Re: If ya liked them records....

[The Man Himself <altruist@shoko.CALARTS.EDU>]

This sounds suspiciously like the beginning of an electronica-oriented 
thread...

I picked up DJ Shadow's _Endtroducing_ and found it interesting but not
mind-blowing.  Perhaps I need to sit down with it some more and delve into
it deeper; there's definitely a great deal of interest there, and I've
been waiting for a long time for someone in the hip-hop community to start
working with odd meter.  But some of the material struck me as backing
tracks in need of an MC on top, without a lot in and of themselves to
recommend extended listening.  I'll have to check this out a few more
times before I level my definitive decision, though.  I also skimmed
through DJ Spooky's disc at a listening station and found the bits I heard
to be interesting, but nothing I felt compelled to pick up. 

I also snatched up a couple of other loop-based electronic albums --
Tricky's _Pre-Millenium Tension_ and Underworld's _Second Toughest In The
Infants_.  Tricky's album I was expecting to be knocked out by, and thus
far I haven't been.  It pretty much encapsulates most of what I tend to
dislike about loop-oriented music, which is a sort of plodding monotony
without the necessary sort of interest or character to justify that sort
of heavy repetition.  Plus, I can't help but think that this is music that
needs to be listened to under, er, states of altered consciousness in
order to be appreciated.  Put another way, this sounds like music made by
people who were quite stoned, to be listened to by people who are quite
stoned.  I think that pretty much rules me out of Tricky's listening base. 

Underworld's album, though, was a revelation for me.  This is some of 
the most happening music I've heard in a long time.  Don't really know 
what to say about it, except that it eschews any standard approaches to 
song-based compositon in favor of a very gradual sort of metaorphoses of 
texture and timbre (ooops, I'm starting to sound like a record label 
press release).  Suffice it to say that I'm enjoying it much.

Anyone else have electronica-oriented recommendatons?

--Andre