“For play music electronic…is better United State” – Benny Benassi

We couldn’t say it any better ourselves, even if our voices weren’t uselessly hoarse after attempting a normal conversation over Tiesto’s seminal “Party Trance.”  And of the injuries we’ll gladly take, that one ranks somewhere between a stumbling Friday night knee scrape/bruise and post-Transformers blindness. It has history. It has meaning. It was the result of play music electronic. If you haven’t already guessed, we don’t plan on writing anything about food this week—except to say that if you ever find yourself on the cusp of a techno dance party engagement, it’s not a good idea to eat too much beforehand.

Quite possibly, the aspect of growing older that we anticipate with the most chilly excited armpit sweat is the ability to say that when we were young, we listened to Daft Punk. In the way our parents say they listened to the Beatles or Led Zeppelin. Except this is cooler. Conversely, the flip side of that Georgian Lari (or ecstasy pill) is the thought that, unless Tron-like hyper-reality virtual existence is in play by 2050, we will eventually stop listening to the stuff. That we may actually become too mature to listen to synthesizer layered over simple beats and looped endlessly. Although we are happy to report that, unlike watching our cholesterol and gradually receding bedtimes, this unhappy stage has not yet come.

Despite the obvious vocabulary problem (techno? electronic music? mindless garbage?) that one only encounters in anthropology classes and conversations about David Guetta’s signature sound, found somewhere at the intersection of SNES, Viagra, Ketamine and HGH, we shall try to articulate the qualities of this music that attract us. And despite the fact that in doing so we are allying ourselves with a million vapid pure-brain stem douchebags from Atlantic City to Ibiza, we will profess our love for it.

To describe good music in print is challenging. To describe what is good about techno, what makes the signature sounds of Benassi, Daft Punk and Armin van Buuren (to name a few) so distinct and primally pleasing is nigh on impossible. From the bottom, we encounter brain- and body-shaking bass that serves to coalesce a roomful (or Ukranian stadiumful) of half-naked individuals.  After centuries of making music into higher art, we seem to have returned it in some measure to its roots as a basic expression of shared humanity and togetherness.  Or, to sound less like assholes, sometimes it makes us feel really good in our ears.  In higher registers, we find a spectrum of unintelligible Baltic female vocals and fake violin sounds that somehow make sense of the thumping below.  Individually, each of these components would sound like total drivel, but together in their best instances they match the resonance frequency of properly-inclined human bones.

Somewhere between the thump and the four-note melodies—die base und die superstructure—lies the Golden Fleece of techno, that signature sound that defines each of the best “artists.”  Here we find Guetta’s light-speed industrial shofar, Benassi’s assertive robotic foreman’s grind-command, Tiesto’s epic hymnal revelation, and Daft Punk’s loving intellectual droid-guitar-speak.  We know this makes absolutely no sense, and, astonishingly, we are totally sober as of this writing, but we honestly haven’t cooked anything of consequence in the past week and we’re sick of offering up impotent lists of where to eat/what to stock/how to groom.  So, rather than a recipe for food, this week we offer you a recipe for the next best thing. We recognize that it is by no means exhaustive, in fact barely representative, and only barely current. At least we can always go to bed with the knowledge that, as Mr. Benassi says, love is gonna save us.

Insert:

Serves 4 to 10,000.  Garnish liberally with sambuca.

Love Is Gonna Save Us 2007 Remix – Benny Benassi

Digital Love – Daft Punk

Echoes – Digitalism

Gravity’s Rainbow – Kavinsky

Ce Jeu (rogerseventytwo bounce remix) – Yelle

I Want You Back (rogerseventytwo remix) – Jackson 5

When Love Takes Over (Feat. Kelly Rowland) – David Guetta

Escape Me (Feat. C. C. Sheffield) – DJ Tiesto

Finger Food – Benny Benassi

Lava Lava – Boys Noize

Heads Will Roll (A-Trak Remix) (Club Edit) – Yeah Yeah Yeahs