A Year of Music

Minimal house is a genre that's made some artists a comfortable living via the simple philosophy of "give them an inch and they'll take a mile". There's a deeply odd disjuncture between the playful sense of humor on display in, say, Akufen and Ricardo Villalobos's work and the studied High Modernism of the music itself. Nowhere is this bizarre gap more obvious than in the Villalobos & Gillings track "Andruic & Japan" on Villalobos's recent Fabric mix. 12 minutes of unvarying house rhythm overlaid with taiko drumming and random vocalese and occasionally manic mutterings about chicken and sashimi. It's self-consciously experimental in a pop Stockhausen way (it seems evident to me, at least, that it wasn't created in a total bong haze, that there is some kind of intent behind it), but I'm not sure the underlying plan was meant to be deciphered. It all adds up to something, but what it is seems opaque, as if the creators were daring listeners to find meaning where there might be none.

Does anyone actually dance to this? And why? Its appeal seems almost exclusively intellectual, and even then on a fairly abstract plane.