21-Sep-15
THE GUARDIAN'S JEREMY CORBYN COVERAGE IN 15 HEADLINES [ 19-Aug-15 3:10pm ]
Response from chukwumaa [ 17-Aug-15 1:26pm ]
System Focus: The Voices Disrupting White Supremacy Through Sound [ 17-Aug-15 1:18pm ]
chukwumaa and E. Jane of Philly duo SCRAAATCH. Photo by Liz BarrAugust's System Focus is on rising networks of African and Afrodiasporic artists disseminating their music in solidarity, along with some cultural context (click here to read). Featuring Chino Amobi, NON, Angel Ho, Nkisi, Serpentwithfeet, SCRAAATCH, E. Jane, chukwumaa, embaci, Brandon Covington, Elon, Butch Dawson, Kayy Drizz, Dog Food Music Group, Violence, Mykki Blanco, Psychoegyptian, Yves Tumor etc.
Back in December, angry New Yorkers gathered to sing "They Don't Care About Us" following the decision not to indict Eric Garner's killer, a police officer. The song's lyrics were written on a placard during a protest against the Ferguson police department in the wake of their fatal shooting of Michael Brown. It also provided the soundtrack to the Baltimore protests in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, danced to by a Jackson impersonator amidst the chaos of helicopters and sirens... The song has recently found new layers of meaning and urgency in the context of the continuing struggle against racist police violence, now taken up by the Black Lives Matter movement...
It's no wonder that African and Afrodiasporic artists are choosing to disseminate music in solidarity. In many cases, this creative decision is a strategy for dealing with the alienation that is so often a part of Afrodiasporic experience. As the London-based writer Kodwo Eshun puts it in his 2003 essay Further Considerations on Afrofuturism: "the condition of alienation, understood in its most general sense, is a psychosocial inevitability that all Afrodiasporic art uses to its own advantage by creating contexts that encourage a process of disalienation." And yet in the continuing environment of white supremacy, this creativity is routinely either erased, appropriated, or confined to narrow and fetishized aesthetic areas...
"In no uncertain terms, the Intent of NON is to run counter to current Western hyper-capitalist modes of representation and function, exorcising the language of domination through the United Resistance of policed and exotified colored bodies," NON's email continued. "At a time when national (market) state financial and political systems are tested as never before, NON shall remain committed to the militant realities and potentials of 'The NON State.' NON came into existence through the Pan-African desire for representation on our own terms." As stated on their Soundcloud page, NON artists are "using sound as their primary media, to articulate the visible and invisible structures that create binaries in society, and in turn distribute power..."
SerpentwithfeetOne of the most beguiling and exciting voices to have emerged from underground music in recent times, Serpentwithfeet also appears on another track that NON reposted on their Soundcloud. Titled "Total Freedom," it finds the singer winding himself delicately around rising and falling tones, including those of an mbira. In an interview for Dazed, he discussed his self-described "PaganGospel" creed for living and said, "I am always ready to pierce things with my black-queer cutlery. I am constantly looking for ways to make my music extra gay and extra black..."
SCRAAATCH is an art and sound double act, originally from Washington DC and now based in Philadelphia, who often perform live. It consists of artists E. Jane and chukwumaa—read interviews with them here and here—and, along with the New Jersey born DJ Haram, they run the monthly Philly "club-not-club" night ATM. Also negotiating race, gender, queerness, mental illness, and the digital world in her artwork and photography, E. Jane makes sounds and edits under the names E_SCRAAATCH and Mhysa, typically with a glitchy, spectral take on R&B. Try their / her Soundcloud playlist I Have To Say No So Much Right Now, especially its magnificent title track. About their / her artwork, E. Jane said in a recent interview with The Offing, "I came to the conclusion that I am black and I am a woman, my body is thoroughly Black American and it is perceived as woman. Then I realized that means my body is not a 'safe' body. My body is an unprotected body. I started asking myself how we protect unprotected bodies? What if the body were code? What if the body were only a simulation? What if I could exaggerate how inhuman I feel?" Her partner in SCRAAATCH, chukwumaa, was born in Nigeria and "on a plane to the US the first week of [his] life." He also engages experimentally with pop as plus_c—the track "quadrille_club_bing" uses a Vine recording of "They Don't Care About Us" being sung during the Baltimore uprising, mixed into a distorted club beat and resonant tones like metal being brushed and played with a bow. He also made an installation consisting of twenty-one burner cellphones playing Beyoncé's "Flawless," which turned the song into a waterfall...
Thumbnail for E_SCRAAATCH's 'I Have To Say No So Much Right Now' Chino Amobi appeared on [Blasting Voice], as did cross-U.S. artist Violence, who is soon to appear on the inaugural release of a new label founded by rapper Mykki Blanco called Dogfood Music Group. Due September 18th, the release will be a compilation titled C-ORE, featuring tracks from Violence, California's Yves Tumor, NYC rapper Psychoegyptian and Blanco himself. "We are a group of friends who have created a release that represents a slice of what we're into, our culture and what we want to show the world," Blanco has said about the collection. "People all over the world are only fed this singular image of 'African American Music' and we want to disrupt that. We all come from backgrounds outside of the black American norm, and the world deserves to see our culture as much as anything else..."
C-ORENeedless to say, the artists mentioned here aren't the only African and Afrodiasporic artists making challenging and beautiful music in the underground, just a few constellations—there are countless more voices out there. As it has been for centuries, since the traumatic dawn of modernity, finding such voices through music is not just a leisure activity, as it is marketed to many of us. It's part of the urgent and fundamental search for self and identity in a world that not only erases that identity, or appropriates it, or predetermines it, or constrains it, or renders it fragmented and ostensibly paradoxical, but that also systematically commits physical violence upon people of that identity. This is why so many artists with minority status end up in underground music—this is why they are underground music. Fortunately, the underground can form spaces and networks where identity matters, is audible, and becomes visible.
System Focus: Why Today's Underground Club Music Sounds Cybernetic [ 17-Aug-15 12:59pm ]
Celestial Trax's Ride or DieJuly's System Focus was on a particular strain of club music with a cybernetic feel, along with some incidental reflections on calling it 'club music' (click here to read). Featuring Night Slugs, Fade to Mind, Keysound Recordings, Liminal Sounds, Her Records, Sentinel, Amnesia Scanner, J.G. Biberkopf, D.J. New Jersey Drone, Track Meet, Bootleg Tapes, P4N4, Velkro, #FEELINGS, CELESTIAL TRAX, Tallesen, WDIS, Gewzer, Gronos1, Magic Fades, SPF666, Korma, Team Aerogel, Infinite Machine, Roller Truck, Tessier-Ashpool Recordings, IMAMI, Cloaka, Spurz, Kadahn, Gel Dust, Dviance, Partisan, Sharp Veins and Lit Internet. Nb/ this article should have said a bit more about the style's relationship to Jersey Club, Bmore Club and Philly Club.
There has been a slow but sure shift in the way the underground talks about one of its key areas: "dance music" has become "club music." The major reason for this is probably that it differentiates it from Electronic Dance Music (EDM), the name that, despite its generality, has come to stick more specifically to the recent explosion of big name, big crowd, big show parties held outdoors, particularly across the U.S. "Club music" is not that—it's a more intimate, enclosed environment, both in the physical spaces it describes and in the community that enters and honors those spaces, whether real or imagined...
DJ New Jersey Drone's Energy EP This kind of music was pioneered by transatlantic labels like Night Slugs, Fade to Mind, and Keysound, and mixes together rebooted ballroom/vogue house and the new wave of instrumental grime, all with a stark, hi-tech machine sheen. It was soon developed further on tight, intense and ice-cold shorter releases by artists on London's Liminal Sounds such as Brooklyn-based producer Copout, and particularly those on fellow UK label Her Records, such as DJ Double M, Sudanim, CYPHR and Kid Antoine. It's a style that is enjoyed by the sort of musicians and fans who don't like to name styles, but instead allude to hybridities of aging categories like house, techno and grime...
Korma's ZGMF-X19AWhat makes this music so good to run to? It has a high tempo which keeps urging you relentlessly forward. But it's more than that. It embodies progress and athleticism in its very sound (unsurprisingly, it's the soundtrack to health goth) not in a merely beautiful way, but with a frightening dose of the sublime too. Because as in both running and culture, forward motion isn't nice, easy, or moral—it's laced with anti-humanistic pain, aggression and dissolution, crashing euphoria and dysphoria together in a bodily blur of hormones and neurotransmitters. As muscles grow and become more supple, as lungs become cleaner and the brain less resistant, so technoculture improves: motors, alloys and power supplies increase in efficiency, pixels shrink and multiply, and digital intelligence grows more independent of yesterday's humanity. Organic, machine—it's all the same in the struggle of kinetic matter. All this seems apt as I schlep my loathsome fleshform across the tarmac in a futile bid to flourish, or at least survive the oncoming war...
Cloaka's AdaptOne particularly fascinating and powerful release is Lit Internet's Angelysium, which features collaborations with some of the producers on the _VIRALITY compilation as well as South London producer Endgame (who was in last month's tresillo column). Cinematic almost to the point of telling a story, if Angelysium ever gets into a groove, it's likely to vanish suddenly into the vast mists, giant machinery and assorted percussive enigmas. The empty spaces that characterise the stop-start textures of eski grime become yawning chasms thick with tension and potential assailants, yet also with melancholic distance.
Lit Internet's AngelysiumAll this is just another reason why the category "club," while it does a lot to hone in on specific and, in many ways, desirable qualities in dance music, can only go so far. "Dance" is a more intangible, open-ended concept, something that can happen anywhere and is directly related to the body and activities like running and other forms of exercise, the body being even more intimate and present than the club that might temporarily enclose it. Dance is music that moves you.
08-Jul-15
System Focus: How A Traditional Rhythm Is Shaping Today's Most Exciting New Music [ 08-Jul-15 9:17pm ]
Exclusivo by Blaze KiddJune's System Focus (click here to read) was on a loose network of producers, most of whom draw on the tresillo rhythm found in reggaeton and other musics of the African diaspora, often using grime and Spanish language too. Labels and artists featured include Blaze Kidd, Uli-K, PALMISTRY, Kami Xlo, Lexxi, Ana Caprix, EndgamE, Golden Mist Records, BLASTAH, Dinamarca, STAYCORE, Lil Tantrum, Sister, Tove Agelii, Mapalma, mobilegirl, Imaabs, ZUTZUT, Extasis Records, Morten_HD, Spaceseeds.
A simple rhythm bounces back and forth over the once vast Atlantic ocean, ever faster. It begins in Sub-Saharan Africa, but Europeans brutally pull it up by the roots—slaves bring it with them on a long journey to the Caribbean. By the nineteenth century it has become the defining element in the Afro-Cuban dance habanera, which finds its way to New Orleans where it helps form ragtime, then to South America, where it contributes to tango, and to Europe, where it becomes the most famous section of one of the era's most popular operas, Carmen. It also spreads across the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa and back again, and its descendents meet and collaborate, now using recordings and drum machines. Soon it doesn't even need to touch the water. Ricocheting off satellites and barreling down cables, it permeates the information sphere, with space and place just an interesting footnote on a Soundcloud profile...
EndgameLondon club music (at home and abroad) has recently come to resonate in sympathy with sounds from Mexico down. And it's not just tresillo and reggaeton rhythms that are being drawn on, but the Spanish language too. South London has both a significant population of Latin American migrants and a network of producers who have been on Soundcloud for years and are very hungry for international sounds. They got together on Exclusivo, the debut mixtape of an MC of Ecuadorian heritage, Blaze Kidd, and recently, as Aimee Cliff reported for The FADER, the video for "Sniper Redux."...
Tresillo is woven throughout Palmistry's delicate and deceptively carefree fabrics. In tracks like "DROPDrip" (on his Ascención mixtape), "Protector SE5," the single "Catch" or his latest, "Memory Taffeta," it'll ride on the back of simple synths, complementing his fragile yet controlled and earnest voice and forming songs of need and tenderness...
Palmistry One track on the Endgame EP was a remix by Dinamarca, and in turn, Endgame provided one for Dinamarca's EP, No Hay Break. "Dinamarca" is Spanish for "Denmark," but the artist Dinamarca is based in Stockholm, and his intense and attitude-filled tracks typically have a tresillo bounce, however it's distributed through the drum machine. Some of them, when the tempo is upped, even feel like they're morphing into footwork. Dinamarca is the head of the Staycore label, who just put out a brill free collection of tracks titled Summer Jams 2K15—hopefully a sign of things to come...
Lil Tantrum is just one of the many areas of overlap between Staycore and Sister, a female-identifying-only club collective founded by the formidable Swedish artist, Tové Agelii. Agelii's own productions are gorgeously gothic and suffused with the human vox the way light shines into a cathedral. And Sister's mixes (again, all female-identifying, using productions that all involve women) are both peppered with a tresillo feel and seriously something...
'Icesheets' by MobilegirlHailing from Santiago de Chile and one of the weirder and more futuristic exponents of grimy reggaeton, Imaabs has a great EP out on noted Mexico City underground-club label NAAFI. Another standout is Zutzut's "Yo Te Voa A Dar" on account of it delectable buzzing synth and proper passionate MC. Zutzut, from Monterray, has a truly lovely Soundcloud collection (try the digital flutes of "Otra Vez Llegue") and a self-titled dembow EP with some vogue inflections out for another Mexican label, Extasis, who have a bit of a net aesthetic and, because all is connected, have released cute speedster Xyloid too. Extasis also explored some pretty bizarre experimental grime with Norwegian producer Morten_HD and Mexico's Spaceseeds, and they too have a summer compilation (from last year). And, aha, it featured a Blaze Kidd track with a reggaeton production by Kamixlo and Uli-K.
System Focus: What Does "Experimental Music" Even Mean Anymore? [ 08-Jul-15 9:00pm ]
What is experimental music, and what does it want from us? As a term and as a field of music-making, it's widely accepted but fits uncomfortably and is never well defined. "Experimental music" was a phrase used in the mid-twentieth-century to describe a range of ultramodernist compositional techniques as being a form of quasi-scientific research. John Cage was careful to point out that the term should apply to music "the outcome of which is not known"—that is, music with chance elements or improvisation built into it—since a composer ought to have completed all the necessary experiments before the piece was finished. And yet in everyday parlance, especially in popular music, "experimental" music has come to refer to music that seems radically unconventional, pretty weird, as if to experiment with the very building blocks of musical beauty...
POPULOUS by Brood Ma [Experimental music is] involved with the building blocks that musical languages are made of. When you put it like this, it's odd to think that people find experimental music "difficult"—it's a radically simpler experience, assuming much less semiotically. And that's where experimental music's appeal lies. It reconnects you with the fundamental life of sound and music, and entices you to search for meaning in a language you cannot yet speak. You ask yourself, "What sort of subjectivity would make art like this? What does it perceive that I don't (or don't yet)?"...
DARK WEB by Giant Claw DARK WEB is clearly and curiously unstuck: juddering, dissonant, stop-start, crazed, obsessive. It's like a robot failing at human entertainment, a rejected intermediate form generated by whatever algorithmic process then went on to produce the less uncanny Far Side Virtual, which resonated more comfortably with human needs and desires. If human music were a CAPTCHA, DARK WEB would fail it...Most striking about [Epitaph] is its empty space—enormous architectures bracketed and magnetized by harsh syncopation. The textures are modular, moving from sound object to sound object and back again; Epitaph divides up its musical world into discrete, almost warring factions...
U.S.M! by DJWWWW DJWWWW's album U.S.M! is one of this year's most absorbing listens, restlessly assembling horrific and beguiling bouquets of musical sensations (many of which will be familiar to followers of underground music)... DJWWWW is extrapolating and caricaturing the myriad experiences of a day in digital, asking us how and why the combinations work (or not)...[Assault Suits's] own release Statue Cathalogue kickstarted the [Flamebait] label last year with its sinuous yet imposing metallic sculptures. The subsequent album by Tokyo producer Hanali is highly complex and predominantly percussive, roving through many layers of rhythm until it seems to coalesce in the bizarro club cut "10 Years or 100 Years." 10.9†01;9 by modular synth artist GOP (Geniuses Of Place) is equally rich: sizzling and glitching its way through the phone networks only to dissolve and digest what it finds... 
Aftertouches by Kara-Lis Coverdale Aftertouches weaves in all kinds of colors, many of them acoustic instruments, others eerily hinting at acoustic instruments, and others carrying all the richness of acoustic instruments yet not at all recognizable as such. She manages to do the exact same with the moods of the pieces: some are human, some eerily hint at the human, and others have all the depth of human moods but are as yet unfamiliar as such. Coverdale recently teamed up with LXV for Sirens, where their different palettes of techniques complement one another. They seem to populate each others' landscapes with the distant faces, dwellings and systems of unknown hi-tech cultures, who harvest the elements of their environment with a peace and concord we don't yet understand...
Fragments of a Scene (text for Creamcake) [ 08-Jul-15 8:32pm ]
Fragments of a Scene website, designed by Jon Lucas
Amazing Berlin clubnight institution Creamcake asked me to write a text to go with an evening they were putting on in April, both to feature Brood Ma, Forever Traxx, Claude Speeed, Club Cacao, DYNOOO, Punishment of Luxury, Hanne Lippard and Britney Lopez. Click here to see the text in its originally obfuscated context with music (scroll down for a PDF), or read below.
Music is space. Music goes high and low, shallow and deep, left and right, in and out,
round and round. It goes here and there at the same time, underneath and over, it
faces in the same and in the opposite direction. It's among and alongside and between
things, it's behind and in front of things, it goes away from and towards things, it's
beyond things and quite within them. Its spatial changes map to bodies when it makes
them move, and in turn music moves according to an embodied imagination. Music is
more than sounds - at the very least it is sounds in spaces. More than that, music is
multimedia, it always means more than just sounds, it means sights, it means
proprioception, it means people. Music is a scene.
Fortunately, there are two senses in that word. A scene is a discrete moment in
theatre, a sequence on-stage with actors, script, speech, costume, props, lights,
background, gesture. Scenes are where things happen, framed both by the elevated
ground, the proscenium and by time. In a way, an entire play is a scene of scenes, and
forms a part of the wider scenes of life. This is where the other sense of the word
scene comes in. It's a term - one loaded with cultural capital, mostly that gained by
disavowing it - for musicians, fans, places, and performances (and speech, costume,
props, lights, background, gesture)clustered together, almost as if in a discrete
moment. The scene in New York in the 1960s: Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground,
Nico and friends, one of many interconnected scenes at the time. Sometimes there's
only one scene, the scene, something to be in touch with - to be 'scene' is to be a part
of it. But the term can be used without that fancy fluff. It's usefulness comes from the
multimedia nature it inherits from theatre - a scene is never just sounds, never even
just musicians, but a network of artists in multiple mediums 'high' and 'low,' and even in
mediums that are not yet known as Art.
And scenes are difficult to piece together nowadays, especially as discrete moments
framed, like the theatre is, by certain locations in space and time. Berlin, London and
New York are still pretty good at that. But the internet has created social and aesthetic
connections that go beyond the more traditional conceptions of space and time. Don't
believe the rhetoric though: the internet has not destroyed time or space, much less
materiality. The internet is still 'in real life / IRL,' all art is still 'physical.' The aesthetics
of art and the internet, however, has been fascinated with the dilemma that it might not
be - whether that's a good thing (ushering a transcendent Utopia) or a bad thing (an
anxiety-inducing accumulation of blasphemous desires and accesses). At its best,
these two feelings occur at the same time.
What you have at Hau 2 on the 16th of April is Fragments of a Scene - in many
senses of a scene (and of fragments). The artists you will see make up something of a
scene, albeit partially: They are related in music, multimedia, social networks,
geography (to some extent), and are ultimately related by the fact that they are all
appearing tonight. They are all engaging with the modern age, which predominantly
means the digital world and its forms of expression. Yet while many artists in this vein
tend towards representation, figuration, even pastiche, these artists tend towards
abstraction and affect. Their perspective is less one of a detailed fantasy universe than
an onslaught of shapes and sensations boiling within a matrix of strong yet
indeterminate feelings.
Take Brood Ma. While there are occasional outlines of samples in James B. Stringer's
work, or the nuclear shadow of styles like grime (he's from London), at the centre is a
roiling mass of sonic shards, glittering and roaring like scales or teeth. Named after the
matriarchal figure in a culture of humanoid women with large scarabs for heads in
China Miéville's weird fiction Perdido Street Station, there is something deeply
insectoid about Brood Ma's modus operandi: biting, chewing, proliferating, attacking,
defending, all under a hard multipartite carapace filled with even weirder, visceral
matter beneath. Brood Ma works at the constituent level of sound itself, its very grains,
whipping digital codes into vortices as if they were pools of water. He distorts sounds
the way jpeg compression distorts Nature, and depixellates them, datamoshing them
until insides and outsides become part of a broader, more disorienting experience of
space.
This comes as no surprise, because James B. Stringer is part of a network of visually
trained multimedia artists coalesced around the Quantum Natives label, all long
interested in digital techniques of both sight and sound. One of the main nodes is
Stringer's friend Clifford Sage, an incredibly prolific sound-producer himself, with an
industrial synth style. At Hau 2, Sage will be providing the visuals to Stringer's
performance, both inviting us to draw some continuity across their respective fragments
of the abstracted scene.
Like many of Fragments of a Scene's artists, Forever Traxx is one of those producers
who instantly stokes curiosity with their mysterious and oblique Soundcloud profile.
Anonymous and not linking to any formal releases, digital or analogue, the mystery of
Forever Traxx is exponentially intensified by the music, which has been uploaded track
by track over the past four years. It's not just a surreal and somehow spiritual collage of
samples tied together by curiously mountainous passions (like the music of Elysia
Crampton, Chino Amobi and Total Freedom - big inspirations in the Soundcloud
collage scene), but the recurring idées fixe: lithe upper-frequency electronic lines,
babies crying, horror effects and other moments of piercing panic, urgent battalions of
drums, edits of tracks that bring the pitch up slightly as if to highlight some inner quality
(structural coherence? cuteness? absurdity?). Visually, the recurring motif is a rubbery
yet golden stickman who, as the apparent star of a ClipArt set, appears in a series of
symbolic scenarios in the Souncloud account's thumbnails and avatars. What's going
through this little guy's solid gold head, that he's beset by rapturously violent music?
He's the modern internet-user, perhaps, living a life that is both bland and breathtakingly,
monstrously intense.
Claude Speeed has explored the complexity and onslaught of the modern mindset
both as a band and as a solo electronic artist. Hailing from Scotland, his band
American Men released a dazzling EP Cool World in 2010, its crystal vistas and fractal
rhythms seeming to usher in a new decade for post-rock. Since then, Speeed has been
exploring sounds far and wide, each new Soundcloud upload an unexpected turn, from
the tweaking trance textures of 'Ambien Rave' to the roving vox of 'Clearing' and the
wailing new-Dark-Age wake of 'V (Spirit Leaves the Body)', via walls and walls of
distortion. At Fragments of a Scene, Claude Speeed will be performing with four amps
in stereo, so expect sounds so rich and intense you can taste them.
Also taking up these alpine electronic textures and inchoate drama is Club Cacao.
Another Soundcloud mystery whose account artwork competes with the music for
beauty, Club Cacao launches off from contemporary production styles from dance and
hip hop, ending up with compelling tracks like 'Go Off,' with its perfect euphoric
liberation, or the darker 'Balaclava,' an industrially twisted bounce over which a voice is
squeezed out, becoming both hilarious and terrifying.
Due to its uncanny ability to fuse disparate elements into a whole that makes a sense
one does not yet understand, but that one appreciates as the insights of a cybernetic
consciousness, DYNOOO's These Flaws Are Mine to War With was one of last year's
most interesting releases. His work has always suggested to me an emerging
intelligence, either artificial or that of the technological post-human, engaging with its
own mechanical realities as well as the curiously organic world around it. Piecing
together rainforest, desert and arctic tundra with an almost military palette of harsh
sounds and leaving it all suspended and rolling in a bubbling tank like a specimen or an
embryo, DYNOOO's conclusions could not have been reached by yesterday's
humanity, and they're as disquieting as they are beautiful.
Not to be confused with the English post-punk band active in the late 1970s and early
1980s, Punishment of Luxury is a Soundcloud experimentalist in a similar vein to
Forever Traxx, Crampton, Amobi and others. PoL creates strange yet urgent new
atmospheres for pop fragments to breathe in, as if they've suddenly been transported
to other planets. The procedure often seems to cause them to spin erratically in situ,
like broken bots in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Try the bizarre
union of Nicki Minaj and the Walker Brothers in 'BASSBREAKUP,' the desperate
product placement of 'BENZ BENZ BENZ,' plagued by alien anxiety, or the way the
ear's finger runs down the length of the male voice in 'TLS Male Vocal Choir Edit,' and
it's rough like a large iron nail file.
Using her voice to beckon a broader understanding of human culture and expression,
Hanne Lippard is somewhere between a poet and a performance artist. A book of her
texts, Nuances of No, was released in 2013. Her phrases often begin or end in the
same way as she accumulates concerns and information in a deceptively random
manner. These parallel the tics of language online, like the telling non-truths of
Google's autocompletes, or the attention-hijacking of sidebar advertising, or the
piecemeal, provisional conclusions of status updates. She narrates the Web 2.0 stream
of attention, but her voice is also perennially human, always seeking to elevate itself
while remaining intimate.
As she puts it, performer Bella Hager was 'torn and raised in Berlin, had to survive the
90s as a teenager.' She focused on pop divas such as Jennifer Lopez, soon feeling a
rupture between the art of being a women in music videos and the art of being a
women on the very own stage. After many years of research in different scenes, social
contexts and with different representations of gender, Bella decided to reunite with
Jenny, Britney, Christina and the rest to resolve this absurd struggle. During the first
act of appearance in Fragments of a Scene her character 'Britney Lopez' will enter
Christina Aguilera's music video to dive into the world of female pop artists in the late
90s, and will then take them into the year 2015 where a new extroverted sexuality
(Bella refers to herself as 'twerself') has left the former virginal image of the diva
behind.
Perhaps the only fair thing to say that all of these artists have in common (apart from
their appearance at Fragments of a Scene), is that they don't quite fit into the normal
distributions of creativity into particular places. Even musically, it is not entirely fitting to
call any of them merely 'producers' or 'musicians,' or to expect their work in clubs or
physical albums. And much of the time, their work is too specific, and too conversant
with the languages of pop and everyday life to feel at home in a gallery or concert hall
either. Many of them have taken the poetics of the visual and used them in a sound-led
medium, perhaps then turning back to re-incorporate the eye, which does not close as
it passes over an online account or a stage. However, nonetheless, these artists have
now carved out a space, somewhere between art and sound and music as it was
understood last century, a way to explore differences within the cohering locus of the
specific, to maintain that fragile equilibrium between novelty and similarity. Isn't that
precisely what a scene should be?
18-Jun-15
BARGAIN-BIN NAIRN: MY LONDON TOP 10 [ 18-Jun-15 4:50pm ]
This little electronica column review fell out of the latest Wire because someone else had already done a longer one. Thought I'd post it up here as it's quite a special release. Video below.
Ben Zimmerman
The Baltika Years
Software DL / 2×LP
With this archive release, Joel Ford and Dan Lopatin's Software have found something that reaches right into the core of the label's interest in the curiously soulful side of late-twentieth-century computer music. Between 1992 and 2002, Ben Zimmerman used a series of Tandy machines working with low-quality waveforms to make short sketches and suites sat everywhere between outright experimentation and vernacular tunefulness. What emerges is a meeting between Moondog and Daniel Johnson in the age of the floppy disk. Most intriguing is the timbre itself - FM synths imitating older instruments alongside samples tuned into sonically matchless keyboards, all coated in a thick oxide layer of digital lo-fi. These are wound up like music boxes and let go, spiralling forward into minimalist abstraction, character pieces or clubbier grooves (including breakbeats) as they eat through their slatted programming. Not only is the limited context intimately audible, but the varieties of mood and texture achieved within it are nothing short of inspiring.
05-May-15
Modal Soul by NujabesOne of the greatest practitioners of drum-machine production with a more traditionally East-Asian sound is from Shanghai: Swimful Buterfly. Swimful has produced for US rappers Lil B and Main Attrakionz, and released a warmly euphoric debut album 馬路天使 (Street Angel) in 2013. Last year's follow-up, 归梦 (Return to a Dream), is even better, perfectly following that trajectory whereby a producer gets both more skilled at crafting beats and more original. It samples both Chinese and Japanese zither instruments and singing try "But Maybe". The track "Air Between Toes" even samples the song "Tsukematsukeru" from J-Pop's kawaii princess Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, transforming its torrent of soda-pop into a cooling stream of sweet mountain water...
春夏秋冬・終 by α·PavWhat about pop? Magic Yume and Zoom Lens (who I talked to here) are two of the best places for Japanese-inspired indie pop in the online underground, and they both have everything on a continuum from laid-back dreaminess to footwork and hyperactive chiptune, showing us that cute and upbeat doesn't have to be intense. At the calmer end, Magic Yume has Tokyo Princess (東京 姫) by Ikaros イカロス (as well as plenty of downtempo beats) and Zoom Lens has Yeule, Girlfriend by Philippines artist Ulzzang Pistol, the gorgeous Paradice by LLLL, and the Yumetatsu Glider EP by Japanese artist Yoshino Yoshikawa, who's affiliated with Tokyo's richly hyperactive Maltine label. 
Yumetatsu Glider EP by Yoshino Yoshikawa
23-Apr-15
ELECTION 2015 [ 23-Apr-15 6:08pm ]
System Focus: What Health Goth Really Means [ 17-Feb-15 10:15pm ]
Le1f photographed by Sam Bayliss Ibram After a brief hiatus, System Focus is back, this time a look at Health Goth, its roots, some of the music surrounding it, and how it represents a turn towards particular aesthetics rather than scenes / genres (click here to read it). Nonetheless there's a geographical convergence in Portland (the piece's working title was 'Health Goth, Portland Hi-Tech and the Age of the Aesthetic.'). Featuring Magic Fades, Club Chemtrail, Karmelloz, C Plus Plus and the return of Vektroid.
How about this: these days there are no scenes or genres, only "aesthetics." A scene implies a physical community in physical architectures, and as such is a fatal slur against the URL everspace and its viral lungs. A genre implies limits, intentions, rules, fixity, and—as every itchy-fingered Facebook commenter knows—is a hateful thing. Nothing exists anyways, not really, only names, only hyperlinks, only patterns that work up to a point and then need an upgrade. Backspace your tearful emojis, hypocrites, it's always been that way; it's just more obvious now that code flows through our arteries rather than squeezes of blood and other smells. But it's not homogenous out there and never will be, the online underground and the cultures tapping its magma are built on a vector field that ripples and clumps together, each blob too quick and continuous for your Dad's rock collection. An aesthetic is not an object, it's a way of looking, a way of finding beauty and sifting experiences, originating with process and behaviour rather than product, or, indeed, a journalist with a butterfly net...
Magic Fades: Push ThruAs the Facebook group curators put it in an interview, "Health Goth is not a lifestyle, it's an exercise in aesthetics. Any publication trying to tell you that Health Goth is about working out has simply taken the two words at face value and opted for a less challenging, and extremely boring alternative." It seems to me that saying that Health Goth is gymming for goths is like saying that cyberpunk is Johnny Rotten doing spreadsheets on a Dell. Let's make something clear: in its original context of the Facebook group and the curators behind it, Health Goth is at a significant remove from music. Health Goth shouldn't be regarded as a musical genre, even if it was given its name by people operating in the online underground music community. What it is is an aesthetic, one that primarily concerns fashion...
The roots of hi-tech, and Health Goth in particular, go way back, but gained particular momentum around 2011. As the Facebook curators recognize, Health Goth is just as reflective of aesthetic trends that preceded it as it is constitutive of new ones. Surprisingly, none of the pieces I'd read on Health Goth mentioned the GHE20G0THIK club phenomenon pioneered by Venus X in NYC, which was a major force in associating pop and hip-hop with dark underground weirdness. Organized alongside Hood By Air designer Shayne Oliver (who often performed), the parties provided an early context for Fade to Mind names like Total Freedom and Nguzunguzu, and were attended by a nascent Arca...
Karmelloz's Silicon Forest, named after the nickname for the Pacific Northwest's hi-tech industry, confirms him as one of hi-tech's best ambient artists, whose subtle work balances heavenly sweetness with the nausea of future shock, and always puts me in mind of giant vats in which amoral artificial biospheres are roused and stirred. C Plus Plus's Cearà is a rich take on a clubbier sound, catching the light of grime, vogue, house, pop and transatlantic styles as it spins eerily in a space of apparently infinite connections. Most notably perhaps, the Push Thru remix album sees the return of Vektroid, one of the key players in the development of vaporwave between 2010 and 2013 as New Dreams Ltd. and Prismcorp Virtual Enterprises. Vektroid is from Portland and the Pacific Northwest of the USA originally, and her remix of "Ecco" is palpably weighty, shifting through a range of cyborg textures in its eight minutes until it feels more like crawling through a digital wormhole or watching a short film demonstrating some horrifying artificial transformation than hearing the usual shuffling of riffs...
31-Dec-14
stuff I wrote and stuff I liked in 2014 [ 31-Dec-14 2:37pm ]
Another pretty busy year for me, writing-about-music-wise. Below is a list of everything, if you're interested. Below that is a list of some releases I particularly enjoyed this year in alphabetical order. I didn't join in with any of the year-end stuff in print or online magazines this year, not because I disapprove - vaguely because I'm finding it difficult to claim I've listened to enough to make the call, and find it really difficult to compare online underground music with more traditionally distributed underground stuff within single assessments - not to mention the fact that great stuff is increasingly coming in chunks smaller and/or less official than the album. But mostly it was because I was really busy at the time all that stuff was due.
Stuff I wrote
AWALthe1$t: Empty
AyGeeTee: Imminent Orphan
bine☃: THINGS WILL BE BETTER FROM NOW ON
Brood Ma: POPULOUS
Chronovalve: Trace of Light
Conan Osiris: Silk
DYNOOO: These Flaws Are Mine to War With
E+E: The Light That You Gave Me To See You
Friendly Sneakrz: Flowers From Above
Geotic: Morning Shore (Eon Isle)
Giant Claw: Dark Web
GOP (Geniuses of Place): 10.9†01;9
Guy Akimoto: BaeBae EP
James Ferraro: SUKI GIRLZ
Karmelloz: Source Localization
Kyoka: Is (Is Superpowered)
Lockbox: Prince Soul Grenade
LXV: New World Spa
Magic Fades: Push Thru
Miami Mais: A Popcorn Diet
Nima: See Feel Reel
Old Manual: リング
Oliver Coates: Towards the Blessed Isles
Palmistry: Ascensión
Ramona Lisa: Arcadia
RAP/RAP/RAP: Killing and Matisse Graveyard
Sentinel: Hybrid
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者: ゲートウェイ
Untold: Black Light Spiral
18+: Trust
30-Dec-14
Review: Arca, Xen (for Electronic Beats) [ 30-Dec-14 7:38pm ]
Did a review of Arca's brilliant Xen for Electronic Beats (click here to read). This sentence was cut:
Digital de Koonings jounce down oozing hallways dragging trains of femme paraphenalia, kawaii cenobites howl and squeal in holes, and sugared children restlessly pound plucked keyboards, enthralled in the boom of the tingling strings.
But others weren't (such as these):
Xen is a multiplicitous figure. Many tracks contain several life forms coiling around each other, each with its own sense of time and space, all crowded into the same fractious textures and struggling for expression and independence. New limbs and organs burst through the skin, feelers fly in every direction and prehensile tongues curl. Disasters of pleasure, showers of sex. The title track is an electrical injection, with strobes of percussion whipping up a club nimbus as stallions rear their heads and the wreckers come whirling and squeaking over the polished floor; at the center of it all a daughter's dancing class on a tightrope.
But other tracks are solo portraits, often keyboard improvisations. "Sad Bitch" pliés forward tentative and lonely before exploding into pirouettes and dovetailing melodies. "Family Violence" is a forest of jabbing and pointed fingers. "Promise" shudders and teeters as if shaking off an ice age, and the piano sketch "Held Apart" waits at the windowsill with memories in its big eyes. The parameters of Ghersi's self-exploration are readjusted with each track, causing constant surprise—dance beats, noise, song, cinematic strings and rave stabs all rotate the album in a space of unexpected dimensions.
Xen artwork by Jesse Kanda
System Focus: Fandom Music Is As Underground As It Gets [ 30-Dec-14 7:30pm ]
Horizon's 'Confinis'Possibly the most out-there System Focus yet, this one looks at recently-emerged fandoms and the way they practice their fandom through music-making online (click here to read). It looks at Pokémon, Adventure Time, Minecraft, Homestuck and My Little Pony. There's some really unusual stuff in this one..One of the major drivers of underground music culture is sincerity. The underground seeks musicians for whom making music is an art and a passion, rather than a performance or a get-rich-quick scheme. You might have heard a lot about 'The New Sincerity' or 'post-irony,' ideas dating back to the 1980s which have been applied to music with a notable level of (usually positive) emotion and innocent frankness. But the search for sincerity goes back as far as its perceived opposites in, say, industrial capitalism go—back to the Romantics and beyond. That's not to say that all underground music culture is sincere. Irony and satire are arguably stronger than ever as the underground re-engages with hi-tech modernity, shunning the ubiquitous, twee, and now almost empty sincerities of the indie aesthetic. But to find music today made from pure positive passion alone, try an online DIY music almost completely outside the remit of the hip underground sites: the music of fandom...
Lethe Wept on Fortissimo Hall The tracks by Pengosolvent are quite unlike anything else—contemporary orchestral VGM squashed imaginatively into a jovial, frenetic and slightly disturbing blur. Try the crazy "Breaktime Over," the highly cute "Enamored Regard" (below), or the proper creepy ghost-type "Paved With Good Intentions" (belated happy Halloween)...
Intriguingly, Adventure Time is a recurring reference point for some fairly parental-advisory hip-hop—here, here, and here. Then there's Oddpauly, who raps about the attractions of the show on one of his tracks. Pauly also has a YouTube channel featuring a music video of his highlight track "Rain," and a video of him playing Minecraft while eating Fruit Rollups...
The largest musical instruments in the virtual worldOne of the most visually striking fandoms online is Homestuck, an epic webcomic about some teens who inadvertently bring about the end of the world, and then get involved with these bizarre troll-like beings that are perfect to dress up as. But don't take it from me—there's a fan song to introduce you to it all... The weirdly great-looking official Homestuck Bandcamp page compiles the soundtrack (made by fans) music and more, and it tends to subtly evade genre, skipping through all kinds of sound worlds, seemingly guided more by emotion (and whatever's going on with those trolls) than form. I've been oddly mesmerized by Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year Older and the cosmically soppy Song of Skaia.
Artwork for 'Firefly Cloud' from Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year OlderThe fandom has a hefty contingent of Bandcamp customers whose pony avatars can be seen lining up on the pages of the most popular albums. But the music only rarely reflects the child-like aesthetic of the show, often bringing out the darker, more romantic connotations of characters and its stories. Alongside sometimes Friedrich-like digital paintings of the relevant ponies, pony musicians regularly put weighty, grand, maximalist and very technically accomplished music. There's punk rock, happy club sounds, ambient electronic, funky song-writing, hardcore, soft rock, epic orchestral, and metal. One of the most popular artists is Eurobeat Brony, who has three volumes of hyperactive 'Super Ponybeat.' Another is TAPS, who has an ear for glitchy vocal science deriving from samples of the show: ponies fractured and suspended in enormous spaces...
Feather's In My Mind
System Focus: High Speed Sounds to Blister Even Internet-Accelerated Brains [ 30-Dec-14 6:46pm ]
DV-i's 'Optical Mode' in its browser context Proper packed System Focus on speed cuteness (click here to read). Kind of a follow-up to the earlier cuteness article (here). Featuring collectives such as JACK댄스, Activia Benz, Donky Pitch, STHWST, Hope Sick Cola, Mecha Yuri, Magic Yume Records and Manicure Records and artists like Guy Akimoto, DV-i, Miami Mais, Maxo, Yeongrak, Friendly Sneakrz, Onika, Ba-Kuura, Xyloid, So So In Luv, Lockbox, DZA, Doss, Yandere and more. I made a tracklist for it, but not all of it ended up in the SoundCloud playlist at the bottom of the article. Here it is in full (click the links to listen):
Lockbox's Prince Soul Grenade What a month it's been for cuteness! The deliciously hyper-camp new aesthetic, in its element online, is most famously embodied by the PC Music label—everyone's been messaging and tweeting about them! Then recently the movement got its anthem in the form of "Hey QT" by QT, a snappy lil number which is also the official tune of a new energy drink I can't wait to taste (that's the artwork above). But QT and PC are only the cherry on top of a vast cutie pie. Not long ago, #Feelings boss Ben Aqua set the net ablaze with his Resident Advisor podcast, a celebration of cute club intensity from all over the clouds. Finn Diesel's DIS Magazine show on Rinse FM, a haven for cuteness and other flavors since May and previously featuring SOPHIE, A. G. Cook and Felicita, entered its third installment on September 25, introducing Onika and So So In Luv. And trans-national club sensation JACK댄스 has returned, this time in New York with a whole new roster of US-based cuties...
So So in Luv: 1 + 0nlyThose high twinkly notes, that high-speed syncopation, that high helium voice. Hints of '90s hardcore rushing unrepentantly into the digital age. And the network that links JACK댄스, DIS Magazine, Ben Aqua and PC Music with labels like Activia Benz, Donky Pitch, STHWST, Hope Sick Cola, Mecha Yuri, Manicure Records and more has converged on this style from many different points of origin: jungle and hardcore, seapunk, footwork, trap, the sparkly HudMo-Rustie sound, pop, J-pop, video game music and experimental breaks. Just as chopped and screwed lethargy seems to be everywhere between beats and vaporwave, this convergence amounts to the return of speed and complexity in ways guaranteed to blister even your internet-accelerated brain...
Guy Akimoto's BaeBae EP, something of an ode to digital communication, begins with the itchy-fingered title track, which includes a demure robot lady announcing, Reality escaping me, emotions with velocity, log me on, sign me out, give me something to type about. Hype tunes, low tides, sending emails all night. Me and bae, bae and me, HDMI, USB...
Indie Goes Hi-Tech: The End of Analogue Warmth and Cosy Nostalgia (Berlin Music Week talk) [ 30-Dec-14 5:49pm ]
At Berlin Music Week I gave a talk (video above) that summed up the wider trend behind basically everything I've written about for the past two years: 'hi-tech,' which I like to oppose to traditional indie aesthetics. It includes a summary of many of its sub-trends which looked at in past articles. The slides for the talk are below in all PowerPoint 2003's splendor.
04-Oct-14
POSTSTEP 2014 [ 04-Oct-14 10:37am ]
OASIS BOOK REVIEW ROUND-UP [ 17-Jul-14 9:47pm ]
DEFINITELY DEFINITELY DEFINITELY OUT NOW [ 15-Jul-14 10:39am ]
AT TIME'S LIGHT THRONGED MERIDIAN [ 20-May-14 9:52am ]
13-May-14
LONDON RADICAL BOOK FAIR, 2014 [ 08-May-14 11:40am ]
FREUD, CHRIST, MARX & THE BROTHERS GALLAGHER: A 300-WORD PRAYER [ 17-Apr-14 1:30pm ]
DEFINITELY MAYBE 33 1/3 [ 15-Apr-14 11:54am ]
SENSE AND SECTIONALITY [ 02-Apr-14 9:56am ]
Reading Sterne's Sentimental Journey, I'm struck by how much its ethical guidebook for the haute bourgeoisie resembles our own RaceSexualityGender doxa. In both cases, morality is abstracted - and pseudo-systematised - through a series of jargon terms for the initiated. Whereas we have PoC, intersectionality, trigger warning, mansplaining, brocialism, the eighteenth century had sentiment, sensibility, nature, decorum, sympathy, etc.
