At the end of 2009, dance music as a whole is far from being ‘in trouble’. However, as noted in the previous entry on Underworld’s ‘Two Months Off’, a certain kind of tradition in British electronica of popular experimentalism has dwindled with the unfolding of the decade. What I term a significant minority act – in this genre, people like Underworld, Leftfield, Aphex Twin, artists communicating broadly underground/avant-garde values to a just-large-enough popular constituency – this sort of act is pretty much a thing of the past on these shores (though Burial springs readily to mind as a notable exception).
Fortunately, the bifurcation of British dance music into middlebrow stadium-massiveness (Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Calvin Harris) on the one hand and microcosmic obscurity (…) on the other, seemed to provide an ideal opportunity for other geographical regions to flourish.
Scandinavia, of course, was one of the major hotspots for left-of-centre noughties electronica (see TotD entries on Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’ and Royksopp’s ‘What Else Is There?’). Continue reading