So Lobster Theremin never sleeps. So an imprint of Lobster Theremin is back with a release from this aussie. Two disco tracks and two on the deeper side. A perfect mix. I'm gonna keep my ears open when it comes to Mood J.

So Baltra is back with a release and it got a swedish touch to it. DJ Seinfeld is remixing Baltra.
So exciting.

I have been a fan of these guys since they got me hooked on their 2 first ep's and an amazing first album. But they kind of lost me around their second album but now i think we are back on track again and this song is so good. Looking forward to hear what more they got coming.

So stoked about this release from No Moon, the guy with not to long ago released an ep on X-kalay. One amazing release from No Moon. Following up with this release on great MÖRK.

At the end of 2015 it seemed like the golden age of poststep was fading fast, so it was quite a surprise that 2016 turned out to be one of the best poststep years ever, perhaps, in terms of completely exhilarating new releases, second only to the peak year 2010. Sure, 2016 didn't have the overwhelming abundance of weirdness and newness that made the years 2009-2013 so incredible, the constant presence of multiple fronts of innovation each developing its own amazing sound. Rather, most things were just further developments of the two already established frontiers of new electronic experimentalism (in contrast to the many older forms of electronic experimentalism still going on - IDM/glitch, dark avant-ambient, minimal techno/industrial noise hybrids etc.), namely abrasive, icy-digital maximalism and various takes on weird hyper-grime, from the neon coloured to the almost vaporwave-weightless. More or less, this was also the main developments in 2015, but in a scattered way that gave the impression of lingering pockets of resistance rather than a frontline moving forward. In 2016, though, that was exactly what happened: The amount and versatility of brilliant new releases made it hard to keep up with just the very best of them.

It actually leaves me confused, as I had already prepared to think of poststep as something that had run its course, and all that was left was to analyse the remains in further depth, figuring out what it was all about and why it didn't get the recognition it deserved. Now, the problem is even more complex, because this unexpected bouncing back seems pretty unprecedented - looking back at other golden ages, the pattern should be that once the rot has set in, it's only going to be diminishing returns from then on. Sure, slight resurgences happen, but only after the golden era is over - that's why it's resurgences, a conscious effort to keep the dream alive that pays off for a while. In retrospect, that's what something like breakcore was, and why it never felt completely convincing as a new development, and perhaps that's also what dubstep was until it unexpectedly turned into wobble and horrified the original true believers. With post dubstep, though, all the great new stuff coming out in 2016 felt like powerful, necessary unfoldings of developmental paths still far from exhausted, rather than attempts to keep poststep going through refining (like with early dubstep) or hybridization (breakcore). And who would try to do that anyway? If there's any "true believers" in poststep, they're rare, nonpartisan and probably has completely different opinions on what constitutes the great stuff and the golden age. But then again, perhaps this is exactly why the style was able to come back in 2016: It had no idea it was finished, because it wasn't even aware it existed in the first place. Which once again brings us back to the question of what the hell post step was and why it didn't get a whole generation exhilarated to be living through such incredible times, musically. Recently I've come further towards thinking this problem through, and hopefully I'll get around to writing it all down soon. Meanwhile, here's a belated "best of 2016" list - heaps of incredible stuff that everyone should own:
Fatima al Qadiri: Brute (Hyperdub)
In terms of formal innovation, Brute didn't add much to the style Qadiri established with the Desert Strike-ep, but instead it offered plenty of what you could call emotional innovation, creating a truly terrifying slow motion-vision of a world falling apart, permeated by supressed fear and violence lurking just below a surface of ghostlike exhaustion. Each time I listen to it, it seems to become more overwhelming and ominously prophetic. In a league of its own really.

Foodman: EZ Minzoku (Orange Milk)
Also in a league of its own, but a completely different beast, this album exists in its own disturbing grotesque-comical unreality. At times resembling a swarm of cartoon microbes skittering about, writhing and mutating in a sonic petri dish, at times exhibiting an oddly compelling - albeit also thoroughly bizarre and alien - sense of groove and melody, but first and foremost simply not sounding like something a human mind could ever have created, or even imagined.
Darq E Freaker: ADHD (Big Dada)
Where most experimental grime is ethereal and atmospheric, this amazing EP twists and exaggerates all the most euphoric and deliberately synthetic grime elements into unrecognizable mutant shapes. As explosive, colourful and hyperactive as old Hyper on Experience-records.

Murlo: Odyssey (Mixpak)Every bit as original and relentlessly inventive as Darq E Freaker, yet also a completely different, much more playful and quirky take on hyper-coloured neo-grime. The melodic structures are as odd and unpredictable as they're catchy, and the overall sound is deeply inorganic in the most compelling way, like a virtual playground overrun by living, neon-coloured plastic toys - fascinating and slightly insidious.
Ískeletor: Lurker (Blacklist)To some degree working within a mini-tradition of raw and ugly experimental grime - where we have previously found Filter Dread, SD Laika and Acre - but also making it much more loose, loud and visceral. Refreshingly different in a year where most forms of post dubstep were dominated by polished digital sounds and shiny virtual surfaces.
Wwwings: Phoenixxx (Planet MU)Infusing cyber-maximalism with a weird sense of para-organic grittiness and unusual melodic twists - often making it downright catchy or touching -, Phoenixxx is simultaneously a disturbing reflection of a fractured present, as well as a deep sci fi-experience that sounds like rave music made a thousand years from now, by war machines faithfully continuing humanity's carnage long after humanity itself has been wiped out.

Amnesia Scanner: AS EP (Young Turks)In many ways inhabiting the same post human virtual space as Wwwings, but making it even more brutally mangled, at times almost doomcore-heavy, and at the same time taking it in a much more bizarre and surreal direction. Deeply fascinating in its utter strangeness and sheer originality.
Brood Ma: Daze (Tri Angle)As for gloomy cyber-soundscapes, Brood Ma was probably the purest and most fully fledged of 2016s many virtual maximalists. Perhaps not being quite as strange and forward-sounding as Wwwings and Amnesia Scanner, Daze nevertheless worked brilliantly as an integrated, atmospheric whole - claustrophobic, apocalyptic, and yet often surprisingly beautiful.
DJ NJ Drone: Syn Stair (Purple Tape Pedigree)Taking digital maximalism to the most abrasive, pummelling extreme, Syn Stair is pretty much an endless staccato structure of hydraulic stutter-beats and hyper-digital rave sounds processed into ear-slicing treble-terror. With only the slightest, most dysfunctional hints of melody or groove, this is one ugly, brutally inorganic record - and it's all the more fascinating for it.


NA: Cellar (Fade to Mind)Appropriately named, this is dark, dank and slimy underground-tunnel-grime, at times recalling the gloomy imperial marches of early dubstep, or even PCP-style doomcore, but recreated fully within the current hyper-inorganic, cyber-maximalist aesthetic.
Halp: Polar (Golden Mist)Clearly building on the compositionally complex and subtly orchestrated ghost-grime of Fatima al Qadiri, but adding a hearty dose of the twitchy hydraulic rhythms usually associated with the Jam City/Brood Ma/Rabit-lineage of cybernetic maximalism. A very obvious hybrid, in other words, but one that works brilliantly.
Loom: European Heartache (Gob Stopper)Oscillating between crass, hyper coloured intensity and melancholic beatless ambience, this EP not only span the furthest extremes of experimental grime - it somehow also manages to make them complementary elements of a broader sci fi-vision.

Rushmore: Ours After (Trax Couture)Weightless trap and new age grime at its most floaty, airy and almost impossibly lithe. The affected emo-vocals of the title track are hard to stomach, but the rest of the album has just the right transparent, untouched-by-human-hand quality to give it a genuine - albeit discrete - futuristic sheen.
Yamaneko: Project Nautilus (Local Action)Consisting almost entirely of icy bleep-patterns glittering like pixilated crystals in an endless empty blackness, Projet Nautilus is as cold and bleak as the most puritan minimal techno, yet also inflicted with an original sense of abrupt, weirdly structured melody - the last traces of grime in what has now become something completely different.