In both cases, ethics becomes a kind of manneristic exercise to be perfected if one is to acquire maturity and attain the degree of cultivation required for social advancement (in the eighteenth century - the church, the court, the judiciary, the army; in our own time - academia, politics, the commentariat, and indeed any profession - ie. the vast majority - in which social liberalism is preached while the most punitive form of neoliberal economics is practiced).
The weakness of both systems is their largely performative aspect - using the appropriate terminology and adopting the correct standpoint today with regard to, say, sexuality, is precisely equivalent to eighteenth-century displays of sensibility (the gentleman doffing his cap or handing the young lady his handkerchief at exactly the right moment). The point is that these are what we might call courtly gestures - largely superficial acts of performance that attract applause and approbation in the short term and in the social foreground but do not extend substantially into the realm of actual social organisation. Indeed, in most cases, the former actively stands in for the latter.
23-Mar-14
SUBLIMATION OF THE SOAR PT.3 [ 23-Mar-14 9:58pm ]
Dream swelling soar here
19-Mar-14
HOW HAS CAPITALISM GOT AWAY WITH THE FINANCIAL CRISIS, AND WHY IS POLITICS SCARED OF IDEAS? [ 19-Mar-14 2:41pm ]
RUINED MILLS OF LEEK, A BALLAD [ 27-Feb-14 1:05pm ]
We drove by the ruined mills of Leek
In the dead time of the year
When the land had become like a faded song
We could no longer hear.
Down where the mouldering sandstone world
Of the Potteries blends with the weeds,
Where the warehouses echo with wandering winds
And the loneliness gathers in beads,
Where the powerful cling to their juggernaut arks
And the cities are sunken and bare,
I was someone who failed like a tumbling tower
On the edge of a kingdom of air.
I was someone who failed like a light going out
In a dream on the edge of sight
Because some men are made for the palace of bliss
And some men are made for the night.
We drove by the ruined mills of Leek
In the last days of the year
And the land was as quiet as a faded song
We could no longer hear.
03-Feb-14
MORE SUBLIMATION OF THE SOAR [ 03-Feb-14 7:10pm ]
INTERSECTIONALITY OF THE GUT [ 23-Jan-14 7:47pm ]
There's been a lot of debate about intersectionality recently. But all too often, it seems to me, what's being termed intersectionality is little more than a classic ascetic-deconstructive manoeuvre, a way of saying: okay, your argument is all very well and good, but you haven't given sufficient attention to x, and here's a more sophisticated, more rigorous turn of the screw, and another, and so on ad infinitum. Some might view this positively, as dialectical ratiocination, or simply a necessary way of conducting intelligent debate. But right now, in the current moment, in the context of the omnishambles that is the contemporary left, I think these sorts of movements are invariably negative and paralysing. What is more (and I think this is partly why it took me so long to understand what intersectionality actually is), what's being left out a lot of the time is the "inter" part of the formulation. Invocations of the intersectional credo are most often made along the lines of emphasising - either explicitly, or implicitly through the virulence of their expression - the interests of a single section, a single ideological category. Debate then gets swallowed up by warring capitalised mega-interests - Anti-Racism, Anti-Sexism, Anti-Homophobia, and so on - which of course very few people in their right minds (on the left at least) would ever really consciously oppose, but which have a tendency to be deployed in the context of frequently absurdist melodramas of debate in which people who are quite obviously in general agreement become violently opposed to each other on grounds of super-subtle sectional difference.
How, then, can intersectionality be used more positively? I think that, when we look at something like the above picture, we all know instinctively, and with a visceral certainty that relegates debate to the level of relative meaninglessness. Yes, the picture tells us, this person is undoubtedly racist. But she is also anti-feminist, pro-capitalist, and (literally) perched on the pinnacle of a system in which the labour of millions is used to furnish the airbrushed propaganda of new neoliberal Tsars and Tsarinas who differ from their pre-twentieth century predecessors only in a smattering of infinitesimal ways. The really effective response to this picture should not be banal cries of racism of the kind that we hear from the liberal press (and which Zhukova can try to refute on the grounds that she, as a bien pensant social-liberal-of-sorts, is interested in sponsoring "anti-racist" artworks). Rather, horrors like this should provoke the counterposition of a holistic, socialist, ethical critique in which anti-racism scarcely has to be invoked because it is so obviously an integral part of a wider anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical critique. Real intersectionality must mean the integration of sectional interests until they need to be emphasised only in rare instances, and in a spirit of solidarity and empathy. If we can't grasp this and act on it before getting sidetracked into endless deconstructive caveatising, then the left really is doomed to repeat the failures of last half-century, if it even makes it through the next decade.
16-Jan-14
POSTMODERNIST REDUX [ 16-Jan-14 10:05pm ]
THE SUBLIMATION OF THE SOAR [ 14-Jan-14 2:17pm ]
I was geet pleased to write the first Quietus Essay. File under: Strains of Tentative Futurism in 2010s Pop!
Hopefully there's more good stuff to come in this new series.
13-Jan-14
2013 POP [ 31-Dec-13 11:47am ]
INTROS [ 29-Dec-13 11:13am ]
NOTES ON ITV'S LUCAN [ 12-Dec-13 2:49pm ]
2013 in Music - Pt. 2 [ 31-Dec-13 5:33pm ]
2013 in Music - Pt. 1 [ 30-Dec-13 4:45pm ]
Pt. 1 House & Bass all in one place
It's very difficult for me to talk objectively about music this year. It's been a year defined by both moving closer towards and further away from the musical scene of action for me.
Moving closer, though jackin was my obsession for much of 2012, it was NYE 2013 when I first actually got to hear the music in its proper context, had one of the best raving experiences of my entire life, and began a love affair with 02:31, the Rainbow and Birmingham which has seen me go back another 4 times this year, including two 02:31 raves I had the privilege of DJing.
Moving away, literally, in March I moved to Japan, where I plan on living for the next few years. In Tokyo I've made some amazing friends, met a lot of very talented DJs and producers, been to some wicked nights out and have had an great time getting involved in the Bass scene out there. But yet, Tokyo's not London, there is no massive, there is no sense that musical activity is plugged into the lives of tens of thousands of people around the nation, there is no sense of the history which everyone with more than a passing interest in raving in the UK knows almost innately, there is no sense that any of it really matters, because to 99.999% of Japanese people, it doesn't.
Still, I had a fantastic 2013, and if you can forgive that my vision is necessarily partial, unreliable both for standing too close to the sun (nearly half my weekends in the UK this year have been spent at 02:31 exclusively), and too far away (the biggest party I've seen in Japan had 200 people... It was sick!) then I hope you'll find me thoughts and feelings and not-feelings worth a read.
02:31/Brum/Jackin
As anyone who read my yearly round-up last year, or basically had any sort of contact with at all knows, jackin was the single sound that defined 2012 for me. The first half of 2013 saw me grow even closer to music, ushering in the new year at 02:31 and going back again and again at every opportunity I've had.
My obsession with the music itself continued on a similar level to 2012 for much of the year, as the scene continued to dash out banger after banger after banger at an insane pace. Indeed, lining up the top 10 or 20 jackin tracks of 2012 and 2013, you could even make the argument that jackin improved this year.
Some of the tracks/vibez/flavours/artists I've been feeling this year are:
DARKNESS2013 was the year jackin did what we all wanted it to and went over to the dark side. Brent Kilner had been pushing his own dark, dubstep/dnb influenced take on jackin since last year's 02:31 anthem Too BadThis year he continued in the fine style, and it's really difficult to whittle down out of so many banging tracks (Too Bad VIP, Kelis's Milkshake refix, Dizzee's Old Skool refix etc etc.). So honestly, go over to his soundcloud, pick a track and random, and be treated to a darkside bass banger. Best of the bunch however has to be the very recent refix of Skeng, an inspired mix which speaks to Kilner's background in dubstep, is hard as f$$$ck and is just a few more follows on Kilner's soundcloud away from becoming a free download, so support the cause and follow him!
2013 also saw Lorenzo on a darker tip, most notably in his tracks with Pete Graham, starting with the half-step, screwface, "dark and creepy" Dorothy's Forest
And getting progressively weirder and wobblier with the likes of Dorothy's Armpit/Wom, Chu Ba Ka, The Twlight Zone and Who Dat.
Chris Gresswell, one half of the pioneering jackin crew Screwface, really came into his own this year, with a stream of twisted bassline bangers, including a likkle dubplate he did for me of the 2-step classic Stone Cold ;)
But nowhere was he spookier than with Silent Hill, sampling from the horror movie of the same name, complete with eery twinkle noises, whipcracking sharp drums, deep rolling bass and two wicked drops.
Come over to the dark side? Yeah alright then.
B list jackin
For me, one of the joys of jackin at it's best was the sense that there was so much energy, so much quality to the scene that even the second tier of tracks - tracks by artists who pop up and disappear again, tracks dashed out on bigtunes with no sort of promo or bloghype, tracks you might rinse for a month obsessively but that are unlikely to be considered classics or even remembered in a few years time - even these tracks are sick.
As the year went on and jackin turned increasingly professional, with tracks signed to record labels. drawn out release schedules and artists imposing stricter quality control/brand management to their releases, this B-list jackin suffered massively for it. We released that this abundance of B-list jackin, the ability to go on to bigtunes and find 10 tracks which were good enough to bang out in a club - if not necessarily good enough to have played at your funeral - was vital to the health of the scene as a whole.
So this goes out to the B-list.
This following one's actually a remix of some bate EDM tune, which I only realised after hearing the original in a connivence store in Tokyo.
Massive hardcore/euphoric vibes on this one. This track really sums up that thing I love about jackin where it rehabilitates fatally cheesy vocals, where you're left wondering during the build what the hell you're listening to and how the producer's ever going to redeem themselves, and then it drops and you do a nasty bassface and cop it into your bigtunes cart right there.
97 plays on soundcloud, but was my song of the month earlier the year, duppying a number of my first DJ sets in Japan
Some dude called Phatfunk, who made this track and no others that I can remember. Wicked dancehall vocal from a DJ Zinc track, and absolutely love the slowed down donk bassline.
Hybrid Theory
Hands down the debut artist of the year, Brummy duo Hybrid Theory exploded onto the scene way back in January with 0483 and have put out nothing but bangers since.
Their sound encapsulates the blend of speed garage warps + bassline wobble + house beats + magical mystery ingredient that defines jacking, and they come with a toughness and grit that counterbalances the cheese and pop tendencies of other jackin artists.
Their soundcloud reads like a best of list for jackin this year, with track names like So High, Higher, Mind Games and Drop to the Max likely to set off screwfaces on anyone who's heard them in a club. Though choosing a favorite out of all of those basslines and beats feels nearly impossible, two special mentions have to be given to the wobbling stomper that is Screened for having one of the best second drops of the last half decade:
And the anthemic remix of Decibel's Skank featuring Flow Dan:
This track had me skanking round my room for nearly an hour when I first clocked it, even bussin' a cheeky selfie video of the massive screwface it induced. It's the gift that keeps on giving, 'dropping' about 3 times before settling into an un-fuck-withable blend of slinky 4x4 drums, owl bassline, and grime vocals. Top 5 tune of the year, and would be number 1 grime x jackin crossover if Cause & Affect hadn't upped the levs later on...
Nigurr
Number 2 breakthrough artist of the year. If Hybrid Theory is a genius producer, likely to be making waves for a long time to come, the South African(!?!?!) Niggur (a name which makes talking about the guy obviously hugely problematic for white people...) is rather only a good producer with a genius formula - namely putting bate, singalong hip hop and r&b vocals on top of You Want Me-style, deep and dirty, bouncy house beats.
Shake Dat
"Shake dat ass for me, shake dat ass for me" - it might not be clever, but it is big.
You Want Me Too
Perfect name for a track which basically acts as the sequel to Nick Hannam ft. Tom Zanetti's mega anthem You Want Me, sampling the classic Cassie track U & Me and guaranteed to get gyals and guys #emotional on the dancefloor.
Cause & Affect/Lorenzo
Yet despite new tallent entering the scene, no one came close to challenging Lorenzo's reign supreme over all that is jackin, either in his original productions with Kane as Cause & Affect, or engineering for countless other producers.
2013 was a big one for Cause & Affect as a duo, seeing their track Don't Like To Do That released on the massive Dirtybird label, with tours taking them everywhere from London to Ibiza to San Francisco. It also saw their productions getting better and better.
Pushing the bass line as hard and far as it could go was Kamikaze, the name being an 'o so subtle statement of intent as to its impact on the dancefloor:
Coming like an 8 bar grime tune, with the same bassline played out in turns between a metallic, saber-toothed sin-wave bassline bass line and a jackin-owl-bass which sounds like someone's been handing out M-kat in an aviary, this was my go to dj tune for when I was mashed and just wanted to take things a bit nasty throughout the year.
On a completely different flex was the C&A remix of Stanton Warriors' (lol yes I know, bare with me) Cut Me Up, a spangling metamodern, back-to-the-future mashup of 'ardcore and 'ouse and bass.
It builds with a near era-perfect replication of a 92/93 hardcore-jungle build - piano vamps, diva voxs, rolling breaks, thundering reese bass, with only its too-clean production values to give its real age away - but drops in pure 2k13 ruffneck jackin style.
Best of the bunch was Battle, an absolute monster riddim featuring vocals from the Newham Generals, all the little orchestral/cinematic frills and trills that fill the C&A soundscape, and a rudebwoy bass line which can't help but make you pull a face like someone farted nearby. A sick tune that got us all very gassed at the possibilities of the grime x jackin crossover
Though much of Lorenzo's best work was in collaboration with other artists (though one never really knows what percent is Loz's input, you suspect sometimes that he basically just makes the whole damn track).
Particularly strong this year was his work with Tom Garnett, which resulted in the wonderfully tracky P.A.R.T.Y featuring party-hard lyrics from Tom Zanetti and a womping bass line which sums up everything jackin does best:
Perhaps winning the award for 'most inspired sampling' (last year's prize obviously had to go to Loz's refix of Running Up That Hill...) was Trouble
Which bounces along nicely until drop in the middle, where it smoothly slips into the original version of Woman Trouble by the Artful Dodger ft. Craig David. I can't conceptualise the human who would not be left beaming, singing along and bouncing around like a mad eejat when this kicks in. This has been one of the anthems of the year for me, played by me or someone else at nearly every party I've been to in Tokyo this year. It's the sheer will-to-pleasure that everyone who 'get's' jackin, gets.
The closest thing the scene had to a runnaway anthem in the vein of You Want Me this year was Darlin' a Lorenzo engineered Sleepin Is Cheatin' track featuring the lethargic and louche, day-after-a-night-taking-too-many-drugs crooning of Tom Zanetti.
With an almost-professional video feature TZ's adorable little son bussin moves in a warehouse, this was the jackin tune with staying power: I've heard it at least 3 times at every 02:31 event I've been to since it was released. It's also the only jackin tune I can think of that's crossed over, getting some serious play in deep-tech raves, radio sets and mixtapes too. Slow, druggy, donky, sick.
Track of the year!!!
Finally, both in the sense of coming at the end of this too long (sorry!) rundown, and being the last major jackin track of the year - released earlier in December - is Up To No Good, a masterful rework of an old hardcore track done alongside the ever ravey Ill Phill
I could pick it apart and look at how every single element is perfectly engineered to to get UK ravers gassed as #f$$ck - but really it's just the best build and drop of the whole year - and then it insanely generously repeats the trick with the best build and 2nd drop of the whole year. A massive anthem, and for what it's worth my track of 2013.
Jacked out?
So, given that I've just spend a lot of words and way too many soundcloud embeds (sorry about that slow computer/internet users...) gassing about 2013 jackin, you might think that the scene is in rude health. The unfortunate truth is however, that over 80% of the tracks listed here came out in the first half of the year. Since the summer, things have really, reaaaally slowed down.
A large part of this would be down to the increasing professionalization of the genre. Whereas it used to be that a track would be previewed on soundcloud, a within the month it would be up for download on bigtunesmp3, now the vibe is, a track gets previewed on soundcloud, it gets signed to a minor record label whose sole act of promotion seems to be getting the track on beatport, and then you wait 6-9 months till you can get hands on it, with none of the producers willing to give the track as a promo because it's signed.
Though this false scarcity and label-support obviously makes sense from the standpoint of the individual producer, on a scene-wide level it acts as a major drain of energy, an aura killer, and has destroyed that scene you had earlier on in the scene's lifespan that there was just so much going on, so much creativity at work, that a producer would release a track a month because they could.
But if producers being more careful with there tracks was a cause of decline, it may also be the case that there simply was less energy, less momentum, less ideas floating about as the jackin brand exerted a weaker and weaker pull on tallent compared to house proper.
For much of the year even - to be honest, especially - among its biggest producers and DJs, you could not find anyone willing to defend, define, or even use the word jackin to refer to the bassline derived house sounds coming from Brum/Leeds.
When 02:31 got a weekly show on Rinse FM, they used the platform not to push jackin, but to push their own brand of 'house & bass' (which is the exact same thing but a million times less informative). As Lorenzo, Hannah Wants, Tom Shorterz have built well deserved profiles for themselves in the national scene, and have found themselves subject to interviews and magazine features, the words "house", "bass", and "house & bass" fly thick and fast, while there is no mention of jackin, the scene they made and that made them.
Chatting to Kane from Cause & Affect, he says the affiliation with house is due to having an eye on the long term - having seen jungle, garage, bassline etc. fall by the wayside, he would rather exert his efforts for the scene that never dies - house music. Of course, while house music never dies, neither does is come to define an era, or expand the possibilities of what is meant by dance music like those UK genres which shine too bright and die too fast.
Ultimately, I can't but see the abandonment of jackin as a name and genre to rally around as a massive shot in the foot - from the bottom of my heart wishing Lorenzo and co all the best in making a name for themselves in the massive, 30 year old, international house scene - but seeing this as less likely, and the rewards in fact lesser, than the patient work of building jackin as its own scene and having the mainstream come to them (ala 2-step).
For this reason, though 2013 was a great year for jackin, it truly saddens me to say, I reckon it will be its last. As the summer wore on and the weeks since I had bought anything from bigtunes piled up, I began looking elsewhere for tunes to fill my record bag and for that little hit of future. My search led me back to my hometown, and ironically given my dispair at jackin's direction, back to house.
Continued in Part 2
2012 in Music [ 27-Dec-12 5:20pm ]
Jack to the Future [ 26-Jun-12 2:39am ]
RUFF HOUSE: Part 1 [ 03-Mar-12 11:48am ]
Atari Teenage Riot [ 09-Aug-11 9:49pm ]
Fucking Voodoo Magic, Man [ 06-Jul-11 10:45pm ]
Abandoned Ship (The future of British Bass) [ 25-Mar-11 3:26pm ]
This Unfolds (10 reasons to see Four Tet this Friday 25th @Plastic People) [ 22-Mar-11 3:51pm ]
Wut (Fashion tips for the Far-Left) [ 09-Jan-11 6:02pm ]
Open Your Mind - Foul Play [ 30-Dec-10 4:03pm ]
Top ten tunes to kettle-break to [ 26-Dec-10 7:01pm ]
leaving earth [ 21-Sep-15 11:02pm ]
The End of PostStep [ 21-Sep-15 11:02pm ]
There's not much to write about in terms of new exciting post dubstep any more. As predicted the last time I posted here - and that's already a long time ago - 2014 produced quite a lot of good poststep + derived and associated music, but not with the same amount of trailblazing creativity as the four years before. There were still some shockingly new stuff, but mostly it was a year of further refining ideas from the previous wonder years.
Best of all - in a league of its own, really - was Felicitas Frenemies ep, containing the most jaw-droppingly weird and alien music I've heard since, I dunno, Jameszoos Faaveelaa probably. Felicita is related to the PC-music camp, but where those people mostly use hyper-syntheticness as a kitsch enhancer, on Frenemies it's taken far beyond its breaking point and into utter abstraction, as creepy and terrifying as watching an artificially intelligent toy, designed to be overbearingly cute and cheerful, going completely insane, its thought processes disintegrating before our ears. In its own absurd way as radical as, say, early Swans or Einstürzende Neubauten, and the rest of the PC music camp is pretty much coming off as a cut rate Test Department by comparison, though the Lucky Me-label did released a couple of actually quite good EPs - Cashemere Cats Wedding Bells and Joseph Marinettis PDA - which, while still being a bit too pastiche-inflicted to be on Felicitas level, managed to share some aspects of the PC-aesthetic and yet be a bit more unreal and weird than the real PC deal. Closest to Felicitas level of alieness was probably Giant Claws Dark Web, which, despite being much more related to the Oneothrix Point Never/ Software end of things, reached moments of the same inorganic weirdness and broken-machine-dream-logic.
As for something approaching an actual leading movement in poststep in 2014, rather than PC music, the most obvious suggestion is what could collectively be called "abstract grime", spanning a whole heap of different approaches, and culminating in an enormous amount of releases last year. Many were only "grime" in the most tangential sense, and many certainly weren't all that great, but a pretty good amount of highly original, forward-thinking stuff still came out if this department. The icy, hyper angular anti-grooves of the "cryo grime" subgenre had pretty much already culminated in 2013 with Logos' Cold Mission, and not much has been added since, but a couple of brilliant EPs - Air Max '97s Progress and Memory, Blooms Hydraulics - did managed to take it into even more abstract extremes in 2014. Related in its quest for inorganic groovelessness, a much more interesting development was what could be called entropic grime, where the clinical, sharp and shiny angles of cryo grime were taken over by stumbling, dysfunctional zombie-rhythms, and buried in layers of sonic dirt, dead sounds in a state of perpetual decomposition. SD Laikas awesome That's Harakiri-album was more or less the definitive release in this respect, though Filter Dreads Midi Space ep was perhaps even better. While his Space Loops lp - released on tape in 2013 and re-released on vinyl in 2014 - offered a slightly more polished and coherent version of the SD Laika aesthetic, Midi Space infused the style with a bizarre playfulness - there's synthetic colours and rubbery syncopations worthy of the best bitstep, yet it all come off as strangely faded, washed out, hazy: Yesterdays amazing cybertoys twisted and broken, their operating systems overtaken by depression.
Among the most characteristic subgenres of grime in 2014, "new age grime" or perhaps "emo-grime" took the clean, delicate structures of cryo grime and made them, if not exactly "warm", then at least soft and bright, inviting. Some seemed to think that this approach was somehow wrong by definition (because grime should be "raw" and "road" and "authentic"), and while I do consider that puritan mindset pretty ridiculous, I must admit that I didn't get much into this stuff. Perhaps I'd been won over if Yamanekos Pixel Wave Embrace - seen by many as a key work - had been released on vinyl and not just tape, but another potential key work, Mr. Mitchs Parallel Memories, didn't really do anything for me either, too wistfully emotional and uniformally pretty for my taste. Rather, I think the best suggestion in this area is probably Fatima al Qadiri's Asiatisch, which is certainly clean, lithe, bright and soft, and at the same time emotional in a wonderfully synthetic, hyper real fashion. Like with SD Laika and Filter Dread, Asiatisch has only a faint, superficial relationship with grime, with just a few artificially inseminated stylistic elements audible, and I do find it kinda silly that these records are being placed under the abstract grime umbrella, but that doesn't mean that they're not some of the greatest releases of 2014.
Cryo- emo- and entropic grime was only a small part of 2014s huge abstract grime wave, and some of the best of the rest managed to be simultaneously emotional, atmospheric and highly experimental, while still clearly recognisable as - at least a kind of - actual grime descendants. Sure, they were still clearly not doing grime (or more generally, 'nuum music) "right", taking it in a deliberately cerebral and arty direction that is far from how the genre was originally supposed to be, but that is exactly why they were actually doing something new and unheard, and why records like Slackk's moody, melancholic Pakm Tree Fire-album or Inkke's Crystal Children ep were among the best records of 2014. This stuff is to the original grime sound what Ultravox, Japan or Soft Cell were to glam: A clearly new and contemporary take on some related ideas, free of the rock'n'roll/'nuum residue still present in the predecessors. Abstract grime is not 'nuum music, but why should it have to be to be good?
In addition to all the abstract-grime-and-related stuff, 2014 still had quite a few brilliant records scattered throughout different kinds of poststep, as well as some not really belonging there, but perhaps not really belonging anywhere else either. Evian Christs Waterfall-ep and Krampfhaft's Before We Leave-album both had elements that perhaps could classify them as a kind of avant trap, and as such the closest we got to descendants of the wonky-wobble/ravey bitstep-lineage. On Waterfall, massive riff-blasts and brutal lurch-march rhythms are twisted into dysfunctionally weird shapes, the effect being somewhere between over the top silly, slightly creepy and genuinely intimidating, while Before We Leave tried to convert Krampfhafts idiosyncratic style into a more subtle and understated "big album"-sound, and as a result failed to be the masterpiece it could have been. The soft and polished overall sound made it a pretty big disappointment at first, but in the end that was only really a problem because of, as so often before, the inappropriate length. With repeated listening it eventually managed to show itself as one of the very best of the year, despite its shortcomings; On the first three fourths, Krampfhaft really succeeded in creating a kind of cosmic, slow motion version of his ultra-angular bleep-melodies and neurotic trap/bitstep beats, whether in the form of ravey-yet-sonambulist freak-step like "Superfluid", "Spinner" and "Toekan", or isolationist deep sea dreams like "Clip Point" and "Mostly Empty Space". It's only with the last four tracks that it gets too much - here we're getting too close to cosy, pretty chill out music, completely unnecessary, and only making the album seem pointlessly drawn out. Which is a shame when the rest is so good.
Surprisingly, after some very slim years where the Californian "post hop"-scene more or less seemed to have regressed into standard down tempo dullness, it made a (slight) come back in 2014, with two pretty great albums. Mono/Poly is one of the scenes lesser known artists, even if he has been active almost from the start, and has released a couple of brilliant EPs. Where his tendency towards new age mysticism was a bit of an annoying element on 2010s digital-only Paramatma-album, on Golden Skies he dedicates himself completely to these elements, and surprisingly makes it work. The glittering bleep cascades is a perfect match for the drowsy, mystically sun-kissed sound - a genuinely contemporary, wide-eyed take on cosmic chill out music, where too much stoner down tempo is just safe and cosy. Much the same effect is to be found on the first half of Collapse, debut album by the hitherto unknown - to me at least - Repeated Measure. The sound here is perhaps more "spaced out" cosmic than warm and sunny, but we're still talking slowly drifting sci fi-music with plenty of fractured bleep patterns. What's really noteworthy, though, is the second half, where these bleep patterns are suddenly backed by a much more heavy and angular bottom, effectively turning the music into wobbly bitstep. Where 2013 actually had a surprising amount of amazing new bitstep, that sound practically disappeared since, and in 2014, and the only place it really made a noteworthy appearance was on the second half of Collapse - and brilliantly so!
Of the remaining 2014 highlights, Mesaks Howto Readme took skweee in new directions that made the style less uniquely its own, but also yielded some interesting hybrid forms. Equally eclectic, Jimmy Pés Insomnia bridged ravey wobble-trap and atmospheric, burialesque sadstep (with some nauseating vocals here and there, unfortunately), while Ital Teks Mega City Industry ep offered more of his trademark dreamy, floating footwork ("dreamwork"?), and the hitherto unknown Chainless made the best darkstep record of the year with Grey Veils, brilliantly building on the best parts of Lorn and early Nosaj Thing. Surprisingly, Inga Copelands Copeland, which on the surface really seemed too minimal for its own good, somehow managed to be better than anything else I've heard from Hype Williams, whether as Blunt and Copeland solo or together. Sort of entropic music reaching peak bleak emptiness. As opposite to this as imaginable, Disrupt offered colourful and catchy 8-bit hyper-dub on Dub Matrix with Stereo Sound, while The Marvs combination of bouncy beats and ghostly bollywood samples on A King of Tuneswas just as catchy - almost pop music.
Which sort of brings us to FKA Twigs' LP1, I guess, which, while not full blown poststep as such, nevertheless used a whole heap of poststep elements, and sort of demonstrated how they could be used as a base for pop music as odd and futuristic as poststep proper. So far, a much more durable and fascinating record than the much talked about XEN by her producer Arca, who goes all the way into the abstract, and is sort of closer to traditional glitch or IDM than Twigs is to traditional pop music. Not that you can't hear the contemporary elements and techniques - and a few tracks do sound genuinely and exhilaratingly new -, but when taken this far into pure soundplay and atmospheric experimentalism, you inevitably end up with something resembling classic Autechre (or, heck, even Eno), at least on the surface level. And this kind of seem to be the way most of the radically experimental electronic scene is heading - away from the unheard structural weirdness of poststep and into the more well established world of "soundscaping", as heard on records from Holly Herndon, M.E.S.H., TCF and Brood Ma. A lot of this is sort of brilliant (Herndons Platform is one of my 2015 favorites so far), but still also slightly disappointing in the returning to safe formulas. Not unlike the goth lite/proto dream pop of the early 4AD school I guess, delivering light, digestible and comforting "art music" as an alternative to the resurgence of lame and mannered "real rock", in 2015 mirrored by the endless forms of retro house/retro 'nuum music paying lip service to all the righteous signifiers of true dance and club culture while offering no actual evolution of the form - except perhaps a few slight hybrid elements and updates in overall sound design - i.e. stuff that only people with oppressive historic knowledge would notice, let alone care about. I mean, how desperate do you have to be as a critic to get excited about something as boring and creatively inane as deep tech or jackin house, with nothing to offer except having the right, 'nuumologically correct attitude?
So, yeah, I'm not optimistic I guess. So far, 2015 has had very little to offer, and I don't think the coming years will offer much more than the aforementioned updated electronic art music - nu-IDM, entropic, new synth. The once so exciting engine of weird wobble dubstep has ossified into formulaic stadium trap, and most other attempts at making music simultaneously experimental and dance floor oriented seem to end up as yet more insultingly dull 4/4-house-with-percussion-and-slightly-gritty-basslines-crap. Of course, some of the best artists of the poststep golden age will be hanging on and continue to release great stuff (Debruit is still at it, and Kuedo is back after a looong break), and now and then a few new artists will make surprising anomalies as weird and wonderful as the best of the originals (like Jlin's Dark Energy, perhaps the best of 2015 so far). And I am excited to hear what artists like Felicita, Filter Dread and SD Laika will be doing next. But, in the end, the golden age of poststep is definitively over, as it inevitably would be. I knew it wouldn't last, and so I should most of all just be happy about the unbelievable amount of amazing music that made the last 5-6 years such a thrill to live through, an abundance I hadn't experienced since the first half of the nineties, and not something I had really expected to ever happen again. Yet, while I'm grateful for all this, and still listen to all these records more than anything else (and even find more amazing records from the last five years that I didn't even notice the first time around), there's also something about it that feels very curious, like somehow it wasn't real, it didn't really happen, despite all the concrete evidence, all the groundbreaking records. And indeed, if we're talking about this music being recognised as a golden age, as an abundance of innovation and creativity and shocking futurism, then it didn't really happen. It seems like I'm more or less the only one having this perspective - even Adam Harpe has a different focus, both with the music he's championing and with the years he consider the best (to him the years prior to 2010 were the best, and then things got good again only recently, so pretty much exactly the opposite of how I see it).
The question is: why wasn't this golden age recognised as a golden age? I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, and it's a complex problem with no single, simple solution. Answering it really deserves a piece of its own - this is pretty long and pretty delayed already - so I'll postpone my thoughts on that matter for now, and hopefully return soon.
19-Aug-15
Best of all - in a league of its own, really - was Felicitas Frenemies ep, containing the most jaw-droppingly weird and alien music I've heard since, I dunno, Jameszoos Faaveelaa probably. Felicita is related to the PC-music camp, but where those people mostly use hyper-syntheticness as a kitsch enhancer, on Frenemies it's taken far beyond its breaking point and into utter abstraction, as creepy and terrifying as watching an artificially intelligent toy, designed to be overbearingly cute and cheerful, going completely insane, its thought processes disintegrating before our ears. In its own absurd way as radical as, say, early Swans or Einstürzende Neubauten, and the rest of the PC music camp is pretty much coming off as a cut rate Test Department by comparison, though the Lucky Me-label did released a couple of actually quite good EPs - Cashemere Cats Wedding Bells and Joseph Marinettis PDA - which, while still being a bit too pastiche-inflicted to be on Felicitas level, managed to share some aspects of the PC-aesthetic and yet be a bit more unreal and weird than the real PC deal. Closest to Felicitas level of alieness was probably Giant Claws Dark Web, which, despite being much more related to the Oneothrix Point Never/ Software end of things, reached moments of the same inorganic weirdness and broken-machine-dream-logic.
As for something approaching an actual leading movement in poststep in 2014, rather than PC music, the most obvious suggestion is what could collectively be called "abstract grime", spanning a whole heap of different approaches, and culminating in an enormous amount of releases last year. Many were only "grime" in the most tangential sense, and many certainly weren't all that great, but a pretty good amount of highly original, forward-thinking stuff still came out if this department. The icy, hyper angular anti-grooves of the "cryo grime" subgenre had pretty much already culminated in 2013 with Logos' Cold Mission, and not much has been added since, but a couple of brilliant EPs - Air Max '97s Progress and Memory, Blooms Hydraulics - did managed to take it into even more abstract extremes in 2014. Related in its quest for inorganic groovelessness, a much more interesting development was what could be called entropic grime, where the clinical, sharp and shiny angles of cryo grime were taken over by stumbling, dysfunctional zombie-rhythms, and buried in layers of sonic dirt, dead sounds in a state of perpetual decomposition. SD Laikas awesome That's Harakiri-album was more or less the definitive release in this respect, though Filter Dreads Midi Space ep was perhaps even better. While his Space Loops lp - released on tape in 2013 and re-released on vinyl in 2014 - offered a slightly more polished and coherent version of the SD Laika aesthetic, Midi Space infused the style with a bizarre playfulness - there's synthetic colours and rubbery syncopations worthy of the best bitstep, yet it all come off as strangely faded, washed out, hazy: Yesterdays amazing cybertoys twisted and broken, their operating systems overtaken by depression.
Among the most characteristic subgenres of grime in 2014, "new age grime" or perhaps "emo-grime" took the clean, delicate structures of cryo grime and made them, if not exactly "warm", then at least soft and bright, inviting. Some seemed to think that this approach was somehow wrong by definition (because grime should be "raw" and "road" and "authentic"), and while I do consider that puritan mindset pretty ridiculous, I must admit that I didn't get much into this stuff. Perhaps I'd been won over if Yamanekos Pixel Wave Embrace - seen by many as a key work - had been released on vinyl and not just tape, but another potential key work, Mr. Mitchs Parallel Memories, didn't really do anything for me either, too wistfully emotional and uniformally pretty for my taste. Rather, I think the best suggestion in this area is probably Fatima al Qadiri's Asiatisch, which is certainly clean, lithe, bright and soft, and at the same time emotional in a wonderfully synthetic, hyper real fashion. Like with SD Laika and Filter Dread, Asiatisch has only a faint, superficial relationship with grime, with just a few artificially inseminated stylistic elements audible, and I do find it kinda silly that these records are being placed under the abstract grime umbrella, but that doesn't mean that they're not some of the greatest releases of 2014.
Cryo- emo- and entropic grime was only a small part of 2014s huge abstract grime wave, and some of the best of the rest managed to be simultaneously emotional, atmospheric and highly experimental, while still clearly recognisable as - at least a kind of - actual grime descendants. Sure, they were still clearly not doing grime (or more generally, 'nuum music) "right", taking it in a deliberately cerebral and arty direction that is far from how the genre was originally supposed to be, but that is exactly why they were actually doing something new and unheard, and why records like Slackk's moody, melancholic Pakm Tree Fire-album or Inkke's Crystal Children ep were among the best records of 2014. This stuff is to the original grime sound what Ultravox, Japan or Soft Cell were to glam: A clearly new and contemporary take on some related ideas, free of the rock'n'roll/'nuum residue still present in the predecessors. Abstract grime is not 'nuum music, but why should it have to be to be good?
In addition to all the abstract-grime-and-related stuff, 2014 still had quite a few brilliant records scattered throughout different kinds of poststep, as well as some not really belonging there, but perhaps not really belonging anywhere else either. Evian Christs Waterfall-ep and Krampfhaft's Before We Leave-album both had elements that perhaps could classify them as a kind of avant trap, and as such the closest we got to descendants of the wonky-wobble/ravey bitstep-lineage. On Waterfall, massive riff-blasts and brutal lurch-march rhythms are twisted into dysfunctionally weird shapes, the effect being somewhere between over the top silly, slightly creepy and genuinely intimidating, while Before We Leave tried to convert Krampfhafts idiosyncratic style into a more subtle and understated "big album"-sound, and as a result failed to be the masterpiece it could have been. The soft and polished overall sound made it a pretty big disappointment at first, but in the end that was only really a problem because of, as so often before, the inappropriate length. With repeated listening it eventually managed to show itself as one of the very best of the year, despite its shortcomings; On the first three fourths, Krampfhaft really succeeded in creating a kind of cosmic, slow motion version of his ultra-angular bleep-melodies and neurotic trap/bitstep beats, whether in the form of ravey-yet-sonambulist freak-step like "Superfluid", "Spinner" and "Toekan", or isolationist deep sea dreams like "Clip Point" and "Mostly Empty Space". It's only with the last four tracks that it gets too much - here we're getting too close to cosy, pretty chill out music, completely unnecessary, and only making the album seem pointlessly drawn out. Which is a shame when the rest is so good.
Surprisingly, after some very slim years where the Californian "post hop"-scene more or less seemed to have regressed into standard down tempo dullness, it made a (slight) come back in 2014, with two pretty great albums. Mono/Poly is one of the scenes lesser known artists, even if he has been active almost from the start, and has released a couple of brilliant EPs. Where his tendency towards new age mysticism was a bit of an annoying element on 2010s digital-only Paramatma-album, on Golden Skies he dedicates himself completely to these elements, and surprisingly makes it work. The glittering bleep cascades is a perfect match for the drowsy, mystically sun-kissed sound - a genuinely contemporary, wide-eyed take on cosmic chill out music, where too much stoner down tempo is just safe and cosy. Much the same effect is to be found on the first half of Collapse, debut album by the hitherto unknown - to me at least - Repeated Measure. The sound here is perhaps more "spaced out" cosmic than warm and sunny, but we're still talking slowly drifting sci fi-music with plenty of fractured bleep patterns. What's really noteworthy, though, is the second half, where these bleep patterns are suddenly backed by a much more heavy and angular bottom, effectively turning the music into wobbly bitstep. Where 2013 actually had a surprising amount of amazing new bitstep, that sound practically disappeared since, and in 2014, and the only place it really made a noteworthy appearance was on the second half of Collapse - and brilliantly so!
Of the remaining 2014 highlights, Mesaks Howto Readme took skweee in new directions that made the style less uniquely its own, but also yielded some interesting hybrid forms. Equally eclectic, Jimmy Pés Insomnia bridged ravey wobble-trap and atmospheric, burialesque sadstep (with some nauseating vocals here and there, unfortunately), while Ital Teks Mega City Industry ep offered more of his trademark dreamy, floating footwork ("dreamwork"?), and the hitherto unknown Chainless made the best darkstep record of the year with Grey Veils, brilliantly building on the best parts of Lorn and early Nosaj Thing. Surprisingly, Inga Copelands Copeland, which on the surface really seemed too minimal for its own good, somehow managed to be better than anything else I've heard from Hype Williams, whether as Blunt and Copeland solo or together. Sort of entropic music reaching peak bleak emptiness. As opposite to this as imaginable, Disrupt offered colourful and catchy 8-bit hyper-dub on Dub Matrix with Stereo Sound, while The Marvs combination of bouncy beats and ghostly bollywood samples on A King of Tuneswas just as catchy - almost pop music.
Which sort of brings us to FKA Twigs' LP1, I guess, which, while not full blown poststep as such, nevertheless used a whole heap of poststep elements, and sort of demonstrated how they could be used as a base for pop music as odd and futuristic as poststep proper. So far, a much more durable and fascinating record than the much talked about XEN by her producer Arca, who goes all the way into the abstract, and is sort of closer to traditional glitch or IDM than Twigs is to traditional pop music. Not that you can't hear the contemporary elements and techniques - and a few tracks do sound genuinely and exhilaratingly new -, but when taken this far into pure soundplay and atmospheric experimentalism, you inevitably end up with something resembling classic Autechre (or, heck, even Eno), at least on the surface level. And this kind of seem to be the way most of the radically experimental electronic scene is heading - away from the unheard structural weirdness of poststep and into the more well established world of "soundscaping", as heard on records from Holly Herndon, M.E.S.H., TCF and Brood Ma. A lot of this is sort of brilliant (Herndons Platform is one of my 2015 favorites so far), but still also slightly disappointing in the returning to safe formulas. Not unlike the goth lite/proto dream pop of the early 4AD school I guess, delivering light, digestible and comforting "art music" as an alternative to the resurgence of lame and mannered "real rock", in 2015 mirrored by the endless forms of retro house/retro 'nuum music paying lip service to all the righteous signifiers of true dance and club culture while offering no actual evolution of the form - except perhaps a few slight hybrid elements and updates in overall sound design - i.e. stuff that only people with oppressive historic knowledge would notice, let alone care about. I mean, how desperate do you have to be as a critic to get excited about something as boring and creatively inane as deep tech or jackin house, with nothing to offer except having the right, 'nuumologically correct attitude?
So, yeah, I'm not optimistic I guess. So far, 2015 has had very little to offer, and I don't think the coming years will offer much more than the aforementioned updated electronic art music - nu-IDM, entropic, new synth. The once so exciting engine of weird wobble dubstep has ossified into formulaic stadium trap, and most other attempts at making music simultaneously experimental and dance floor oriented seem to end up as yet more insultingly dull 4/4-house-with-percussion-and-slightly-gritty-basslines-crap. Of course, some of the best artists of the poststep golden age will be hanging on and continue to release great stuff (Debruit is still at it, and Kuedo is back after a looong break), and now and then a few new artists will make surprising anomalies as weird and wonderful as the best of the originals (like Jlin's Dark Energy, perhaps the best of 2015 so far). And I am excited to hear what artists like Felicita, Filter Dread and SD Laika will be doing next. But, in the end, the golden age of poststep is definitively over, as it inevitably would be. I knew it wouldn't last, and so I should most of all just be happy about the unbelievable amount of amazing music that made the last 5-6 years such a thrill to live through, an abundance I hadn't experienced since the first half of the nineties, and not something I had really expected to ever happen again. Yet, while I'm grateful for all this, and still listen to all these records more than anything else (and even find more amazing records from the last five years that I didn't even notice the first time around), there's also something about it that feels very curious, like somehow it wasn't real, it didn't really happen, despite all the concrete evidence, all the groundbreaking records. And indeed, if we're talking about this music being recognised as a golden age, as an abundance of innovation and creativity and shocking futurism, then it didn't really happen. It seems like I'm more or less the only one having this perspective - even Adam Harpe has a different focus, both with the music he's championing and with the years he consider the best (to him the years prior to 2010 were the best, and then things got good again only recently, so pretty much exactly the opposite of how I see it).
The question is: why wasn't this golden age recognised as a golden age? I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, and it's a complex problem with no single, simple solution. Answering it really deserves a piece of its own - this is pretty long and pretty delayed already - so I'll postpone my thoughts on that matter for now, and hopefully return soon.
