Andy Battaglia

The circus happening just outside the circus gearing up inside made one thing perfectly clear: For all its progress in methodically creating a new cultural language, electronica still knows how to stage a good old-fashioned spectacle. This was reassuring throughout the course of the night, because while the music’s language can be fascinating to hear, it resonates with little more than a markedly unsubtle command to “Dance! Dance! Dance!” when spread out over more than four hours of opening and headlining acts. Selectively whittled down to snippets, though, it made for some interesting conversation. Like that carried on by two young teenagers bounding into the theater during DJ Paul Oakenfold’s opening set. The boy, his head all but completely swallowed up by his oversized hood, heard a sound drifting through the doorway and turned toward his girlfriend. “No shit!” he said, before curling his mouth. “Diiiiuurrrrrr, niiuuuurrr, ruuuiir,” he muttered, presumably “singing” along with what seemed to be his favorite song. Maybe even “their” song. He put his arm around her shoulders. Her eyes lit up. She smiled. They’d just had one of those moments.

The crowd had been sufficiently greased by the time the Chemical Brothers took the stage. Giddy dancers twirled glow-sticks like little kids waving sparklers on the Fourth of July. House music (both in style and in origin) had extended Oakenfold’s relatively starched and unadventurous beats through the break between acts. When the Chemical Brothers came out to man their machines, the gears were already churning.

Moving swiftly from the single “Hey Boy Hey Girl” to the ironically (or embarrassingly) self-evident sample snap that pleads for “music that triggers some kind of response” on their latest album, “Surrender,” the Chemicals made their intentions clear from the git-go. As long as that response wasn’t asked to transcend the merely physical it was in good hands. There’s no way not to react in some way to the Chemical Brothers’ live act because, unlike on their recordings, the duo benefit from the mechanics of sheer volume. Enabled by a keen sense of dynamics, their music offers not so much an invitation to respond, but an insurmountable challenge not to. Their bass tones rattled chest cavities more than ears. And their electronic drones and chirps cut vectors through the spacious ballroom, transforming its Art Deco-tinged self into something more like a NASA hangar.

The Brothers themselves were a joy to watch, lovably geeky when their arms raised up in exaltation and analytically cool when their eyes gazed at nothing but the black boxes before them. Bouncing up and down as they punched buttons and fiddled with knobs, they looked charmingly like spirited data-entry specialists. Behind them rose a series of projection screens covered by images ranging from primitive black-and-white animation to architectural models to Day-Glo-rendered stained-glass deities to an army of ominously marching tin-toy robots. “Hyperkinetic” seemed to be the word of the evening.

The scattered start, however, began to wear thin before long. On “Surrender,” the Chemicals steered relatively clear of their Big Beat beginnings in an attempt to accentuate the spaces in between their euphoric breaks. It’s a respectable move, since their formula of old has been co-opted and mercilessly pummeled into the ground. The problem, both on the record and at the show, is that the spaces in between those breaks still sound like in-between spaces. There’s little to latch onto after the Chemicals’ trick-bag is empty. Which wouldn’t have been a problem at the Hammerstein if they were more capable with the tools of trance, but subtlety and nuance have never been associated with the Chemical Brothers. Hearing their bumbled attempts at finding finesse was a bit like reading a novel written without punctuation: In the right hands in can be hypnotic, in the wrong ones it stumbles clumsily.

And stumble clumsily the show did, not unlike a boy inspecting a cut over his eye in a Hammerstein bathroom mirror. “Damn!” he said, speaking to no one but his bloodied image. “All I did was try to jump over a few chairs, and now I have to go to the hospital.” It was a reflective moment.

The main room upstairs is throbbing with the ceaseless bass of house music, that four-to-the-floor boom-boom-boom-boom that has been dance music’s go-to sound for ages. The tourists are into it, as are the curiously made-up girls from New Jersey and the few lady-slaying sailors in town for Fleet Week. There’s a big-room purposefulness to the music upstairs, a workhorselike aspect to its time-tested thump. It’s the kind of music people want when they drop $20 every now and then to do the dance-club thing.

