Johnlenham said:
Care to explain what you mean?
Sure. It's more to do with genre-mashing than anything. As djtiesto said progressive house can now mean anything. Unfortunately, as a genre it stagnated and is now just a synonym for slow trance. There's nothing progressive about it.
I presumed those artists fell under a wiki entry for progressive house. If I had time I'd go and re-edit that to what I feel are the stand-out artists of that genre. To me, progressive house is very little like trance. It's basically tech-influenced deep house music. There was a campaign in the mid-00s to 'bring back the drums' when things got too electro and trance influenced, which is when artists like Armin van Buuren, George Acosta, Gabriel and Dresden and Markus Shulz were being labelled as such.
These people were largely trance, although an off-shoot that favoured slower beats rather than the rave style fast beats that trance is usually associated with. They would use one or two progressive house tunes at the start of a set, and then the rest would be trance. But the genre name stuck with them.
Armin van Buuren and Above and Beyond are names that I would never expect to be seen as progressive house, however 'trance' is such a dirty word to most people that I guess it's better for them to be seen as something cool, even though that something cool died out a decade ago. In the same way, Paul van Dyk (a huge trance pioneer) would never call his music 'trance', he'd always say it was electronic music.
I'm getting distracted, and I should probably write a book on this instead. Basically, what I'm trying to point out is that genres in electronic dance music are bullshit while simultaneously pointing out my hatred for dance DJs jumping on the bandwagon of labels.
If you've seen Human Traffic, I've become the cliche bloke on a sofa in the club telling anyone who'd listen how it used to be better before the kids were let loose.
Thankfully, if I need my progressive house hit these days I'll listen to some modern techno and tech house because they're a lot more similar to the prog house I remember.