THE FANTASTIC HOPE [ 19-Aug-15 3:10pm ]
THE GUARDIAN'S JEREMY CORBYN COVERAGE IN 15 HEADLINES [ 19-Aug-15 3:10pm ]1. 'Corbyn is on the ballot for the Labour leadership election: but he'll never win'2. 'Corbyn is doing well in the Labour leadership election: why he definitely still won't win'3. 'Corbyn is doing better than we thought: but voting for him would be childish and wrong'4. 'Corbyn has a massive lead in the polls: they must be wrong'5. Michael White: 'Corbyn would return Labour to the 80s'6. Martin Kettle: 'Corbyn would return Labour to the 80s'7. Polly Toynbee: 'Corbyn would return Labour to the 80s'8. Tony Blair: '[jazz hands]'9. Peter Mandelson: 'Corbyn would return Labour to the 80s'10. '0.01% of new Labour supporters once voted Green: cancel the leadership contest'11. 'Editorial: Please please please don't vote for Jeremy Corbyn'12. 'Editorial: Vote for … Yvette Cooper?'13. 'Do you think if we relegate coverage of the leadership election to lower down
the page that will make people forget to vote for Corbyn?'14. 'Shit, still not working: so how the hell are we going to cover this political development that seems to, like, mean something to people?'15. 'Jeremy Corbyn's style evolution'
17-Aug-15
the page that will make people forget to vote for Corbyn?'14. 'Shit, still not working: so how the hell are we going to cover this political development that seems to, like, mean something to people?'15. 'Jeremy Corbyn's style evolution'
Rouge's Foam [ 17-Aug-15 1:26pm ]
Response from chukwumaa [ 17-Aug-15 1:26pm ]chukwumaa, a musician and artist who appeared in August's System Focus - headlined 'The Voices Disrupting White Supremacy Through Sound' - contacted me about framing the music as 'disrupting white supremacy.' I thought his response was important and justified, and it's posted here, [sic] and with permission:
ive been ruminating on it and its implications for a minute and come to think about the scope of the multifarious, nuanced and inventive sounds of the artists involved. I think framing it as "disrupting white supremacy" is painfully de-centering and still framing these artist in relation to whiteness in a way that is simply not explicitly expressed by any of the folks mentioned. i doubt any of the artist create this music with a sole motivation of disrupting white supremacy.
i *do* however believe the artists involved were able to develop (and continue to develop) frames of reference *outside* of whiteness. for someone whose default frame of consumption may be chiefly steeped in whiteness, this may come off as a "disruption", but thats more to do white the perceiver than the perceived. it may have been more apt to frame these musics/processes/ideas as a *departure* from musics/processes/ideas that center whiteness.
chukwumaa's work and other links can be found on Soundcloud, here.
ive been ruminating on it and its implications for a minute and come to think about the scope of the multifarious, nuanced and inventive sounds of the artists involved. I think framing it as "disrupting white supremacy" is painfully de-centering and still framing these artist in relation to whiteness in a way that is simply not explicitly expressed by any of the folks mentioned. i doubt any of the artist create this music with a sole motivation of disrupting white supremacy.
i *do* however believe the artists involved were able to develop (and continue to develop) frames of reference *outside* of whiteness. for someone whose default frame of consumption may be chiefly steeped in whiteness, this may come off as a "disruption", but thats more to do white the perceiver than the perceived. it may have been more apt to frame these musics/processes/ideas as a *departure* from musics/processes/ideas that center whiteness.
chukwumaa's work and other links can be found on Soundcloud, here.
System Focus: The Voices Disrupting White Supremacy Through Sound [ 17-Aug-15 1:18pm ]chukwumaa and E. Jane of Philly duo SCRAAATCH. Photo by Liz BarrAugust's System Focus is on rising networks of African and Afrodiasporic artists disseminating their music in solidarity, along with some cultural context (click here to read). Featuring Chino Amobi, NON, Angel Ho, Nkisi, Serpentwithfeet, SCRAAATCH, E. Jane, chukwumaa, embaci, Brandon Covington, Elon, Butch Dawson, Kayy Drizz, Dog Food Music Group, Violence, Mykki Blanco, Psychoegyptian, Yves Tumor etc.Back in December, angry New Yorkers gathered to sing "They Don't Care About Us" following the decision not to indict Eric Garner's killer, a police officer. The song's lyrics were written on a placard during a protest against the Ferguson police department in the wake of their fatal shooting of Michael Brown. It also provided the soundtrack to the Baltimore protests in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, danced to by a Jackson impersonator amidst the chaos of helicopters and sirens... The song has recently found new layers of meaning and urgency in the context of the continuing struggle against racist police violence, now taken up by the Black Lives Matter movement...
It's no wonder that African and Afrodiasporic artists are choosing to disseminate music in solidarity. In many cases, this creative decision is a strategy for dealing with the alienation that is so often a part of Afrodiasporic experience. As the London-based writer Kodwo Eshun puts it in his 2003 essay Further Considerations on Afrofuturism: "the condition of alienation, understood in its most general sense, is a psychosocial inevitability that all Afrodiasporic art uses to its own advantage by creating contexts that encourage a process of disalienation." And yet in the continuing environment of white supremacy, this creativity is routinely either erased, appropriated, or confined to narrow and fetishized aesthetic areas..."In no uncertain terms, the Intent of NON is to run counter to current Western hyper-capitalist modes of representation and function, exorcising the language of domination through the United Resistance of policed and exotified colored bodies," NON's email continued. "At a time when national (market) state financial and political systems are tested as never before, NON shall remain committed to the militant realities and potentials of 'The NON State.' NON came into existence through the Pan-African desire for representation on our own terms." As stated on their Soundcloud page, NON artists are "using sound as their primary media, to articulate the visible and invisible structures that create binaries in society, and in turn distribute power..."
SerpentwithfeetOne of the most beguiling and exciting voices to have emerged from underground music in recent times, Serpentwithfeet also appears on another track that NON reposted on their Soundcloud. Titled "Total Freedom," it finds the singer winding himself delicately around rising and falling tones, including those of an mbira. In an interview for Dazed, he discussed his self-described "PaganGospel" creed for living and said, "I am always ready to pierce things with my black-queer cutlery. I am constantly looking for ways to make my music extra gay and extra black..."SCRAAATCH is an art and sound double act, originally from Washington DC and now based in Philadelphia, who often perform live. It consists of artists E. Jane and chukwumaa—read interviews with them here and here—and, along with the New Jersey born DJ Haram, they run the monthly Philly "club-not-club" night ATM. Also negotiating race, gender, queerness, mental illness, and the digital world in her artwork and photography, E. Jane makes sounds and edits under the names E_SCRAAATCH and Mhysa, typically with a glitchy, spectral take on R&B. Try their / her Soundcloud playlist I Have To Say No So Much Right Now, especially its magnificent title track. About their / her artwork, E. Jane said in a recent interview with The Offing, "I came to the conclusion that I am black and I am a woman, my body is thoroughly Black American and it is perceived as woman. Then I realized that means my body is not a 'safe' body. My body is an unprotected body. I started asking myself how we protect unprotected bodies? What if the body were code? What if the body were only a simulation? What if I could exaggerate how inhuman I feel?" Her partner in SCRAAATCH, chukwumaa, was born in Nigeria and "on a plane to the US the first week of [his] life." He also engages experimentally with pop as plus_c—the track "quadrille_club_bing" uses a Vine recording of "They Don't Care About Us" being sung during the Baltimore uprising, mixed into a distorted club beat and resonant tones like metal being brushed and played with a bow. He also made an installation consisting of twenty-one burner cellphones playing Beyoncé's "Flawless," which turned the song into a waterfall...
Thumbnail for E_SCRAAATCH's 'I Have To Say No So Much Right Now' Chino Amobi appeared on [Blasting Voice], as did cross-U.S. artist Violence, who is soon to appear on the inaugural release of a new label founded by rapper Mykki Blanco called Dogfood Music Group. Due September 18th, the release will be a compilation titled C-ORE, featuring tracks from Violence, California's Yves Tumor, NYC rapper Psychoegyptian and Blanco himself. "We are a group of friends who have created a release that represents a slice of what we're into, our culture and what we want to show the world," Blanco has said about the collection. "People all over the world are only fed this singular image of 'African American Music' and we want to disrupt that. We all come from backgrounds outside of the black American norm, and the world deserves to see our culture as much as anything else..." C-ORENeedless to say, the artists mentioned here aren't the only African and Afrodiasporic artists making challenging and beautiful music in the underground, just a few constellations—there are countless more voices out there. As it has been for centuries, since the traumatic dawn of modernity, finding such voices through music is not just a leisure activity, as it is marketed to many of us. It's part of the urgent and fundamental search for self and identity in a world that not only erases that identity, or appropriates it, or predetermines it, or constrains it, or renders it fragmented and ostensibly paradoxical, but that also systematically commits physical violence upon people of that identity. This is why so many artists with minority status end up in underground music—this is why they are underground music. Fortunately, the underground can form spaces and networks where identity matters, is audible, and becomes visible. System Focus: Why Today's Underground Club Music Sounds Cybernetic [ 17-Aug-15 12:59pm ]Celestial Trax's Ride or DieJuly's System Focus was on a particular strain of club music with a cybernetic feel, along with some incidental reflections on calling it 'club music' (click here to read). Featuring Night Slugs, Fade to Mind, Keysound Recordings, Liminal Sounds, Her Records, Sentinel, Amnesia Scanner, J.G. Biberkopf, D.J. New Jersey Drone, Track Meet, Bootleg Tapes, P4N4, Velkro, #FEELINGS, CELESTIAL TRAX, Tallesen, WDIS, Gewzer, Gronos1, Magic Fades, SPF666, Korma, Team Aerogel, Infinite Machine, Roller Truck, Tessier-Ashpool Recordings, IMAMI, Cloaka, Spurz, Kadahn, Gel Dust, Dviance, Partisan, Sharp Veins and Lit Internet. Nb/ this article should have said a bit more about the style's relationship to Jersey Club, Bmore Club and Philly Club.There has been a slow but sure shift in the way the underground talks about one of its key areas: "dance music" has become "club music." The major reason for this is probably that it differentiates it from Electronic Dance Music (EDM), the name that, despite its generality, has come to stick more specifically to the recent explosion of big name, big crowd, big show parties held outdoors, particularly across the U.S. "Club music" is not that—it's a more intimate, enclosed environment, both in the physical spaces it describes and in the community that enters and honors those spaces, whether real or imagined...
DJ New Jersey Drone's Energy EP This kind of music was pioneered by transatlantic labels like Night Slugs, Fade to Mind, and Keysound, and mixes together rebooted ballroom/vogue house and the new wave of instrumental grime, all with a stark, hi-tech machine sheen. It was soon developed further on tight, intense and ice-cold shorter releases by artists on London's Liminal Sounds such as Brooklyn-based producer Copout, and particularly those on fellow UK label Her Records, such as DJ Double M, Sudanim, CYPHR and Kid Antoine. It's a style that is enjoyed by the sort of musicians and fans who don't like to name styles, but instead allude to hybridities of aging categories like house, techno and grime...
Korma's ZGMF-X19AWhat makes this music so good to run to? It has a high tempo which keeps urging you relentlessly forward. But it's more than that. It embodies progress and athleticism in its very sound (unsurprisingly, it's the soundtrack to health goth) not in a merely beautiful way, but with a frightening dose of the sublime too. Because as in both running and culture, forward motion isn't nice, easy, or moral—it's laced with anti-humanistic pain, aggression and dissolution, crashing euphoria and dysphoria together in a bodily blur of hormones and neurotransmitters. As muscles grow and become more supple, as lungs become cleaner and the brain less resistant, so technoculture improves: motors, alloys and power supplies increase in efficiency, pixels shrink and multiply, and digital intelligence grows more independent of yesterday's humanity. Organic, machine—it's all the same in the struggle of kinetic matter. All this seems apt as I schlep my loathsome fleshform across the tarmac in a futile bid to flourish, or at least survive the oncoming war...Cloaka's AdaptOne particularly fascinating and powerful release is Lit Internet's Angelysium, which features collaborations with some of the producers on the _VIRALITY compilation as well as South London producer Endgame (who was in last month's tresillo column). Cinematic almost to the point of telling a story, if Angelysium ever gets into a groove, it's likely to vanish suddenly into the vast mists, giant machinery and assorted percussive enigmas. The empty spaces that characterise the stop-start textures of eski grime become yawning chasms thick with tension and potential assailants, yet also with melancholic distance.Lit Internet's AngelysiumAll this is just another reason why the category "club," while it does a lot to hone in on specific and, in many ways, desirable qualities in dance music, can only go so far. "Dance" is a more intangible, open-ended concept, something that can happen anywhere and is directly related to the body and activities like running and other forms of exercise, the body being even more intimate and present than the club that might temporarily enclose it. Dance is music that moves you. System Focus: How A Traditional Rhythm Is Shaping Today's Most Exciting New Music [ 08-Jul-15 9:17pm ]Exclusivo by Blaze KiddJune's System Focus (click here to read) was on a loose network of producers, most of whom draw on the tresillo rhythm found in reggaeton and other musics of the African diaspora, often using grime and Spanish language too. Labels and artists featured include Blaze Kidd, Uli-K, PALMISTRY, Kami Xlo, Lexxi, Ana Caprix, EndgamE, Golden Mist Records, BLASTAH, Dinamarca, STAYCORE, Lil Tantrum, Sister, Tove Agelii, Mapalma, mobilegirl, Imaabs, ZUTZUT, Extasis Records, Morten_HD, Spaceseeds.A simple rhythm bounces back and forth over the once vast Atlantic ocean, ever faster. It begins in Sub-Saharan Africa, but Europeans brutally pull it up by the roots—slaves bring it with them on a long journey to the Caribbean. By the nineteenth century it has become the defining element in the Afro-Cuban dance habanera, which finds its way to New Orleans where it helps form ragtime, then to South America, where it contributes to tango, and to Europe, where it becomes the most famous section of one of the era's most popular operas, Carmen. It also spreads across the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa and back again, and its descendents meet and collaborate, now using recordings and drum machines. Soon it doesn't even need to touch the water. Ricocheting off satellites and barreling down cables, it permeates the information sphere, with space and place just an interesting footnote on a Soundcloud profile...
EndgameLondon club music (at home and abroad) has recently come to resonate in sympathy with sounds from Mexico down. And it's not just tresillo and reggaeton rhythms that are being drawn on, but the Spanish language too. South London has both a significant population of Latin American migrants and a network of producers who have been on Soundcloud for years and are very hungry for international sounds. They got together on Exclusivo, the debut mixtape of an MC of Ecuadorian heritage, Blaze Kidd, and recently, as Aimee Cliff reported for The FADER, the video for "Sniper Redux."...Tresillo is woven throughout Palmistry's delicate and deceptively carefree fabrics. In tracks like "DROPDrip" (on his Ascención mixtape), "Protector SE5," the single "Catch" or his latest, "Memory Taffeta," it'll ride on the back of simple synths, complementing his fragile yet controlled and earnest voice and forming songs of need and tenderness...
Palmistry One track on the Endgame EP was a remix by Dinamarca, and in turn, Endgame provided one for Dinamarca's EP, No Hay Break. "Dinamarca" is Spanish for "Denmark," but the artist Dinamarca is based in Stockholm, and his intense and attitude-filled tracks typically have a tresillo bounce, however it's distributed through the drum machine. Some of them, when the tempo is upped, even feel like they're morphing into footwork. Dinamarca is the head of the Staycore label, who just put out a brill free collection of tracks titled Summer Jams 2K15—hopefully a sign of things to come...Lil Tantrum is just one of the many areas of overlap between Staycore and Sister, a female-identifying-only club collective founded by the formidable Swedish artist, Tové Agelii. Agelii's own productions are gorgeously gothic and suffused with the human vox the way light shines into a cathedral. And Sister's mixes (again, all female-identifying, using productions that all involve women) are both peppered with a tresillo feel and seriously something...'Icesheets' by MobilegirlHailing from Santiago de Chile and one of the weirder and more futuristic exponents of grimy reggaeton, Imaabs has a great EP out on noted Mexico City underground-club label NAAFI. Another standout is Zutzut's "Yo Te Voa A Dar" on account of it delectable buzzing synth and proper passionate MC. Zutzut, from Monterray, has a truly lovely Soundcloud collection (try the digital flutes of "Otra Vez Llegue") and a self-titled dembow EP with some vogue inflections out for another Mexican label, Extasis, who have a bit of a net aesthetic and, because all is connected, have released cute speedster Xyloid too. Extasis also explored some pretty bizarre experimental grime with Norwegian producer Morten_HD and Mexico's Spaceseeds, and they too have a summer compilation (from last year). And, aha, it featured a Blaze Kidd track with a reggaeton production by Kamixlo and Uli-K. System Focus: What Does "Experimental Music" Even Mean Anymore? [ 08-Jul-15 9:00pm ]What is experimental music, and what does it want from us? As a term and as a field of music-making, it's widely accepted but fits uncomfortably and is never well defined. "Experimental music" was a phrase used in the mid-twentieth-century to describe a range of ultramodernist compositional techniques as being a form of quasi-scientific research. John Cage was careful to point out that the term should apply to music "the outcome of which is not known"—that is, music with chance elements or improvisation built into it—since a composer ought to have completed all the necessary experiments before the piece was finished. And yet in everyday parlance, especially in popular music, "experimental" music has come to refer to music that seems radically unconventional, pretty weird, as if to experiment with the very building blocks of musical beauty...
POPULOUS by Brood Ma [Experimental music is] involved with the building blocks that musical languages are made of. When you put it like this, it's odd to think that people find experimental music "difficult"—it's a radically simpler experience, assuming much less semiotically. And that's where experimental music's appeal lies. It reconnects you with the fundamental life of sound and music, and entices you to search for meaning in a language you cannot yet speak. You ask yourself, "What sort of subjectivity would make art like this? What does it perceive that I don't (or don't yet)?"...DARK WEB by Giant Claw DARK WEB is clearly and curiously unstuck: juddering, dissonant, stop-start, crazed, obsessive. It's like a robot failing at human entertainment, a rejected intermediate form generated by whatever algorithmic process then went on to produce the less uncanny Far Side Virtual, which resonated more comfortably with human needs and desires. If human music were a CAPTCHA, DARK WEB would fail it...Most striking about [Epitaph] is its empty space—enormous architectures bracketed and magnetized by harsh syncopation. The textures are modular, moving from sound object to sound object and back again; Epitaph divides up its musical world into discrete, almost warring factions... U.S.M! by DJWWWW DJWWWW's album U.S.M! is one of this year's most absorbing listens, restlessly assembling horrific and beguiling bouquets of musical sensations (many of which will be familiar to followers of underground music)... DJWWWW is extrapolating and caricaturing the myriad experiences of a day in digital, asking us how and why the combinations work (or not)...[Assault Suits's] own release Statue Cathalogue kickstarted the [Flamebait] label last year with its sinuous yet imposing metallic sculptures. The subsequent album by Tokyo producer Hanali is highly complex and predominantly percussive, roving through many layers of rhythm until it seems to coalesce in the bizarro club cut "10 Years or 100 Years." 10.9†01;9 by modular synth artist GOP (Geniuses Of Place) is equally rich: sizzling and glitching its way through the phone networks only to dissolve and digest what it finds... Aftertouches by Kara-Lis Coverdale Aftertouches weaves in all kinds of colors, many of them acoustic instruments, others eerily hinting at acoustic instruments, and others carrying all the richness of acoustic instruments yet not at all recognizable as such. She manages to do the exact same with the moods of the pieces: some are human, some eerily hint at the human, and others have all the depth of human moods but are as yet unfamiliar as such. Coverdale recently teamed up with LXV for Sirens, where their different palettes of techniques complement one another. They seem to populate each others' landscapes with the distant faces, dwellings and systems of unknown hi-tech cultures, who harvest the elements of their environment with a peace and concord we don't yet understand... Fragments of a Scene (text for Creamcake) [ 08-Jul-15 8:32pm ]
Fragments of a Scene website, designed by Jon LucasAmazing Berlin clubnight institution Creamcake asked me to write a text to go with an evening they were putting on in April, both to feature Brood Ma, Forever Traxx, Claude Speeed, Club Cacao, DYNOOO, Punishment of Luxury, Hanne Lippard and Britney Lopez. Click here to see the text in its originally obfuscated context with music (scroll down for a PDF), or read below.
Music is space. Music goes high and low, shallow and deep, left and right, in and out,
round and round. It goes here and there at the same time, underneath and over, it
faces in the same and in the opposite direction. It's among and alongside and between
things, it's behind and in front of things, it goes away from and towards things, it's
beyond things and quite within them. Its spatial changes map to bodies when it makes
them move, and in turn music moves according to an embodied imagination. Music is
more than sounds - at the very least it is sounds in spaces. More than that, music is
multimedia, it always means more than just sounds, it means sights, it means
proprioception, it means people. Music is a scene.
Fortunately, there are two senses in that word. A scene is a discrete moment in
theatre, a sequence on-stage with actors, script, speech, costume, props, lights,
background, gesture. Scenes are where things happen, framed both by the elevated
ground, the proscenium and by time. In a way, an entire play is a scene of scenes, and
forms a part of the wider scenes of life. This is where the other sense of the word
scene comes in. It's a term - one loaded with cultural capital, mostly that gained by
disavowing it - for musicians, fans, places, and performances (and speech, costume,
props, lights, background, gesture)clustered together, almost as if in a discrete
moment. The scene in New York in the 1960s: Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground,
Nico and friends, one of many interconnected scenes at the time. Sometimes there's
only one scene, the scene, something to be in touch with - to be 'scene' is to be a part
of it. But the term can be used without that fancy fluff. It's usefulness comes from the
multimedia nature it inherits from theatre - a scene is never just sounds, never even
just musicians, but a network of artists in multiple mediums 'high' and 'low,' and even in
mediums that are not yet known as Art.
And scenes are difficult to piece together nowadays, especially as discrete moments
framed, like the theatre is, by certain locations in space and time. Berlin, London and
New York are still pretty good at that. But the internet has created social and aesthetic
connections that go beyond the more traditional conceptions of space and time. Don't
believe the rhetoric though: the internet has not destroyed time or space, much less
materiality. The internet is still 'in real life / IRL,' all art is still 'physical.' The aesthetics
of art and the internet, however, has been fascinated with the dilemma that it might not
be - whether that's a good thing (ushering a transcendent Utopia) or a bad thing (an
anxiety-inducing accumulation of blasphemous desires and accesses). At its best,
these two feelings occur at the same time.
What you have at Hau 2 on the 16th of April is Fragments of a Scene - in many
senses of a scene (and of fragments). The artists you will see make up something of a
scene, albeit partially: They are related in music, multimedia, social networks,
geography (to some extent), and are ultimately related by the fact that they are all
appearing tonight. They are all engaging with the modern age, which predominantly
means the digital world and its forms of expression. Yet while many artists in this vein
tend towards representation, figuration, even pastiche, these artists tend towards
abstraction and affect. Their perspective is less one of a detailed fantasy universe than
an onslaught of shapes and sensations boiling within a matrix of strong yet
indeterminate feelings.
Take Brood Ma. While there are occasional outlines of samples in James B. Stringer's
work, or the nuclear shadow of styles like grime (he's from London), at the centre is a
roiling mass of sonic shards, glittering and roaring like scales or teeth. Named after the
matriarchal figure in a culture of humanoid women with large scarabs for heads in
China Miéville's weird fiction Perdido Street Station, there is something deeply
insectoid about Brood Ma's modus operandi: biting, chewing, proliferating, attacking,
defending, all under a hard multipartite carapace filled with even weirder, visceral
matter beneath. Brood Ma works at the constituent level of sound itself, its very grains,
whipping digital codes into vortices as if they were pools of water. He distorts sounds
the way jpeg compression distorts Nature, and depixellates them, datamoshing them
until insides and outsides become part of a broader, more disorienting experience of
space.
This comes as no surprise, because James B. Stringer is part of a network of visually
trained multimedia artists coalesced around the Quantum Natives label, all long
interested in digital techniques of both sight and sound. One of the main nodes is
Stringer's friend Clifford Sage, an incredibly prolific sound-producer himself, with an
industrial synth style. At Hau 2, Sage will be providing the visuals to Stringer's
performance, both inviting us to draw some continuity across their respective fragments
of the abstracted scene.
Like many of Fragments of a Scene's artists, Forever Traxx is one of those producers
who instantly stokes curiosity with their mysterious and oblique Soundcloud profile.
Anonymous and not linking to any formal releases, digital or analogue, the mystery of
Forever Traxx is exponentially intensified by the music, which has been uploaded track
by track over the past four years. It's not just a surreal and somehow spiritual collage of
samples tied together by curiously mountainous passions (like the music of Elysia
Crampton, Chino Amobi and Total Freedom - big inspirations in the Soundcloud
collage scene), but the recurring idées fixe: lithe upper-frequency electronic lines,
babies crying, horror effects and other moments of piercing panic, urgent battalions of
drums, edits of tracks that bring the pitch up slightly as if to highlight some inner quality
(structural coherence? cuteness? absurdity?). Visually, the recurring motif is a rubbery
yet golden stickman who, as the apparent star of a ClipArt set, appears in a series of
symbolic scenarios in the Souncloud account's thumbnails and avatars. What's going
through this little guy's solid gold head, that he's beset by rapturously violent music?
He's the modern internet-user, perhaps, living a life that is both bland and breathtakingly,
monstrously intense.
Claude Speeed has explored the complexity and onslaught of the modern mindset
both as a band and as a solo electronic artist. Hailing from Scotland, his band
American Men released a dazzling EP Cool World in 2010, its crystal vistas and fractal
rhythms seeming to usher in a new decade for post-rock. Since then, Speeed has been
exploring sounds far and wide, each new Soundcloud upload an unexpected turn, from
the tweaking trance textures of 'Ambien Rave' to the roving vox of 'Clearing' and the
wailing new-Dark-Age wake of 'V (Spirit Leaves the Body)', via walls and walls of
distortion. At Fragments of a Scene, Claude Speeed will be performing with four amps
in stereo, so expect sounds so rich and intense you can taste them.
Also taking up these alpine electronic textures and inchoate drama is Club Cacao.
Another Soundcloud mystery whose account artwork competes with the music for
beauty, Club Cacao launches off from contemporary production styles from dance and
hip hop, ending up with compelling tracks like 'Go Off,' with its perfect euphoric
liberation, or the darker 'Balaclava,' an industrially twisted bounce over which a voice is
squeezed out, becoming both hilarious and terrifying.
Due to its uncanny ability to fuse disparate elements into a whole that makes a sense
one does not yet understand, but that one appreciates as the insights of a cybernetic
consciousness, DYNOOO's These Flaws Are Mine to War With was one of last year's
most interesting releases. His work has always suggested to me an emerging
intelligence, either artificial or that of the technological post-human, engaging with its
own mechanical realities as well as the curiously organic world around it. Piecing
together rainforest, desert and arctic tundra with an almost military palette of harsh
sounds and leaving it all suspended and rolling in a bubbling tank like a specimen or an
embryo, DYNOOO's conclusions could not have been reached by yesterday's
humanity, and they're as disquieting as they are beautiful.
Not to be confused with the English post-punk band active in the late 1970s and early
1980s, Punishment of Luxury is a Soundcloud experimentalist in a similar vein to
Forever Traxx, Crampton, Amobi and others. PoL creates strange yet urgent new
atmospheres for pop fragments to breathe in, as if they've suddenly been transported
to other planets. The procedure often seems to cause them to spin erratically in situ,
like broken bots in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Try the bizarre
union of Nicki Minaj and the Walker Brothers in 'BASSBREAKUP,' the desperate
product placement of 'BENZ BENZ BENZ,' plagued by alien anxiety, or the way the
ear's finger runs down the length of the male voice in 'TLS Male Vocal Choir Edit,' and
it's rough like a large iron nail file.
Using her voice to beckon a broader understanding of human culture and expression,
Hanne Lippard is somewhere between a poet and a performance artist. A book of her
texts, Nuances of No, was released in 2013. Her phrases often begin or end in the
same way as she accumulates concerns and information in a deceptively random
manner. These parallel the tics of language online, like the telling non-truths of
Google's autocompletes, or the attention-hijacking of sidebar advertising, or the
piecemeal, provisional conclusions of status updates. She narrates the Web 2.0 stream
of attention, but her voice is also perennially human, always seeking to elevate itself
while remaining intimate.
As she puts it, performer Bella Hager was 'torn and raised in Berlin, had to survive the
90s as a teenager.' She focused on pop divas such as Jennifer Lopez, soon feeling a
rupture between the art of being a women in music videos and the art of being a
women on the very own stage. After many years of research in different scenes, social
contexts and with different representations of gender, Bella decided to reunite with
Jenny, Britney, Christina and the rest to resolve this absurd struggle. During the first
act of appearance in Fragments of a Scene her character 'Britney Lopez' will enter
Christina Aguilera's music video to dive into the world of female pop artists in the late
90s, and will then take them into the year 2015 where a new extroverted sexuality
(Bella refers to herself as 'twerself') has left the former virginal image of the diva
behind.
Perhaps the only fair thing to say that all of these artists have in common (apart from
their appearance at Fragments of a Scene), is that they don't quite fit into the normal
distributions of creativity into particular places. Even musically, it is not entirely fitting to
call any of them merely 'producers' or 'musicians,' or to expect their work in clubs or
physical albums. And much of the time, their work is too specific, and too conversant
with the languages of pop and everyday life to feel at home in a gallery or concert hall
either. Many of them have taken the poetics of the visual and used them in a sound-led
medium, perhaps then turning back to re-incorporate the eye, which does not close as
it passes over an online account or a stage. However, nonetheless, these artists have
now carved out a space, somewhere between art and sound and music as it was
understood last century, a way to explore differences within the cohering locus of the
specific, to maintain that fragile equilibrium between novelty and similarity. Isn't that
precisely what a scene should be?
THE FANTASTIC HOPE [ 18-Jun-15 4:50pm ]
BARGAIN-BIN NAIRN: MY LONDON TOP 10 [ 18-Jun-15 4:50pm ]I'll be leaving London in a few weeks to return to the Motherland (Newcastle), so thought I'd compile a LONDON TOP 10 based on my nearly four years in the capital.
These are tourist or daytrip recommendations I suppose, with the sort of faint psychogeographical ground bass you might expect from someone of my age, gender and epoch.
I will confess at this point that despite strenuous attempts, I do not now, nor do I think I ever will, love London. My abbreviated epithet (epitaph?) for the city is:
DARWINIAN PUDDLE
By far the best thing about London is its people: their variety, proximity and vitality. This might be a sentimental cliche, but then I love both cliche and sentiment and try to avow these values at every available opportunity.
Most of the places on this list are neither blockbuster highlights nor hipster curios. Rather, I've tended to go for generally popularly celebrated sites from the recent-ish past (often the mid-twentieth century) which have somehow clung on in spite of the topographical atrophy of the neoliberal period, but which haven't (yet) been invested with Sinclairean gothic glamour. Having said that, St Mary Woolnoth is included.
Anyway, enjoy!
1) CECIL COURT, COVENT GARDEN
A street of bookshops just off Charing Cross Road (a street famous for its bookshops which now has very few good bookshops - the best second-hand store as far as I can make out is now Skoob in Bloomsbury). Personal favourites are the place that sells 60s sheet music and the shop selling framed collections of stamps. Still possible to buy something good here, or at least have fun browsing.
2) THE BARBICAN, BARBICAN
An absolute pearl of aristocratic Brutalism. Okay it was always for the nobs, but this has made it difficult to get rid of while most of everything else has been destroyed. An oasis of rigidly good modernist design in a swamp of capitalist decoupage. 10 out of 10.
3) THE BLUE POSTS, BERWICK STREET
A slightly dilapidated pub in Soho, for those who like that sort of thing (me). It's a good shape, is not overly hyped, doesn't get too full, and sells Snyders Jalapeno Ptretzel Pieces, an ineffably good American snack that goes very well with a Stella or a Kronenbourg 1664 (another thing in favour of this place is the absence of both real ales and craft lagers).
4) ACE CAFE, STONEBRIDGE
A biker's cafe just off the North Circular. Sells cheap hearty food and always has some sort of shindig going on in the carpark. Jon Savage probably loves this place. A living embodiment of Richard Thompson's '1952 Vincent Black Lightning'.
5) CRYSTAL PALACE PARK, CRYSTAL PALACE
The dinosaurs are incredible, and you can see the countryside in the distance. Modernist sports centres alongside Victorian non-ruins. A profoundly haunting and fun day out.
6) AREA AROUND CROMER STREET, KINGS CROSS/BLOOMSBURY
There's a really weird topographical lacuna just south of the British Library bit of Euston Road. Lots of genuinely grimey pubs here, one of which has gaelic football memorabilia on the walls and serves the Worst Meal I've Ever Had in London: a fucking unspeakable ploughmans lunch. They may have shut this place down by now. Difficult to believe these forlorn streets are in Zone 1.
7) ST MARY WOOLNOTH, BANK
A dark and terrifyingly powerful building, with a claustrophobically beautiful interior. Belly of the beast, and certainly nothing Christian about it. Ian Nairn's liver.
8) ALL OF SOHO
The one part of London with any discernible civic atmosphere. A pretty unbeatable place to walk around on a summer's day. Humanity amid the hieratic callousness, though not without its own dark side, of course. I would recommend a trendy eatery but to be honest I think Chipotle is the place here that has given me the most pleasure. Actually, Wrapchic near Golden Square does a pretty amazing curry burrito. Go there.
9) PAOLOZZI MURALS, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD STATION
What has become of them? Genuinely worried. On a related note, will there be anything left of central London after 2018?
10) HIGH ROAD LEYTON--HOE STREET, LEYTON/WALTHAMSTOW
My best period in London was June through August 2013. I'd finished my PhD and was writing the Oasis book, which I now realise was probably a once in a lifetime gig for a writer in terms of sheer self-indulgent enjoyment. I would walk 30 mins each morning from Leytonstone to Walthamstow tube and thence to British Library, walking through Bakers Arms and the Pakistani stretch of High Road Leyton, past the Romanian enclave on Hoe Street and the place where William Morris was born, ending up at a Walthamstow just beginning to ride the crest of gentrification, but still in this section pretty working-class. It was a bright, hot summer after a long, cold winter. I listened to Definitely Maybe most days, and was grateful to be alive.
14-May-15
These are tourist or daytrip recommendations I suppose, with the sort of faint psychogeographical ground bass you might expect from someone of my age, gender and epoch.
I will confess at this point that despite strenuous attempts, I do not now, nor do I think I ever will, love London. My abbreviated epithet (epitaph?) for the city is:
DARWINIAN PUDDLE
By far the best thing about London is its people: their variety, proximity and vitality. This might be a sentimental cliche, but then I love both cliche and sentiment and try to avow these values at every available opportunity.
Most of the places on this list are neither blockbuster highlights nor hipster curios. Rather, I've tended to go for generally popularly celebrated sites from the recent-ish past (often the mid-twentieth century) which have somehow clung on in spite of the topographical atrophy of the neoliberal period, but which haven't (yet) been invested with Sinclairean gothic glamour. Having said that, St Mary Woolnoth is included.
Anyway, enjoy!
1) CECIL COURT, COVENT GARDEN
A street of bookshops just off Charing Cross Road (a street famous for its bookshops which now has very few good bookshops - the best second-hand store as far as I can make out is now Skoob in Bloomsbury). Personal favourites are the place that sells 60s sheet music and the shop selling framed collections of stamps. Still possible to buy something good here, or at least have fun browsing.
2) THE BARBICAN, BARBICAN
An absolute pearl of aristocratic Brutalism. Okay it was always for the nobs, but this has made it difficult to get rid of while most of everything else has been destroyed. An oasis of rigidly good modernist design in a swamp of capitalist decoupage. 10 out of 10.
3) THE BLUE POSTS, BERWICK STREET
A slightly dilapidated pub in Soho, for those who like that sort of thing (me). It's a good shape, is not overly hyped, doesn't get too full, and sells Snyders Jalapeno Ptretzel Pieces, an ineffably good American snack that goes very well with a Stella or a Kronenbourg 1664 (another thing in favour of this place is the absence of both real ales and craft lagers).
4) ACE CAFE, STONEBRIDGE
A biker's cafe just off the North Circular. Sells cheap hearty food and always has some sort of shindig going on in the carpark. Jon Savage probably loves this place. A living embodiment of Richard Thompson's '1952 Vincent Black Lightning'.
5) CRYSTAL PALACE PARK, CRYSTAL PALACE
The dinosaurs are incredible, and you can see the countryside in the distance. Modernist sports centres alongside Victorian non-ruins. A profoundly haunting and fun day out.
6) AREA AROUND CROMER STREET, KINGS CROSS/BLOOMSBURY
There's a really weird topographical lacuna just south of the British Library bit of Euston Road. Lots of genuinely grimey pubs here, one of which has gaelic football memorabilia on the walls and serves the Worst Meal I've Ever Had in London: a fucking unspeakable ploughmans lunch. They may have shut this place down by now. Difficult to believe these forlorn streets are in Zone 1.
7) ST MARY WOOLNOTH, BANK
A dark and terrifyingly powerful building, with a claustrophobically beautiful interior. Belly of the beast, and certainly nothing Christian about it. Ian Nairn's liver.
8) ALL OF SOHO
The one part of London with any discernible civic atmosphere. A pretty unbeatable place to walk around on a summer's day. Humanity amid the hieratic callousness, though not without its own dark side, of course. I would recommend a trendy eatery but to be honest I think Chipotle is the place here that has given me the most pleasure. Actually, Wrapchic near Golden Square does a pretty amazing curry burrito. Go there.
9) PAOLOZZI MURALS, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD STATION
What has become of them? Genuinely worried. On a related note, will there be anything left of central London after 2018?
10) HIGH ROAD LEYTON--HOE STREET, LEYTON/WALTHAMSTOW
My best period in London was June through August 2013. I'd finished my PhD and was writing the Oasis book, which I now realise was probably a once in a lifetime gig for a writer in terms of sheer self-indulgent enjoyment. I would walk 30 mins each morning from Leytonstone to Walthamstow tube and thence to British Library, walking through Bakers Arms and the Pakistani stretch of High Road Leyton, past the Romanian enclave on Hoe Street and the place where William Morris was born, ending up at a Walthamstow just beginning to ride the crest of gentrification, but still in this section pretty working-class. It was a bright, hot summer after a long, cold winter. I listened to Definitely Maybe most days, and was grateful to be alive.
Rouge's Foam [ 14-May-15 1:58pm ]
Review: Ben Zimmerman, The Baltika Years [ 14-May-15 1:58pm ]
This little electronica column review fell out of the latest Wire because someone else had already done a longer one. Thought I'd post it up here as it's quite a special release. Video below.Ben Zimmerman
The Baltika Years
Software DL / 2×LP
With this archive release, Joel Ford and Dan Lopatin's Software have found something that reaches right into the core of the label's interest in the curiously soulful side of late-twentieth-century computer music. Between 1992 and 2002, Ben Zimmerman used a series of Tandy machines working with low-quality waveforms to make short sketches and suites sat everywhere between outright experimentation and vernacular tunefulness. What emerges is a meeting between Moondog and Daniel Johnson in the age of the floppy disk. Most intriguing is the timbre itself - FM synths imitating older instruments alongside samples tuned into sonically matchless keyboards, all coated in a thick oxide layer of digital lo-fi. These are wound up like music boxes and let go, spiralling forward into minimalist abstraction, character pieces or clubbier grooves (including breakbeats) as they eat through their slatted programming. Not only is the limited context intimately audible, but the varieties of mood and texture achieved within it are nothing short of inspiring.
System Focus: If You've OD-ed On The Internet, This Music Will Save You (Soothing Sounds of East Asia) [ 05-May-15 10:09pm ]
Modal Soul by NujabesOne of the greatest practitioners of drum-machine production with a more traditionally East-Asian sound is from Shanghai: Swimful Buterfly. Swimful has produced for US rappers Lil B and Main Attrakionz, and released a warmly euphoric debut album 馬路天使 (Street Angel) in 2013. Last year's follow-up, 归梦 (Return to a Dream), is even better, perfectly following that trajectory whereby a producer gets both more skilled at crafting beats and more original. It samples both Chinese and Japanese zither instruments and singing try "But Maybe". The track "Air Between Toes" even samples the song "Tsukematsukeru" from J-Pop's kawaii princess Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, transforming its torrent of soda-pop into a cooling stream of sweet mountain water...春夏秋冬・終 by α·PavWhat about pop? Magic Yume and Zoom Lens (who I talked to here) are two of the best places for Japanese-inspired indie pop in the online underground, and they both have everything on a continuum from laid-back dreaminess to footwork and hyperactive chiptune, showing us that cute and upbeat doesn't have to be intense. At the calmer end, Magic Yume has Tokyo Princess (東京 姫) by Ikaros イカロス (as well as plenty of downtempo beats) and Zoom Lens has Yeule, Girlfriend by Philippines artist Ulzzang Pistol, the gorgeous Paradice by LLLL, and the Yumetatsu Glider EP by Japanese artist Yoshino Yoshikawa, who's affiliated with Tokyo's richly hyperactive Maltine label. Yumetatsu Glider EP by Yoshino Yoshikawa THE FANTASTIC HOPE [ 23-Apr-15 6:08pm ]
ELECTION 2015 [ 23-Apr-15 6:08pm ]At the very least, the 2015 election is an interesting rebuttal to Peter Mair's notion that Western democracy is 'hollowing out'. In fact, after a couple of decades of hollowing, it seems that the British system is starting to grow bulk again.
This is the third time I've been able to vote, and the first election in which anything resembling actual analysis of the parties and candidates has seemed desirable/possible.
As far as I can make out, in my consitutency (Leyton and Wanstead), there are three choices:
1) Greens
2) Spoil me ballot paper
3) Labour
About which I am thinking thusly:
1) The Greens are tempting, but the candidate is a former The Bill actor called Ashley Gunstock. Not necessarily a beyond-the-pale transgression, I know, but it seems to chime with my impression of the party as a whole as bit middle-class and vacuous. The policies are pretty sound, even courageous. But do they have an inkling about the working-class vote in the North, Wales, etc? I'd say probably not, but please feel free to disabuse me.
2) Did this in the council/European elections. Also very tempting, and I don't have any underlying ethical qualms about it. In fact, anyone who tries to tell me ballot-spoiling is apathetic and nihilistic can fuck right off and vote Lib Dem.
3) Which leaves Labour. A few months ago I would have said not in a million years. But then the candidate in my consitutency is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group and Left Platform, and now there is this prospect of a Labour-SNP alliance, perhaps with the Campaign Group MPs holding some sort of balance of power ... Increasingly, this is looking like it might not be such a terrible option.
But can one really vote for a party that will put Ed Balls in charge of fiscal policy?
Why aren't the SNP standing in England?
What's a brother to do?
See, it's exciting.
17-Feb-15
This is the third time I've been able to vote, and the first election in which anything resembling actual analysis of the parties and candidates has seemed desirable/possible.
As far as I can make out, in my consitutency (Leyton and Wanstead), there are three choices:
1) Greens
2) Spoil me ballot paper
3) Labour
About which I am thinking thusly:
1) The Greens are tempting, but the candidate is a former The Bill actor called Ashley Gunstock. Not necessarily a beyond-the-pale transgression, I know, but it seems to chime with my impression of the party as a whole as bit middle-class and vacuous. The policies are pretty sound, even courageous. But do they have an inkling about the working-class vote in the North, Wales, etc? I'd say probably not, but please feel free to disabuse me.
2) Did this in the council/European elections. Also very tempting, and I don't have any underlying ethical qualms about it. In fact, anyone who tries to tell me ballot-spoiling is apathetic and nihilistic can fuck right off and vote Lib Dem.
3) Which leaves Labour. A few months ago I would have said not in a million years. But then the candidate in my consitutency is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group and Left Platform, and now there is this prospect of a Labour-SNP alliance, perhaps with the Campaign Group MPs holding some sort of balance of power ... Increasingly, this is looking like it might not be such a terrible option.
But can one really vote for a party that will put Ed Balls in charge of fiscal policy?
Why aren't the SNP standing in England?
What's a brother to do?
See, it's exciting.
