Minimal nation

This time I'll talk about what minimalism means in the context of house music, according to me.

It's easier to start by defining what minimalism is not. Minimalism is not genre, it can be applied to any form of music. Minimalism is not about making a boring loop, playing it for six minutes and calling it a finished track. Minimalism is not about using an artificially limited amount of elements just for the sake of it.

What is it then? It's a way of thinking, sort of like a philosophy applied to music production. It's about adding only the elements the track in question really needs and nothing else. Sometimes a minimalist piece might actually need lots of elements (such as in Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians - which as the title suggests is written for  18 musicians and is sometimes performed with even more than that), but it's still considered a minimalist piece while something else might be composed for just four musicians but would not be minimalist in nature no matter how far you stretch the definition.

Minimalism in techno is well documented as well and there's an entire sub genre called minimal techno, even if some of the music associated with it actually rather maximal. However, often when people try to make minimal techno they are more interested in what equipment Robert Hood happened to have in his disposal in the 90's, rather than actually try approach their own music from a minimalist point of view. No, you don't need a vintage 909 to make minimal techno. You need the right mindset and the right vision.

 Steve Reich and Robert Hood aside, how about house music then? How does one strip a house track to it's bare essentials, yet make it funky and danceable and interesting enough so that the listeners don't get bored? It's a fine line and one of my main weaknesses actually. I tend to hide my poor taste and my  lack of compositional and arrangement skills with a wall of sounds, effects and mediocre, useless melodies.  It's an area where I really have to improve, learn to concentrate on what's important for the track I'm making and lose the rest, or at the very least use the less important bits more sparingly.

The basic principle is that the less elements your track has, the better they need to be if your goal is to make a track that hypnotizes the listener for 6 or so minutes. To an extent, everything has to be just perfect, because in a barebone track even the slightest of mistakes can break the illusion. Perfect sounds, perfect melodies, chords and rhythms, perfect arrangement, perfect mixdown. Perfect everything pretty much. Sounds like a daunting task but fortunately, pioneers did most of the hard work already so you don't have to start everything from scratch. If you've listened to house for a long time you probably already have some kind of an idea how things should sound like and how a house track is structured. I'm not suggesting directly copying an existing tracks (except as an exercise), just trying to say that you should carefully analyse them and see how and why they work. If you don't analyse them and dissect them, you're more or less just guessing. There is no shame in using a frame someone else created, especially in the context of this blog where I'm not even trying to invent something new, just trying to learn how to make a great house track.

What does perfect mean then? It doesn't mean an over polished pop production, neither does it mean a great composition in a classical music sense. It simply means that within the boundaries of the track you're working on, everything just fits and there's no extra fat. Everything makes sense. It sounds good sonically, even if it contains distorted or lofi elements. The melody (if it even has one) might only contain a handful of notes, but they are the right notes. The same goes for chords. There are some amazing tracks that have no melodies at all and the chord progression is just one chord repeating over and over again. Aril Brikha's Groove La Chord comes to mind immediately. That doesn't mean that every track using similar elements is great. Most of them suck and suck badly actually. Brikha just happens to have great taste, vision and a good sense of drama. He can write a more complex melody or a chord progression too, it's just that Groove La Chord didn't need anything more complex than what it has. A lesser musician would've either added more notes and made it unnecessarily complex or alternatively, his lack of dramatic sense would've resulted in an arrangement that doesn't do justice to the the elements.

Speaking of arrangement, it's one of the most important if not the most important aspect of a minimal track. Some rather minimal tracks actually contain lots of different elements. They are just used sparingly when needed and are almost never all played at the same time. Those elements are also purposefully introduced or removed at certain points, where they make dramatic sense. Two different tracks might be superficially similar, but if the other track is arranged to tell some kind of a story and the other is just a loop with elements dropped in and out almost randomly, it's the first one that will get noticed and played by the key DJ's.

One could go on and on about this subject, but I decided to stop right here and keep it minimal (pun intented). Feeling somewhat exhausted  so it's difficult to think clearly, write in a coherent manner even less so. So I'll just leave this as it is, maybe return to the subject later.

Oh, and I also have a new track! Again, I tried to make something relevant to the topic at hand. Stripped down, minimal house track, using only what the track needs and nothing else. I would've preferred to make it even more stripped down but I'm not perfect, it is what it is. Also tried to inject a bit of humour into it with that speech sample from an interview of a certain, quite famous musician known for his opulence and pomposity.