Ash Koosha: |AKA| (Ninja Tune)Containing some of the most captivating melodic material of 2016, |AKA| often seems like a hybrid of "new synth" (Oneotrhrix Point Never et al.), glitchy EDM and dreamy indietronica. Still, it's all filtered through an entropic poststep-prism of digtial ghost sounds and disintegrating structures, creating a feel that is simultaneously contemporary and sort of timeless.
Lolina: Live in ParisThe kind of broken aural dreamscape that shouldn't really sound "new", using well known elements like messy rudimentary beats and minimally palpitating sequencers, manipulated samples and aloof narration. Nevertheless, it's put together in such a thoroughly weird and idiosyncratic way that it's almost impossible to describe, simply not sounding like anything you've heard before.
Patten: Psi (Warp)Combining a hazy sense of loss and sadness with blurry elements of rave and club music, Psicould perhaps be seen as belonging to the ongoing hauntological trend of "rave deconstruction". The actual result is a much stranger beast, though, like an AI trying to recreate what we used to think the future would sound like, based on assorted scraps and fragments found in decaying memory banks. Cod futurism gone so awry that it's actually sounding genuinely weird and futuristic.

Sinistarr: Naine Rouge (Exit)Where most recent footwork mutations have tried to make the style more intricate and atmospheric, Sinistarr takes it in the opposite direction, back to the original raw febrility and then further into something even more weird and twitchy visceral, with the hackneyed ghetto clichés thankfully absent.
Zomby: Ultra (Hyperdub)Despite being perhaps a couple of tracks too long, Ultra contain lots of brilliant music, often pushing the patented Zomby-style in slightly new directions, and offering a bleaker, more splintered and icy cold take on the sound. Makes it clear that he's still a force to be reckoned with, and at this point perhaps the most enduring of the original poststep key players.
Debruit: Debruit & Istanbul (ICI) Usually Debruit's ethnotronic funk is bright and playful, but this time he's both darker and more introverted, and the sound more raw and organic (and, unfortunately, traditional) - which makes sense, given that it's a collaboration with a bunch of Turkish musicians, recorded on location in Istanbul. Intense and timely stuff, if perhaps not as uniquely Debruit-ish as before. 

Dusk + Blackdown Keysound Rinse FM March 2017 show ft Ganesa Special Request "Stairfoot Lane Bunker" [forthcoming Houndstooth] Suda "Inner Monologue" [Her Records] AlexAugier "TFG Track 4" [unreleased] ? "Detour" ? [unreleased] Trilla P "Exciter" [unreleased] Krotone "System Check" [unreleased] Lack "Get A Grip" [unreleased] Grievious angel "Wicked Sound (Yak Remix)" [Black Beacon Sound]

**Dusk + Blackdown Rinse FM Feb 2017 Keysound show** Naaahhh "Blooz" [Blackest Ever Black]Naaahhh "My Theme" [Blackest Ever Black]Vern & Milla "Intro riff" [Unreleased]Logos & Mumdance "Cafe del Mar" [Different Circles]Sega Bodega "Ess B (Intro)" [Crazy Legs]Glot "Flaga" [unreleased]Sega Bodega "Strings In April" [Crazy Legs]Isslund "Erotic Weakness" [Unreleased]Ahadadream "Bamboo

  Keysound show rinse FM Jan 17 Good Lads "Marger Evil remix" Fujin "Expanse" Glot "Ruinous" Yamaneko "Shadow Temple Early" [Different Circles] Blackdown "Keysound Sessions Anthem [feverish weightless mix]" [Keysound Recordings] Sharp Veins "Already Bones" Blackdown "Halcyon Skies" Glot "Vitriol Bile Pt. 2" Jett Chandon "Julia" Jam City "Direct Drums" [Night Slugs] Mr. Mitch "Dru (Part 2)" [

I was so shocked and upset to learn of Mark Fisher's death yesterday. For me, Mark was both an idol and, as time passed, someone I was always pleased and not a little humbled to encounter in person and sometimes share a platform with. I didn't know Mark very well personally, and being a generation younger than he was I only know second hand the milieu of the 90s and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University he formed an integral part of, through its growing legacy and some of the reminiscences and thoughts of people who knew him then (Robin MacKay, Simon Reynolds and Jeremy Greenspan among them). But as someone a generation younger than Mark, I can express something about the incalculable impact he had on me, my thinking and writing, and my gratitude for the times when he actively, kindly helped me, as well as the times that were just good times.

Mark simply changed my life. By 2009, the year I started the blogging, he was a central node in a network of bloggers, thinkers and forums that encompassed critical theory, philosophy and several areas of cultural criticism, especially of popular music. It was a conversation and a community I eagerly wanted to participate in, late and all too hot-headed though I was. As commissioning editor of Zer0 books, he fostered the growth and evolution of this network into a collective of thinkers built on diverse, self-contained and regularly powerful statements that went far.
Mark's own essay for the imprint, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was undoubtedly one of the best of the lot. I continue to recommend it widely as one of the best, most distilled expression of today's ideological challenges. By the end of 2009, Mark had reached out to me and asked if I wanted to write for Zer0. I was 22. Infinite Music was the result two years later. He told me that I should reconsider the title I had initially proposed - 'The New New Music' (can you believe that!?) - which didn't take Mark's genius, but thank God. His faith in me - this despite my frequent and often crude HTML critiques of his positions on music - led to so many amazing opportunities and blessings for the struggling, wet-behind-the-ears critic I was.I first met Mark in person in April 2010 when we were both part of a panel discussion at London's Café OTO, a 'salon' under the auspices of Wire magazine: 'Revenant Forms: The Meaning of Hauntology'. He was warm, friendly and funny back stage, powerful, precise, provocative and funny on-stage. Someone I brought to the event who didn't know Mark and his ideas said to me 'but capitalism is the only system that works!' (this of course is precisely was Capitalist Realism describes and addresses). I believe I next saw him marching alongside thousands of students at one of the protests against the raising of tuition fees and the cutting of the university teaching budget in late 2010, an issue that inflamed and unified the blog network like nothing else, not least Mark himself.At some point in 2011 I was at a gig behind a pub at which Maria Minerva was playing. Maria had been taught by Mark during her Master's at Goldsmith's college. In an amazing moment, Maria gave a shout-out on stage to her 'professors' - I followed the direction of her outstretched arm, and there was Mark, leaning against a wall next to Kodwo Eshun. I saw him at least twice in 2013, once at a symposium at Warwick University on the Politics of Contemporary music, where I burned with envious ambition at his ability to deliver such an on-point, appropriate and funny lecture from only a small notebook. The other time was in Berlin, where I was talking about accelerationist pop for the CTM festival, Mark was there to talk about the death of rave. We walked from our hotel to the venue, had lunch, and Mark talked sympathetically and encouragingly about my career difficulties. He sat in the front row of the talk I gave. I played some of the kitschiest vaporwave as the audience came in. I'll never forget the bemused look on his face, as if he was trying to figure out what sort of a hilarious prank was being played, and whether he wanted in on it. That image of Mark is still for me the opposite end on the spectrum of vaporwave listeners to the one where vaporwave is, uncritically, 'just good sincere nostalgic vibes', and why I have no regrets about 'politicising' vaporwave (a genre that in any case owes an enormous debt to his theorising of hauntology).But for me there was another Mark as well - the formidable writer and theorist, k-punk. This voice I began to get to know in 2006, the year when he did so much to lay the foundations of hauntology (it was his invention, frankly). It was from k-punk that I learned about something called 'neoliberalism' ('what on earth has this guy got against liberalism?' I would wonder). It was from k-punk that I learned that post-modernism was not necessarily the wonderful cultural emancipation I had naively believed it to be. In fact, during these years I was mostly against k-punk. He was critical of more recent trends in electronic music, believing them a poor comparison to what the 90s had offered. This led to a fierce division between writers and bloggers that manifested not just in blogs but magazine sites and a day-long conference at the University of East London, which I attended (the first time I saw Mark in the flesh). Though we both agreed that new music was necessary, naturally his position irritated my young, idealistic self with my special music, and my own blog posts attempted to intervene in support of the new stuff. 'Loving Wonky', my first blog post to attract more than a handful of readers, was directed at k-punk implicitly throughout and at its conclusion, explicitly.This negativity that got me started, this need to talk back to the authority figure, was a testament to the power of his writing. But more so was the way he subsequently taught me as I took a closer look. In preparation for my post on hauntology, I printed out and re-read everything he'd written on or near the subject, underlining and making notes. And he convinced me of his position. He was right. I didn't want to accept his theorising of 'the end of history', thinking it merely pessimistic. His blog posts are so imaginatively, seductively, persuasively written. He's probably the most referenced person on Rouge's Foam. Then I read Capitalist Realism, and rather than the mere youthful defence of certain musics it could have been, Infinite Music became an attempt to stand with Capitalist Realism and answer k-punk's resounding call for a newfound creative imagination. Later, in 2012, it was from k-punk that I learned of accelerationism, and because of his theory that I used it to describe new forms of electronic music in 'Welcome to the Virtual Plaza.' And it wasn't only theory. Wherever I wrote about music and Mark was writing too (Wire, Electronic Beats), my writing was improved by the honour and by his raising of the bar (this was the guy who had described Michael Jackson as 'only a biotic component going mad in the middle of a vast multimedia megamachine that bore his name.')Mark isn't just the figure behind every significant thing I've done as a critic. His theory is now deeply embedded in who I am and what I say. Even the residue of the ideas I have fought against condition my thinking. I have brought his concepts home, they structure my conversations with my friends and family. Capitalist realism: describing the ideology that miserable as it is, there is no alternative to capitalism and that's just the way it is. Business ontology: the ideology that any social or cultural structure must exist as a business. His use of the concept of the Big Other - the imaginary subjectivity that holds important beliefs but may not in fact exist - has guided me through my personal response to Brexit and Trump. (By the way, I couldn't possibly summarise Mark's writing - if you haven't read it already, what are you waiting for?) Even his blackly comic image of a broken neoliberalism, as a cyclist dead and slumped over the handlebars yet continuing downhill and gathering speed, keeps coming back to me.Mark eventually became something of a role model to me. Asked what sort of space I wanted to carve out between academia and public criticism for my own career, I have often said I wanted to be a Mark Fisher. Yet as he regularly explained with his astonishing balance of passion and precision, the world as it is today, its ideologies and its institutions - it's hardly set up to encourage fringe intellectuals. I'm not sure whether he would have fully encouraged me to aspire to his career, tied so closely as he well knew to challenges of mental health (something I started to live in 2014 when, initially and like so many others, my PhD went nowhere). But he did warmly support and encourage my writing when so many people around me could only regard it with doubt.One of Mark's most abiding lessons, and for me at least the key to his writing, was something he put pithily to me at the end of an email: 'Negativity, not pessimism!' I had not appreciated the subtle but important difference the two, but then I instantly did. What a rallying call for the nightmarish 2010s. And as others have noted, it was his encouragement and optimism that was especially nourishing. It was certainly not a pessimistic new-music naysayer who wrote the final words of Capitalist Realism:

