EntheoHouse

The listening in class yesterday, specifically the ambient and spiritual house tracks (Enigma's "Sadness" and KLF's "Chill Out"), was very interesting and enjoyable. The class did, however, make me very confused about the distinctions between genres - I never would have thought to classify some of the songs we heard as "house" - and the genre chart we were shown only made this confusion worse. The ambient and spiritual house, songs, for example, sounded extremely similar to general ambient/dance songs I've heard - what's the difference?

Over the past few weeks I've acquired a distinct taste for ambient music, so I thought it would be interesting to compare a couple of these songs to the listening from class and try and draw out the line between the genres. 

First, here is KLF's "Chill Out:"

This song, once the "four to the floor" beat comes in, definitely falls within the house BPM range (probably around 130). Though its natural samples make it distinctly ambient, the electronic sounds and drum machine tie it to its roots in house. 

Next let's look at the music of Entheogenic, a two-man German band and music project that produces ambient/psytrance tracks and which an Australian friend of mine recently introduced me to. Here is one of their songs, "Kashmir Day Trip:"

This song has the same ambient quality and 4/4 meter as the ambient house songs sampled, but is much slower. This track is around 109/110 BPM, placing it outside the normal range for house music and into the straight ambient music category, which is generally slower and can also be divided into sub-genres accordingly. 

Generally, though, I still find it very hard to classify music by sub-genre - the overlap between categories such as these makes it especially confusing. Hopefully by the end of this course I'll be able to tell more easily what defines "Chill Out" and not "Kashmir" as house. In the end though, I don't really care what the genre is - If I like a song I'll listen to it, regardless of its category.