if there is an interesting story behind it, i will listen/buy/download it, and i wouldn't care so much about sound. say, there's a 40 year old kickboxing trainer who makes electronic music on minimal equipment inbetween the sessions with his students. i would download his stuff, without even taking a listen first.
i've been in contact with a guy from lebanon who makes rough electronic music. this is alone makes me love his music, that he makes hard stuff in a country and situation like this.
or another example, i just read a profile by a guy who is "a bureacrat by day" and an electronic artist at night. okay, this is not so rare a condition in the field of electronic music, but there is magic to this story, that this alone would make me listen to his music.
there is something oliver chesler said in an interview once, that with today's technology and stuff (i would also mention all those tutorials), everyone can do any form of electronic music basically. (end of his statement) everyone with at least a slight bit of equipment and half a talent can make a "big production" tune in hardcore, or drumnbass, or any other genre.
because of this, music itself has become completely meaningless to me. it's only the idea or spirit that matters.
and if the idea is good enough, the actual music becomes secondary (or, as said before, meaningless).
i'm totally into late 70s/early 80s punk and postpunk sounds. this sound has some of the lowest production values ever. it's often just post-teenage boys who used there spare money to buy a single synthesizer, put it into their bedroom, and then recorded there wonderful beautiful tracks to cassette tape. fantastic.
the "hardcore", or rather most of the techno-electric scenes are quite behind on this in the moment (and quite frankly, i think they lost that race - probably for a long time. unless a wholy new generation comes up.). in indie rock, for example, it's quite obvious that image/attitude/ideas can be more important for the "success" than the actual sound. even in mainstream pop - do so many people admire lady gaga because of the quality of her tracks, or not rather because of all of the image/publicity stunts she does?
it makes me a bit sad that most people in the electronic-techno scene fail to understand what this means.
the thing is that techno (and hardcore) in the beginning was farther ahead than almost any other type of music in this matter. alec empire once said amongst the things that put him into techno was that he was fascinated how producers with minimal equipment could create tunes that were more thrilling than the million-dollar studio pop productions that dominated the charts at that time. because these tunes had soul and spirit.
take a lot at some of the early techno and hardcore productions. some of them have extremely simple structures and are produced in a lofi way. yet they are great and wonderful. because there is spirit to them.