The scene downstairs is markedly different. The crowd is a mix of finicky music-obsessives and stylish scene-makers here to check out Drive By, New York’s hottest home for the hottest new sound in dance music. Those in the know are tipping flutes of champagne, the drink of choice for their subcultural compatriots over in beat-loving London. In the middle of the floor, the good dancers are bouncing and flailing, sticking their moves with an angularity those on the edges are still trying to work out. The music is really new and different, the beats snapping in crisply slanted ways that make the house tunes upstairs sound old-fashioned. It’s all precision and shine down here.

The DJ drops some remarkably irony-free remixes of chart-topping hits — “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child, Bell Biv Devoe’s “Poison” (twice!?) — alongside the genre-making tracks that have just started making their way to the States. An MC spits out gritty freestyle on the mike, toasting Jamaican dancehall style. “Hometown NYC … Drive By … . We’re gonna spin you out,” he belts. “Bring your energy, bring your love … Let’s get sexy … It’s time for two-step garrraaaaaaggggeee!!!”

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If you’re really into dance music, you probably know two-step garage. If you’re not — if the difference between house and techno seems like little more than the punchline-ready distinction between country and western — maybe you’ve seen it referenced in a magazine. Maybe it meant something, or maybe you just wrote it off as another example of dance music’s tendency to spit out new genre names as signifiers of readymade revolution. Either way, two-step is a legitimately distinctive new style that owes a lot to drum ‘n’ bass and the futuristic minimalism that dominates American pop and R&B. But its debt extends equally to every other strain of dance music that has cropped up in the past 25 years. Giddy disco, soulful house, mechanistic techno, rhythm-crazed hardcore, bouncy Jamaican dancehall, big-bottomed Miami bass, gin-sipping G-funk, glitchy ambience — they’re all there.

It’s an unfortunate circumstance in electronic music that such terms mean the world to some and nothing to others. If you follow the music closely, the distinctions are both meaningful and necessary. They all connote something specific, even if they often bleed into one another and break down when it comes time for precise definitions. But keeping up with the linguistic free-for-all can wind up amounting to a full-time job. And it unfortunately guarantees that the newest sounds get discussed most interestingly in coded language that only alienates those who don’t have a working knowledge of the vocabulary. This isn’t exclusive to electronica, but the music’s largely wordless and hyperspecialized nature certainly doesn’t help.

With this in mind, two-step offers an interesting way out of the classic postmodern jam. For all its exposed roots and historical ties, the music amounts to much more than the sum of its parts, both in its sound and in its ability to juggle specialized progressivism and audience-courting populism behind a premise that relies on disregarding the conflict altogether.

Two-step really is a new sound, one that was cooked up as both an inevitable offshoot of everything that came before it and a marked departure from the history it tries so hard to revise. But while its big-picture history gives it some serious conceptual underpinning, its most immediately noticeable trait is its delicious accessibility. In England, where it’s been positively huge for a couple of years now, two-step (or U.K. garage, as it’s interchangeably known) appeals equally to both screaming teeny-boppers and underground DJs who disseminate it through pirate-radio stations and specialty record shops. The secretive white-label culture that dance music is famous for - DJs trading unlicensed remixes, trainspotters trying to steal ideas, etc. — is a big part of two-step. However, in England at least, the same tracks that get passed around like Samizdat in the underground can end up sitting pretty atop the singles charts, with no love lost on either side of the cultural divide.

If you’ve ever sat around and wondered what might one day pop up as a new sound that could make waves, however big or small, you’d be right to be intrigued by this. There’s a lot going on in two-step garage, both on the surface and beneath it, that speaks to both the present and the future in illuminating ways. It’s not likely to change the world in any magically profound fashion, but there’s something inspiring and true in the mere existence of a style that offers something to both jaded aesthetes and their 6-year-old nieces. Two-step’s mix of sophisticated stylization and pleasantly Epicurean excess just feels so … so culturally right.

