Getting familiar with Divine Interfaces music first lead me on a more beat and chill inspired kind of electronic music. While this new Divine Interface touches more of a hazy lo-fi slow-mo House. I like where Drew Biggs is headed. Album is coming. Be alert. 

I have always had a soft spot for Canadian music and dreamy pop. Tide Riders debut "Minus Touch" is such a catchy pop tune i have been listening to it a lot. I sure hope there is more to come.

Kllo did floor me with their latest brilliant single "Still here", i recommend a listen to this Aussie duo. A little more laid back but lush and gorgeous this one. Im so thrilled to hear the album coming later on this year.

So I remember back in 2012 I've first heard the lovely duo Southern Shores.
I remember falling in love with the sounds reminding me very much of the Swedish west coast sound. So happy to see they are back. It is really the sound I need this year.


CASCINE · Southern Shores - Estrisa

2010: 130 2012: 130 2020: ... 2020: More Cowbell 2020: "RollageLive vol 1: Nightfall" on Bandcamp or Spotify.

 Resident Advisor suggested I write an article for them about the emerging online underground, and the result was my most comprehensive (and polemical) statement on the topic to date (click here to read). It's running theme was a comparison to late-C20th punk and indie, and it went into the aesthetics of vaporwave and PC Music too. The piece appeared alongside a (controversial but, I thought, pretty brilliant) podcast by #Feelings boss Ben Aqua.

How many times has the concept of punk been redefined? Far too many to count, and besides, no one seems to want to label music any more. Even in the early '90s, barely 15 years into its life, the definition of punk had been broadened and warped in surprising directions—punk could mean naive pop, heavy metal in the charts, or even doing something yourself, whatever that might be. In a new music culture where guitars have been replaced by cracked copies of Ableton, bands have been replaced by anonymous individuals with SoundCloud accounts, and where rock as such hasn't really been on the underground agenda for years, what significance does punk still have?...

In each of these areas, the processes and problems of the online underground were those of the punk underground in the late 20th century. Building a musical culture on SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Facebook might seem new and strange (if only due to the technology involved) or—more negatively—unimportant or a sign of decline, but these paradigm shifts have happened to the underground before, and they hint at the opportunities and difficulties of the current situation....
Just like the classic punks, PC Music can be heard as dramatizing the decline of good taste at the hands of modernity, and in 2014 that means noble underground traditions like all that monochrome club/post-club music that rakes reverentially and melancholically through 30 years of analogue production all being displaced by digital decadence, rampant excess and fucking children. PC Music are trolling old ravers, the generation that built the hardcore continuum; they're trolling old punks and their insistence on realism. They're saying, "We might as well sound like this. In a world of gloss and accelerated desire, this is what society made us." And in this regard, they're punks...

Last month on Rinse we did an impromptu vinyl "roots of dubstep" show. While I think about this era a lot - it's one of my favourites of all time - and use it for inspiration while writing music, I don't tend to play old school sets very often. It is now as it was then: my jam is digging through new music to find what's next. The last "Roots of..." I did was for Holloway & Foxmind's Radar show

---- Hugo Massien's "Remnants / London Underground 2014 - 16" EP is out now: hear it on Spotify or buy vinyl & digital ---- Blackdown: So I think the very natural - if not very original - place to start is to start is to hear a little bit about your beginnings of making music and the beginnings of releases because everything will probably build from there. Can you talk me through how

Ever since I almost entirely missed it (I only really got into techno and rave in 1992-1993), I've been fascinated by the short period of time - at most 1990 to 1994 - where "rave music" seemed able to take over all of popular music, but somehow just didn't. It's a pet theory of mine that one of the main reasons that rave never really won - that is, that it never really replaced rock and pop as the default mainstream music that everyone (and the media) takes for granted - was its overall failure to work out how to function as album music. There's certainly many other reasons, the most obvious probably being the general lack of lyrics/narrative content, making the "content" less straightforwardly relatable, but this problem was worsened by the lack of a convincing way to make the relatable content that the music did have, ie. its palette of emotional fireworks and abstractions, fit the album format. Some would say that the mistake was to even try, that rave music is simply not album music, but I don't buy it.
When rock'n'roll began it certainly didn't seem like album music either, it was dance music driven by singular hits, and it needed to come up with a way to make albums work as albums, a way to piece them together as wholes rather than just containing a few hits and a lot of fillers. And eventually this got worked out, the "fillers" evolved from fast attempts to reinvoke the hit formula over and over, to an open space for trying out a variety of different types of stuff, without necessarily trying to make hits. Not that it always worked, but there never really seemed to be a constant question of "how to translate rock music into album music" - the solution just sort of developed by itself and now appears to be an intuitive understanding. If you're setting out to make a rock album, a bunch of songs of different kinds, and it doesn't work, it's not because you haven't squared the album circle, it's simply because your material isn't good enough. With rave music - well, with the whole post acid electronic scene, really - that never got to be the case. It wasn't just a matter of making good stuff, you also had to make a proper album context for it.
So why didn't rave music find a way to turn into album music, if it wasn't simply because it was too ecstatic, too lost-in-the-here-and-now-of-the-dancefloor-experience, to make sense outside of that context? I think there's several reasons: First of all, and unlike rock, "electronic dance music" never really lost its identity as "dance" music - which is why I'm using that rather clunky name for it, rather than simply calling it "rave" or "techno", both of which have much more specific meanings for a lot people. This is something that the older generation of rock critics embraced wholeheartedly, because it meant that they could dismiss it as mere faddish functionality - not something you'd really need to pay attention to, let alone try to understand on a deeper level, because it didn't have a deeper level, it was just about stupid fun on the dancefloor and nothing more. And sadly, a lot of rave insiders fully accepted this traditional, rock derived idea of musical substance (authenticity, narrative), and took it as a badge of honour that rave didn't contain any of that. Rather than figuring out how to understand and describe the music on its own terms, the easy option was to stay in the reservation and just use it as a defence: Yeah, you old farts don't understand it because you have to experience it in the context of the dancefloor and the lights and bass and  the drugs, to get it - it can't work on its own, so of course it doesn't sound good at home. As if there wasn't plenty of people who did listen to it at home, or got it fine without the drugs'n'dancefloor-context (I'm one of them, and I've got several friends for whom it worked just as well). 

That one of the most common umbrella terms for everything from deep house to eurodance to hardcore techno is simply "dance music", is exactly the problem - suggesting not just that it's music that can be used for dancing (unlike rock or jazz or hip hop?), but rather that it's the only use, that listening to it is pointless. This leads directly to the second reason that rave never fully managed to turn into album music, namely the split between electronic "dance music" and electronic "listening music". The "electronic listening music" was seen as the obvious way to approach the album market, because albums are, after all, something you "listen to". As a result, far too much of this stuff deliberately avoided everything that had made rave music so great - the brutally inhuman machine structures, the raw synthetic sounds, the harsh viscerality - in favour of a polished and pleasing mood music that too often came of strangely regressive compared to the dancefloor-stuff. I remember that the whole "ambient"-movement seemed inexplicable and disappointing to me at the time - not because I didn't like ambient, but exactly because I already knew it well: Ambient was an old style by the nineties, and it appeared to me such a ridiculously regressive move to go back to that just when something as radically new and exciting as rave and techno was happening, I couldn't understand why anyone from the electronic scene would rather look back just when electronic music was at its most revolutionary peak ever, let alone how they could claim that something as safe and well-established as ambient was a new front line.
Not that the ambient/"electronic listening music" camp didn't produce some really good stuff,  they certainly delivered their share of the brilliant and incredibly inventive music that made the first half of the nineties such a golden age, but there was also a huge amount of it that sounded as tame and regressive as you'd expect from a movement that used a return to decades old contemplative mood music as the "mature" and "sophisticated" response to the not-just-music of the kids. Most of all, though, both parts suffered from this divide, as it meant that almost everything was forced into one of the two options, and the synthesis needed to make it work as versatile album music never really materialized - the "listening" albums all too often ended up as far too long "mind journeys", lacking the straightforward buzz and urgency of rave, while the pure rave albums either became collections of hits+fillers, trying to repeat a successful formula over a whole album, or tried to create variation through awful "rave ballads" or annoying guest vocalists.
The need for variation was worsened by the third obstacle for rave as album music: That rave just happened to break through at a time where everybody thought that the CD had won over vinyl, especially as the album format of the future. Even though rave and techno probably were the most resilient vinyl strongholds of the nineties, they still subscribed to the logic of vinyl = singles and CDs = albums. The consequence was that far too many electronic albums from this time were simply too long for their own good - the 74 available minutes of the CD became a standard that you were expected to fill out, whether you had the material or inspiration for it -  there were even buyers who felt "cheated" if they didn't get their "money's worth" (apparently it was of less importance if the music was any good, as long as they got more of it). As a result of the 74 minutes as the default album length, just making a collection of straightforward rave tracks became a much more problematic option.
The pioneering "album rock" of the sixties had the great advantage that no one expected it to exceed forty minutes (and even thirty minutes or less was perfectly acceptable and far from unusual), which meant that even relatively single-minded rock or pop albums rarely dragged on for too long and became monotonous. It's hard to imagine that most classic rock albums would have gained much by being twice as long - even if the hypothetical extra material was as good as the original stuff, it seems likely that the end result would eventually become to samey. The sharp and precise format of the classic rock LP simply meant that even more-or-less one trick ponies could get away with presenting a handful of slightly different variations of the one trick. In the CD age that approach became increasingly problematic, and releasing an album started to be seen more and more as some sort of "project", something that had to show ambition, versatility and the ability to envision - as well as fill - a vast canvas. Which is all in all not the most obvious way to go when doing a "rave" album.

One solution to this problem was focusing on EPs for straightforward rave/techno/hardcore-releases. Rather than having to live up to the expectations of "the album", you could simply do 4-6 tracks that were good enough to stand on their own, yet with sufficient variation and ideas among them for the record to work as a whole. Effectively hijacking 12" singles and turning them into the rave scenes equivalent of the "classic", "handful of songs" rock album, the early nineties was a golden age for the EP format. As for actual albums, though - rave albums as well as those with a deliberate "listening-oriented" ambient/IDM-approach (which also had their troubles with the 74 minutes) -, the problem was never really solved. Or rather, the best solutions seemed more to be down to pure "luck" - that is, simply having enough good and sufficiently varied material to pull of not doing anything but more of the same (i.e. the same "luck" that made many straightforward rock albums work, except that much more luck was needed in the CD age) - or some unique visionary twist that would only work with the specific style and approach of the artist coming up with it (this was of course more often the case with the IDM-leaning stuff - in the rave department, very few even remotely succeeded with this trick).
So, no one managed to invent a universally workable way to build albums out of rave music, but there was a lot of attempts, and a lot of them was actually really good - even if the majority was basically failures. Perhaps this is why I find them fascinating: The possibility of finding a good one isn't big, but it's all the more rewarding, and unexpected, when it happens. The overview below is almost certainly far from complete, I'm sure there's some obscurities, and perhaps even some obvious ones I'm unaware of, but I've tried to include as much as possible. I'm only looking at stuff that I consider "rave", which basically means music that is not trying to be deliberately "underground" and "clubby", i.e. no minimal techno, proto-IDM, deep or progressive house etc. - as well as stuff like straightforward bleep or acid. What I'm after is artists that either got to make albums because the already had hits, or made music that showed that they clearly tried to make hits, all while still staying within actual rave and techno (unlike crossover eurodance/pop like 2 Unlimited, Snap, Technotronic and their ilk). Which basically means that it's mostly within the breakbeat 'ardcore/Belgian techno/proto trance-spectrum, even though there's obviously some grey areas here and there. To avoid those as much as possible, I've also restricted myself to the years 1990-1992, because after that point, most artists had either chosen a specific subgenre path (jungle, trance, gabber), or they'd abandoned rave all together (there was some exceptions, of course, I'll look into some of the more interesting ones in the end of this list).


THE BRITISH SCENE: I've grouped the albums according to the regional scenes, starting with the British, which perhaps had the largest amount and broadest variety of rave albums. The breakbeat sound was almost uniquely British (a few continental producers used it occasionally, but basically as a deliberately added "British flavour"), and in retrospect, we think of it as being what early British rave music was, laying the foundation for jungle. But as we'll see, there was a lot more going on.

The Prodigy: Experience (1992)Pretty much the gold standard of rave albums, this is exactly how it should be done - presuming you've got the endless supply of explosive energy and inventive ideas that Liam Howlett had at this point. Despite being pretty much all hyper intense break beat 'ardcore from start to finish, Experience simply has so much going on, such an abundance of rhythmic-melodic twists and turns, that it never seems even remotely samey or single minded. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that every moment of Experience is a highlight, at the very least there's never any part of it that come off as uninspired filler material, and it's especially amazing how the tracks constantly morph and change direction - no part of them ever get a chance to grow dull or predictable before they're suddenly taken over by a new, insanely catchy hook leaping out of the speakers, taking the intensity and excitement to a new level. You'd think that this could become too much, but the greatest achievement of the album is perhaps that the sheer originality and freshness of the riffs and the way the tracks are structured, enables it to keep up that insane level of hyperactivity without ever getting exhausting or monotonous. There's the one more "experimental" track, "Weather Experience", which is perhaps not quite as memorable as the rest, but it still has enough jittery drive to not feel out of place. And the rest - well, whether it's stone cold classics like "Hyperspeed", "Charly", "Out of Space" and "Everybody in the Place", or tracks made especially for the album like "Jericho", "Wind it Up" or "Ruff in the Jungle Bizness", each of them is pretty much a mini breakbeat masterpiece in its own right, all while forming a whole that is even greater than the sum of its parts. It's hard to imagine it done better than this!   Altern8: Full on - mask hysteria (1992)Much in the same vein as Experience, albeit still with some vestiges of Archer and Peats background in acid house/detroit techno/bleep (of which there were no traces in Howletts sound), and generally considered the lesser album. Which it is. It's not so much that it's closer to the hits-and-fillers-formula, it's rather that neither the hits (quite numerous, actually) nor the fillers are nowhere as good as The Prodigys hits and fillers. Most of the tracks are still pretty good, but they're also more or less standard run-of-the-mill breakbeat 'ardcore. Lots of catchy riffs and nice samples, and thankfully it never goes into crossover dance territory, so all in all not bad at all, it just doesn't really blow your mind, and in the end the genericness do get a bit longwinded in just the way that Experience so impressively manage to avoid. It definitely would have benefited from being a couple of tracks shorter. That said, it's perhaps a bit unfair to criticise it for not being of the same calibre as the definitive masterpiece of the form, and had Experience not existed, Full On - Mask Hysteria might be remembered as the purest album destillation of breakbeat rave: Far from perfect, but with plenty of the lumpen throw-away quality and cheap synthetic excitement that is all part of the charm.

Urban Hype: Conspiracy to Dance (1992)While Full On is better than its reputation, this is pretty much the platonic ideal of getting it wrong when it comes to British breakbeat rave. Known mostly for the novelty "toytown" hit "A Trip to Trumpton", you'd think Urban Hype would, at least partially, go for a playful and "tasteless" approach a la The Prodigy, but instead most of the tracks seems to aim for a slightly more "deep" vibe, or the most anonymously bland rave-pop-by-numbers combination of italo piano and soul divas. On tracks like "Relapsed" and "The Dream", the rave elements are still sufficiently raw and ecstatic to drown out the worst sirupy samples and keep them at least pretty exiting in the moment, but with "The Feeling", "Embolism" and "Living in a Fantasy", it's unfortunately the other way round, and they leave no other imprint on the memory than a slight nausea. And while the "deeper" tracks actually have some potential - especially "Teknologi part 2" and "Emotion" strike a good balance between groove, melody and atmospherics - for some reasons the lame divas and pianos are also tacked on here, as if Urabn Hype didn't actually believe that they would work as more moody pieces after all, and eventually ruining them in the process.
Shades of Rhythm: Shades (1991)Shades of Rhythm were unusually prolific on the album front, although a lot of the same tracks appeared on 1989's Frequency, 1991's Shades and 1992's The Album. Where the last one was pretty much just a slight update of Shades, Frequency is in a more rough, house/acid-derived bleep'n'breaks style, and not quite rave yet - despite the presence of the hits "Homicide" and "The Exorcist". In any case, I guess Shades is the "classic" Shades of Rhythm album, but unfortunately it gets it wrong in much the same way as the Urban Hype-album. There are some good tracks on it - in addition to the aforementioned hits there's also heavy bleep'n'breaks workouts like "The Scientist" and "666 - the no. of the bass" - but then there's also the archetypical potentially-great-but-ruined-by-soul-diva-sugar-coating of "Sweet Sensation", as well as far, far too much horrible soul-jazzy deep house-ish dreck like "Shakers", "The Sound of Eden" and "Lonely Days, Lonely Nights", making it a bit of an endurance test listening to the album as a whole.
The Hypnotist: Let Us Pray - the complete hypnotist 91-92 (1992)Refreshingly devoid of crossover dance and soulful "deepness", this is pretty much a collection of straightforward rave singles with a few unreleased tracks added, and drawing on both the continental brutalist sound as well as British breakbeats. While this is obviously a good thing, Let Us Pray unfortunately doesn't work quite as well as it could have, because even though none of the tracks are bad, a lot of them are also sort of generic and samey, and as a result it isn't able to stay exciting for the 80-minute playing time. Too many tracks follow the same minimally surprising structure, and lack the wellspring of original ideas and hooks that made Liam Howlett able to pull off an hour of the same hectic sound without ever getting boring. That said, and despite missing "The Ride" - arguably his greatest track ever -, there's plenty of classics here ("House is Mine", "Hardcore you know the score" and "God of the Universe" to name a few), and as such it works pretty great as a collection, an archival overview of Caspar Pounds contribution to rave music. It's just not something that it makes much sense to listen to as a whole. Had it been trimmed down to half the length, it could have been really great, but as it is, the sharp blast of the Hardcore ep is a much better suggestion for the definitive Hypnotist record. 
Rhythmatic: Energy on Vinyl (1992)A wonderfully compact and straightforward little album - basically an EP extended to an eight track mini LP -, and more or less getting it right where Urban Hype and Shades of Rhythm got it wrong: There's plenty of stylistic variety, stretching from full on rave mania to more atmospheric sparseness, but it never degenerates to mainstream dance or tasteful, tedious "deepness", and it's never just doing styles-by-numbers. This might actually be the best thing about it - there's elements of breakbeat 'ardcore, bleep'n'bass, Belgian techno and even some house/Detroit vestiges here and there (it is on Network), but it's all mixed up into unique, constantly morphing concoctions, doing all sorts of weird and unexpected tricks and twists and never really being one single thing - except that it's all, in one way or another, rave music, pulsing with synthetic energy and jittery intensity. Sure, there's a few elements I could do without (the rapper on "Nu-Groove", the few examples of soul divas, i.e. the usual suspects), but exactly because the tracks change and evolve all the time, those elements never get stuck long enough to become annoying. Energy on Vinyl is one of the greatest overlooked gems of the early British rave scene.
N-Joi: Live in Manchester (1992)Despite being some of the most successful hitmakers on the British rave scene, N-Joi didn't release a proper album until 1995, the rather tame and polished, progressive-housey Inside Out, long after the heyday of their original signature sound. They did make this brilliant "live" mini-LP, though, a just-short-of-30-minutes non-stop barrage of breaks, hooks and buzzing riffs that seems like a much better shot at finding an effective rave album formula than most proper rave albums. Reputedly an after-the-fact studio reconstruction, Live in Manchester creates a cheap laboratory-facsimile of the "real" thing, a buffet of one-dimensional, yet thrillingly synthetic, empty rave calories.