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.

A big long (k-punk-quoting) blog post like the good old days. I used to apologise for them. Mark never did. I still can't wait to read his latest book.The last time I saw Mark was after Dhanveer Brar's lecture on Actress at Goldsmiths last autumn. He was talking to his friends and colleagues in the distance and still, even after all this time, I was too nervous to say hello. What a fool. I had not stopped to gather up and communicate Mark's importance to me until now, and I hope I don't make such a mistake again. What I've seen over the cybernetic systems this weekend has emphasised how important he was to so many others as well, and well beyond the world of theory too.Goodbye Mark, and thank you.

Dusk + Blackdown mix Blackdown "Hackney Vandal Patrol" Blackdown "Halcyon Skies" Koast & Blackdown "More Drumz, More Rollage" Blackdown "Somewhere Else" Blackdown "Untouchable" Rollage vol.1: WDYM?! (rollage VIP) Dusk + Blackdown "Clueless" Blackdown & Nico Lindsay "No Affiliation (Keysound Sessions Anthem 8bar vocal mix)" Dusk + Blackdown "Peng One Two VIP" Blackdown "Keysound Sessions

Dusk + Blackdown Rinse Nov 16 Alexx A-Game x Swing Ting "A-Game Everyday" (Master) [Swing Ting] Rider Shafique "I-Dentity" [Young Echo] Blackdown "Keysound Sessions Anthem (Feverish Weightless mix)" [unreleased] Kyo x Daffy "Metroid (Devil Mix)" [unreleased] Vern & Milla "Yoshimitsu" [unreleased] Om Unit "Hidden Dread" [forthcoming Cosmic Bridge] LKD Beats "Arctic" [unreleased] Orson "

I think it really gripped me when it went black.

Then just legs and...

I like this. Feels like a tape some kids find and decide to play in the old VCR in the cabin that they've rented for the weekend.

I don't know anything else about this band / person but I'm gonna start digging now...

Dusk & I have done tracklists for every one of our Rinse shows since 2007. I do this because I want the new producers we find to get discovered & recognised. Lost dubs is all well and "elusive" or "ephemeral" or whatever, but in a world of more music being made or published than we each could listen to in any one lifetime, cutting some signal through the noise matters. At least, it matters

Not that one.

Here's Thighpaulsandra, whose Golden Communion record is starting to worm its way into my life. This one, goes all over the place and through a lot of his influences: from Kevin Ayers, to Julian Cope and onto Coil. It's not a blend as much as a spread... this track doesn't know what it wants to be and is all the better for it.

Yeah. Song-writing needs more of this hopeless dilettantery. It's full of fun and frolics; lets in light and shade equally, feels earnest and heartfelt and honest in its appreciation of others.

Art by Kim LaughtonThe first episode of my new monthly show for RBMA Radio aired a few days ago, and is archived here. Bubblebath is a two-hour show all recorded and edited by me, featuring new, typically lesser known tunes that I'm interested in, segments going for some deeper analysis, and interviews with various people from underground music culture. For the first show, I looked at the pseudo-humanistic style of James Ferraro's Human Story 3 and some other records, and talked to Mat Dryhurst about some of the problems facing underground culture today and his platform Saga. The playlist is below.
People in the US won't be able to listen to the archived version of the show for various legal reasons. I didn't realise that would happen and I do apologise. If that's you, you might try using a proxy server, especially with different browsers. US listeners can listen to the show live without any problems, though, so I'll make sure to forewarn people next time.
· 00:00:02 - 00:02:41 Julien - Alpha Beat - Calm (from Calm 2 https://calmdot.bandcamp.com/album/calm-2)

· 00:02:41 - 00:05:28 Alfie Casanova - 4 Play - Calm (from Calm 2 https://calmdot.bandcamp.com/album/calm-2)

· 00:05:28 - 00:10:16 NKC - Salon Room - Her Records (from Hague Basement http://store.herrecords.com/album/hague-basement)

· 00:10:16 - 00:13:03 仮想夢プラザ - 秘密 - Plus 100 Records (from Balance with Useless https://plus100.bandcamp.com/album/balance-2) (extract, background, and again throughout )

· 00:13:03 - 00:18:17 Julien - Day Racer - Orange Milk (from FACE OF GOD https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/face-of-god)

· 00:18:17 - 00:23:52 NV - Bells Burp - Orange Milk (from Binasu https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/binasu)

· 00:24:50 - 00:29:57 Easter - Leda - own Bandcamp page (from New Cuisine Part 2 https://easterjesus.bandcamp.com/track/leda)

· 00:29:57 James Ferraro - various tracks from Human Story 3 - own Bandcamp page (https://jjamesferraro.bandcamp.com/album/human-story-3) (extract, background)

· 00:32:04 - 00:37:32 James Ferraro - Individualism - own Bandcamp page (from Human Story 3 https://jjamesferraro.bandcamp.com/album/human-story-3)

· 00:39:19 - 00:40:31 John Adams - Lollapalooza - Nonesuch (from I Am Love Soundtrack) (extracts)

· 00:40:55 - 00:41:20 Steve Reich - Eight Lines Number 1 - RCA Red Seal (extract)

· 00:41:36 - 00:42:30 Aaron Copland - Allegro from Appalachian Spring - Sony Classical (from Bernstein Century: Copland) (extract)

· 00:43:05 - 00:44:32 Jeffery L. Briggs - CivNet Opening Theme - Microprose (from CivNet Soundtrack) (extract)

