What is MicroHouse

[Dialect]

I have an idea of what i think MicroHouse is and sounds like, but...


I would like some experts to give a clear description/definition of what MicroHouse....

*is in sound

*how its made, technique/software/hardware

*who makes it, labels/artist

*the ethos behind it, maybe go into its roots, where does the style come from.

*where its played and by whom

--------

cheers experts

[Tomoki]

Artists are Akufen, Jetone, Vladislav Delay, Safety Scissors, Spectre, Andreas Tilliander and some acts on the ForceTracks label and Perlon.
Both labels are based in Frankfurt.
A breeding-place for Microhouse is Montreal.
It sounds very fragmented with very short samples in it. Very quirky, and so minimal that it rocks.

[Dialect]

cheers

thats some info to start with.

anyone else.....

[V Knid esq]

the godfathers of the sound are Basic Channel, Pole and to a lesser extent Pan(a)sonic... A lot of tracks have a dub influence - pure sine tone basslines. Quatermass records are doing some good things taking it in new directions... Fisherofgold from Ireland mix it with a kind of Kruder & Dorfmeister / Ninja Tune jazz-hip-hop sensiblitiy...

[bine]

I think it's just a new word for a kind of music that exists much longer, than most people think. But when Akufen appeared it became extremely popular, so it got a new name.

check out TWERK/now I'm rendered useless/FIM Album
not that housy, but fucking cool micro-stuff
check out the labels Playhouse, Context, and don't forget Cabanne and ARK from Paris, they appeared on Telegraph, Brif, Perlon and Karat, ARK is fucking brilliant

Akufen appeared also on Trapez, Background and a few other labels. The sounds are mainly recorded from the radio. He cuts them into short pieces and arranges these bits very presize. He uses a short-wave receiver for doing that, also when he plays live.

[V Knid esq]

I've always had a weakness for Nonplaceurbanfield aka Burnt Friedman - he uses the micro-edit clicks & pops in a huge variety of different grooves...

[deccard]

nonplaceurbanfield? what´s the latest album called? i´ve got 3 albums from friedman but sadly never heard of this project.

[V Knid esq]

Friedman has been using the nonplaceurbanfield name for a long time - the only vinyl I've got is an EP on N-Tone from yeeeeers ago (1993?), everything else is shit I've got off Audiogalaxy, which mostly sounds like it has been produced pretty recently.

[dick head]

so, theories - why has akufen out of all the perlon artists suddenly become really popular? i think some of the dimbiman and pantytec realeases are just as good or better. do they count as 'microhouse'? what about babyford and playhouse? is microhouse different from minimal house? is dbx microhouse? how about vogel's more housey moments like 'artists in charge of..'?

why do we invent silly genres and then have arguments about whether music fits them? what an odd way to behave. symptomatic of the old music journo criticism 'dancing to architecture' perhaps.


nonplace is burnt friedman's label, and very good it is too, onto it's 9th release - i just got 'replicant rumba rockers' , an lp of atom latin groovers only found on cd before mixed by burnt, highly recommend it.

[V Knid esq]

Microhouse is different from minimal house as it involves 'micro-edits' - i.e. percussive lines built up from very short clicks and pops as pioneered by Pole, Oval, Mego, Pansonic etc... Coil have separately been using these sounds for a few years - they call them the crackles of the digital campfire.

[dick head]

so we now have a rigid genre definition. grrrreat.

but i can stick a fly in the ointment by pointing out that yer man akufen - many of his tracks which i have seen being called microhouse do not contain clicks and pops. perhaps it's more the grooves are built from digital edits.

[deccard]

i don´t think either that microhouse has evolved from clicks and pop sounds from oval and the likes.
the perlon sound was just a more minimal approach to house and techhouse but coming from the housyside. i got some perlons and the only one using more those digital cracklesounds was ricardo villalbos´ releases i remember. akufen has for me a typical perlonsound.
i think it´s just a evolution from minimal techhouse.

[Basic]

1. It's a very small dwelling
2. It's an oven ready abode (approx two mins - 850 watts):D

[mr_chombee]

errr...MICROHOUSE he??? I like industrialtechhousefunk, advanced detroitnoizechill and especially minimal gabbaambient, but only with reversed cracklesynthbleeps on the 1 and 6, because anything else is boring elektrobootybass.

[namshub]

don't forget micro schranze (if that is what U call it?)...

[pejot]

coming from the housyside

I heard old Pile (duo of Zip and Markus Nikolai) CD and it was rather acid (maybe trancy a little) then house.

[deccard]

@pejot: mh could be. i remember the perlon2 which has some soft acidlike sequence in the background. (good morning eyeballs).
acidhouse :D hehe

[Ava]

Originally posted by mr_chombee
errr...MICROHOUSE he??? I like industrialtechhousefunk, advanced detroitnoizechill and especially minimal gabbaambient, but only with reversed cracklesynthbleeps on the 1 and 6, because anything else is boring elektrobootybass.

don't forget speedbeatdoublegaragegangsta tech-hop


i think microhouse came about because wire magazine did a feature on a bunch of people who were doing this sort of stuff - jan jelinek etc. and they needed a name for it.

whats that 'montreal smoked meat' comp like? seems to have lots of good artists on it.

[Dialect]

Well that cleared things up, and kinda confirmed what I believed. always the case when some jurno type gives a name to stuff youve been listening too already.

[amble]

when this thread started i thought i didn't know anything about 'micro house'. now i realize that i even have a few records mentioned and had no idea what i had there on my hands. i mean, wow.. don't even want to think about what fancy new styles i could cover as well.

[V Knid esq]

I think the journo in question was a WIRE bod - Phillip something... Sherbourne? Sheridan? Can't remember....

[V Knid esq]

Philip Sherburne:

I even took my own stab at the game of genre, coining the term MicroHouse for an article I wrote for The Wire in which I attempted to delineate a substrain within house and tech-house music, one especially popular among German artists. There, I chose to use the term as a descriptor. I wasn't making grand claims about this particular style, but imposing a new word was the easiest way of saying not only what these artists all had in common, but also how their tracks differed from other forms of house music. I'm well aware, though, that genre can be a pissing match -- and that's one of the reasons artists and fans can get so annoyed by the seemingly arbitrary proliferation of genre terms. It seems like the critic is trying to usurp the artist's role as creator, and rob her of her autonomy, by imposing a form. Simon Reynolds has certainly taken a lot of flak for his coinage of terms like post-rock and neurofunk, but I think he's done us all a service: "post-rock" gave people a new way of talking and thinking about rock music at a time when it was going through profound shifts not only stylistically but also culturally and economically. (I could also just be biased; as Simon wrote to me in an email after my MicroHouse piece appeared, "We coiners have to stick together and resist the genrephobes!")

from http://www.neumu.net/needledrops/data/00008_needledrops.shtml

[dick head]

delineate a substrain?

wanker.