Eon: Void Dweller (1992)Every time I start listening to this, I immediately think it's going to be a brilliant album, which is hardly surprising, given that it takes off with three of Eons catchiest tracks - "Bakset Case", "Inner Mind" and "Fear" - , all offering an abundance of exiting riffs and samples, as well as a highly original sound somewhere between the dominating rave of the day and a kind of proto big beat, as you might expect from something that involves J. Saul Kane. So why doesn't the album stay brilliant? Well, it's not just that the majority of the rest of the tracks are a bit more laid back and atmospheric (with a few exceptions, i.e. "Spice"), it's more that this means that they're less intent on being exciting, and the resulting slightly lower quota of wild sounds and samples draws your attention to the fact that the compositions in themselves haven't that much to offer - there aren't any really memorable hooks or melodies, or exiting structural ideas. Not that there has to be, of course, it's still an original and enjoyable album in many ways, it just doesn't grab the attention all the way as it should, and would have benefitted highly from being two or three tracks shorter.
Shut Up and Dance: Dance Before the Police Comes (1991)Ragga Twins: Reggae Owes Me Money (1991)Rum & Black: Without Ice (1991)I've talked about Ragga Twins and SUAD before, and they only tangentially belong here, given that rave elements only appear as parts of a broader, cross over-hybrid sound with an emphasis on vocals. There's some quite ravey tracks on them for sure, but there's even more where the rap is the main thing, and though enjoyable (well, mostly SUAD, I've never been completely convinced by the twins I must admit), neither Dance Before the Police Comes or Reggae Owes Me Money really work as rave albums. In comparison, Without Ice is a much "purer" album, in that it's pretty much proto breakbeat darkcore from start to finish. Not that it makes it one dimensional, there's both energetic rave, more sparse and gloomy atmospherics, as well as a lot of tracks that combine a bit of both. As such, I suppose it could have been great, but unfortunately, there's really not a lot of ideas in each of the many, many tracks - there's some good and interesting sample choices (Sakamoto, lots of Art of Noise), and the breaks are often treated so that they have a great, synthetic edge to them, but in the end, all tracks more or less just consist of a couple of simple, interchanging loops. It can sound great in smaller doses, but with a 50 minute playing time it eventually becomes a bit of a drag, where it's difficult to tell the tracks apart.



THE GERMAN SCENE: Despite being the only rave scene with a size and variety comparable to the British, early German rave has always been a bit overshadowed by its Belgian contemporaries, which had a few more hits of a broader, international impact. They do have a lot in common - in particular the EBM and new beat-elements, but in Germany that became even more pronounced and electroid, reflecting the importance of the early Frankfurt scene and its roots in new wave and industrial. Still, there's also many other elements present.
Time to Time: Im Wald der Träume (1991)Equal parts rave euphoria, EBM/synth wave-coldness and infantile German humour, Im Wald der Träume is still as charming and paradoxical as the first time I wrote about it. As much an absurdist deconstruction as perhaps the purest distillation of rave silliness around,  it's an unique and wonderfully bizarre artefact from a time where it was still pretty open what rave could and should be - there isn't really anything else like it.

Twin EQ: The Megablast (1991)Much like Rhythmatics Energy on Vinyl, and as mentioned elsewhere, this is a short and intense LP that very much sound like it was slapped together in a hurry (as I'm sure it was, the Lissat/Zenker-duo was hyper-productive back then), and it contain no recognizable classics, yet it's all the more charming for it. In addition to plenty of buzzing riffs and stomping beats, there's also 8-bit elements ("Hardcore Keyboard") and even weird machinic acid ("Enjoy"), but in the end it all has a sort of clunky functionality that suggests that this was made by people who were fully aware that they were churning out soulless rave fodder, and just decided to have fun with it, revelling in the cheap, inauthentic-synthetic aesthetic. 
Interactive: Intercollection (1992)Interestingly, and despite obviously trying to build on their previous hits, the debut album from Lissat and Zenkers most successful and well know project was not nearly as convincing as the practically forgotten Twin EQ-LP. In addition to "Who is Elvis", the first and most likely biggest in what would eventually become a series of gimmicky novelty-hits, many of the tracks here were minor hits on the early German rave scene, and exhibit the typical combination of EBM-coldness and Belgian brutalism (with new beat as the mediating factor). Arguably, the more minimal and restrained approach of this sound didn't work in Interactives favour, they didn't let loose with as many deliciously synthetic sounds and raw ideas as on The Megablast, though that is not to say that there isn't some pretty great tracks on The Intercollection - "The Techno Wave", "No Control" and "Dance Motherfucker" are all brilliant examples of the style - they just dolose some immediate freshness as they go on. The albums biggest problem, though, and the reason it isn't nearly as good as it could have been, is the fillers, which don't really offer much - again unlike The Megablast, which pretty much was nothing but exciting fillers.

Westbam: A Practising Maniac at Work (1992)Westbam is an interesting character in German rave history; one of its most successful and enduring DJs, figurehead and main brain behind the massive, epoch-defining Mayday mega raves, yet at the same time having a somewhat unusual background, more resembling the British DJ-tradition, raised on hip hop and proto-house, than the typical German EBM/new beat-route. Already a bit of a veteran in 1992, his previous two albums were more in a clear hip house-vein, and it would seem obvious that he would go into breakbeats when going full on rave with A Practising Maniac at Work, but instead, at least to some degree, he approached the more straightforwardly bruising, linear sound domineering the continental dancefloors at the time. Not that we're talking full on Belgian brutalism, there's still hip house vestiges and plenty of uplifting breaks and samples, but rather you get a kind of fusion between these elements and the harder, more cyber-cubist stuff. This actually makes it a somewhat original album, though not a very consistent one - some of the more housey and/or eclectically experimental tracks, like "Acid Snail Invasion" and "Street Corner", just goes nowhere. Westbam is definitely best when he's clearly trying to make fast paced dancefloor functionality or straight up anthems, and he is able to make invigorating and somewhat cheesy rave fodder if he wants to, but here there's a bit too little of that to make a really powerful album. It's still enjoyable, the boring stuff is not too dominant and there's thankfully no cringeworthy dance-crossover attempts, but as a pure rave album, it's too uneven.
U96: Das Boot (1992)I love the humour of the cover hyperbole: "The TV-advertised mega-seller album including at least 10 top-ten hits". Das Boot contain exactly ten tracks, with several clearly being fillers, included only to reach a playing time of at least a short album. But clocking in at slightly over 40 minutes is actually a benefit here - U96 doesn't have that many ideas, so the fast pace of the whole thing means that some weaker elements (mostly) doesn't become annoyances. As a result, this is definitely one of the best cashing-in-on-a-one-hit-wonder albums of the entire rave era. In addition to some actually convincing examples of slow and dreamy "atmospheric fillers", including an odd yet oddly charming "Moments in Love"-pastiche, Das Boot is basically abrasive Belgian brutalism tinged with a few whiffs of the colder, EBM-derived German sound, and except for the misnamed "Ambient Underworld", which could have been good but is completely ruined by lame rap and a histrionic soul sample - it delivers just the kind of great "more-of-the-same"-rave tracks that you usually hope for with this kind of album, but far too rarely get.     
Time Modem: Transforming Tune (1992)By far the best album based on the EBM-derived rave sound, and basically just one of the greatest, most consistent and convincing solutions to the whole rave album conundrum. Eventually, at least on the shorter and more condensed vinyl version, it's only 50% rave tunes, with the rest being atmospheric mood tracks, but the two elements frame each other so brilliantly that it all just seems like a whole, simultaneously a blinding rave album that works as pure listening experience, and a sort of futuristic concept album that just happen to work as blinding rave music as well. The softer tracks are interesting in that they're not really excursions into already established moody electronics, like ambient or soft house, but mostly a further mutation of the elements used in the harder rave-tracks - epic chorus-pads, fanfare-like melody riffs, driving EBM sequencer-bass -, all turned dreamy and melancholically introverted. The bittersweet ambiguity is obviously a part of Time Modem's EBM/new wave-genes, and even permeates the rave tracks, most brilliantly on "Welcome to the 90's", the pinnacle of, and key to, the album. Over hectically opulent, yet mercilessly focused rave, an aloof voice embody naïve early nineties cyber-futuristic excitement, with sentences like "we don't need the sun anymore" and, as far as I can hear; "greed is the means to success", but countered by what sound like movie samples in German, shouting bitterly about the horrible state of the world, including the phrase "es ist alles luege" ("it is all lies"). I get the impression that Transforming Tune reflect the ambivalence felt by rave artists coming from older EBM/industrial-derived techno - on the one hand swept away by the hope and celebratory spirit of rave as the soundtrack to the future and a unified Germany, on the other hand still influenced by EBMs dystopian, cyber-punk view of technology. This seems further supported by the closing track "Space and Time", sort of a defeatist hymn to isolation and alienation through technology, with a melancholy girls voice uttering phrases like "take the headphone and flow away, want to be one with my sound" and "cannot forget my reality, eternally apart and loneliness" - a heartbreakingly precise prediction in many ways, and the perfect way to end an album that successfully manages to be invigorating rave, ambiguous electronic mood music, and conceptual futurism all at once! A lost gem if ever there was one.
  New Scene: Waves (1992)Coming from the same scene as Time Modem, but with the EBM and new/cold/dark-wave elements much more dominant, this is only full-on rave music on two tracks - "Sucken" and "PSG 22" - while the rest is somewhere between proto trance and the same sort of slowly drifting, atmospheric not-quite-ambient that was also found on Transforming Tune. The more streamlined, dark and restrained sound makes Wavesa contemplative experience rather than a rave album, but I think it's still worth including here, not just because it pretty good on its own terms, but also because it represent a strange and unique alternative way to turn techno into home listening music, completely different from the path taken by the IDM and ambient scenes, and in many ways not really sounding like anything else: Beneath the dark and dreamy surface, the underlying structures of the tracks - the way they're built - is still clearly recognisable as early nineties continental rave techno.    O: From Beyond (1992)The first album from one Martin Damm, who would eventually release countless records of almost all kinds of hardcore, rave and techno, under a plethora of pseudonyms like Biochip C, Search and Destroy and The Speed Freak. Though there aren't many remnants of it on his later releases, he started out in much the same EBM/new beat/electro-based area of continental rave as Time Modem and New Scene, and From Beyond is also a combination of old school German rave, proto trance and epic synthscapes. It's a bit on the long side, with a few less-than-inspired tracks, which I guess could partly be blamed on the fact that, unlike Transforming Tune and Waves, this is a CD-only release, and therefore doesn't benefit from being trimmed down to a more focused single LP, as those albums were. Still, there's a lot of really good stuff here, and especially the atmospheric synth tracks have an endearingly-dated period charm, though many would probably find their swelling pads and cod-epic melodies too much. Personally, I find this aspect of the album fascinating - as with the two previous ones, a glimpse of a completely forgotten road not travelled.
Space Cube: Machine & Motion (1992) A bit of an outsider here, Space Cube started out making more ravey tracks, and are often remembered as one of the few early German rave acts to use breakbeats, but on the debut album Machine and Motion, they worked with a lot of different elements, including pounding techno and drifting acid, as well as - unfortunately - quite a bit of house, foreshadowing Ian Pooleys later career. The result is simultaneously varied and somewhat more "pure" than most records on this list - as in "not cheesy" and "closer to proper dark'n'deep minimal techno". Which eventually makes it a bit too "nice" and anonymous to my ears. There's some really good tracks on it, such as the 80Aum/T99-ish brutalist "Disruptive" and the UR-acid-spacey "Forbidden Planet", but as a whole there's too much good taste and relaxed smoothness for it to be really convincing as a rave album. Perhaps it could be seen as a good example of how there still weren't any clear genre borders at this time, and how an album from the rave/techno-scene could contain many different styles and ideas, and on those terms I guess it has merit - many of the softer tracks are not bad at all - but I'd still much rather listen to an album one dimensional "rave fodder" than this exercise in well-crafted style and diversity.



THE BELGIAN/DUTCH SCENE: It's strange that Belgium usually gets all the credit here, because the infamous brutalist sound was as much the responsibility of Dutch producers - several of the classics that are by convention considered Belgian (like Human Resource or 80 Aum) were indeed Dutch. Of course, the Belgians didhave the EBM and especially new beat-scenes to draw on, which could explain why - when it came to albums - they seemed a bit more prolific. In the end, though, the rave made in the two countries was generally so similar that it makes little sense separating them, which actually is a bit strange, considering that the Dutch producers had roots in hip hop and italo disco, rather than new beat/EBM, and eventually went on to create gabber, while the Belgian producers more or less disappeared from the techno map subsequently. 
Human Resource: Dominating the World (1991)According to some guy on discogs, this was actually released prior to "Dominator" becoming the huge hit that it was, making it a very odd thing on this list: An album that produced a classic track, rather than being produced to cash in on an already established classic. Given the title, though, they were at the very least aware of the tracks potential, but in addition to that, there's actually a lot of quality stuff present here, especially in the beginning, with inventive and well produced, slightly more atmospheric (but still highly invigorating) tracks like "The Joke" and "Faces of the Moon". Unfortunately, much like Eons Void Dweller, as the album goes on the tracks become less interesting - still very well constructed, but more or less lacking really memorable hooks or sounds, or the general raw power usually associated with the Belgian sound that "Dominator" played such a big part in developing. Furthermore, remixes of "The Joke" and "Dominator" - nice as they are - makes the album longer than it had to be, and the lack of new ideas on the second half becomes even more obvious.
LA Style: The Album (1992)Of all the one hit rave wonders, LA Style had the biggest challenge with creating an album, and sadly, they weren't up for that challenge at all. Not only was "James Brown is Dead" the biggest and most iconic of all the brutalist hits, it was also based on such an idiosyncratic and immediately recognisable riff that it was pretty much impossible to expand upon it - it was painfully clear how the countless clones that sprouted overnight tried to recreate the exhilaration of the fanfare blast, and you'd recognise this right away. "James Brown is Dead" is simply impossible to take any further (the sound alone - it actually managed to give the impression of realizing the old joke: make everything lounder than everything else!), and it might seem a bit like a novelty-track in this way, but don't get me wrong; it's arguably the greatest rave track ever exactly because of this - rather than a "gimmick", it's a singular stroke of genius. And how do you cash in on that, without repeating yourself ad nauseam? Well, don't ask LA Style, because that's just what they did - pretty much every single track on The Album recycles the "James Brown"-riff in one form or another. At best it gets more baroque and exaggerated, as on "LA Style Theme" - though that track could pretty much be called a "James Brown is Dead"-remix -, other times it regress back into something slightly more italo-piano-ish, and far far too often there's added a hearty dose of the most generic early nineties dance rap-and-soul imaginable. A few moments have merit, but only when they're repeating what was already perfect on "James Brown is Dead" - that single is still all the LA Style you need, and nothing is added here that changes that.

T99: Children of Chaos (1992)Next to "James Brown is Dead" and "Dominator", T99s "Anasthasia" is probably the greatest belg-core hit of all time, but unfortunately the album based on it isn't much better than the two previous ones. It's not for lack of trying, though, as T99 clearly wants to make a varied and coherent whole, rather than just a bunch of "Anasthasia"-clones. Now, a bunch of "Anasthasia"-clones would probably have been a lot better than this mess of crossover rave and more or less successful attempts to make laid back tracks, but the latter actually dohave some merit, Patrick De Meyer and Oliver Abbeloos are excellent craftsmen and they know how to create a good tune with good futuristic sounds at low speeds as well (despite some annoyingly "musical" elements like the nauseating sax sample on "After Beyond"). The biggest problem on Children of Chaos is the insufferable amounts of tacked on vocals - the usual lame rapping and cringeworthy soul divas - that render otherwise brilliant rave tracks like "Maximizor", "Cardiac" and "Nocturne" almost unlistenable. And it's really a shame, for had the album kept to just raw synthetics, and perhaps scaled down the amount of atmospheric tracks slightly while developing some of the shorter rave sketches a bit, this could really have been the Belgian rave album. But then, you could say something similart about most of these.
Quadrophonia: Cozmic Jam (1991)Prior to his succes with T99, Oliver Abbeloos also had a couple of hits together with Lucien Foort as Qadrophonia. Containing many of the classic Belgian elements - exhilarating blasts of raw angular bombast - as well as a surprising amount of breakbeats, Cosmic Jam unfortunately also contain extremely dated rapping on all tracks but a few short interludes. I guess this was a conscious choice, trying to give them a bit more personality (much like with added vocalists of 2 Unlimited) bit it completely ruins what could otherwise have been a pretty good - if perhaps a bit long - rave album.
Pleasure Game: Le Dormeur (1991)Le DormeurI've talked about before, and though it still has its flaws - most tracks are slightly abbreviated, and there's a couple of somewhat uninspired "ambient" fillers - it also remains one of the most straightforward and convincing of the early nineties rave albums. Actually, of the Belgian albums, only one was better, and interestingly, that was made more or less by the same people.
DJ PC: 100%(1992)While DJPC was fronted by DJ Patrick Cools, the production team behind the project included Pleasure Games Jacky Meurisse and Bruno Van Garsse - both coming from the EBM/new beat-outfit SA42 - and with 100% they made the ultimate Belgian rave record, the album that Human Resource or LA Style or T99 should have made. Some tracks are better than others, but even when they're a bit too gimmicky ('Return of Tarzan', 'Di Da Da, Di Da Di Da Da'), or ridiculously bombastic-by-the-numbers ('Control Expansion'), they're still super effective, focused and exhilaratingly brutal. And the best tracks are just incredibly good, all ugly angular machine music, relentless mentasm madness, and not a guest vocalist or smooth'n'laid back track in sight.


Hypp & Krimson: Rave Sensation (1991)Containing tracks released under six different names, this is sometimes listed as a compilation. Everything is produced by the duo of Jeff Vanbockryck and Patrick Claesen, though, with different collaborators here and there. We get the instrumental versions for a couple of Miss Nicky Trax productions, well known Ravebusters-classics "Mitrax" and "Power Plant" (though for some reason the latter is accredited to Hypp & Krimson)showing their roots in new beat, and in addition several unknown (to me) gems in the same vein, like "Torsion", "Dreams Forever" (as Code Red) and "Liquid Empire" (as Cold Sensation) - heavy rave fodder that isn't all that inventive or catchy, but makes up for it with precision-locked efficiency. The weakest part is the more floaty, atmospheric offerings - one of the Nicky trax and the not very aptly named "Rave Banging" - they're not exactly bad, just pretty uninspired, and they do create a couple of dull drops in the overall energy flow. As a result, Rave Sensation doesn't completely live up to its name, but it's not too far off either, and certainly one of the more consistent of the belgian albums.
Holy Noise: Organoized Crime (1991) Perhaps the greatest of the Dutch rave producers, Holy Noise was where DJ Paul got his first real success with tracks like "The Nightmare" and especially "James Brown is Still Alive!!", his riposte to LA Style, before he became a key player on the emerging gabber scene. As such, he's one of the only Benelux producers to have a noteworthy career after the rave heyday, as well as perhaps the most obvious link between gabber and the early brutalist rave sound. Organoized Crime is one of the better lowland albums, even though it sort of disappoints because it could easily have been so much better. While no tracks are bad as such, and several are really great, there's also a couple that are a bit too mediocre - in particular more minimalist ones like "House Orgasm" and "The Noise", and since the album is much longer than it has to be, it just becomes a bit exhausting overall. If the two aforementioned tracks were kicked out, as well as one of the two versions of "Get Down Everybody", we'd have an absolute classic here, one for the rave album top ten. Instead, we get something that do contain a lot of good stuff, but eventually looses its steam before you're through.



OTHERS: Two (or perhaps rather two and a half) other local scenes needs mentioning, being big enough to eventually produce full length rave albums (that I've heard of). Yet they're very different - the Italians produced endless amounts of generic (and often brilliant) rave fodder, a variant of the brutalist sound more or less infused with elements of italo disco and italo house, while the rave proper produced by the American scene seemed like maverick attempts to participate in what was going on in Europe, rather than a reflection of an overall American sound. Finally, the odd Spanish "makina"-scene was arguably closest to the early German rave, with EBM and new wave still very clearly present. 

