Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
A-TRAK - Bloghaus Revival Mix (2015)
TRACKLIST:
Don Rimini - Let Me Back Up (Crookers Tetsujin Mix)
Larry Tee ft. Princess Superstar - Licky (Herve Goes Low remix)
Fake Blood - Mars
Boys Noize - Oh! (A-Trak Remix)
Justice - Waters of Nazareth (Erol Alkan re-edit)
Boys Noize - &down
Crookers - Love To Edit
Simian Mobile Disco - Hustler
The Gossip - Standing (Soulwax Nite Version)
Klaxons - Gravity's Rainbow (Soulwax Remix Dub)
Daft Punk - Human After All (SebastiAn Remix)
Tepr - Minuit Jacuzzi (DatA Remix)
Les Petits Pilous - Wake Up
Surkin - Radio Fireworks (Surkin 909 Edit)
PUZIQUe - Don't Go!
Treasure Fingers - Cross The Dancefloor (demo version)
The Whitest Boy Alive - Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix)
Kelis - Bossy (Alan Braxe & Fred Falke Remix)
Switch - A Bit Patchy
Radioclit - Divine Gossa (Switch Remix)
Proxy - Raven
Does it offend you, yeah? - We Are Rockstars
DJ Mehdi - Signatune (Thomas Bangalter Remix)
A-Trak Does An Undeniable Good Deed And Shares "Bloghaus Revival Mix"
"Recorded a mix of some of my favorite tracks from the era of BLOG HAUS, INDIE DANCE, DISTORTED ELECTRO, FIDGET roughly 2007-2009."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnyy7n/a-trak-does-an-undeniable-good-deed-and-shares-bloghaus-revival-mix
October 26, 2015
Just last week, Airbird & Napolian had us feeling nostalgic for the golden era of mid-00s indie dance with their heavy new single, "POWEr," and it seems like A-Trak has been on a similar tip lately. Delivering a Random Act of Kindness That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity, he's gone ahead and uploaded a "Bloghaus Revival Mix" to SoundCloud. It comes accompanied with the following note: "Recorded a mix of some of my favorite tracks from the era of BLOG HAUS, INDIE DANCE, DISTORTED ELECTRO, FIDGET roughly 2007-2009. If you ever wore a neon-colored all-over hoodie you can probably relate…" Stream it below, and check out the tracklist after the jump; while we're on the subject, also have another read of our piece "Defending the Indefensible: How Blog House was Secretly Brilliant."
"Recorded a mix of some of my favorite tracks from the era of BLOG HAUS, INDIE DANCE, DISTORTED ELECTRO, FIDGET roughly 2007-2009."
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wnyy7n/a-trak-does-an-undeniable-good-deed-and-shares-bloghaus-revival-mix
October 26, 2015
Just last week, Airbird & Napolian had us feeling nostalgic for the golden era of mid-00s indie dance with their heavy new single, "POWEr," and it seems like A-Trak has been on a similar tip lately. Delivering a Random Act of Kindness That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity, he's gone ahead and uploaded a "Bloghaus Revival Mix" to SoundCloud. It comes accompanied with the following note: "Recorded a mix of some of my favorite tracks from the era of BLOG HAUS, INDIE DANCE, DISTORTED ELECTRO, FIDGET roughly 2007-2009. If you ever wore a neon-colored all-over hoodie you can probably relate…" Stream it below, and check out the tracklist after the jump; while we're on the subject, also have another read of our piece "Defending the Indefensible: How Blog House was Secretly Brilliant."
What the hell was blog house? 30 classic tracks from a great lost era
In the summer of 2006 the Klaxons spawned nu rave, but the real youth subculture of the mid-00s was the music that DJs played after bands had finished: blog house.
https://www.factmag.com/2016/06/16/30-best-blog-house-tracks/
It’s difficult to define what blog house was exactly, because it covered so many styles. Some of it was dance music that mutated from the electroclash scene and trickled out from seminal London nights like Nag Nag Nag, Trash and Our Disco. DJs Erol Alkan, Rory Phillips and Nadia Ksaiba brought acts like Justice and 2manyDJs to the capital, all of them combining disco and ‘80s classics with noisy electro house. For a country still recovering from NME‘s “new rock revolution” led by The Libertines and The Strokes, it was a breath of fresh air.
