if minimal was a genre unto itself*....

interesting question but it's quite difficult....

I think it's more consumed house/techno/electrohouse than anything else, I suppose people (like me) always tend to omit other genres when discussing how big minimal has become.

• deep minimal-"deep" very hard to pin down but I'd say, and I don't like all of these, some are deep in a boring flavourless way, efdemin, lawrence, steve bug/pokerflat, anja schneider, someone else, henrik schwarz.

• electro (house) minimal-bodzin/huntemann, tiefschwarz, hug, m.a.n.d.y. sometimes, dj t, chloe.

• progressive minimal-again varying definitions of progressive, border community, ozgur can, plus all the increasingly boring sky was pink rip offs....

• funky minimal-I'm going to say tuning spork, jamie jones, claude vonstroke...

I don't really think of the house and techno I listen to at the moment as minimal so much, I mean it's the easiest way to define it to the outsider but really so much of the stuff within the minimal scene and on the minimal labels is just occupying a space between house and techno......

Loco Dice is in between a couple of the categories (funky, deep, techno and, yes, pop). He's certainly been brilliant this year - "Seeing Through Shadows", "Orchidee" and the two tracks I've heard from Harissa are all brilliant. Very much in the Luciano mould but there's a certain... inevitable compulsion to his grooves that's distinct, they build so perfectly. That bit towards the end of "Seeing Through Shadows" where the "straight" groove comes in is quite brilliant, one of the moments of the year for me.

As per Ronan, for me "minimal" is basically now a codeword for various types of negotiations b/w house and techno, with various "movements" within it simply different takes on it which favour one side of the other. For example "Deep minimal" (or "deepinal" to use Ronan's term! I like my portentous "The New Deepness") is basically a deep house-ish corrective to the techno-fication of a lot of this stuff throughout 2004 and 2005 (be it the muscular Sender end or the reduced M-nus end). Yes most of it has fiddly sound design but I don't think that's the underlying key to it.

pop minimal = michael mayer, justus kohncke et al surely?

He definitely has a sound/groove of his own in his tracks true, but they strike me more like being the inevitable knock-offs, than having an "inevitable compulsion" about them (ahem, witty (not) I know). Tim F OTM as usual tho'

makes me think of rohypnol, which seems appropriate.

in one sense it irks me to hear more and more "epic string laden detroit" records coming out of germany...i mean some are amazing eg woody's remix of autotune, but it does feel a bit lazy, if these guys are going to go deep/housier something like "lohn and brot" seems a much more intriguing way of doing so...

that, and lawrence is definitely deep minimal. and i would venture to say that some of luciano's stuff can get deep....