Moby: Moby(1992)This amazing LP will be a bit of a surprise to anyone only familiar with the later emo-Moby - or anyone who think "Go" is representative of his early style. What you get is a tour de force of almost perfect rave intensity, with "Go" and the closing "Slight Return" being the only softcore tracks. Sure, the first half is by far the best, and there's a house piano here and a soul sample there that you could certainly do without, but there's only a few of these (and let's be fair - even The Prodigys Experience had a couple), and they're not prominent enough to do any real damage to what is otherwise a brilliant collection of tracks, action packed with jittery ideas, catchy sequencer riffs and dynamic twists and turns. Whether it's near-claustrophobic EBM-ish tightness ("Yeah", "Have You Seen My Baby"), strings'n'acid-driven brightness ("Help Me to Believe"), or explosive, unhinged rave-insanity (pretty much all of side A), none of the tracks are bad - and some of them are simply among the very best of the era. This is pretty much the only Moby album you need - but if you're after early nineties rave then you really do need it (and who'd have thought you really needed any Moby at all?). As rave-albums-that-works-as-albums go, Mobyis among the very best.
Oh-Bonic: Power Surge (1992)A brilliant little album that sadly seems to be completely forgotten. As far as I can figure out, Oh-Bonic was basically Omar Santana, who has followed a long and pretty weird trajectory through electronic dance music: Starting out as a part of Cutting Records early electro/house famil, and eventually ending up (last time I checked, anyway) producing bizarre "patriotic gabber" in the wake of 9.11 - presumably distancing himself from his earlier New York Terrorist-moniker, which I guess didn't seem that funny anymore. In between, however, there was both a more ordinary gabber/hardcore phase (much in the typical Industrial Strength/Brooklyn vein), as well as an earlier phase of awesome, brutalist rave - with Power Surge as the crowning achievement. Here, all the most obvious and effective rave elements are supercharged by generous inspiration - every track is jam packed with ideas and variation, constantly shifting and adding small electrifying details - as well as a knack for catchy riffs. Much like the early Prodigy in this respect, actually. The only downside is the tacked-on rap that makes a couple of otherwise excellent tracks seem cringeworthily dated - in one case made even worse by a liberal dose of soul diva samples. With the rest of the album being so pure in its super synthetic sound design, these attempts at adding a human emotional element just makes it seem much more mundane and backwards-looking. Not so much, though, that Power Surge isn't still a small gem in the same vein as Energy on Vinyl and The Megablast, well worth tracking down.
Digital Boy: Futuristik (1991)Digital Boy: Technologiko (1991)With two albums in one year, Digital Boy was one of the most prolific of the Italian producers, and probably the closest we get to a household name from that scene. In a lot of ways I really want to like the ambitious Futuristik double LP, it has a lot going for it: A good title and a ridiculous cover, a couple of really good, catchy rave tracks, and some unexpected oddball moments (a bleep'n'bass-ish xylophone-riff here, a playful rip off of Speedy J's 'Pullover' there, a live track that actually sounds live). And while there's also a lot of more uninspired, clumsy fillers that doesn't quite reach escape velocity, there's only a few tracks that are really awful (especially "Touch Me", a horrid attempt at a kind of smooooooth hip house torch song). The problem is that it just goes on for such a long time, which means that the mediocre stuff that would be acceptable in smaller doses on a more focused album, eventually becomes the defining character here, and rather than being invigorating like the best rave should be, it kind of loses all momentum in the long run. Luckily, Technologiko gets it right - a super condensed eight track mini-LP that just deliver functional rave fodder in the most hook-filled, simple and electrifying way. None of the tracks are lost classics, but there's no real duds either: They all work the formula brilliantly, and like The Megablast, Energy on Vinyl or Power Surge, the result is a record that captures raves single-minded, disposable hyper-excitement perfectly, exactly by having no other ambition than being a short, one-dimensional energy blast.

Bit-Max: Galaxy (1992)Pretty much as concentrated italo-techno as it gets: Generic-yet-explosive rave tools by a bunch of virtually unknown producers (the only ubiquitous one on the album being one Maurizio Pavesi), overdosing on all the most effective euro-rave elements (mentasm stabs, hypnotic EBM arpeggios, bombastic fanfare blasts - though, thankfully, no pianos), with half of it sounding suspiciously like something you've heard somewhere before. And - of course - there's several otherwise brilliant tracks that are ruined by relentless diva samples, which prevent Galaxy from being up there with the very best. But there's still plenty of good stuff to make it highly recommended to anyone into golden era rave at its most gloriously mercenary.
Teknika: Yo No Pienso en la Muerte (1991)This is the only example I've got from the Spanish "makina"-scene, basically a local take on EBM-influenced rave in the same vein as German acts like Time Modem and 'O'. I suppose there's a lot more out there, but at least for albums, I've not located any others (not that I've tried that hard, it must be said). In any case, it's an effective mini LP, where most tracks deliver a relentlessly propulsive, slightly more minimal and machinic version of the aforementioned German sound. A couple of melancholic tracks are thrown in for variety, sounding somewhat dated, but in a charming way - sort of instrumental "minimal wave" rather than the floating, complex mood pieces that the German acts were doing. A nice little album that holds together very well.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: By 1993, "rave" as an overall term had more or less disappeared, or rather, had split up into fully self sufficient and clearly distinct niches like darkcore/proto-jungle, trance, gabber/happy hardcore or even "techno", which had hitherto been an overall term used for pretty much all the rave forms, but now suddenly became more and more synonymous with pounding minimal functionalism. Still, there were some producers left who in one way or another continued making "rave" at a time where there wasn't really a scene for non-specialized rave any more. Whether they simply were a bit too slow following the changing landscape, just had some tracks left that would have been perfectly up to date a year prior, or deliberately tried to create a continuation of the general, all-encompassing rave spirit, I find these out-of-time rave albums fascinating, and deserving some mention. Indeed, some of them are truly brilliant in their own right.

GTO: Tip of the Iceberg (1993)In many ways a very sympathetic album, wrapping the classic "old faves + some new fillers"-formula in a pan-stylistic, almost meta-rave "unite-the-scene"-concept, at a time when the rave scene was busy splitting up. We more or less get everything from piledriving gabber and hardcore over cold, monolithic trance to softer, more housey tracks, sometimes with an almost bleep'n'bass-feel. The weird thing is how none of this sounds quite right, but rather like someone decided to make trance or gabber, rather than growing it organically from within a scene. This certainly gives Tip of the Iceberg an original sound, but it also means that it doesn't really manage to create the feel of rave-distilled-in-album-form that it seems to aim for. In particular, there's an awkward minimalistic restraint to it, at odds with the cutting-loose-and-going-mental effect you'd usually expect with these styles. This goes for the sound design - strangely polished and empty even in the raw'n'ruff hardcore tracks - as well as the compositions, where there aren't that many ideas or really memorable hooks around. It eventually becomes a problem for an album as long as this. In smaller doses - like side B with its metal machine gabber, or the more hit-oriented side C -, it's quite enjoyable, but as a whole, and especially with the two somewhat uninspired and monotonously minimal closing tracks, Tip of the Iceberg gets a bit tiring. Which is a shame for a record that so deliberately and head-on try to solve the rave-album-problem. That said, it remains refreshingly odd.
Sonic Experience: Def til Dawn (1993)An unabashed "meta rave" effort, where raw and ruff breakbeat tracks are interlaced with sound clips from open air raves (mostly police confrontations). The clips are sort of charming, I guess, but they do make the LP feel more like a kind of "historic document", rather than simply a great collection of generic-yet-invigorating 'ardcore at its most unpolished - which is basically what it is. But perhaps what Def til Dawn shows is that by 1993 this sound was already seen as something to look back upon nostalgically, as things had moved much further ahead. A great snapshot of an era that was over almost as soon as it had started.

Sonz of a Loop da Loop Era: Flowers in My Garden (1993)Just a mini-LP, but worth including here as it's the closest we get to a Sonz of Loop da Loop Era-album. Perhaps its shortness is an advantage, as all six tracks capture Danny Breaks at his b-boy derived best, filled to the brink with jittery riffs and hyperkinetic breaks (more proto big beat than 'ardcore on "Breaks Theme pt. 1", but still great), with no time to fall into any of the traps so many others fall into when having to deliver a full album. Flowers in My Garden might not be as catchy and relentless as Experience, but it's a pure distillation of 'ardcore at its most un-assumedly loose and playful.
Criminal Minds: Mind Bomb (1993)
The flipside to Sonz of a Loop's silly and colourful sound, Mind Bomb is a much more raw and aggressive take on 'ardcore. There's quite a lot of slightly (for its time) backwards-looking techno-elements, as well as plenty of proto-jungle, just not dominant enough for it to actually be jungle (unlike, say, Bay B Kane's Guardian od Ruff or A Guy Called Gerald's 28 Gun Badboy, which are arguably just on the other side of the divide - perhaps not fully developed jungle yet, but still closer to jungle than to breakbeat rave). None of the tracks are super memorable or lost gems, but neither are any of them bad - they're hectic, rough and hard-hitting examples of generic hip hop-influenced 'ardcore of the kind where the genericness is a crucial element, and as such it is perhaps the most "authentic" example of this music in album form.

You can read more and buy it here

'Can you imagine Doobie in your funk?' - George Clinton
'You fake the funk / Your nose got to grow' - Bootsy Collins
I like my Funk uncut, but who doesn't? However, around 1978, a funny thing happened; white kids extracted seminal fluids from the recently deceased corpse of Punk and spiked everyone's drinks with it at the mutant disco. The bands born of that experiment wouldn't be content to play Funk lite or heaven forbid 'blue-eyed soul'. Oh no. This was a different beast altogether. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
Time is a trick of the mind, as Rip Rig & Panic once suggested, so I'm here in 2018 listening to music that's 30 years-old but actually inspired by music that was 10 years-old then. Geddit? There were a bunch of lads living close to the eye of the 'Madchester' storm but not about to embrace the whole Summer of Love, E'd-up, Rave on scenario, as stated in this lyric: 'no way ( i'm getting laid back )\ there's no way I'm getting laid back, I'm going to attack attack attack attack attack!\ e-sucking teepee heads' (No Way / E-Sucking TeePee heads). Too young for Punk but keen on Funk, Jazz, Improv and more, they conjured up the spirit of '78, the one that had some contorting themselves and their music into shapes formed by Punk, Free Jazz, Dub and, er, 'experimental' Rock.
At a time when white music lacked 'attack' (the E-ffect) but dabbled in the 'baggy' version of Dance music or a straight-up take on Techno, Stretchmarks got themselves into another, 1978 state of mind. You could say that, like E-heads (tee-pee heads), they were escaping reality, but who can blame them? Me, I was coming down after a decade of discovering Jazz whilst dancing to Rare Groove and Hip-Hop. At my Soho cellar bar club, a friend would tell me of the chemicals he'd ingested and describe 'the scene' but I thought 'never mind the Balearics', what about Public Enemy? 
Anyway, here on The Stretch m​-​ARKhives are a set of tunes never released at the time. 1988 wasn't the place for them and today? Yes. Why not? We can all do the time warp. It's...fun? To an old fart like me who still treasures Defunkt or The Pop Group above most contemporary bands it's a treat anyway. As the world edged towards becoming a zone of zero funkativity in 1978 what The Pop Group followed by Rip Rig & Panic along with James Chance then Defunkt did was a blast. Little did I know that Defunkt's Joseph Bowie had a brother, Lester, would provide such a source of pleasure in the next decade, or that the creator of the very words 'Rip Rig & Panic' (Roland Kirk) would do the same. One door (Punk) closed, another (Jazz) creaked open a few years later.
Sorry, but I can't help referring to my musical past, it's so intertwined with that of Stretchmarks. Despite and because of the clear influences, this is a fascinating release. All the relevant names I've mentioned are fed into the sound. No Wavers DNA are also in the, um, DNA, as in Arto Lindsay-style guitar. What marks them out as very British, dare I say, are the 'eccentric' lyrics. 'lets get weird, lets get weird, lets get weird in my kidney shaped swimming pool.' (Let's Get Weird) for instance, reminds me very much of a satirical bite Jason Williamson spits out for Sleaford Mods. Likewise, in a nonsensical fashion: 'twighlight or dawn, i'm yawning at the sudden similarity.\ lobster or prawn , i'm certainly no Jaques Cousteau when it comes to the sea.' (Puddle of Love).
Free-form, funky, raw and ridiculous, Stretchmarks proved it was possible to fake the Funk without fear of serious nose growth. I'm enjoying this album very much and that's no lie. The CD with bonus tracks is worth getting if only for Cosmic String and No Reason. You can buy it and the vinyl version on the Bandcamp page. Band member Matt Wand's words are also, as always, worth reading.

The best thing about Good Looking records was that because most started in an ambient fashion they made mixing easy for someone like me, who never learnt beat mixing when I was a DJ. I preferred to join the thematic/style dots, as befitted an eclectic DJ.
To say that was 'the best thing' isn't strictly true, of course. I only did so in order to reel out an old story from the days of mobile DJs which, I assume, still exist. In the mid-70s a friend once knocked at my door and asked if I wanted to go into the DJ-ing game with him. I was interested until he told me the cost of the turntables. So he went ahead anyway and on one night declared over the microphone that the best thing about the Elvis record he'd just played were the scratches at the end. Not that he was a proto-Christian Marclay-type sonic experimentalist or anything; he simply wanted to wind up the Teddy Boys in the hall. 
No, I'm not that old, but you'll have to take my word for the fact that in 1977 Teddy Boys still existed. There were frequent running battles between them and Punks down the King's Road. His comments sparked another battle between those two tribes on that night. He asked us if we'd stand in front of his speakers to protect them, which we did. Luckily, both the Punks and Teds were more intent on damaging each other.
22 years later, how have Good Looking records aged? That's what I wondered, staring at the 99p double CD, LTJ Buken presents Logical Progression, in the charity shop this morning. At that price, I could find out the answer. Also in the shop was Radiohead's OK Computer, for even less, 69p, yet despite being tempted I couldn't even part with that measly sum in order to satisfy my curiosity regarding what many consider to be a 'classic'. Whenever I've seen Radiohead performing on TV they've annoyed the hell out of me. Having passed up on OK Computer at that price, I shall never know if I can find anything worthwhile in it. Yes, I could go to YouTube, but cannot be arsed.
I did buy a few Good Looking singles at the time (1996) but preferred labels with more bite, like Metalheadz or No U-Turn. Bukem brought a kind of sophistication to the Drum'n'Bass scene, not that others didn't try to do the same, just that he made a mission out of it. All these tunes are polished to a high sheen. I'm on the verge of saying 'you can't polish a turd' but that would be a little harsh. My problem with a lot of these tunes now is the very thing that marked them out as Good Looking records in the first place; that gloss and, in places, 'soul' crooning all over the shop. I confess that the desire to have repeat phrases run through Jungle and D&B tunes gets on my nerves now. At the time I would have forgiven it if the drum and bass were hard enough. 
So I've run through both discs and my only, admittedly weak (sorry) opinion is that a lot of the tracks are OK, running to good when the rhythm gets going. It's kind of D&B Easy. To many, I know, that will translate as 'classical', especially those thinking themselves too smart for ruffneck tunes featuring gangsta/JA vocal samples (just my kind of thing!).

Talking of Metalheadz, 25 Years of Goldie (Unreleased And Re-Mastered) was a Record Store Day release (limited copies available at a later date) and right from the opening bass on Rufige Kru's I Walk The Dog you get that feeling, the one you had back in the day, the tingle of anticipation....then...here come the drumz! - and the incessant, ominous future noize splicing your brain - you know, the way Goldie and co. did. Rob Playford & Goldie's Shadow VIP is a corker too, the la-la-la-la vocal (?) enhancing what is already a demented percussion workout with trademark chainsaw bass flipping it into the realms of a psychotic treat which segues nicely into Rider's Aftermath wherein that vocal mutates into a mechanised refrain whilst Playford and Goldie proceed to beat you into a bloody pulp (and you love it). Although you're either helpless flat on the floor or jumping around the room by now (possibly even middle-aged Junglists can still do that) Stormtroopa delivers the coup de grâce, rewinding your mind (if not body, though you wish it were true) to times when you could and did go mental to Metalheadz records.

There seems to be little left to say about John Coltrane or Miles Davis, although such is our (human) nature plenty of prose about them will no doubt pour out until the end of the world. I was going to 'review' Miles Davis & John Coltrane - The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6, but thought better of it, then thought differently again and so on...
...my head bounced to and fro as if I was an audience member at one of these gigs, assuming Coltrane had that effect, which he surely did. Today we're oh-so-wise about What Happened Next but it's not hard to imagine, having closed off retrospective wisdom, how shocking Coltrane's playing was in 1960...
...it's even shocking now in the context of a band tour under the name of a legend playing standards and future classics from Kind Of Blue to all intents and purposes supposedly not 'just' but no more than a 'cool' god playing Modern Jazz but...
...what happens, no-one could predict. What happens is a draft of things to come not just from Coltrane but a generation of iconoclasts out to smash what used to be Jazz into pieces, albeit very large pieces in the form of 20-minute voyages of discovering just how far they could go when blowing and in the process alienating many Jazz-lovers, just as Miles Davis would do towards the end of the 60s with Bitches Brew...
...talking of which, on this tour, at times, Coltrane manages to make Miles Davis sound like The Past, no mean feat, although it's easy to exaggerate what happened. The fact is Coltrane was in a bad mood most of the time and wanted out; the sound of a prisoner sawing at his shackles doesn't always make for comfortable listening but neither does most of what he would unwittingly unleash in the form the The New Thing...
...some of the crowd at the Paris gig definitely weren't happy, as we can hear by the whistling when, having briefly dipped back into the theme on All Of You Coltrane goes way off-message and to those without the ability to see into the future may well have sounded as if he'd lost the plot completely like an amateur in a cutting contest...
...what Davis thought during the process is anyone's guess but 'Muthafucker!' is one good guess. He had, after all, suggested Coltrane try taking the horn out of his mouth when he told his boss he didn't know when to stop, but the Free thing would be very much about not stopping, or more to the point, not being concerned about neatly tying up a tune (what tune?) in the tradition of improvising as it was known up until the 60s when through a hunger for taking a magical mystery tour Afrocentric blacks and radical whites engaged in a process of developing what would become known as just Improv, rather than 'improvisation', thus, ironically, shortening a word but considerably lengthening the nature of the beast unleashed by the likes of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and the UK's own Joe Harriott who, it must be said, deserved more than he got in terms of recognition and, to be frank, lifetime, but instead is a cult figure in musical history, unlike Coltrane, who despite living for 6 years less than Harriott had the drive, ideas, connections etc to make more incredible music than most tenor players could manage should they live forever and there was tough competition, not that he was in competition except regarding polls; the likes of Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter who, having 'scrambled eggs' with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers was called up for duty in Davis' next Great Band, which set a pace of their very own whilst others took to roaming Free range, which Davis had no interest in or respect for therefore making the wild electric storm blown up by him in the late-60s ironic, eh?  
Did I blow for too long with that sentence? Oh well, consider it a homage...

Sonae started wearing black some time ago - I'm not sure that's a good thing but I defer to her right to do so - me, I don't like black or wear it, except shoes for work. The negative connotations are obvious, although that aside, without a care for what it may suggest, black is popular, mainly in the office. People are lazy, knowing that anything goes with black. I understand. If your base sartorial colour is actually a colour, you have to work on the rest of the outfit. The problems of life...
Meanwhile, Sonae's music on I Started Wearing Black is not quite as Dark as the title suggests, without being cheery either. Personally I'm wary of cheerful people. I think they must be a bit simple, but at the same time, envy (a little) their ignorance-is-bliss state of existence. I don't know what shiny happy people listen to (Beyonce?), but it's probably not this kind of music. Among the highlights is Dream Sequence (with Gregor Schwellenbach). Except there's nothing 'high' about it; instead, a beautiful quasi-orchestral feeling of a half-remembered dream. On this and throughout, Sonae loads the track with atmosphere courtesy of concrete-type sound. She has mastered the art of texture to the point where it becomes an art form, as opposed to a cheap easy route to supposed 'haunting' auras, hauntology-by-numbers.
Thankfully, when she decides to use a beat, it doesn't sound like a tokenistic nod towards feeling obliged to liven things up but, as in the case of the title track, an organic evolution, executed with taste. The stripped back metallic beat, when it comes, is even more effective on White Trash Rouge Noir. Quality product.

