alistair Dave and Ben are piling in, clearly triggered, while Eric hasn’t added to what he first tweeted. Call me old fashioned but that’s quite cool. Dave has probably spent/wasted about two hours putting that response together. So lame to still be referring to call on me 20 years and about 2,000 tracks later
Your first line there is actually quite pertinent.
Although I of course disagree with Prydz’ original statement, it at first glance seems rather jarring that it’s Ben Sims and Dave Clarke jumping in to try and disagree with his claim that techno is “the music of the past”.
Tbf, Ben Sims has released a few decent tracks in recent years which keep his more typical loopy grooves but with a bit more of a modern polish, but ultimately Sims and Clarke are pretty old-school and far from the first people one would point to in order to support the idea that techno is indeed still somehow futuristic. The notion that they may have been “triggered” by Prydz could have some truth to it.
I have been a fan of Clarke’s music over the years, but he has very much become an “old man yells at cloud” recently. Having already achieved a very successful and no doubt lucrative career, he’s basically taken to badmouthing pretty much every major new development and artist in the techno scene, knowing that it won’t effect him one jot as he approaches a comfortable retirement. His targeting of so-called “business techno” in particular seems a tad hypocritical given how many huge, commercial festivals he’s headlined over the years. It’s partly just an easy card for him to play to try and maintain some street-cred while deflecting from his own career.
Back to Sims’ original tweet - as some have pointed out above, Prydz did release a few tracks early in his career that were championed by quite a few underground techno jocks, and he was also close to the likes of John & Jesper Dahlback and Adam Beyer in the 00s, so even if he’s a bit out of the loop on a lot of what’s going on now he does have some underground credentials and Sims’ slight on him isn’t 100% accurate. That Cirez D at ARC Festival set alistair posted above also does have a surprising amount of actual techno in there (including, ironically, a Dave Clarke track).
Finally, I also would be surprised if Sims would ever (have) turn(ed) down business class flights to a gig if the promoters were offering it, but he’s probably past the point in his career where that would be on the cards so he can instead virtue-signal about it to his heart’s content (while perhaps hiding a bit of envy).
