Microhouse

Last updated

Microhouse, buftech or sometimes just minimal, is a subgenre of house music strongly influenced by minimalism and 1990s techno. [2]

Contents

History

Microhouse has its roots in the minimal techno, bitpop (both developed in the early 1990s), and house (developed in the early 1980s) genres of music. Its first echoes appeared in a glitch album by German experimental artist Oval, in 1993. Like many contemporary electronic genres, Microhouse has many influences, most notably techno and the "click and pop" garage house that has emerged from Yorkshire Bleeps and Bass (or "Bleep"), bitpop and minimal techno. Contrasting with tech house, which is often thought of as 'house music with elements of techno in its arrangement and instrumentation', microhouse is more aptly described as 'housey minimal techno' – a marriage of the funky and groovy backroom house elements with bitpop and the driving, repetitive sound of techno. Emphasis tended to fall on cushiony kick-drum thumps and the accompanying hi-hats, with faint textures provided by synthetic strings and dreamy keyboard tones.

Full-fledged microhouse artists start appearing in the late-90's to early-00's such as German producer Jan Jelinek. His contributions are notable in the genre considering works like "textstar+" (as Farben) and "Loop-finding-jazz-records". Both works have amassed cult status and widespread acclaim with its distinctive microhouse sound. Microhouse has continued on in the late 2010's-20's with electronic artists like Jon Hopkins, The Field, Pantha du Prince, Rival Consoles, Matthew Herbert, Actress, Four Tet, Isolée, and many others. "Vocalcity" by Luomo is a hallmark album in microhouse and has been credited as one of the main works that helped popularize the genre.

Throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s, several small labels thriving on this approach cropped up. A fair percentage of the output from already-established labels like Playhouse  [ de ] (Isolée, Losoul  [ de ]), Kompakt (Sascha Funke, M. Mayer) and Klang Elektronik  [ de ] (Farben) made for some of microhouse’s most thrilling moments. Other labels — such as Force Tracks (Luomo, MRI), Perlon (Ricardo Villalobos, Pantytec) and Trapez (Akufen, M.I.A.) — were virtually all-microhouse in scope. [3] [4]

Coinage

The term microhouse was coined by music journalist and DJ Philip Sherburne [5] in a July 2001 article for the magazine The Wire . [6] Dave Stelfox wrote in Hyperdub that the term described "the spectral, hypnotic interpretation of classic Chicago grooves emerging on labels such as Perlon, Kompakt, Playhouse, Ongaku, Klang Elektronik and the Mille Plateaux family of imprints-most notably Force Tracks and Force Inc- at the turn of the millennium." [7]

Sherburne recalled how listening to Perlon's Superlongevity compilation in 1999, he "had the strong impression that House had been stripped down to a trifold essence: rhythm, soul and silence." For Sherburne, this was "not so much House as 'MicroHouse'," capturing "not only the proportions of the music, but also its semi-underground status, positioned at odds with more traditional Deep House, to say nothing of the genre's even more mainstream, megaclub fare." He traced the sound's reductionism to "Chain Reaction's blissed out minimalism," and its "punchier and groovier" qualities to "Matthew Herbert's clipped, cushioned romps, and the minimalist Chicago disco pioneered by the likes of Moodymann and Theo Parrish." He traced further antecedents in "the catalogues of German labels like Klang Elektronik, Playhouse and subsequently Force Tracks". [6]

Characteristics

Like house and techno, microhouse is built around a 4/4 time signature. Its tempo ranges between 115 and 130 BPM. A noticeable difference between microhouse and house is the replacement of typical house kick drums, hi-hats and other drum machine samples with clicks, static, glitches, and small bits of noise, which more often than not are stretched out and last longer in drops. [2] [3] Microhouse artists often experiment with different forms of sampling to achieve this effect.