"Alright people, let's move like we got a purpose..." B: So, could you introduce yourself? Where are you from, where you at as we speak?" K303: This is Kellen303 I am in Brooklyn, on my bed, Superbowl Sunday not giving a shit about sports. B: Could you tell me a bit about when you began the 'WHB' EP? K303: That happened last year, last August. I had a couple of friends of

There comes a time when you really have no interest in such things as 'Junglepussy In the city centre of Ghent, in northwest Belgium' (Quietus headline today). This time comes earlier in some people's lives than others. To say I have only just arrived at that point as I near 60 would be a lie. For a few years now (how many, I cannot count because a gradual development has no definite beginning) I have had such thoughts when faced with contemporary music news.
I could lay the blame, not on Mame, but J.S.Bach; to be precise, his cello suite No.4, which I started playing half an hour ago. It took less than a minute for me to think what all great music is capable of making us think, namely: "This is superior to everything" (except the relatively few other truly great pieces of music I own). The subject in the back of my mind is how middle-aged listeners relate to contemporary music, not that which inhabits the narrow specialist field they may still explore should they be interested in contemporary music, but the 'contemporary' as covered by the larger sites.
Unfortunately, even defining 'contemporary music' is not as simple as it once was, in the olde days when vinyl was all we had. That cassette-only album (but on Bandcamp) your Noise-making friend released recently is still, basically, contemporary music. But the fact that it will not even register on supposed indie-minded sites means that, by inhabiting the very furthest margins, it is beyond being recognised in the contemporary field. 
Pop music may not be aimed at my age group but that does not stop those within the demographic occasionally (or even frequently) blowing their tops about the state of modern Pop. Within most of us there's a trip mechanism liable to be set off at any time by the mere appearance on screen of a modern Pop star as, say, part of of newspaper's front page. Watching coverage of Glastonbury is asking for trouble, yet sometimes we do so to reaffirm prejudices.
We know that musical appreciation is subjective but that doesn't prevent us from making 'definitive' statements sometimes, by which I mean statements which we are convinced are correct, 100%, no question. This is problematic if one tries comparing say, Slade to Ed Sheeran. Both made/make music for teeny boppers. The thing here is that one made music for me, when I was a teeny bopper, which immediately makes Slade better. Ed Sheeran will be better, in 30 years time, for those who love him now, than whoever kids worship then. Apologies for stating the obvious but part of this process must inevitably be the laying out of facts in order to try and find a truth.
As I said to friend in a pub recently, the only chance contemporary music has of trumping what's gone before is by using new technology in such a way as to truly make something new. But it is only those who have 'heard it all before' who must endure that curse/blessing. Yes, we saw Bowie's first Top of the Pops appearance when it happened and we watched the Sex Pistols 'live' on the Bill Grundy Show. Perhaps we also felt the rush of Jungle when it was new and so on. Such experiences taint us terribly, partly because they are firmly placed in the museum of groundbreaking Musical Events. Those who place them there will be from various generations, of course. Older (than me) people will have seen Bill Hayley's first UK tour, Dylan's first electric set and so on. 
What irks some of us, after a few decades, is the site of further additions to that hall of fame. It's as if we have the right to lock the doors of that museum when we think there can be no more worthy additions. One case that springs to mind is is the 90s 'Cool Britannia' phenomenon. I remember well that neither Blur nor Oasis were thought of as actually groundbreaking, original or sensational by seasoned veterans of the listening game. The former were 'mockney' jokes, the latter, Beatles imitators. With some catchy tunes. You don't need me to tell you that for many they too are now deemed worthy nominees for the Hall of Fame. Well, they're already in there. 
As far as the professional music press goes it serves them to maintain a continuum of Great Music for obvious reasons. People's earnings depend on it. This is no cynical conspiracy by 'old' editors, but simply a matter of employing young writers and letting them be enthusiastic about all that music which sounds fresh because to them it is despite easily available evidence to the contrary. 
Although we have the potential for rational thinking, we humans are prone to being irrational. You've noticed? Rational thought and logic aren't easily applied to music. It takes a very cool head to be rational about all this. But isn't music supposed, among other attributes, to arouse a degree of passion? The very thing about the music we love is most likely to blow rational thinking away. There are few greater sounds, for instance, than a Charlie Parker solo. Agreed? Of course not, unless you also happen be a fan. 
Perhaps, when all is said and done, talking/writing about music is a futile exercise. Here on Include Me Out I've written a great deal about music yet I could not begin to describe/explain what it is about a Charlie Parker solo that is so very special. Professional Jazz critics could explain it technically, but no more define the mysterious thrill than I can.

I may think them 'wrong' but I enjoy hearing friends declare a Frank Zappa album to be mind-blowingly brilliant. What worries me more (here's the crux) is seeing the same comment tagged onto a Level 42 album on YouTube. OK, they were a random choice, of course. It would be easier to say Kanye West. Or a contemporary Pop group, but I couldn't name one. Do Pop groups still exist, or are they a dead breed, replaced by solo artists? Is it time for bingo yet, nurse?

My final point is that I'm as capable as any idiot of declaring modern music (within the general field) to be RUBBISH!...
...(Starts shouting) I SAW PARLIAMENT/FUNKADELIC, ORNETTE COLEMAN, THE ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO (original line-up), THE CLASH (SUPPORTED BY THE SPECIALS) AND THE THE RAMONES! I WAS THERE WHEN THE ZIGGY STARDUST ALBUM, ROXY MUSIC'S DEBUT AND 'NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS' WERE RELEASED! I DANCED TO THE FIRST 12" DISCO RECORDS! (Internal editor: "Stop, this could go on for ages"). AND YOU EXPECT ME TO GET EXCITED ABOUT MODERN MUSIC???!!! IT'S LIKE VISITING THE SOUTH OF FRANCE THEN BEING FORCED TO LIVE IN BLACKPOOL!

You see how easy it is? To return to J.S.Bach, as he once said: If I decide to be an idiot, then I'll be an idiot on my own accord. The best I can do it restrain myself as often as possible.

Thank you

Most of the action is now over here

Whilst the New Year may be open to question the quality of the work on this album is not. Furthermore, you're invited by the label to make your own additions to these tracks, the first layer 'is created within the collaboration of MƩCHΔNICΔL ΔPƩ and Les Horribles Travailleurs', so the challenge is set, although this is very much in the spirit of collaboration rather than competition. As always, the bar is set high here but why not (re) create? Remake/remodel (should be a Roxy Music title...oh, it is?). 'You are invited to finish this soundwork by altering\adding layers etc. to the first layer, which can be downloaded from Bandcamp'. As it stands it's very good.

Let's start the New Year with a whimper...@',mn,mn,qwwwwwhhhhhhhhherrrr'
Fact is this year's going to be the one that sees the downfall of the music industry due to it's incessant gnawing of itself like a doped-up rabid labradoodle, foaming as it very slowly chews its own leg off and keeps going as far as it can reach until it's stinking innards spool out across everything but don't worry, you will be immune to the putrid, poisonous substance due to years of injecting the antidote in the form of JS Bach, James Brown, Bernard Parmegiani and other names involving capital 'B', or 'L', or 'D'...how about 'D'? Don Cherry, Defunkt...that's enough, that's the ABC of it, your alphabetically registered pantheon of  ....music people...the countermeasure to all the crap...
On the subject of letters...

That one's called AB...there's more of my art over here
Whatever...or, actually, all my art work this year will be part of a series called So What...why? I reckon it's the most common response.
In 2018, though, let's not be blase about things, least of all what we love the most and what we make...

The case for vinyl in 2018 Less is more We live in an era of abundance. Choice, choice and if that's not enough choice, yet more choice. Within a couple of clicks from your smart phone's home screen there is more music than you can listen to in your lifetime, or even in a thousand lifetimes. If that's the case where the hell do you start? After all we mostly don't want to listen to

Some time ago Simon Reynolds did a quite long (especially with the endless youtube clips) piece in response to the last one I wrote, with some interesting points - some of them in the comments - and I've wanted to make a response for quite some time, but got sidetracked by real life as so often before. So, as a not-exactly-exiting post step-year is nearing its end, I'll try and write something before it all gets completely forgotten - if that is not already too late.
As expected, he didn't buy that the poststep stuff is as great as I'm claiming it is. The interesting thing in this respect is the claim that he actually has tried (as stated in the comments), but it just doesn't click. In a way this takes the problem to a different level, not about poststep per se, but about how we react to music, what it means for someone to really get something, and not least: whether really feeling, or not feeling, something, is really an argument for its merit or lack thereof? Personally, there's a lot of stuff I know I ought to like, but that just doesn't do anything for me; which seems pointless and uncommunicative (in the derogatory sense Reynolds is using here - I certainly find some deliberately uncommunicative music deeply fascinating). Something like Velvet Underground could be a good example. All right-thinking people seem to agree that this is simple the most important and amazing rock music ever made, but nevertheless, it leaves me completely cold. Sure, it's mildly interesting when I'm listening to it, but not to a degree where I'm not also slightly bored, and afterwards, I have no wish to ever hear them again. That doesn't mean that I can't see its historical importance - tons of stuff I love (krautrock, post punk, noise rock and dreampop) are deeply indebted to VU, might not even have existed without them. But just because something is revolutionary on a technical level, it doesn't make it the best example of the trend it started. The noise/avant garde-element is still very rudimentary and one-dimensional (not enough Cale), and Lou Reed's song writing is mostly just dull. And yet, even though I've tried "getting" Velvet Underground for many years, and still barely remembers any of it, I'll accept that they are, in a way, "objectively good", I just don't find them subjectively good. I'll grant that they have an important place in the historical archives. There's just many other parts of those archives that I'd much rather like to spend my time with. Such as the best post step, which as far as I see it, isn't just subjectively good, but truly objectively good as well.
The question then is: by what objective criteria? Well, most likely not by how influential it has been (probably the best argument for VUs "importance"), as I doubt most of it will have much influence at all. But then, I think most of us have favourite records that have had very limited subsequent impact, and which we yet would consider truly "good" by some other criteria. Most obviously, I think it should be about originality - creating musical structures that have not been heard before, and yet truly is "structures" (which is what makes it work as music, makes it relatable and fascinating), rather than just pure randomness. But already there's a problem here, because judging if something "has been heard before" or creates a "relatable structure" certainly involve some quite subjective elements. One person's deeply engaging structural originality is the next one's empty indulgence, and as I talked a lot about last time, it's highly relative how "new" something will sound to different people. That said, it seems that Reynolds is acknowledging that there is some formal newness going on in post step, it's just that, as he doesn't connect with the music, then obviously something else must be amiss (and there has to be something wrong with it when he's not feeling it - much like I just tried to explain what is "wrong" with Velvet Underground, because it doesn't seem to be satisfactory that it's simply be a matter of taste whether you're getting something that is "objectively good" or not).

So what is missing, according to Reynolds? Sort of the usual rockish suspects, I guess: Social energy, functionality (being useful), viscerality, bursting-into-the-world, smashing-up, cutting loose, "brocking out". I think there's a least two questions to consider here - 1: why should it be a problem that these elements are absent? And furthermore - 2: are they actually absent? Or rather, in what way can we determine that they're absent, except whether we simply feel them being there?
As for the first question, one of the returning themes in my writings on post-step is that I think it's a huge fallacy to measure it by a 'nuumologically calibrated brock-o-meter. The social chemistry of cutting-loose-on-the-dancefloor is notthe point of this music - or at least most of it -, and saying that it is lacking in this department is a bit like saying sixties electro-acoustic avant garde is "lacking" the passionate social interaction of tango or waltz. I mean, it certainly doesn't have that element, but then, it's not really something it ought to have. It's not that I disagree with the point that "with dance music you want to be getting your rocks off", but most post-step is simply not meantto be heard as dance music - not supposed to belong to the same continuum as Foghat and Slipmatt, but rather - if anything - the same as Subotnick and Schnitzler, Mouse on Mars and The Black Dog. Or, I'd say, as Chrome and Wire. Because once again I think post punk is the obvious analogy - do post punk belong in the cerebral "listening" department that Reynolds have no problem with in itself, or as part of the "brock continuum" that he identifies as running from garage rock all the way through punk and rave to present day hip hop? Post punk is conspicuously absent from his long youtube brock-list, with the quite rock-ish Killing Joke as the only example. Which is not to say that you couldn't find a few more brocking post punkers if you wanted to, but wasn't it exactly the whole pointof most post punk to question and deconstruct that very (b)rockist "essence". Huge swathes of it was self-consciously arty and cerebral, deliberately esoteric and dysfunctional. Sure, a lot of them worked with groove-based black music, and had a lot of physical propulsion (as do a lot of post-step), but there was almost always a mind game element as well, they were never really "cutting loose" in the same way as 'nuum music and "pure" rock, funk or disco is, if for no other reason than it was always articulated, always subservient to some larger artistic goal (trance-states, confrontation, subversion, ritual).
Well, some might point out, doesn't goals like "confrontation" or "ritual" - even though they might be self-consciously constructed - show a strive for social energy and interaction, exactly the kind of thing that is lacking in post-step? And with that I would, at least mostly, agree. It just doesn't mean that post punk is "brock" music. Rather, it shows that social energy can take many other forms than just "getting your rocks off" on the dancefloor. I think placing post punk in the 'nuum would require a lot of creative shoehorning, but then again, I don't see any reason it should be there. Of course, it isn't straight up ethereal "brain music" either, there's still very much a physicality to it - if anything, I would say it's a part of both those worlds (and therefore not really belonging to any of them). And I would say it's the same with post-step. Which gets us to the second question.
Not only do I not have a problem with post-step not belonging to the 'nuum, it's even been one of my points all the time that it's the wrong lens to view it through. But does that mean that there's no visceral element to it, no "cutting loose" or "bursting-into-the-world"? Absolutely not. I must say that Reynolds inability to feel the visceral energy of post-step - and it does seem to have been a point of his right from the start - is really strange to me, because that was exactly what pulled me into it in the first place, what made me a believer. I did not - as suggested in the comments of the Energy Flash post - have to force myself to believe. What I did was accepting that here was something worthy of belief, without the safety net of post modern doubt and constant how-new-or how-good-is-it-really-questioning, saving me from having to defend what I love, and being ridiculed for claiming - how absurd, how naïve - that here is again something worthy of history. But I obviously wouldn't have accepted it if the music wasn't so overwhelming in the first place - and what overwhelmed me to begin with wasn't the more subtle and understated forms (of which there is many), because those are always easier to reject as "just more moody head music" - its originality doesn't demand your attention like the heavier stuff.
How anyone can listen to early poststep tracks like Slugabeds "Gritsalt", Suckafish P. Jones' "Match Set Point", or Eproms "Shoplifter", without getting blown away by the sheer physical force, the explosive energy, the visceral freshness, that is a mystery to me. After all, a lot of the first post-step (and especially what I've called bitstep) was pretty much a reaction to the challenge of wobble - not a "turning back" to "true dubstep" or neo-2step (aka funky), though there sure as hell were a lot of that crap too. Instead, the bitsteppers seemed to ask what the next step after wobble should be - how could you take this music even further out, make it even more mad and grotesque. It was pretty clear that it couldn't be done with just more convoluted twists of the wobble bass itself, the limit had been reached there (and as a result, big wobble producers moved into much more melodic, EDM-crossover territory), so instead post-step producers added cascades of multicoloured sound splinters, absurd syncopations and mangled structures, like treacherous vortices pulling you in several different directions simultaneously - and always with massive force.
The best bitstep delivered on wobbles promise, transforming it from a potential dead end to a gateway into a new world. And when it had opened my ears to the strange and wonderful new things going on, I discovered plenty of other forms of post-step that was equally unique and amazing, even though the brilliance wasn't as in-your-throat-energetic as with bitstep. Though indeed there weremany other forms of hyper-physical post-step too, sometimes even downright groovy (at least for a definition of groovy that includes something as weird as Can - as Reynolds' brockout list does) - the brutally twisted cyberfunk of Debruit and a lot of skweee had a massive, propulsive power, while the freaked out maximalism like DZA, 813 and Eloq is among the most over the top explosive stuff I've ever heard, and avant-trap like TNGHT, Krampfhaft and the later Starkey should be able to work a dancefloor as effectively as any classic rave music. Heck, despite being incredibly cold and dysfunctional, a lot of the current "cybermaximalism" (like Brood Ma, Wwwings and Amnesia Scanner), is also deeply visceral music.
So, I've proved my point then? After all, I've just claimed that a lot of post-step does indeed have a highly physical quality, bursting into the world with undeniable force, so obviously it does! Except... what do I base that claim on? On the fact that I feel it - to me it's undeniable. But to others, not so much, just like there's a lot of stuff that doesn't affect me the way others claim it should. And there's people who never felt rave music, or punk and post punk for that matter, found it empty and cynical, the surrounding subcultures destructive and pointless. In other words: if some music simply doesn't do anything for me, I know that this gut reaction isn't really an argument for it not being any good, I need some more objective way to measure it. But if that measuring device - say, how viscerally enticing it is - itself depends upon a gut level reaction, I'm back where I started. I guess this is why rock critics often use so much time on lyrics, more or less becoming ersatz literary critics, because words are slightly more concrete and tangible than timbres and harmonic structures. Perhaps the sociological angle used by many critics is useful in the same manner - giving them something "real" to deal with, and offering an easy measuring device: If music is worthwhile, it makes a socio-cultural impact - and if doesn't, it's not. Of course, by that standard you'd need some way to explain why, say, Celine Dion isn't more worthwhile than Xenakis or Sun Ra.
That said, this is indeed the point where I think something is lacking with post-step - it hasn't created an active, socially transformative (sub)-culture. That I agree with, but what I doesn't buy is that this is because the music in itself doesn't have what it takes to build such a social structure. A main point from my last post was that nothing could built something like that now, the social-media-mediated reality we inhabit makes it impossible, except as in the form of virtual subcultures, existing online, of which there's as many as you could wish for. They just don't have any transformative power. Or at least not the ones based on music, the physical manifestations of which - concerts, clubs, festivals - simply seem like extensions of the socially networked existence. I don't see any actual socially transformative musical subcultures going on anywhere, and I don't think it's possible anymore. Young people still go out, and a lot of post-step is indeed played at hipster festivals, where there's some social interaction and bonding going on. But no feeling of any chance of changing anything through music - or in any other way for that matter. The modern bohemians into experimental electronics - graphic designers moving from city to city in Europe and the US - might make enough to live sort-of-comfortably with this drugs-and-music hobby, yet they never seem to have any hope or dreams of achieving anything more than that.
Take grime - I think most would agree that the first generation had the shocking formal newness and the burning will necessary to create a truly powerful, reaching-beyond-itself subculture - and yet, it didn't really happen. Countless online 'nuum-connoisseurs clearly wanted it to be the next big thing, but it never got beyond cult status, and was first taken over by dubstep, later by the experimental second wave that seems to have given up all ambitions of moving beyond small, web based communities.  In the end, I don't think any form of music will be able to be truly socially transformative in the world we currently live in, no matter how full of energy or how much it wants to. Had jungle never existed, and was then invented out of the blue today, I sincerely doubt it would have more impact than anything going on in post-step, or anything else. It could just as well be called yet another empty show of technical trickery with nothing expressed through it. Because if people are so desensitized that they're immune to the mad dynamics of the best bitstep, I can't see why jungles explosive rhythms should make a bigger impact. No matter how wild and physically powerful, if there isn't a receptive context, the social ignition isn't going to happen. And I think it's really the lack of this kind of "context" - a "practising community" (i.e "a way of life") grown organically around the music, and vice versa - that's the reason Reynolds doesn't relate to post-step. But then again, isn't this something we especiallyexpect from genres like rock, dance and rave? We don't usually diss the electro-acoustics for not having built a subculture of functionality and social practice around their music.
So where does that leave us? With a form of music which is as good as it's gonna get under the current conditions. And that is really, really good, as soon as you're able to accept that you're not going to get any kind of youth movement so potent that it actually makes an impact on society, as with rave and sixties rock. But you do get music that is an incredibly powerful reflection of our current conditions - and as such it's also music that is indeed having a lot released through it. Not pleasant things, mind you, but in its own way very true and overwhelming emotions. You could ask what the point of physically propulsive music is if people aren't going to use it in a social context. Now I'm not really sure this kind of post-step actually isn't used at some underground parties, but even if it's not, the viscerality is still crucial, because it reflects the psycho-somatic aspect of our supposedly purely cerebral online existence: the way it mangles our sense of time, place and identity, wears our body down and traps us in an everchanging maze of stimuli which renders us helpless and nauseas, the way the brightly coloured entertainment-fractal is simultaneously silly and terrifying, an exhilarating joyride with a sinister, insidious core of instability and uncertainly constantly lurking under the surface. To create this feeling, these strains of post-step do indeed need a to deliver a physical punch.
Now, I don't know how many of these producers consciously went for this reality-fracturing effect, for all I know they could just have wanted to create the sickest, most colourfully synthetic party music around, and then simply followed the music's logic all the way into the candy coloured nightmare zone. You can be a vessel for the zeitgeist without being aware of it. With the many strains of post-step that are more dark and atmospheric - directly revelling in the neurosis and hopelessness beneath the surface - the feeling of disintegration and entropic decay often seem to be a much more conscious thing, descended from the whole "death of rave"/end of history-discourse around Burial. Here, the lack of visceral force is part of the whole point of what is being expressed. Its impact is purely on the emotional level - but it's certainly still there, at its best as strange, disorienting and sometimes downright spellbinding as any, say, Young Marble Giants, Tuxedomoon or early Cabaret Voltaire. Which again brings us back to post punk: Unlike rave and sixties rock, post punk and post-step doesn't express a victorious belief in owning the future; rather, it's the sound of desperate resistance against a world where the very possibility of hoping for a better future is being increasingly crushed.
With post punk the resistance could still - and indeed, mostly did - happen through physical social interaction. With post-step it has moved to the virtual sphere, and the "resistance" is happening almost entirely on the art-for-arts-sake level. Some might say that isn't much, but considering that current music is not supposed to be able to do more than mix and re-contextualize pre-existing elements, that art is simply seen as a vehicle for tastes and opinions, I'd say it's actually incredible that something as original and overwhelming in its distillation of the zeitgeist is even existing. Never alone in the soul-destroying web of constant social media, yet isolated and paralyzed, people still dream of strange new worlds never heard before, still want to invent thrilling, absurdly twisted musical structures even if they seem to have no "purpose", still manage to create ominous musical forms that capture the essence of the very condition that should render them incapable of creating anything of any relevance at all. That such a wealth of invention is still possible, still being made, despiteall the forces opposing it (including the creators doubt in their own relevance), well to me that's at least as amazing as people coming up with good stuff under deeply fertile conditions. That stuff as inventive and vibrant as the best post-step mange to even exist now seems like an act of defiance. That it's one of the only places where I can still feel the spark of creative resistance - in a way, relevance - is all the more reason to cherish it. But of course, you'd have to be able to feel that vibrancy, otherwise, well...
After all, what do I know - to me most contemporary rap is completely pointless and with as much relevance and "promise of freedom" as contemporary metal. Or musicals. All something that command social energies and make a lot of people feel something on a gut level - just not me.
...
I think this is going to be the last post-step piece of mine for some time. Have I exhausted the subject? Well, on the level of these long think pieces then yes, I guess I have - even if I still feel like elaborating, I'm already starting to repeat some things from last time. But I'm not exhausted with poststep. Sure, as for new releases, 2017 hasn't been impressive, and I suspect last year was simply a last spasm, or perhaps even the beginning of a different, more static era. Yet, I'm still listening to the older post-step records almost all the time, still not tired of it. So, what I'd perhaps like to do is to go more into some of my favourites, trying to - to use Reynolds' term - incite, making the greatness and expressive power of the music directly relatable, rather than arguing its relative newness in the larger historical context, as I've mostly been doing so far. I have a half baked theory that the lack of messianic writing about specific tracks or records is at least a part of why it's impossible to create the same level of excitement about new music as in previous eras. Back then, when it could take a long time before you were even able to listen to a reviewed record, inventive descriptions in good music writing became a part of how you heard the music, part of its greatness - sometimes the music couldn't live up to the incredible imagery, but ideally, the writing made great music even better, made you hear it in a way that convinced you of its greatness. Now, all you get is a bunch of youtube clips that you'll skip through, unimpressed. I don't think any real incitement can happen that way. I think "forcing" people to use their imagination about music makes that music more vibrant, and makes the relationship with it deeper. So that's what I'll try to do, perhaps, some time. For now, though, I need a break from thinking about post-step (if not from listening to it), and I've had one or two other things lined up for a long time, before I suddenly got caught up in this whole post-step thing, so perhaps it's time to look at them.