Rouge's Foam [ 17-Feb-15 10:15pm ]
System Focus: What Health Goth Really Means [ 17-Feb-15 10:15pm ] Le1f photographed by Sam Bayliss Ibram After a brief hiatus, System Focus is back, this time a look at Health Goth, its roots, some of the music surrounding it, and how it represents a turn towards particular aesthetics rather than scenes / genres (click here to read it). Nonetheless there's a geographical convergence in Portland (the piece's working title was 'Health Goth, Portland Hi-Tech and the Age of the Aesthetic.'). Featuring Magic Fades, Club Chemtrail, Karmelloz, C Plus Plus and the return of Vektroid.How about this: these days there are no scenes or genres, only "aesthetics." A scene implies a physical community in physical architectures, and as such is a fatal slur against the URL everspace and its viral lungs. A genre implies limits, intentions, rules, fixity, and—as every itchy-fingered Facebook commenter knows—is a hateful thing. Nothing exists anyways, not really, only names, only hyperlinks, only patterns that work up to a point and then need an upgrade. Backspace your tearful emojis, hypocrites, it's always been that way; it's just more obvious now that code flows through our arteries rather than squeezes of blood and other smells. But it's not homogenous out there and never will be, the online underground and the cultures tapping its magma are built on a vector field that ripples and clumps together, each blob too quick and continuous for your Dad's rock collection. An aesthetic is not an object, it's a way of looking, a way of finding beauty and sifting experiences, originating with process and behaviour rather than product, or, indeed, a journalist with a butterfly net...
Magic Fades: Push ThruAs the Facebook group curators put it in an interview, "Health Goth is not a lifestyle, it's an exercise in aesthetics. Any publication trying to tell you that Health Goth is about working out has simply taken the two words at face value and opted for a less challenging, and extremely boring alternative." It seems to me that saying that Health Goth is gymming for goths is like saying that cyberpunk is Johnny Rotten doing spreadsheets on a Dell. Let's make something clear: in its original context of the Facebook group and the curators behind it, Health Goth is at a significant remove from music. Health Goth shouldn't be regarded as a musical genre, even if it was given its name by people operating in the online underground music community. What it is is an aesthetic, one that primarily concerns fashion...The roots of hi-tech, and Health Goth in particular, go way back, but gained particular momentum around 2011. As the Facebook curators recognize, Health Goth is just as reflective of aesthetic trends that preceded it as it is constitutive of new ones. Surprisingly, none of the pieces I'd read on Health Goth mentioned the GHE20G0THIK club phenomenon pioneered by Venus X in NYC, which was a major force in associating pop and hip-hop with dark underground weirdness. Organized alongside Hood By Air designer Shayne Oliver (who often performed), the parties provided an early context for Fade to Mind names like Total Freedom and Nguzunguzu, and were attended by a nascent Arca...
Karmelloz's Silicon Forest, named after the nickname for the Pacific Northwest's hi-tech industry, confirms him as one of hi-tech's best ambient artists, whose subtle work balances heavenly sweetness with the nausea of future shock, and always puts me in mind of giant vats in which amoral artificial biospheres are roused and stirred. C Plus Plus's Cearà is a rich take on a clubbier sound, catching the light of grime, vogue, house, pop and transatlantic styles as it spins eerily in a space of apparently infinite connections. Most notably perhaps, the Push Thru remix album sees the return of Vektroid, one of the key players in the development of vaporwave between 2010 and 2013 as New Dreams Ltd. and Prismcorp Virtual Enterprises. Vektroid is from Portland and the Pacific Northwest of the USA originally, and her remix of "Ecco" is palpably weighty, shifting through a range of cyborg textures in its eight minutes until it feels more like crawling through a digital wormhole or watching a short film demonstrating some horrifying artificial transformation than hearing the usual shuffling of riffs... stuff I wrote and stuff I liked in 2014 [ 31-Dec-14 2:37pm ]Another pretty busy year for me, writing-about-music-wise. Below is a list of everything, if you're interested. Below that is a list of some releases I particularly enjoyed this year in alphabetical order. I didn't join in with any of the year-end stuff in print or online magazines this year, not because I disapprove - vaguely because I'm finding it difficult to claim I've listened to enough to make the call, and find it really difficult to compare online underground music with more traditionally distributed underground stuff within single assessments - not to mention the fact that great stuff is increasingly coming in chunks smaller and/or less official than the album. But mostly it was because I was really busy at the time all that stuff was due.Stuff I wrote
- Pattern Recognition: Cold Forecast - a broad look at the aesthetics of coldness in recent underground music, and how it's an exploration of modernity. Ft. Egytprixx, Logos, Diamond Black Hearted Boy, Mykki Blanco and more
- Pattern Recognition: Pon! Cuter Love - on the rise of cuteness and kawaii. Ft. JACK댄스, Sophie, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Meishi Smile.
- Pattern Recognition: Gangnam and Beyond - selections from recent K-Pop and how it might reflect underground aesthetics.
- System Focus: The Divine Surrealism of Epic Collage - on the striking and sublime music of E+E, Diamond Black Hearted Boy, Total Freedom, TCF and more.
- System Focus: Inside the New Digital DIY Labels - a look at a handful of digital DIY labels, with interviews, ft. Illuminated Paths, Ailanthus, 1080p, Zoom Lens, Dopefish Family and Aural Sects
- System Focus: The Evolution of the Voice in the Digital Landscape - a look at the spectrum of technological uses of the voice, ft. Nima, Metallic Ghosts, Blank Banshee, vocaloids and more.
- System Focus: Today's Hi-Tech World Has given Birth to a New, Gleaming Grey Sonic Vocabulary - hi-tech dark luxury beats from bine☃, DYNOOO, Dutch E Germ, M-O-R-S-E, Sentinel, Subaeris, Weed Konducta and James Ferraro.
- Cute Computer Chaos (for Boiler Room) - the new wave of digital desire, ft. Hudson Mohawke, Oneohtrix Point Never, AG Cook, SOPHIE and more.
- System Focus: Bridging the Singular Sounds of Lisbon's Underground - I take a trip to Lisbon to investigate Portugal's underground scene and consider what it means to be local in the digital age. Ft., the AVNL and Golden Mist labels, and artists including RAP/RAP/RAP, Old Manual, Marie Dior, Conan Osiris and Lake Haze.
- The Online Underground: A New Kind of Punk? (Resident Advisor Article) - big bad polemical account of the online underground and the aesthetics it takes from its context, with running comparisons to previous generations of punk and indie. Key examples in vaporwave and PC Music.
- Indie Goes Hi-Tech: The End of Analogue Warmth and Cosy Nostalgia (Berlin Music Week Talk) - a talk tying together all the various different hi-tech sub-trends I've been writing about lately.
- System Focus: High-Speed Sounds to Blister Even Internet-Accelerated Brains - more cuteness, this time at high speed and high complexity. Ft. Guy Akimoto, DV-i, Miami Mais, Maxo, Yeongrak, Friendly Sneakrz, Onika, Ba-Kuura, Xyloid, So So In Luv, Lockbox and more.
- System Focus: Fandom Music is as Underground as it Gets - an exploration of the music made as a manifestation of fandom, and its sincerity in particular. Ft. Pokémon, Adventure Time, Minecraft (those note blocks), Homestuck and My Little Pony.
- Review of Arca's Xen (for Electronic Beats) - feverish and gooey writing on one of the year's best albums.
AWALthe1$t: Empty
AyGeeTee: Imminent Orphan
bine☃: THINGS WILL BE BETTER FROM NOW ON
Brood Ma: POPULOUS
Chronovalve: Trace of Light
Conan Osiris: Silk
DYNOOO: These Flaws Are Mine to War With
E+E: The Light That You Gave Me To See You
Friendly Sneakrz: Flowers From Above
Geotic: Morning Shore (Eon Isle)
Giant Claw: Dark Web
GOP (Geniuses of Place): 10.9†01;9
Guy Akimoto: BaeBae EP
James Ferraro: SUKI GIRLZ
Karmelloz: Source Localization
Kyoka: Is (Is Superpowered)
Lockbox: Prince Soul Grenade
LXV: New World Spa
Magic Fades: Push Thru
Miami Mais: A Popcorn Diet
Nima: See Feel Reel
Old Manual: リング
Oliver Coates: Towards the Blessed Isles
Palmistry: Ascensión
Ramona Lisa: Arcadia
RAP/RAP/RAP: Killing and Matisse Graveyard
Sentinel: Hybrid
t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者: ゲートウェイ
Untold: Black Light Spiral
18+: Trust
Review: Arca, Xen (for Electronic Beats) [ 30-Dec-14 7:38pm ]Did a review of Arca's brilliant Xen for Electronic Beats (click here to read). This sentence was cut:Digital de Koonings jounce down oozing hallways dragging trains of femme paraphenalia, kawaii cenobites howl and squeal in holes, and sugared children restlessly pound plucked keyboards, enthralled in the boom of the tingling strings.
But others weren't (such as these):
Xen is a multiplicitous figure. Many tracks contain several life forms coiling around each other, each with its own sense of time and space, all crowded into the same fractious textures and struggling for expression and independence. New limbs and organs burst through the skin, feelers fly in every direction and prehensile tongues curl. Disasters of pleasure, showers of sex. The title track is an electrical injection, with strobes of percussion whipping up a club nimbus as stallions rear their heads and the wreckers come whirling and squeaking over the polished floor; at the center of it all a daughter's dancing class on a tightrope.
But other tracks are solo portraits, often keyboard improvisations. "Sad Bitch" pliés forward tentative and lonely before exploding into pirouettes and dovetailing melodies. "Family Violence" is a forest of jabbing and pointed fingers. "Promise" shudders and teeters as if shaking off an ice age, and the piano sketch "Held Apart" waits at the windowsill with memories in its big eyes. The parameters of Ghersi's self-exploration are readjusted with each track, causing constant surprise—dance beats, noise, song, cinematic strings and rave stabs all rotate the album in a space of unexpected dimensions.
Xen artwork by Jesse Kanda System Focus: Fandom Music Is As Underground As It Gets [ 30-Dec-14 7:30pm ]Horizon's 'Confinis'Possibly the most out-there System Focus yet, this one looks at recently-emerged fandoms and the way they practice their fandom through music-making online (click here to read). It looks at Pokémon, Adventure Time, Minecraft, Homestuck and My Little Pony. There's some really unusual stuff in this one..One of the major drivers of underground music culture is sincerity. The underground seeks musicians for whom making music is an art and a passion, rather than a performance or a get-rich-quick scheme. You might have heard a lot about 'The New Sincerity' or 'post-irony,' ideas dating back to the 1980s which have been applied to music with a notable level of (usually positive) emotion and innocent frankness. But the search for sincerity goes back as far as its perceived opposites in, say, industrial capitalism go—back to the Romantics and beyond. That's not to say that all underground music culture is sincere. Irony and satire are arguably stronger than ever as the underground re-engages with hi-tech modernity, shunning the ubiquitous, twee, and now almost empty sincerities of the indie aesthetic. But to find music today made from pure positive passion alone, try an online DIY music almost completely outside the remit of the hip underground sites: the music of fandom...Lethe Wept on Fortissimo Hall The tracks by Pengosolvent are quite unlike anything else—contemporary orchestral VGM squashed imaginatively into a jovial, frenetic and slightly disturbing blur. Try the crazy "Breaktime Over," the highly cute "Enamored Regard" (below), or the proper creepy ghost-type "Paved With Good Intentions" (belated happy Halloween)...
Intriguingly, Adventure Time is a recurring reference point for some fairly parental-advisory hip-hop—here, here, and here. Then there's Oddpauly, who raps about the attractions of the show on one of his tracks. Pauly also has a YouTube channel featuring a music video of his highlight track "Rain," and a video of him playing Minecraft while eating Fruit Rollups...
The largest musical instruments in the virtual worldOne of the most visually striking fandoms online is Homestuck, an epic webcomic about some teens who inadvertently bring about the end of the world, and then get involved with these bizarre troll-like beings that are perfect to dress up as. But don't take it from me—there's a fan song to introduce you to it all... The weirdly great-looking official Homestuck Bandcamp page compiles the soundtrack (made by fans) music and more, and it tends to subtly evade genre, skipping through all kinds of sound worlds, seemingly guided more by emotion (and whatever's going on with those trolls) than form. I've been oddly mesmerized by Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year Older and the cosmically soppy Song of Skaia.Artwork for 'Firefly Cloud' from Erik "Jit" Scheele's One Year OlderThe fandom has a hefty contingent of Bandcamp customers whose pony avatars can be seen lining up on the pages of the most popular albums. But the music only rarely reflects the child-like aesthetic of the show, often bringing out the darker, more romantic connotations of characters and its stories. Alongside sometimes Friedrich-like digital paintings of the relevant ponies, pony musicians regularly put weighty, grand, maximalist and very technically accomplished music. There's punk rock, happy club sounds, ambient electronic, funky song-writing, hardcore, soft rock, epic orchestral, and metal. One of the most popular artists is Eurobeat Brony, who has three volumes of hyperactive 'Super Ponybeat.' Another is TAPS, who has an ear for glitchy vocal science deriving from samples of the show: ponies fractured and suspended in enormous spaces... Feather's In My Mind System Focus: High Speed Sounds to Blister Even Internet-Accelerated Brains [ 30-Dec-14 6:46pm ]DV-i's 'Optical Mode' in its browser context Proper packed System Focus on speed cuteness (click here to read). Kind of a follow-up to the earlier cuteness article (here). Featuring collectives such as JACK댄스, Activia Benz, Donky Pitch, STHWST, Hope Sick Cola, Mecha Yuri, Magic Yume Records and Manicure Records and artists like Guy Akimoto, DV-i, Miami Mais, Maxo, Yeongrak, Friendly Sneakrz, Onika, Ba-Kuura, Xyloid, So So In Luv, Lockbox, DZA, Doss, Yandere and more. I made a tracklist for it, but not all of it ended up in the SoundCloud playlist at the bottom of the article. Here it is in full (click the links to listen):- Guy Akimoto: BaeBae
- DV-i: Shenzhen Miracle
- Miami Mais: Goose
- Maxo: Hiya
- Yeongrak: estrogen
- Friendly Sneakrz: Morning
- Onika: Bffs
- Ba-Kuura: Dual Wield
- Bames: BYB (Pablo)
- Xyloid: Neptune Pool
- SO SO IN LUV: 1 + 0nly
- Lockbox: Human Makeout
- Maxo: Snow Other
- Yeongrak: shabushabu
- DV-i: Fractal Mode
- Lil Mystic: Hiryo
- Friendly Sneakrz: Restless
- WALLACE: OutAspAce
- DZA: Fluffernutter
- Lockbox: Brainhead
- Yeongrak: flowerkingdom
- Doss: Extended Mix
- Ba-Kuura: Let's Go
- Kaleidoscope: Royal Flash
- Slugabed: Pure El Nino Vibes
- Yeongrak: all i do
- Xyloid: Zephyr
- Yandere: u know
Lockbox's Prince Soul Grenade What a month it's been for cuteness! The deliciously hyper-camp new aesthetic, in its element online, is most famously embodied by the PC Music label—everyone's been messaging and tweeting about them! Then recently the movement got its anthem in the form of "Hey QT" by QT, a snappy lil number which is also the official tune of a new energy drink I can't wait to taste (that's the artwork above). But QT and PC are only the cherry on top of a vast cutie pie. Not long ago, #Feelings boss Ben Aqua set the net ablaze with his Resident Advisor podcast, a celebration of cute club intensity from all over the clouds. Finn Diesel's DIS Magazine show on Rinse FM, a haven for cuteness and other flavors since May and previously featuring SOPHIE, A. G. Cook and Felicita, entered its third installment on September 25, introducing Onika and So So In Luv. And trans-national club sensation JACK댄스 has returned, this time in New York with a whole new roster of US-based cuties... So So in Luv: 1 + 0nlyThose high twinkly notes, that high-speed syncopation, that high helium voice. Hints of '90s hardcore rushing unrepentantly into the digital age. And the network that links JACK댄스, DIS Magazine, Ben Aqua and PC Music with labels like Activia Benz, Donky Pitch, STHWST, Hope Sick Cola, Mecha Yuri, Manicure Records and more has converged on this style from many different points of origin: jungle and hardcore, seapunk, footwork, trap, the sparkly HudMo-Rustie sound, pop, J-pop, video game music and experimental breaks. Just as chopped and screwed lethargy seems to be everywhere between beats and vaporwave, this convergence amounts to the return of speed and complexity in ways guaranteed to blister even your internet-accelerated brain...Guy Akimoto's BaeBae EP, something of an ode to digital communication, begins with the itchy-fingered title track, which includes a demure robot lady announcing, Reality escaping me, emotions with velocity, log me on, sign me out, give me something to type about. Hype tunes, low tides, sending emails all night. Me and bae, bae and me, HDMI, USB...
Indie Goes Hi-Tech: The End of Analogue Warmth and Cosy Nostalgia (Berlin Music Week talk) [ 30-Dec-14 5:49pm ]At Berlin Music Week I gave a talk (video above) that summed up the wider trend behind basically everything I've written about for the past two years: 'hi-tech,' which I like to oppose to traditional indie aesthetics. It includes a summary of many of its sub-trends which looked at in past articles. The slides for the talk are below in all PowerPoint 2003's splendor.
leaving earth [ 4-Oct-14 10:37am ]
POSTSTEP 2014 [ 04-Oct-14 10:37am ]Three-fourths of 2014 is allready gone, and it's obvious that the golden age of poststep is at its end. Brilliant music is still being released, and I'm sure the year will eventually be a "great" one, but it's mostly because there's still an abundance of futuristic energy left from the high tide (2010-2012) that needs to find an outlet. A lot of started developments have to run their course, and a lot of the main artists are far from finished with being inspired. I do fear, though, that this will be the last year where these remnants are still strong and plentiful enough to be seen (if - like me - you're so inclined) as the sprawling manifestations of a hyperactive musical climate, rather than isolated glimmers of light in an otherwise tired and backwards-looking landscape. I suppose it's never possible to say exactly when that blurry line is crossed, but the way things are going right now, it's hard to believe that yet another year will pass without it happening.
The decline was already evident last year - plenty of great records came out, but the sense of constant surprise and opening of endless new possibilities was somehow gone. Rather than continuing the restless drive for even further explorations into the unknown, the best music was mostly exploring the already established new possibilities in further detail - which is obviously not a bad thing in itself, it's just a bad sign when that is most of what's going on. Furthermore, the few examples of something really strange and previously unheard that the year didproduce, were new and unheard because of unique oddball approaches, and not because they discovered fertile new areas open for all: On D'zzzz, Misty Conditions took the rhythmic dementia of the best footwork (but luckily none of the clichéd "street"-samples that always come off as lame and regressive), and used it to create a murky, 21st century scrap heap music all their own. En2ak's 3 got rid of (almost) all of the down tempo and alternative-hip-hop vestiges that made his two previous albums a bit too uneven to be completely convincing, and instead he embraced a kind of playful para-rave, where elements of bitstep, Rustie-style maximalism and even stadium-EDM didn't-quite-coalesce into quirky, almost pop-like microforms.
Though far more minimal and understated, Coco Bryce's Club Tropicana also offered a weird hodgepodge of melodic miniatures - 8bit-mangled pseudo-skweee, electroid dream step and zomby-arpeggiated break beat-contraptions -, while David Kanagas soundtrack for the experimental video game DYADdissolved its miniatures into a liquid kaleidoscope, where fragments of melody and rhythm constantly melted and merged into a colourful virtual goo. Even further gone into the digital ether, the spindly, transparent voicescapes on Co La's Moody Coup seemed to have lost any connection to organic reality or known musical forms, much like on R+7, where Oneohtrix Point Never finally completed the process of eliminating the last traces of synth pastiche, and instead offered an eerie, transparent non-space, that seemed equally untouched by both human hand and human mind.
The last three sort of belong to the entropic camp, at least when it's made wide enough to include the whole "new synth"/virtual dreampop/vapourwave crossover area - Adam Harper territory, basically. Though not as uniquely strange and of-its-own-kind as Kanaga, Co La and Oneohtrix, there's much, much more of this stuff to choose from, but most of it I'm only tangentially interested in - there's a lot of potential and some great creations (in 2013, Ikonika and The-Drum made a couple of good contributions in the "new synth"-camp), but far too often it'll end up as eighties pastiches, or dull indietronica, or slightly off-kilter atmospheric pop. It's a fine line - on one side we'll find someone like Minerva, who have never really been able to convince me that she's more than a dreampop/synthpop-hybrid, but then on the other side there's Fatima al Qadiri, sounding exactly as strange, new and otherworldly as you could hope for. Her long awaited debut LP for Hyperdub, Asiatisch, is among the 2014 highlights so far - by no means a sino grime pastiche (as the concept might lead you to believe), but rather a much more ethereal beast, a transparent and unreal maze of slowly morphing, digitally rendered dream-fragment simulacra.
In some ways Asiatisch could be the ultimate Adam Harper-album, bridging the slightly vaporwave-leaning part of the new synth territory with the current wave of abstract, atmospheric "cryo-grime", which was one of the few successful examples of something resembling a broader movement within the 2013 poststep landscape, where it perhaps reached its apex with Logo's Cold Mission. A completely alien, empty and groovelesssly stuttering beatscape, it didn't actually sound like grime at all - not even like the cold, grey instrumentals of early Plasticman or Mark One. If anything, it was the aesthetic of Jam City's Classical Curves taken to its logical conclusion, a trail followed by many others in 2013, and source of some of the best EP-releases in a year where that format seemed in decline.
Highlights in this department were Rabit's Double Dragon, Mssingno's Mssingno and Wen's Commotion, the latter followed in 2014 by Wens debut album Signals, which sort of took a few steps backwards towards a - slightly - more warm, groovy and full sound. While definitely containing some brilliant tracks (as well as a few fillers - an EP would have been better), it does seem like a regressive development, but perhaps it's not really possible to take cryo grime further after Cold Mission. You could certainly argue that the best developments of the style in 2014 (Filter Dread, Air Max '97, Beneath, Mock the Zuma) have pretty much gone entirely into omni-experimental "beat music", the monochrome, inorganic art music that is Adam Harpers current favourite soundcloud-and-bandcamp-zeitgeist. Clearly related, yet much more ground breaking and unique, SD Laika's debut LP That's Harakiri has mostly been classified as a kind of "avant-grime", but pretty much remain unclassifiable, a claustrophobic stress-scape of bizarre digital debris, asymmetrically twitching march-rhythms, and disturbing, dirty-yet-clinically-synthetic sounds - basically one of the greatest, strangest and unfathomably newest records of 2014.
The only slight drawback of That's Harakiri is a few tracks, like "Meshes" or "Remote Heaven", where the ugly, punishing harshness seem to almost regress into a kind of minimal techno - a problem that is not uncommon for many current practitioners of beats-experimentalism. The root of this may be Actress, whose minimalism occasionally fell back into some of the most unimaginative repetitive art-techno clichés, and far too much music did the same in 2013 - an even more annoying tendency than the countless, dreadfully pretty dream pop/trip hop-hybrids. And even worse, hitherto brilliant poststep practitioners suddenly decided to make boring minimal crap, perhaps the electronic equivalent of a rock musician going back to the "mature" "essence" of "song writing". The worst offender in this respect was Montgomery Clunk, who made one of the greatest, maddest EPs of 2012 with Mondegreen, but in 2013 minimalized his name to Clnk and released an album of tasteful, restrained and deeply dull dub techno - not unlike that on Single Point Edge's SPE album, which the otherwise peerless Rwina-label for some reason released in 2013. Also disappointing was Egyptixx, who followed 2011s brilliant Bible Eyes with A/B Till Infinity, an album that seemed to consist almost entirely of not-that-interesting ambient interludes, mixed with a couple of excursion into pounding, pointless techno, and Dam Mantle, who haven't made much recently, but the little we've got - mostly remixes and tracks on split EPs - seem to be stuck in a minimal-house-with-slightly-more-lively-percussion groove, light years away from the brilliance he used to be capable of.
Going back to "serious 4/4-techno" is of course nothing new in the arty end of dubstep - it was pretty much what people like 2562, Scuba and Shackleton did back before arty dubstep had really become post dubstep yet - but it's always sad to see a straightforward regression. Luckily, a lot of poststep artist still moved forward in 2013, even if it was mostly within the territory of already well-defined frontiers. Some of these included the maximalist hypergrime that took Rusties Glass Swords as a starting point and ran amuck with it, the expansion of footwork into a more and more deranged form of head music, and still-going-on-outside-the-limelight styles like skweee and bitstep. The hyper-maximal stuff was perhaps a bit of a hangover from 2012, and was best in the beginning of 2013, where Slugabeds Activia Benz-label released brilliant EPs like 813's Recolor and Eloq's C'mon, occasionally reaching the same level of ridiculous, sugar-overdose madness as Montgomery Clunks aforementioned Mondegreen . Since then, the style has been slightly in decline, a symptom perhaps being that Activia Benz apparently has given up on vinyl and now apparently is a digital-only label. The best attempts at actually doing something new with a maximalist approach have more or less been from the trapified wobble camp, which in 2013 delivered some good EPs in in the intersection of populist EDM-bombast and weird avant-brostep; good examples being Joney's Illowhead or Blue Daisy/Unknown Shapes Used to Give a FK. As for 2014, Rusties much anticipated follow up to Glass Swords, the messy Green Language, doesn't really seem like a convincing revitalisation of the style.
With footwork, the hype is also slowly fading, it's not really the new thing anymore, and with the death of DJ Rashad, just as he was beginning to get the attention he deserved, the scene also lost its most obvious figurehead. Rashad's first Hyperdub-album, Double Cup, was released shortly before his death, and was anticipated as sort of the definitive footwork statement, but sadly it wasn't quite the milestone it was supposed to be. On the other hand, 2013 also gave us Lil Jabba's Scales, arguably the best footwork album yet (second perhaps only to DJ Diamond's Flight Muzik), where the jittery rhythms turned weirdly cold and arrested, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere further enhanced by murky drones and demented, oppressive-yet-catchy fanfare-melodies.
Also worth mentioning was Hade+Dwfl's The Healthiest Man in Chicago, which, despite being a bit uneven, did have some brilliantly weird tracks on it, and Ital Tek, who continued to expand on the hybrid style developed on his 2012 Nebula Dance-album. He benefited from working with much shorter formats - the EP Hyper Real and the mini-LP Control - where his super smooth production style and the lack of attention grabbing melodic material didn't create the same problem of sameness as on a full length album. Especially Control had just the right balance between ideas and length, atmospheres and inventive structures, and it's probably his best release so far. His 2014-EP Mega City Industry pretty much follows the same path, but still works as great little entity in its own right.
Footwork is only in the first phase of losing its status as the new hip style; for bitstep this happened years ago. The "golden age" was approximately from 2009 to 2011, which is a long time ago by today's standards, but nevertheless, surprisingly many of the best releases in 2013 could be classified as either bitstep or, in cases like Zomby and Desto, bitstep-derived. The latter's Emptier Streets is mostly a kind of somnambulist ghost-trap, containing only a few scattered remnants of the archetypical "bit"-signifiers (angular arpeggio-patterns, diced computer game sounds), but it also comes off as an obvious, almost logical development - the empty, spectral city where harder, rave-aligned poststep goes to die. Equally haunted, but clearly bitstep proper, Clouds double EP USB Islandssounded like the (mini)-album Dam Mantle or Darkstar should have made, which means that it's obviously one of the very best poststep releases of 2013. In a way it's the perfection of bitstep-as-entropic/psychedelic-melancholia, like wandering further and further into a dark maze of hopelessness and despair, all stumbling, fractured beats, seasick laments and cascades of vertigo-inducing 8bit-debris.
In the opposite, more wild and colourful end of bitstep, 96wrlds mini-LP Private Language and Eprom's Halflife both offered diverse curio cabinets of popular club-forms turned into grotesque and lopsided, yet still oddly groovy, monsters. Especially Halflife, as a follow up to 2012s not-completely-successful Metahuman, was pretty much exactly the album you'd hope Eprom would make - bare boned, raw and wonderfully ugly, containing both brutally rave-oriented behemoths and completely bizarre experiments, as well as a few more relaxed pieces - which were thankfully as unpolished and direct as the rest of the album. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like Halflife was done much faster and in a much more intuitive manner than its predecessor, and is all the better for it.
Perhaps DKSTR's mini-LP Pleasures should be classified as bitstep as well - it definitely contains a lot of the aforementioned "bit-signifiers" - but in any case, it was the best skweee-release of 2013, and probably the best since the wonder year of 2010. Ever since the brief media-interest of approximately 2009-2010, skweee has lived even more outside of the limelight than bitstep, yet the style just keep going, and each year there seem to come at least a couple of great releases, showing that it's still worth keeping an eye on. In the case of Pleasures - apparently by a new skweee-recruit - it feels almost like a rebirth. All the best skweee-elements - the baffling syncopations, the raw, deliberately synthetic sounds, the abrupt, counter-intuitive melodies - seem intensified, turned up to eleven, and further enhanced by an onslaught of hysteric 8bit-shrapnel - an instant skweee-classic!
In 2013 Pleasures was pretty much in a skweee-league of its own, but that said, the debut LP of one of the oldest skweee-practitioners, Easy & Center of the Universe, was definitely also worth checking out. Easy & C.O.U. is the prime exponent of "ethno skweee", and on Aryayek Machine the fusion of rubbery square wave-funk and middle eastern elements had never worked better. It might seem a bit regressively organic compared to the futuristic madness of DKSTR, but on its own terms it's a brilliant combination, sort of the skweee equivalent of Débruit - who happened to release a pretty great album in 2013 as well. A collaboration with Sudanese singer Alsarah, Aljawal was also a meeting of organic and synthetic, but Débruits production was as colourful and inventive as ever, and seemed further inspired by the plenty of opportunity for vocal science offered by Alsarah.
All in all, it should be obvious that 2013 was indeed a brilliant year for poststep-releases - there's even a few great ones that I haven't been able to fit in yet, but which definitely should be mentioned: Nguzunguzu made one of their best so far with the mini-LP Skycell, Burial made his most interesting release since Untruewith Rival Dealer, and Pascäal gave new life to the original Burial-sound by turning it into irresistibly catchy, heartbreakingly sad and yet weirdly bright and colourful pop-step on Fragile. So far - despite some really great releases, some promising ones on their way, and an apparent resurge of great new EPs - 2014 doesn't seem nearly as great. But then, in all fairness, that's probably also how I felt same time last year. A lot can still happen. But in the end, that's not the point. There's at least 20-25 EPs and albums from 2013 that I wouldn't be without, records that didn't sound like they could belong in any other era than this, and more than half of them still radiated the utter newness that has been so thrilling the last five years, still held the future promise. Perhaps there will be as many records of the same calibre when 2014 ends, but again - that's not the point.
The point is that all this is living on borrowed time, running on a hitherto unimagined reservoir of energy that was detected sometime around 2007, and unexpectedly erupted two years later. We shouldn't expect it to go on forever, and the transformation from out-of-control frontline research to slightly-refining-discoveries-already-made will happen as gradually and almost unnoticed as it did in the mid-nineties, the early eighties, the early or mid-seventies (depending on how you regard prog), etc. Except - this time it doesn't even seem like most of the people involved have even recognised it as a golden age, so perhaps they won't notice that anything's gone afterwards? It does leave a lot of questions. How did the original energy materialise, seemingly out of nowhere and in spite of all those people saying that it didn't exist - couldn't exist - and even now, saying that it never even did exist, that nothing have happened during the last ten years that haven't just been a regurgitation of all the real innovation that (of course) happened when they were young. Which leads us to the next question: Why was the energy never recognised? Even the ones who participated didn't seem to think of it as a connected thing - or a whole lot of connected things -, there was never really a movement, a common feeling of moving in specific, ground breaking new directions - even though that was what they did - and never any struggles as to which new directions ought to be followed. Everyone was left to their own devices.
These questions will take some time to answer, time I don't have right now. Obviously, it all has something to do with the time we're living in, a time where movements just aren't supposed to happen, and where the ability to recognise something new has been purged to such a degree that most people refuse to recognise it even if it's staring them in the face. Hopefully, I'll have the time to go into further detail later.
18-Jul-14
The decline was already evident last year - plenty of great records came out, but the sense of constant surprise and opening of endless new possibilities was somehow gone. Rather than continuing the restless drive for even further explorations into the unknown, the best music was mostly exploring the already established new possibilities in further detail - which is obviously not a bad thing in itself, it's just a bad sign when that is most of what's going on. Furthermore, the few examples of something really strange and previously unheard that the year didproduce, were new and unheard because of unique oddball approaches, and not because they discovered fertile new areas open for all: On D'zzzz, Misty Conditions took the rhythmic dementia of the best footwork (but luckily none of the clichéd "street"-samples that always come off as lame and regressive), and used it to create a murky, 21st century scrap heap music all their own. En2ak's 3 got rid of (almost) all of the down tempo and alternative-hip-hop vestiges that made his two previous albums a bit too uneven to be completely convincing, and instead he embraced a kind of playful para-rave, where elements of bitstep, Rustie-style maximalism and even stadium-EDM didn't-quite-coalesce into quirky, almost pop-like microforms.
Though far more minimal and understated, Coco Bryce's Club Tropicana also offered a weird hodgepodge of melodic miniatures - 8bit-mangled pseudo-skweee, electroid dream step and zomby-arpeggiated break beat-contraptions -, while David Kanagas soundtrack for the experimental video game DYADdissolved its miniatures into a liquid kaleidoscope, where fragments of melody and rhythm constantly melted and merged into a colourful virtual goo. Even further gone into the digital ether, the spindly, transparent voicescapes on Co La's Moody Coup seemed to have lost any connection to organic reality or known musical forms, much like on R+7, where Oneohtrix Point Never finally completed the process of eliminating the last traces of synth pastiche, and instead offered an eerie, transparent non-space, that seemed equally untouched by both human hand and human mind.
The last three sort of belong to the entropic camp, at least when it's made wide enough to include the whole "new synth"/virtual dreampop/vapourwave crossover area - Adam Harper territory, basically. Though not as uniquely strange and of-its-own-kind as Kanaga, Co La and Oneohtrix, there's much, much more of this stuff to choose from, but most of it I'm only tangentially interested in - there's a lot of potential and some great creations (in 2013, Ikonika and The-Drum made a couple of good contributions in the "new synth"-camp), but far too often it'll end up as eighties pastiches, or dull indietronica, or slightly off-kilter atmospheric pop. It's a fine line - on one side we'll find someone like Minerva, who have never really been able to convince me that she's more than a dreampop/synthpop-hybrid, but then on the other side there's Fatima al Qadiri, sounding exactly as strange, new and otherworldly as you could hope for. Her long awaited debut LP for Hyperdub, Asiatisch, is among the 2014 highlights so far - by no means a sino grime pastiche (as the concept might lead you to believe), but rather a much more ethereal beast, a transparent and unreal maze of slowly morphing, digitally rendered dream-fragment simulacra.
In some ways Asiatisch could be the ultimate Adam Harper-album, bridging the slightly vaporwave-leaning part of the new synth territory with the current wave of abstract, atmospheric "cryo-grime", which was one of the few successful examples of something resembling a broader movement within the 2013 poststep landscape, where it perhaps reached its apex with Logo's Cold Mission. A completely alien, empty and groovelesssly stuttering beatscape, it didn't actually sound like grime at all - not even like the cold, grey instrumentals of early Plasticman or Mark One. If anything, it was the aesthetic of Jam City's Classical Curves taken to its logical conclusion, a trail followed by many others in 2013, and source of some of the best EP-releases in a year where that format seemed in decline.
Highlights in this department were Rabit's Double Dragon, Mssingno's Mssingno and Wen's Commotion, the latter followed in 2014 by Wens debut album Signals, which sort of took a few steps backwards towards a - slightly - more warm, groovy and full sound. While definitely containing some brilliant tracks (as well as a few fillers - an EP would have been better), it does seem like a regressive development, but perhaps it's not really possible to take cryo grime further after Cold Mission. You could certainly argue that the best developments of the style in 2014 (Filter Dread, Air Max '97, Beneath, Mock the Zuma) have pretty much gone entirely into omni-experimental "beat music", the monochrome, inorganic art music that is Adam Harpers current favourite soundcloud-and-bandcamp-zeitgeist. Clearly related, yet much more ground breaking and unique, SD Laika's debut LP That's Harakiri has mostly been classified as a kind of "avant-grime", but pretty much remain unclassifiable, a claustrophobic stress-scape of bizarre digital debris, asymmetrically twitching march-rhythms, and disturbing, dirty-yet-clinically-synthetic sounds - basically one of the greatest, strangest and unfathomably newest records of 2014.
The only slight drawback of That's Harakiri is a few tracks, like "Meshes" or "Remote Heaven", where the ugly, punishing harshness seem to almost regress into a kind of minimal techno - a problem that is not uncommon for many current practitioners of beats-experimentalism. The root of this may be Actress, whose minimalism occasionally fell back into some of the most unimaginative repetitive art-techno clichés, and far too much music did the same in 2013 - an even more annoying tendency than the countless, dreadfully pretty dream pop/trip hop-hybrids. And even worse, hitherto brilliant poststep practitioners suddenly decided to make boring minimal crap, perhaps the electronic equivalent of a rock musician going back to the "mature" "essence" of "song writing". The worst offender in this respect was Montgomery Clunk, who made one of the greatest, maddest EPs of 2012 with Mondegreen, but in 2013 minimalized his name to Clnk and released an album of tasteful, restrained and deeply dull dub techno - not unlike that on Single Point Edge's SPE album, which the otherwise peerless Rwina-label for some reason released in 2013. Also disappointing was Egyptixx, who followed 2011s brilliant Bible Eyes with A/B Till Infinity, an album that seemed to consist almost entirely of not-that-interesting ambient interludes, mixed with a couple of excursion into pounding, pointless techno, and Dam Mantle, who haven't made much recently, but the little we've got - mostly remixes and tracks on split EPs - seem to be stuck in a minimal-house-with-slightly-more-lively-percussion groove, light years away from the brilliance he used to be capable of.
Going back to "serious 4/4-techno" is of course nothing new in the arty end of dubstep - it was pretty much what people like 2562, Scuba and Shackleton did back before arty dubstep had really become post dubstep yet - but it's always sad to see a straightforward regression. Luckily, a lot of poststep artist still moved forward in 2013, even if it was mostly within the territory of already well-defined frontiers. Some of these included the maximalist hypergrime that took Rusties Glass Swords as a starting point and ran amuck with it, the expansion of footwork into a more and more deranged form of head music, and still-going-on-outside-the-limelight styles like skweee and bitstep. The hyper-maximal stuff was perhaps a bit of a hangover from 2012, and was best in the beginning of 2013, where Slugabeds Activia Benz-label released brilliant EPs like 813's Recolor and Eloq's C'mon, occasionally reaching the same level of ridiculous, sugar-overdose madness as Montgomery Clunks aforementioned Mondegreen . Since then, the style has been slightly in decline, a symptom perhaps being that Activia Benz apparently has given up on vinyl and now apparently is a digital-only label. The best attempts at actually doing something new with a maximalist approach have more or less been from the trapified wobble camp, which in 2013 delivered some good EPs in in the intersection of populist EDM-bombast and weird avant-brostep; good examples being Joney's Illowhead or Blue Daisy/Unknown Shapes Used to Give a FK. As for 2014, Rusties much anticipated follow up to Glass Swords, the messy Green Language, doesn't really seem like a convincing revitalisation of the style.
With footwork, the hype is also slowly fading, it's not really the new thing anymore, and with the death of DJ Rashad, just as he was beginning to get the attention he deserved, the scene also lost its most obvious figurehead. Rashad's first Hyperdub-album, Double Cup, was released shortly before his death, and was anticipated as sort of the definitive footwork statement, but sadly it wasn't quite the milestone it was supposed to be. On the other hand, 2013 also gave us Lil Jabba's Scales, arguably the best footwork album yet (second perhaps only to DJ Diamond's Flight Muzik), where the jittery rhythms turned weirdly cold and arrested, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere further enhanced by murky drones and demented, oppressive-yet-catchy fanfare-melodies.
Also worth mentioning was Hade+Dwfl's The Healthiest Man in Chicago, which, despite being a bit uneven, did have some brilliantly weird tracks on it, and Ital Tek, who continued to expand on the hybrid style developed on his 2012 Nebula Dance-album. He benefited from working with much shorter formats - the EP Hyper Real and the mini-LP Control - where his super smooth production style and the lack of attention grabbing melodic material didn't create the same problem of sameness as on a full length album. Especially Control had just the right balance between ideas and length, atmospheres and inventive structures, and it's probably his best release so far. His 2014-EP Mega City Industry pretty much follows the same path, but still works as great little entity in its own right.
Footwork is only in the first phase of losing its status as the new hip style; for bitstep this happened years ago. The "golden age" was approximately from 2009 to 2011, which is a long time ago by today's standards, but nevertheless, surprisingly many of the best releases in 2013 could be classified as either bitstep or, in cases like Zomby and Desto, bitstep-derived. The latter's Emptier Streets is mostly a kind of somnambulist ghost-trap, containing only a few scattered remnants of the archetypical "bit"-signifiers (angular arpeggio-patterns, diced computer game sounds), but it also comes off as an obvious, almost logical development - the empty, spectral city where harder, rave-aligned poststep goes to die. Equally haunted, but clearly bitstep proper, Clouds double EP USB Islandssounded like the (mini)-album Dam Mantle or Darkstar should have made, which means that it's obviously one of the very best poststep releases of 2013. In a way it's the perfection of bitstep-as-entropic/psychedelic-melancholia, like wandering further and further into a dark maze of hopelessness and despair, all stumbling, fractured beats, seasick laments and cascades of vertigo-inducing 8bit-debris.
In the opposite, more wild and colourful end of bitstep, 96wrlds mini-LP Private Language and Eprom's Halflife both offered diverse curio cabinets of popular club-forms turned into grotesque and lopsided, yet still oddly groovy, monsters. Especially Halflife, as a follow up to 2012s not-completely-successful Metahuman, was pretty much exactly the album you'd hope Eprom would make - bare boned, raw and wonderfully ugly, containing both brutally rave-oriented behemoths and completely bizarre experiments, as well as a few more relaxed pieces - which were thankfully as unpolished and direct as the rest of the album. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like Halflife was done much faster and in a much more intuitive manner than its predecessor, and is all the better for it.
Perhaps DKSTR's mini-LP Pleasures should be classified as bitstep as well - it definitely contains a lot of the aforementioned "bit-signifiers" - but in any case, it was the best skweee-release of 2013, and probably the best since the wonder year of 2010. Ever since the brief media-interest of approximately 2009-2010, skweee has lived even more outside of the limelight than bitstep, yet the style just keep going, and each year there seem to come at least a couple of great releases, showing that it's still worth keeping an eye on. In the case of Pleasures - apparently by a new skweee-recruit - it feels almost like a rebirth. All the best skweee-elements - the baffling syncopations, the raw, deliberately synthetic sounds, the abrupt, counter-intuitive melodies - seem intensified, turned up to eleven, and further enhanced by an onslaught of hysteric 8bit-shrapnel - an instant skweee-classic!
In 2013 Pleasures was pretty much in a skweee-league of its own, but that said, the debut LP of one of the oldest skweee-practitioners, Easy & Center of the Universe, was definitely also worth checking out. Easy & C.O.U. is the prime exponent of "ethno skweee", and on Aryayek Machine the fusion of rubbery square wave-funk and middle eastern elements had never worked better. It might seem a bit regressively organic compared to the futuristic madness of DKSTR, but on its own terms it's a brilliant combination, sort of the skweee equivalent of Débruit - who happened to release a pretty great album in 2013 as well. A collaboration with Sudanese singer Alsarah, Aljawal was also a meeting of organic and synthetic, but Débruits production was as colourful and inventive as ever, and seemed further inspired by the plenty of opportunity for vocal science offered by Alsarah.
