A Berlin Techno Head Takes On The Youtube Algorithm
Youtube is now by far the biggest engine for music discovery. Not just in the mainstream, but those looking for such outside the normal, their algorithm has what’s just right for you. And it’s commendable really, that quality Japanese city-pop and jazz fusion, Brazilian bossa and funk, and outre jazz/experimental have had their chance to catch the eye of unsuspecting users. Unfortunately, one genre and its subsections have not been given the same luxury. The electronic music recommendations on Youtube are simply atrocious. Bland lo-fi house and its ilk have bubbled up alongside the likes of Theo Parrish and Moodymann to the eyes of millions.
Yet few in the know have really taken concern with this. Not like techno snobs really care about the larger populace anyway, but it is a bit rough to see regardless. That’s why I needed a keen eye for comment. Vincent Jenewein is a fellow contributor at Tone Glow and one the most apt techno critics I know, having given a presentation on Robert Hood’s minimal techno for the 8th International Conference on Music and Minimalism. He’s also from Berlin, giving us a “real” Berliner techno perspective on these algo tracks. If you’d like more of his content, check him on Substack or Twitter!
Andrés - New For U
Back in 2012, you couldn't escape this record, it was damn near everywhere, canned by all kinds of DJs. Today, it is hard to imagine any new lowkey, vinyl-only release having the cross-scene impact that New For U had. The fractalization of music global music scenes has drastically shortened a record's half-life and cultural reach. In the streaming era, such older hits live on as a ghostly, haunting existence; carrying with them specific cultural conditions that no longer exist. But perhaps what has given New For U its extended shelf-life is precisely that it doesn't sound like any specific musical or cultural moment. It belongs to the type of eternal, ever-green House that (apart from some changes in production aesthetics) could have been released at any time in the last twenty-five years. Maybe that is the core of House music's u-topia, the feel-good groove as a no-place and no-time. A bassline is a bassline is a bassline. Add some searing sampled Disco strings and we are good for-ever. Perhaps a track such as this is naturally fitted to the time-dispersing nature of the algorithm. There's always a party in need of a mood happening somewhere.
It's not a bad track, this one. Quite decent, even. Solid deep tracker. But why this one? Mat Dryhurst has spoken of the "lottery" nature of viral success in the age of platforms. What the algorithm likes or doesn't like appears to be stochastic. Some things get amplified, most don't, with no discernible logic driving it all. As such, it would be trivial to source any number of similar tracks from labels such as Yoyaku. What privileges any one over the other? Perhaps this issue isn't so new. There's always been something anonymous, replaceable, exchangeable about the average dance music track. A tool. A tool, unlike a song-like hit, doesn't call for attention. It makes space for the hits. And yet, there have always been "tool-hits”, tracks that perform reliably in a variety of situations. Tracks that are memorable in their functionality. Tracks that the average clubgoer wouldn't recognize, but get an approving nod from the heads in the back. In the age of vinyl, when the amounts of records a DJ could physically bring to a gig was fairly limited, surviving an entire season inside a record bag was somewhat of a Darwinian test of fitness. Now, things are different. Tracks that previously would have been hidden away in the DJ's secret realm of the twelve-inch are now accessible to anyone, broadcasted into cyberspace through playlists and algorithms. Inevitably, they appear in a different context, in a certain sense freed from a culture that operates like an infernal machine, cycling through records on a weekly basis. Outside the teleology of functionalism, the tool takes on a new light. It reaches people that don't consume dance music in its traditional contexts at all. Instead of dancing and mixing, there's new regimes of running, studying, chilling, walking, fucking, sleeping, or whatever it is that people are currently doing when YouTube slots a track like Decompression into its algorithms. While most music on digital platforms finds no listeners at all, Harrison BDP appears to have enjoyed a decent career boost off of his newfound algorithmic listeners. Blessed are the lucky.
DJ Boring - Winona // Ross From Friends - Talk To Me You’ll Understand
I'm talking about these together because they're essentially the same track - there appears to be a formula to Lo-fi House algo-smash-hits. Lowpassed, saturated 909 drums; warm, oozing pads, a chunky bassline and a sparkling 303 on top. What is transmitted? Emotions of some kind, to be sure - but a different kind than, say Andrés traditionally schooled Disco House. With their intentionally reduced fidelity, these tracks sound nostalgic, but in a way that sidesteps the tradition. Traditionally, dance music had always invoked clubs and parties situated in specific times and places. Lo-fi house instead channels a kind of generalized cultural nostalgia, hence the references to mainstream Pop-culture like Friends.
Perhaps this generalization of the past allows it to appeal to a wider range of people from all sorts of musical and cultural backgrounds. Someone, somewhere is always mindlessly scrolling YouTube at 3am. Could it be that Lo-fi House was the first real "internet" genre of dance music? While it started off in traditional record stores, it soon found itself in cyberspace, reaching younger generations that had only ever encountered dance music's past as the endless, flattened, decontextualized archive that it is on YouTube. And yet, for anyone that was into dance music during Lo-fi House’s key years, it itself has assumed a kind of specificity. Just now, I am remembering the first time I heard Florian Kupfer’s Lo-fi smash hit Feelin'. But I am too lazy to dig up the record or search my hard drive. So I hit up YouTube. There it is, one more click, one more memory, one among hundreds and thousands and millions.