Of course, England has always been a little cooler than America when it comes to recognizing this kind of thing. From the days when English rockers heard something in the blues that had slipped past American ears for years, the Brits have been building what your casual everyday Anglophile could rightfully call impeccable taste. The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” nowadays the leading vote-getter for best album ever, was a smash in England from Day 1, while it went largely unappreciated back home in the States. Examples like this are a given in rock history. But none of them even comes close to techno, which was invented in Detroit but really blew up only after Europeans recognized the soul that was hiding beneath the music’s posthuman future shock.

There’s a certain degree of overromanticizing going on here — Spice Girls, anyone? — but take a look at the magazine racks and it’s clearly more true than false. For reasons that are tough to pin down, England is home to a whole slew of publications — Mojo, the Wire, Uncut, etc. — that consistently treat music as something weighty and important and telling about our culture. It’s hard to think of an equivalent in the States simply because there isn’t one. (Or at least there isn’t one that can afford not to hide matters of substance in a mix of cheeky charticles and industry-stroking sloganeering.)

And this is to say nothing of the serious theory that has sprung up around electronic music in England. The better writing about techno and drum ‘n’ bass regularly places beat science alongside the most head-crunching social and political thought. Throw down a slamming break-beat and there will be a British writer ready to decorate it with a quote from Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida or Theodor Adorno.

If the British rave theorists’ intellectualizing is occasionally overreaching, it’s still invigorating in a way that seems almost inconceivable on this side of the pond. It’s also enough to make your casual everyday Anglophile imagine New Electronic London as a sort of cultural dreamscape, an updated fantasyland along the lines of the Old Weird America that Greil Marcus invoked around Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music.” In a similar way, this New Electronic London is an overly idealized construct that helps the quixotic music fan accept that music isn’t all things to all people. But it’s also an instance of constructive romanticism capturing a certain essence by mixing the real with the imagined. There’s something to be said for swinging hard in case you hit something (or at least miss the point in a tellingly interesting way), and the critical flailing that surrounds London’s teeming dance scene lands a lot of punches in the name of electronic music’s progressive promise.

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It’s probably safe to assume that ‘N Sync’s Justin Timberlake doesn’t care much for the nuances of cultural criticism. When he recently told Entertainment Weekly that two-step garage is “where we think music is going,” he was talking about cool-ass beats. “It’s more futuristic,” he said, referring to the two-step influence of “Pop,” his group’s new single. “It’s like R&B twice as fast.”

Two-step’s debt to chart-dominating pop and R&B is yet another example of British aesthetes recognizing greatness in what their American peers traditionally write off as unlikely sources. The Brits aren’t entirely alone in holding up pop producers like Swizz Beatz, Rodney Jerkins, Kevin “Shek’spere” Briggs, et al., as serious artists. In America, though, the kind of producers who have worked with Destiny’s Child, Ruff Ryders and even Britney Spears are appreciated more exclusively by a cottage industry of critics whose dialogue rarely seems to drift outside the pages of magazines and large cities’ weekly newspapers.

While Spin or the Village Voice might freak out over Timbaland’s production work on Missy Elliot’s new album, it’s hard to imagine many underground American musicians — i.e., the guys in Tortoise — talking earnestly about “Get Ur Freak On,” much less doing something with its sound that would satisfy both indie kids and the people whose market-driving dollar makes records go platinum. It’s a phenomenon that speaks to simple logistical differences between the U.K. and the U.S., from the vastly different makeup of the radio industries to the obvious discrepancy in geographical size. But more than either of those, it’s evidence of the racial divisiveness that seems to dominate music-making in the States.

