It's all "electro" to me.

October 10, 2009 10:24 AM

Can anyone identify the artist, album, or even subgenre of this electronic music track?

I'm terrible at the whole trance vs. ambient vs. trip hop thing. I don't even know where to begin. But I know I love this album that somehow got onto my hard drive with absolutely no identifying information.

Here is another track from the same album.

I really want to know what this album is and who made it, but even more than that, I want to know what this kind of music is called so that I can find more of it.

posted by 256 to media & arts (7 comments total)

Ray Mang.

The album is Mangled.

The two tracks you posted are "Number One" and "Quantico Hilton". The versions are slightly different than those found online, but if you listen to both for about a minute they match up.

The genre is "Progressive House/Latin".
posted by JeremiahBritt at 10:40 AM on October 10 [3 favorites]

To add to the genre thing, it's pretty flexible. Something can be "Dance" and "Industrial". On the myspace page he self-defines as "Disco House / Psychedelic / Latin "
posted by JeremiahBritt at 10:43 AM on October 10

wow, that was fast. thank you. I don't suppose you can recommend anything else that is similar?
posted by 256 at 10:47 AM on October 10

I think they'd be fine on a mix with Ratatat (who isn't techno at all, but has a similar vibe), Bonobo and Nouvelle Vague. It's really subjective though. I have a friend who refuses to listen to any electronica with vocals.
posted by JeremiahBritt at 11:03 AM on October 10

There's a bit of a Latin vibe to this, but Latin house overlaps a lot with the genre known (not very creatively) as "funky house"—which (like this track) often features a more relaxed tempo, bass guitar lines, and a sunny, breezy disco feel. Closely related genres (or other names for the same genre, depending on how anal-retentive you want to get about labels) include disco house, filter house, and French house.

Latin house is basically the same thing, with elements of Latin music (Latin instruments, Latin polyrhythms, Latin jazz keys, etc.) grafted on top.

(See Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music v2.5, if you really care about "funky tribal house" vs. "hard acid house" vs. "cantaloupe shoebox ambient breakbeat house".)

It's big on the west coast in the US. I'm not an expert on the genre, but you might like some of Kevin Yost and Doc Marten's stuff.
posted by ixohoxi at 12:02 PM on October 10 [1 favorite]

JeremiahBritt's right on with the helpful info.

If you're a rank amateur like me when it comes to electronica, a very simple way to approach this is to notice the beat. It goes 'boom-chik boom-chik boom-chik boom-chik' really fast. See? That's 'house.' It's a sort that came into being in Chicago in the 80s, as far as I know, but it's generally become vastly popular over the last ten years or so all over the world.

Two fantastic examples that were my own initiation into modern electronic music:

Daft Punk. This is a popular enough band that it might seem completely obvious, but ixohoxi was actually quite right to mention French house, and Daft Punk are pretty much the premier French progressive house group. See their classic disk Discovery if you like the 70s-style broad grooves here or the populist danceability; it contains some of their biggest hits, some of which you've almost certainly heard before, such as "One More Time" and the epic "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger." However, as good as that album is, their first album, Homework, is (I think) a fair chunk better; and it's a good bit of homework itself, since it'll teach you a bit more of what house really sounded like in the first place. It owes a lot more to the original Chicago house stuff, and it's more in that spirit.

Gui Boratto. Brazilian guy who's been a producer for many years and worked with all kinds of famous people; he'd done a lot of great singles and one-offs, but he finally put together his first solo record two years ago in 2007, and it was one of those disks that amazed people enough that the buzz even reached relatively staid, non-electronica folks like myself. It was called Chromophobia, and it's one of the best records I've ever heard; it's house music, but it plays with rhythm in very interesting ways. Also, it's a good deal cooler, quieter, more contemplative. I dare you to listen to the high point of that album, "Beautiful Life," a New Order-styled throwback featuring Boratto's wife on (minimal) vocals, and not fall in love with it; "Beautiful Life" is without a doubt the best new song I've heard in at least a decade. Great song, and the album as a whole is magnificent. What's more Gui Boratto released his much-anticipated follow-up this year: Take My Breath Away. I'm still sort of assessing it, but there are some very good tracks, and "No Turning Back" seems to be his update of "Beautiful Life."

There's another fellow who happens to be on the same record label as Boratto named Axel Willner, a Swedish dude who records under the name The Field. He too released fantastic progressive electronica records in 2007 and 2009; his work is a bit more intellectual and mathematical than Boratto's, but in particular if you liked the interesting, experimental bit at the beginning of the first Ray Mang track you posted, then you'll really like The Field. His 2007 disk, From Here We Go Sublime, was sort of the second half of the double whammy of awesome that Kompakt records put out in that year. (They're getting a reputation for putting out disks by artists that become underground superstars.) It's not as easily accessible as Chromophobia, but I think it's in many ways superior; if you listen for a while, you hear all sorts of astounding and amazing touches. Great cuts include "The Little Heart Beats So Fast" and "The Deal." The Field's 2009 followup is called Yesterday And Today, and frankly I like it even better than Take My Breath Away; I really like "The More That I Do."

posted by koeselitz at 2:02 PM on October 10 [2 favorites]

Sorry, that's three examples, not two. Threw in Daft Punk because they're a more familiar touchstone in the prog-house genre, I think.
posted by koeselitz at 2:04 PM on October 10