It wasn’t just happening in London. In Paris, the Ed Banger and Institubes crews took inspiration from Daft Punk and French touch. In Australia, Van She and the Bang Gang DJs fed off acts like Cut Copy and The Presets. A US contingent grew out of the Hollerboard forum run by Diplo, while Switch and Hervé weaved ghetto house with UK club music into a style commonly known as fidget. In Japan they played these tracks and called it “apparel electro”. But this melting pot of lurid synths, compressed bass and big beats had one thing in common: it was the focus of an international network of music blogs disseminating DIY remixes and dodgy radio rips around the world. “Blog house was what happened when people who ought to have been in bands spent more time in nightclubs than in venues,” says Jas Shaw, half of one of the era’s taste-making DJ duos Simian Mobile Disco. “These same people spent as much time online as in ‘proper’ record shops. Blogs were essentially just digital fanzines but they could reach further, and rather than just enthuse about a record they had just found, they could post it – you could grab it and hear it, or play it in your own town that night. It was the beginning of what we take for granted now.”
For a period of roughly three years between 2006-09, producers making tracks in their bedroom believed they could be the biggest act in the world if they managed to reach the top of MP3 blog aggregator The Hype Machine. As blogs raced to post the biggest tracks first so they could get to the top of the charts themselves, the quality control levels dropped to appallingly low levels. The abrasive bass and angular structures perfected by Justice were endlessly copied, resulting in club nights where DJs would play any old 128KB MP3 just to stay ahead of the curve, even if the music was basically unlistenable. By 2009, the pills were crap and the neon dreams and carefree days were over. Joy Orbison released ‘Hyph Mngo’ and everyone moved on to post-dubstep, where house mutations were the next logical destination for kids who had caught the club bug.
A lot of people now might sneer at blog house or try to pretend they had nothing to do with it, but for plenty of us who heard Erol Alkan play ‘We Are Your Friends’ at Trash or saw 2manyDJs in a warehouse in then-derelict King’s Cross, the fun we had in that era is the reason we carry on going to clubs now. “In retrospect it all seems like some sort of musical puberty, slightly embarrassing and messy, but we were making it up as we went along rather than attempting to fit in,” Shaw says. “The intentions were solid.” The blog house era gave us a lot of unforgivable music, but it also spawned some genuine bangers that remain fuckloads more fun than anything you’ll hear at a tech-house pool party in 2016. To mark roughly 10 years since the peak of one of dance music’s most maligned genres, we picked over the blog house carcass to rank the best tracks – from sing-along anthems to obscure deep cuts. If you were there, you’ll know.
Listen to a YouTube playlist of every track
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg5ScSqSDXssiTmE6M_X3070yRe0dTVZo
In the summer of 2006 the Klaxons spawned nu rave, but the real youth subculture of the mid-00s was the music that DJs played after bands had finished: blog house.
https://www.factmag.com/2016/06/16/30-best-blog-house-tracks/
It’s difficult to define what blog house was exactly, because it covered so many styles. Some of it was dance music that mutated from the electroclash scene and trickled out from seminal London nights like Nag Nag Nag, Trash and Our Disco. DJs Erol Alkan, Rory Phillips and Nadia Ksaiba brought acts like Justice and 2manyDJs to the capital, all of them combining disco and ‘80s classics with noisy electro house. For a country still recovering from NME‘s “new rock revolution” led by The Libertines and The Strokes, it was a breath of fresh air.
It wasn’t just happening in London. In Paris, the Ed Banger and Institubes crews took inspiration from Daft Punk and French touch. In Australia, Van She and the Bang Gang DJs fed off acts like Cut Copy and The Presets. A US contingent grew out of the Hollerboard forum run by Diplo, while Switch and Hervé weaved ghetto house with UK club music into a style commonly known as fidget. In Japan they played these tracks and called it “apparel electro”. But this melting pot of lurid synths, compressed bass and big beats had one thing in common: it was the focus of an international network of music blogs disseminating DIY remixes and dodgy radio rips around the world. “Blog house was what happened when people who ought to have been in bands spent more time in nightclubs than in venues,” says Jas Shaw, half of one of the era’s taste-making DJ duos Simian Mobile Disco. “These same people spent as much time online as in ‘proper’ record shops. Blogs were essentially just digital fanzines but they could reach further, and rather than just enthuse about a record they had just found, they could post it – you could grab it and hear it, or play it in your own town that night. It was the beginning of what we take for granted now.”
