It's house music, made by outsiders, so why not call it outsider house? Naming a new electronic genre just isn't that easy
Outsider house is the latest dance music subgenre to cause excitement and consternation in equal measure among the message board cognoscenti. The term was created to pull together a new breed of US producers who embrace lo-fi techniques rather than the polished cleanliness of the deep house and EDM brigades.
Huerco S (real name Brian Leeds) spent his college years in Kansas City studying ceramics and going to avant garde happenings rather than learning how to program a Roland 909 or popping pink pingers. That background probably goes some way to explaining his downtempo, distorted tracks, which regularly crawl along at just above 100bpm. He started off releasing music on cassette-only label Opal Tapes, before putting together an intriguing album called Colonial Patterns, due out on Daniel Lopatin's (AKA Oneohtrix Point Never) Software imprint later this month.
Over on the east coast, Anthony Naples started applying the DIY attitude he'd learned while growing up in the punk scene to house productions, and was soon getting his stripped-back garage-influenced tunes released by Will Bankhead's painfully cool label Trilogy Tapes. He's now started his own label, Proibito, whose first release was a 12-inch by another Brian Leeds alias, Royal Crown Of Sweden. Brooklynite and LIES Records boss Ron Morelli is a bit of a demi-god for the outsider house disciples, with his label turning out a string of back-to-basics house bangers from the likes of Willie Burns and former footwork producer and tape-hiss enthusiast Delroy Edwards.
Hessle Audio's Ben UFO first playfully coined the term "outsider house" during a Rinse FM show, in reference to the outsider art phenomenon that champions untrained, "naive" artists from beyond the art world. Before long, it was being applied to any American producers whose tracks sounded like they'd been recorded backwards on a reel-to-reel recorder using sandpaper instead of tape. Unsurprisingly, the producers have since distanced themselves from the term, considering that it implies that they just smash some buttons together and hope for the best, rather than spending hours carefully honing their tracks.
But this latest generation of outsiders are not the first to bring DIY vibes to the dance music party. Chicago house institution Trax records famously re-pressed new releases on to melted-down second-hand vinyl in order to save money, and in the UK grime producers changed urban music for ever by making tracks on their PlayStations. Outsider house might sound like another pretentious microgenre, but its proponents are continuing dance music's long lo-fi lineage.
Anthony Naples' POT 12" is out Mon; Huerco S's Colonial Patterns is out 23 Sep
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