Everything gets slicker. When it comes to consumer technology, you just have to throw up your hands at some point. My discman finally died its death a month or so back, and I was forced to buy an iPod I couldn't really afford. If I'm honest, I caved mostly because the idea of buying a new discman in 2007 was too ridiculous to contemplate. I would have been laughed out of Best Buy. Aesthetics are a little bit different. I continue to wear Chuck Taylors and Vans because I'm as turned off now by extraneous bells-and-whistles as when I was when griping like a 14-year-old Andy Rooney about all the lights and pumps and gels. So I guess sneakers were my inchoate introduction to refusenik simplicity. And if you still want to be cheesily ostentatious, a pair of snakeskin Chucks or slip-ons with stupid flames airbrushed on them are a lot more honest than a goddamn Identi-Kit basketball shoe with a bunch of pointless and "modern" plastic gewgaws.
Like the late 20th century output of your neighborhood Foot Locker, my recent distaste for electronic music stems from a sterile slickness imposed by the march of technology colliding with an aesthetic asceticism-- an over-articulation of an extremely limited language. Too much "minimal" sounds both conceptually thin and sonically fussy. Listening to the new 2xCD Book of Dogma, a collection of rare EPs by famed but obscure proto-IDM act the Black Dog, I was struck on the first few listens by a joyous simplicity that manages never to sit still. Take "Seer and Sages", which, over a beat that never deviates from its two loud thwacks, shifts from boogaloo house pianos to techno synthesizers recast as "Baby Elephant Walk" baseball stadium muzak to an agitated rave spasm of pure noise to an outro as delicate as anything off a Kompakt Pop Ambient LP.
If, as with the crude, cut-up New York house and sparkling Detroit techno they were inspired by, time has somewhat dulled the shine of the Black Dog's sonics, it's also made the music sound more direct and engaging than ever by cultural contrast. To flip another non-musical metaphor, minimal can feel like the suspended animation slog of non-narrative avant-garde filmmaking in THX/IMAX fidelity, but these early Black Dog tracks are like a spelunking spaceman bounding happily through the corny, color-saturated landscape of a no-budget 1980s sci-fi flick with a cranked-up soundtrack of post-Kraftwerk synths, sampled self-help gurus, cosmic divas, distant dog howls, and chirping wind-up birds. Though Book of Dogma comes wrapped in the chilly graphics of a Depeche Mode album, this at times gaudy music, with its barreling melodies and shouting rappers, isn't afraid to get loud in your face; it sounds like an oddball party crasher in glassy, reserved 2007.
This out-of-step quality isn't terribly surprising; as the first decade of the 2000s winds to a close, the electronic music of the early 90s, be it of the smarty pants or party hard variety, feels as distant as "Models Inc." or Homer Simpson's beloved clear cola. In the light of everything from the rainbow-hued syncopation of 2-step garage to Perlon's thousand dry timbres of percussion, the Dog's very first EP Virtual-- the first three tracks on disc one of Dogma-- sounds stark, like staring into the tie-dye-cum-Rorschach pattern on the original's vinyl label as it spins on your turntable: revolving breakbeat patterns overlaid with creaky synths. But its bold if basic boom-bap is totally appealing, even on the more hi-fi second disc when the trio begins to swing their beats into crunching triplets as on the broken beat foreshadowing "Vanttool" or whatever the hell the stop-start lurching astro-samba of "Erb" is. "The Age of Slack", from the 1989 EP of the same name, is zonked electronic funk with shuffling beats straight off a Rob Base record and bursts of sampled rap; its woozy atmosphere-- that faded soul singer makes the whole thing sound like a stoned take on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts-- slows you down, creating a very different kind of "slacker" vibe than contemporaneous Superchunk. I mean, what better way to describe the Dog's music than their own pointed, self-penned epigram "Ambience with Teeth"?
Not everything on Book of Dogma sounds bound to some unrepeatable golden era for nostalgic ravers. "Glassolalia" is spare and dark enough to still be easily slotted into a DJ set, and listen to the intro to "Techno Playtime" and tell me that Mouse on Mars weren't listening hard. You might say it's silly to pit music from two very different decades against each other, especially considering I can be as much of a sucker for a well-done piece of shiny modern minimalism as anyone. But call me a crank or a grouch or hopelessly out of touch or more interested in aesthetic appeal than the march of technology-- I still can't shake my feeling that too much modern techno has been molded into a slick, aerodynamic Nike-sweatshop anonymity that's more fun to read about than listen to. Maybe it's less about being a luddite than about comfort and enjoyment. For folks too young or indifferent to be into 90s "electronic listening music" at the time, Book of Dogma may feel like a pair of ratty old sneakers, but try them on and I bet you they get worn a helluva lot more this year than the pair that's eye-catching in the catalog and hell on the feet.
