Deconstructed club

Deconstructed club, also known as post-club[1][2] or deconstructed music[1] is an experimental electronic dance music genre, characterized as a post-modernist counterpart to house and techno.[1]

Deconstructed club
Stylistic origins
Cultural originsEarly 2010s, New York, United States
Other topics
Intelligent dance music

History

The style was born in New York dance parties named GHE20G0TH1K, which started in 2009.[1] These parties featured voguers, punks, and fashionista,[1] took place in warehouses across Brooklyn and Manhattan and started to radicalize the city's nightclub scene within a year.[3] The style that defined the deconstructed club movement was directly shaped by the possibilities of CDJs, and DJ sets, in turn, have inspired producers to imitate this chaotic experimentation in their own music, creating feedback that continued to re-imagine the expectations of the dance-floor music.[4]

The MP3s used by DJs on GHE20G0TH1K had a crunchy, cruddy texture while being played on a big sound system, which came to define their aesthetic.[1] Each member of the collective came from a different background, but they incorporated those differences into the mix, hybridizing a melange of Jersey club, Baltimore, Footwork, Grime, and Ballroom music, as well as elements of House and Techno.[1][5] Because of Deconstructed club's relationship to vogue and prominent LGBTQ originators, the genre's identity is tied to the underground party scene in NYC and alternative queer nightlife. [1]

Artists from the labels Fade to Mind, and Keysound, that mixed together rebooted ballroom/vogue house, jersey club, and the new wave of instrumental grime, all with a stark, hi-tech machine sheen are also cited as pioneers of the genre.[6]

The term itself started circulating in the mid-2010s and was used as an umbrella term to describe a disparate, international genus of producers pushing the limits or boundaries of club music and turning it avant-garde.[7]

Characteristics

The genre steps away from traditional and mainstream dance music tropes, such as four on the floor beats, stable tempos, build-ups, and drops. Instead, it is identified by an aggressive, frantic, post-industrial sound design, featuring metallic or staccato sounds such as samples of glass smashing, gunshots, etc., deconstructed club aims for an excessive, apocalyptic-sounding soundscape, with constant rhythmic switch-ups and atonality. [1]

Deconstructed club proposes a chaotic mix and a sonic canvas where ballroom samples, field recordings, a cappella rapping and industrial soundscapes are adjusted into dance-floor music.[1] The genre is characterized by its disruptive elements and a wide dynamic tempo range, often utilizing jersey club kick-patterns, grime claps, and jittery footwork production to create a sensation of frenetic high-BPM tracks; in addition, tracks delve into experimental soundscapes and alternating atmospheric breathers.[1] The genre's ethos and ideas are decidedly post-structuralist towards conventional music production and dance music.[8]

Visual art

The music, often accompanied by music videos, resembles visual art. Some of the artists, such as Matthew Barney, studied visual arts rather than music.[8] The visuals are often abstract and despicable mutational grotesque, decomposing forms. This crossing between the visuals and experimental electronic music has become such a thing that one of the key labels in the genre PAN has launched an imprint, "Entopia", dedicated to producing soundtracks for art installations, films, theater works, dance, and fashion podiums.[8]

Reception

The music journalist and critic Simon Reynolds called the style conceptronica and said that "it isn't a genre as such, but more like a mode of artistic operation".[8] He compared the genre with 1990s IDM, saying that the pioneers of the early IDM, such as Aphex Twin or Luke Vibert produced their music with juvenile humor, creating a chilly background for unthinking daydreaming rather than intellectual thoughts of the latter.[8] But genres are rather connected by their background, while IDM was a commentary on the last days of the club and rave trends, the deconstructed club is also able to work over the dance music history, e.g. Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner[6] gleaned inspiration from the Euro-techno sound known as hardstyle, Stine Janvin did loose homage to the 90s rave trends completely based on manipulating the sound through her voice, while Venezuelan producer Arca drastically decimate hedonistic rap and R&B in her early track "Doep".[8]

References
  1. "The Radical Dissonance of Deconstructed, or "Post-Club," Music". Bandcamp Daily. 2019-07-09. Retrieved 2020-05-16.
  2. "Post-club: Why DJs and producers are leaving nightclubs behind". Mixmag. Retrieved 2020-05-16.
  3. Dazed (2019-12-17). "Venus X on the origins of GHE20G0TH1K, a club night that shaped the 2010s". Dazed. Retrieved 2020-05-31.
  4. "A decade of DJing: how technology changed the art form". DJMag.com. 2020-02-05. Retrieved 2020-05-17.
  5. "GHE20G0TH1K: How It Started". Highsnobiety. 2017-05-01. Retrieved 2020-05-16.
  6. "Why Today's Underground Club Music Sounds Cybernetic". The FADER. Retrieved 2020-05-16.
  7. "What on earth is deconstructed club music?". www.redbull.com. Retrieved 2020-05-16.
  8. Reynolds, Simon. "The Rise of Conceptronica". Pitchfork. Retrieved 2020-05-18.

Further reading
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