· 00:44:48 - 00:45:24 Oneohtrix Point Never - Problem Areas - Warp (from R Plus Seven) (extract)

· 00:45:52 - 00:46:11 Kara-Lis Coverdale - AD_RENALINE - Sacred Phrases (from Aftertouches https://sacredphrases.bandcamp.com/album/aftertouches) (extract)

· 00:46:30 - 00:47:04 Giant Claw - DARK WEB 005 - Orange Milk (from DARK WEB https://orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dark-web) (extract)

· 00:47:25 - 00:47:51 Metallic Ghosts - University Village - Fortune 500 (from City of Ableton https://fortune500.bandcamp.com/album/the-city-of-ableton) (extract)

· 00:48:58 - 00:49:59 Torn Hawk - The Romantic - Mexican Summer (from Union and Return) (extract)

· 00:52:12 - 00:55:08 Subaeris - Shadow Portal - Nirvana Port (from Transcendent God https://nirvanaport.bandcamp.com/album/transcendent-god)

· 00:55:08 - 00:58:23 Subaeris - Beating Heart - Nirvana Port (from Transcendent God https://nirvanaport.bandcamp.com/album/transcendent-god)

· 00:59:08 - 01:01:16 Klein - Babyfather Chill - own Bandcamp page (from ONLY https://klein1997.bandcamp.com/album/only)

· 01:01:16 - 01:03:45 Klein - Make it Rain - own Bandcamp page (from BAIT https://klein1997.bandcamp.com/album/bait)

· 01:04:49 - 01:47:38 Valentin Silvestrov - Diptych - ECM (from Valentin Silvestrov: Sacred Works) various tracks from Valentin Silvestrov: Silent Songs - ECM (extracts, background)

· 01:49:09 - 01:54:25 Swimful - Atop - SVBKVLT (from PM2.5 https://svbkvlt.bandcamp.com/album/pm25)

· 01:54:25 - 01:58:45 Swimful - Bounce (Simpig Remix) - SVBKBLT (from PM2.5 Remixes https://svbkvlt.bandcamp.com/album/pm25-remixes)

Art by Sam Lubicz3hd festival is back for its second year in Berlin this October, and its website has gone up (click here). I'll be there lecturing and participating in discussions over various aspects of their theme 'There is nothing left but the future.' In the meantime, I wrote an essay for them (click here to read it) sketching some initial thoughts about some of the problems facing musical futurism and musical sarcasm after a summer of violence and Brexit, through the lens of the 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and Wendy Carlos's electronic version of it particularly (incidentally, Jeremy Corbyn, something of a lightning rod for various kinds of political tumult whatever you think of him, recently mentioned listening to Beethoven's 5th).
Beethoven's Ode to Joy has accumulated cultural and political baggage of apparently every different kind, and, especially, in extremes. It has played the role of humanity's highest and most noble achievement and an incitement to horrifying violence both. And it is the anthem of the European Union...
Who needs dehumanising machine music when you have Trump, when you have the rise of hatred the world over?
There is an important difference, of course, between the future and the futuristic. The futuristic is a costume, a thrill, a performance, a caricature, all from within the safety of the present. The future is what actually happens to you and at some point, whoever you are, it will hurt you. What can art and music help us to do and to say before that point?

Well, I never knew about this... I guess Farmer Glitch does since he knows The Mob mob... Been through Temple Cloud loads of times, of course, but never off course...

These little spaces and places interest me and the Mutoid connection sends seeds way back to the early post-Pilton parties and pre-raves that popped up (periodically)... Also great to not know about something on the doorstep, especially as it's almost certainly related and connected in various ways to places / people I know.

A calming band on indistinct uncertainty in a world tainted with grim inevitability...

Still, keep on! Keep on!

Always had an on-off relationship with American Hardcore... never liked most of it as much as the Brit anarcho / hippy / punk dimension but this was a great song and is still a great song...

And entirely true, of course.

**Dusk + Blackdown Rinse FM May 16** Dusk + Blackdown "What do you mean?! (parro mix)" [unreleased] Threnody "Forward Levels" [unreleased] Mark pritchard "The Blinds Cage Feat Beans" [Warp] Fox "Chaos (prod. by Samrai & Platt) [unreleased] Blackdown "Hackney Vandal Patrol" [unreleased] Delo "Can You" [unreleased] Squane "Bog"  [unreleased] Yak "Anju" [unreleased] Champion "Chrome" [unreleased

There's a new IX Tab split release with Hoofus on the every reliable Front&Follow, the first in a series of collaborative things...

Here's a sample:



Will come in a sexy little cassette form plus downloads for those of you with digital manipulation devices.

An hour of dubs from me. Truce & Damu in two very different mixes to follow.

...a mix by Kemper Norton, or a mix of Kemper Norton, including some stuff I don't think I've heard before: an on open envelope of odds and ends, including a collaboration / remix of the inimitable Ice Bird Spiral, a band who might well have precipitated a causal chain that lead to Kemper Norton, Ekoplekz, Hacker Farm, IX Tab and probably many others... if only because everyone who went to see them thought: yeah, absolutely, this is immense; why the fuck NOT?

Time marches on and new music is made, but not music containing much that is actually "new". From my perspective, this is where things have been heading the last couple of years, after approximately five years of endless wonder and invention, while from the perspective of other people, it's how things have continuously been since at least the nineties. For me, the big question is not why things are slowing down - if anything, it would be far more weird if they didn't - but rather, why the majority of people, including those who have dedicated their lives to actively investigating the cutting edge of new music, didn't experience the same future rush as I did, even when directly confronted with some of the most unique, strange and groundbreaking music ever made. And, perhaps even more puzzling, why did the people making that music rarely argue their cause? Almost as if they didn't really believe they could create anything new, they seemed unable to escape the retro-logical mindset themselves, even when their creations did. The answers to these questions are complex and I'm still in the process of thinking them through, so it'll still take some time before I'll the be able to pull it all together comprehensively. In the meantime, even though I'm not driven by the same thrill of discovery as before, I'd still like to make some kind of overview of the state of posstep last year. There was nowhere as much good stuff as in 2014, but the creative momentum of the poststep peak years was still big enough to produce quite a few brilliant records, even if they were all more or less working from within categories established during the peak years, rather than inventing new ones.

Jlin: Dark Energy (Planet MU)
SIMPIG: Strangers (Argent Sale)Darren Keen: He's Not Real (Orange Milk)Ever since footwork became the new big thing among ghetto beat connoisseurs, there's been a lot of handwringing about the possible gentrification of the style. Even with Jlin, who I suppose is seen as an "authentic" member of the original scene, there's been some talk about how she's moving away from the raw radicalism of the original sound, which I think is pretty silly. She's allowing herself to experiment and use a broad palette of sounds and ideas, but the "authentic" rawness and jagged edges are certainly still there - it's just not something that is made with the endlessly repeating rap- and soul-loops of "traditional" footwork, and thank heavens for that. Those loops were already pretty lame to begin with, and have only become more and more annoying as they've been used over and over again for five years by anyone who wanted to sound "authentic". Wonderfully free of that, Dark Energy is one of the best and most forward thinking "proper" footwork albums ever, second perhaps only to DJ Diamonds Flight Muzik, as well as one of the very best and most refreshingly strange albums of 2015. Which, sadly, doesn't mean that it's offering something completely new and unheard, it's just one of the best possible utilization of the still existing potential for the new and unheard in a style that is, in itself, not all that new any more.
Where Dark Energy remains raw, SIMPIGs Strangers is archetypical dreamy-cosmic, almost chilled, footwork-through-an-IDM-lens, to the degree that you hardly even notice the footwork elements at first - it's mostly just rhythmic eccentricities seamlessly blending into a wider concoction of different well established poststep innovations, as well as various chill out/IDM-trappings in general. It was definitely the bitstep-remains that drew me in more than the footwork, but in the end it all just comes together in a way that simultaneously feels obviously right and perhaps a bit too obvious. On the one hand, Strangersrefine and recombine stuff that already works, rather than invent anything new, and as such it's clearly exemplifying the halt that poststeps engine of invention has come to, but on the other hand, it's hard not to enjoy an album that manage to use a good deal of the innovations that has exited me so much the last five years in a rather original and convincing way. After all, I still wish there was more of this stuff, and SIMPIG delivers it.
If Dark Energy is "authentic" footwork at its best and most forward thinking, and SIMPIG is a brilliant example of the "inauthentic" cosmic/atmospheric approach to the style, Darren Keen's He's Not Real is a typical example of the more bizarre and silly end of "inauthentic footwork", turning it into a hyperactive bricolage of IDM-tomfoolery and goofy samples. The result is pretty uneven, with several tracks being hard to stomach due to their lame sample sources (self consciously cheesy pop, ironic "ghetto" vocals), but there's also quite a few tracks (something like half of them, I'd say) that reaches a kind of absurdist, baroque charm that is quite unique, making the album worth seeking out.