Unlike London’s two-step community, whose catchall musical recipe could only be the product of free-flowing culture-swirl, the lines that separate race here are bold and unmoving. Even if the monstrous success of hip-hop and R&B on the charts suggests otherwise, when it comes to the creative process, black music is black music and white music is white music. There are exceptions, of course, but the crosscurrent of racially blind musical influence here is more like a gentle breeze that blows only occasionally. And when it does, it’s more often than not on the empty-seeming pop charts, so that while Justin Timberlake speaks with surprising prescience about the culturally diverse two-step scene, it’s still hard to imagine the surly rock grouch at your corner record store doing the same.

Two-step garage was born from the ashes of drum ‘n’ bass, the hard-driving club sound that had all of London screaming “revolution!” in the early ’90s and then wondering what happened when the music hit a stylistic dead end. For all its churning progress, jungle was doomed to pound itself into remission. As it became increasingly popular, drum ‘n’ bass ultimately repelled its audience with the same characteristics that made it big to begin with: grating sonic attacks, speed-fixated break beats and chest-shaking bass lines. Because the purists didn’t allow it to change, it was easy to see why the once-frothing fan felt a little dissatisfied and ended up turning away like a foie gras goose come grain time.

In big-picture terms it might as well be the Edsel of hyped-up musical movements. But regardless of the way the fall of drum ‘n’ bass is caricatured now, there’s no denying that it was a seriously important and influential strain of musical thought. Excepting certain examples from hip-hop, there’s been no sound that better captured the personality-diffusing identity swirl and paranoid teeth-gnashing of turn-of-the-century culture. As a snapshot of the times, drum ‘n’ bass — and by extension, electronic dance music — delivered a relevance that rock ‘n’ roll simply wasn’t capable of invoking in its limping, arthritic state.

Two-step garage doesn’t exactly deliver on this promise either, but that’s largely because it learned from the morality tale that so consumed drum ‘n’ bass. A big part of two-step’s allure is simply that it strives to be alluring. In an effort to restore dance music’s social graces, two-step producers slowed down jungle’s pace and pumped their tracks full of the soulful atmosphere and sing-songy choruses of house music. It was a move that played to dance music’s communal aspirations and also brought back the women, whose noticeable absence had reduced large parts of the drum ‘n’ bass scene to something of a break-beat sausage party.

Besides, who’s really looking for a scorching indictment of the world in pop music these days, anyway? It’s not necessarily a good thing, but that new-century complacency everybody talks about is very much alive and well in the musical realm. Ecstasy, a drug whose long-term ill effects allegedly inspired the dark-core turn of rave music in the early ’90s is now more expressly associated with hip-hop artists who are enamored with their newfound lovey-dovey revelations. Feminism has become little more than a sexy parlor game, with Madonna entertaining her animated pimp fantasies and Destiny’s Child waxing all bootylicious. And so on. There’s Radiohead, of course, but their paranoid psychic crunch is more a meditation on the problems of the world than a reaction against them.

So, for better or worse, garage music’s good-time vibe plays to the culture that surrounds it. Listen to the lone pair of two-step compilations currently available in the U.S. — “Vital 2-Step” (V2) and the Artful Dodger-mixed “Re-Rewind” (London) — and it’s clear that the aim of this stuff is to move serious musical ideas while also paying serious respect to the pleasure principle. “Vital 2-Step,” the more appropriately varied of the two, mixes startling rhythmic inventions with hands-in-the-air diva vehicles, so that balladeering odes like Y Tribe’s “Enough Is Enough” rub up against the seething break beats of DJ Zinc’s “138 Trek” and sound in no way out of place.

It’s even more difficult than usual to describe this music for a couple of reasons, the first one being the almost impossibly wide range of styles that converge within the same movement. There are raw, skittering break-beat artists (Stanton Warriors, Reservoir Dogs), dubby bass enthusiasts (Zed Bias, Wideboys), speedy ragga vocalists (Ms. Dynamite), shiny pop purists (Artful Dodger, Oxide & Neutrino) and tons of others who fit different tendencies within the same two-step framework. What draws them all together is an intricate attention to detail and a working method that dreams up beats as immaculate conceptions. The two-step rhythm, as much as it formally exists, borrows the lurching stutter of drum ‘n’ bass, creating a similar sensation of beats continuously falling forward, close to tripping but always landing on their toes. But at most, the pattern works only as a suggestive foundation.