All in all, it should be obvious that 2013 was indeed a brilliant year for poststep-releases - there's even a few great ones that I haven't been able to fit in yet, but which definitely should be mentioned: Nguzunguzu made one of their best so far with the mini-LP Skycell, Burial made his most interesting release since Untruewith Rival Dealer, and Pascäal gave new life to the original Burial-sound by turning it into irresistibly catchy, heartbreakingly sad and yet weirdly bright and colourful pop-step on Fragile. So far - despite some really great releases, some promising ones on their way, and an apparent resurge of great new EPs - 2014 doesn't seem nearly as great. But then, in all fairness, that's probably also how I felt same time last year. A lot can still happen. But in the end, that's not the point. There's at least 20-25 EPs and albums from 2013 that I wouldn't be without, records that didn't sound like they could belong in any other era than this, and more than half of them still radiated the utter newness that has been so thrilling the last five years, still held the future promise. Perhaps there will be as many records of the same calibre when 2014 ends, but again - that's not the point.
The point is that all this is living on borrowed time, running on a hitherto unimagined reservoir of energy that was detected sometime around 2007, and unexpectedly erupted two years later. We shouldn't expect it to go on forever, and the transformation from out-of-control frontline research to slightly-refining-discoveries-already-made will happen as gradually and almost unnoticed as it did in the mid-nineties, the early eighties, the early or mid-seventies (depending on how you regard prog), etc. Except - this time it doesn't even seem like most of the people involved have even recognised it as a golden age, so perhaps they won't notice that anything's gone afterwards? It does leave a lot of questions. How did the original energy materialise, seemingly out of nowhere and in spite of all those people saying that it didn't exist - couldn't exist - and even now, saying that it never even did exist, that nothing have happened during the last ten years that haven't just been a regurgitation of all the real innovation that (of course) happened when they were young. Which leads us to the next question: Why was the energy never recognised? Even the ones who participated didn't seem to think of it as a connected thing - or a whole lot of connected things -, there was never really a movement, a common feeling of moving in specific, ground breaking new directions - even though that was what they did - and never any struggles as to which new directions ought to be followed. Everyone was left to their own devices.
These questions will take some time to answer, time I don't have right now. Obviously, it all has something to do with the time we're living in, a time where movements just aren't supposed to happen, and where the ability to recognise something new has been purged to such a degree that most people refuse to recognise it even if it's staring them in the face. Hopefully, I'll have the time to go into further detail later.
THE FANTASTIC HOPE [ 17-Jul-14 9:47pm ]
OASIS BOOK REVIEW ROUND-UP [ 17-Jul-14 9:47pm ]Well well well, treatments of the Oasis book are now coming in thick and fast ...
First up, David Stubbs wrote an excellent long-form review essay in Review 31 under the lyrically apposite title: On the Crest of a Wave. It's a great piece of prose in its own right, and contains the seeds of a longer argument DStubbs is developing all about (I think) 1996 as the pivotal year in recent cultural history.
Next, under another great title (Are Oasis Socialists?) VICE's Noisey blog published an interview I did with Josh Hall (also, incidentally, another top-notch writer - see for example here). The VICE copy-editing leaves much to be desired, but once you've waded through the typos there's some very valuable stuff in there, particularly about the Left and heritage.
Most bizarrely of all, perhaps, I managed to get Oasis into this week's TLS. Yes, that's right, the Times Literary Supplement has actually gone and fucking reviewed my book about Definitely Maybe. The piece is relatively short and isn't available online if you're not a subscriber. What's more, it was written by Joe Charlton, one of the two or three people from my Northumberland comprehensive school with even a shred of influence in the contemporary British culture-sphere. But still. The fucking TLS. What would Liam Gallagher make of that, I wonder?
Finally, and most importantly, my intellectual soulmate Rhian E. Jones has written a cracking essay over at Velvet Coalmine, which glances at the Oasis book, but is really just a spot-on summary of everything that matters most in the world right now. Praise her, with great praise.
Oh, also, there's that psychogeographical tour of Manchester thing on the Bloomsbury blog I mentioned in the last post.
There may yet be more to come, you never know.
15-Jul-14
First up, David Stubbs wrote an excellent long-form review essay in Review 31 under the lyrically apposite title: On the Crest of a Wave. It's a great piece of prose in its own right, and contains the seeds of a longer argument DStubbs is developing all about (I think) 1996 as the pivotal year in recent cultural history.
Next, under another great title (Are Oasis Socialists?) VICE's Noisey blog published an interview I did with Josh Hall (also, incidentally, another top-notch writer - see for example here). The VICE copy-editing leaves much to be desired, but once you've waded through the typos there's some very valuable stuff in there, particularly about the Left and heritage.
Most bizarrely of all, perhaps, I managed to get Oasis into this week's TLS. Yes, that's right, the Times Literary Supplement has actually gone and fucking reviewed my book about Definitely Maybe. The piece is relatively short and isn't available online if you're not a subscriber. What's more, it was written by Joe Charlton, one of the two or three people from my Northumberland comprehensive school with even a shred of influence in the contemporary British culture-sphere. But still. The fucking TLS. What would Liam Gallagher make of that, I wonder?
Finally, and most importantly, my intellectual soulmate Rhian E. Jones has written a cracking essay over at Velvet Coalmine, which glances at the Oasis book, but is really just a spot-on summary of everything that matters most in the world right now. Praise her, with great praise.
Oh, also, there's that psychogeographical tour of Manchester thing on the Bloomsbury blog I mentioned in the last post.
There may yet be more to come, you never know.
DEFINITELY DEFINITELY DEFINITELY OUT NOW [ 15-Jul-14 10:39am ]Well friends the Oasis book has finally emerged from the primordial swamp and is now available from at least some good bookshops in the UK and the rest of the world.
The launch is this Wednesday, 16 July, at 7.30 at the Peckham Pelican, Peckham. I'll read a short extract from the introduction to the book, and the inimitable David Stubbs will play some 1994 tunes. Everyone is welcome and there's no ticketing.
Extracts from the book have been published at ...
Stereogum
Flavorwire
+ The Quietus
Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 blog is also publishing some associated features this week as part of "Oasis Week".
First up: my short autobiographical take on the album. I barred first person from the text proper for various stylistic and political reasons, but thought it might be nice to do a brief sketch all about ALEX NIVEN for the sake of scene-setting, empathy, identification, all that shite. Later this week there will be a Video Vault feature nodding at the album's influences and a psychogeographical tour of Manchester featuring Maine Road, Mr Sifter, and Adolphe Valette.
More to follow on reviews, talks &c.
20-May-14
The launch is this Wednesday, 16 July, at 7.30 at the Peckham Pelican, Peckham. I'll read a short extract from the introduction to the book, and the inimitable David Stubbs will play some 1994 tunes. Everyone is welcome and there's no ticketing.
Extracts from the book have been published at ...
Stereogum
Flavorwire
+ The Quietus
Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 blog is also publishing some associated features this week as part of "Oasis Week".
First up: my short autobiographical take on the album. I barred first person from the text proper for various stylistic and political reasons, but thought it might be nice to do a brief sketch all about ALEX NIVEN for the sake of scene-setting, empathy, identification, all that shite. Later this week there will be a Video Vault feature nodding at the album's influences and a psychogeographical tour of Manchester featuring Maine Road, Mr Sifter, and Adolphe Valette.
More to follow on reviews, talks &c.
AT TIME'S LIGHT THRONGED MERIDIAN [ 20-May-14 9:52am ]NOTES ON THE GUARDIAN NORTH-EAST/DETROIT ARTICLE [ 13-May-14 12:26pm ]
Perhaps because the football season ended so anti-climactically this weekend, the north-east of England has since taken a diversion into socio-cultural terrain to enact a now familiar ritual of tragedy-as-farce played out in the national press. (See also the social media accounts of pretty much everyone from the region over the past couple of days.)
Seeing as I was one of the interviewees for the piece by Andy Beckett that started the whole fuss on Saturday, here's some of my thoughts about both the article and the response to it ...
Firstly, some notes about the format of the piece. My contribution was to be interviewed by Andy over the phone some six or seven months ago. The conversation lasted about an hour, and although a part of me was initially sceptical about the fact of the article being written by someone from [evil voice] The South, I was impressed by Andy's intelligence, inquisitiveness, and above all, his sympathy - arising, I think, out of his own socialist beliefs and certain of his life experiences - in highlighting the profound social and economic difficulties the north-east has faced in recent years, difficulties that have often been occluded and even ridiculed in the mainstream media. Inevitably, in the final version of the article, my comments had been whittled down to two or three short quotations (which are, by the way, kind of embarrassingly ungrammatical - proof of their spontaneous, extemporised origins I think).
I fully expected this to happen and nothing in the piece misrepresented my feelings in any way. At the same time, of course there was a hell of a lot of stuff that I mentioned in that 1-hour phone conversation that didn't make it into the final cut.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to to follow incumbent politician Chi Onwurah's lead by claiming that the choice of quotations and the overall thrust of the article was selective, that there was a lot of more positive stuff mentioned in the interview with Andy that wasn't used in the published version. I could go on about how I think the north-east is the greatest place on earth (I do), talk about how desperate I am to get back there (4 unsuccessful job applications this year and another pending), reel off soundbites for the sake of balance about the growth of tech start-ups in the region, moderate increases in house prices, the fact that Newcastle's nightlife is still thriving, the continued outstanding creative achievements of the area's sons and daughters, how wonderful the landscape is, and so on and so forth.
All this stuff is true, but to be honest, I'm not writing a tourist industry brochure or massaging PR for the Nissan car factory. Besides, as the ever trenchant Ross Lewis pointed out on Twitter: "You can love the best of a place and also be ashamed of it and try and change the worst aspects".
I don't want to speak for Andy Beckett, but I should imagine there are a couple of reasons why his article was not entitled "The North-East of England: Some Pros and Cons" or "A Rounded Portrait of a Part of the Country That is Essentially Quite Similar to Everywhere Else".
The first, obviously, is that no editor would have published it and no reader would have bothered to read it through to the end. Outside the world of corporate hospitality literature and marketing hyperbole, articles about a particular subject will of necessity take a specific line of argumentation, and the Guardian piece was in my opinion an entirely fair-minded exploration of the (factually indisputable) notion that the north-east has suffered in recent years from socio-economic decline. If this premise was subsequently simplified on a superficial level by headlines, choice of images, pull-quotes, the Detroit parallel, etc, then that's the nature of journalism, and it's surely not all that difficult to see beyond this paraphernalia in order to see the nuances of the discussion contained in the actual text. Accusations of a "hatchet job" are laughable, and should be rejected out of hand by anybody with any sense.
The second reason I think for the critical angle taken in the piece is that criticism of the way recent political history has unfolded to the detriment of certain parts of the country are much-needed. If I knew the Detroit analogy would be used in the quite the way it was, I might have been more wary of deploying it in conversation with Andy. But then again, I think the parallel is pretty apt (though of course only partially so), because Detroit is the archetypal example of a post-industrial city/region that has suffered very badly over the last three decades - in a broadly similar way to the NE - from the neoliberal double whammy of deindustrialisation and massively reduced social spending.
I think that anyone who cares about the north-east is likely to feel a sense of anger about the fact that it has, inarguably, suffered in certain concrete statistical ways in the post-Thatcher period. Nitpicking about the finer points of the Detroit analogy seems to me pretty foolhardy in light of the essential connection between working-class Western cities that have been continually passed over in the race to liberate the market and bolster the wealth of the super-rich in the last three decades. (Moreover, looked at another way, as someone pointed out on Facebook, isn't being compared to Detroit - cradle of Motown, Eminem, MC5, and Iggy Pop - quite a bit better than being compared to Croydon?)
I have sympathy with some of the defensive reactions to the Guardian piece. Perhaps there's always something slightly questionable about being told by an outsider that the place you live might have problems, and its a natural human reaction to respond to such claims with proclamations of local pride and useful additions to the discussion that try to provide examples of north-eastern resilience and ingenuity in the face of social and economic marginalisation.
But I think a better way to react to the article than trumpeting local success stories and worrying hysterically about how negative PR might deter capitalist investment (which I'm going to go out on a limb here by suggesting might not necessarily be a plausible or even a worthwhile solution to the problems faced by the vast majority of north-easterners), is to use the example of the way the region has been shafted by the London-based institutions of the English Establishment over the last few years as fuel for political anger and constructive determination to change things. The former ultimately plays into the hands of the Tories, while the latter offers the hope of something much more valuable.
There are way more than 100 reasons why it's great up north, but right now offering a coherent, organised alternative to the south-east and its capitalist mega-city is not one of them.
It could be.
08-May-14
Seeing as I was one of the interviewees for the piece by Andy Beckett that started the whole fuss on Saturday, here's some of my thoughts about both the article and the response to it ...
Firstly, some notes about the format of the piece. My contribution was to be interviewed by Andy over the phone some six or seven months ago. The conversation lasted about an hour, and although a part of me was initially sceptical about the fact of the article being written by someone from [evil voice] The South, I was impressed by Andy's intelligence, inquisitiveness, and above all, his sympathy - arising, I think, out of his own socialist beliefs and certain of his life experiences - in highlighting the profound social and economic difficulties the north-east has faced in recent years, difficulties that have often been occluded and even ridiculed in the mainstream media. Inevitably, in the final version of the article, my comments had been whittled down to two or three short quotations (which are, by the way, kind of embarrassingly ungrammatical - proof of their spontaneous, extemporised origins I think).
I fully expected this to happen and nothing in the piece misrepresented my feelings in any way. At the same time, of course there was a hell of a lot of stuff that I mentioned in that 1-hour phone conversation that didn't make it into the final cut.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to to follow incumbent politician Chi Onwurah's lead by claiming that the choice of quotations and the overall thrust of the article was selective, that there was a lot of more positive stuff mentioned in the interview with Andy that wasn't used in the published version. I could go on about how I think the north-east is the greatest place on earth (I do), talk about how desperate I am to get back there (4 unsuccessful job applications this year and another pending), reel off soundbites for the sake of balance about the growth of tech start-ups in the region, moderate increases in house prices, the fact that Newcastle's nightlife is still thriving, the continued outstanding creative achievements of the area's sons and daughters, how wonderful the landscape is, and so on and so forth.
All this stuff is true, but to be honest, I'm not writing a tourist industry brochure or massaging PR for the Nissan car factory. Besides, as the ever trenchant Ross Lewis pointed out on Twitter: "You can love the best of a place and also be ashamed of it and try and change the worst aspects".
I don't want to speak for Andy Beckett, but I should imagine there are a couple of reasons why his article was not entitled "The North-East of England: Some Pros and Cons" or "A Rounded Portrait of a Part of the Country That is Essentially Quite Similar to Everywhere Else".
The first, obviously, is that no editor would have published it and no reader would have bothered to read it through to the end. Outside the world of corporate hospitality literature and marketing hyperbole, articles about a particular subject will of necessity take a specific line of argumentation, and the Guardian piece was in my opinion an entirely fair-minded exploration of the (factually indisputable) notion that the north-east has suffered in recent years from socio-economic decline. If this premise was subsequently simplified on a superficial level by headlines, choice of images, pull-quotes, the Detroit parallel, etc, then that's the nature of journalism, and it's surely not all that difficult to see beyond this paraphernalia in order to see the nuances of the discussion contained in the actual text. Accusations of a "hatchet job" are laughable, and should be rejected out of hand by anybody with any sense.
The second reason I think for the critical angle taken in the piece is that criticism of the way recent political history has unfolded to the detriment of certain parts of the country are much-needed. If I knew the Detroit analogy would be used in the quite the way it was, I might have been more wary of deploying it in conversation with Andy. But then again, I think the parallel is pretty apt (though of course only partially so), because Detroit is the archetypal example of a post-industrial city/region that has suffered very badly over the last three decades - in a broadly similar way to the NE - from the neoliberal double whammy of deindustrialisation and massively reduced social spending.
I think that anyone who cares about the north-east is likely to feel a sense of anger about the fact that it has, inarguably, suffered in certain concrete statistical ways in the post-Thatcher period. Nitpicking about the finer points of the Detroit analogy seems to me pretty foolhardy in light of the essential connection between working-class Western cities that have been continually passed over in the race to liberate the market and bolster the wealth of the super-rich in the last three decades. (Moreover, looked at another way, as someone pointed out on Facebook, isn't being compared to Detroit - cradle of Motown, Eminem, MC5, and Iggy Pop - quite a bit better than being compared to Croydon?)
I have sympathy with some of the defensive reactions to the Guardian piece. Perhaps there's always something slightly questionable about being told by an outsider that the place you live might have problems, and its a natural human reaction to respond to such claims with proclamations of local pride and useful additions to the discussion that try to provide examples of north-eastern resilience and ingenuity in the face of social and economic marginalisation.
But I think a better way to react to the article than trumpeting local success stories and worrying hysterically about how negative PR might deter capitalist investment (which I'm going to go out on a limb here by suggesting might not necessarily be a plausible or even a worthwhile solution to the problems faced by the vast majority of north-easterners), is to use the example of the way the region has been shafted by the London-based institutions of the English Establishment over the last few years as fuel for political anger and constructive determination to change things. The former ultimately plays into the hands of the Tories, while the latter offers the hope of something much more valuable.
There are way more than 100 reasons why it's great up north, but right now offering a coherent, organised alternative to the south-east and its capitalist mega-city is not one of them.
It could be.
LONDON RADICAL BOOK FAIR, 2014 [ 08-May-14 11:40am ]This Saturday!
Myself and the incomparable Tamar Shlaim will be hosting the Zero stall 10-5.
Blog here. Come doon.
29-Apr-14
Myself and the incomparable Tamar Shlaim will be hosting the Zero stall 10-5.
Blog here. Come doon.
CREATIVE BLOG PROCESS TOUR [ 29-Apr-14 6:12pm ]
I'm not quite sure of the of the origins of this series, but I was flattered to be asked to contribute by esteemed Manchester blogger and dapper man-about-town Greg Thorpe, by way of Emma Jane Unsworth I think (and also somehow Zoe Lambert, who've I've never met but who seems like a very nice lass judging by the writing on her blog).
Greg's answers are here. My nominees are sensational cultural critic/fiction writer Rhian E. Jones and an as yet uncomfirmed international celebrity chef.
What am I working on?
At the moment I'm waiting for a couple of books to come out, and tying together some other ideas in the hope that they'll coalesce into a new project. There's an essay for Glasgow quarterly The Drouth about the Anglo-Scottish borders which will hopefully come out around the time of the independence referendum: a Yes vote is looking increasingly likely so I think we have to start thinking seriously now about what will happen to the North of England after Scottish secession. Aside from another, more academic essay about Ezra Pound's late poetry, I'm trying to work out how to corral my willfully disparate output into a single book about something or other. I've done two short-ish books now so something a bit bigger would be good. The poetry is ongoing too, and sporadic, as poetry tends to be - the latest accretion is here.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Following on from the last question, I think one of my biggest preoccupations is trying to work out what genre is best for saying the things that need to be said at this moment in time. I think it's quite a strange period for art in general and countercultural art in particular - lots of the old forms and genres are a bit lost, a bit enervated, and we're awaiting some sort of social development that will re-organise culture in a way that will give a bit more shape to the way we experience art collectively. At the moment the culturescape is a kind of Darwinian sludge pit, with lots of competing individuals and not much agreement about the underlying point of it all. I think that both the big strength and the big weakness of my writing is that it's not yet quite committed to one genre, but hopefully interesting because it's trying to think about how you might create a new genre that's responsive to the spirit of the age and anticipatory about the big societal bang - whatever it may be - that's just around the corner. Maybe something like lyric criticism or lyric non-fiction would be a good term for it. And I think with poetry, similarly: lyric realism or something like that.
Why do I write what I do?
Look, I'm just doing what I'm doing do and if anyone else likes it ... Only joking. I'm trying to say a handful of things that I think are important - I don't really have a problem with that fundamental bedrock. It's more the stuff about genre and form and positioning, and of course trying to persuade people to publish that's the hard part.
How does my writing process work?
I don't really have a set method, partly because, like most people, I live and work pretty precariously with very little routine or long-term job security. When I get a book project to work on it's quite liberating, and I try to work for five hours a day, morning to afternoon, five days a week, until the book's done, if I can. More than that and your concentration starts to slip. I tend to write in short, closely worked-on chunks of 500-700 words at a time and keep the editing at the end to a minimum. Poetry is obviously very different - short bursts followed by continual revisions, sometimes over many years, mainly tied up with the issues of publication and cultural positioning outlined above.
17-Apr-14
Greg's answers are here. My nominees are sensational cultural critic/fiction writer Rhian E. Jones and an as yet uncomfirmed international celebrity chef.
What am I working on?
At the moment I'm waiting for a couple of books to come out, and tying together some other ideas in the hope that they'll coalesce into a new project. There's an essay for Glasgow quarterly The Drouth about the Anglo-Scottish borders which will hopefully come out around the time of the independence referendum: a Yes vote is looking increasingly likely so I think we have to start thinking seriously now about what will happen to the North of England after Scottish secession. Aside from another, more academic essay about Ezra Pound's late poetry, I'm trying to work out how to corral my willfully disparate output into a single book about something or other. I've done two short-ish books now so something a bit bigger would be good. The poetry is ongoing too, and sporadic, as poetry tends to be - the latest accretion is here.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Following on from the last question, I think one of my biggest preoccupations is trying to work out what genre is best for saying the things that need to be said at this moment in time. I think it's quite a strange period for art in general and countercultural art in particular - lots of the old forms and genres are a bit lost, a bit enervated, and we're awaiting some sort of social development that will re-organise culture in a way that will give a bit more shape to the way we experience art collectively. At the moment the culturescape is a kind of Darwinian sludge pit, with lots of competing individuals and not much agreement about the underlying point of it all. I think that both the big strength and the big weakness of my writing is that it's not yet quite committed to one genre, but hopefully interesting because it's trying to think about how you might create a new genre that's responsive to the spirit of the age and anticipatory about the big societal bang - whatever it may be - that's just around the corner. Maybe something like lyric criticism or lyric non-fiction would be a good term for it. And I think with poetry, similarly: lyric realism or something like that.
Why do I write what I do?
Look, I'm just doing what I'm doing do and if anyone else likes it ... Only joking. I'm trying to say a handful of things that I think are important - I don't really have a problem with that fundamental bedrock. It's more the stuff about genre and form and positioning, and of course trying to persuade people to publish that's the hard part.
How does my writing process work?
I don't really have a set method, partly because, like most people, I live and work pretty precariously with very little routine or long-term job security. When I get a book project to work on it's quite liberating, and I try to work for five hours a day, morning to afternoon, five days a week, until the book's done, if I can. More than that and your concentration starts to slip. I tend to write in short, closely worked-on chunks of 500-700 words at a time and keep the editing at the end to a minimum. Poetry is obviously very different - short bursts followed by continual revisions, sometimes over many years, mainly tied up with the issues of publication and cultural positioning outlined above.
FREUD, CHRIST, MARX & THE BROTHERS GALLAGHER: A 300-WORD PRAYER [ 17-Apr-14 1:30pm ]With Easter approaching, here's a short, obliquely religious reading of Live Forever by Oasis (pruned and abstracted, as you might imagine, from the 33 1/3 book).
Whatever else Oasis were, there is no doubt that they embodied, in their early days, a kind of religious fervour, channelling a quasi-spiritual urge Sigmund Freud once characterised as oceanic consciousness (a "feeling … of being indissolubly bound up with the whole of the world outside of oneself"). Oasis's great achievement was to advocate a spiritualised form of collectivism in a neoliberal society where such practices had been outlawed. Just ten years after the Miners' Strike, Definitely Maybe suggested that maybe, just maybe, the spiritual core of working-class identity had not been purged completely by Thatcher and her radically individualist regime, that solidarity and towering hope could be put back at the centre of British pop culture by a heroic project of melodic forcefulness and blind belief. The tragedy, of course, was that Oasis quickly became paid-up members of the Thatcherite music industry establishment they had once reviled. But this makes their original mission statements all the more poignant - indeed, sometimes unbearably so.
Live Forever condensed Oasis's radical working-class spiritualism into a raggedly glorious pop song about eternal life built around one of the most affecting lyrics in pop history: "maybe you're the same as me / we see things they'll never see / you and I are gonna live forever". Buried in this fragment is a kind of Christian Marxism - it is easier, after all, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But perhaps more important than Live Forever's impassioned belligerence is its belief in a visionary togetherness that can unite people when they realise, in a moment of leaping bewilderment, that they are unequivocally the same as each other. This special kind of grace has many epithets - comradeship, friendship, solidarity, brotherhood - but perhaps its most familiar name for religious believers and humanists alike is love.
15-Apr-14
Whatever else Oasis were, there is no doubt that they embodied, in their early days, a kind of religious fervour, channelling a quasi-spiritual urge Sigmund Freud once characterised as oceanic consciousness (a "feeling … of being indissolubly bound up with the whole of the world outside of oneself"). Oasis's great achievement was to advocate a spiritualised form of collectivism in a neoliberal society where such practices had been outlawed. Just ten years after the Miners' Strike, Definitely Maybe suggested that maybe, just maybe, the spiritual core of working-class identity had not been purged completely by Thatcher and her radically individualist regime, that solidarity and towering hope could be put back at the centre of British pop culture by a heroic project of melodic forcefulness and blind belief. The tragedy, of course, was that Oasis quickly became paid-up members of the Thatcherite music industry establishment they had once reviled. But this makes their original mission statements all the more poignant - indeed, sometimes unbearably so.
Live Forever condensed Oasis's radical working-class spiritualism into a raggedly glorious pop song about eternal life built around one of the most affecting lyrics in pop history: "maybe you're the same as me / we see things they'll never see / you and I are gonna live forever". Buried in this fragment is a kind of Christian Marxism - it is easier, after all, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But perhaps more important than Live Forever's impassioned belligerence is its belief in a visionary togetherness that can unite people when they realise, in a moment of leaping bewilderment, that they are unequivocally the same as each other. This special kind of grace has many epithets - comradeship, friendship, solidarity, brotherhood - but perhaps its most familiar name for religious believers and humanists alike is love.
DEFINITELY MAYBE 33 1/3 [ 15-Apr-14 11:54am ]Right folks, the campaign trail for this here Oasis book is starting to stammer into life, just as the 20th anniversary season approaches a point of scarcely creditable hysteria.
Apparently some North American readers are beginning to receive copies. Here's one pictured with a first edition of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov (thanks to the estimable David Soud for this):
(By the way, this is uncannily apt, as there's a quotation from the Brothers K on my epigraph page - if that seems incongruous, well, it's not, and I will tell you for why if you ask me.)
The media campaign is also up on the rails ...
Here's a comment piece published in the Guardian this weekend, which gives a hyper-condensed summary of the book's argument.
Meanwhile, a handful of speaking events have been scheduled, with more to follow. At the moment these are:
26 June, 2014, Rough Trade East, Brick Lane, London. Q&A with fellow 33 1/3 authors Pete Astor (Richard Hell's Blank Generation) and Darran Anderson (Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson).
14-17 August, 2014, Green Man Festival, Glanusk, Wales. Q&A with Agata Pyzik (author of the excellent Poor But Sexy). Details tbc.
1 October, 2014 (exact date tbc), Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London. Legacy of Britpop panel discussion featuring Owen Hatherley (author of Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp) and Rhian E. Jones (author of Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender).
More details as and when they come in. And if you'd like a review copy, or want to open high-level negotiations for an event/reading, do get in touch via the email address on the sidebar.
02-Apr-14
Apparently some North American readers are beginning to receive copies. Here's one pictured with a first edition of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov (thanks to the estimable David Soud for this):
(By the way, this is uncannily apt, as there's a quotation from the Brothers K on my epigraph page - if that seems incongruous, well, it's not, and I will tell you for why if you ask me.)
The media campaign is also up on the rails ...
Here's a comment piece published in the Guardian this weekend, which gives a hyper-condensed summary of the book's argument.
Meanwhile, a handful of speaking events have been scheduled, with more to follow. At the moment these are:
26 June, 2014, Rough Trade East, Brick Lane, London. Q&A with fellow 33 1/3 authors Pete Astor (Richard Hell's Blank Generation) and Darran Anderson (Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson).
14-17 August, 2014, Green Man Festival, Glanusk, Wales. Q&A with Agata Pyzik (author of the excellent Poor But Sexy). Details tbc.
1 October, 2014 (exact date tbc), Foyles, Charing Cross Road, London. Legacy of Britpop panel discussion featuring Owen Hatherley (author of Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp) and Rhian E. Jones (author of Clampdown: Pop-cultural Wars on Class and Gender).
More details as and when they come in. And if you'd like a review copy, or want to open high-level negotiations for an event/reading, do get in touch via the email address on the sidebar.
SENSE AND SECTIONALITY [ 02-Apr-14 9:56am ]Reading Sterne's Sentimental Journey, I'm struck by how much its ethical guidebook for the haute bourgeoisie resembles our own RaceSexualityGender doxa. In both cases, morality is abstracted - and pseudo-systematised - through a series of jargon terms for the initiated. Whereas we have PoC, intersectionality, trigger warning, mansplaining, brocialism, the eighteenth century had sentiment, sensibility, nature, decorum, sympathy, etc.
In both cases, ethics becomes a kind of manneristic exercise to be perfected if one is to acquire maturity and attain the degree of cultivation required for social advancement (in the eighteenth century - the church, the court, the judiciary, the army; in our own time - academia, politics, the commentariat, and indeed any profession - ie. the vast majority - in which social liberalism is preached while the most punitive form of neoliberal economics is practiced).
The weakness of both systems is their largely performative aspect - using the appropriate terminology and adopting the correct standpoint today with regard to, say, sexuality, is precisely equivalent to eighteenth-century displays of sensibility (the gentleman doffing his cap or handing the young lady his handkerchief at exactly the right moment). The point is that these are what we might call courtly gestures - largely superficial acts of performance that attract applause and approbation in the short term and in the social foreground but do not extend substantially into the realm of actual social organisation. Indeed, in most cases, the former actively stands in for the latter.
SUBLIMATION OF THE SOAR PT.3 [ 23-Mar-14 9:58pm ]Dream swelling soar here
HOW HAS CAPITALISM GOT AWAY WITH THE FINANCIAL CRISIS, AND WHY IS POLITICS SCARED OF IDEAS? [ 19-Mar-14 2:41pm ]Bit of a late one this, but if you're in central London tonight you could do a lot worse than come along to this event, which I'm speaking at alongside Mark Fisher, Rhian E. Jones, Dan Taylor, and Tariq Goddard.
Event info: Wednesday 19th March, 6.30pm - 8.30pm, Committee Room 8, House of Commons
27-Feb-14
Event info: Wednesday 19th March, 6.30pm - 8.30pm, Committee Room 8, House of Commons
RUINED MILLS OF LEEK, A BALLAD [ 27-Feb-14 1:05pm ]We drove by the ruined mills of Leek
In the dead time of the year
When the land had become like a faded song
We could no longer hear.
Down where the mouldering sandstone world
Of the Potteries blends with the weeds,
Where the warehouses echo with wandering winds
And the loneliness gathers in beads,
Where the powerful cling to their juggernaut arks
And the cities are sunken and bare,
I was someone who failed like a tumbling tower
On the edge of a kingdom of air.
I was someone who failed like a light going out
In a dream on the edge of sight
Because some men are made for the palace of bliss
And some men are made for the night.
We drove by the ruined mills of Leek
In the last days of the year
And the land was as quiet as a faded song
We could no longer hear.
MORE SUBLIMATION OF THE SOAR [ 03-Feb-14 7:10pm ]Now this is what I mean when I get steamy about 2010s pop ...
Man called Futurebound ffs.
23-Jan-14
Man called Futurebound ffs.
INTERSECTIONALITY OF THE GUT [ 23-Jan-14 7:47pm ]There's been a lot of debate about intersectionality recently. But all too often, it seems to me, what's being termed intersectionality is little more than a classic ascetic-deconstructive manoeuvre, a way of saying: okay, your argument is all very well and good, but you haven't given sufficient attention to x, and here's a more sophisticated, more rigorous turn of the screw, and another, and so on ad infinitum. Some might view this positively, as dialectical ratiocination, or simply a necessary way of conducting intelligent debate. But right now, in the current moment, in the context of the omnishambles that is the contemporary left, I think these sorts of movements are invariably negative and paralysing. What is more (and I think this is partly why it took me so long to understand what intersectionality actually is), what's being left out a lot of the time is the "inter" part of the formulation. Invocations of the intersectional credo are most often made along the lines of emphasising - either explicitly, or implicitly through the virulence of their expression - the interests of a single section, a single ideological category. Debate then gets swallowed up by warring capitalised mega-interests - Anti-Racism, Anti-Sexism, Anti-Homophobia, and so on - which of course very few people in their right minds (on the left at least) would ever really consciously oppose, but which have a tendency to be deployed in the context of frequently absurdist melodramas of debate in which people who are quite obviously in general agreement become violently opposed to each other on grounds of super-subtle sectional difference.
How, then, can intersectionality be used more positively? I think that, when we look at something like the above picture, we all know instinctively, and with a visceral certainty that relegates debate to the level of relative meaninglessness. Yes, the picture tells us, this person is undoubtedly racist. But she is also anti-feminist, pro-capitalist, and (literally) perched on the pinnacle of a system in which the labour of millions is used to furnish the airbrushed propaganda of new neoliberal Tsars and Tsarinas who differ from their pre-twentieth century predecessors only in a smattering of infinitesimal ways. The really effective response to this picture should not be banal cries of racism of the kind that we hear from the liberal press (and which Zhukova can try to refute on the grounds that she, as a bien pensant social-liberal-of-sorts, is interested in sponsoring "anti-racist" artworks). Rather, horrors like this should provoke the counterposition of a holistic, socialist, ethical critique in which anti-racism scarcely has to be invoked because it is so obviously an integral part of a wider anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical critique. Real intersectionality must mean the integration of sectional interests until they need to be emphasised only in rare instances, and in a spirit of solidarity and empathy. If we can't grasp this and act on it before getting sidetracked into endless deconstructive caveatising, then the left really is doomed to repeat the failures of last half-century, if it even makes it through the next decade.
POSTMODERNIST REDUX [ 16-Jan-14 10:05pm ]Further to this debate about retromania (see below), there's a very interesting article by James Parker and Nicholas Croggon over at Tiny Mix Tapes, which widens the discussion into an attack on contemporary music crit as a whole.
There's a lot of very tasty stuff there, and the article is strongest I think in pointing to a sort of endemic, half-unconscious historicism right across the board in music writing from Rolling Stone to The Wire.
However, I don't quite get the conclusion:
So, the lesson of Cage, Eno, and now vaporwave, Belbury Poly, and even (if read critically) Daft Punk is that history need not be conceived of as an endless hurtling into the future. Indeed, the important thing about these musics is that they not only concern history, but assume a critical position in relation to it — they both critique certain conceptions of history and offer new ones.
Firstly, there's the obvious fact that a group like Belbury Poly is surely the epitome of retromania in its hauntological mode (and I don't buy the argument in the piece that it "makes us question our sense of nostalgia" - maybe it can, but to do so you have to run it pretty hard against itself, because I reckon most people get off on the nostalgia way more than they enjoy the implicit critique).
Also, and relatedly, I'm not sure from these examples (and from the examples of Malevich and Duchamp) what is being held up as a more positive kind of art. In fact, it seems to me - and the authors' use of the word "timeless" is a tell-tale sign here - that what is being avowed is essentially a very specific mid-twentieth century lineage of postmodernist art, the high-art canon of the last few decades of post-modern, post-ideological neoliberal orthodoxy if you like. "Black Square" and 4'33" were indeed modernistic steps forward of a kind, but they were also endpoints for modernism itself, transition works that helped to usher in the postmodern period (of which "retromania" is merely a latter-day extenuation).
As such, and taken together with the argument against time viewed as an "endless hurtling into the future", I don't really see that anything is ultimately said in the article beyond a restatement of the end of history ethos that the retromania argument takes as a starting point of its diagnosis.
What seems to be being rejected is the idea that art/music can make active, purposive social interventions that impinge upon democratic forward-movements, and I'm afraid we've had more than enough of that sort of thing for way too long now.
14-Jan-14
There's a lot of very tasty stuff there, and the article is strongest I think in pointing to a sort of endemic, half-unconscious historicism right across the board in music writing from Rolling Stone to The Wire.
However, I don't quite get the conclusion:
So, the lesson of Cage, Eno, and now vaporwave, Belbury Poly, and even (if read critically) Daft Punk is that history need not be conceived of as an endless hurtling into the future. Indeed, the important thing about these musics is that they not only concern history, but assume a critical position in relation to it — they both critique certain conceptions of history and offer new ones.
Firstly, there's the obvious fact that a group like Belbury Poly is surely the epitome of retromania in its hauntological mode (and I don't buy the argument in the piece that it "makes us question our sense of nostalgia" - maybe it can, but to do so you have to run it pretty hard against itself, because I reckon most people get off on the nostalgia way more than they enjoy the implicit critique).
Also, and relatedly, I'm not sure from these examples (and from the examples of Malevich and Duchamp) what is being held up as a more positive kind of art. In fact, it seems to me - and the authors' use of the word "timeless" is a tell-tale sign here - that what is being avowed is essentially a very specific mid-twentieth century lineage of postmodernist art, the high-art canon of the last few decades of post-modern, post-ideological neoliberal orthodoxy if you like. "Black Square" and 4'33" were indeed modernistic steps forward of a kind, but they were also endpoints for modernism itself, transition works that helped to usher in the postmodern period (of which "retromania" is merely a latter-day extenuation).
As such, and taken together with the argument against time viewed as an "endless hurtling into the future", I don't really see that anything is ultimately said in the article beyond a restatement of the end of history ethos that the retromania argument takes as a starting point of its diagnosis.
What seems to be being rejected is the idea that art/music can make active, purposive social interventions that impinge upon democratic forward-movements, and I'm afraid we've had more than enough of that sort of thing for way too long now.
THE SUBLIMATION OF THE SOAR [ 14-Jan-14 2:17pm ]
I was geet pleased to write the first Quietus Essay. File under: Strains of Tentative Futurism in 2010s Pop!
Hopefully there's more good stuff to come in this new series.
2013 POP [ 31-Dec-13 11:47am ]This was the best year for the pop single I can remember:
10. Sky Ferreira, "You're Not the One"
9. Miley Cyrus, "We Can't Stop"
8. Lana Del Rey, "Summertime Sadness" (Cedric Gervais Remix)
7. Pusha T, "Numbers on the Board"
6. Taylor Swift, "I Knew You Were Trouble"
5. Naughty Boy, "La La La"
4. Duke Dumont feat A*M*E, "Need You (100%)"
3. Rizzle Kicks, "Lost Generation"
2. Lorde, "Royals"
1. Chvrches, "Gun"
Trendier addenda:
10. Sky Ferreira, "You're Not the One"
9. Miley Cyrus, "We Can't Stop"
8. Lana Del Rey, "Summertime Sadness" (Cedric Gervais Remix)
7. Pusha T, "Numbers on the Board"
6. Taylor Swift, "I Knew You Were Trouble"
5. Naughty Boy, "La La La"
4. Duke Dumont feat A*M*E, "Need You (100%)"
3. Rizzle Kicks, "Lost Generation"
2. Lorde, "Royals"
1. Chvrches, "Gun"
Trendier addenda:
INTROS [ 29-Dec-13 11:13am ]I'm going to nominate some categories (partly picking up on stuff already thrown up on the decade blogs and elsewhere):
THE SPOKEN WORD RALLYING CRY
THE ANOMALOUSLY GOOD DIAMOND-IN-THE-ROUGH FRAGMENT
THE STATEMENT-RIFF
THE SEPARATE MINI-SONG
THE CORRECT USE OF THE BLUES JAM (AS OPPOSED TO STICKING IT IN THE MIDDLE/END OF THE TRACK)
THE GARAGE BAND UNCOVERS PRIMITIVIST MAGIC
THE INDISPUTABLE
(Carl has already nabbed it, but great minds etc ...)
THE SPOKEN WORD RALLYING CRY
THE ANOMALOUSLY GOOD DIAMOND-IN-THE-ROUGH FRAGMENT
THE STATEMENT-RIFF
THE SEPARATE MINI-SONG
THE CORRECT USE OF THE BLUES JAM (AS OPPOSED TO STICKING IT IN THE MIDDLE/END OF THE TRACK)
THE GARAGE BAND UNCOVERS PRIMITIVIST MAGIC
THE INDISPUTABLE
(Carl has already nabbed it, but great minds etc ...)
NOTES ON ITV'S LUCAN [ 12-Dec-13 2:49pm ]Caught the first episode of this last night. So far it's fine social-realist TV drama in the tradition of Our Friends in the North, Tinker Tailor, Red Riding, etc, and certainly better than anything the Beeb have done this year I reckon. (Definitely better than last year's shambolic effort in this regard, anyway.)
There's quite an interesting political thread running through it, too. Christopher Eccleston is deliciously demonic as gambling club owner John Aspinall. An unusual amount of script space is given over to Aspinall's Randian dialogues full of references to Alpha Males, biological determinism, the survival of the fittest, the importance of accepting the growth of an inferior underclass, and all that shite. He's basically a walking Adam Curtis theory, a right-wing crank grumbling about the power of "the Miners" in social-democratic post-war Britain, a sinister Blimp full of embittered determination to reassert what he calls the "natural order". Of course, the character is all the more shady because his views will become depressingly mainstream some ten years after the early-seventies moment that provides the backdrop to Lucan's narrative.
Another interesting thing is the way this class narrative is synthesised with a powerful feminist argument. Egged on by Aspinall's reactionary Alpha Male spiel, Lord Lucan starts to intimidate his wife Veronica - mentally and physically - in an attempt to get her committed so he can win custody of his children. Fortunately, this is the progressive early seventies rather than the Downtonite 1920s, so the courts decide in favour of the independent, sound-of-mind woman against the imperious, bullying aristo. The tragedy is that the working-class nanny who has supported Veronica in the run-up to the trial is bludgeoned to death by a crazed Lucan at the end of the first episode.
The symbolism here - of a brutal, quasi-Darwinian patriarchy reasserting its authority after a period of "effeminate" egalitarianism - is not difficult to grasp. The unheimlich contemporary relevance - bearing in mind certain recent uber-Darwinian pronouncements of the British Conservative Party - is also striking.
And then you realise who Aspinall's step-nephew is:
There can be no more denying it ...
The conspiracy theory is the true realist art form of the twenty-first century.
There's quite an interesting political thread running through it, too. Christopher Eccleston is deliciously demonic as gambling club owner John Aspinall. An unusual amount of script space is given over to Aspinall's Randian dialogues full of references to Alpha Males, biological determinism, the survival of the fittest, the importance of accepting the growth of an inferior underclass, and all that shite. He's basically a walking Adam Curtis theory, a right-wing crank grumbling about the power of "the Miners" in social-democratic post-war Britain, a sinister Blimp full of embittered determination to reassert what he calls the "natural order". Of course, the character is all the more shady because his views will become depressingly mainstream some ten years after the early-seventies moment that provides the backdrop to Lucan's narrative.
Another interesting thing is the way this class narrative is synthesised with a powerful feminist argument. Egged on by Aspinall's reactionary Alpha Male spiel, Lord Lucan starts to intimidate his wife Veronica - mentally and physically - in an attempt to get her committed so he can win custody of his children. Fortunately, this is the progressive early seventies rather than the Downtonite 1920s, so the courts decide in favour of the independent, sound-of-mind woman against the imperious, bullying aristo. The tragedy is that the working-class nanny who has supported Veronica in the run-up to the trial is bludgeoned to death by a crazed Lucan at the end of the first episode.
The symbolism here - of a brutal, quasi-Darwinian patriarchy reasserting its authority after a period of "effeminate" egalitarianism - is not difficult to grasp. The unheimlich contemporary relevance - bearing in mind certain recent uber-Darwinian pronouncements of the British Conservative Party - is also striking.
And then you realise who Aspinall's step-nephew is:
There can be no more denying it ...
The conspiracy theory is the true realist art form of the twenty-first century.
