Imagine this: it’s Friday night and you’re out with your mates. You’ve blocked off the next 8 hours for a proper night out. You arrive to the club. The familiar smell of sweat and cigarettes infiltrates your brain, conjuring saccharine memories of past rave glory.

You’ve been waiting all week for this moment. The headliner steps on. You’ve been talking him up to your friends all week. That live set he did from a secluded mountain top in Bulgaria? Priceless. That SoundCloud bootleg of Moby he made? So underrated.

Three songs in, something feels a bit off. The same hi-hat loop has been going for 15 minutes now (or so it seems). The basslines are blending together in monotony. Seven songs in, you realize this is how it’s going to be for the rest of the night.

It’s just as you feared: it’s an entire set of tech house. Not only that, it’s a very particular, somewhat hollow shell of tech house known colloquially as “party tech.” You leave the party early, disgruntled, in a frenzied search for a techno beat.

“Art is dangerous... when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.” Duke Ellington said that, and I think it applies perfectly to the current state of tech house.

You see, something has happened over the last few years. Tech house has gone from a generally well-received subgenre into one of the underground’s most contentious topics. You can feel it in the general unease that surrounds the term. Even just mentioning ‘tech house’ in certain underground circles is guaranteed to produce a grimace.

How did this happen? It certainly wasn’t always the case. When tech house was first introduced - circa 1994 in tandem with the legendary London party Wiggle - it was hailed as a groundbreaking new sound, combining the best elements of both house and techno.

“A lot of people were a bit bored of house music and wanted something a bit more punky, a bit more quirky,” Terry Francis, Wiggle resident, recalls in a 2014 interview with 2014 interview with Mixmag. Even 10 years on, in the era of tracks like M.A.N.D.Y. and Booka Shade’s ‘Body Language’, it still felt undeniably fresh.

Yet in 2018, can we say the same? Somewhere along the way, tech house lost its edge. As Mr. Ellington would say, it ceased to be dangerous.

Much like the Hollywood epidemic of ‘passable movies’ -- an idea conceived by film critic Evan Puschak -- we seem to have entered the era of ‘passable tech house.’

You know the sound I mean: it’s the kind of track with a two-note bassline, an obnoxiously loud hi-hat loop, and an unintelligible vocal sample. Throw in some random synth fills every 8 bars and you’ve basically got the formula for 80% of tech house on the market right now. And that’s a problem.