Monday 18 July 2011

Maya Jane Coles & Good Generic Minimal Tech-House

Minimal Tech-House is a hard genre to get excited over but it's also one capable of giving me some of the biggest thrills... sparingly. That there's so much, oh so much, bilge to trawl through doesn't make the rewards any better, but the prospect of foraging for them too daunting to bother with. Anyone viewing charts from tipster DJs and listening to them will realise how predictible, perfunctory, samey and boring they mostly are. I DLed a couple of chart lists - Steve Bug and Loco Dice - recently to check out what the kids were digging and my how bored I was. I'm sure these pieces fit together adequately and get the drugged-up young feet shaking on the floors (they'd have done it for my younger feet), but how bland, blank and aesthetically neuter these sets must be.

I know little about Maya Jane Coles aside from that she's 23 and British with an RA podcast under her belt. With minimal tech-house it's a fine line between generic button pushing and outstanding but somehow she wrings noticeable quality from tired formula; nothing earth shaking but, like the ol' Raymond Chandler analogy, genre work done very well. There's a deep house girth to the rhythms and she's fond of nice rotund bleeps, as heard in Anja Schneider's 'Belize', which she crafts into bright groovy melodic shards. Read more from one of her current homes Mobilee here which put out her excellent Beat Faster 12", and they seem the right place for her sound. But she's done plenty and it's mostly very good:







... And Anja Schneider's influential 'Belize':

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