Bruce Smear: Chlorine (Orange Milk)Oneothrix Point Never: Garden of Delete (Warp)Co La: No No (Software)The unhinged and at times almost disturbing weirdness of Giant Claw, Filter Dread (on Midi Space at least) and especially Felicita, was one of the most refreshing developments in 2014, but it wasn't developed much further in 2015 - actually, if that year produced anything even remotely as deranged as Felicitas Frenemies, I didn't hear it. The ultra sharp, bright and hyperactive sound of Bruce Smear's Chlorine came close, but also seemed, to some degree, like a bit-too-obvious mixture of PC music, cryo-grime and electro-tinged IDM, and as such it eventually did feel like a slight step backwards despite it's exciting syntheticness.

If anyone actually seemed to take a step forward in this direction, it was Oneothrix Point Never. On Garden of Delete he all but completely abandoned the retro-synth sound of his early records, in favour of a strange concoction of abrasive digital textures, and an opulent, baroque-yet-inorganic approach to composition, sometimes resulting in something like an absurdist take on EDM-"song writing", complete with grotesquely autotuned vocals. Like a self consciously weird and arty cousin to Hudson Mohawkes kitchy Butter, not everything on Garden of Delete worked equally well, but it was definitely one of the most unique and alien records of 2015.

Slightly in the same area - though nowhere as loudly twisted and fractured - was Co La's NO NO, which finally felt like a proper follow up to 2013s Moody Coup (2014's uneven Hegemony of Delete seemed more like a one-off diversion). Using the same strange AI-dream-logic that made Moody Coup such an inexhaustibly fascinating record, but taken in a more febrile and rhythmically angular direction, NO NOwas in many ways as artificial and post-organic as OPN, yet at the same time deceptively straightforward and well rounded, and as such perhaps the better album.

Holly Herndon: Platform (4AD) Aisha Devi: Of Matter and Spirit (Houndstooth)Visionist: Safe (Pan)As one of the most talked about and anticipated albums of 2015, Holly Herndon's Platformseemed to disappoint some, but with me it was the other way round - I liked it so much more exactly because she abandoned the familiar IDM/industrial-ambient structures that made Movement a rather predictable, almost traditional album, and went all the way into twitchy, labyrinthine voicescapes. Sure, abstract voicescapes is not something new, and you could argue that especially within poststep it's pretty much its own tradition, but it's nevertheless still something with a lot of potential, and that potential was brilliantly realised on Platform, which simultaneously managed to avoid the glitchy-dreampop comfyness that these voicescapes far too often regress to, yet sounded almost like pop on some tracks, making abrasive avant garde structures surprisingly catchy.

If Herndon avoided the well-established use of voice manipulations to create dreamy, floating soundscapes, that approach was a big part of Aisha Devi's Of Matter and Spirit, but with none of the usual comforting pleasantness. Instead, the overall sound was icy synthetic and inhuman, as ominous and foreboding as Devis mangled voice, which sounded like the wailing of digital spirits forever caught inside forgotten data networks, or the mysticism of Dead Can Dance remade by an alien AI left to its own devices for millennia.

Herndon and Aisha Devi seem to represent two different takes on how manipulated voices can be used to explore the ever disintegrating border between artificial unreality and the organic, but the most radical of 2015's voice-alchemists was perhaps Visionist, who I guess should technically be classified as "weightless grime", though the use of disembodied, half dissolved voices was pretty much the only defining characteristic of Safe, which otherwise was more or less unclassifiable. Drenched in an overwhelming sadness, the album was sort of related to Burial in spirit, but without using any of the well-established Burial-tricks so familiar by now - no broken 2step beats, engulfing crackle or ghostly submerged rave sounds here, just a half-fractured mosaic of abandoned voice fragments lost in an icy void. Unable to connect while blindly calling into an endless indifferent nothingness, isolated words and phonemes glittered like distant stars in ever changing constellations, creating patterns of stark beauty and hopeless longing.  At the same time moving and weirdly terrifying, Safe among the absolute best of the year.

Slackk: Backwards Light (R&S) Acre: Better Strangers (Tectonic)Acre+Filter Dread: Interference (Codes)While Visionist made abstract grime so weightless that it became something else entirely, there were still plenty of experimental grime producers pushing the style forward in 2015 without leaving it behind altogether. One of the best was Slackk - a bit of a veteran in the field by now - who never seemed interested in the pure and bleak abstractions pursued by so many of his colleagues. Continuing down his own path, further refining a highly personal take on "emo-grime", it was hardly surprising that his Backwards Light ep was much in the same style as 2014's Palm Tree Fire lp - an abundance of complex-yet-straightforward melodic arrangements and bittersweet, melancholic moods. At the same time, it also felt like an even more focused distillation of that sound, with each of the six hollow funeral marches a brilliant and self-contained gem in its own right, making it perhaps his best release yet.

Melancholic moods were also present on Acre's Better Strangers, though only as one element in an overall extremely dark and grim sound world - sort of how the most brutally ugly and inorganic tracks from the first Rephlex Grime-compilation would have ended up if they'd been left to disintegrate and deteriorate in a cold concrete basement for ten years. This didn't work all the way through Better Strangers though, some tracks were simply too minimal and monochrome to be interesting, which was extra frustrating because the best tracks were just incredibly good - at the same time genuinely futuristic and hauntologically ghostly, oppressively dystopic and strangely touching, vulnerable and beautiful in all their icy, crumbling hopelessness. Trimmed down three or four tracks, Better Strangers could have been the album of the year, but then, Interference, Acre's collaboration with Filter Dread, was arguably the ep of the year - a much more sharp, focused and upbeat affair, but still every bit as strange and inorganically alien as you could wish for, a sonic landscape inhabited by odd machine creatures moving in high speed patterns completely incomprehensible to us.


Brood Ma: Populous (Hemlock) Arca: Mutant (Mute)Kuedo: Assertion of a Surrounding Presence (Knives)Related to the abstract grime contingent, the biggest "movement" in experimental electronics in 2015 was probably all those producers inhabiting the interzone between the kind of abstract grime that had become so abstract that it contained no actual traces of grime anymore, vaporwave-turned-neo-IDM, and what I used to call "entropica" - disintegrating soundscapes updating dark ambient and avant-industrial techno for post dubstep sensibilities. Adam Harper territory, on other words. As with a lot of the first generation entropica (Actress, Hype Williams, Lukid), a lot of this stuff didn't completely convince me; a bit too often it was also a bit too close to standard dark/industrial-tinged ambient, or Autechre-ish IDM, and while both kinds of music can be great, it also feels pretty regressive going on making that kind of stuff. So I never really got into M.E.S.H., J.G.Biberkopf or Rabit's Communion - the latter didseem fresh and invigorating at first and in small doses, but it simply lacked the focus and variety to be convincing as Whole LP. Only a few from this camp really worked for me; Brood Ma's Populous had enough structural power and momentum to make the gritty, noisy aesthetic fascinating, even if it didn't exactly feel forward-thinking, and Arca's Mutant, while a bit too reminiscent of traditional glitchy IDM to be a revolutionary work, still had an undeniable originality and personality to its compositions, slowly unfolding the more you'd listen. I'm still in the process, but as with Xen, more and more of it is getting into focus and suddenly making sense. I doubt it'll stop being too long, though, but who knows?