For a period of roughly three years between 2006-09, producers making tracks in their bedroom believed they could be the biggest act in the world if they managed to reach the top of MP3 blog aggregator The Hype Machine. As blogs raced to post the biggest tracks first so they could get to the top of the charts themselves, the quality control levels dropped to appallingly low levels. The abrasive bass and angular structures perfected by Justice were endlessly copied, resulting in club nights where DJs would play any old 128KB MP3 just to stay ahead of the curve, even if the music was basically unlistenable. By 2009, the pills were crap and the neon dreams and carefree days were over. Joy Orbison released ‘Hyph Mngo’ and everyone moved on to post-dubstep, where house mutations were the next logical destination for kids who had caught the club bug.
A lot of people now might sneer at blog house or try to pretend they had nothing to do with it, but for plenty of us who heard Erol Alkan play ‘We Are Your Friends’ at Trash or saw 2manyDJs in a warehouse in then-derelict King’s Cross, the fun we had in that era is the reason we carry on going to clubs now. “In retrospect it all seems like some sort of musical puberty, slightly embarrassing and messy, but we were making it up as we went along rather than attempting to fit in,” Shaw says. “The intentions were solid.” The blog house era gave us a lot of unforgivable music, but it also spawned some genuine bangers that remain fuckloads more fun than anything you’ll hear at a tech-house pool party in 2016. To mark roughly 10 years since the peak of one of dance music’s most maligned genres, we picked over the blog house carcass to rank the best tracks – from sing-along anthems to obscure deep cuts. If you were there, you’ll know.
Listen to a YouTube playlist of every track
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg5ScSqSDXssiTmE6M_X3070yRe0dTVZo
We Owe Everything to Bloghouse
https://www.papermag.com/bloghouse-2655912825.html#rebelltitem1
The year was 2008, and I showed up to my first day of junior year in a lamé skater dress and a rat’s nest that looked like a giant mushroom on my head. At the time, I was transitioning out of the Warped Tour emo circuit and entering a new era dedicated to copycatting all the “alt” girls I saw in Cobrasnake photos posted on Tumblr, and so my tote bag contained a pack of stolen Parliaments, a copy of Eeeee Eee Eeee and an iPod full of Sébastien Tellier, Crystal Castles, Klaxons, Uffie and every MSTRKFT remix under the sun. You name it, and I had the illegal MP3, which is probably something I shouldn’t commit to writing, but, I guess, what’s done is done. Either way, this was a personal watershed moment, heavily colored by “irony,” Cory Kennedy candids and the Vice Do’s and Dont’s column, but I didn’t really know what to call it until Carles, the enigmatic author behind Hipster Runoff, made a post titled “WTF is Blog House?” Granted, with the publication of Lina Abascal’s Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the Dancefloor, we now have a much more comprehensive answer to that nostalgia-laden question.
For the uninitiated, bloghouse (AKA “bloghaus”) is an umbrella term for a wide-spanning cultural movement that was simultaneously a party scene, a fashion trend and an all-encompassing lifestyle centered on a “very certain kind of dance music,” per Abascal. Lasting from roughly 2006 to 2011, there isn’t a particular sound or sonic signature unique to the genre since you could, technically, classify different bloghouse songs and artists as everything from French touch to nü rave to electroclash. Rather, it’s probably better to describe the overall vibe of bloghouse, which was chaotic, glitchy, garish, glittery, and almost as neon as American Apparel’s color range. After all, as Abascal clarified, it was “less about the exact sound and more about how you found it” as a subculture that revolved around the online discovery of catchy electronic music during a time when “rock music was getting boring” and “people were just really ready to dance.”