The second reason — and the one that makes two-step so startlingly new and distinct from drum ‘n’ bass — is the dizzying number of ideas that play out in almost every track. If musical progression could be measured in units of Ideas Per Song, two-step at its best would be completely off the scale. The music’s shiny surface couldn’t be much more inviting, but once you dig down into the mechanics of what’s going on beatwise, the simple pop appeal turns into something gloriously disorienting in its micromanaged obsessiveness. The tracks snap into shards, like crackling ice sculptures, while the beats resist any efforts to isolate the six, seven, eight different rhythmic patterns that create the rollicking whole. A big part of two-step’s M.O. is to do with treble what jungle did with bass, so that its big, body-dominating effects play out on hi-hats rather than a thudding kick drum. The effect is as consciously manipulative as any brain-tearing bass rip, but it’s sneakier and more finessed, with the beats receding in reverse perspective as they invite you in and then laugh as you try to pick out what exactly makes them work.

Take a song like Artful Dodger’s “Re-Rewind,” a mellow track that’s one of the scene’s first monster hits. On one hand, it’s a warm bath of melody and soulful vocals by British R&B star Craig David. Its verses roll comfortably over Mellotron chords and sizzling rim taps that sound like clinking wine glasses. When it gets to the chorus, though, it turns to musique concrète, with a darkened bass figure ripped from gangster dancehall setting a base for endlessly spliced tape-edits and found sounds like skidding cars and shattering windows.

Both the “Vital 2-Step” and “Re-Rewind” compilations offer a good introduction to this stuff, but the time delay that separates British dance music from proper domestic release makes the newer developments available only on imports. At Tower Records in New York at least, there are enough people paying import prices that two-step has earned a listening station display on the main floor, right next to the racks that hold Missy Elliot and Destiny’s Child. It’s on those imports — the four double-disc volumes of “Pure Garage,” the two editions of “Sound of the Pirates,” DJ Dee Kline & Donna Dee’s “Beat Freaks” — that the style coalesces into its crystalline order and offers all its sage advice for ways to reconcile pop and the avant-garde.

Scan the aboveground musical horizon and you’ll turn up no shortage of artists who are similarly pushing their forms while moving serious units: Daft Punk, Radiohead, Missy Elliot, Basement Jaxx, OutKast. What they share with the artists who make two-step a style worth obsessing over is a firmly raised hand to the idea that nothing’s going on in music these days. Spend some time trying to size up two-step garage and the argument reveals itself more than a little bit lazy.

As two-step artist MJ Cole, on the phone in the middle of a current U.S. tour, tells it, “This is pretty much some of the only really fresh music that nobody can put their finger on yet.” He’s right — and it’s not for lack of pointing.

Still, all forms of electronica owe a good bit of their conceptual subtext to process. In terms of expressed intent, it’s what separates dance-floor techno from mindless disco, and ambient experimentation from the New Age.

Oval’s Markus Popp has built his whole career out of toying with the notion of process. When his landmark “Systemisch” album hit the racks in 1996, its twisted, ambient mix of skipping CD sounds and slow-rolling static exposed the entire techno template by freeing it from its musical duties. Thin, brittle click tracks worked to mark time and meter, but not in a way that had any real rhythmic presence. Similarly, any recognizable features from the traditional ambient soundscape were notable more for their almost narrative shifts than their suggestions of melody. Popp was undoubtedly working in the realm of “music,” but he seemed more concerned with exposing the limitations of the term than acknowledging its accepted role as a medium.

