Magda might make the tea, and everyone might be into it at the moment, but Minimal is certainly not Ubercoolische. It is SOOOO BORING. What started in the mid-90's with labels like Basic Channel, its successors Chain Reaction and Burial Mix, and currently championed by labels-du-jour Trapez, Shitkatapult and Kompakt, and such "artists" as Ricardo Villalobos and Canadian ex-pat-turned-Berliner-with-a-bad-haircut Richie Hawtin, Minimal has now become ubiquitous. You might say it is the current "It Girl" of electronic music, akin to IDM in the late 90's and Electroclash a few years ago. Problem is, Minimal is nowhere near as interesting as either of those genres.
I really like The Hacker's take on the subject (taken from this week's Jonty Skrufff newsletter):

"There are some good records out there of course, but now everybody is into it and what I find particularly surprising is that you're finding hard techno DJs who are doing minimal stuff now as well as people from the commercial house scene," said Michel.

"It just shows that minimal is a new fashion thing, that people think it's cool to do be involved. It's exactly the same as what happened with electroclash, three or four years ago; everybody was suddenly into electro from one day to the next. It's the new thing, it's everywhere, but then next year it will be something else that's in fashion. We just have to wait and see which artists will remain."

The French producer remains one of the highest profile artists to have emerged and prospered from electroclash, though confessed he loathes minimal so much he often hassles DJs, bombarding them with cheeky record requests.

"I always go to the DJ booth, especially when I'm drunk, If I'm sober, or normal I don't ask, but when I drunk I always ask the DJ to play different records if I don't like what I'm hearing," Michel chuckled.

"I remember being in a club with Vitalic a few years ago and we were totally drunk and there was some DJ, I can't remember who, playing this very serious, intellectual minimal style and we thought it was very boring so we approached him and said 'please play something interesting, play Daft Punk or Giorgio Moroder, whatever, play something funky'. I have to say the day after I felt a little guilty and thought I shouldn't have done that but during the moment, it was very funny. Not for the DJ but it was for us," he laughed.

"I have to say I was in Berlin a few weeks ago and this music is
everywhere, at every party everybody is playing the same thing and it's quite boring; very boring," he continued, "Three hours of plip-plop, plip-plop is too much. I guess it must have something to do with the drugs. Minimal is very druggy music."

Expect to hear even more Minimal in the very near future as Richie Hawtin is soundtracking the opening ceremonies of the XXth Olympic Winter Games next month in Torino, Italy.
Bleh.