Under the radar, off the map...such terms hardly do justice to Chris Douglas' non-place in the what we might call 'the music world', even the 'underground electronic' version. No surprise then that Fuadain Liesmas  has not, to my knowledge, appeared in any end-of-the-year charts. As Dalglish, O.S.T. and Scald Rougish, Douglas has persisted in making music for any reason but the desire for publicity or, perhaps, praise. Not that I believe he wouldn't welcome recognition. Searching for reviews of this album I've found no mention other than on this blog and, of course, Boomkat (because their job is to try and sell music). 
Describing the carefully crafted sounds here would be a challenge for most would-be critics, yet that's no reason for it's apparent invisibility; many writers are better equipped than me to talk about 'abstract' sound and do so regularly. Nonetheless, here I am...on the edge of...reviewing what eludes easy categorisation. 
Negin Giv, being just 30secs long, might be a good place to start (and end?) since it is, in microcosm a snapshot of Douglas' methodology....his ability to...punch holes in ...the space-time continuum...? If I improvise, forgive me. Free-flowing word scrambles might suit talk of Jazz, but  Fuadain Liesmas being so meticulously composed I feel duty-bound to attempt the same in writing. And fail. 
OT-IntVxEs 1 is typical of what goes on here, which is not to suggest that it's all predictable from the outset (only in...approach to sound). Rather, I mean, in creating melancholic (?) tones which in other hands would signal mere ambient eternal drift somnambulism, Douglas scatters brittle components throughout. No sleeping here. No daydreaming 'bliss'. Only on Hrm Clng or Dtn#09_Ed do we find what feels like a place of rest, albeit one derived from an afterlife (?). After what? This is life, in all it's restless, skittish, uncertain gravity. 
Perhaps ambiguity renders such albums unpopular; not 'difficult listening' - that, surely, is in the ear of the beholder. Albums that gain attention often shout something, even if in a thoroughly minimalist, quiet fashion. Is the popularity of Ambient a result of what many perceive to be a  politically turbulent world? An escape from that madness? As if the world has ever been stable. Whatever, the thing to do is make music which speaks of either 'the street', or technological trickery in the service of an adrenaline boost. Songs, naturally, are always in favour. Fuadain Liesmas offers no such musical certainties. It's neither flash nor pleasingly serene. Ultimately, I can only say 'It is what it is'. You can get a taste from the stream below, but to fully savour what Chris Douglas has created, I suggest you buy the CD from here.

Two other pieces in the series here

RTomens, 2016
WHAT? forgive me. I dunno. WHEN? last year. I mean, this year, 2017. In PC world nobody's memory works so I must consult this blog, scroll back in time (one day everyone will have mental bookmarks implanted, won't they?) to see which albums might be considered memorable worth mentioning in a round-up...
So here goes...
Broken Ground  - Christian Bouchardreview


Structures And Light - Group Zeroreview


Sacred Horror In Design - Sote review



Mnestic Pressure - Lee Gamble
review






Some People Really Know How To Live - Shit and Shine
review







Hesaitix - M.E.S.H
review






Fuadain Liesmas -  Aclds
review forthcoming




Monika Werkstatt - Various
review






A Little Electronic Milky Way Of Sound - Roland Kayn (this didn't even make the Wire charts!?)
review





Entertaining The Invalid - Various
review 

Texture, abstraction, atmosphere...mood music for the apocalypse in your head. Who is not enduring small (or large) psychotic trauma on a daily basis? It's the modern world...in which other modern people go about their business, answering 'it' with just a 'sigh'. 
COMA †‡† KULTUR 
Pay what you want but somehow you will pay it all, (play it all) back...

All The Marks Of Identity Are Swept Away, RTomens, 2017
Wonder why...I'm not myself of late...





Self-Portrait, RTomens 2017
STARVE LIVING ARTISTS INTO SUBMISSIONDO NOT SHOP

RTomens, 2017 Three art works from a series I made in honour of Thelonious Monk. The music is taken from his tune, Monk's Mood.


RTomens, 2017


RTomens, 2017

So another CD chariddy shop bargain, Cypress Hill's Black Sunday for a quid - whoo-eee! I had this on vinyl too when it came out - then - what happened? 
Remember when hip-hop was big? Remember when Public Enemy were fresh after the old first wave - like dangerous music, like grabbing the torch from The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron bad - eh? Yes. Then, well, not quite then, but a few years after the second wave, maybe even the third, hip-hop got out of control worldwide MASSIVE - didn't it? Like many a street sound before it soon every square on the block was into this thing whilst debates about how good it was for the black community and folks at large, what with all that swearing, cop-killing, female-disrespecting, money-idolising, gang-glorifying lyrical splurge - all of which only endeared it to youth and gangsters, naturally. The bigger hip-hop got, the smaller my interest. What this says about me may be that I'm a snob who reacts against popularity, or simply prefers movements when they're fresh? What? Which?
Here's an album that went Triple platinum in the U.S - fuck! I knew Cypress Hill were popular but...only just saw that stat on Wikipedia. I remember loving Black Sunday when it came out, like millions of others - it had the juice - got the juices flowing - but that was then - how would it sound 24 years later? How about BRILLIANT! tHAT'LL DO. sHOCK. tHERE WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING ABOUT b-rEAL'S VOCALS THAT WERE DIFFERENT AND STILL SOUND THAT WAY, AS IF HE'S PERMANENTLY, YES, INSANE IN THE MEMBRANE AND HAMMERING AT YOUR WINDOW TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT. Whoops, caps lock - which rhymes with 'Glock, funnily enough. 
In retrospect it's easy to hear how Cypress Hill got so big and so rich. The samples are choice, the mixing is absolutely perfect with the breaks in your face and somehow this album insists that you succumb, not through lyrical force so much as vocal/rhythmic dynamism. It's not original (when did that ever get you rich?). If anything, it's stereotypical of hip-hip subject matter (violence, drugs, bragging) - yet - yet - after the first four tracks you're slaughtered! Putty in their hands. Well, I was, again.

Courtney Pine's debut album for a quid? Couldn't resist. Of course I owned the vinyl when it came out, which was 1986...and Courtney was our Coltrane - he was! We could only watch in awe as our man, a young black man, in a suit, delivered his version of what was then contemporary Jazz..in London Town! He was slimmer then - we all were. He was also the only one to make the cover of the NME. Well how has it aged? Fine, to my surprise. As We Would Say sounds particularity good. OK, in the writing stakes he was no Wayne Shorter or Coltrane, but after 31 years and in the context of all that went before Journey To The Urge Within holds its own with no small help from the likes of Julian Joseph on piano, Gary Crosby's bass and Mark Mondesir's drumming. 

                                             
So today I came across an interview Pine conducted with David Bowie in 2005, asking him about the influence of Jazz in his life. Turns out our David had some impressive names to drop. I'd never heard Bowie talking about Jazz before but I've often wondered if he got the 'Wham bam thank you mam' line in Suffragette City from the Charles Mingus track. It's more likely he nicked it from the Small Faces tune of that name, of course. 

To continue the Mingus connection, when asked for the one Jazz tune that really moves him, Bowie goes for Hog Callin' Blues from the album that Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am was also on, Oh Yeah. A man of taste! This also happens to be one of LJ's favourite tunes. Just listen to Roland Kirk tearing the roof off the studio...

                                           

Pure (sun sound) pleasure from Modern Harmonic and how clever of them to collate Sun Ra's 'exotica'. For those not familiar with Sun Ra any sampling of tracks from here will be a surprise if they had him down as too 'crazy'. They may even wonder what all the fuss is about but to miss Ra in these moods is to ignore their worldly 'ancient' and thoroughly justified inclusion in the Arkestral sound collage. Essential.



Accelerated Destruction, RTomens, 2017
This along with other art prints is available now in my shop

How much more 70s/80s cassette culture can we take? - loads! it seems. And why not? There's much pleasure to be had from the beneath-the-underdog bedroom synthesists; the chancers, non-game- changers, radical visionary lunatics and nerds with attitude.
'Nuclear fuel breeds nuclear war/The politics of power/ Rotten to the core' - it's Missing Persons and Rotten To The Core, one of the treats on this superb collection, which illustrates many angles taken by the Lost of Tape Land. PCR's Myths of Seduction and Betrayal (Extract) is another gem. Human Flesh, Urbain Autopsy are names that tell of the Cronenbergian body mutation fixation of the times, when perhaps the recently-evolved opportunity to integrate mind and machine bred obsession with cybernetic mutation. Who knows. 
Cassette-sharing sites are popular now but for obvious technical reasons the sound quality is usually poor so this is a welcome chance to hear hi-resolution lo-fi emissions from the vast cavern of underground cassette culture.




Beneath the concrete field, the beach? Perhaps not. Here, at least, is a contemporary collection worthy of your attention. Material by Mark of Concrete/Field, remixed by various folk, most of whom have remodelled original sounds in a very interesting way. Descent's Freebase has great depth, a build-up of tension pressure that's all the better for never actually being released. AMANTRA's Scorched Earth Policy wouldn't sound out of place on the Underground Cassette comp - I mean that as a compliment. Kek-W got A Fax from Philip Glass (great title), well, I suppose a few people did in the 80s - anyway, as always, KW's work is spot-on/interesting, as is Libbe Matz Gang's Tratamento de Enxaquecas, like death metal machine music! Very good comp.



Windows To The SoulBEFORE I GO, A PLUG FOR MY ART PRINTS, WHICH ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE HERE

Oh, yes, it's Ladies' Night
And the feeling's right
Oh, yes, it's Ladies' Night
Oh, what a night (oh, what a night)...

...Monika Werkstatt at Cafe Oto - yes, what a night! You don't need me to tell that electronic music is a male-dominated world (which part isn't? bingo?), just like Rock, but unlike that traditionally macho realm of phallic axe-wielding at first glance there should be no reason for electronic music being a (mostly) men-only domain, until you start thinking about stereotypical male gadget obsession and the historical culturally-enforced tradition of DIY (inc tinkering with electronics).
Issues surrounding all that (not bingo or DIY) were discussed in the Q&A. An interesting point was raised about how women are expected to be 'brilliant' whereas it's OK for men to be 'all right'. The conclusion was that women should be allowed to be 'all right' too. The issue of expectations aside, pure percentage stats dictate that there's a lot more average male performers in electronic music simply because they dominate.

Politics aside, if it's possible to lay them aside and see the performers as just that (perhaps there's an irony there in rightfully demanding equality, ie not just being viewed as 'female artists', whilst presenting an all-female collective - tricky) with nothing to prove Monika Werkstatt proved it. It was an evening of seductive, passionate, humorous, powerful music, each of the four players performing two songs before a collective session finale. All four were present on stage throughout and it was entertaining just watching their individual reactions to what the performer was doing.

Before the collective, support came from London's La Leif, who brought beats and bass fit to shake Cafe Oto's foundations with a very tough set.

The first of MW to perform was Sonae, whose subtle, richly-textured ambient sounds set a good tone...


Then Barbara Morgenstern ('Queen Of Harmonies') delivered two superb songs, the power of which was amplified times 10 in a 'live' context...



Watch out, it's Pilocka Krach, surely the prankster in the pack, giving us all a good slap with her stomping Electro-Power-Pop! Do you like the beat? Yes, I did!



Finally in solo form, 'the boss', Gudrun Gut, organiser of the whole collective and legendary figure on the scene for years.



The quartet session was as intriguing as you'd expect from four diverse artists with their very own styles, working together intuitively, in the spirit of improvisation, just don't call it 'Improv', Gudrun's ambiguous about that scene and I don't blame her. As she said, it's something you can hate yet be drawn to at the same time. There's nothing to hate about Monika Werkstatt. Do check the collective album. It's an essential release from this year. As an encore, the joint was jumping to Who's Afraid Of Justin Bieber? Here's a brief video I took...

Oh what a night!

Improvising to tape loops may sound implausible, or rather, contrary to the spirit of Improv, but who cares about that, eh? Not you. So here's saxophonist Colin Webster doing just that and the combination of his chops and repetitive sounds works very well. You can almost hear Webster thinking 'What shall I do with this?' in the unaccompanied sections, which adds to the intrigue. Being capable of creating many varied sounds from his horn, Webster has no trouble finding the 'right' tone for each loop (well, perhaps he did, but the released versions all succeed).


On impulse I called in Daunt Books today to see what sci-fi they had. I asked the girl if they had a section for it, she said they didn't because they 'specialised in travel'. "What about space travel?" I asked..."I know," she replied, almost smiling...

Bought this John Sladek collection the other day, having decided to read more science-fiction. The genre has promised more than it's delivered as far as my needs in recent years are concerned. Those needs have changed since I started reading sci-fi a long time ago, of course. 
After the early-teen experience of space adventures I progressed to the biggies such as Asimov and co.. It wasn't until the late-70s and discovering William Burroughs that my view of the genre changed completely; in short, he ruined it regarding everyone else, except JG Ballard, who I still rate highly and read regularly. That's no coincidence considering Ballard's opinion of Burroughs despite their very different writing styles.
Burroughs even gets a mention on page 79 of this Sladek collection from a stoned character trying to get to Morocco. Published in '68, the first novel, The Reproductive System, reflects the era in a good way rather than a 'dated' fashion, covering paranoia, anti-authoritarian, secret agent, science-gone-mad cynicism in the spirit of adventure that reminds me of both Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius and Wilson and Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy. So far so good and since I will finish it that's a recommendation from someone who's a serial non-finisher (life's too short, isn't it?)
TTFN

RTomens, 2017
More of my art here



1967 1st edition
You've been warned - 'YOU DARE NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO IGNORE IT!' (from the back cover).

Flying saucers are hostile, so too are the alien bugs in Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers - "The only good Bug is a dead Bug!". It's 20 years old and re-watching it I confess to enjoying it even more than the first time. That's a 'confession' because revelling in a film filled with square-jawed, squeaky clean heroes out for military death or glory to bombastic soundtrack sounds like hell as a film, but that's the point. ST is pumped up and primed as a trashy action film whilst constantly undermining everything it superficially celebrates. It's very sheen is as sickening as the site of a bug ripping a soldier limb-from-limb. It's gung ho writ large but gets booby trapped at every turn. Verhoeven knew what he was doing but did it so well that few could see the subversive irony through all the flying limbs and phoney machismo. 

In a way Shit & Shine like to play with machismo (note the cover) - perhaps they really are macho men. But there's an 'ironic' edge to most everything they do and their latest, That's Enough, is no exception - 'Do you know the way to the garden party?' - the EPs filled with samples, a long one opening the opening title track, which you've probably heard by now. The Worst continues playing with the sample idea -  the judges on American Idol? Subversion, like ST, is embedded in the per-usual nasty grooves - that must be Simon Cowell sampled - we might think that's enough of that talent contest shit but it just seems to keep rolling and so too, thankfully, do Shit & Shine. 



Do they still make musical geniuses? What do you reckon? Whoever 'they' are - parents of musically gifted kids who rise above being mere talented? What? Anyway, Felix Kubin: as Mark E Smith said 'Check the guy's track record' - it's impressive, to say the least. Here he is with Takt der Arbeit, four soundtracks to educational and industrial 16mm films about work. Is this a return to the fascist/imperial/dictatorship reflected in Starship Troopers? Is that what Work is? 
Track one has a militaristic slant (those drums) echoing the regimentation of both machine and human operators but here Kubin brilliantly orchestrates the components into something that sounds part friendly info film soundtrack, part chaotic depiction of factory-frazzled minds. Geburt eines Schiffes has the mood of Soviet-era proletariat-powered propaganda so strong you can see the workers marching towards you over the horizon, shirt-sleeves rolled over bulging biceps. Hold on, I got carried away with that idea. The actual mood is one of a huge industrial-age factory gradually coming to life with the roar, clank and hiss of machines complete with triumphant music heralding the brave new era of man-made mechanical wonders - or hell, since the overriding atmosphere is actually one of foreboding and tragedy. Martial Arts continues the work-til-you're-musclebound theme but Kubin continually breaks things down (a musical spanner in the works). The group Kubin works with add essential components to the EP; the human element in what could have been just another 'industrial record' in other, less creative hands. Release date was supposedly Nov 17th but as I write it's not yet out so keep an eye on Editions Mego. Don't miss it.

Briggflatts by Basil Bunting is one of the great poems of the twentieth century. However, it has not always occupied a prominent place in discussions of modern poetry. The reasons for this are complex, and have largely to do with a range of contentious biographical and historical factors (such as the marginal status of modernism in the UK and Bunting's own variable reputation). Another factor, the poem's supposed difficulty, requires some qualification. Briggflatts is a dense, carefully wrought high-modernist work. As with other poems in this bracket (The Waste Land, The Cantos, The Maximus Poems) it repays diligent close reading and re-reading. But it is arguably more vital (and, dare I say it, accessible) than those works, and can in fact be appreciated pretty well by first-time readers. As a teacher of undergraduate students over the last few years, I have found that Part 1 in particular lends itself very well to group reading and seminar discussion: indeed, the first section of Briggflatts seems to me to serve as a far better introduction to modernist poetry in a pedagogical context than a work like The Waste Land, with its copious and contested layers of allusion. It does help, it is true, to have a skeleton key to unlock some of the key features of Briggflatts. But I think the really essential facts about the poem can be summarised in a relatively modest space. The following brief guide to the poem should hopefully provide a good foundation for first-time readers. I have tried to shine light on the basic subjects and structures of Briggflatts, without diminishing its music and magic.AN, 2017





Part 1

Season: Spring
Phase of Bunting's life: Childhood
Location: Northern England
 
Part 1 is the most immediate and tightly structured in the poem. Twelve stanzas, each of thirteen lines, sketch an idealised panorama of Northumbria (in Bunting's poetic vocabulary this meant pretty much the whole of Northern England). The verse here is emphatically musical, foregrounding alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme, with a stark rhyming couplet at the end of each stanza to draw it to a close. In one sense, this is pure sound evoking a pastoral idyll and it should be enjoyed as such: Bunting himself said that readers (or listeners) shouldn't try too hard to uncover 'meaning' beneath the musical surface of his verse. At its simplest, this whole section is an extension of the song of the bull ('Brag, sweet tenor bull') in the first line.

