP, combining the lush synthetic textures of italo with the stylings of french house.
The ammount of nu-disco material coming out of the woodwork was phenomenal; the back pages of the workout alone are choc-full of standout tracks from 2008 to 2009. And as with any popular scene, the commercialism set in. Blogs focused on hype-machine rankings derived from exploiting unsigned tracks by fame-hungry bedroom producers, culminating in a symbiotic, parasitic, relationship. The anti-establisment niavete of the mp3 blog had simply withered into another form of the music industry.
Music blogs were the music business.
So here we are.
Contemplating the death of disco at the end of a decade, sick of the commercial excess, sick of the daily grind, helplessly exhausted in the face of something that was supposed to be an escape from it all.
Exactly where we were, thirty years earlier.
This blog, like every other blog, is founded on the wide-eyed dream of reliving the disco era. Well, you did it. Congratulations. You have relived the death of disco and made every same mistake along the way. You know know what it’s like to watch dance music die.
The question is, what are you going to do about it?
Times like these are do or die. 1980 was the year that sunk the careers of a great many dance artists. 2010 is no different. Sure, there is pressure to conform, and pressure to stand out. But if you can put all that self-conscious garbage to rest and just focus on the music. Play what you love and nothing else!
If you can do that, then you can do what your disco forefathers could never do.
Sincerly,
Malcolm Extacy.
Well said Malcom Ex. This is exactly the sort of soul searching in which we are engaged. But we’re proud of that fact that we’ve always only ever posted what turns us on. And perhaps our dirty little secret is that the “disco” in the title is more about a feeling than a literal genre. And I think you al, dear readers, know this.
We’ve never chased easy web traffic by reposting whatever Blouse or Chillwave or AnCo remixes are in the Hype machine top 10. And while our mailbag overfloweth more and more (we currently get about 150-200 emails every day) if nothing in it jumps out, we’d rather let a few weeks go by than post something for the hell of it. And we’re pretty proud of that.
Anyway, internally at DW headquarters here we’ve been talking about how to recharge our batteries in the wake of a sort of standardization/stagnation of the blogosphere. And we have some exciting evolutionary changes in the works for DW’s design and focus. Don’t worry – we’ll still write about music we adore and that we want to share with the world. I’m pretty excited about it…watch this space!
Excellent. I’m glad to hear that blogmageddon hasn’t fazed you. You’ve steadily been dropping dancefloor secret weapons since as long as I’ve known the blog, and it would be a tragedy to end it all in a fit of post-new year’s hangover/midlife crisis/blog suicide.
PS: One feels almost sorry for the chillwave crowd. It’s really not that different from disco house, production-wise (they both sample italo) and stylistically (both emulating niche subgenres that came and went decades ago, in this case shoegaze) they simply have the misfortune of coming at a time when blogged music was becoming viewed with scorn and had it have been five years ago, they would be as respected as M83 or Van She.
Or not.
-MXTC