Frank Kogan

I used to give Consistency an awful lot of importance, especially as a teenager and a student. It's much less vital now I've grown up a bit and trust my own opinion as to whether something is good or not.

Within the super-broad sphere of dance music there are plenty of different genres that are so divisive for very inconsistent reasons. To illustrate what I'm getting at, on Thursday I'm going to a dance music festival. This festival has a number of stages according to 'genre': Techno, House, Breaks, Psy-Trance, Wrong Music Mentalism, Chillout, Roots (world music, hip-hop, salsa etc). I can tell you now without even looking at the lineups that I will stick to Techno, House and the Wrong Music (like I did last year!). Other dudes won't leave the Breaks tent all weekend. The goths like Psy-trance and Wrong music but not Techno. Fair enough - everyone has different tastes. But ask them WHY they like Techno and not Psy-Trance but still like Breaks, and they'll go 'ummm Psy-trance doesn't have a pounding 4-4 beat like Techno.' Ah but neither does Breaks! 'But Breaks has whooshy bits and has more variety in the beats.' Psy-trance is ALL whooshy bits & the beats are all over the place! Personally I like bibbly squelch noises common to Techno and Psy-Trance but dislike the latter genre for its lack of structure and flow. However I'm sure that Psy-trance enthusiasts would ALSO say that Techno has a lack of structure and flow, but mean something quite different! Basically my point is that two styles of music can be very similar indeed (my Mum certainly wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Techno and Psy-trance at all) but polarise opinion nonetheless - and those opinions are based on different interpretations of the same reasoning. Does that make sense?