SO MINIMAL RIGHT NOW

The general problem with minimal beats is that they are not conducive for headphones. You need to either ignore them and have them on in the background or have them loud enough that it's a visceral rather than intellectual experience. If you put them on your ipod even the sickest of minimal beats becomes not that interesting. You basically need to be doing something other than focusing on minimality while sober, which will not work.

Below I offer a brief overview of some minimal beats in late 2007.


1. SUPERMAYER - TWO OF US

From SUPERMAYER - SAVE THE WORLD


Don't buy this album. It's a pretty uneven affair. Points to Michael Mayer and Superpitcher for making a least partially-concerted effort to extend the sonic territory of Kompakt records: if they don't know yet what the future sounds like, they're at least facing the right way. The problem is that the tracks that deviate from Kompakt's revered minimal palette are mostly the same ones that are not that captivating - they're a motley assortment of pop goofs. 'Two of Us' is one of the two or three tracks that stays deep in the minimal beat vein - it's a serious minimal stormer intended for loud play when your girlfriend isn't at home, or maybe while jogging.

2. Here's a tip for Mayer and Pitcher: instead of going pop, why not take a page from Brooklyn's playbook and go native? Black Dice's latest album, Load Blown, has a number of instances that sound like European minimal beats have filtered across the Atlantic and into some Bushwick basements - so that Kompakt's claim for futuristic, streamlined and digital has been swapped for BD's brute analog twitch. 'Roll Up' and others on Load Blown would be good soundtrack material for those documentaries in which the worlds of praying mantises and other alien microbiological entities are rendered in grotesque, uncanny detail.

BLACK DICE - 'ROLL UP'





3. SHACKLETON - BLOOD ON MY HANDS (VILLALOBOS APOCALYPSO NOW REMIX)

RICARDO VILLALOBOS


There are instances in art when a single work stands in for an entire genre that doesn't exist. Sometimes those moments get followed-up on later on, and sometimes they are left as curious indexes of whole aesthetic paths never taken. Brian Eno has a lot of those moments - 'Third Uncle' from 'Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy)' has Joy Division/post-punk relatively in nuce. Heavily-sweated minimal beat demigod Villalobos has his own such moment in this remix, which is of course good ground to come up with a non-existent style. If Screw House ever catches on, matching propulsive beats with the narcotic stupor of slowed-down rap vocals, it will have this track as its retroactive father. Good background music for the half German-half English art and architecture bookstore that you run in Berlin Mitte.


LYRICS:
"When I see the towers fall,
It cannot be denied that,
As a spectacle,
It is a realization of the mind.

You see, I'm standing on a mountaintop
And letting out a scream,
It's the language of the earth,
It is the language of the beasts.

There's no point to look behind us,
We left the corpse behind,
Because flesh is weak and forms break down.
They cannot last forever."

This is a pretty intense sentiment. For a insightful take on the words go here for minimal beats expert Phillip Sherburne's piece on the track.

PS: If you are a fan of minimal and you don't have Villalobos' new Fabric mix then you are basically a gay loser that no bloggers will ever listen to.

4. GUI BORATTO - THE BLESSING



Gui Boratto is still holding down the traditional Kompakt fortress pretty hard. Very recommended to put on in the background when you're tooling around at home and while working on your laptop you need a layer of steady, unobtrusive sonics to protect your addled mind from an unwelcome confrontation with the gnawing silence that is the sound of life in its sheer, brutish meaninglessness.