One characteristic feature of microhouse is the use of sampling: extremely short ('micro') samples of the human voice, musical instruments, everyday noises and computer created wave patterns are arranged to form complex melodies (such as can be heard in Akufen's "Deck the House"). Vocals in microhouse are often simplistic, nonsensical, and monotone in nature, although some artists, such as Matthew Dear, combine singing with microhouse production. This is one of the main characteristics of microhouse compared to deep house, for example, which tends to feature no vocals and also a slower tempo going to as low as 115 BPM in some songs.

Microhouse is somewhat obscure when compared to other genres of house and techno, but several cities including Bucharest, Melbourne, Berlin, London, Paris, Montreal, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Miami, Detroit, and Chicago, have budding scenes, and with the minimal techno boom of the mid-2000s, is now gaining great popularity in German, French, Canadian, Italian and Spanish clubs. Mainstream tech house records and CDs will occasionally have microhouse or minimal reworks of tracks. On top of this, several tracks have become major club hits over the years, and a few others have even gained European radioplay.

The following labels generally release minimal techno, deep house or other genres but also release microhouse:

Notes

  1. ↑ Reynolds, Simon (2013). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Soft Skull Press. In microhouse, elements of techno and disco, electro and house, acid and trance, get shuffled;
  2. 1 2 3 Ishkur (2019). "Ishkur's Guide: Microhouse". Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music . Retrieved December 16, 2023.
  3. 1 2 "Microhouse". AllMusic . Retrieved August 12, 2014.
  4. ↑ Nye, Sean, "Minimal Understandings: The Berlin Decade, The Minimal Continuum, and Debates on the Legacy of German Techno," Journal of Popular Music Studies 25, no. 2(2013): 154-84.
  5. ↑ Michaelangelo Matos (April 7, 2010). "Pantha Du Prince: Techno Music A Rock Fan Can Love", NPR Music .
  6. 1 2 Sherburne, Philip (July 2001). "The Rules of Reduction". The Wire . The Wire Magazine Ltd (209): 19.
  7. 1 2 Stelfox, Dave (2002). "Clicky Disco: Microhouse's Forward March". Hyperdub. Archived from the original on 2004-03-15.

Related Research Articles

Ambient techno is a subgenre of techno that incorporates the atmospheric textures of ambient music with the rhythmic elements and production of techno. It was pioneered by 1990s electronic artists such as Aphex Twin, Carl Craig, The Orb, The Future Sound of London, the Black Dog, Pete Namlook and Biosphere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vladislav Delay</span> Finnish musician

Vladislav Delay is the most frequently used pseudonym of Sasu Ripatti, a Finnish electronic musician. He has also recorded as Luomo, Sistol, Uusitalo,Conoco, and Ripatti, working in styles such as minimal techno, glitch, and house.

Hardcore is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany in the early 1990s. It is distinguished by faster tempos and a distorted sawtooth kick, the intensity of the kicks and the synthesized bass, the rhythm and the atmosphere of the themes, the usage of saturation and experimentation close to that of industrial dance music. It would spawn subgenres such as gabber.

Jan Jelinek is a German electronic musician who also operates under the names Farben, Gramm and The Exposures. His music is usually categorized as minimal techno, glitch or microhouse, and is characterized by deep basslines, extensive use of samples from earlier jazz and rock recordings, and clicks & cuts effects. He is the founder of the German record label Faitiche.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Akufen</span> Canadian electronic musician

Marc Leclair, better known by his stage name Akufen, is a Canadian electronic musician. His music is electronic music that is often described as minimal house, minimal techno, glitch, or microhouse.

Minimal techno is a subgenre of techno music. It is characterized by a stripped-down aesthetic that exploits the use of repetition and understated development. Minimal techno is thought to have been originally developed in the early 1990s by Detroit-based producers Robert Hood and Daniel Bell. By the early 2000s the term 'minimal' generally described a style of techno that was popularized in Germany by labels such as Kompakt, Perlon, and Richie Hawtin's M-nus, among others.