Eventually, the best of this bunch in my opinion was Kuedo's ep Assertion of a Surrounding Presence, which moved away from the pioneering "cosmic footwork" of Severant in favour of a much more cold and ominous sound. There was still a slight element of synth "classicism" here and there, but the overall feel was as bleak and post-organic as anything by Rabit or Brood Ma, just delivered in a much more immediate and straightforwardly structured way, and not held back by attempts to be as formless and constantly shifting as possible.

Turnsteak: Digitale Pourpre (With Us) Debruit: Outside the Line (ICI)I have never really been into the "clubby" end of poststep, but it does deliver some good stuff now and then, and surprisingly, two if the most original albums of 2015 was actually from this end of things - as well as from France. The duo Turnsteak, previously completely unknown to me, worked with the well-known formula of twitchy UK funky/2step-beats and a neon lit emotionalism somewhere between euphoria and melancholia - i.e. where we also finds artists like Damu, Walton and Sully (around Carrier at least). Some tracks on Digital Pourpre didn't do much more than continue this tradition, but big parts of the album also showed that there was still plenty of opportunities for new twists within the formula - enough potential for further development to make an album that was both a well-rounded whole and a completely personal take on the sound, full of odd and original touches.

With Debruit's Outside the Line, the most surprising thing is that it seemed like a "clubby" poststep record at all, rather than another instalment of his uniquely twisted ethno-wonky-funk. Sure, the ethno samples were still there, and there was none of the house/garage elements so common to the strains of poststep desperately trying to align itself with club/'nuum authenticity, but the use of four to the floor beats and much more straightforwardly flowing basslines also took it in the direction of - relatively - conventional dancefloor-oriented 21st century club music. And I'm not really sure how to feel about it, I must confess. On one hand, it's good that Debruit is trying completely new things - as great as his previous style is, he has also by now refined it to the point where some new input is clearly needed -, and there's still some wonderfully weird sounds and dreamy, dizzy moods on Outside the Line. On the other hand, though, working within a much simpler rhythmic structure is just not to his advantage: It has always been the sharp edges and far out syncopations that made his music really original and amazing, and without them it can at times feel a bit flat and featureless, especially with the heavy use of sampled "tribal" percussion, which just seems pointlessly tacked on when it isn't twisted into original shapes by larger, weirder rhythmic structures. As a result, Outside the Line was to some degree frustrating - sometimes it seemed strangely anonymous, and sometimes it sounded wonderfully strange and original - but in any case it's a good thing that Debruit isn't stuck. I just hope that he'll be able to develop further while regaining the rhythmic weirdness that made him so special to begin with.

Zomby: Let's Jam pt. 2 (XL)Myth: Evaporate (Halc)Ebbo Kraan: Aletta (Rwina) As with the SIMPIG-album mentioned above, this is all records that feel a bit like guilty pleasures, in that they're immediately pleasurable for someone with my preferences in poststep, but at the same time they're not trying to push any envelope whatsoever. If anything, they sound great exactly because they're cultivating some of those elements that seemed so revolutionary and envelope-pushing in the beginning of poststep. I guess there's people who, like me, wish that there was simply more of this amazing, wonderful music, and hence they make more of it, ticking all the right boxes, rather than inventing new ones. While not straightforward bitstep - still my favourite poststep substyle - these records all use, to some extend, the spiralling arpeggios and 8-bit cascades so significant for that style, but mostly within a slightly more dreamy and melancholic frame, as pioneered by artists like Ikonika, Desto and not least Zomby. So in a way, you could say that Zomby is plagiarizing himself on part 2 of the two Let's Jam-ep's he released in 2015, doing what he does best, and pretty obviously still doing it brilliantly. Not that he's simply repeating classic Zomby-formulas without any development, there's some very slight twists, the tracks seem both more varied and looser, yet also more fully formed than most of the With Love-album, though it's not easy to really put a finger on why that is. In any case it's a great Zomby ep, still evolving his personal sound slowly and organically, his inspiration still far from exhausted. Though, to be fair, part 1 was pretty much run-of-the-mill minimal "acid"/techno-jams that contained nothing to distinguish them as Zomby-productions.
That the "classic" Zomby-sound still has fans should not be surprising, somehow the sad, longing hopelesness of post-Burial sadstep just seem to fit twinkling, super-simple arpeggio-melodies like a glove. Myth's Evaporate ep didn't bring anything new to that table, and yet, it's hard to resist that sound when it's made so pure and immediate. Which could also be said about Ebbo Kraan's Alettaep, despite being a much more hard and heavy affair, based on the half-atmospheric, half-pompous avant-trap sound developed by artists like Starkey, Desto and Krampfhaft over the last three years. Again, there's nothing here really moving that sound forward, but when something works so well, it's obvious that there'll be people out there who think that it's unfair that it should be gone so soon, and wat to keep it alive. I can't really blame them.


STOP PRESS: Just when I'd come to the conclusion that poststep is more or less over and done, a bunch of amazing new poststep records appears in a short time, almost recreating the feeling of a continuous eruption of brilliance that made the previous peak years such a wonder to live through. OK, to be fair, the element of constant surprise is still missing, none of these records are creating something utterly unheard and unexpected, they're all pretty much expanding the current abstract grime sound, but they're doing it on such a uniformly inventive and invigorating level that I'm still feeling an unmistakable future buzz - apparently this style has huge hidden reservoirs of unused potential for invention. The play- and colourful, almost downright cartoony side of grime is taken to the max with Darq E Freaker's ADHDep, Murlo's Odyssey lp, and Loom's European Heartache ep (or most of it, anyway) - sometimes wonderfully absurdist and quirky like toys designed to amuse a hyper-intelligent alien child, and sometimes creating a kind of hysteric grime version of the über-synthetic frenzy found in PC music. In the more harsh and dark department, Brood Ma takes a quantum leap forward from the already pretty good Popolous, and makes the kind of record that actually sounds like you imagine all those abstract electronic artists like MESH, Rabit or Lotic would sound, when reading Adam Harper-ish descriptions of their music. Dazeuses a lot of the same tricks as everybody else in this scene, but here they really work, creating music that is every bit as ominously monumental and inorganically shapeshifting as you could wish for.
Equally heavy and doomy, but also much more cold and punishing, the Cellar ep from NA (half of Nguzunguzu) is like grime reinvented by Marc Acardipane, and at times reminiscent of NA's former Future Brown-collaborator Fatima Al Qadiri, whose own second album Brute is the best of this brilliant bunch. It has been criticised for not bringing much new to Qadiris table, as well as for being too samey, but even though it's definitely closer to her "defining" sound from the Desert Strike ep and generally even more monochromatic than the already pretty samey Asiatisch, her insistence on refining what's already brilliant, ever so subtly investigating what can be done with it, turns out to be the right strategy. Qadiri is confident that her core aesthetic vision is strong enough to carry the album, and it is - rather than "samey" in any bad sense, Brute is first of all an integrated work of art, almost a meditation on the heart breaking hopelessness permeating our world as the end of history starts to crumble, the veneer of the neoliberal mummery dissolving. Not since Burials debut have I heard an album so drenched in sorrow, but Brute is a much more dark and threatening beast, like feebly trying to navigate in a world of endless fog, while a nervous violence is constantly brooding just below the surface, waiting to break through. Bruteis one of the albums of the decade, but I'm afraid that it most likely will not be remembered as such. And why that is - why something as great as this isn't being recognised, but rather seen as just another slightly experimental electronic record of no real consequence, is also why poststep as whole hasn't been recognised I think. And that's the question that I'll try and tackle next.