However, that is not quite the whole story; there is also a definite realist narrative here. Bunting is recalling a childhood 'holiday romance' with a girl called Peggy, which took place in the early 1910s in Brigflatts (the correct spelling), a tiny village in the North Pennines. Rawthey is a river; Garsdale, Hawes and Stainmore are nearby locations; the stonemason and miners are local characters. Part 1 is therefore the beginning of a process of remembering real things, literally the first chapter in an autobiography. Deeper history also comes to the surface with the first, brief appearance of the Viking warrior and sometime ruler of Northumbria Eric Bloodaxe, killed in battle on Stainmore around 954AD. This enigmatic darker image or 'tone' prepares the way for the mournful conclusion to part 1. Spring ends, the natural presences begin to die and rot, and somehow—we never quite find out why or how—the poet's idyllic love affair with Peggy is 'lain aside' and forgotten.
 
 
Part 2
Season: Summer
Phase of Bunting's life: Early adulthood to early middle age
Locations: London; North Sea; Italy; North Pennines; Middle East; Mediterranean
 
Part 2 is by some distance the longest in the poem. In stark contrast to the chiselled stanzas of part 1, part 2 is an eclectic collage of clashing poetic fragments, perhaps intended to mirror the immature, evolving state of Bunting's mind throughout his wandering 20s and 30s. We start with an intentionally dramatic change of location, from the idealised North to artificial, money-obsessed London (Bunting is nodding at similar depictions of the capital in Wordsworth's Prelude). From this point onward there are continual geographical shifts (again, this is a recollection of real events in Bunting's early life). We are treated to a short tour around 1920s Bloomsbury bohemia (lines 1-23), a jaunt along the Italian coast and mountains (most of the middle of part 2 from 'About ship! Sweat in the south') and finally to a more obscure conclusion that includes flashes of the Middle East, where Bunting spent the latter part of World War II ('Asian vultures riding on a spiral column of dust') and generalised Mediterranean references—as well as spending the early 1930s in Italy, Bunting returned there during and after the war as a soldier and intelligence agent. In between these biographical fragments, more indirect passages and mythical subjects jostle in typical high-modernist fashion. The Bloodaxe narrative is treated more fully: we see Eric cruelly commanding a longship in the North Sea ('Under his right oxter …') and then dying a horrifically violent death back in the Pennines in the first great climax of the poem (the long passage beginning 'Loaded with mail of linked lies'). Paralleling this episode, Bunting nods in the final lines of the section at the Ancient Greek myth of Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur after an encounter with a bull sent by the sea-god Poseidon (note the subject rhyme with the bull at the start of the poem).

As well as being a sometimes chaotic—though often beautiful—record of the frustrations of Bunting's early adulthood, part 2 is also the place where the underlying moral of Briggflatts is first advanced. Put very simply: human beings cannot control the world, they must find a way to co-operate and co-exist with it. As Bunting put it (far more eloquently) in his 'Note on Briggflatts': 'Those fail who try to force their destiny, like Eric; but those who are resolute to submit, like my version of Pasiphae, may bring something new to birth, be it only a monster.'
 
 
Part 3
Season: n/a
Phase of Bunting's life: n/a
Locations: Edge of the world; Northumbrian arcadia
 
Part 3 is outside the main structure of the poem: it refers neither to a season nor to a specific period in Bunting's life. Nevertheless, Bunting intended it to be the climax of the narrative. In musical terms this is the 'loudest', most forcefully expressed part of the poem, the place where the moral first hinted at in part 2 is affirmed in a dramatic 'big reveal'. The section is based on an episode from the medieval Persian epic poem Shahnameh, which includes a portrayal of the Greek leader Alexander the Great (356-323BC). In Shahnameh, Alexander journeys with his troops to the mountains of Gog and Magog at the edge of the world. At the summit he leaves his men behind and encounters an angel (Bunting has him played by the Biblical figure 'Israfel') who is poised to blow a trumpet to signal the end of the world. There is some ambiguity in Bunting's retelling of this legend. What exactly happens to Alexander on the mountain? Why does Israfel 'delay' in blowing the trumpet? What sort of divine intervention is at play here? Yet the underlying moral is clear. Alexander tries to conquer the world and reach the limits of experience, but in doing so he is ultimately returned back to the ground, to his homeland (for Alexander this was Macedonia, but Bunting describes it here as a kind of Northumbrian arcadia). Lying dazed in the moss and bracken after his fall from the mountain, he encounters the hero of Briggflatts, the slowworm (actually a snake-like lizard) who advises him to lie low, be patient, persistent and mindful of the beauty of his surroundings.

This is the most abstract moment in the poem, but there are also clear parallels here and throughout part 3 with Bunting's biography. The opening passages of the section caricature greedy, powerful people who obstruct creativity and make life a literal shitty nightmare. As a struggling poet for much of his life, Bunting had built up some resentment towards these establishment 'turd-bakers', such as the businessman and newspaper owner Lord Astor ('Hastor'). The overall narrative shape of part 3 also mimics the curve of Bunting's middle years: after spending much of the 1940s in Persia (poring over works like Shahnameh) he returned in the 1950s to Northumberland, the homeland from which he would eventually write Briggflatts.
 
 
Part 4
Season: Autumn
Phase of Bunting's life: Late middle age
Locations: North Yorkshire; Lindisfarne; Tynedale
 
Part 4 is the shortest section in Briggflatts, and is best viewed (or heard) as a penultimate, minor-key movement resembling those in pieces of classical music (Bunting called Briggflatts a 'sonata'). You don't need to follow this musical analogy too closely, but it might be worth spending some time looking at the way Bunting weaves together different textures and 'themes' in the second half of part 4.

Aside from its musical properties, part 4 is also notable for its elegiac subjects. It begins with allusions to the sixth-century poet Aneirin (the correct spelling), whose most famous work Y Gododdin describes the Battle of Catterick and its aftermath in North Yorkshire around 600AD. The purpose of this allusion is twofold. Firstly, Bunting is nodding at what is in effect the first Northumbrian poem (although Aneirin was a 'Welsh' poet, we should remember that the Welsh or Britons lived in Northumbria prior to the Anglo-Saxon arrivals of the fifth and sixth centuries). In terms of the realist dimension, there may also be a glance here at the war and destruction Bunting witnessed in the mid-twentieth century (we are now, chronologically, up to the 1940s-1950s). More personally, the litany of death and decay segues eventually into a recollection of the lost love affair with Peggy. In some of the most moving lines in the poem, Bunting says 'goodbye' to his memories of Peggy as he settles down to lonely old age in post-war Northumberland.

But there is some light in the gloom. Aside from the redemptive music of the baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, we also encounter the Northumbrian Renaissance of the seventh and eighth centuries (a dramatic 'rebirth' following the violent period marked by events like the Battle of Catterick). Among other achievements, this cultural upsurge produced the Lindisfarne Gospels (celebrated in the gorgeous passage beginning 'Columba, Columbanus …'), a beautiful illuminated book created in part to celebrate the life of the Northumbrian saint Cuthbert, who appears here as the (positive) mirror image to the (negative) portrait of Eric Bloodaxe in part 2. Aside from his Northumbrian pedigree, Bunting gives Cuthbert a starring role because he reputedly 'saw God in everything'. In line with the moral of Briggflatts, Cuthbert was a quiet hero living on the margins of society who loved nature without seeking to control it.   
 
 
Part 5
Season: Winter
Phase of Bunting's life: Old age
Locations: North Northumberland, Farne Islands
 
If part 4 was mostly tragic notes with a brief major-key interlude, part 5 is the opposite. Like the final movement of a symphony, this is a resounding conclusion to the poem ('years end crescendo') although it ends with a sad diminuendo.


In musical verse that often recalls the 'Sirens' episode in Joyce's Ulysses, Bunting revisits the idyllic landscape of part 1 (the powerful opening syllable 'Drip' recalls part 1's 'Brag'). But now that he is an old man the perspective is different. We have moved from the mountains in springtime to the Northumberland coast in winter, where the sea speaks of finality and the end of a journey. Having accepted the need to be patient and respect human limitations in the face of nature, it is now possible to appreciate the precious details of life: rock pools, a spider's web, the lapping of the ocean, the way birds fly in harmony, the skill of shepherds in handling sheep dogs, the inexplicable wonder of the night sky. There is a kind of spiritual idealism here, and this conclusion is certainly upbeat and effusive in some ways, with the faint suggestion of a happier ending to Bunting's life than was predicted in part 4.
Part 5 is on the whole concerned with images in themselves rather than any more complex symbolism, but the line 'Young flutes, harps touched by a breeze' may just carry a hint of the optimism Bunting felt in the mid-1960s, when he was 'rediscovered' by younger poets and finally became a celebrated literary figure. However, there is still the nagging sense of tragedy that has persisted throughout Briggflatts. As the stars shine out over the Farne Islands, where St Cuthbert once lived and worshipped, Bunting remembers Peggy for the last time, and awaits a final 'uninterrupted night'.
 
 
Coda
The Coda is a fragment composed prior to the rest of the poem, which Bunting rediscovered and welded on at the last minute. It is a condensed summary of the key philosophical motifs in the previous sections: the power of music, the impermanence of all creation, the impossibility of knowing everything. Tellingly, the poem ends with a question mark (this is a work of literature that proclaims its own uncertainty and inability to conquer the world with language). For all that, one thing is certain in the end: as Bunting once remarked, Briggflatts is 'about love, in all senses'.

This past weekend I gave a talk about how, why and whether cultural work can refuse the various alienations of modern society / economics, as part of a panel called 'DIY or Die: Is Bartleby Dead in the Post-Digital Age?' at the No! Music Festival at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt. I don't think the event was recorded, but I thought I'd share my slides / notes on it here, if only because the HKW computer wasn't able to display my outrageous choice of font at the time.

















What Sarkeesian says:

M.E.S.H. must be an acronym for something but I haven't bothered finding out what - Making Electronic Shit Happen? - that's probably it. James Whipple does make shit happen - good shit - detailed, interesting electronic shit like Hesaitix. Listening to Mimic just now I kept thinking someone was outside my window, rustling about and banging something so I got up to look and heard that sound again, from the speaker. Whipple's a spook in the speakers, spiriting sounds like...like you can't say what, except for the tolling of bells on Blured Cicada I...and now he's playing ping pong with Robert Henke (you know that sound?), who must be a spiritual brother of sorts, a forebearer, you might say. The difference being the beat, absence of the regular Tech motor Henke uses; instead, more irregular, as on 2 Loop Trip. But whatever messing around there is, he keeps a feeling of movement...the percussion on Search. Reveal is one outstanding aspect of a proper shapeshifting intergalactic gro-o-o-o-ver - yes it is! Whipple maps the space-sound continuum brilliantly, singing the body and brain electric. Damned good.

Bought a Clint Eastwood Spag Western box set a few weeks ago but only started watching it recently, beginning, (chrono)logically, with A Fistful Of Dollars. I thought they were due reappraisal, having not watched one all the way through for many years. 
One of several things that struck me was the sound, which I only learnt the other day was dubbed on afterwards, thus explaining why every 'clip-clip' of the horses' hooves, jangle of bits and clomp of boots on boards seemed heightened, to the fore. Then the laughter; throughout bad guys spend a lot of time laughing. At times, it's as if some are high on something. The framing of some shots, of course, Leone's recognised for that now, so I wondered why this film, apparently, got such a luke-warm reception from critics. Couldn't they see the artistry involved? Perhaps they were blinded by the amount of gun smoke. If not exactly hailed as a bone fide 'classic' today, this and the subsequent ones are at least rightly hailed as unique.
One other thing that struck me was the similarity between the scene where The Man With No Name is getting his (swollen) eye in again, the shot of his gun hand as he practices to the sound of a militaristic drum beat by Morricone instantly brought to mind Travis Bickle firing to a similar beat by Bernard Herrmann. I may have imagined it, but as you know that military-style drum runs through the Taxi Driver theme.
One astonishing scene is the massacre of the Baxter clan. Leone doesn't depict this in a normal fashion, but hammers home the brutality with almost as many shots of the slayers as bullets they fire. It plays out relentlessly. 
By coincidence it's Ennio Morricone's birthday today. The score for A Fistful Of Dollars is great, of course, although as regular readers will know when it comes to playing Morricone scores I favour his Giallo work. Watching the film reminded me of reggae artists' obsession with Spaghetti Westerns, often resulting in hilarious Jamaican/Mexican dialogue. So by way of honouring Morricone, I'm opting for one of those instead of anything by 'Il Maestro'. Featuring adapted dialogue from the film, the now famous coffin joke... 

Post-Halloween horror treat for you from I Monster: H.P.Lovecreaft read by Dolly Dolly (David Yates) - what's not to like? The musical accompaniment features students at Leeds Beckett University and is pitched just right, avoiding hauntology cliches, opting instead for a blend of dark electronics and even motorik rhythm. Yates' delivery is, as you'd expect, absolutely perfect. Time to throw another log on the fire, light a candle or two and watch the shadows flicker as your skin crawls. Superb. Available as cassette or download here.