Musings of a socialist Japanologist [ 31-Dec-13 5:33pm ]
2013 in Music - Pt. 2 [ 31-Dec-13 5:33pm ]Pt. 2 We Going Tech
Right at the tail end of 2012, a thread was started on the music forum I frequent, dissensus, calling for a discussion on "Shuffling / House Music / Cutting Shapes", referring to the shuffling/shape shifting/cutting shapes dance style which had taken the capital by storm - essentially a revamped charleston, or a take on the kind of fancy foot-work that proper dancers have been doing to house music since it began - and the deep tech house music pushed by DJs like Mark Radford and Majesty which these shufflers were dancing to.
I clocked the thread, watched a few of the videos, listened to a few of the tracks, thought the dance was good fun and the music alright but a bit pedestrian, and then basically didn't give it any serious thought for the next half year. Because why would I need to when jackin existed and it was a gift from the EDM gods, a music that could have been custom made for me considering how exactly it hit all my raving-erogenous zones, with a thriving club scene and massive tunes coming out faster than I could keep track of?
Yet as the summer wore on and I found myself having to search harder and harder for less and less jackin trax, I began looking elsewhere for tunes to fill my sets and I thought I'd give "shuffle house", as I thought it was called (it is not, it's called deep tech), another look. Credit where credit is due, "give another look" meant "give another look through the dissensus thread", and it's simply the case that without that thread, and without the advocacy of posters like Continuum and Trilliam in particular, I would have never clocked the sound (clocked it from Tokyo? are u mud??), I would have never clocked the big tunes, and the second half of 2013 might have been spent in total musical/existential crisis mode, rather than gleefully exploring a whole new genre's worth of beats and bass and #danger.
One of the first deep tech tunes I "got". Total scene anthem, crowds singing all the words sort of flex. Wicked vocal and lovely rolling bassline, very easy to see how this fits into a UK tradition of tuneful bass bangers.
Whereas with jackin I was hooked at the first donk, with deep tech it took me half a year to get from "I don't like it", to "I don't really like it, but some of the tunes are alright for warming up jackin with", to "I don't really like most of it, but some of the tunes are big, still", to "I like it, but it's not very original" to finally just admitting "fuck it, I really like it".
If that sounds like a lot of umming and erring over a few tunes, then I'll justify my caution by saying that, deep and tech house has been, in a very tangible way, ruining my nights out in London for the last 2 years. This is not some inverse hipster snobbery about the inherent superiority of British urban dance musics compared to european house music (though duuuuuh, that music sucks and our music is great), but I mean I have been to countless club nights across the capital where the DJ I liked has stopped playing, and the next DJ would come on and start playing some fucking boring standard house music, and on a visceral level I would stop having fun, would no longer want to dance, would want to go home.
(I remember one party in particular where Marcus Nasty had been playing a jackin set, smashing up di place, me and my mates feeling jolly with a couple of pints and a spliff in us and having a great time. The next DJ comes on, we're not really paying attention, he wheels a track, we sit up to take notice, the track drops, it's some tedious deep house bullshit, my mate Becky says "this sounds like... HOUSE music!" and we down our pints and leave...)
Another one of the first tunes I was feeling. Though it's difficult to identify a single sonic innovation there is a certain swagger and menace to the track that has been absent from house music for a long time now. Spooky ghost noises, sleazy/chugging bassline, an almost breaks-y shuffle and complexity to the rhythm section, and a fuck off massive second drop all speak of its UK origins.
It took me half a year to realise that deep tech is not simply deep or tech house, although the ridiculousness of that sentence does belie the slight undead quality to UK rave music as we go full circle on the 25th anniversary of acid house...
Like Lorenzo with jackin, the birth of London deep tech can almost be entirely attributed to one person - Mark Radford. Whereas Lorenzo's path to jackin involved slowing down a UK genre - bassline - to house tempo, Radford's "innovation" such that it was one, was to see the UK tuffness immanent in the best of Euro and US deep and tech house, but crowded out by the filler:
"I'd go to raves and hear 3 hours worth of music, and out of them 3 hours of music there might have been 3 tunes that I thought "if someone put a set together, of all that sort of music, they're gonna kill it", I did, I killed it!"
Radford's own story is the perfect example of the hardcore continuum theory - which states a genealogical and scenelogical affinity that runs through nearly every major UK underground dance music from the time of acid house through to the present day, and is proof positive that this deep tech stuff fits into that lineage.
"I've been through every genre of what you could possibly say is the London dance scene. Started off back in the early days with, like, the acid house raves, then I got into jungle, drum & bass, then moved on to garage when I felt that drum & bass had lost a lot of its soul, then the same thing happened with garage, so I moved onto soulful house and then where I am now, with like the deep tech stuff.
In the same video he talks about a marriage of "mad noises" and "groove" that is more or less the perfect summary of what it is that holds genres as disperate as hardcore, jungle, garage, UK funky, bassline, jackin and deep tech together.
Interestingly, there are more or less three separate groups of producers who all come to deep tech from very different backgrounds, but all contribute to it being more that just deep house in very different ways:
1. Old Dons
One of the most interesting thing about deep tech is the prevalence of old dons, guys who've been through every hardcore genre like Mark Radford, and many more who had their moment many years back, and have found deep tech the perfect forum for their comebacks. The list is kind of astounding, from garage you have Ed Case and Sticky and from jungle you have Bizzy B(!?!!) Best of the lot however are Martin Ikin, a G making hardcore back in 92, and darkside, breakstep/dubstep pinoeer Darqwun/Oris Jay making tunes under the name of RS4.
Marin Ikin's deep tech sound can be heard best on the magnificent, Nightmares On Wax sampling Nothing To Fear:
Old hardcore vocal samples, deep, subbass heavy rolling jackin basslines, a bleeps and bloops that flicker like vague memories of the entire history of UK dance music - watch for the Soft Cell - Tainted Love bleeps at the drop. A masterful blend of the bouncing, raw-danceability of deep house music, with the sonic debris of UK rave music, this was one of my tracks of the year, and one of the tracks which taught me how to stop worrying and love deep tech.
Even better is RS4, which is no surprise considering just how sick Darqwun was back in the day (Said the Spider, top dubstep tracks), but what is somewhat surprising is that a figure so foundational in early dubstep, but only really remembered among the DJs he influenced and not the massive at large, managed to reinvent himself to be so thoroughly relevant in 2013, using his years of production practice to show up all the young upstarts.
Essentially every track track he's released or previewed on his soundcloud has been pure fire, with killer remixes of Walk On By and L.F.O but for my money, the best of them are his remixes of Soulstar's Locked On You and Sia's Little Man.
(This version unfortunenly cuts out before the wicked second drop, but you can hear a longer version here for now from about 7:30 into this mix - http://podcast.dgen.net/rinsefm/podcast/MarkRadford071213.mp3)
If Martin Ikin's tracks meet somewhere between house and hardcore, Locked On You strips the house elements down to a mere skeletal structure, 4x4 scaffolding to build his monster darkcore riddim. For Locked On You sounds like nothing more than that moment around 93 when hardcore turned to the darkside, the drugs stopped working and euphoria quickly turned to its opposite. Panic attack synth stabs, an undulating, slimy bass lines, militaristic rolling snare drums and haunting synth strings which sound like they're about to snap all made this one of the spookiest tracks of the year, and one of the best.
Equally sick is the "monster remix" of Little Man, a classic garage vocal rerubbed on pure darkside 2013/2014 flex.
This one's a proper scene anthem and got wheeled twice - once for each drop - when it got dropped at Scala on Boxing Day. Though it might sound restrained compared to the exuberance of the original, it throbs with a compacted energy, like jungle slowed way way down, and grows on you slowly. By the time the swamp monster squelches come in, there's not a hand in the rave not bussin gun fingers.
2. The Bandwagon
Another major source of deep tech producers comes not from such old veterens, but producers from recently extant scenes which have been loosing their zeitgeist luster - grime and funky primarily, but more recently from bassline and jackin too.
Of the grime guys, it's Black Ops' Charmzy who's been making the biggest moves for me with his Shape Shifting EP, specifically the icey cold Dirty Disco:
http://www.beatport.com/track/dirty-disco-original-mix/4541389
The biggest contingent however come from funky, who's death was intimately tied up with deep tech's rise, and who can be said to have bequeathed this new scene not just a large number of DJs, producers and MCs, but also much of its clubbing infrastructure, and perhaps the entirety of its audience.
Carnao Beats was one of the earliest defectors, having been edging his funky towards a deeper sound as early as 2011 with his VERY cleverly named Deep-ception EP http://www.beatport.com/track/infected-by-house-original-mix/206353/, before switching decisively to the deep tech sound in 2012. With a number of releases out on Audio Rehab, half of his tunes being scene anthems, and being a mainstay at deep tech raves from London to Leicester, Carnao represents one of those figures who was a bit tangental in one scene - funky - but has become central to another.
His sound is defined by mental, polyrhythmic, almost acid house basslines, with a distinctively 80s, electro vibe to his drums. His hit rate is high, but my favorite tracks are the hypnotic, shuffle-tastic, bleepy and bassy H.O.U.S.E
And the recent top-40-hit-by-any-other-name Gone in the Morning, with the ever shape shifting Donao, who's also jumped from funky to deep tech right on schedule
Also from the funky diaspora is Tazer, producer of the house-music-for-people-who-hate-house-music masterpiece, the slow-fast, Notorious BIG sampling Wet Dollars
An absolute anthem in the scene, this got played about 4 or 5 times at each deep tech party I went to in December. It's difficult to pin down just what it is exactly that makes this track go so goddamn hard, but there's some magic in the percussion section for sure, with those memetic ravey woodblock stabs that linger in the body hours after hearing them on a system. One of my favorite tracks of the year, if you don't get this one, then you won't get deep tech.
My favorite crossover artist of the bunch though is Arun Verone, the new deep tech alias for bassline/UK B badman DJ Pantha, coming hot off the heels of his jump to jackin last year, which produced some stone cold bangers:
With his deep tech stuff Arun Verone has brought some of that bassline/jackin rowdiness, and has brought the full force of his knowledge of big, bouncy basslines to bare on the house template, making for a much needed anecdote to the sometimes-too-serious vibe and aesthetic of the deep tech scene.
With only a couple of free downloads and hardly any official releases to his (new) name yet, the best way into Verone's stuff is through his mixes:
And it's a lucky coincidence that he happens to be one of the scene's best DJs, with a proper grimey cutting and chopping, wheelups, fast mixes, constant energy-vibe-hype-flex to his sets. (For what it's worth though, the quality of DJing in deep tech as a whole is infinitely better than in jackin, where apart from Marcus Nasty, there isn't a really top class DJ among them, though the best of their producers, IE Lorenzo, is objectively the greatest UK producer of the last half decade - seriously, name anyone who comes close...)
Vocal hooks a-plenty, wompy, warpy wobblers, sharp plasticy drums and a certain reek of noir/dread that hovers over his sounds like old skunk make his sounds a perfect entry point into deep tech from other UK genres, and give all of his tunes that vital edge.
3. Young Blood
The last major group of artists keeping deep tech gully and UK is the new school of producers for whom deep tech is their first foray into UK rave music, for whom DJs like Mark Radford and Majesty were their path into the music and who come to it, consequentially, unburdened with and largely uninterested in the long history of house music, and questions of how house music 'should sound'.
This perhaps represents the largest group of the three, with many of the artists of Radford's essential-listening Audio Rehab label, seemingly having no name to speak of in any genres before the current deep tech wave.
This group would seem to include massive-in-the-scene names like Playtime Productions:
(check the hip hop meets house in East London vibez on this one, and the wobbles)
And Lance Morgan:
(Absolutely love the noir swagger on this one, perfect music for driving around London at night)
As well as some very recent debuts such as Truce:
And indeed, a whole new Audio Rehab imprint, +Recordings dedicated to highlighting the work of new producers exclusively, starting with the 'ard-as-fuck debut from the Area 8 boys, which sounds, of all things, like Pulse X at house tempo
Cutting Shapes
So, having got over my initial distaste at the name and the music's proximity to deep house - I've never liked a music more that has verged on music I dislike so much - I think the quality of music speaks for itself. If you're not listening to deep tech, then you're missing out on a lot of the best music in the UK at the moment, and that's never a good idea.
Getting into the music slowly over the year, as a DJ, miles removed in Japan, I was lucky enough to experience it in its proper context, in a rave, when I was back in the UK over Christmas. First, DJing it out at 02:31 in an absolutely mental night which started when my plane got in from Tokyo around 4 in the afternoon, getting a lift from Heathrow back home from #Mum (big up!), shaving, showering, burning my CDs/USBs, wistfully looking at my bed and thinking it looked GREAT, then grabbing my 17 year old brother, rushing to Euston and grabbing the 9:05 to Birmingham where it just so happened that a group of 4 girls - deep tech ravers - were VERY publicly taking balloons, talking about Arun Verone and Lance Morgan, and running house which sounded EXTRA deep on their tinny mobile phone speakers, before getting into Birmingham New Street, hitting the Rainbow, and playing the 12-1 warm up slot with a set of 90% deep tech to a crowd of about 5-600 people and absolutely tearing the place down if I do say so myself, which, you know, I do.
My other experiences were at a couple of club nights over Christmas, House Passion at Scala on Boxing Day, and Rhythm N Funk at Dukes the weekend before New Years.
I had been curious to see deep tech music in a rave for a long time, and was interested to see how the club experience of the music that was taking over London compared to 02:31 and the jackin scene in Birmingham. Unfortunately, but not really surprisingly, neither event even came close to the standard vibes of 02:31 on an off week, let along their big blow out, monthly 10:31 specials. But it's not really a fair comparison, because I've never been to any rave ever which is nearly as good as 02:31. If you're into bass music, it's probably the greatest event on the planet right now.
But on their own terms, both House Passion and Rhythm N Funk were good, really damn good in fact, the best party experiences I've had in London for a long long time. Both had sound issues - Scala's a live music venue and it had a live music soundsystem, all the low frequencies were there, but it was not exactly a bodily experience. Rhythm N Funk had a MAJOR problem for half the night, the problem being that the sound man at Duke was a prick and had the limiter set insanely low, so that you really couldn't hear any sub frequencies at all. If by some insane coincidence the sound guy from Duke reads this - fuck u thnx. It got sorted at the end of the night, and was a bit of a lesson in how this music is of course, UK bass music and needs rasclart bass.
Both were very vibezy. The crowd was a bit older than 02:31 (average age, say, 26 as opposed to 21) and blacker (maybe ~60% to 02:31's ~10%). Both had a mixed crowd, mostly quite street, with plenty of those new-school house band wagon not-hipsters-but-still-wearing-Raybans sorts, with a spattering of proper cockneys shouting OI OI and FUCK OOOORRRFFFF at the big drops. Plenty of people on MDMA, but not particularly a communal loved up vibe - more like drug/music induced personal hypnosis. Skunk smoke everywhere. Most importantly, EVERYONE was dancing, shuffling, cutting shapes, going #ham. It was wicked to see, some really great moves, and it looked like it must be loads of fun to be able to do it to the music, which compliments it really well. Actually felt like a bit of a prick for wearing a t-shirt not a shirt, and not being able to shuffle.
Would definitely recommend that anyone in London checks out some of the raves, because to my mind you're unlikely to find better vibes or better music in any other scene in the capital.
Back to the Future
So in short, after a year of being aware of the music, and 6 months of actively attempting to get into I end 2013 and begin 2014 big into deep tech and excited about what the future holds. Which is good, because if I didn't like the stuff I think I'd be in a very bleak place musically right now.
That said, it doesn't move me like jackin at its best did, and there remain legitimate criticisms of the sound, least not the question of its novelty and innovation. For while the questions of "is it really its own sound?" and "Isn't it just deep house music?" have been answered ("yes", "no") the question of "is there anything new here?" is still open.
For all it's many qualities - darkness, toughness, danceability big badbwoy basslines, hip hop vox, diva vox, slinky riddims, fact that it's an actual massive scene people are raving to - there really isn't anything about the sound you can call totally unique to deep tech or totally new. Though there's something future about it in terms of spaceaged sounds, cold minimalism, tech-noises, it's a sort of Robocop-retro futurism, with a massively strong 80s influence running through the sound. This is hardly a bad thing, as it's great to hear those old 80s synths and bleeps and drums brought into a new context, but it does feel like the hardcore continuum going back to its roots rather than opening new horizons of possibility.
We're living in retromania, and the fight for the future remains more important than ever, there is a point where if you don't compromise a bit, you're either going to end up listening to experimental but vibeless wank (see "poststep", or don't), or just not enjoying anything at all.
For me, the fact that dark, trippy rave music is taking over London again - and looks poised to infect the heart of the mainstream like no genre since garage - is reason enough to be hopeful for 2014.
Tokyo, you've got the rhythm in you
Though I've gone on these last two posts about the state of UK rave, the truth is that I spend most of 2013 in Tokyo. It wouldn't be right not to end with a shout out to some of the incredibly talented musicians I've had the privilege to get to know this year.
Pakin - Probably the most important grime MC in East Asia
First up is my mate Pakin (パ禁）which is short for 中途半端 chuuto hanpa 禁止 Kinshi - which means "being halfhearted/half-arsed is forbidden" or "don't fuck about". An old school hip hop head with a massively knowledge of JP-hop hop, he got into grime nearly 10 years ago by reading about Dizzee Rascal in a magazine. One of the hardest working guys I know - in the context of the fickle Tokyo nightlife scene, his event Gum has been running bi-monthly without fail for 5 years and recently had its 30th event - and also one of the safest. I've seen his MC skills grow sharper and sharper in the year I've known him and seen him doing his best to promote an authentic Japanese grime culture, teaching hip hop MCs about wheelups, and encouraging them to pass the mic and spit over DJs grime sets.
His hard work has paid off with a number of collaborations with Birmingham's Dark Elements crew (including the likes of Devilman and Darx), cumulating in him going up to Brum when he was visiting me over the summer and recording this:
Seiho feels rave
Though there are many talented DJs and producers out in Japan, it's often said that the Japanese are better technicians than innovators and not many have a uniquely Japanese sound. I think this is racist as shit - the idea of Asians as hyper rational, lacking soul, orientalist bullshit - even though many Japanese would say the same thing and it is true that many Japanese artists judge their own success via its proximity to a Western source material.
Seiho however is a true original, fusing sugary sweet J-pop influences with rave, trap, footwork, trance, hardcore, and anything bright and euphoric in his own productions, and DJing with a controller and midi keyboard, adding live piano vamps, speeding up and slowing down songs to double or halftime, dressed in mental-stylish-mental combos of colours and patterns while dancing like a maniac and singing along to his own stuff. He's wicked basically.
Part2Style have more dubs than you
Part2style are purveyors of "future ragga". Doing exactly what it says on the tin, they're sets consist of dancehall, dub, dubstep, grime, jungle, dnb, footwork, garage, and house , everything and everything as long as it's got a strong ragga vibe. Their mixing and selection is sick, reaching deep in the bag for old gems and pulling up new tracks which haven't been rinsed out. Nearly everything they play is an exclusive dub, with some absolutely massive names giving them a shout out including General Levy on their dubplate of Incredible. Their sets are packed full of energy with super authentic ragga-style MCing, and I've never not seen them mash up the daaaarnce. Regulars at Outlook Festival, and booked to play Fabric later this year, they might just be the first Japanese DJs to break the UK. Watch the fuck out.
Frankly$ick has more grime than you
Not /strictly/ Japanese although 100% fluent in the language and poised to be out in Tokyo for, I dunno, the next decade or something, he gets to be on this list because he's such a fixture of the Tokyo bass scene. DJing a bit of everything, but specialising in grime and bassline, he's one of the most technically on-point DJs I know, and the only person I can think of who still puts in the legwork, crate digging, hitting up producers - big and small - to get exclusives, and overall hustling like mad to keep his sets full of gully, future, non-wishy-washy-seapunk-Visionist-eskiwank up-to-date grime music. A DJ who'll have you reaching over the booth and asking "what the fuck is thiiiiiis?????" he's $ick and you should check him out.
2014
This last year was the first in recent memory where I literally could not keep up with everything I wanted to. Trap, footwork, UK 130 shit, and pop were all popping off, and I simply did not have time to get as into Miley Cyrus as I wanted to. Every just focussing on the current UK house stuff took me so long that I'm now publishing my 2013 list in the second week of the new year lol.
But it's probably a good sign, though economically, socially and politically, the world's probably more bleak now than at any other point in my lifetime, musically we're living in times of abundance. If you can't get excited by that then you're doing it all wrong.
Right at the tail end of 2012, a thread was started on the music forum I frequent, dissensus, calling for a discussion on "Shuffling / House Music / Cutting Shapes", referring to the shuffling/shape shifting/cutting shapes dance style which had taken the capital by storm - essentially a revamped charleston, or a take on the kind of fancy foot-work that proper dancers have been doing to house music since it began - and the deep tech house music pushed by DJs like Mark Radford and Majesty which these shufflers were dancing to.
I clocked the thread, watched a few of the videos, listened to a few of the tracks, thought the dance was good fun and the music alright but a bit pedestrian, and then basically didn't give it any serious thought for the next half year. Because why would I need to when jackin existed and it was a gift from the EDM gods, a music that could have been custom made for me considering how exactly it hit all my raving-erogenous zones, with a thriving club scene and massive tunes coming out faster than I could keep track of?
Yet as the summer wore on and I found myself having to search harder and harder for less and less jackin trax, I began looking elsewhere for tunes to fill my sets and I thought I'd give "shuffle house", as I thought it was called (it is not, it's called deep tech), another look. Credit where credit is due, "give another look" meant "give another look through the dissensus thread", and it's simply the case that without that thread, and without the advocacy of posters like Continuum and Trilliam in particular, I would have never clocked the sound (clocked it from Tokyo? are u mud??), I would have never clocked the big tunes, and the second half of 2013 might have been spent in total musical/existential crisis mode, rather than gleefully exploring a whole new genre's worth of beats and bass and #danger.
One of the first deep tech tunes I "got". Total scene anthem, crowds singing all the words sort of flex. Wicked vocal and lovely rolling bassline, very easy to see how this fits into a UK tradition of tuneful bass bangers.
Whereas with jackin I was hooked at the first donk, with deep tech it took me half a year to get from "I don't like it", to "I don't really like it, but some of the tunes are alright for warming up jackin with", to "I don't really like most of it, but some of the tunes are big, still", to "I like it, but it's not very original" to finally just admitting "fuck it, I really like it".
If that sounds like a lot of umming and erring over a few tunes, then I'll justify my caution by saying that, deep and tech house has been, in a very tangible way, ruining my nights out in London for the last 2 years. This is not some inverse hipster snobbery about the inherent superiority of British urban dance musics compared to european house music (though duuuuuh, that music sucks and our music is great), but I mean I have been to countless club nights across the capital where the DJ I liked has stopped playing, and the next DJ would come on and start playing some fucking boring standard house music, and on a visceral level I would stop having fun, would no longer want to dance, would want to go home.
(I remember one party in particular where Marcus Nasty had been playing a jackin set, smashing up di place, me and my mates feeling jolly with a couple of pints and a spliff in us and having a great time. The next DJ comes on, we're not really paying attention, he wheels a track, we sit up to take notice, the track drops, it's some tedious deep house bullshit, my mate Becky says "this sounds like... HOUSE music!" and we down our pints and leave...)
Another one of the first tunes I was feeling. Though it's difficult to identify a single sonic innovation there is a certain swagger and menace to the track that has been absent from house music for a long time now. Spooky ghost noises, sleazy/chugging bassline, an almost breaks-y shuffle and complexity to the rhythm section, and a fuck off massive second drop all speak of its UK origins.
It took me half a year to realise that deep tech is not simply deep or tech house, although the ridiculousness of that sentence does belie the slight undead quality to UK rave music as we go full circle on the 25th anniversary of acid house...
Like Lorenzo with jackin, the birth of London deep tech can almost be entirely attributed to one person - Mark Radford. Whereas Lorenzo's path to jackin involved slowing down a UK genre - bassline - to house tempo, Radford's "innovation" such that it was one, was to see the UK tuffness immanent in the best of Euro and US deep and tech house, but crowded out by the filler:
"I'd go to raves and hear 3 hours worth of music, and out of them 3 hours of music there might have been 3 tunes that I thought "if someone put a set together, of all that sort of music, they're gonna kill it", I did, I killed it!"
Radford's own story is the perfect example of the hardcore continuum theory - which states a genealogical and scenelogical affinity that runs through nearly every major UK underground dance music from the time of acid house through to the present day, and is proof positive that this deep tech stuff fits into that lineage.
"I've been through every genre of what you could possibly say is the London dance scene. Started off back in the early days with, like, the acid house raves, then I got into jungle, drum & bass, then moved on to garage when I felt that drum & bass had lost a lot of its soul, then the same thing happened with garage, so I moved onto soulful house and then where I am now, with like the deep tech stuff.
In the same video he talks about a marriage of "mad noises" and "groove" that is more or less the perfect summary of what it is that holds genres as disperate as hardcore, jungle, garage, UK funky, bassline, jackin and deep tech together.
Interestingly, there are more or less three separate groups of producers who all come to deep tech from very different backgrounds, but all contribute to it being more that just deep house in very different ways:
1. Old Dons
One of the most interesting thing about deep tech is the prevalence of old dons, guys who've been through every hardcore genre like Mark Radford, and many more who had their moment many years back, and have found deep tech the perfect forum for their comebacks. The list is kind of astounding, from garage you have Ed Case and Sticky and from jungle you have Bizzy B(!?!!) Best of the lot however are Martin Ikin, a G making hardcore back in 92, and darkside, breakstep/dubstep pinoeer Darqwun/Oris Jay making tunes under the name of RS4.
Marin Ikin's deep tech sound can be heard best on the magnificent, Nightmares On Wax sampling Nothing To Fear:
Old hardcore vocal samples, deep, subbass heavy rolling jackin basslines, a bleeps and bloops that flicker like vague memories of the entire history of UK dance music - watch for the Soft Cell - Tainted Love bleeps at the drop. A masterful blend of the bouncing, raw-danceability of deep house music, with the sonic debris of UK rave music, this was one of my tracks of the year, and one of the tracks which taught me how to stop worrying and love deep tech.
Even better is RS4, which is no surprise considering just how sick Darqwun was back in the day (Said the Spider, top dubstep tracks), but what is somewhat surprising is that a figure so foundational in early dubstep, but only really remembered among the DJs he influenced and not the massive at large, managed to reinvent himself to be so thoroughly relevant in 2013, using his years of production practice to show up all the young upstarts.
Essentially every track track he's released or previewed on his soundcloud has been pure fire, with killer remixes of Walk On By and L.F.O but for my money, the best of them are his remixes of Soulstar's Locked On You and Sia's Little Man.
(This version unfortunenly cuts out before the wicked second drop, but you can hear a longer version here for now from about 7:30 into this mix - http://podcast.dgen.net/rinsefm/podcast/MarkRadford071213.mp3)
If Martin Ikin's tracks meet somewhere between house and hardcore, Locked On You strips the house elements down to a mere skeletal structure, 4x4 scaffolding to build his monster darkcore riddim. For Locked On You sounds like nothing more than that moment around 93 when hardcore turned to the darkside, the drugs stopped working and euphoria quickly turned to its opposite. Panic attack synth stabs, an undulating, slimy bass lines, militaristic rolling snare drums and haunting synth strings which sound like they're about to snap all made this one of the spookiest tracks of the year, and one of the best.
Equally sick is the "monster remix" of Little Man, a classic garage vocal rerubbed on pure darkside 2013/2014 flex.
This one's a proper scene anthem and got wheeled twice - once for each drop - when it got dropped at Scala on Boxing Day. Though it might sound restrained compared to the exuberance of the original, it throbs with a compacted energy, like jungle slowed way way down, and grows on you slowly. By the time the swamp monster squelches come in, there's not a hand in the rave not bussin gun fingers.
2. The Bandwagon
Another major source of deep tech producers comes not from such old veterens, but producers from recently extant scenes which have been loosing their zeitgeist luster - grime and funky primarily, but more recently from bassline and jackin too.
Of the grime guys, it's Black Ops' Charmzy who's been making the biggest moves for me with his Shape Shifting EP, specifically the icey cold Dirty Disco:
http://www.beatport.com/track/dirty-disco-original-mix/4541389
The biggest contingent however come from funky, who's death was intimately tied up with deep tech's rise, and who can be said to have bequeathed this new scene not just a large number of DJs, producers and MCs, but also much of its clubbing infrastructure, and perhaps the entirety of its audience.
Carnao Beats was one of the earliest defectors, having been edging his funky towards a deeper sound as early as 2011 with his VERY cleverly named Deep-ception EP http://www.beatport.com/track/infected-by-house-original-mix/206353/, before switching decisively to the deep tech sound in 2012. With a number of releases out on Audio Rehab, half of his tunes being scene anthems, and being a mainstay at deep tech raves from London to Leicester, Carnao represents one of those figures who was a bit tangental in one scene - funky - but has become central to another.
His sound is defined by mental, polyrhythmic, almost acid house basslines, with a distinctively 80s, electro vibe to his drums. His hit rate is high, but my favorite tracks are the hypnotic, shuffle-tastic, bleepy and bassy H.O.U.S.E
And the recent top-40-hit-by-any-other-name Gone in the Morning, with the ever shape shifting Donao, who's also jumped from funky to deep tech right on schedule
Also from the funky diaspora is Tazer, producer of the house-music-for-people-who-hate-house-music masterpiece, the slow-fast, Notorious BIG sampling Wet Dollars
An absolute anthem in the scene, this got played about 4 or 5 times at each deep tech party I went to in December. It's difficult to pin down just what it is exactly that makes this track go so goddamn hard, but there's some magic in the percussion section for sure, with those memetic ravey woodblock stabs that linger in the body hours after hearing them on a system. One of my favorite tracks of the year, if you don't get this one, then you won't get deep tech.
My favorite crossover artist of the bunch though is Arun Verone, the new deep tech alias for bassline/UK B badman DJ Pantha, coming hot off the heels of his jump to jackin last year, which produced some stone cold bangers:
With his deep tech stuff Arun Verone has brought some of that bassline/jackin rowdiness, and has brought the full force of his knowledge of big, bouncy basslines to bare on the house template, making for a much needed anecdote to the sometimes-too-serious vibe and aesthetic of the deep tech scene.
With only a couple of free downloads and hardly any official releases to his (new) name yet, the best way into Verone's stuff is through his mixes:
And it's a lucky coincidence that he happens to be one of the scene's best DJs, with a proper grimey cutting and chopping, wheelups, fast mixes, constant energy-vibe-hype-flex to his sets. (For what it's worth though, the quality of DJing in deep tech as a whole is infinitely better than in jackin, where apart from Marcus Nasty, there isn't a really top class DJ among them, though the best of their producers, IE Lorenzo, is objectively the greatest UK producer of the last half decade - seriously, name anyone who comes close...)
Vocal hooks a-plenty, wompy, warpy wobblers, sharp plasticy drums and a certain reek of noir/dread that hovers over his sounds like old skunk make his sounds a perfect entry point into deep tech from other UK genres, and give all of his tunes that vital edge.
3. Young Blood
The last major group of artists keeping deep tech gully and UK is the new school of producers for whom deep tech is their first foray into UK rave music, for whom DJs like Mark Radford and Majesty were their path into the music and who come to it, consequentially, unburdened with and largely uninterested in the long history of house music, and questions of how house music 'should sound'.
This perhaps represents the largest group of the three, with many of the artists of Radford's essential-listening Audio Rehab label, seemingly having no name to speak of in any genres before the current deep tech wave.
This group would seem to include massive-in-the-scene names like Playtime Productions:
(check the hip hop meets house in East London vibez on this one, and the wobbles)
And Lance Morgan:
(Absolutely love the noir swagger on this one, perfect music for driving around London at night)
As well as some very recent debuts such as Truce:
And indeed, a whole new Audio Rehab imprint, +Recordings dedicated to highlighting the work of new producers exclusively, starting with the 'ard-as-fuck debut from the Area 8 boys, which sounds, of all things, like Pulse X at house tempo
Cutting Shapes
So, having got over my initial distaste at the name and the music's proximity to deep house - I've never liked a music more that has verged on music I dislike so much - I think the quality of music speaks for itself. If you're not listening to deep tech, then you're missing out on a lot of the best music in the UK at the moment, and that's never a good idea.
Getting into the music slowly over the year, as a DJ, miles removed in Japan, I was lucky enough to experience it in its proper context, in a rave, when I was back in the UK over Christmas. First, DJing it out at 02:31 in an absolutely mental night which started when my plane got in from Tokyo around 4 in the afternoon, getting a lift from Heathrow back home from #Mum (big up!), shaving, showering, burning my CDs/USBs, wistfully looking at my bed and thinking it looked GREAT, then grabbing my 17 year old brother, rushing to Euston and grabbing the 9:05 to Birmingham where it just so happened that a group of 4 girls - deep tech ravers - were VERY publicly taking balloons, talking about Arun Verone and Lance Morgan, and running house which sounded EXTRA deep on their tinny mobile phone speakers, before getting into Birmingham New Street, hitting the Rainbow, and playing the 12-1 warm up slot with a set of 90% deep tech to a crowd of about 5-600 people and absolutely tearing the place down if I do say so myself, which, you know, I do.
My other experiences were at a couple of club nights over Christmas, House Passion at Scala on Boxing Day, and Rhythm N Funk at Dukes the weekend before New Years.
I had been curious to see deep tech music in a rave for a long time, and was interested to see how the club experience of the music that was taking over London compared to 02:31 and the jackin scene in Birmingham. Unfortunately, but not really surprisingly, neither event even came close to the standard vibes of 02:31 on an off week, let along their big blow out, monthly 10:31 specials. But it's not really a fair comparison, because I've never been to any rave ever which is nearly as good as 02:31. If you're into bass music, it's probably the greatest event on the planet right now.
But on their own terms, both House Passion and Rhythm N Funk were good, really damn good in fact, the best party experiences I've had in London for a long long time. Both had sound issues - Scala's a live music venue and it had a live music soundsystem, all the low frequencies were there, but it was not exactly a bodily experience. Rhythm N Funk had a MAJOR problem for half the night, the problem being that the sound man at Duke was a prick and had the limiter set insanely low, so that you really couldn't hear any sub frequencies at all. If by some insane coincidence the sound guy from Duke reads this - fuck u thnx. It got sorted at the end of the night, and was a bit of a lesson in how this music is of course, UK bass music and needs rasclart bass.
Both were very vibezy. The crowd was a bit older than 02:31 (average age, say, 26 as opposed to 21) and blacker (maybe ~60% to 02:31's ~10%). Both had a mixed crowd, mostly quite street, with plenty of those new-school house band wagon not-hipsters-but-still-wearing-Raybans sorts, with a spattering of proper cockneys shouting OI OI and FUCK OOOORRRFFFF at the big drops. Plenty of people on MDMA, but not particularly a communal loved up vibe - more like drug/music induced personal hypnosis. Skunk smoke everywhere. Most importantly, EVERYONE was dancing, shuffling, cutting shapes, going #ham. It was wicked to see, some really great moves, and it looked like it must be loads of fun to be able to do it to the music, which compliments it really well. Actually felt like a bit of a prick for wearing a t-shirt not a shirt, and not being able to shuffle.
Would definitely recommend that anyone in London checks out some of the raves, because to my mind you're unlikely to find better vibes or better music in any other scene in the capital.
Back to the Future
So in short, after a year of being aware of the music, and 6 months of actively attempting to get into I end 2013 and begin 2014 big into deep tech and excited about what the future holds. Which is good, because if I didn't like the stuff I think I'd be in a very bleak place musically right now.
That said, it doesn't move me like jackin at its best did, and there remain legitimate criticisms of the sound, least not the question of its novelty and innovation. For while the questions of "is it really its own sound?" and "Isn't it just deep house music?" have been answered ("yes", "no") the question of "is there anything new here?" is still open.
For all it's many qualities - darkness, toughness, danceability big badbwoy basslines, hip hop vox, diva vox, slinky riddims, fact that it's an actual massive scene people are raving to - there really isn't anything about the sound you can call totally unique to deep tech or totally new. Though there's something future about it in terms of spaceaged sounds, cold minimalism, tech-noises, it's a sort of Robocop-retro futurism, with a massively strong 80s influence running through the sound. This is hardly a bad thing, as it's great to hear those old 80s synths and bleeps and drums brought into a new context, but it does feel like the hardcore continuum going back to its roots rather than opening new horizons of possibility.
We're living in retromania, and the fight for the future remains more important than ever, there is a point where if you don't compromise a bit, you're either going to end up listening to experimental but vibeless wank (see "poststep", or don't), or just not enjoying anything at all.
For me, the fact that dark, trippy rave music is taking over London again - and looks poised to infect the heart of the mainstream like no genre since garage - is reason enough to be hopeful for 2014.
Tokyo, you've got the rhythm in you
Though I've gone on these last two posts about the state of UK rave, the truth is that I spend most of 2013 in Tokyo. It wouldn't be right not to end with a shout out to some of the incredibly talented musicians I've had the privilege to get to know this year.
Pakin - Probably the most important grime MC in East Asia
First up is my mate Pakin (パ禁）which is short for 中途半端 chuuto hanpa 禁止 Kinshi - which means "being halfhearted/half-arsed is forbidden" or "don't fuck about". An old school hip hop head with a massively knowledge of JP-hop hop, he got into grime nearly 10 years ago by reading about Dizzee Rascal in a magazine. One of the hardest working guys I know - in the context of the fickle Tokyo nightlife scene, his event Gum has been running bi-monthly without fail for 5 years and recently had its 30th event - and also one of the safest. I've seen his MC skills grow sharper and sharper in the year I've known him and seen him doing his best to promote an authentic Japanese grime culture, teaching hip hop MCs about wheelups, and encouraging them to pass the mic and spit over DJs grime sets.
His hard work has paid off with a number of collaborations with Birmingham's Dark Elements crew (including the likes of Devilman and Darx), cumulating in him going up to Brum when he was visiting me over the summer and recording this:
Seiho feels rave
Though there are many talented DJs and producers out in Japan, it's often said that the Japanese are better technicians than innovators and not many have a uniquely Japanese sound. I think this is racist as shit - the idea of Asians as hyper rational, lacking soul, orientalist bullshit - even though many Japanese would say the same thing and it is true that many Japanese artists judge their own success via its proximity to a Western source material.
Seiho however is a true original, fusing sugary sweet J-pop influences with rave, trap, footwork, trance, hardcore, and anything bright and euphoric in his own productions, and DJing with a controller and midi keyboard, adding live piano vamps, speeding up and slowing down songs to double or halftime, dressed in mental-stylish-mental combos of colours and patterns while dancing like a maniac and singing along to his own stuff. He's wicked basically.
Part2Style have more dubs than you
Part2style are purveyors of "future ragga". Doing exactly what it says on the tin, they're sets consist of dancehall, dub, dubstep, grime, jungle, dnb, footwork, garage, and house , everything and everything as long as it's got a strong ragga vibe. Their mixing and selection is sick, reaching deep in the bag for old gems and pulling up new tracks which haven't been rinsed out. Nearly everything they play is an exclusive dub, with some absolutely massive names giving them a shout out including General Levy on their dubplate of Incredible. Their sets are packed full of energy with super authentic ragga-style MCing, and I've never not seen them mash up the daaaarnce. Regulars at Outlook Festival, and booked to play Fabric later this year, they might just be the first Japanese DJs to break the UK. Watch the fuck out.
Frankly$ick has more grime than you
Not /strictly/ Japanese although 100% fluent in the language and poised to be out in Tokyo for, I dunno, the next decade or something, he gets to be on this list because he's such a fixture of the Tokyo bass scene. DJing a bit of everything, but specialising in grime and bassline, he's one of the most technically on-point DJs I know, and the only person I can think of who still puts in the legwork, crate digging, hitting up producers - big and small - to get exclusives, and overall hustling like mad to keep his sets full of gully, future, non-wishy-washy-seapunk-Visionist-eskiwank up-to-date grime music. A DJ who'll have you reaching over the booth and asking "what the fuck is thiiiiiis?????" he's $ick and you should check him out.
2014
This last year was the first in recent memory where I literally could not keep up with everything I wanted to. Trap, footwork, UK 130 shit, and pop were all popping off, and I simply did not have time to get as into Miley Cyrus as I wanted to. Every just focussing on the current UK house stuff took me so long that I'm now publishing my 2013 list in the second week of the new year lol.
But it's probably a good sign, though economically, socially and politically, the world's probably more bleak now than at any other point in my lifetime, musically we're living in times of abundance. If you can't get excited by that then you're doing it all wrong.
2013 in Music - Pt. 1 [ 30-Dec-13 4:45pm ]Pt. 1 House & Bass all in one place
It's very difficult for me to talk objectively about music this year. It's been a year defined by both moving closer towards and further away from the musical scene of action for me.
Moving closer, though jackin was my obsession for much of 2012, it was NYE 2013 when I first actually got to hear the music in its proper context, had one of the best raving experiences of my entire life, and began a love affair with 02:31, the Rainbow and Birmingham which has seen me go back another 4 times this year, including two 02:31 raves I had the privilege of DJing.
Moving away, literally, in March I moved to Japan, where I plan on living for the next few years. In Tokyo I've made some amazing friends, met a lot of very talented DJs and producers, been to some wicked nights out and have had an great time getting involved in the Bass scene out there. But yet, Tokyo's not London, there is no massive, there is no sense that musical activity is plugged into the lives of tens of thousands of people around the nation, there is no sense of the history which everyone with more than a passing interest in raving in the UK knows almost innately, there is no sense that any of it really matters, because to 99.999% of Japanese people, it doesn't.
Still, I had a fantastic 2013, and if you can forgive that my vision is necessarily partial, unreliable both for standing too close to the sun (nearly half my weekends in the UK this year have been spent at 02:31 exclusively), and too far away (the biggest party I've seen in Japan had 200 people... It was sick!) then I hope you'll find me thoughts and feelings and not-feelings worth a read.
02:31/Brum/Jackin
As anyone who read my yearly round-up last year, or basically had any sort of contact with at all knows, jackin was the single sound that defined 2012 for me. The first half of 2013 saw me grow even closer to music, ushering in the new year at 02:31 and going back again and again at every opportunity I've had.
My obsession with the music itself continued on a similar level to 2012 for much of the year, as the scene continued to dash out banger after banger after banger at an insane pace. Indeed, lining up the top 10 or 20 jackin tracks of 2012 and 2013, you could even make the argument that jackin improved this year.
Some of the tracks/vibez/flavours/artists I've been feeling this year are:
DARKNESS2013 was the year jackin did what we all wanted it to and went over to the dark side. Brent Kilner had been pushing his own dark, dubstep/dnb influenced take on jackin since last year's 02:31 anthem Too BadThis year he continued in the fine style, and it's really difficult to whittle down out of so many banging tracks (Too Bad VIP, Kelis's Milkshake refix, Dizzee's Old Skool refix etc etc.). So honestly, go over to his soundcloud, pick a track and random, and be treated to a darkside bass banger. Best of the bunch however has to be the very recent refix of Skeng, an inspired mix which speaks to Kilner's background in dubstep, is hard as f$$$ck and is just a few more follows on Kilner's soundcloud away from becoming a free download, so support the cause and follow him!
2013 also saw Lorenzo on a darker tip, most notably in his tracks with Pete Graham, starting with the half-step, screwface, "dark and creepy" Dorothy's Forest
And getting progressively weirder and wobblier with the likes of Dorothy's Armpit/Wom, Chu Ba Ka, The Twlight Zone and Who Dat.
Chris Gresswell, one half of the pioneering jackin crew Screwface, really came into his own this year, with a stream of twisted bassline bangers, including a likkle dubplate he did for me of the 2-step classic Stone Cold ;)
But nowhere was he spookier than with Silent Hill, sampling from the horror movie of the same name, complete with eery twinkle noises, whipcracking sharp drums, deep rolling bass and two wicked drops.