With the new “Ovalprocess,” though, he has gone a bit too far. One of the most addictive features of “Systemisch” is the way that it managed to close the tautological loop seemingly built into its post-musical commentary. The biggest knock against minimal electronica — and for that matter anything that flashes process as a legitimacy badge — is that it’s more interesting to think about it than it is to admire, to be moved by it. At his best, Popp made a mockery of the argument by marrying his otherwise clinical intentions with a shockingly beautiful sense of composition and beguiling sound palette. Past Oval projects have always worked just as well as plain old “music,” even if such a distinction stood at odds with Popp’s steely Germanic sense of purpose.

“Ovalprocess,” however, is about process — and process only. The record gets its name from the proprietary software that Popp plans to take on the road in a forthcoming sound-installation tour. After the program is set up, would-be musicians will be able to manipulate sound files and rhythmic designs, essentially composing their own Oval tracks. It’s a fascinating idea, and one that Popp has toyed with for years. But his recorded attempt to shine the spotlight solely on his methods comes almost completely at the expense of everything that made Oval so confoundingly listenable in the past.

The new album takes the “Systemisch” blueprint and crumples it into a ball of pointy edges and messy folds. What were once distant otherworldly echoes are now shards of doctored guitar feedback and screechy test tones. And instead of arrangements that testify to sound’s ability to make itself musical in the most unlikely conditions, his composition feels like little more than slapdash collage.

“Ovalprocess” certainly works to further Popp’s march against authorship and traditional forms of musicality. The problem is, it’s more interesting to talk about than to listen to. And music, even (or especially) as it once laid dissected on Popp’s examining table, addresses itself in truer terms than wagging tongues ever could.

Yet even as she invites her would-be suitor to talk to the hand — “I’m a goob magnet, man,” she told Cosmo Girl magazine — she rubs up against her words, crossing her tease and batting her eyes with arched-back growls and cool space-kitten purrs. Sung so suggestively, a line like “To lose all my senses/That is just so typically me” comes off less as a lamentable self-realization than as a lip-licking appeal to the sordid powers of imagination. And in spite of its exclamation point, her hardhearted cry of “Oops!” sounds more like a conscienceless dismissal than a conscious apology.

Britney’s back, and so are the overwrought psychosexual readings that get attached to her otherwise throwaway teen-pop drivel. But it’s a safe bet that Spears is less concerned with identity politics than her critics are. “Oops!” then, on its own drivelly terms, is a masterpiece of sorts not for its message but for the way it applies the conventions of the pop-musical medium.

Most of “Oops!” was crafted by Max Martin and Rami, two Swedish superproducers from Stockholm who built recent hits for the Backstreet Boys and ‘N Sync. They are dubiously motivated product pushers, yes, but these guys are also Nobel-worthy scientists of melody. All seven of their songs on “Oops!” are saturated with choruses too well designed to be written off as anything less than calculatedly brilliant. “Stronger” — with Spears belting, “I’m stronger than yesterday/Now it’s nothing but my way/Loneliness is killing me no more” — could crush the entire self-help industry with its melody alone. And it’s just one of many.

Spears and her songwriting teams know their audience, too. Which is to say that “Oops!” is outfitted with a number of pop signifiers and psychological tags for listeners who like — and need — to be reminded that they’re having a good time. “Don’t Go Knockin’ on My Door” unabashedly rips off Destiny’s Child; it’s a funk hymn played on a dot-matrix printer. “What You See (Is What You Get)” lifts a melody line straight from Celine Dion’s “That’s the Way It Is.” “Lucky” reaches back to bite Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.” And “One Kiss From You” goes ’80s by way of DeBarge’s “Rhythm of the Night.”

Then, in a definitive redefinition, Spears twists the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” into a cutesy electro-tribute to her own burgeoning girl power. But even if there’s a women’s studies term paper to be written about the way she toys with the Stones’ dick-swinging swagger — the Britney version goes, “When I’m watching my TV/And that girl comes on to tell me/How tight my skirt should be/She can’t tell me who to be” — who cares? It could be some sort of rallying cry for her audience of ‘tween and teen girls, but the smart money says they’re more concerned with whether she sounds great.

And she really, really does.