Join the Keysound Rinse list, get free tracks to DL and the show emailed to you: http://bit.ly/keysoundrinselist **Keysound show Rinse FM April '16** Blackdown "Keysound Sessions Anthem (feverish weightless mix)" [unreleased] Becoming (N)one "Becoming (N)one" [v1984] Becoming (N)one "Pre, Post, Pre(-lude) i" [v1984] Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke "Beautiful People" [Warp] Anz "Functioning on

Keysound Rinse show March 16 Atlas "Solitude" [unreleased] Desto "untitled"  [unreleased] Aphix "Chemtrails" [unreleased] Walton "Caught in a Trap" [unreleased] Walton "Black Hole"  [unreleased] Beneath "Giv Sum" [No Symbols] RS4 "Be Free"  [unreleased] Near "Lurk" [unreleased] Blackdown "Where we come from" [unreleased] ??? Blackdown "untitled (WIP for Koast)" [unreleased] Yak "Mido" [

Click to enlarge and read the blurbs for each talkI'm looking forward to participating in a Post-Internet Working Group at Brunel University that'll meet on two occasions, on Feb 4th at 2pm, when Michael Waugh will be giving a talk ('Post-Internet Popular Music: From the Underground to the Mainstream'), and on March 8th at 1pm, when I will be giving a talk ('"Accelerated by the Digital Age?"An Ambivalent Aesthetics of the Digital World in Underground Electronic Music'). Why not come along for some IRL content creation? ;)

Listening to this on the way to work, through frost fronds creeping sunlight and reminded (again) of how great this album is... absolutely of its time (never get why that is supposed to be a bad thing and 'timeless' such a great thing - being of its time has to be at least one of the goals, doesn't it?) in the sense that it doesn't really sound like anything else... the first bit, with the bass turned up, could be some kind of early Photek jam (that perfect tumbling, falling-down-the-stairs drum sound) before taking a slight turn into the kind of deep-seated, slow-burning mania of Comus, then adding in a bit of Bowie, maybe even Dylan at one point before...

Ah, I'm running out of references (and forgetting why I felt the need to mention them in the first place... Guess I'm still caught up in a wave of Silver Age Blog nostalgia where it was all about describing... now you can just listen and that's probably what you should be doing...

Ok, maybe not exactly like an early Photek jam.

I'm listening to Moondog. It keeps coming up. I can't explain what it wants with me or where this relationship is going but it is going... It's ineffable and uncertain, it's past-commentary, almost incorrigible. People don't still listen to Moondog, do they? I'd always been suspicious.

Great hat though. Digging that Merlin-chic.

You can see Holly Herndon doing this kind of thing I guess but, if Sesame Street is still going, I can't see it happening again in quite the same way. Kids TV used to be a kind of deregulated fug, full of off-cuts of audio and odd animation even in the most banal settings but now... Well, maybe there's corners of the internet / cable TV where something like this prospers; it's not on Netflix.

Is it really true old age when you start bitching about Kids TV not being avant-garde ??

What next? Breaking out in hives over the Gold Standard, I guess. Fistfights about the fifty year anniversary celebrations of 2nd Annual Report's release?

Jeff Harrington's work also found at

http://parnasse.com/jh/blog/

Well, this looks pretty good... twinkling, with a little shudder; gert big beats as well and the merest hint of mushroom madness, psi(locybe) breakdowns; the fear of burping up your hash-pipes in the heart of the wood... horrifying, in it's way and apparently put together by someone who's got still occasionally for that flashbacked thousand-yard stare but (maybe) has managed to come out the other side, still smiling.

Buy it here, if you fancied a go.

This tripped me out on the way to work today. I don't even know how it got into the car.

I don't know anything anymore. Maybe I never did.

Christ.

This

Found via Bob

In 1979, I was 8 and I liked 2000AD. I got this and it was immense and it still is.


Here's Breakfast In The Ruins talking about it and giving up loads of scans.

That guy with the plant on his head has been very influential.

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Starting slow this year. But I think it'll end up immense.

This crept up on me when I wasn't paying attention. I'm hoping for more of that kind of thing.

Here are the slides from my recent talk at the 3hd festival in Berlin. It was a bit more freeform, so apologies if the threads are a bit unclear from them. It was a great festival altogether, with a great line-up of performances too - there was a write-up about it on AQNB.

I've written a blogpost - click here to read it - for Verso reflecting on some of the aesthetic implications of the critique of 'folk politics' in their new book by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work:

When, in Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams critique the collection of tendencies within the contemporary left they call 'folk politics,' they could also be lamenting the aesthetics that now dominates those areas of popular music that were once progressive. Whether it's underground, or 'indie,' or even happens to be in the charts, contemporary popular music routinely 'chooses the familiarities of the past over the unknowns of the future;... habitually chooses the small over the large' and 'value[s] withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony'. For independent music as in folk politics, 'organisations and communities are to be transparent, rejecting in advance any conceptual mediation, or even modest amounts of complexity' and both 'emphasis[e] the local and the authentic, the temporary and the spontaneous, the autonomous and the particular'. Srnicek and Williams show that these strategies arose and achieved much in the special political circumstances of the mid-twentieth century, and again, as aesthetic strategies in popular music, they arose during the same period in the countercultural atmosphere of jazz, rock, punk and, indeed, folk musics. And for both folk politics and folk-political music, the time has come to invent what happens next...

I'm not interested particularly in adding to the canon - everyone loves Spanners don't they? - but in the spirit of revisiting it recently...

It is striking thing. It's a thinking thing. I remembered hearing it for the first time all over again & thinking that these guys were properly aligned with the avant-garde in a way that most of this era (every era) techno / IDM just weren't. I loved Aphex Twin and Autechre and Reload but The Black Dog were entirely odder & clearly unwilling to make commercial leans even in the vaguest of senses. The disco and techno bits of this album show they could easily be assimilated into (what would become) background music for Masterchef / Football Results / Home Improvement shows but the other bits were just so bowel-churningly creepy & psychedelically awkward that you can imagine advertising execs & music placers not being able to... place it.

There's bits on Spanners that make it exist in the world of Coil or The Residents rather than Hip Hop (or Kraftwerk, or Tomita, or Eno), bits that prevent a lay person wandering through the Warp catalogue keeping going....

Bytes was good but Bytes did attempt a theme of sorts; you had a clue as to what was coming next. With Spanners, the chimera / Cerberus is much more evident; this was the multi-headed techno beast in all it's directions, all at once...

I'm going back in. Bits of it our soundtracking our regular live action Angry Birds simulation (you hurl a 5 year old boy towards stuffed toys and pillow constructions) and it works perfectly: scary, silly, serious, soft. The 5 year old says some of it sounds like 'the pigs have gone crazy' and he's right; they really have.

Woebot in various iterations has been hugely influential on this blog and on IX Tab (and on my relationship with unicorns / small horses) and on the www's relationship to music in general and this is his mix for Paris:

For Paris by Woebot on Mixcloud

Plus, I have a Woebot t-shirt that I was wearing yesterday when I went to visit my Mum. So, fate.

Fell into this via some wormhole or other. It's maybe not meant for me but I've been playing it a lot.

Actually, I'm not sure what is for me.

Not sure I really believe music is for anyone.

These days, I'm always awake, it seems.

Yeah, I think so.

Some good stuff here about Voodoo Ray from Woebot on hardcore vocal samples. I didn't know it was Peter Cook but it seems perfect that it was. The best thing about those early acid / hardcore tracks was the entirely odd choices of sample material and the dullest thing about what came later was the insistence on 'obscure' horror samples or bits of Blade Runner - Tricky is the exception there, since the Blade Runner sample sounds like it couldn't have been absent... and in fact Tricky's use of Japan's Ghosts was one of the more interesting things about his first album; that kind of non-more-white(skinned) Newpop framework wrapped itself around Tricky in an almost sinister, post-colonial way... I like most of his stuff but none of the later albums seemed willing to disengage from the musical frames that Tricky ought to have been in (Specials, Ganja boys, Grandmaster Flash, Jungle)and so failed to sound.

And when we're talking about vocal samples, I guess this ought to be mentioned because I vaguely remember the moment I first heard this and started giggling uncontrollably for reason I mow really question:


In fact, Woebot's point about the odd nature of vocal samples very much affected my choices of vocal samples on the IX Tab albums - bearing in mind that most of the reviews of both albums focus on the avant-garde / occult nature of the music, the vocal samples are generally utterly prosaic (I can't mention all the sources, for reasons) seem many of them are utterly, and very deliberately prosaic: Dangerous Liasons, Hollywood after Oscar parties, Children's TV, TSW News, Gus Honeybun, Hal from 2001 (yawn!), ITV Drama Specials... It's a kind of occult banality that interests me. that feels truly occult because it's truly personal; it's the detritus of everyday lives that make it occult. I mean, I love all that Crowley / OTO / Hellraiser guff but using it as it is a resource seems totally beside the point.