Come over to the dark side? Yeah alright then.
B list jackin
For me, one of the joys of jackin at it's best was the sense that there was so much energy, so much quality to the scene that even the second tier of tracks - tracks by artists who pop up and disappear again, tracks dashed out on bigtunes with no sort of promo or bloghype, tracks you might rinse for a month obsessively but that are unlikely to be considered classics or even remembered in a few years time - even these tracks are sick.
As the year went on and jackin turned increasingly professional, with tracks signed to record labels. drawn out release schedules and artists imposing stricter quality control/brand management to their releases, this B-list jackin suffered massively for it. We released that this abundance of B-list jackin, the ability to go on to bigtunes and find 10 tracks which were good enough to bang out in a club - if not necessarily good enough to have played at your funeral - was vital to the health of the scene as a whole.
So this goes out to the B-list.
This following one's actually a remix of some bate EDM tune, which I only realised after hearing the original in a connivence store in Tokyo.
Massive hardcore/euphoric vibes on this one. This track really sums up that thing I love about jackin where it rehabilitates fatally cheesy vocals, where you're left wondering during the build what the hell you're listening to and how the producer's ever going to redeem themselves, and then it drops and you do a nasty bassface and cop it into your bigtunes cart right there.
97 plays on soundcloud, but was my song of the month earlier the year, duppying a number of my first DJ sets in Japan
Some dude called Phatfunk, who made this track and no others that I can remember. Wicked dancehall vocal from a DJ Zinc track, and absolutely love the slowed down donk bassline.
Hybrid Theory
Hands down the debut artist of the year, Brummy duo Hybrid Theory exploded onto the scene way back in January with 0483 and have put out nothing but bangers since.
Their sound encapsulates the blend of speed garage warps + bassline wobble + house beats + magical mystery ingredient that defines jacking, and they come with a toughness and grit that counterbalances the cheese and pop tendencies of other jackin artists.
Their soundcloud reads like a best of list for jackin this year, with track names like So High, Higher, Mind Games and Drop to the Max likely to set off screwfaces on anyone who's heard them in a club. Though choosing a favorite out of all of those basslines and beats feels nearly impossible, two special mentions have to be given to the wobbling stomper that is Screened for having one of the best second drops of the last half decade:
And the anthemic remix of Decibel's Skank featuring Flow Dan:
This track had me skanking round my room for nearly an hour when I first clocked it, even bussin' a cheeky selfie video of the massive screwface it induced. It's the gift that keeps on giving, 'dropping' about 3 times before settling into an un-fuck-withable blend of slinky 4x4 drums, owl bassline, and grime vocals. Top 5 tune of the year, and would be number 1 grime x jackin crossover if Cause & Affect hadn't upped the levs later on...
Nigurr
Number 2 breakthrough artist of the year. If Hybrid Theory is a genius producer, likely to be making waves for a long time to come, the South African(!?!?!) Niggur (a name which makes talking about the guy obviously hugely problematic for white people...) is rather only a good producer with a genius formula - namely putting bate, singalong hip hop and r&b vocals on top of You Want Me-style, deep and dirty, bouncy house beats.
Shake Dat
"Shake dat ass for me, shake dat ass for me" - it might not be clever, but it is big.
You Want Me Too
Perfect name for a track which basically acts as the sequel to Nick Hannam ft. Tom Zanetti's mega anthem You Want Me, sampling the classic Cassie track U & Me and guaranteed to get gyals and guys #emotional on the dancefloor.
Cause & Affect/Lorenzo
Yet despite new tallent entering the scene, no one came close to challenging Lorenzo's reign supreme over all that is jackin, either in his original productions with Kane as Cause & Affect, or engineering for countless other producers.
2013 was a big one for Cause & Affect as a duo, seeing their track Don't Like To Do That released on the massive Dirtybird label, with tours taking them everywhere from London to Ibiza to San Francisco. It also saw their productions getting better and better.
Pushing the bass line as hard and far as it could go was Kamikaze, the name being an 'o so subtle statement of intent as to its impact on the dancefloor:
Coming like an 8 bar grime tune, with the same bassline played out in turns between a metallic, saber-toothed sin-wave bassline bass line and a jackin-owl-bass which sounds like someone's been handing out M-kat in an aviary, this was my go to dj tune for when I was mashed and just wanted to take things a bit nasty throughout the year.
On a completely different flex was the C&A remix of Stanton Warriors' (lol yes I know, bare with me) Cut Me Up, a spangling metamodern, back-to-the-future mashup of 'ardcore and 'ouse and bass.
It builds with a near era-perfect replication of a 92/93 hardcore-jungle build - piano vamps, diva voxs, rolling breaks, thundering reese bass, with only its too-clean production values to give its real age away - but drops in pure 2k13 ruffneck jackin style.
Best of the bunch was Battle, an absolute monster riddim featuring vocals from the Newham Generals, all the little orchestral/cinematic frills and trills that fill the C&A soundscape, and a rudebwoy bass line which can't help but make you pull a face like someone farted nearby. A sick tune that got us all very gassed at the possibilities of the grime x jackin crossover
Though much of Lorenzo's best work was in collaboration with other artists (though one never really knows what percent is Loz's input, you suspect sometimes that he basically just makes the whole damn track).
Particularly strong this year was his work with Tom Garnett, which resulted in the wonderfully tracky P.A.R.T.Y featuring party-hard lyrics from Tom Zanetti and a womping bass line which sums up everything jackin does best:
Perhaps winning the award for 'most inspired sampling' (last year's prize obviously had to go to Loz's refix of Running Up That Hill...) was Trouble
Which bounces along nicely until drop in the middle, where it smoothly slips into the original version of Woman Trouble by the Artful Dodger ft. Craig David. I can't conceptualise the human who would not be left beaming, singing along and bouncing around like a mad eejat when this kicks in. This has been one of the anthems of the year for me, played by me or someone else at nearly every party I've been to in Tokyo this year. It's the sheer will-to-pleasure that everyone who 'get's' jackin, gets.
The closest thing the scene had to a runnaway anthem in the vein of You Want Me this year was Darlin' a Lorenzo engineered Sleepin Is Cheatin' track featuring the lethargic and louche, day-after-a-night-taking-too-many-drugs crooning of Tom Zanetti.
With an almost-professional video feature TZ's adorable little son bussin moves in a warehouse, this was the jackin tune with staying power: I've heard it at least 3 times at every 02:31 event I've been to since it was released. It's also the only jackin tune I can think of that's crossed over, getting some serious play in deep-tech raves, radio sets and mixtapes too. Slow, druggy, donky, sick.
Track of the year!!!
Finally, both in the sense of coming at the end of this too long (sorry!) rundown, and being the last major jackin track of the year - released earlier in December - is Up To No Good, a masterful rework of an old hardcore track done alongside the ever ravey Ill Phill
I could pick it apart and look at how every single element is perfectly engineered to to get UK ravers gassed as #f$$ck - but really it's just the best build and drop of the whole year - and then it insanely generously repeats the trick with the best build and 2nd drop of the whole year. A massive anthem, and for what it's worth my track of 2013.
Jacked out?
So, given that I've just spend a lot of words and way too many soundcloud embeds (sorry about that slow computer/internet users...) gassing about 2013 jackin, you might think that the scene is in rude health. The unfortunate truth is however, that over 80% of the tracks listed here came out in the first half of the year. Since the summer, things have really, reaaaally slowed down.
A large part of this would be down to the increasing professionalization of the genre. Whereas it used to be that a track would be previewed on soundcloud, a within the month it would be up for download on bigtunesmp3, now the vibe is, a track gets previewed on soundcloud, it gets signed to a minor record label whose sole act of promotion seems to be getting the track on beatport, and then you wait 6-9 months till you can get hands on it, with none of the producers willing to give the track as a promo because it's signed.
Though this false scarcity and label-support obviously makes sense from the standpoint of the individual producer, on a scene-wide level it acts as a major drain of energy, an aura killer, and has destroyed that scene you had earlier on in the scene's lifespan that there was just so much going on, so much creativity at work, that a producer would release a track a month because they could.
But if producers being more careful with there tracks was a cause of decline, it may also be the case that there simply was less energy, less momentum, less ideas floating about as the jackin brand exerted a weaker and weaker pull on tallent compared to house proper.
For much of the year even - to be honest, especially - among its biggest producers and DJs, you could not find anyone willing to defend, define, or even use the word jackin to refer to the bassline derived house sounds coming from Brum/Leeds.
When 02:31 got a weekly show on Rinse FM, they used the platform not to push jackin, but to push their own brand of 'house & bass' (which is the exact same thing but a million times less informative). As Lorenzo, Hannah Wants, Tom Shorterz have built well deserved profiles for themselves in the national scene, and have found themselves subject to interviews and magazine features, the words "house", "bass", and "house & bass" fly thick and fast, while there is no mention of jackin, the scene they made and that made them.
Chatting to Kane from Cause & Affect, he says the affiliation with house is due to having an eye on the long term - having seen jungle, garage, bassline etc. fall by the wayside, he would rather exert his efforts for the scene that never dies - house music. Of course, while house music never dies, neither does is come to define an era, or expand the possibilities of what is meant by dance music like those UK genres which shine too bright and die too fast.
Ultimately, I can't but see the abandonment of jackin as a name and genre to rally around as a massive shot in the foot - from the bottom of my heart wishing Lorenzo and co all the best in making a name for themselves in the massive, 30 year old, international house scene - but seeing this as less likely, and the rewards in fact lesser, than the patient work of building jackin as its own scene and having the mainstream come to them (ala 2-step).
For this reason, though 2013 was a great year for jackin, it truly saddens me to say, I reckon it will be its last. As the summer wore on and the weeks since I had bought anything from bigtunes piled up, I began looking elsewhere for tunes to fill my record bag and for that little hit of future. My search led me back to my hometown, and ironically given my dispair at jackin's direction, back to house.
Continued in Part 2
2012 in Music [ 27-Dec-12 5:20pm ]2K12 IN MUSIC
Yo, this blog post will be in two sections, Part I dealing with my own personal year-in-music, and the second a more critical look at some of the major musical trends this year.
PART I
2012 was a good year! Started the year doing a dissertation/parring it in Cambridge and finish it as a graduated real human about to move to Japan for the next few years :O
On a personal musical level it's been interesting as well. Though I've been out raving less than in 2011, this was the year I really pushed myself with DJing and began to develop a (very small) name for myself. As I say, my first couple of terms at Cambridge were a big parr, and it was bedroom DJing that made most days bearable, so I did a lot of it (big up my neighbour Leeana for her tolerance!!). Coupled with getting far, far better technically, my residency slots with Rudimental and Voodoo Rave, and later on in the year, my slot on Innacity FM, gave me space to develop a sound and the motivation to constantly hunt for new music to keep things fresh. I can now say "I am a DJ" without feeling like a wanker.
As a punter, a few of my major moments came on the dance floor - Champion dropping Mosquito at Cable, Beneath's whole set at Rudimental, Manny and J-Cush slaughtering the dance in Brooklyn - but just as often came from intimate moments with friends - discovering Call Me Maybe at Jambie's Jubilee BBQ,
And a very high, very magic May Week evening listening to Will Saul's old Fact mix by Mill pond with good friends.
But in true 2012 fashion, the defining musical moment of my year, my epiphany/I-have-seen-the-future/I-like-music-again/this-is-why-I-rave moment, came not in collective euphoria on the dance floor, but in the atomised setting of my dorm room on headphones, when I clocked Marcus Nasty's jackin podcast, thus instigating the most exciting 6 months in music I've ever had. More of that below.
PART II - TRENDS
'UK Bass' AKA post-dubstep, AKA intelligent zzzzfest AKA HOUSE MUSIC… AGAIN!!!!!
Hessel Audio, Hypderdub, Hemlock, Night Slugs etc. Are all banished to the 'boring until proven exciting' corner.
how do u even dance to this I don't even
For London producers working under the 'Bass' umbrella this year, not a single gun finger was busted. Postmodernism has not treated UK dance music well, and the atemporal, internetty, vybless music coming from the capital - a mush of vaguely dubsteppy bass, house rhythms, washy synths, 808s and AALIYAH SAMPLES MADE BORING HOW DO U EVEN DO THAT?!?!? - has lost all sense of FWD progression and all sense of fun.
This is literally Pearson Sound pressing the 'make Pearson Sound track' button on Logic. Dead-Out.
One notable exception to this rule has been the output of Keysound records, and Dusk and Blackdown's Rinse sessions. Here a sense of teleology has been sculpted by the curation of a tight aesthetic - dark, grimey, jungalistic, syncopated rave music:
Yet otherwise there was next to zero signs of life here. Wake me up when London artists stop talking like critical theorists and when somebody, anyone makes a BANGER. Until then Fuck u-K bass.
UK FUNKY 2007-2012 RIP
Well it had a good run; maintaining a sense of cohesion and progression, constantly putting out great tunes, and balancing light and dark elements for a good five years, even as it was loosing support to the most stale of deep and tech-house for three of them.
2012 even saw a number of great funky releases, notably from Beneath, who's combo of dank 2006-dubstep dread vybez with ass-shaking tribal soca-flavored skank riddims make him a sub-genre unto himself.
DANK
Mosquito by Redlight's Lobster Boy alias is possible one of the greatest funky tunes ever, and gets a special mention for providing my most memorable and documented rave moment of the year:
Champion's one of the best DJs in the country, and his Crystal Meth EP showcased the gully possibilities of entwining funky even further with grime.
Still, though the massive left funky in 2009, for a few years still there was a constant stream of great music being made by people like Roska, Lil Silva, Cosmin TRG, Swing Ting etc. By summer 2012 that stream had truly dried up. UK FUNKY R I P
EUPHORIA
Not so much a movement as a feeling.
This year, we climaxed.
100% of humanity has climaxed to this song
We've gone up up up up up uuuuup.
And we wailed where have you been all my life.
Yes. Yes yes yes.
TEKLIFE OR NO LIFE
Imagine what music/culture would be like right now if footwork didn't exist? It's a truly depressing thought. For musical modernists, footwork is pretty much all that that stands between us and the end of history. There is quite literally no other movement across the arts - music, literature, visual culture - that is more radical, more important right now.
Yet the radical rhythmic/music-structural disjuncture that footwork represents is a large part of why the original sound itself has been limited in popularity to the Chicago demographic that created it and the global avant-hipster class who live for that future rush.
Where its influence has spread, it has spread in watered down forms - from UK bass to trap. The fact that the for the first time in musical history the UK has responded to an American innovation by tempering it:
And not by roughing it up:
Is in itself a telling sign of the relative decline of the London based hardcore contiuum vis-a-vis ghetto America.
This year was a particularly great one for footwork, and once again the Teklife crew of Chicago fought off new pretenders and reasserted their place at the top of the footwork food chain.
The undeniable king of footwork is and remains DJ Rashad, who this year helped to launch the Lit City label to showcase the best of the Teklife massive. The first album on the imprint, Welcome To The Chi, showed footwork reaching a new stage of maturity and production values, and showed it turning outwards towards the world by incoperating influences as diverse at Jungle and Grime:
The dreadest track on the album, We Trippy Mane, brought footwork at it's most avant-'ard, evoking the minimal grime instrumentals of Alias and Wiley:
Back in the summer I was privileged enough to make a trip to Chicago to witness a footwork battle in a closed-off shop front down on 87th street. The vibe was insane - dark outside, bright florescent lighting inside, no drinks or drugs (just lots of soda), fuck off pounding sub-bass, a circle of dancers kicking their limbs at speeds your eyes can't register, DJ Spinn MCing like a total joker, and 200 tracks just like this - the dark, minimal, brutal ones they call battle trax - mixed deftly by DJ Earl. It was like witnessing the limits of human cultural expression expanding before my eyes.
Fellow Teklife badman Traxman also killed it this year with his Da Mind of Traxman over at Planet Mu, which engaged the rhythmic NOW of footwork in a dialogue with black America's musical history - namely jazz, funk, and disco.
Planet Mu were also responsible for a number of the other footwork highlights this year, particularly the scholarly undertaking that was Bangs & Works Vol 2 - which showcased footwork in all its wonderful diversity
And they brought us the dancefloor duppying experiments, the metamodern mashup of Jungle/Juke/Jukle/jUKe/Foot & Bass with Dream Continuum's Reworkz e.p.
The experiment worked and it remains to offer a fascinating path out of the UK's dancefloor malaise and a good answer to the question of how to deal with an import scene like Chicago footwork. Here's to more of it in 2013.
Jackin AKA Jackin House AKA Jackin Bass AKA "bouncey wobbly mucky in ya face catty phat beats (real house music)" AKA THANK FUCK NOW I LIKE MUSIC AGAINN!!!!!
Anyone who's friends with me on facebook, or who's held a conversation with me over the last 6 months will know wot music won 2012 for me. Ever since clocking Marcus Nasty's 6th of June Rinse podcast, northern/midlands jackin house has made up the vast majority of the music I listen to, buy, think about and DJ.
Never since getting into music have I been so interested by a current scene that old music ceased to grab my attention, but since Jackin my DJ sets have gone from predominantly old school Garage retro-fare to 80% traxs from the last month or so. Every month brings out as much good music as I was used to getting in half a year. It is quite simply the most exciting thing happening in British music, and if you disagree, you're wrong.
What is jackin? Jackin is what happened when the police shut down all the bassline raves up north and all the bassline ravers, DJs and producers started going to house events, and eventually, started making house music.
Bassline RIP
From house jackin got its "neck snapping" 4x4 riddim, defined by propulsive open high hats and straight forward snares. From house, jackin got its slower BPMs (124-130, with the sweet spot at 126), and from house jackin got its sense of 'cool', 'sexy'.
From bassline, jackin got its penchant for big, mellifluous diva vocals, good-times-toasting MC patter and cheeky pop bootlegs. Most importantly, from bassline jackin got its bass: big, bolshy bass; bass that overpowers the other elements; bass that would be turned away at the door at classy house events.
But those these elements - snappy 4x4 beats, cheesy, crowd pleasing vocals, oversized bass lines - are the core of jackin, there's more to it than that. At its best Jackin is kitchen-sink UK house, in the tradition of Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada, both of whom have been serviced with the jackin treatment to great effect.
More than that Jackin is a topography of a specifically Northern British dance tradition - evoking everything from bassline to Northern soul, via organ house, speed garage, happy hardcore, donk and jungle, and at times reaching to a pan-UK pop history which includes 2-step garage, dubstep, and the imported RnB and hip hop American hits that topped the charts here.
The difference between this music history in a blender and the internetty mush I decry in London-centric UK Bass, is that Jackin is the response to a specific Northern tradition, it's not a random assortment of influences gathered from soundcloud and youtube (thought the artists are all very much plugged in, the music disseminated through 2k12 digital channels), but local influences absorbed into the music through a regional IRL scene, and absorbed through the memory of other local scenes. Simply put, jackin is exactly what you'd expect Northern rave music to sound like in 2k12, and it's strong because of its basis in The Real.
Apart from this Jackin succeeds where UK Bass fails not only because it takes itself far less seriously:
The Anchorman sample ALONE here cements jackin as the true heir to 'ardcore
But because it is a scene which corresponds to a sound. Whereas if you say a song sounds like UK bass I have 0% idea what you might be referring to - in regards to its rhythmic pattern, its sound pallet etc. - if you tell me a song has a jackin bass then I know what to expect from the bass line. This is a sign of the scenius at work - a creative community that is stronger because its members share good ideas, not one in which such a premium is given to individual expression that there's no sense of collective purpose.
I've seen this drop do things to people...
Specifically, jackin doesn't just have a sound, but it has a new sound, a sonic innovation, in what I call its hollow-donk-warp-owl-bass.
Check at 1:14
Reliable sources tell me that the sound was one hidden away under layers of midrange in bassline, and that the innovation here consists of bringing it to the forefront, giving it space, and making it "cooler". The sound is made by taking a speed garage warp:
2:05
Then ramping up the attack, and filtering it through high-end, spacey/contemporary F-X. If dubstep innovated by giving the sub-bass some space, and then through its wobble, jackin runs with these innovations and furthers them by making the bassline carry the melody, wobbly arpegiated melody.
It's space aged shit, and its impact upon the body in the dance is like nothing else before.
Tracks which meant a lot to me in particular include Tom Shorterz - We Are The Stars
Garage to the future, this track perfectly evokes that moment in 1995/1996 when the Brits first tried their hands at American garage house - labels like Nice and Ripe, Confetti etc. but it updates this pallet for a 2k12 sensibility. The track is glorious and euphoric throughout, but something rather magic happens at 2:45 when the female MC and organ sounds come in.
Donkie Punch n Lorenzo - Snapbacks & TattoosTo pick just a single Lorenzo tune would be to commit a great violence, and indeed, if you look at the tracks throughout this list the tag '& Lorenzo' appears again and again. Lorenzo, one half of Cause & Affect is without a doubt the greatest producer of the year. Lending his engineering skills to countless collaborations which populate and dominate the bigtunesmp3 best selling charts, as well as his work with C&A, I count no less than 41 tracks this year in my iTunes folder, of which perhaps 30 are total classics. There has not been a producer with this kind of hit rate since Wiley, or perhaps the DMZ guys if you're being generous. The year wouldn't have been the same without him.
Majestic - Let's Go Back (Cause & Affect remix)The first track on the Marcus Nasty mix, the track which started it all, the track that was so good I had to wheel it about 10 times before I could bring myself to move on to the next track. This one's a true collaboration between Majestic's nostalgic vocals and C&S's futuristic production. It starts with one of the most perfect build ups in dance music, going from the shuffling two-step, filling in with the thudding 4x4 bass drum, before pausing to build and then.... and then that drop. SNM
TUNE OF THE YEAR: Nick Hannam & Tom Garnett ft. Tom ZanettiNo competition - no single song got wheeled as much, got as much play on my iPod, made me and my friends smile so hard or gave me more faith in UK dance music's ability to revitalise itself.
The tune combines Nick Hannam's signature sound - deep, haunting, crisp-yet-murky, silly-yet-sexy - with Tom Zanetti's cool, bubbling, pure-Leeds-vybzin vocals, and that Said Ama sample. It sounds great at its native 124 bpm or pitched up to a ravey 132, on a poor quality pirate stream or a massive club system.
This is the perfect British pop song. Perfect. If there was any justice in the world this would have been number 1 in the charts, sung at school discos, sodcasted from people's Blackberries at the back of the bus, wheeled up and sung along to at raves across the country.
It helped make this year the best year I can remember for music. And just to reiterate, 2012 was a great year in music. Let's push the sound and make 2013 even better.
Happy New Year! XXX
Yo, this blog post will be in two sections, Part I dealing with my own personal year-in-music, and the second a more critical look at some of the major musical trends this year.
PART I
2012 was a good year! Started the year doing a dissertation/parring it in Cambridge and finish it as a graduated real human about to move to Japan for the next few years :O
On a personal musical level it's been interesting as well. Though I've been out raving less than in 2011, this was the year I really pushed myself with DJing and began to develop a (very small) name for myself. As I say, my first couple of terms at Cambridge were a big parr, and it was bedroom DJing that made most days bearable, so I did a lot of it (big up my neighbour Leeana for her tolerance!!). Coupled with getting far, far better technically, my residency slots with Rudimental and Voodoo Rave, and later on in the year, my slot on Innacity FM, gave me space to develop a sound and the motivation to constantly hunt for new music to keep things fresh. I can now say "I am a DJ" without feeling like a wanker.
As a punter, a few of my major moments came on the dance floor - Champion dropping Mosquito at Cable, Beneath's whole set at Rudimental, Manny and J-Cush slaughtering the dance in Brooklyn - but just as often came from intimate moments with friends - discovering Call Me Maybe at Jambie's Jubilee BBQ,
And a very high, very magic May Week evening listening to Will Saul's old Fact mix by Mill pond with good friends.
But in true 2012 fashion, the defining musical moment of my year, my epiphany/I-have-seen-the-future/I-like-music-again/this-is-why-I-rave moment, came not in collective euphoria on the dance floor, but in the atomised setting of my dorm room on headphones, when I clocked Marcus Nasty's jackin podcast, thus instigating the most exciting 6 months in music I've ever had. More of that below.
PART II - TRENDS
'UK Bass' AKA post-dubstep, AKA intelligent zzzzfest AKA HOUSE MUSIC… AGAIN!!!!!
Hessel Audio, Hypderdub, Hemlock, Night Slugs etc. Are all banished to the 'boring until proven exciting' corner.
how do u even dance to this I don't even
For London producers working under the 'Bass' umbrella this year, not a single gun finger was busted. Postmodernism has not treated UK dance music well, and the atemporal, internetty, vybless music coming from the capital - a mush of vaguely dubsteppy bass, house rhythms, washy synths, 808s and AALIYAH SAMPLES MADE BORING HOW DO U EVEN DO THAT?!?!? - has lost all sense of FWD progression and all sense of fun.
This is literally Pearson Sound pressing the 'make Pearson Sound track' button on Logic. Dead-Out.
One notable exception to this rule has been the output of Keysound records, and Dusk and Blackdown's Rinse sessions. Here a sense of teleology has been sculpted by the curation of a tight aesthetic - dark, grimey, jungalistic, syncopated rave music:
Yet otherwise there was next to zero signs of life here. Wake me up when London artists stop talking like critical theorists and when somebody, anyone makes a BANGER. Until then Fuck u-K bass.
UK FUNKY 2007-2012 RIP
Well it had a good run; maintaining a sense of cohesion and progression, constantly putting out great tunes, and balancing light and dark elements for a good five years, even as it was loosing support to the most stale of deep and tech-house for three of them.
2012 even saw a number of great funky releases, notably from Beneath, who's combo of dank 2006-dubstep dread vybez with ass-shaking tribal soca-flavored skank riddims make him a sub-genre unto himself.
DANK
Mosquito by Redlight's Lobster Boy alias is possible one of the greatest funky tunes ever, and gets a special mention for providing my most memorable and documented rave moment of the year:
Champion's one of the best DJs in the country, and his Crystal Meth EP showcased the gully possibilities of entwining funky even further with grime.
Still, though the massive left funky in 2009, for a few years still there was a constant stream of great music being made by people like Roska, Lil Silva, Cosmin TRG, Swing Ting etc. By summer 2012 that stream had truly dried up. UK FUNKY R I P
EUPHORIA
Not so much a movement as a feeling.
This year, we climaxed.
100% of humanity has climaxed to this song
We've gone up up up up up uuuuup.
And we wailed where have you been all my life.
Yes. Yes yes yes.
TEKLIFE OR NO LIFE
Imagine what music/culture would be like right now if footwork didn't exist? It's a truly depressing thought. For musical modernists, footwork is pretty much all that that stands between us and the end of history. There is quite literally no other movement across the arts - music, literature, visual culture - that is more radical, more important right now.
Yet the radical rhythmic/music-structural disjuncture that footwork represents is a large part of why the original sound itself has been limited in popularity to the Chicago demographic that created it and the global avant-hipster class who live for that future rush.
Where its influence has spread, it has spread in watered down forms - from UK bass to trap. The fact that the for the first time in musical history the UK has responded to an American innovation by tempering it:
And not by roughing it up:
Is in itself a telling sign of the relative decline of the London based hardcore contiuum vis-a-vis ghetto America.
This year was a particularly great one for footwork, and once again the Teklife crew of Chicago fought off new pretenders and reasserted their place at the top of the footwork food chain.
The undeniable king of footwork is and remains DJ Rashad, who this year helped to launch the Lit City label to showcase the best of the Teklife massive. The first album on the imprint, Welcome To The Chi, showed footwork reaching a new stage of maturity and production values, and showed it turning outwards towards the world by incoperating influences as diverse at Jungle and Grime:
The dreadest track on the album, We Trippy Mane, brought footwork at it's most avant-'ard, evoking the minimal grime instrumentals of Alias and Wiley:
Back in the summer I was privileged enough to make a trip to Chicago to witness a footwork battle in a closed-off shop front down on 87th street. The vibe was insane - dark outside, bright florescent lighting inside, no drinks or drugs (just lots of soda), fuck off pounding sub-bass, a circle of dancers kicking their limbs at speeds your eyes can't register, DJ Spinn MCing like a total joker, and 200 tracks just like this - the dark, minimal, brutal ones they call battle trax - mixed deftly by DJ Earl. It was like witnessing the limits of human cultural expression expanding before my eyes.
Fellow Teklife badman Traxman also killed it this year with his Da Mind of Traxman over at Planet Mu, which engaged the rhythmic NOW of footwork in a dialogue with black America's musical history - namely jazz, funk, and disco.
Planet Mu were also responsible for a number of the other footwork highlights this year, particularly the scholarly undertaking that was Bangs & Works Vol 2 - which showcased footwork in all its wonderful diversity
And they brought us the dancefloor duppying experiments, the metamodern mashup of Jungle/Juke/Jukle/jUKe/Foot & Bass with Dream Continuum's Reworkz e.p.
The experiment worked and it remains to offer a fascinating path out of the UK's dancefloor malaise and a good answer to the question of how to deal with an import scene like Chicago footwork. Here's to more of it in 2013.
Jackin AKA Jackin House AKA Jackin Bass AKA "bouncey wobbly mucky in ya face catty phat beats (real house music)" AKA THANK FUCK NOW I LIKE MUSIC AGAINN!!!!!
Anyone who's friends with me on facebook, or who's held a conversation with me over the last 6 months will know wot music won 2012 for me. Ever since clocking Marcus Nasty's 6th of June Rinse podcast, northern/midlands jackin house has made up the vast majority of the music I listen to, buy, think about and DJ.
Never since getting into music have I been so interested by a current scene that old music ceased to grab my attention, but since Jackin my DJ sets have gone from predominantly old school Garage retro-fare to 80% traxs from the last month or so. Every month brings out as much good music as I was used to getting in half a year. It is quite simply the most exciting thing happening in British music, and if you disagree, you're wrong.
What is jackin? Jackin is what happened when the police shut down all the bassline raves up north and all the bassline ravers, DJs and producers started going to house events, and eventually, started making house music.
Bassline RIP
From house jackin got its "neck snapping" 4x4 riddim, defined by propulsive open high hats and straight forward snares. From house, jackin got its slower BPMs (124-130, with the sweet spot at 126), and from house jackin got its sense of 'cool', 'sexy'.
From bassline, jackin got its penchant for big, mellifluous diva vocals, good-times-toasting MC patter and cheeky pop bootlegs. Most importantly, from bassline jackin got its bass: big, bolshy bass; bass that overpowers the other elements; bass that would be turned away at the door at classy house events.
But those these elements - snappy 4x4 beats, cheesy, crowd pleasing vocals, oversized bass lines - are the core of jackin, there's more to it than that. At its best Jackin is kitchen-sink UK house, in the tradition of Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada, both of whom have been serviced with the jackin treatment to great effect.
More than that Jackin is a topography of a specifically Northern British dance tradition - evoking everything from bassline to Northern soul, via organ house, speed garage, happy hardcore, donk and jungle, and at times reaching to a pan-UK pop history which includes 2-step garage, dubstep, and the imported RnB and hip hop American hits that topped the charts here.
The difference between this music history in a blender and the internetty mush I decry in London-centric UK Bass, is that Jackin is the response to a specific Northern tradition, it's not a random assortment of influences gathered from soundcloud and youtube (thought the artists are all very much plugged in, the music disseminated through 2k12 digital channels), but local influences absorbed into the music through a regional IRL scene, and absorbed through the memory of other local scenes. Simply put, jackin is exactly what you'd expect Northern rave music to sound like in 2k12, and it's strong because of its basis in The Real.
Apart from this Jackin succeeds where UK Bass fails not only because it takes itself far less seriously:
The Anchorman sample ALONE here cements jackin as the true heir to 'ardcore
But because it is a scene which corresponds to a sound. Whereas if you say a song sounds like UK bass I have 0% idea what you might be referring to - in regards to its rhythmic pattern, its sound pallet etc. - if you tell me a song has a jackin bass then I know what to expect from the bass line. This is a sign of the scenius at work - a creative community that is stronger because its members share good ideas, not one in which such a premium is given to individual expression that there's no sense of collective purpose.
I've seen this drop do things to people...
Specifically, jackin doesn't just have a sound, but it has a new sound, a sonic innovation, in what I call its hollow-donk-warp-owl-bass.
Check at 1:14
Reliable sources tell me that the sound was one hidden away under layers of midrange in bassline, and that the innovation here consists of bringing it to the forefront, giving it space, and making it "cooler". The sound is made by taking a speed garage warp:
2:05
Then ramping up the attack, and filtering it through high-end, spacey/contemporary F-X. If dubstep innovated by giving the sub-bass some space, and then through its wobble, jackin runs with these innovations and furthers them by making the bassline carry the melody, wobbly arpegiated melody.
It's space aged shit, and its impact upon the body in the dance is like nothing else before.
Tracks which meant a lot to me in particular include Tom Shorterz - We Are The Stars
Garage to the future, this track perfectly evokes that moment in 1995/1996 when the Brits first tried their hands at American garage house - labels like Nice and Ripe, Confetti etc. but it updates this pallet for a 2k12 sensibility. The track is glorious and euphoric throughout, but something rather magic happens at 2:45 when the female MC and organ sounds come in.
Donkie Punch n Lorenzo - Snapbacks & TattoosTo pick just a single Lorenzo tune would be to commit a great violence, and indeed, if you look at the tracks throughout this list the tag '& Lorenzo' appears again and again. Lorenzo, one half of Cause & Affect is without a doubt the greatest producer of the year. Lending his engineering skills to countless collaborations which populate and dominate the bigtunesmp3 best selling charts, as well as his work with C&A, I count no less than 41 tracks this year in my iTunes folder, of which perhaps 30 are total classics. There has not been a producer with this kind of hit rate since Wiley, or perhaps the DMZ guys if you're being generous. The year wouldn't have been the same without him.
Majestic - Let's Go Back (Cause & Affect remix)The first track on the Marcus Nasty mix, the track which started it all, the track that was so good I had to wheel it about 10 times before I could bring myself to move on to the next track. This one's a true collaboration between Majestic's nostalgic vocals and C&S's futuristic production. It starts with one of the most perfect build ups in dance music, going from the shuffling two-step, filling in with the thudding 4x4 bass drum, before pausing to build and then.... and then that drop. SNM
TUNE OF THE YEAR: Nick Hannam & Tom Garnett ft. Tom ZanettiNo competition - no single song got wheeled as much, got as much play on my iPod, made me and my friends smile so hard or gave me more faith in UK dance music's ability to revitalise itself.
The tune combines Nick Hannam's signature sound - deep, haunting, crisp-yet-murky, silly-yet-sexy - with Tom Zanetti's cool, bubbling, pure-Leeds-vybzin vocals, and that Said Ama sample. It sounds great at its native 124 bpm or pitched up to a ravey 132, on a poor quality pirate stream or a massive club system.
This is the perfect British pop song. Perfect. If there was any justice in the world this would have been number 1 in the charts, sung at school discos, sodcasted from people's Blackberries at the back of the bus, wheeled up and sung along to at raves across the country.
It helped make this year the best year I can remember for music. And just to reiterate, 2012 was a great year in music. Let's push the sound and make 2013 even better.
Happy New Year! XXX
Jack to the Future [ 26-Jun-12 2:39am ]So there's this big thing happening Up North called Jackin House and standandarly the southern blogaratti haven't clocked it at all.
Jackin House, or more commonly, just Jackin (also known as/near interchangable with Electroline) is basically Electro House mashed together with Bassline at about 130 bpm, with strong influences from Speed Garage and 2-step, a bit of Dubstep and Funky, and even traces of Jungle thrown in. The other way to think about it is that Jackin is to Electro House what UK Funky is to Funky House. Either way, what most seperates it from international Electro is the presence of MCs toasting over the top of it in the vybezy, bubbling vein of old skool garage, but the truth is it runs on a spectrum, ranging from a whole-lot-of-shite that's little more than Electro House + MCs to some stuff which is far more interesting and nuum'y.
Jackin is kind of a big deal. Marcus Nasty, Godfather/Don of UK Funky has up and jumped ship:
(This is THE Jackin mix to get to know) Leed's main man Tom Zanetti has about as many Facebook fans as Joy Orbison (29,274 vs. 33,478), and in many cities across the North, Bassline is out and Jackin is in. This is a new twist, a new chapter in the 25 year history of the hardcore continuum, yet it's been getting no recognition or love from any of the usual suspects. This seems like critical neglect.
To be fair to the bloggers, Jackin has any number of things going against it. For one the name's been taken, like, 25 years ago. Jackin shouldn't even be a genre name, it's an adjective: a type of house that jacks, which you can jack to. Popularly understood, it refers to hard hitting dancefloor Chicago trax from the 80s, which makes searching for information about this new northern stuff really difficult.
The second thing is how it bleeds into other genres at all edges, with barely any solid core to grip on to. Simon Reynolds has spoken before of this 'plausibile deniability', whereby as dance genres increasingly seek out the space between existing poles of influence rather than exploring new zones of sonic possibility, it becomes increasingly easy to deny that there's any meaningful difference between, say, Tech-Step and Neuro Funk; Jackin and Electro. Combined with this is a 'whachucallit' syndrome, where on bigtunesmp3 (a dedicated online retailer for the stuff, and from where I'm sitting down Saaf, something of its mecca) every tune is tagged mulitiple times as both Jackin and Electroline, Warper, House, Bass, and Funky, befitting the fact that Jackin is as of yet a space where many influences combine without any new sound to call all its own.
Finally is the matter of just what a parr how much of it is. Bigtunesmp3 is flooded with painfully poorly produced tunes amounting to little more than bait Electro House with some swag northern MC toasting on top of it. It's barely its own thing and most of it's shite; why would you pay attention to this scene?
Because this is nuum shit, that's why! It's a scene filling the gap left by the decline of Bassline, listened to by northern nuumy contingent of multi-racial livin-for-the-weekend ravers.
Musically it's most obvious link to the nuum is the presence of MCs toasting over the top in the champagne and good times vein or Jungle/Garage/Funky/Bassline rather than the darkside verbal pyrotechnics of Grime. But on top of this sonically, at its best it brings together the most winsome elements of the nuum's 20 something years of history in a manner neither pastiche or hauntological, but true to the spirit of rave. Tracks with a bassline/dubstep wobble are called 'wobblers'. Tracks using the Double 99/187 Lockdown Speed Garage bass warp are, fittingly, called 'warpers'. It mixes a 4x4 bounce with the shuffly Dem 2 high hats, bringing the swing and at times traces of Funky in the snares. It's got the vocal science of 2-step (see the Burkie tune above) and some tunes, like this one even bring the Ragga chat and Amen break of Jungle. On top of all these sonic signifiers are other promising signs of 'nuumental activity, not least the surfeit of cheeky pop tune bootlegs:
Though all too commonly, it lies too close for comfort to the Electro sphere of influence, it's clear that Jackin is the latest chapter in the history of the Hardcore Continuum, a summary of which now runs: Hardcore - Jungle - DnB - Speed Garage - 2-step - Grime - Dubstep - Bassline - Funky - Jackin.
And though as of yet Jackin doesn't have a sound all of its own (though that steely, hollow warpy bass is pretty distinctive), there's no reason that it can't develop one. For now, it might be fair to call Jackin one of the first Metamodernist dance scenes, neither straight forwardly postmodern/revivalist nor jetting off into a modernist future, a tension perfectly encapsulated by the first tune of the Marcus Nasty mix (A remix of Majestic's Let's Go Back, but I'm DESPERATELY searching for an ID if anyone's got it).
It starts with a skippy 4x4 garage beat while Majestic spits about the jokes old days of cheap McDonalds and Garage Raves in the early 2000s, untill he gets to these lines:
We can't go back,
That's in the past when I reminisce now
Bring on the future, here for the day,
I'll be making music come what may.
I don't come from the Old Skool,
But I got to big up the Old Skool,
Reminiscing for times when I was younger,
To this day I still got the hunger.
And it breaks into a cavernous, space-age-shiny j-j-jackin bass riff destined for insta-wheelup and total dance duppiage. Jack to the Future? Yeah, alright then.
P.S. Big up my fellow Voodoo ravers, my boys Frankly $ick and Jack Jambie. They got me into this shit, and they're killer DJs each of them. #crewlove
RUFF HOUSE: Part 1 [ 03-Mar-12 11:48am ]YO. Haven't blogged in ages and thought I'd ease myself into with a big splurge of youtube.
Big debates going on ATM about the state of the scene.
Some people think that a return to first principals - in Dance music, this means House - is just what the doctor ordered for the Dubstep scene, and that the space where 'UK Bass' - a vom inducing term that tries to hide that we don't got a sound at the moment - and House collides is a particularly fertile one. I think it probably makes House a bit more interesting and UK music a fuck lot more boring.
But also, I don't see why there's any need for it to happen, when around 2006 Grime producers cottoned onto American and European Funky House - like this:
And rather than subtly incorporate a few UK influences around the edges of this, totally transformed it into something hard, gully and ridiculously fun, bringing it into an amazing tradition of hyper energetic, multi-cultural UK dance music that reaches back through Grime, Dubstep and Garage all the way to Jungle and Rave. UK Funky. This post is basically a 'fuck me, UK Funky was/is/can be so good! LOOK HOW GOOD IT IS.
This time round I'm going to be focusing on the darker, ruffer stuff from 2007-2010. What was great about UK Funky though is the way it mixed this harder aesthetic with loads of amazing gyal tunes, big poppy vocal numbers and kept the ideas of light/dark, male/female, pop song/dj tune gloriously in tension, so I'll look at some of the other strands + the more recent output from the scene in later posts.
Big debates going on ATM about the state of the scene.
Some people think that a return to first principals - in Dance music, this means House - is just what the doctor ordered for the Dubstep scene, and that the space where 'UK Bass' - a vom inducing term that tries to hide that we don't got a sound at the moment - and House collides is a particularly fertile one. I think it probably makes House a bit more interesting and UK music a fuck lot more boring.
But also, I don't see why there's any need for it to happen, when around 2006 Grime producers cottoned onto American and European Funky House - like this:
And rather than subtly incorporate a few UK influences around the edges of this, totally transformed it into something hard, gully and ridiculously fun, bringing it into an amazing tradition of hyper energetic, multi-cultural UK dance music that reaches back through Grime, Dubstep and Garage all the way to Jungle and Rave. UK Funky. This post is basically a 'fuck me, UK Funky was/is/can be so good! LOOK HOW GOOD IT IS.
This time round I'm going to be focusing on the darker, ruffer stuff from 2007-2010. What was great about UK Funky though is the way it mixed this harder aesthetic with loads of amazing gyal tunes, big poppy vocal numbers and kept the ideas of light/dark, male/female, pop song/dj tune gloriously in tension, so I'll look at some of the other strands + the more recent output from the scene in later posts.
Atari Teenage Riot [ 09-Aug-11 9:49pm ]There's been a lot of opinion written on the #londonriots. The main divide seems to be between those who think this is 'pure and simple', 'just criminality', and those who see the matter in its complexity. The first view point is understandable from the standing point of the ruling classes. If this matter were complex, more than an act of mindless animals, then that might necessitate a rethink of an action like scrapping EMA. It would necessitate the entire political class, all the major parties to admit the abject failure of the Neo-Liberal project. It would also force a wider rethink of our own negligence of communities such as Tottenham and Brixton, our own role in the hollowing out of the social sphere.
Those who seek to probe the causes of these outbursts beyond shouting 'thuggishness' (say it aloud over and over again) are charged with the difficulties of articulating the questions of blame and causality and potential plans of action to be drawn from these.
Seeing the enormity of this task, I thought I'd restrict myself to trying to answer the question 'what about these protests is political'. The question is not 'are these protests political'. I'm a Marxist. Of course they are. But they are not political in the sense that most liberals/lefties have argued so far.
The argument runs like this:
"I understand that there are legitimate concerns with police brutality and cuts to youth services etc. But there are people out there who are just using this as an excuse to get a new TV".
