To casual observers, dance music’s multitude of genres must seem amusingly pedantic. How many ways are there to describe electronic music that you can dance to?
House, trance, techno, drum & bass – it’s a confusing world with its own language, and that’s before they started chucking adjectives into the already dubious pot. Minimal techno? Psychedelic trance? Progressive house? Talk about splitting hairs.
And then when you consider that language develops over time, especially in electronic music which is intrinsically linked to technological change and the fickle trends of youth, you’re left with, well, meaningless drivel.
What does progressive house in 2009 mean exactly? Call us fools, but we’ll try to answer that.
In the early 90s when the term ‘progressive house’ was coined by Mixmag editor Dom Phillips, it described the kind of complex house music that Guerilla Records and Renaissance pushed in the UK.
The sound had a greater emphasis on emotion and subtly evolving compositions. Synthesized sounds changed incrementally over time, and basslines and rhythms gracefully attempted to keep your feet moving. Progressive house avoided the build ups, breakdowns, drum rolls, and continuous choruses of house or trance music.
And like progressive rock, it was characterized by classical influences, the use of keyboards, and lengthy compositions. It was innovative, and as such, ‘progressive’ was the perfect description.
Now progressive house describes the kind of 4/4 dance music in between house, trance, and techno, which more often than not, uses keyboards and subtle changes in melody and rhythm to wrought emotion.
In short, it’s a bastard description of a bastard. One arguably perceived change though, is that progressive house is no longer seen as ‘progressive’, in the innovative, reforming sense of the word. It’s old hat, basically. And anything that’s old, surely can’t be progressive. Remember Hypercolor tshirts? They were progressive.
But if you dig deep, you’ll find plenty of innovation in the progressive house sound, and that is why we’ve put together this list of artists. Each one of these producers we’d argue, are progressive house fundamentalists – firmly committed to the prog sound, both sonically and ideologically. Some of them might not be classified as progressive house in databases today, some of them might even resent being labelled as prog such is the dirty nature of the word, but that is merely a consequence of our shifted perceptions, fools that we are.
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