However, it’s also worth noting that no one called it “bloghouse” back then, even if the posthumous moniker is apt for a genre spawned by a “network of independent blogs.” From Stereogum to Gorilla Vs. Bear, these sites would share links of songs and remixes culled from HypeMachine charts and Tumblr posts, which made the once-arduous process of music discovery through hyper-niche forums and expensive record collections a thing of the past. Instead, bloghouse’s use of the internet meant DIY music was simplified to one click on a playlist link or illegally downloaded songshare file — something that predicted our current relationship with the online dissemination of music and culture.
“One of my favorite things about bloghouse is the democratization of it through free access to music online. You were able to become a curator yourself and participate, and I think people were really ready for that,” Abascal said, explaining that this was taking place during a time when more and more people were getting computers and the internet at home. As social media and technology continued to advance throughout the mid- to late-aughts, Abascal reflected on her own experience of being one of the many “listeners who turned into bloggers themselves,” merely because they loved the music and wanted to share it. “Anyone can log on and be like, ‘Oh, shit, I care about this. Let me find other people that care about this,’ and it connected people from all over,” Abascal continued. “I think the motivations were very pure, which sounds kind of corny because by no means was this a wholesome scene, but I do think that there were elements of it that really were wholesome.”
snip
https://www.papermag.com/bloghouse-2655912825.html#rebelltitem1
The year was 2008, and I showed up to my first day of junior year in a lamé skater dress and a rat’s nest that looked like a giant mushroom on my head. At the time, I was transitioning out of the Warped Tour emo circuit and entering a new era dedicated to copycatting all the “alt” girls I saw in Cobrasnake photos posted on Tumblr, and so my tote bag contained a pack of stolen Parliaments, a copy of Eeeee Eee Eeee and an iPod full of Sébastien Tellier, Crystal Castles, Klaxons, Uffie and every MSTRKFT remix under the sun. You name it, and I had the illegal MP3, which is probably something I shouldn’t commit to writing, but, I guess, what’s done is done. Either way, this was a personal watershed moment, heavily colored by “irony,” Cory Kennedy candids and the Vice Do’s and Dont’s column, but I didn’t really know what to call it until Carles, the enigmatic author behind Hipster Runoff, made a post titled “WTF is Blog House?” Granted, with the publication of Lina Abascal’s Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the Dancefloor, we now have a much more comprehensive answer to that nostalgia-laden question.
For the uninitiated, bloghouse (AKA “bloghaus”) is an umbrella term for a wide-spanning cultural movement that was simultaneously a party scene, a fashion trend and an all-encompassing lifestyle centered on a “very certain kind of dance music,” per Abascal. Lasting from roughly 2006 to 2011, there isn’t a particular sound or sonic signature unique to the genre since you could, technically, classify different bloghouse songs and artists as everything from French touch to nü rave to electroclash. Rather, it’s probably better to describe the overall vibe of bloghouse, which was chaotic, glitchy, garish, glittery, and almost as neon as American Apparel’s color range. After all, as Abascal clarified, it was “less about the exact sound and more about how you found it” as a subculture that revolved around the online discovery of catchy electronic music during a time when “rock music was getting boring” and “people were just really ready to dance.”
However, it’s also worth noting that no one called it “bloghouse” back then, even if the posthumous moniker is apt for a genre spawned by a “network of independent blogs.” From Stereogum to Gorilla Vs. Bear, these sites would share links of songs and remixes culled from HypeMachine charts and Tumblr posts, which made the once-arduous process of music discovery through hyper-niche forums and expensive record collections a thing of the past. Instead, bloghouse’s use of the internet meant DIY music was simplified to one click on a playlist link or illegally downloaded songshare file — something that predicted our current relationship with the online dissemination of music and culture.
“One of my favorite things about bloghouse is the democratization of it through free access to music online. You were able to become a curator yourself and participate, and I think people were really ready for that,” Abascal said, explaining that this was taking place during a time when more and more people were getting computers and the internet at home. As social media and technology continued to advance throughout the mid- to late-aughts, Abascal reflected on her own experience of being one of the many “listeners who turned into bloggers themselves,” merely because they loved the music and wanted to share it. “Anyone can log on and be like, ‘Oh, shit, I care about this. Let me find other people that care about this,’ and it connected people from all over,” Abascal continued. “I think the motivations were very pure, which sounds kind of corny because by no means was this a wholesome scene, but I do think that there were elements of it that really were wholesome.”
snip