This forms a neat parallel with what was said of the student protests:
"I'm against tuition fees but some people are just using these protests as an excuse to smash shit".
But these riots are not the student protests, and though the Left was right to challenge the division of 'good' and 'bad' protesters then, they are wrong not to see that there is a big difference between the vigil for Mark Duggan and the mass looting taking place across the country. The latter are far more 'political'.
The idea is meant to be that there are some people with legitimate political concerns re: police and poverty and that there are others who are 'stupid', 'greedy', 'selfish', with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes. Every society everywhere has some people who are willing to clash with police, who are willing to risk jail for their political beliefs. But what the fuck does it say about our society that there are so many with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes? What does it say about our society that there are so many who would have no guilt in stealing them?
I wouldn't mind getting a PS3 for free. But I could never steal one. For one I'd feel guilty, because stealing goes against social conventions and society's treated me well. And secondly, I'd be scared, because I'm part of that tiny minority who are privileged enough to have received an expensive education providing the skill-set and the networks/networking skills and all the life opportunities that arise from that. If I were to steal a TV and get caught doing so, it would fuck up those opportunities. Clearly my life is too good for looting to be worth it.
The majority of people have something that means that the risk of prison or social exclusion for stealing a £50 pair of shoes isn't worth it. You don't need loads of money for the algebra not to add up. A caring family might be your dissuasion. Your religion. Your diploma course. Your part time job. That tune you're working on in Reason. Some of us have every reason, and most of us have a few, to think "should I go riot? Nah". The people out at night on the High Streets of Britain now, have none.
The left have talk much of 'simmering anger', this is certainly one component in the mix of social unrest, but what about simmering boredom? The question on people's lips is 'why are these people rioting', but perhaps the question should be 'why wouldn't they'?
Politicians can't see any political message to be drawn from the eruption into the public consciousness of thousands of people around the country with so little stake in society, so little to loose, so little to do with a long hot summer and no EMA, no spending money, no youth centres to do anything in that they're willing to risk jail time for the thrill of a firebomb and a new TV. If they want to see an end to #londonriots11 and avoid #londonriots12 they better look a bit closer
Those who seek to probe the causes of these outbursts beyond shouting 'thuggishness' (say it aloud over and over again) are charged with the difficulties of articulating the questions of blame and causality and potential plans of action to be drawn from these.
Seeing the enormity of this task, I thought I'd restrict myself to trying to answer the question 'what about these protests is political'. The question is not 'are these protests political'. I'm a Marxist. Of course they are. But they are not political in the sense that most liberals/lefties have argued so far.
The argument runs like this:
"I understand that there are legitimate concerns with police brutality and cuts to youth services etc. But there are people out there who are just using this as an excuse to get a new TV".
This forms a neat parallel with what was said of the student protests:
"I'm against tuition fees but some people are just using these protests as an excuse to smash shit".
But these riots are not the student protests, and though the Left was right to challenge the division of 'good' and 'bad' protesters then, they are wrong not to see that there is a big difference between the vigil for Mark Duggan and the mass looting taking place across the country. The latter are far more 'political'.
The idea is meant to be that there are some people with legitimate political concerns re: police and poverty and that there are others who are 'stupid', 'greedy', 'selfish', with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes. Every society everywhere has some people who are willing to clash with police, who are willing to risk jail for their political beliefs. But what the fuck does it say about our society that there are so many with no higher motive than acquiring a new pair of Nikes? What does it say about our society that there are so many who would have no guilt in stealing them?
I wouldn't mind getting a PS3 for free. But I could never steal one. For one I'd feel guilty, because stealing goes against social conventions and society's treated me well. And secondly, I'd be scared, because I'm part of that tiny minority who are privileged enough to have received an expensive education providing the skill-set and the networks/networking skills and all the life opportunities that arise from that. If I were to steal a TV and get caught doing so, it would fuck up those opportunities. Clearly my life is too good for looting to be worth it.
The majority of people have something that means that the risk of prison or social exclusion for stealing a £50 pair of shoes isn't worth it. You don't need loads of money for the algebra not to add up. A caring family might be your dissuasion. Your religion. Your diploma course. Your part time job. That tune you're working on in Reason. Some of us have every reason, and most of us have a few, to think "should I go riot? Nah". The people out at night on the High Streets of Britain now, have none.
The left have talk much of 'simmering anger', this is certainly one component in the mix of social unrest, but what about simmering boredom? The question on people's lips is 'why are these people rioting', but perhaps the question should be 'why wouldn't they'?
Politicians can't see any political message to be drawn from the eruption into the public consciousness of thousands of people around the country with so little stake in society, so little to loose, so little to do with a long hot summer and no EMA, no spending money, no youth centres to do anything in that they're willing to risk jail time for the thrill of a firebomb and a new TV. If they want to see an end to #londonriots11 and avoid #londonriots12 they better look a bit closer
Fucking Voodoo Magic, Man [ 06-Jul-11 10:45pm ]!!!!
!!!!@1111?!11
come 2 this this this this this this this this this
U NO IT MAKES SENSE.
Definitely come, you've got nothing better to do and there's nowhere else in London you're going to hear any Juke or Bassline in the next 6 months xxx
!!!!@1111?!11
come 2 this this this this this this this this this
U NO IT MAKES SENSE.
Definitely come, you've got nothing better to do and there's nowhere else in London you're going to hear any Juke or Bassline in the next 6 months xxx
Abandoned Ship (The future of British Bass) [ 25-Mar-11 3:26pm ]Crisis averted.
The future of the Hardcore Continuum is secured.
The future of the Hardcore Continuum is secured.
This Unfolds (10 reasons to see Four Tet this Friday 25th @Plastic People) [ 22-Mar-11 3:51pm ]10 >>
9 >>
8 >>
7 >>
6 >>
5 >>
4 >>
3 >>
2 >>
1 >>
9 >>
8 >>
7 >>
6 >>
5 >>
4 >>
3 >>
2 >>
1 >>
Wut (Fashion tips for the Far-Left) [ 09-Jan-11 6:02pm ]This article is obviously not going to be a list of fashion tips for the Far-Left. That would be a stoopid article. What I would like to do is talk a bit about the relationship between emancipatory politics and fashion. Firstly because fashionistas seem to be quite bad at defending the political and social worth of what they do, and secondly because there's a current of philistinism in the Left which I think is misguided and perhaps even counter-productive.
At its worst fashion is vacuous and self-obsessed. The Fashion Industry is notoriously cut-throat and bitchy. Fashion marketing is perhaps the worst culprit in the "YOU ARE WORTHLESS/UGLY - BUY OUR SHIT AND YOU WILL BE WORTHY/PRETTY" line of work. This, combined with the size-zero culture of the cat-walk can probably take the majority of the blame for the heart-wretching rise in anorexia and other eating disorders in the developed world. High Street fashion has its brutal sweat-shops. High End fashion has its fur. To judge someone for their clothing seems to be the most brazen example of book/cover and is riddled with the risk of enforcing cultural stereotypes and classist prejudices. The very concept of fashion itself - that something is 'in' one day and 'out' the next - seems like it was concocted by evil genius/idiot to rape the planet for the lulz of it. It enforces destructive and archaic gender roles. Yes, with a list of crimes like this it would seem like it was duty of the Left to find fashion guilty and revert to Anarcho-Primativism/German nudism. Which I'm not wholly opposed to
However, fashion is important. In fact, to define 'important' narrowly, fashion and architecture are the most important of arts in that they are both the only completely unavoidable arts in modern society. Everyone wears clothes, and every street has buildings. Fashion weighs heavier in our cultural memory than perhaps anything else. If you think of the 60s, you see hippies in floral dresses and tie-dye whatever. Think of the 70s and you see flares and punks. Think of the Japanese and you either see terrifying panda-girls or geisha and samurai. Think of the Mexicans and you see sombreros. Considering the aesthetic ubiquity and social significance of fashion I would rather say that it is the duty of the Left to firstly understand fashion and to ultimately appropriate it for our own ends.
I think the first step to defending fashion is simply to recognise that some people really really love it. The number of lefties in the world of music is probably disproportionate to their numbers in the general population, so when I talk about a passion for music I think it's a language most of us can understand. The world of work and our pop-culture at large are incredibly alienating. In the workplaces of our regimented jobs there is no community, and as mass-culture becomes ever more commodified it provides no space for individual expression. We get the isolation of individualism but the conformity of communalism. 8 hour routine jobs then 6 hours shit TV then bed then death. The people who are best able to survive in today's world are those who have something they truly love to escape to. You can call this escapism, you can work it into the framework of John Holloway's Crack Capitalism, or Hakim Bey's theory of Temporary Autonomous Zones, you can even get old-skool and Marxy and talk about religions and opiates. Religion no longer matters to anyone, but music does, and the important thing to remember is that if somebody's leg has just been cut off you sure as fuck don't take away their opiates! Playing in a band is a very obvious way of creating the space for the best of communalism and individualism, but I would argue too that a real love for the listening of music is a qualitatively different thing to the mere consumption of it. And in the same way my life is richer and more meaningful for debates about the difference between 4x4 and Speed Garage and piecing together the roots of Burial back into old Foul Play and El-B tracks, people's souls have been saved, not only by the creative/colaborative act of designing clothes, but by recreating outfits from old films and perusing 50 vintage shops in search of the perfect cardigan. And in the same way Dubstep moves beyond necessary escape-route into a revolutionary weapon when it's used to soundtrack kettle-breaking, a good suit takes on a new political baggage when the person inside it abuses policemen with Byron. You can't get away with smashing a Starbucks unless everyone's dressed in all-black.
I think this last point relates to the notion of fashion and tribalism. Though fashion can be an individual act of playfulness, it almost always has a social role in projecting an image to others. It's for this reason that I think it's misguided to think that those who spend a lot of effort on their clothes are necessarily narcissistic, as a carefully constructed costume can just as much mean "I'm making an effort for you". But regardless, an interesting element of fashion is its role as a social signifier stating one's membership of a group. When we talk of teen tribes we mean groups of young people who wear similar clothes and hang out with each other. Fashion is not the only thing that defines these groups, music, drug choice and all sorts of rituals play their part, and so we can be pretty sure that the kids in one corner of the canteen in the hoodies listen to grime and the kids in the other in Nirvana hoodies and baggie jeans listen to, well, Nirvana. This seems like a negative thing. There are often tensions between the groups that can escalate into violence, it seems a means to divide people of the same class background and with the same material interests. If Socialists are to reject Nationalism, we should surely reject all fashion tribalism, right? But to me there is probably something more healthy about people organizing themselves around communities based upon shared interests and tastes rather than the wholly arbitrary divisions of the nation state. Socialists may call for the abolition of the nation state, but we certainly shouldn't call for the abolition of cultural and regional diversity. And one of the most inspiring things about this recent Student Movement is that is has brought together pretty art-school students in fur coats with indie kids and revolutionary Rastafari and grime'eads from council estates all in the same place at the same time fighting for the same thing. And it's the presence of all these different fashion cultures that allows us to talk of a broad coalition and not just a big interest group. Of course, when crunch-time comes, people must know that their true loyalty is to the struggle and class solidarity and not their tribe, but to the extent that class solidarity is achieved then I think the spaces of aesthetic nationhood can be a breeding ground for communalist sentiment and cultural-assertion and the diversity this brings is only a good thing.
The final topic I was to address is fashion and class relations. It would seem like the easiest criticism of what I have said so far is that it is incredibly class-coded and that it's all very well for me as a posh Socialist to talk about how great clothes are but that many people just don't have the money to dress well or the time to think about it. Yes, Fashion is incredibly class-coded and clothes are one of the most instant tip-offs of someone's wealth and status. Of course single mothers with 3 kids who are living on the appallingly inadequate welfare state don't have the means to be fashion conscious, which is to say nothing of the developing world where so many of our cheap-clothes are sweat-shoppingly sweat-shopped. Nor is any of this is to deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that different cultures and classes have different notions of taste. However I reckon that class barriers to fashion are less now than they have ever been, that the class-coding of fashion is something that can be manipulated and played with, and that just because many people can't afford to dress as they like it doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to.
In fashion as in politics the internet has seriously eroded many of the old hierarchies and power structures. Blogs are able to prove that what the big fashion magazines say is 'in' or 'out' bares no relation to what people actually like to wear. Street photography means that anyone with the ability to put together a creative and unusual outfit can show it to millions of people without having to be spotted looking like a stick-insect and working up through the fashion industry. On a rather less technological front, the rise of second hand/charity shop/vintage fashion - through predictable gentrified and co-opted into fancy overpriced shops, like all good things - has made interesting clothes from throughout the ages widely available and highly affordable, seriously damaging the Tax-Dodging-Top-Shopping-Next-Oligarchy's ability to make everyone look the same. Furthermore, owing largely to Labour's (too-few, too-meager) wealth redistribution schemes, perhaps most notably EMA, millions of kids for the first time in their life have had the money to go out and buy some nice clothes. Incidentally, when people say we should replace the EMA with something more targeted like free transport for the 16-19s and free school books, the answer is no, we should supplement EMA with such schemes, we're not fighting for a world in which everyone has just the bare material necessities, but one in which people can actually enjoy their lives. Some of my most fashionable friends are those on the dole and conversely, as a student in Cambridge, I can assure everyone that money does not buy taste. Fashion in the abstract then, is less exclusive than ever.
However, in as far as clothes still do tell a tale of class and fortune I think there are radical opportunities for subversion and assertion. I think we feel uncomfortable with the culture of fake Burberry not just out of some Kunderian concept of totalitarian kitsch, but also because it reveals how deeply the poison Thatcherite notion that 'we're all middle class now' has permeated into the working class. Likewise as mentioned before, there is something tragic about gentrification, about the ability of capitalism and the ruling classes to steal the most vibrant elements of working class culture, package it, and sell it back to them for a profit. Hence £3 cardigans from Portobello Market going for £50 down the road in Notting Hill and John Lewis selling pink/punk baby t-shirts. For Punk, of course, was a working class culture which beautifully displayed the subversive potential of fashion. It inverted dandyism and said 'what ever you say is ugly we say is pretty' and genuinely created a moral panic and rupture in the social fabric of Britain. I think we need a punk for the 21st Century. I also think we need to learn from Caroline Lucas. Caroline Lucas is one of the top-5 radical voices in Parliament (others: Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, somebody help me out here). The Green Party advocates for a maximum wage and the nationalisation of transport, yet she wins votes from Conservatives. This is no doubt because she is highly intelligent and a brilliant advocate of the cause, but it is also because she is able to articulate radical policies while not seeming like a radical. This is partly because she wears a nice suit. The problem with New Labour is that they thought "this country is full of Right Wing reactionaries who read The Daily Mail, we can never win an election on a platform of Social Democracy, what we have to do is publicly espouse Right Wing reactionary policies and sneak whatever scraps of progressivism we can under the table to the dog/working class while nobody's watching". Really they should have realised that nobody believes in anything anyway and people will vote for an 80% upper rate of taxation and the abolition of the army if they're told to by somebody reasonable sounding in a nice suit. We need more Socialists in nice suits.
The final argument is that in a world where people are dying every day of curable diseases and the wealth divide is ever increasing, it is frivolous and exclusionary to care about fashion. The problem with this is it borrows the language of the mushy centre, the Social Capitalists who say that pushing for revolution in a world where there are so many problems in the here and now is dangerous and delusory. Don't join a revolutionary party, just give to Oxfam. We can have a revolution once we've dealt with Africa. Of course this is a fallacy. While accepting that of course charity keeps people alive within a brutal system, if you don't work to destroy the system itself and put something better in its place then there will always be unnecessary deaths. In parallel to this, fashion, music, art, are all in fact more important than feeding the poor. Bare with me, I'm going to get a bit Wilde here. We want a world in which everyone has enough food to survive, a roof over their heads, freedom from aggression, clean water, free education, free high-quality health-care. But we don't want this for it's own sake. The fact is this is simply the starting point for something much, much better. Feeding Indian children in 2011 is 100% necessary, and it's also a complete waste of time and effort. Nobody should have to dedicate their life, their altruism and energy to feed the poor, because we should have a system where the equal and just allocation of goods takes place as a matter of course. It is not a lack of resources and technology that causes hunger, but an unequal distribution of them. When we have a system of equal distribution in place, the human mind will be free to focus on far more challenging, far more creative, far more fulfilling things. Like fashion.
I started writing this when thinking about the stereotype image of the scruffy Left. Then thinking about the partial truth of that image. Then I thought about the the wicked-cool Marxists who own the vintage shop at 295 Portobello Road. Then I saw this post on a friend's fashion blog And the more I thought about it the more I realized how everyone I know involved in fashion in some way is pretty right-on, and there must be something to it. The occupations are amazing spaces were all voices are listened to equally regardless of gender, sex, party political background, race, class, and regardless of if you're decked out in a sharp suit or an old "Hostky for Trotsky" t-shirt (these don't exist, but I want them to). But within the Left at large, on a lot of internet discussion there's been a vibe of hostility towards students in suits and anyone who looks a bit middle class. This can been seen in some of the nasty and overly personal sniping at (and not the justified 'no enemies on the left' tactical critique of) Laurie Penny from Far-Left or the language of the debate around Charlie Gilmour and his outburst of patriotism. This is A Bad Thing™. I would never try to imply that those who just aren't interested in fashion should be, and I would never try to dictate my own personal aesthetics on anyone else. But I argue that the term 'Fashionable Leftist' is not a contradiction in terms nor a hypocrisy. If we can excuse his old-fashioned notions of gender and his technophobia, I'd like to bring in some William Morris. In his fantasy piece of the Socialist utopia - 'News From Nowhere' - everyone spends their time writing poetry, carving tobacco pipes and making and sharing beautiful clothes. I dig.
At its worst fashion is vacuous and self-obsessed. The Fashion Industry is notoriously cut-throat and bitchy. Fashion marketing is perhaps the worst culprit in the "YOU ARE WORTHLESS/UGLY - BUY OUR SHIT AND YOU WILL BE WORTHY/PRETTY" line of work. This, combined with the size-zero culture of the cat-walk can probably take the majority of the blame for the heart-wretching rise in anorexia and other eating disorders in the developed world. High Street fashion has its brutal sweat-shops. High End fashion has its fur. To judge someone for their clothing seems to be the most brazen example of book/cover and is riddled with the risk of enforcing cultural stereotypes and classist prejudices. The very concept of fashion itself - that something is 'in' one day and 'out' the next - seems like it was concocted by evil genius/idiot to rape the planet for the lulz of it. It enforces destructive and archaic gender roles. Yes, with a list of crimes like this it would seem like it was duty of the Left to find fashion guilty and revert to Anarcho-Primativism/German nudism. Which I'm not wholly opposed to
However, fashion is important. In fact, to define 'important' narrowly, fashion and architecture are the most important of arts in that they are both the only completely unavoidable arts in modern society. Everyone wears clothes, and every street has buildings. Fashion weighs heavier in our cultural memory than perhaps anything else. If you think of the 60s, you see hippies in floral dresses and tie-dye whatever. Think of the 70s and you see flares and punks. Think of the Japanese and you either see terrifying panda-girls or geisha and samurai. Think of the Mexicans and you see sombreros. Considering the aesthetic ubiquity and social significance of fashion I would rather say that it is the duty of the Left to firstly understand fashion and to ultimately appropriate it for our own ends.
I think the first step to defending fashion is simply to recognise that some people really really love it. The number of lefties in the world of music is probably disproportionate to their numbers in the general population, so when I talk about a passion for music I think it's a language most of us can understand. The world of work and our pop-culture at large are incredibly alienating. In the workplaces of our regimented jobs there is no community, and as mass-culture becomes ever more commodified it provides no space for individual expression. We get the isolation of individualism but the conformity of communalism. 8 hour routine jobs then 6 hours shit TV then bed then death. The people who are best able to survive in today's world are those who have something they truly love to escape to. You can call this escapism, you can work it into the framework of John Holloway's Crack Capitalism, or Hakim Bey's theory of Temporary Autonomous Zones, you can even get old-skool and Marxy and talk about religions and opiates. Religion no longer matters to anyone, but music does, and the important thing to remember is that if somebody's leg has just been cut off you sure as fuck don't take away their opiates! Playing in a band is a very obvious way of creating the space for the best of communalism and individualism, but I would argue too that a real love for the listening of music is a qualitatively different thing to the mere consumption of it. And in the same way my life is richer and more meaningful for debates about the difference between 4x4 and Speed Garage and piecing together the roots of Burial back into old Foul Play and El-B tracks, people's souls have been saved, not only by the creative/colaborative act of designing clothes, but by recreating outfits from old films and perusing 50 vintage shops in search of the perfect cardigan. And in the same way Dubstep moves beyond necessary escape-route into a revolutionary weapon when it's used to soundtrack kettle-breaking, a good suit takes on a new political baggage when the person inside it abuses policemen with Byron. You can't get away with smashing a Starbucks unless everyone's dressed in all-black.
I think this last point relates to the notion of fashion and tribalism. Though fashion can be an individual act of playfulness, it almost always has a social role in projecting an image to others. It's for this reason that I think it's misguided to think that those who spend a lot of effort on their clothes are necessarily narcissistic, as a carefully constructed costume can just as much mean "I'm making an effort for you". But regardless, an interesting element of fashion is its role as a social signifier stating one's membership of a group. When we talk of teen tribes we mean groups of young people who wear similar clothes and hang out with each other. Fashion is not the only thing that defines these groups, music, drug choice and all sorts of rituals play their part, and so we can be pretty sure that the kids in one corner of the canteen in the hoodies listen to grime and the kids in the other in Nirvana hoodies and baggie jeans listen to, well, Nirvana. This seems like a negative thing. There are often tensions between the groups that can escalate into violence, it seems a means to divide people of the same class background and with the same material interests. If Socialists are to reject Nationalism, we should surely reject all fashion tribalism, right? But to me there is probably something more healthy about people organizing themselves around communities based upon shared interests and tastes rather than the wholly arbitrary divisions of the nation state. Socialists may call for the abolition of the nation state, but we certainly shouldn't call for the abolition of cultural and regional diversity. And one of the most inspiring things about this recent Student Movement is that is has brought together pretty art-school students in fur coats with indie kids and revolutionary Rastafari and grime'eads from council estates all in the same place at the same time fighting for the same thing. And it's the presence of all these different fashion cultures that allows us to talk of a broad coalition and not just a big interest group. Of course, when crunch-time comes, people must know that their true loyalty is to the struggle and class solidarity and not their tribe, but to the extent that class solidarity is achieved then I think the spaces of aesthetic nationhood can be a breeding ground for communalist sentiment and cultural-assertion and the diversity this brings is only a good thing.
The final topic I was to address is fashion and class relations. It would seem like the easiest criticism of what I have said so far is that it is incredibly class-coded and that it's all very well for me as a posh Socialist to talk about how great clothes are but that many people just don't have the money to dress well or the time to think about it. Yes, Fashion is incredibly class-coded and clothes are one of the most instant tip-offs of someone's wealth and status. Of course single mothers with 3 kids who are living on the appallingly inadequate welfare state don't have the means to be fashion conscious, which is to say nothing of the developing world where so many of our cheap-clothes are sweat-shoppingly sweat-shopped. Nor is any of this is to deny that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and that different cultures and classes have different notions of taste. However I reckon that class barriers to fashion are less now than they have ever been, that the class-coding of fashion is something that can be manipulated and played with, and that just because many people can't afford to dress as they like it doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to.
In fashion as in politics the internet has seriously eroded many of the old hierarchies and power structures. Blogs are able to prove that what the big fashion magazines say is 'in' or 'out' bares no relation to what people actually like to wear. Street photography means that anyone with the ability to put together a creative and unusual outfit can show it to millions of people without having to be spotted looking like a stick-insect and working up through the fashion industry. On a rather less technological front, the rise of second hand/charity shop/vintage fashion - through predictable gentrified and co-opted into fancy overpriced shops, like all good things - has made interesting clothes from throughout the ages widely available and highly affordable, seriously damaging the Tax-Dodging-Top-Shopping-Next-Oligarchy's ability to make everyone look the same. Furthermore, owing largely to Labour's (too-few, too-meager) wealth redistribution schemes, perhaps most notably EMA, millions of kids for the first time in their life have had the money to go out and buy some nice clothes. Incidentally, when people say we should replace the EMA with something more targeted like free transport for the 16-19s and free school books, the answer is no, we should supplement EMA with such schemes, we're not fighting for a world in which everyone has just the bare material necessities, but one in which people can actually enjoy their lives. Some of my most fashionable friends are those on the dole and conversely, as a student in Cambridge, I can assure everyone that money does not buy taste. Fashion in the abstract then, is less exclusive than ever.
However, in as far as clothes still do tell a tale of class and fortune I think there are radical opportunities for subversion and assertion. I think we feel uncomfortable with the culture of fake Burberry not just out of some Kunderian concept of totalitarian kitsch, but also because it reveals how deeply the poison Thatcherite notion that 'we're all middle class now' has permeated into the working class. Likewise as mentioned before, there is something tragic about gentrification, about the ability of capitalism and the ruling classes to steal the most vibrant elements of working class culture, package it, and sell it back to them for a profit. Hence £3 cardigans from Portobello Market going for £50 down the road in Notting Hill and John Lewis selling pink/punk baby t-shirts. For Punk, of course, was a working class culture which beautifully displayed the subversive potential of fashion. It inverted dandyism and said 'what ever you say is ugly we say is pretty' and genuinely created a moral panic and rupture in the social fabric of Britain. I think we need a punk for the 21st Century. I also think we need to learn from Caroline Lucas. Caroline Lucas is one of the top-5 radical voices in Parliament (others: Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, somebody help me out here). The Green Party advocates for a maximum wage and the nationalisation of transport, yet she wins votes from Conservatives. This is no doubt because she is highly intelligent and a brilliant advocate of the cause, but it is also because she is able to articulate radical policies while not seeming like a radical. This is partly because she wears a nice suit. The problem with New Labour is that they thought "this country is full of Right Wing reactionaries who read The Daily Mail, we can never win an election on a platform of Social Democracy, what we have to do is publicly espouse Right Wing reactionary policies and sneak whatever scraps of progressivism we can under the table to the dog/working class while nobody's watching". Really they should have realised that nobody believes in anything anyway and people will vote for an 80% upper rate of taxation and the abolition of the army if they're told to by somebody reasonable sounding in a nice suit. We need more Socialists in nice suits.
The final argument is that in a world where people are dying every day of curable diseases and the wealth divide is ever increasing, it is frivolous and exclusionary to care about fashion. The problem with this is it borrows the language of the mushy centre, the Social Capitalists who say that pushing for revolution in a world where there are so many problems in the here and now is dangerous and delusory. Don't join a revolutionary party, just give to Oxfam. We can have a revolution once we've dealt with Africa. Of course this is a fallacy. While accepting that of course charity keeps people alive within a brutal system, if you don't work to destroy the system itself and put something better in its place then there will always be unnecessary deaths. In parallel to this, fashion, music, art, are all in fact more important than feeding the poor. Bare with me, I'm going to get a bit Wilde here. We want a world in which everyone has enough food to survive, a roof over their heads, freedom from aggression, clean water, free education, free high-quality health-care. But we don't want this for it's own sake. The fact is this is simply the starting point for something much, much better. Feeding Indian children in 2011 is 100% necessary, and it's also a complete waste of time and effort. Nobody should have to dedicate their life, their altruism and energy to feed the poor, because we should have a system where the equal and just allocation of goods takes place as a matter of course. It is not a lack of resources and technology that causes hunger, but an unequal distribution of them. When we have a system of equal distribution in place, the human mind will be free to focus on far more challenging, far more creative, far more fulfilling things. Like fashion.
I started writing this when thinking about the stereotype image of the scruffy Left. Then thinking about the partial truth of that image. Then I thought about the the wicked-cool Marxists who own the vintage shop at 295 Portobello Road. Then I saw this post on a friend's fashion blog And the more I thought about it the more I realized how everyone I know involved in fashion in some way is pretty right-on, and there must be something to it. The occupations are amazing spaces were all voices are listened to equally regardless of gender, sex, party political background, race, class, and regardless of if you're decked out in a sharp suit or an old "Hostky for Trotsky" t-shirt (these don't exist, but I want them to). But within the Left at large, on a lot of internet discussion there's been a vibe of hostility towards students in suits and anyone who looks a bit middle class. This can been seen in some of the nasty and overly personal sniping at (and not the justified 'no enemies on the left' tactical critique of) Laurie Penny from Far-Left or the language of the debate around Charlie Gilmour and his outburst of patriotism. This is A Bad Thing™. I would never try to imply that those who just aren't interested in fashion should be, and I would never try to dictate my own personal aesthetics on anyone else. But I argue that the term 'Fashionable Leftist' is not a contradiction in terms nor a hypocrisy. If we can excuse his old-fashioned notions of gender and his technophobia, I'd like to bring in some William Morris. In his fantasy piece of the Socialist utopia - 'News From Nowhere' - everyone spends their time writing poetry, carving tobacco pipes and making and sharing beautiful clothes. I dig.
Open Your Mind - Foul Play [ 30-Dec-10 4:03pm ]Within this beautiful student movement there has been an ugly undercurrent of un-comradely reds-under-the-bed style attacks on the far-left. To the extent that our focus remains outwards and that we're all moving towards a similar goal, diversity and debate within the movement is only a good thing.
Emily Davis' notion that a "coalition of social-democrats and democratic-socialists" would constitute some sort of broad front is risible. So too is her Godwin baiting claim that "[Communists'] views are comparable to Fascism" in what is meant to be an article about left wing unity. The centre-left and the far-left can and must work together. Here are a couple of reasons why:
1) We share the same goals.
I am a Revolutionary Socialist, but I'm not a very revolutionary personality. Violence kind of scares me and I tend towards searching for practical solutions for immediate issues. If I believed that legislation and changing social attitudes could result in a global Norway; If I believed that reforming capitalism to purge it of its worse excesses could end with Zimbabwe having full employment on a 35 hour work week with a generous paternity and maternity leave system in place, then I would be a Social Democrat. Unfortunately I'm convinced that this isn't the case. The capitalistic economic system is a totality that absorbs and neutralizes dissent. This is why something radical like the post-Stonewall LGBT Rights movement ends up in the position today where its biggest public cause is the fight to allow LGBT people access to the reactionary institution of marriage. This is why seemingly permanent gains in people's living conditions, brought about by the welfare state, are in retreat across the developed world, even in the Nordic countries. Though the word 'revolution' seems big and scary, at its most basic it just refers to the need to change the basis of the economy away from one in which the market allocates goods and dictates price towards something different.
2) We need each other.
To look at Europe, the countries with the strongest and largest far-left organizations are those with strong centre-left traditions. A Marxist systemic analysis of the inevitable failure and end of capitalism, though objectively correct, is certainly less able to capture the public imagination than a pragmatic call of "let's raise wages". A strong centre-left provides a certain level of class-consciousness and the narrative of asserting one's rights which the far-left requires. But this relationship goes both ways. The Soviet Union was a Very Bad Thing™. But we in the developed world also owe the Social Democratic gains of the post-war to its existence. If it wasn't for the threat of this alternative economic system which completely did away with their class as a whole, the ruling classes of the Western World would not have so easily made the concessions of the welfare state that they did. It is significant that it is after the fall of the Berlin Wall that we see the rise of the 'Third Way' among the mainstream left, the Thatcherite pact with the devil pledging "there is no alternative". It takes a strong revolutionary current to scare the ruling classes into reformism.
Their are other benefits that we westerly comrades bring to the movement that the centre-left would do well not to forget. Our tradition and experience of direct action, our ability to get feet on the ground for demonstrations, our strong presence in the trade union movement and our ability to put students and workers in direct contact. I may disagree with the means of Social Democracts as ultimately ineffectual, but I would also hope to engage in productive dialogue in the spirit of solidarity and not aim to exclude them from the movement. To suggest that it was my place or Emily Davis' to decide who's in and who's out would run contrary to any notion of democracy. Social or otherwise.
Emily Davis' notion that a "coalition of social-democrats and democratic-socialists" would constitute some sort of broad front is risible. So too is her Godwin baiting claim that "[Communists'] views are comparable to Fascism" in what is meant to be an article about left wing unity. The centre-left and the far-left can and must work together. Here are a couple of reasons why:
1) We share the same goals.
I am a Revolutionary Socialist, but I'm not a very revolutionary personality. Violence kind of scares me and I tend towards searching for practical solutions for immediate issues. If I believed that legislation and changing social attitudes could result in a global Norway; If I believed that reforming capitalism to purge it of its worse excesses could end with Zimbabwe having full employment on a 35 hour work week with a generous paternity and maternity leave system in place, then I would be a Social Democrat. Unfortunately I'm convinced that this isn't the case. The capitalistic economic system is a totality that absorbs and neutralizes dissent. This is why something radical like the post-Stonewall LGBT Rights movement ends up in the position today where its biggest public cause is the fight to allow LGBT people access to the reactionary institution of marriage. This is why seemingly permanent gains in people's living conditions, brought about by the welfare state, are in retreat across the developed world, even in the Nordic countries. Though the word 'revolution' seems big and scary, at its most basic it just refers to the need to change the basis of the economy away from one in which the market allocates goods and dictates price towards something different.
2) We need each other.
To look at Europe, the countries with the strongest and largest far-left organizations are those with strong centre-left traditions. A Marxist systemic analysis of the inevitable failure and end of capitalism, though objectively correct, is certainly less able to capture the public imagination than a pragmatic call of "let's raise wages". A strong centre-left provides a certain level of class-consciousness and the narrative of asserting one's rights which the far-left requires. But this relationship goes both ways. The Soviet Union was a Very Bad Thing™. But we in the developed world also owe the Social Democratic gains of the post-war to its existence. If it wasn't for the threat of this alternative economic system which completely did away with their class as a whole, the ruling classes of the Western World would not have so easily made the concessions of the welfare state that they did. It is significant that it is after the fall of the Berlin Wall that we see the rise of the 'Third Way' among the mainstream left, the Thatcherite pact with the devil pledging "there is no alternative". It takes a strong revolutionary current to scare the ruling classes into reformism.
Their are other benefits that we westerly comrades bring to the movement that the centre-left would do well not to forget. Our tradition and experience of direct action, our ability to get feet on the ground for demonstrations, our strong presence in the trade union movement and our ability to put students and workers in direct contact. I may disagree with the means of Social Democracts as ultimately ineffectual, but I would also hope to engage in productive dialogue in the spirit of solidarity and not aim to exclude them from the movement. To suggest that it was my place or Emily Davis' to decide who's in and who's out would run contrary to any notion of democracy. Social or otherwise.
Top ten tunes to kettle-break to [ 26-Dec-10 7:01pm ]From the free-party and rave scene of the early 90s through to dubstep, grime and UK Funky today, there has been one force, one culture at the heart of Britain's alternative electronic music scene. This cultural phenomenon has been called the Hardcore Continuum ('nuum'), taking its name from the early days of Hardcore Rave and a simple time-line of it might read Rave>Hardcore Rave>Jungle>Drum and Bass at which point (sometime in the mid-90s) a lot of the big names and the mass of fans found things getting stale, moved into the second floor of the club, which played American Garage House, made it faster, bassier, darker, better, and then we get Garage and eventually its bastard daughters and sons; Dubstep, Grime, Bassline and more recently UK Funky. It has in other words pretty much contained every exciting strand of electronic music to come out of the UK this last 20 years. It is a continuum, or rather culture, because although its constituent parts sound nothing alike (rave and garage, grime and jungle), it has the same demographic (multi-cultural working class), the same hubs of activity (South and East London, outposts in Bristol and the North East), often the same DJs and producers (Steve Gurley who went from Jungle to Garage to Dubstep, El-B who went from Garage to Dubstep to UK Funky etc) the same means of distribution (pirate radio, small record shops, giant raves) and alongside an intense look-to-the-future Modernism, and sense of its roots in those that came before.
Another defining feature of this culture has been its almost total lack of political consciousness. Despite its roots in the self-assertion of the most marginalised sections of British society, despite the fact that the music itself is dark, anarchic and avant-guard to the extreme, despite how much energy and passion goes into the creation and expansion of this music (check this for an example of the insane lengths people went to to set up pirate radio stations), despite an explicitly combative stance to 'the mainstream', despite its energy and innovation deriving from the collectivity of the 'scenius' (good ideas are generated randomly, spread rapidly, with no question originality or providence) rather than the auteurship of select genius individuals, despite it's hyper-modernist dedication to progression - moving forward, the scene was never overtly political.
This has been to the immense detriment of the Left. Politics happens when an intellectual understanding of what is wrong combines with an emotional impetus and arrives at the anger to act. Culture, for many, is this emotional impetus. It's a love of cultural traditions that makes Nationalism such a potent and WHY WONT YOU DIE persistent force in the face of its obvious, objective falsehood. But culture is also at the heart (as opposed to the head) of the best movements of the Left. Thatcher killed off the mining industry - that was so economically successful that it subsidized the rest of nationalised British industry - because it supported a way of life and culture that was antithetical to her plan of creating an island state of island people. That this large body of angry self-organised, self-consiously outcast, intimidatingly creative people never in a moment of bass endued madness decided to leave the club and clobber and burn down the buildings of Parliament Square, is a waste of potential and talent on a (failed) apocalyptic scale.
But something new happened in November. While 5,000 of us assembled outside of the TORYHQ at Millbank, kids with boomboxs blasted out wub-wubbing dubstep and bmttsttskkattskatsskabmttsbmkatsts of Drum and Bass. It worked really well and ever since British Bass music has been a recurring feature of the student protests, often brilliantly accompanied by live drum groups. The most radical music to come from Britain since Punk is finding its place within radical politics. This is proof of the novelty of our movement. When the drop comes in we charge. Smash the window in time with the bass.
But there is one problem. The kids with the speakers - their taste is shit. Richard Dawkins help the university student who thinks they know better than the sixth-formers, who thinks they can lead the way for those living life on the edge of this governments axe, but I will allow myself the patronizing tone - not an older and wiser-political entity, but of a massive geek - when I say, wipe the Pendulum and Rusko from your Protest Playlist, and try out a couple of these:
DJ Crystal - Warpdrive - 1993
Omigosh, this is the sort of tune which makes one baffled to think of how the Hardcore Continuum didn't achieve the revolution. The beats talk of destruction, the melody of creation.
DJ Tango - Think Twice - 1994
It's dark. Play this. Set off flares. Confuse Police.
KMA Productions - Cape Fear - 1996
The squelching bass kind of reminds me of a crowd pushing and being pushed. The 4x4 beat keeps you pushing. I also think you'd get points for get battoned to garage.
Photek - Smoke Rings -1997
Photek - Smoke Rings at Hype Machine
Makes you want to hit things while writhing on the floor. Which come to think of it isn't especially wise considering the police's medieval cavalry tactics of late. Maybe it will help you violently roll away.
ES Dubs - Standard Hoodlum Issue (Z Bias mix)
Wriggle right past the police line.
Vex'd - Angels - 2005
Scary.
Burial - South London Boroughs - 2005
I think this is a good one for those times when you've been re-kettled on a bridge 5 minutes after leaving the last one.
Distance - Traffic - 2006
The ravey high parts sound like the sound of sirens come, the bassy roars sound like wolves or bears or something.
Code 3 - Response Call - 2010
For plotting.
Jack Sparrow feat. Ruckspin - Dread 2010
I'm pretty sure the vacuum-scuffle-boom sounds the right temp for heave hoing a metal fence.
Bonus Track (not British, not Bassy) for those who like their riots with 20 minute build ups:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Providence - 1998
------------------------
Bibliography of others talking about music and politics
Simon Reynolds (coined the phrase Hardcore Continuun, started all of this, is the most ravey of the academics and the most academic of the ravers - this blog is essentially 90% ripped off him)
An early Wire article of his
A pre-protest blog on the failure of the 'Nuum to politicize
BBC Article on dubstep and protest
An [incorrect] counter point
Counter-counter-point/wider view (Good article~)
Another defining feature of this culture has been its almost total lack of political consciousness. Despite its roots in the self-assertion of the most marginalised sections of British society, despite the fact that the music itself is dark, anarchic and avant-guard to the extreme, despite how much energy and passion goes into the creation and expansion of this music (check this for an example of the insane lengths people went to to set up pirate radio stations), despite an explicitly combative stance to 'the mainstream', despite its energy and innovation deriving from the collectivity of the 'scenius' (good ideas are generated randomly, spread rapidly, with no question originality or providence) rather than the auteurship of select genius individuals, despite it's hyper-modernist dedication to progression - moving forward, the scene was never overtly political.
This has been to the immense detriment of the Left. Politics happens when an intellectual understanding of what is wrong combines with an emotional impetus and arrives at the anger to act. Culture, for many, is this emotional impetus. It's a love of cultural traditions that makes Nationalism such a potent and WHY WONT YOU DIE persistent force in the face of its obvious, objective falsehood. But culture is also at the heart (as opposed to the head) of the best movements of the Left. Thatcher killed off the mining industry - that was so economically successful that it subsidized the rest of nationalised British industry - because it supported a way of life and culture that was antithetical to her plan of creating an island state of island people. That this large body of angry self-organised, self-consiously outcast, intimidatingly creative people never in a moment of bass endued madness decided to leave the club and clobber and burn down the buildings of Parliament Square, is a waste of potential and talent on a (failed) apocalyptic scale.
But something new happened in November. While 5,000 of us assembled outside of the TORYHQ at Millbank, kids with boomboxs blasted out wub-wubbing dubstep and bmttsttskkattskatsskabmttsbmkatsts of Drum and Bass. It worked really well and ever since British Bass music has been a recurring feature of the student protests, often brilliantly accompanied by live drum groups. The most radical music to come from Britain since Punk is finding its place within radical politics. This is proof of the novelty of our movement. When the drop comes in we charge. Smash the window in time with the bass.
But there is one problem. The kids with the speakers - their taste is shit. Richard Dawkins help the university student who thinks they know better than the sixth-formers, who thinks they can lead the way for those living life on the edge of this governments axe, but I will allow myself the patronizing tone - not an older and wiser-political entity, but of a massive geek - when I say, wipe the Pendulum and Rusko from your Protest Playlist, and try out a couple of these:
DJ Crystal - Warpdrive - 1993
Omigosh, this is the sort of tune which makes one baffled to think of how the Hardcore Continuum didn't achieve the revolution. The beats talk of destruction, the melody of creation.
DJ Tango - Think Twice - 1994
It's dark. Play this. Set off flares. Confuse Police.
KMA Productions - Cape Fear - 1996
The squelching bass kind of reminds me of a crowd pushing and being pushed. The 4x4 beat keeps you pushing. I also think you'd get points for get battoned to garage.
Photek - Smoke Rings -1997
Photek - Smoke Rings at Hype Machine
Makes you want to hit things while writhing on the floor. Which come to think of it isn't especially wise considering the police's medieval cavalry tactics of late. Maybe it will help you violently roll away.
ES Dubs - Standard Hoodlum Issue (Z Bias mix)
Wriggle right past the police line.
Vex'd - Angels - 2005
Scary.
Burial - South London Boroughs - 2005
I think this is a good one for those times when you've been re-kettled on a bridge 5 minutes after leaving the last one.
Distance - Traffic - 2006
The ravey high parts sound like the sound of sirens come, the bassy roars sound like wolves or bears or something.
Code 3 - Response Call - 2010
For plotting.
Jack Sparrow feat. Ruckspin - Dread 2010
I'm pretty sure the vacuum-scuffle-boom sounds the right temp for heave hoing a metal fence.
Bonus Track (not British, not Bassy) for those who like their riots with 20 minute build ups:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Providence - 1998
------------------------
Bibliography of others talking about music and politics
Simon Reynolds (coined the phrase Hardcore Continuun, started all of this, is the most ravey of the academics and the most academic of the ravers - this blog is essentially 90% ripped off him)
An early Wire article of his
A pre-protest blog on the failure of the 'Nuum to politicize
BBC Article on dubstep and protest
An [incorrect] counter point
Counter-counter-point/wider view (Good article~)