Simon and Garfunkel, half-heard on my parents stereo on a Sunday is Bay-B-Kane and is darkness incarnate.

Well, if there's any kind of avant - scene that I'm aware of (maybe even a little part of), Nick's the kind of Kingpin: playing on LP, on big boy's labels; undisputedly popular and critically acclaimed where most of us are (at best) critically acclaimed and resoundingly unpopular. He's been quiet recently but he's almost back. You'll love this as much as you loved the other ones. I'm never sure if there's a change in methodology / sound that goes along with a change in name when Nick Edwards / Ekoplekz is concerned but the Eko sound is very much here, give or take some IDM techno lashings, here and there.

He's probably not even using the Eko, anymore but the sound is a thing-in-itself now, has it's own logic.

This is happening in Bristol at the weekend and it features Kemper Norton, who is always a delight to meet and watch and hear. I'm going despite the fact that I'm normally deeply suspicious of musical events that cross over into art. I love Art, love music but don't think anything about soundpoems or soundart (both deeply flawed concepts, as far as I can see). I loved it when Throbbing Gristle shifted out of the Art scene and into Pop (sort of) and didn't much care for anything they got up to when, in recent times, they got sucked back in. Coum seemed interesting, as Art, TG were much more interesting as music - and so it goes...

We should watch out for Art, creeping into our musical scenes.

We should resist.

The rules of engagement are different over there.

Hi. I'm Dan Hodges. And I tell it like it is.

Like. It. Is.

If you believe everything you read on Lefty Twitter you'd think that time progresses in linear fashion, one day after another, week succeeding week, month upon month.

But hang on. Let's stop and think for a second - is this really what's going on here?

No. It's not.

And I'll tell you why not. People like me - go on, call me a 'Tory' if you like - know that in the real world things like this just don't happen.

Apparently, when the clocks strike 12 tonight, by some magical process of Socialist metamorphosis, today will just magically turn into another, newer, and different day. When the Earth gets to the end of its daily cycle it will just spontaneously keep on spinning, in a kind of Hard-Left utopia of ongoing movement.

Except it won't. Not now. Not ever.

Because this is the Real World. Where Real Things Happen. In barely formulated tabloid-ish sentences that have somehow made their way into a broadsheet where they masquerade as incisive realism. With their no-nonsense tone. And their full-stops.

My trick is to take exaggeratedly cynical negative statements with absolutely no intellectual basis and make them seem like bullshit-free common sense. The sort of common sense that just so happens to coincide exactly with the latest Conservative Party policy announcement.

I say things aren't going to happen. Categorically. End of story.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. That gives me a roughly 50% success ratio, which is just about enough to insulate my reputation and guarantee my salary at a newspaper for which pessimism and demagogic mean-spiritedness are strategic imperatives.

So for the last time, oh my Lefty comrades.

Tomorrow ain't gonna happen.

Not now. Not ever.

Not even tonight.

Deal with it.

Yesterday I gave a talk on the history, nature, and pros and cons of accelerationism at the Unsound festival. These slights might not give you the full picture of what was said, but since they're full of quotes and references, people have asked that I upload them.

Man, this is good.

Really good.


I've been offline / limits / thick with flu & driving lesson woes for what seems to be ages but I've finally got around to listening properly to this Shape Worship album (another in the ever-predictable - in that every release is going to be great - line of outsider-chic that is Front And Follow) and it's a little bit immense. This is what I thought Burial was going to sound like when I'd read about them but not yet heard anything. I like Burial, but this is better; this feels less mannered, lighter but paradoxically more intense, less rooted in the (rather obvious) slow-car-garage trails.

This isn't just a car drive. This is a slice of collective consciousness. The cranes are flying.

It is extraordinarily confident in its approach, taking on Burial's shuffling gun-cock / ratchet drums (hopefully without the mythology that they were just created in Audacity) and sending them into new territories, deep in the heart of Britain. It's not all like this (it's better than that), of course but still... each cymbal hisses like a winter yawn. This is Britain not submerged but hanging on a thread; socio-political agitations, key council estate worries, local government politics.

I've not read much about this release because I wanted it to wash over me without contamination (of perhaps the terrible truth) but it's clear that every squeak and every whistle and every hummingly slurred vocal (although many of the samples are clear as day) has a very definite purpose and a place: when the light breaks out at the end of Heygate Palimpsest, for instance, it feels like we've been waiting a long time... like when they finally do put in that zebra crossing that everyone's been asking for... other bits sound like the tiniest snatches of vocal behind and within some of The Shamen's best techno squiggles, pre-C. That sense of delirium can certainly be found in tracks like Zoned (Hecate) which has a tinkling, endless, post-acid comedown vibe to it that is just perfect.

And then the voices come in and make the world real again. Some of them hum with static, with echo but other times they are naked and alone

Although this is some kind of master work and is clearly (I hope, I think) following a concept, it also seems small scale and intimate - cocktail synths, even, at the start of the gently stirring An Exemplar. And the scale works perfectly for the kind of psychogeographical details attended to here. This is a boiling down of issues and virtues; it has a sense of place that has often been neglected in music (replaced with sense of feeling or atmosphere) but not in the sense of windswept moors or smoked bracken (ha!) or goat-noises; instead Ed's attempted to approximate the place as a political satellite, as microcosm.

Easily one of the best things I've heard all year...

 The TOWNSHIPTECH logo
The latest System Focus is on dance sounds of South Africa that live online, chiefly 'gqom' with some shangaan electro and sgubhu too (click here to read). featuring: Spoek Mathambo, Nozinja, TOWNSHIPTECH, SHANGAANBANG, DJ Dino, U-Zet, Phelimuncasi, Rude Boyz, GQOM OH, Citizen Boy and DjAsinatar and the Facebook groups IGqomu, Sgubhu & Gqom Lovers, Gqomu music and Gqom Nation.

South African popular music, in its myriad forms—from choral folk group Ladysmith Black Mambazo to madcap rappers Die Antwoord—has played a huge role on the world stage for decades, and today this richly musical country boasts an ecosystem of electronic dance and club sounds that changes, spreads, and develops with an energy that can rival that of just about anywhere else you care to name...

Meanwhile, the southeastern coastal city of Durban in the KwaZuluNatal province of South Africa has been incubating a style called gqom for a few years now... It would be difficult to imagine a kind of music more different from Shangaan Electro than gqom is—it's a slow-burning, minimal and ominous style that's frequently described as "raw." Gqom fan Thandolwethu BlaqueMusiq Mseleni—who runs a group on Facebook called Sgubhu and Gqom Lovers out of King Williams Town in the Eastern Cape province—told me that qqom is "house music with broken beats, sliced vocals or chants, high tempo and mostly with no bassline."

"We grew up on it," Veezy tells me about gqom. "You know, taxis in town or everywhere in and around Durban blasting these songs that had really catchy and funny verses as well as banging hooks. Most people just hear loud bangs but, if you take time to really listen to it, you realize it's more than a created pattern—it's rhythm that syncs with fun. I like it cause it's a really huge crowd favorite in lounges and clubs to get turnt with or get the party sounded."...

Citizen Boy is one of gqom's most creative producers. Plunge headlong into his kasimp3 uploads... featuring him and his affiliates, and you'll encounter dozens of weird and wonderful twists on the genre's template. Try the hectic "Spit Fire (Remix)," the ultra-minimal "VH HIT" with its deadpan cuíca hook, the downright evil "Natural Mafias," the alien skirmish of "Thekwini War (Mafiamix)" or the unholy croaks of "Point Magnet (Dope mix)." There there's "Deep Gqomu," a masterpiece that builds up majestically, its ethereal scales climbing ever skyward...

I like the way this sucks and wheezes. It reminds me of my future. One day, I'll be at a bus stop and this will be the last sound I make. I'm looking forward to it.

This was something that fascinated me a while ago. Still fascinates me. Uchronie never really took off, though.

I need some people.

The thing is, the essay I linked to in the above post has a related sub/sur-Acid mix and that mix is now here. It's currently sound-tracking some marking of essays related to the Cognitive Approach and seems fairly apposite.


Yeah.