Someone once said that as good as the real life Berghain might be, it couldn't possibly match the club in the imagination of those that had never been. The allure of this fantastic imagined space has been strong enough to transform a medium-sized Techno club in east Berlin into a global pop-cultural phenomenon. What does it mean to those that have never been? I think above all, it represents a promise - that authentic culture is still out there, that experiences can still be pure and ecstatic, that secret societies can still exist in an age of opacity. Subzero is this imagined, hyper-real Berghain, its promise put into music. A deep, fathomless kick reverberating through infinity, a spine-chilling riff, bursting sweeps of noise. What would it be like, to be there? I myself felt that promise, that question when I was sixteen or seventeen. I listened and imagined, what might be, what could be. Despite having later spent a lot of time in the real life Berghain, I've only heard Subzero played there once. Unsurprisingly, it felt underwhelming, couldn't live up to what I had been promised years ago. There is a part in Claude Levi-Strauss' epochal Tristes Tropiques where, after months of searching for an uncontacted tribe in the depths of the searing Amazonas, he finally finds what he was looking for. But alone, exhausted, without a translator, he has no access to their secrets. What he wanted does not give him what he wants. Dejected, he turns around and makes his way home. A promise, a desire is always most intense when it remains open, unfulfilled.
I have a story. I was nineteen at the time. This record had just come out, I saw it in the record stores. I was planning to go to a party that I had been looking forward to for months. At that time, "real" Techno parties were still hard to source, even in Berlin. I was supposed to go with a friend of a friend, who ended up ghosting me that very night. Having spent most of my teen years playing World of Warcraft, I had unsurprisingly never set a foot inside a nightclub. My friends weren't into any kind of dance music. Still living at my parents', I downed a large vodka coke inside my room and got on my way. After some searching, I found what I was looking for. It was still early into the night, barely a queue in front. As I was approaching, I heard this exact track playing from outside the club. I recognized it instantly. Dim but still audible, that hook couldn't be confused for anything else. In front of me were a few people squattering about, visibly drunk. Suddenly, the club's bouncer yelled out "You don't even have to try here!". Looking back, he was obviously referring to the drunk troublemakers in front of me. But my adolescent mind instantly concluded that he had to have meant me, had seen me from fifty feet away; hunched over, messy hair, crunched up into my hoodie, had instantly concluded that I wasn't techno, that I didn't belong. Without missing a beat, I turned around, still hearing the bass' reverberations, quieter and quieter as I made distance from where I had so desperately wanted to go.
A sad story? Perhaps. Yet, feelings of exclusion have never been an uncommon experience in club land. It has always had its side of loneliness and suffering. The intro to DJ Sprinkles' Midtown 120 famously recalls that "one time they wouldn't let me into The Loft and at that very moment, I shit you not, they were playing one of my records". Even inside, we aren't away from suffering. "Clubs aren't an oasis from suffering. Suffering is in here, with us...". Can you suffer on YouTube? Surely; but would someone load up this? Unlikely. With the freedom of skipping ahead, someone probably wouldn't pick a track as joyful as this to soundtrack their suffering. There is a certain cruelty to being locked into a specific place and time, the music chosen by someone who isn't you. Stay and suffer for a little while. But cruelty can also be transformative, making way for catharsis. Such is the power of the night. It remains inaccessible to algorithms.
loved this, esp the exploration of the idea of internet fractalization & how artifacts from brief fads & moments linger with a playcount boost. on the topic of dance music as a hyperspecific thing, it gets a mention on Midtown 120 Blues’ into track too, establishing New York Deep House in particular as the product of a series of specific moments in specific places that yielded sounds with particular associations. interesting to see that same thing play out now, just over weeks or months instead of years (& usually without most of the political context that drives so much of terre thaemlitz’s work, but i will leave that to more capable minds to hash out).
to defend lo-fi house just a BIT i think the ‘nostalgia’ present in it is feeding off the same 90s/00s revivalism we’ve seen ebbing & flowing for years now. it’s not from the generation that grew up with serial experiments lain but rather the generation after that experienced it via 3 hour analysis video on youtube deconstructing the PS1 game. it’s a nostalgia for something imagined rather than directly experienced, almost always filtered through the internet as either a touchstone within the work or the medium to experience it (usually both), & while the building blocks (anime ps1 game footage, or 303 samples with a faux-vinyl hiss-pop FX layer underneath) may differ i think the overall effect is about the same. maybe this is the final version of Culture (Fukuyama heads RISE!) but on the other hand we seem to be in a lot of holding patterns waiting for something to happen. so who knows! thanks for the good think about it tho :)