Topic: The Minimal Disco Thread
Hello one and all,
After a question I raised in the "techno techno techno techno" thread I seriously began thinking about what this would sound like. So this morning I started on something.
There are a few things to bear in mind here:
I don't have much experience of techno, let alone subgenres and what little knowledge I could gather from typing "minimal techno" into youtube and the wiki page seemed a little unclear. What I could see however was the influence of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass on the genre (unconsciously I feel from the youtube clips, very consciously from the wiki page) and I actually know a fair bit about they way those composers wrote music, so this is the direction I was coming from. Without wanting to get too academic (which I think ruins a lot of the fun sometimes) I felt that this was an exercise in Retro-Futurism, which is essentially trying to imagine what art will be like in the future.
So after that I set myself some rules:
1) The genre should most likely be somewhere between 90 and 125 bpm, any faster I feel it would turn into techno (or my impression of techno) anyway
2) All synths and drum machines should be from the disco / italo disco era
3) Any post editing or sound creation should be achievable with analog (or at least outboard) gear (ie. no obvious timestretching, naturally if I wanted to get a sample or loop in time that would be allowed as long as any digital artifacts couldn't be heard)
4) Try and get as many poly-rhythmic elements in there as possible
The track is far from sparse, but is based on a lot of classical minimal techniques.
All work for this genre from myself will be under the name THE SHEPARDTONES because I think it is a good name
here is the track:
The Shepardtones - Reichatronics <--- CLICK HERE
Essentially I'm looking for feedback and criticism, I also want to encourage others to have a go at making some "minimal disco" themselves and to share the results either with everyone here or at least just me.
email me here: antonmaiof (at) gmail.com
Please ignore those rules I set for myself and come up with your own.
I very much look forward to the results!