If a golden age of musical originality and innovation happens and no one builds a movement and narrative around it, did it actually create anything new? Did it even happen? The last 5-8 years I've done my best to argue for and document the existence of a golden age of deeply original, shockingly new electronic music being made in the wide field opened by dubstep - hence using the overall term poststep. Apparently, though, very few seem to feel the same way. Arguably people like Adam Harper or Joe Muggs are to some degree on the same page, but mostly the consensus is that for the last, what is it now, 20 years I think, electronic music (as well as all other music) has been stranded in an endless wasteland of not being the ideal, shock-of-the-new-delivering frontier of cultural innovation.  
First and foremost, this considered a symptom of the postmodern "end of history" declared by neo-liberalism. If the dizzying development of music during the 20th century is the very manifestation the human spirits thirst for the future, its visionary will-to-re-imagen, to grow and develop, then the lack of anything new, the endless, retromanic harking back to older forms for inspiration, obviously expose our current inability to imagine any alternatives - let alone a future being different from the present. But in that case, shouldn't we perhaps expect music to start moving again, now that the end of history is clearly over - indeed, shouldn't this already have happened? As far as I can tell, it hasn't. Or rather: In the last couple of years, music hasn't begun to move forward any bit more than it has done the previous 5-10 years. The twist, of course, is that I happen to be one of the few people who think, within electronic music at least, that those 5-10 years actually offered a cornucopia of musical invention, originality and brilliance fully on par with the progressive period of late sixties/early seventies or the post punk years, and close even to the early nineties golden age of rave-derived electronic music.
With last year being a kind of return to form for the poststep musical frontline, after a couple of years with a slight lull, I'm not quite sure if the golden age is still going on, or just offered a last outburst, but the interesting thing is that this doesn't change how things are seen, or can be seen. If you're in the camp arguing that everything is completely, retromanically stuck and doing nothing but recycling the past, then I see nothing happening now - and that hasn't already been happening the years before - that should make you change that point of view: Music hasn't suddenly started to be a way for todays youth to address and tackle the graveness of the times, despite living in a world that is seemingly falling apart. If, on the other hand, you've thrilled to the amazing stuff created from, say, 2008 to 2015, then you could still get just as thrilled in 2016. Perhaps this is a clue to what is going on: Not just that the feeling of being in a golden age or in a wasteland can be how the same music is simultaneously interpreted by different people, but also that these divergent interpretations might seem just as valid to both parties even though the zeitgeist is changing violently. You'd think it would change everything - that's how it's supposed to go - but apparently not.
So why is that? Well, there's obviously many different layers to this, but I think crux of it all is that something is indeed missing: Not the ability to create new and inventive stuff, but the ability to recognise new stuff - somehow were getting more and more unable to feel the thrill of the new, even when directly confronted with it, and as a part of this: We seem unable to construct the surrounding narrative of innovation and upheaval necessary for this. Which is why we're not getting that narrative even now, when it would seem bound to pop up. Remember how it was possible for a lot of people to take even grunge as some kind of forward-pushing "movement", despite being largely a media construct, and practically consisting entirely of reheated rock leftovers? Even if there weren'tany even remotely new music around now, it certainly seems like it should be possible to construct narratives of boundary-pushing musical subcultures in the current political climate - but alas, it hasn't happened, even with actual boundary-pushing music around.
The narrative of endless retro-stagnation has become so internalized that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy by now - the very lack of anything truly new is pretty much presented as established fact by most leading critics, of which the best, most convincing are most likely Simon Reynolds and the sadly late K-punk. With the latter, cultural stagnation was an integral part of his Capitalist Realism-analysis, and it certainly makes sense: In a culture unable to even imagine the world being different, how is it possible to create something new? If a culture has completely internalised the notion that all it can do is pick n mix the riches of the past, how can it do otherwise? Well, first of all, I think it's pretty clear that a lot of electronic artists actually don't accept that recombining previous innovations is all they can do. Instead, they're often very actively looking for strange new openings, trying to make something "fresh" The way hordes of hipster beatmakers immediately and eagerly tried to utilise (and twist) the innovations of more "authentically" grown styles like wobble, footwork and trap, clearly shows the thirst for something novel, and the sheer, almost exhibitionistic delight many producers took in creating unrestrained-bordering-on-dysfunctional musical weirdness suggests that it was crucial for them to pledge allegiance to electronic music's heritage as the frontline of innovation.
If anything, I think many of the producers of what I've been calling poststep were fighting a desperate battle to prove that they were indeed still making new things, not least because they were constantly told not only that they weren't - as old farts have always told young turks creating genuinely new stuff - but, more crucially, that they simply couldn't, that it was historically impossible! And as a result, you often get the impression that they didn't even believe themselves that what they were doing was as amazing as it was, they never got into celebratory mode, never rode a crest of victorious excitement. Instead they constantly had to fight, never able to prove to the retrologists that they were creating the shockingly new, and consequently, they were never allowed to feel that what they did was exactly that. But, you might say, if it really wasso great, shouldn't they simply be able to not care what the old farts were thinking? Well, this is where I think the suffocating effect of the end-of-history mindset sets in - I'm not questioning that it's there -, it's just that its result is not in an inability to create something new, it results in an inability to recognise and believe in newness, to be exited by it and letting it ignite a broader, culturally significant movement.
At this point, I suppose I should probably try to back up my claim that an abundance of thrilling newness actually was created during the last 5-10 years. How do you really determine how "new" or inventive a piece of music is - after all, even though I hear some music this way, many others clearly don't, so it's obviously not enough just to listen and say whether you think it "sounds new". Specifically, Reynolds actually did listen  to some of the stuff I've been raving about, but even though he did find some of it exciting, he couldn't "quite hear" the formal originality that had been blowing me away, deeming it basically just a combination of existing things. Obviously, the sensitivity to whether music has reached mutational escape velocity can be very differently calibrated, but the question is why? 
A possible critique of Reynolds is he is obviously, at least to some degree, a man with a theory he wants to support - if his conclusion is already that things are not moving anywhere, he might very well scrutinise anything supposedly delivering something new, deliberately looking for the recognisable, pre-existing elements (which all music obviously contain), while at the same time underrating the things that are different from post forms. I suppose this is why it took him so long to recognise the new thing going on in dubstep, for years maintaining that nothing really was going on, until it eventually became undeniable with full on wobble. Similarly, his critique of the new wave of "art grime" seems weirdly to mirror "real punk" evangelists moaning about middle class art wannabees not keeping it real, making pretentious (and, I'd certainly say, "superficially jagged and challengingly ugly") art rock - as he himself describes in Rip It Up, where he's fully on the art-wankers side. But grime shouldn't be abstract or emotional or have any other kind of arty pretentions, because the style is by definition meant to be raw, functional backing tracks for MCs delivering its one true essence - its street cred approved will to succeed, to break in to the pop mainstream and take over. Heaven forbid that anyone would think of doing anything different with this music.
All that said, I think it's not so much a matter of deliberately ignoring evidence contrary to the retromania hypothesis, but more of being a victim of the same internet glut that is usually seen as the reason young people can't create anything new: Having all of music available all the time, they're simply stunned by too much inspiration, as well as by the feeling that everything has been done before. But why shouldn't the same be the case with critics? If by 1980 all you had heard before had been mainstream rock and pop, it would be easy to get blown away by Pere Ubu, DNA, Cabaret Voltaire and the early Scritti Politti, thinking it must be the most insanely inventive, radical stuff ever. If, on the other hand, you were already familiar with Conrad Schnitzler, Faust, Henry Cow and the early Red Krayola, then you could certainly say that the new stuff of the post punk years wasn't really that new - that is was a combination, not a direction/mutation. I'm not saying post punk wasn't an amazing cornucopia of invention and originality, but it certainly must seem much more mind blowing and shockingly new if you haven't heard the predecessors. Personally, I clearly remember being deeply underwhelmed when I finally got around to hearing Throbbing Gristle and Suicide - often not easy stuff to obtain in pre-internet days. As someone well acquainted with Schnitzler, Schulze and sundry electronic avant garde, these legendary artists sounded slightly poor and uninspired by comparison.
This is further illustrated by the way K-Punk use music to argue for the overwhelming cultural stasis under capitalist realism, here taken from "The Slow Cancellation of the Future"-essay: ...faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back to, say, 1995, and played on the radio. It's hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listener. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
I think there's both a correct and an incorrect assumption here, with correct one probably being the best demonstration of why I think the overall conclusion is misleading. First the incorrect one: It is simply not right that you could take any record from 2012 and play it in 1995 and it wouldn't sound weird, new or unrecognisable. There was nothing in 95 that sounded like what Jameszoo, Starkey, Montgomery Clunk or Jam City were doing in 2012 - to take just a small selection of that year's most original posstep riches. But, some might counter, all that is just, like, updated IDM or hipster club-music - not essentially different from the original strands of IDM and experimental techno already developed by 1995. Well, perhaps, but only in the same way that post punk was basically just updated fringe art rock and avant garde electronics - not essentially different from the original strands of astringent prog, kraut and cut up experimentalism. In both cases, you can identify the tradition and the predecessors - if you know them - but that doesn't mean that things are the same, or that it isn't blindingly obvious that this is new stuff. You can find lots of dysfunctionally weird beats and mangled soundscapes in nineties IDM, but again: None of them sounds even remotely like the fractured syncopations and hyper-coloured structures of the aforementioned 2012-artists. Or at least, if anyone does, I've certainly never heard them.
Of course, you could probably take most current or 2012 mainstream pop records and they wouldn't seem particularly weird in 1995, just as you could take a lot of different underground music - both rock and electronic - and it would be almost the same in 2012 as in 1995. But then again, you could also beam back the majority of mainstream 1993 pop, as well as a huge selection of underground music (indie rock, chill out/ambient, house, early minimal techno), and it would be readily recognised by the people of 1989. Heck, a lot of it would certainly make people 17 years earlier wonder how so little could have changed. Just like the forefront of the current deliberately-trying-to-be-new stuff is more or less unknown to the vast majority, so was most jungle and rave music in 1993, to say nothing of the most out-there post punkers in their heyday. It's connoisseur stuff. Sure, sometimes it really crosses over into wider audiences, and most people will know about it, but it doesn't mean they listen to it regularly, let alone feel any particular future buzz (rather, it's often something like: "is this absurd noise really what people call music these days?!").
I happen to work with a lot of teenagers, and there's a contingent of them into electronic music, which basically means the omnipresent EDM-trap-sound. This is perhaps the most recognisable current trend - even something a lot of people seem to know about - and not something anything sounded like in 1995. It just doesn't mean that it's what everybody is into or acknowledges as "the new thing". By far the majority of the teenagers are basically into rock and pop, r'n'b or metal - just like they've always been - and just like they were in 1993! Sure, everybody knew about techno back them, but most people (perhaps except some places in Germany) sure didn't care for it. Where I came from, there was an OK rave underground, but it was miniscule compared to something like the indie rock underground or the metalheads. Even now, when people talk about what happened the nineties, the talk about either eurodance, or, if it's supposed to be "real music", goddamn grunge. And when jungle broke through shortly after, it was hardly even recognised outside of England. Perhaps if you lived in London, you could feel that you were living through an incredible golden age of invention, but the rest of the world didn't notice until it filtered out through adverts and David Bowie.
To feel that you're living in an age of exhilarating future shock, you have to be both open to the shock of the new, and you have to actually encounter it. Certainly, a lot of people encountered jungle in it's heyday, but even more people didn't, and if they did, it was only fleetingly, and not something that made them think of the first half of the nineties as a pinnacle of musical innovation. However, the point is - and this is where K-Punk was definitely, unquestionably right - the first half of the nineties was a pinnacle of musical innovation. It's just that to see it, you have to focus on the places where that innovation was taking place. And if you're part of that place - even if it's only as an observer -, you're most likely not even aware that you're focussing on something most people doesn't see or care about. Yet, when you do focus, when you're aware of the unbelievable speed and wildness of the evolution going on, its magnitude is overwhelming. 
Which is exactly why K-Punk's example is correct, but also misleading with regard to the argument he's making, because nothing is really comparable with the incredible, Cambrian-explosion-like blast of creativity that in just a few years brought forth just jungle, but also bleep, gabber, trance and first generation IDM. But jungle is of course the ultimate example of hyper-accelerated musical evolution, of something so shockingly new and unprecedented that it's practically unrecognisable. Well, to be fair, even without following the development of jungle in real time, when I eventually heard it I could certainly hear that it came from Prodigy-style break beat rave, which again I could recognise as being somehow based on sped up hip hop beats. But that doesn't change how unbelievably, unquestionably new and forward-thinking jungle truly sounded (the early Prodigy too, come to think of it) at the time, for someone thirsting for the newest, most futuristic music around.
It shouldn't be surprising that the musical developments of the last 20 years are not on the same level as what is arguably the greatest eruption ever of musical innovation, in the shortest possible time. Heck, the 20 years from, say, 1965 to 1985, doesn't really compare. Sure, an amazing shitload of innovation took place, but was anything really as jarring, as incredibly different from anything going on before, as jungle or gabber? Well probably many would disagree, but then, the point simply is: The poststep innovations made from something like 2009 to 2014 were maybe not as great as those made in the first half of the nineties, but that is a bar so high that not passing it is absolutely not a proof that nothing exhilaratingly new happened. To return to my favourite comparison: The post punk years yielded an amazing amount of newness, but almost all of it within already established traditions of experimental rock - just like poststep has come up with an equally overwhelming abundance, and almost all of it within established traditions of experimental electronics. Even if we take everything going on in account, including electro and full blown wobble-EDM, neither the postpunk nor the poststep era delivered anything as radically new and game-changing as the inventions of the early nineties rave scene.
What the most inventive post punk and poststep had in common, is that a lot of it was self-conscious experimentalism, art-for-arts sake, weirdness as a goal in itself. And listening to the music, I simply can't hear any evidence that postpunk was more successful on those terms than poststep. Take the most original postpunk creations, whether in terms of pure, extreme abstraction (say, No New York or Voice of America), or in making wild innovations workable components of highly listenable new pop hybrids (say, Remain in Light or Chairs Missing), and I'd like to know what actual musical elements made them more new and revolutionary, compared to the experimental music that came before, than the Zomby ep, Sich Mang's Blwntout, Slugabed's Ultra Heat Treated or Krapfhaft's First Threshold. That the post punk classics are seen as more successful on those terms, though, is abundantly clear. The four mentioned postpunk records are considered classics, and know to everyone interested in rock and pop history. The four poststep records are virtually unknown. But rather than drawing the conclusion that then they obviously didn't offer anything sufficiently original or interesting to make them milestones, can anyone actually point out the in-originality? What previous music is sounding so alike these poststep records - i.e. much more alike than the postpunk artist were alike their predecessors - that you could argue they're just making small adjustments to or combinations of already established forms? I can't find it, and instead I think it's more relevant to search for a reason for why the originality of poststep is unacknowledged, than to claim that it simply isn't there. 
Perhaps the history known to future generations will only be the history written by the winners, but the history written while it is happening is also written by the believers - who might eventually become winners, determining how we understand the past. Rock history is a prime example; once seen as primitive, juvenile trash, its history is now considered an important subject with its own priesthood of serious critics. And, paradoxically, the believers who eventually became winners - critics like Bangs and Christgau - reversed the values so that the juvenile primitivism became the hallmark of rock authenticity, what separated the "good taste" of true rock from what is ridiculed as tasteless, self-important trash, like prog, goth or stadium rock. In the postpunk heyday, though, that was still a revolution in progress, and if you weren't part of the theoretical front line (like the British music magazines), you might not even have noticed the fights going on. New pop might have reached the national charts, but how many "ordinary people" - i.e. not music nerds -living in the post punk years had actually heard about The Fall or The Raincoats, Pere Ubu or The Contortions? Even Joy Division was mostly a cult group (though the cult was certainly huge), as they remain today, even despite critics talking about them like it's an established, scientific fact that they were bigger than The Beatles, and at least as important - much like Nick Cave, who apparently, in their minds, is the pinnacle of human culture. 
When I recently read some old issues of a local film magazine, during the postpunk years also covering music, its rock critics acknowledged that, sure, some slightly new things were going on, but they clearly weren't thinking they were living in some golden age of unrivalled innovation. All rock music was analysed and understood through the lens of what had gone before, and was more or less classified within established traditions, developed in the sixties and early seventies. They had the same music available as the believers of the British music mags, and yet, they weren't feeling shocked by the new, even though it was staring them in the face. Had the believers not existed, would we, today, recognise postpunk as golden age? And even though everybody now recognises some "important" central names - Joy Division, Talking Heads, Throbbing Gristle, The Human League - would people interested in rock history recognise those groups as just the most recognisable trendsetters in the otherwise amazingly complex, interwoven cultural upheaval described in Rip It Up, if it wasn't for an über-believer like Reynolds? And interestingly, while Reynolds' believing sort of managed to change the focus of dance music history from singular, crossover-prone artists to the runaway inventiveness of intensity-seeking rave scenes, that shift still only happened within dance music fandom. Mainstream (popular) music journalists are still centred around "authentic rock history", and still don't recognise that anything really happened in nineties rave culture. Sure, they'll grant that a whole heap on new dance genres emerged, but how "new" were they really when they were constructed from samples of old music? And besides, it was just dance music, just flashy fads, not dealing with important issues of the human condition - such as being an angsty, horny teenager - like rock music.
To those not invested in music, postpunk was no more an age of future shock than the present. The majority of mainstream music journalists most likely recognise it as such, and yet they don't see the golden age of rave music, K-Punks crown example, as a time of particularly future shocking music. The believers, of course, know that it was, but so far, their cause hasn't won, hasn't shaped mainstream music history. Is it because there aren't enough of them? I don't think so, it seems all kinds of nineties underground dance music has huge web communities. But perhaps that is exactly the problem: Everyone can find a group of likeminded fans, but as a result there's no need to fight for the cause in a broader public framework. Before the internet, you had to become a believer and fight publicly for the stuff you loved, if you wanted to see it succeed and prosper, and if you wanted to find anyone to share your passion. Column inches were limited, so if you didn't push your favoured genre, they would go to lesser, unworthy contestants. Now, the problem is the reverse; you can write endlessly about whatever you want - as I've been doing here - and it will make no difference. Who has time to explore, let alone discuss, unfamiliar stuff anymore, when there's already a near infinite amount of discussion available about the things you already love?
I think it's pretty obvious that this is a part of the reason why poststep doesn't have the believers necessary to make its incredible abundance of invention and originality recognised. There's no need to be zealous when you apparently are able to reach your goal - find the community and recognition you seek - right away. But it's not the whole reason, because shouldn't a poststep believer have a bigger goal than that? Shouldn't the current producers have the same zeal to conquer the world and let everyone know that they are the future as the rave and postpunk (and prog and rock) believers had? Regardless of whether the stuff you make actually do change the world in any significant way, you should still be convinced that it will, that it has to. This is missing now, and the reason it's easy to think nothing new is truly happening - poststep producers (and fans) should by all means be backed by an unyielding belief that the music they love IS the future, IS the most out there, radical, new shit around, but they simply don't. The end-of-history narrative is so internalised, the ubiquitous presence of the past so suffocating, that they're simply unable to believe. When you see reviews of new electronic records, you'll very often have the critic trying to excuse that the music isn't some kind of completely unheard new genre created ex nihilo, say that 'yes, it is admittedly built upon elements of this or that genre, but yet it isn't just a rehash of past stuff, because there's these original touches here and there'.
Now there's obviously plenty of records that are indeed just recycled older styles with a more or less insignificant veneer of contemporary hipness, but the strange thing is that this need to explain that something actually is delivering something new is even felt when dealing with stuff that, by all reasonable accounts, are indeed deeply original and forward-thinking - I've done it myself plenty of times. Remember how Kuedo's Severant was basically considered a retro record, its claim to newness only slightly redeemed by its use of footwork and trap-elements. Despite the Vangelis influence being very clear, though, Severant didn't really sound like anything made before - the fusion of cosmic synthscapes and miniaturized ghetto beats perhaps worked so seamlessly that it didn't grab you throat by its strangeness, but it was nevertheless deeply original, as the countless records using it as the blueprint for further developments demonstrates. Compare with something like A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. The influence from psychedelic rock on that is very clear indeed, yet, as far as I know, postpunk critics didn't feel any need to defend it from being seen as a retro record. Similarly with the afro funk and juju-elements on Remain in Light, they were seen as a part of what made that record a milestone of innovation, and not as a recombination of already known music. All these records are brilliantly using elements of older music to develop something equally original, and yet when we talk about Severant (and several other poststep records just as brilliantly utilising fragments of the past) we for some reason focus on "using older music" and feel a need to excuse it (unless we want to draw the conclusion that it's nothing new, of course), while with the postpunk records "developing something original" is the main thing, and that it is done using older forms doesn't seem to be a problem. 
Why is that? Partly, there's the problem of musical omniscience - the use of "exotic" sound-sources seems a lot less exotic when you're familiar with them, having all the music of the past both available and greedily consumed (there's not really "forbidden zones" like with postpunk, where the use of different kinds of hippie music might seem extremely original to the casual listener, simply by not being recognised). When you have seen the building blocks, you can't really unsee them, and unlike postpunk, poststep is probably very rarely functioning as a gateway to unknown musical riches, because the listeners are pretty much on the same omniscient level as the producers when it comes to those riches. But more importantly, the end-of-history-mindset simply doesn't allow us to believe that we're part of a conquering movement, able to change anything.
In the late sixties/early seventies, you could believe that it was possible to transform all of society in a fully positive, utopian way, and music both reflected and embodied that. When we reach punk and postpunk it's horribly clear that that hope had been completely crushed by reactionary forces, and instead we got a movement that was still trying to transform and confront society openly, but now more like a sort of resistance, subverting and destabilising the existing order from below, rather than trying to convince it nicely from above - and again, this is reflected and embodied by the music.  With rave, it is clear that this strategy didn't work either, and now the only option left to do something actively for a better world is creating short lived parallel societies, unbound by the rest of the world, but also unable to transform it in any way - the TAZ as defeated escapism. Still, the music reflecting and embodying this was by no means less inventive than the previous era's music of victory and resistance. 

Since then, even this last refuge of belief in the transformative power of music and culture has dissolved, and even though the supposed liberal-capitalist utopia at the end of history - which never really fulfilled its promises in the first place - is now falling apart all around us, the belief in an alternative, in the ability to act, remains largely absent. And the music reflects and embodies this - you can create an endless stream of strangeness and newness, and build worldwide connoisseur communities around it, but it's all build within a parallel virtual dimension that is not only no threat or alternative to the established world order, but rather a product of it. If you want to create any kind of community around music, there seem to be no way around the online mirror maze, which will eventually absorb and assimilate anything, turning it into just another random fragment in its entertainment-and-self-surveillance-fractal.
This is the conditions under which poststep is produced, and in that light, it's a true expression of our schizophrenic, bipolar zeitgeist - its fractured structures either dissolving into entropic decay or juxtaposing absurd, hyper-agitated angles, its unreal soundscapes either summoning the hopelessness and sorrow of dead futures, or unfolding ultra-coloured, nausea-inducing stimulation-overdoses. Equally a dazzling spectacle of alien shapes and inventions, and a terrifying premonition of the reality of decay and emptiness hidden behind infinite layers of entertainment and distraction, the best of poststep offers not a music to build the belief of an alternative around, but rather a reflection of the condition under which the very ability to construct such an alternative is non-existent.