Ghostly International is an American independent record label founded in 1999 by Samuel Valenti IV and currently headquartered in Brooklyn, New York City. Chief artists include Matthew Dear, Dabrye, Com Truise, Tycho, Gold Panda, School of Seven Bells, Mux Mool, and Shigeto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ricardo Villalobos</span> Musical artist

Ricardo Villalobos is a Chilean-born German electronic music producer and DJ. He is well known for his work in the minimal techno and microhouse genres, and is one of the most significant figures in the minimal techno scene.

Mille Plateaux is a German record label founded in 1994 by Achim Szepanski in Frankfurt, as a sublabel of Force Inc. Music Works. Its releases in the fields of minimal techno, glitch music and other experimental electronic music have a lasting influence.

Hard NRG, nu-NRG, filthy hard house, or more recently just filth, is an electronic dance music genre similar in structure to UK hard house form, taking influences from German hard trance. The main difference is in the musical/thematic content of each style.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isolée</span> Musical artist

Rajko Müller, better known by his stage name Isolée, is a German electronic music producer. He is noted for his work in the microhouse genre, reminiscent of indie electronic pop music of the early eighties and ambient techno from a decade on. Isolée is credited with creating the very first microhouse record to reach the club charts. Isolée's 2000 album Rest, containing the hit "Beau Mot Plage", was arguably the first microhouse full-length.

Perlon is an electronic music record label founded in 1997 in Frankfurt, Germany, now based in Berlin, and run by Thomas Franzmann aka Zip and Markus Nikolai. It is a minimal techno and tech house label which has been characterised as one of the most influential German dance music labels. Its catalogue features music by producers such as A Guy Called Gerald, Akufen, Ricardo Villalobos, Baby Ford, Dandy Jack, Luciano, Matt John, Pantytec, Stefan Goldmann and Thomas Melchior. It is mostly a vinyl label, apart from a compilations and DJ mixes released on CD. No releases have been made available online in digital formats.

<i>Vocalcity</i> 2000 studio album by Luomo

Vocalcity is an album by Finnish electronic music producer Sasu Ripatti, better known as Vladislav Delay, and the first to be released under his stage name Luomo. It was released on 23 May 2000 on Force Tracks, and was reissued in 2005 on Ripatti's label Huume.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pantha du Prince</span> German musician

Hendrik Weber, better known as Pantha du Prince, Panthel, and Glühen 4 is a German producer, composer and conceptual artist for electro, techno, house, minimal, and noise, affiliated with Dial Records, and Rough Trade Records.

Gas is the main musical project of German electronic musician and composer Wolfgang Voigt. The project was created as an expressive medium inspired by his experiences with taking LSD in the Königsforst, a German forest situated near his hometown of Cologne, for long periods in his youth. He has claimed that the intention of the project is to "bring the forest to the disco, or vice-versa".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Babicz</span> Musical artist

Robert Babicz is a Polish-born music producer, mastering engineer and live performer living in Malta. With a career spanning nearly three decades covering genres from techno to acid house to minimal, Robert has also been known under the pseudonyms Rob Acid, Acid Warrior, Department of Dance and Sontec amongst many others. He has released a number of well respected records on labels such as Kompakt, Systematic Recordings, Treibstoff, Bedrock, Intec Digital and Steve Bug's Audiomatique, as well his own labels, Junkfood, Babiczstyle and Dirtcut. He is well known as a live performer rather than a DJ, as he uses synths and live equipment and improvises in every set he plays.

Kenneth James Gibson is a musician, record producer, composer, singer, songwriter and a founding member of Bell Gardens, Furry Things, Eight Frozen Modules, and [a]pendics.shuffle.

<i>BFORD 9</i> 1992 studio album by Baby Ford

BFORD 9 is the third studio album by English house producer Baby Ford, released in 1992 by Insumision Records in the United Kingdom and by Sire Records in the United States. Ford co-produced the album with Richard Salt. Dispirited by hardcore music and the contemporary house scene, Ford decided to create an album that explored moods and emotions, while combining elements of his acid house work. The resulting album is eclectic and explores styles of techno, funk and disco, as well as featuring Ford's soft vocals.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.