When Reynolds say that what is missing is postpunks "expressive intent andcommunicative urgency" or first-generation-grimes "social expression" and"individual hunger", he's basically right. If that's the kind of excitement you're seeking from new music, nothing is going to deliver it. But then again, if your reference points were established in the sixties and early seventies, and you'd expect forward-thinking music to be an optimistic force, imagining positive futures, punk and postpunk probably didn't deliver the excitement you were craving (I think Bill Martin's brilliant book on prog, Listening to the Future, is a good example of this mindset). And if you're expecting music of social importance to actively try and engage directly with the course of society, then certainly rave could very much seem more like escapism than something igniting your social excitement. If social urgency and individual hunger is the only parameters to deem music interesting and relevant, then it has definitely been diminishing returns since the early seventies. You have sort of ensured that nothing will probably be really exiting anytime soon, and that times are as dire as you'd like to think - which of course they are, only not in a way that makes truly exciting music impossible. Also in this respect, the retromanic mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the end, I guess the feeling of having been stuck for twenty years can be justified. During that time there hasn't really been a musical movement to believe in in the all-consuming, righteous way where you could convince yourself that you were part of a future unfolding in advance, being swept away by a huge contingent of people - or at least a contingent certainly feeling huge, much huger than it most likely actually is - collectively knowing that they're transforming the world around them through the power of art and imagination. Having felt this way during the nineties rave explosion, I can certainly feel the lack of a musical development so powerful that it's greater than its parts, making it seem important to be alive just to be a part of it. Nothing has really been on that level afterwards - the first wave of grime was promising, but didn't quite deliver a punk-like shock to music that many hoped for; dubstep almost got there, fulfilling its promise by turning into the inescapable noise of wobble - so undeniably original and so successful that for a few years it seemed unstoppable, known by everyone, even if they mostly hated it. Then it sputtered out, like punk, and was followed - also like punk - not by a new genre, but rather by a polymorphous patchwork of weirdness and invention, the sprawl of fluctuating, overlapping para-genres that I collectively called poststep. 
While wobble might have shortly recreated the intensity and run-amuck excitement of rave, it didn't recreate rave's overall sense of tearing down an old, dead regime and collective beginning the establishing of a new order, and it didn't include the sense of explosive potential for social transformation that punk passed on to postpunk. As a result, even though poststep was deeply invigorated by dubstep's success, impregnated by an overload of ideas and evolutionary potential, it didn't establish a social excitement and individual hunger around this incredible surge of creative energy. Eventually neither poststep itself nor the dubstep movement preceding it had the ability to transform the ingrained outlook of people living through these times, not matter how much shockingly new material it delivered. I'd dare say that had jungle, or rave, or acid, or postpunk, or prog, or psychedelia, or rock'n'roll, been happening for the first time now, it would not have fared any better. All of those musical revolutions happened in times where some sort of belief was possible, although it had to be redefined as time progressed. The music didn't feel transformative because it delivered a future shock - it was delivering a future shock because it happened at a time where people were still able to be shocked.
Perhaps the lack of social urgency is felt as a bigger problem by the generations that has actually been living through previous communal golden ages, than by the generation creating most of poststep today. It's obvious that many of them really want to create something truly new and original, and feel frustrated by the overall consensus that what they're doing is not really breaking any new ground. They might actually be much more conscious than anyone before, about whether what they're doing is new or not, simply by being met by much higher standards of "newness". And yet, just as they might strive for innovation at some points, they often seem just as satisfied with creating facsimiles of old styles, finely crafted pastiches and educated deconstructions. It's probably that, more than anything, that makes people of the generations before wary of acknowledging them any true inventiveness - if you've always associated the creation of the new with the creators utter dedication to that newness, to the future heralded by it, then the way contemporary producers just treat innovation as some sort of aesthetic game to play among many others, rather than a matter of life, death and social transformation, must give you the impression that they're not really up to it. What I think it shows is that even though poststep producers might long just as much for future shock as anyone before them, they're not longing for a socially transformative community build around it. Not because they don't want to be as dedicated to their art as previous generations, but simply because they're unaware that it can have that power, having never experienced the feeling before. To those who hasexperienced it, the sociological aspect is missing, and they draw the conclusion that the music just isn't sufficiently new, because otherwise it obviously should have created the same social investment in its fans and creators as rave or postpunk did.
The poststep producers most likely don't feel this lack, having grown up in a world where music simply doesn't play that role anymore. But to us who have experienced music in that way, something obviously is missing, our addiction to the future rush comes as a package where the transformative power of truly forward-thinking music should be a given. Always looking for more newness, yet each year harder to convince now we've heard it all, constantly suspicious and demanding hard proof, asking ourselves 'is this really it, the new thing, worthy of my belief in it?', rather than simply giving in and revelling in the brilliance in front of us. We long so much to be overtaken by a new musical revolution, yet dare not believe in it unless we know for certain that we'll get exactly what we long for, the whole package just like last time. So in 2010, when I finally realised that there wasn't just an unusual amount of unusually fresh sounding new music around, but that rather what seemed like a veritable tidal wave of the stuff, coming from all sorts of strange directions, it wasn't easy coming to terms with what was going on, because this unexpected arrival of a new golden age, suddenly realising I was in the middle of it, wasn't anything like I'd expected, there wasn't cries of triumph all over the place - heck, grime and dubstep had been much closer in this respect -, everything was sort of going on independently in small hidden pockets, you had to know it was there and connect the dots. 
Yet, it became clear to me that if I didn't accept this as the hidden cornucopia it was, I was simply going to miss it - the golden age was there, but I had to decide to believe in it, suspend the disbelief that had been building ever since the original golden age of rave just sort of fizzled out, so that I was subsequently always conscious about whether something was it or not. And - as soon as I did accept the bounty before me, heard it with fresh ears, it became every bit as overwhelming and future shocking as I could have hoped for. On the purely musical level of course - the sociological level never followed, and it became clear that it didn't have to for the music to be as radically new and inventive as that of earlier, more socially extrovert eras. I could just try and figure out why, all while thrilling to an embarrassment of riches unknown to those who did not let themselves be taken over.
That's where I am now, drawing the conclusion that music can be overwhelmingly, undeniably original and ground breaking without being tied into a socially urgent movement and narrative. Which should not really come as a surprise when I've been deeply compelled by the sheer futuristic strangeness of older electronic music years before rave demonstrated to me that there could actually be a thriving community around something that radically post human. Or for that matter, when I've always been into all sorts of pretentious avant-garde stuff with almost no audience - and certainly with no care for an audience -, simply because I find ridiculous musical weirdness fascinating. And yet, the impact of experiencing the rave years first hand somehow rewired me to think that a future shock in purely musical terms wasn't really relevant without a accompanying impact in the "real world". Well, it would obviously be more amazing if it did include that dimension, but now I know that it doesn't have to to blow me away, that even under conditions stifling to musical evolution, music still evolves, and as a reflection of those very conditions, it perhaps turn even more weird and convoluted than it would otherwise have been. 
So, despite what is missing, I do consider myself lucky: not ending like the rock journalists that missed rave. By recognising that a golden age of poststep was going on around me, and subsequently going all in, trying to catch as much as possible, gave me five of the most exiting years of new, ground breaking music I've ever lived through, all being made right here and right now, an exuberant buffet of excitement and surprise that I wouldn't have dared to even dream of when dubstep started taking off in the mid noughties. Whereas those explaining away every new exhilarating thing as lacking either in content (not really new enough) or context (no social combustion around it), well, they just got five more disappointing years of nothing exiting happening. At least, hopefully, people will one day be able to discover the riches the same way I discovered the riches of postpunk - long after the fact. If not, it'll be their loss.

I'm helping to run and speaking at a study day in London next week, 'Is there a Musical Avant-Garde today?' Come along! We're expecting great research and lively debate, and we're most excited about having a forum for ideas of musical 'avant-gardes' (however you feel about the term) that brings together different musical and scholarly traditions.
Date: Friday 21st July, 9:45am-5pm.

Location: City, University of London, College Building, Room AG08 (entrance via St John Street, no. 280). Nearest Tube stations: Angel and Farringdon.

Keynote: Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London).

Organising panel: Alexi Vellianitis (University of Oxford), Adam Harper (City, University of London) and Rachel McCarthy (Royal Holloway).

Registration: £8 including lunch and refreshments

If you'd like to attend, click here to register 

What would it mean to talk of 'progressive' music today? Applied to the past or, especially, the present, the term 'avant-garde' has largely fallen out of favour within the academy, both as a description of and an imperative for new music. Yet much contemporary music - whichever combinations of limited terms such as 'art', 'popular,' 'classical' or 'commercial' might apply to it - defines itself, if often all too implicitly, in ways most often associated with avant-garde movements: a focus on stylistic complexity and innovation, and an antagonism towards aesthetic norms and the predominant modes of political thought and practice associated with them. But can such a concept still have currency for musicologists and composers?

The aim of this Study Day is to stimulate a broad, interdisciplinary conversation about how, if at all, to talk of an avant-garde in musical cultures today. For the purposes of this conference, the term 'avant-garde' is fluid, but is broadly defined as a particular idea and praxis of a music considered more progressive than certain others.

We invite scholars and practitioners from different fields to address the ways in which musical avant-gardes today are both practiced and discursively constructed. Topics for discussion could include, but are not limited to the following:

• Might there be one, distinct avant-garde (as our title suggests) or many? Should there be one or many?
• How is the avant-garde politically motivated, and how does it contribute to discussions about race, class, and gender? Is it necessary that the musical avant-garde be a mouthpiece for social and political issues, or can these remain indirect, implicit?
• Is the musical avant-garde located within 'classical' or 'art' or 'popular' or 'experimental' music, or none of the above? Can we (still) locate avant-gardes within, variously, art-music, bohemian, bourgeois, academic, urban or minority cultures? Is a musical avant-garde synonymous with an 'underground,' a 'counterculture' or a 'subculture'? Is the avant-garde merely a Western concept or can it be discerned elsewhere? To what extent are all such distinctions even useful?
• What is the present relationship between avant-gardes, patronage, and institutions? Should avant-gardes avoid direct interaction with capital and other forms of social organisation, or should they embrace them? How do musical avant-gardes interact with and condition physical space? How do they relate to emerging technologies
• Ultimately: is progression in musical aesthetics a possible or desirable goal? What might we demand of a musical avant-garde, and what might it demand of us?

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Royal Musical Association.

Timetable (approximate):

09:45 Arrival and Coffee
10:00 Welcome and Introduction
10:20 Max Erwin: 'Political Music After Sound: Konzeptmusik and the Complicity of the Avant-Garde'
10:50 Alistair Zaldua: '"Small and Ugly": Critical Composition and the Avant-Garde'
11:20 Lauren Redhead: 'The Avant-Garde as Exform'
11:50 (end of first session)

13:00 Rachel McCarthy: '"The Beat Gets Closer': Post-Capitalist Potential in Girls Aloud's 'Biology'
13:30 Adam Harper: 'Object: Resistance: Underground Music Institutions, Discourse, and Representation'
14:00 (ten minute break)

14:10 Alexi Vellianitis: 'Street Culture and the Musical Avant-Garde'
14:40 George Haggett: 'Towards a Sensual Operatic Ekphrasis in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp's Written on Skin'
15:10 (ten minute break)

15:20 Jeremy Gilbert: Keynote
16:05 Plenary Session
17:00 (end)

Abstracts (in chronological order):Max Erwin: 'Political Music After Sound: Konzeptmusik and the Complicity of the Avant-Garde'This paper seeks to clarify the historical, social, and aesthetic precedents, as well as their broader implications, for New Conceptualism in general, with specific reference to the music of Johannes Kreidler, Patrick Frank, and Celeste Oram. Pursuant to this end, I examine Kreidler's work Fremdarbeit (2009) and how it deploys both veiled self-critique and a radical repositioning of artistic engagement, from autonomy to complicity. Such a complicity, I argue, is crucial for understanding the most recent developments in the musical avant-garde, wherein every critique of society/culture/politics is a priori a self-critique; or, as composer Marek Poliks recently put it, "new music 2.0 is new music about new music". I will demonstrate that this self-critical paradigm is nevertheless far from introverted, with an examination of Patrick Frank's discursive-collaborative compositions, especially the "theory-opera" Freiheit - die Eutopische Gesellschaft (2015) which has as its aim no less than the wresting of 1968-style utopia from a material/cynical exhaustion.

In addition, I aim to provide an overview of how a younger generation of New Music practitioners are grappling with the problems exposed by avant-garde culture in general and Konzeptmusik in particular. I examine Celeste Oram's works soft sonic surveillance (2015) and O/I (off/on, 2016) in terms of an attempted reconciliation between the emancipatory potential of technology and its deployment by corporate and government entities.

Keywords: New Conceptualism, Johannes Kreidler, political art, cultural theory

Alistair Zaldua: "Small and Ugly"; Critical Composition and the Avant-Garde
The quotation in the title of this talk is taken from Bruno Liebrucks description of the processes involved in progress: "The next higher step always appears small and ugly in comparison to the lower, and more completed, step."(1) In his article political implications of the material of new music(2), Mathias Spahlinger explains the concept and enactment of 'critical composition'. He seeks to define his choice of musical materials, processes, and open form, as suggestive of a political utopian ideal. Spahlinger locates this historically by describing the importance of atonality: "the appearance of atonality is the very first time in history in which an approach to composition affects all parameters, in particular the fundamental change in the relation between the parts to the whole. From this, all other parameters must follow."(3)

In Spahlinger's conception, atonality is a historical and irreversible moment where historical understanding and progress intertwine. This is a musical movement in which a vision of utopia can be suggested. Spahlinger's approach to composition is self-reflexive and autonomous; Max Paddison describes Spahlinger's aesthetic as one that lays emphasis on the "…largely structural, technical, and methodological aspects of the music itself" rather than one that continues and develops Hans Eisler's engagierte musik, or 'committed' music.(4) The final category Paddison uses to frame his response to Spahlinger's text is of "[…]composition as political praxis in the sense of the now long-standing avant-garde project of the search for the new and not-yet-known through emergent forms." Thus, the criteria of critical composition could be employed in the search for a musical avant-garde.

Open forms and emergent structures are at work in Spahlinger's little known vorschälge(5): a collection of 28 concept, or word scores. These were created for the purpose of both blurring the distinction between composer and performer and 'making the composer redundant'. This talk will examine these pieces through the lens of 'critical composition' and make some tentative suggestions as to how this avant-garde practice could be identified in more recent music.

1. "Die nächst höhere Stufe ist immer klein und häßlich, gegenüber der niedrigeren, in ihrer Vollendung." Liebrucks, B. 'Sprache und Bewusstsein', Trans. Alistair Zaldua
2. Mathias Spahlinger, 'political implications of the material of new music', trans. by Alistair Zaldua, Contemporary Music Review, Vol 34, no.2-3 (2015), 127-166.
3. "Die Atonalität ist die erste Erscheinungsform dessen, was dann alle anderen Parameter ergreift, nämlich eine grundsätzliche Veränderung des Verhältnisses der Teile zum Ganzen in der Musik. Und die anderen Parameter mussten folgen." (Translation: Alistair Zaldua), Spahlinger, M, and Eggebrecht, H. H,'Geschichte der Music als Gegenwart. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht und Mathias Spahlinger im Gespräch', Musik-Konzepte special edition, edited by Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Reiner Riehn, Munich (2000),16
4. Paddison, M 'Composition as Political Praxis: A Response to Mathias Spahlinger', Contemporary Music Review, Vol 34 (Part 2-3), 2015, 167-175
5. Spahlinger, M. vorschälge: konzepte zur ver(über)flüssigung der funktion des komponisten, Rote Reihe, Universal Edition, UE 20070, (Vienna: 1993)

Lauren Redhead: The Avant-Garde as Exform
Peter Bürger's critique of the historical avant-garde accounts for its ineffectual nature as a movement because '[a]rt as an institution prevents the contents of works that press for radical change in society […] from having any practical effect.'(1) Bürger argues for hermeneutics to be employed as a critique of ideology,(2) as a facet of the understanding of the 'historicity of aesthetic categories'.'(3) The influence of institutions on music 1968 has served as a central part of its critique: the work concept itself seems to enshrine political ineffectiveness and the bourgeois nature of art practice that ought to be critiqued by an avant-garde. Adorno's claim that 'today the only works which really count are no longer works at all'(4) also no longer seems to apply when the relationship of work such as that produced by the so-called Neue-Konzeptualismus(5) with established musical institutions is considered.

In contrast, Bourriaud's concept of the 'exform'(6) re-conceives the avant-garde as outside of institutions and an idea of 'progress' that is aligned with a dominant capitalist ideology. The exformal is 'the site where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted, products and waste', and forms 'an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political.'(7) Progress, as part of a capitalist narrative, both creates and abhors waste. Therefore the task of the avant-garde artist is to give energy to this waste, outside of political and ideological institutions. This type of avant-garde practice functions to 'bring precarity to mind: to keep the notion alive that intervention in the world is possible.'(8) This paper explores the exform with respect to the music and art work of the British composer Chris Newman, and considers how Bourriaud's approach to re-thinking the avant-garde might apply specifically to contemporary and experimental music in the
present.

1. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 4 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, [1984] 2009), p.95.
2. ibid., p.6.
3. ibid., pp15-16.
4. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. by Anne G Mitchell and Wesley V Blomster (New York: Continuum, 1973), p.30.
5. cf. Johannes Kreidler, 'Das Neue am Neuen Konzeptualismus', published as 'Das Neue and der Konzeptmusik', Neue Zeitschrift für Muzik, vol. 175, no. 1 (2014), pp44-49, de/theorie/Kreidler__Das_Neue_am_Neuen_Konzeptualismus.pdf> [accessed 13.05.2017].
6. Nicholas Bourriaud, The Exform, trans. by Erik Butler, Verso Futures (London: Verso, 2016).
7. ibid., p.10.
8. ibid., p.47.

Rachel McCarthy: 'The Beat Gets Closer': Post-Capitalist Potential in Girls Aloud's "Biology"'
A recent body of Leftist socio-political theory advocates a transformational approach to post-capitalism. Inspired by Brecht's maxim 'don't start from the good old things but the bad new ones', as well as Lenin's suggestion that capitalist institutions such as banks could be re-purposed for socialist ends, writers including Jameson (2010), Williams and Srnicek (2014), and Mason (2015) posit that a future beyond capitalism must be secured not through a rupture with present society, but rather by a transformation of already-existing phenomena. Jameson identifies utopian potential in the organisational structures of Wal-Mart, while Williams and Srnicek promote accelerationism as a means of pushing through the bonds of capitalism.I suggest that the music of the mainstream pop group Girls Aloud represents an aesthetic parallel to this kind of political theory. With roots in the reality television talent show Popstars, capitalist relations of production are deeply embedded in the group's music. Yet analysis of their 2005 hit single 'Biology' demonstrates how, in deviating from the structural norms of mainstream pop, the song contains a striking kernel of utopian impulse. This is further complicated by the disturbing sense of jouissance that pervades the song's reception, whereby a 'critical' enjoyment of mainstream pop can amount to having one's cake and eating it too. Ultimately, 'Biology', like Jameson's assessment of Walmart, should be understood dialectically: neither as a regressive symbol of the evils of capitalism nor as a shining beacon of hope for a post-capitalist future, but as something in between.Adam Harper: 'Object: Resistance': Underground Music Institutions, Discourse and RepresentationHow might a sonic avant-garde go hand in hand with a progressive social ideology today? Might an enlarged set of sonic possibilities correspond to greater social representation? Taking the term 'representation' in both its political and aesthetic senses (that is, the representation of emotion, experience and so on), this paper hopes to begin to approach these questions in the light of a number of recently established collectives and institutions within underground music that explicitly provide platforms specifically for women (such as Sister, Discwoman and Objects Limited), people of certain regional or diaspora contexts (such as NON and Eternal Dragonz), or people of certain sexualities (such as KUNQ). What sort of discourse surrounds such collectives? What are their goals and are they achieving them? To what extent do they combine the musical and the social in redistributing representation?Alexi Vellianitis: 'Street Culture and the Musical Avant-Garde'This paper looks at ways in which certain metaphors or rhetorical strands linked to the musical avant-garde have been mobilised to describe interactions between new classical music and 'urban' music (grime and electronic dance musics) on the London classical concert scene since 2000. In particular, it is concerned with a fetishisation of the 'the symbolic power of street culture[, which] is often understood as authentic, defiant and vital' (Ilan, 2015). Seen as such, this symbolic power shares much with the classical avant-garde, since modernist or avant-garde status has historically been conferred on the basis that music signals 'political engagement and commitment', and is linked to and fuels 'periods of political instability, change, revolt, and revolution' (van den Berg, 2009).In order to unpack these issues, this paper focuses a number musical performances around London over the past decade: two BBC Proms concerts, in which grime was featured alongside the BBC Symphony Orchestra; and the musical activities of composer and producer Gabriel Prokofiev, whose nightclub and record label Nonclassical brings classical music to clubs throughout London, and whose orchestral music brings 'urban sounds into the concert hall' (Shave, 2011). In each case, accusations that the classical concert scene is being 'dumbed down' by featuring popular music are countered by arguments that this 'urban' popular music is in some way new, current, or vital.These concerts foreground questions about race, class, and inclusivity that have been dominant in public discourse. Is this a positive diversification of classical music culture, or just another set of appropriations of black, working-class music by white, affluent musicians? What is it about the experience of social unrest in urban areas that speaks to the political pretentions of the avant-garde? What change, if any, is being effected?George Haggett: Towards a Sensual Operatic Ekphrasis in George Benjamin and Martin Crimp's Written on SkinThere is little in Katie Mitchell's production of George Benjamin and Martin Crimp's 2012 opera Written on Skin that goes unseen: not only does the thirteenth-century plot feature an on-stage orgasm, but throat-slitting, evisceration, cannibalism, and suicide. Nevertheless, when these lurid events are painted by 'the Boy' (the heroine, Agnès's, illicit lover), the audience can never see them. Instead, during what Crimp and Benjamin term 'Miniatures', he takes out a page and, singing, describes the illumination that he has painted onto it. In so doing, he turns his pictures into uttered acts of ekphrasis, the rhetorical device through which visual art is described in detail.In asking how operatic ekphrasis can function and unpacking its potency in Written on Skin, I will do three things: 1) lift ekphrasis from its specificity to the reified, written word and into the performative realm of the sung act; 2) refer outwards from Written on Skin's Troubadour source text to locate its viscera within thirteenth-century understandings of the body; 3) analyse each miniature in turn to interrogate Benjamin's compositional responses to these conditions. Integrating the former two, I will dissect Written on Skin into four sensory organs—eyes, ears, skin, and mouths—and lodge them between Miniature analyses. My intention is to bring the body to the fore, always in pursuit of a reading that hears the body when it hears ekphrasis, and hears ekphrasis when it hears the body.

All i can say is that i Love Garrett David's music. So happy to see there is a upcoming release on Distant Hawaii.

Oh. Ross From Friends is back with a deep rhythmic release on Magicwire. So looking forward to this one. It sounds mad.

In Chaos In The CBD and Jon Sable we trust. So nice to see another one coming from these guys.
You can always trust theses guys.

So nice to hear BLONDES are back. Following up their amazing album swisher. They have the same love from me as Teengirl Fantasy. Love them New Yorkers.

15 tracks collected throughout June. Got some really good ones there. If you don't know what to listen to. You can always listen to this to get inspired.

Grant totally blew me away with his album cranks and the even earlier one the acrobat as well. Two heavyweight deep house albums. So glad to see he is back on lobster t. for a new release. Cannot wait for this one.

Frank & Tony are back with a new ep and it's inspired by DaRand Land, which also include DaRand Land. So why am i so hooked on Frank & Tony, well the depth in their music is so speaking to me it turns me bonkers. I love their music.

So here is the playlist for April. Oh enough said really, you just need to listen to all theses great tracks.

This release by Octo Octa is so great. New Paths is such a great tune! Octo Octa's 4 release in a short amount of time. And such quality. I love Octo Octa.