This lot had a Top 10 hit with a song that is basically about an intra-scene war - the nu garage rappists (Oxide + Neutrino, So Solid) versus the old guard. Represented here by the sour faced, jowly, paunching-out a bit deejays who get their comeuppance thanks to a G-Force rippling blast of noise. 

Portion of the lyric

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

If I recall right, there was actually something - called maybe The Council - , that was formed or mooted to ensure that UKG was run correctly, in terms of media coverage, who got to represent the scene etc

An echo of the Committee (I believe that was the name) formed during jungle over the whole General Levy fracas...

Maybe the jungle era one was The Council, and the garage one was the Committee

Videos from this era of UKG (see also Truesteppers) have a cheap-and-nasty digi-quality (obviously age and wear have worsened it in this case, making it look really los-res - like an ancient 128kps mp3). Feels like it was clumsily processed to have a sub-Hype Williams gleam to it. Actually what it looks like is a Nathan Barley episode. 

Mark Fisher thought "Up Middle Finger" was the spirit of punk reincarnated as UKG.

Here is a piece he wrote for Hyperdub when it was a website rather than a label, under the name Mark De'Rosario

Hyperpulp: It's All the Rage 2001 

by Mark De'Rosario 

Oxide and Neutrino's Up Middle Finger is as important for 01 as the Pistols' Anarchy in the UK was in 76. Like Anarchy, Up Middle Finger is both a call to arms and an darkly exuberant gesture of joyful defiance. Alongside Ms. Dynamite's Booo! (an instant classic, surely the biggest tune in the last year), Up Middle Finger demonstrates that UK garage's efforts to ethnically cleanse the genre of all impure' elements has failed, big style. Everything exiled from the snooty, purocentric higher echelons of UK garage - jump-up ragga-chat, abstract numanoid electronix, frenzy-inducing MCing, deep darkcore bass, film samples, kiddiecore refrains - has returned to terminate its former masters. With extreme prejudice. 

Up Middle Finger captures a mood, a growing undercurrent of rage in the country about the discrepancy between the sunny vistas projected by managerialist PRopoganda and the webs of corrruption and incompetence that are lived everyday reality. Neutrino's fury will resonate with anyone who has the misfortune to have tangled with Style London's sad coterie of promoters, PR zombies and A and R people. But, more generally, his invective also speaks to and for anyone who has been blocked and patronized by the complacency and arrogance of all the bullet-pointed, empty-headed drones who officiate in the blurry liar lair of Blair's Britain. Neutrino brings back an edge, an aggression, that has been lacking for too long in a British culture that has seemed to pride itself on its tolerance of mediocrity. 

Whilst totally contemporary, Up Middle Finger (and the Execute album from which it hails) sound like a return to the vibe - if not exactly the sound - of jungle in its earliest, most fissile and molten phase, when the sonic contours of the new genre were first becoming audible. 

Effectively, O and N have rejected everything 'progressive' that's happened since then - they have rescinded the supposedly inevitable maturation process which proceeds from bolted-together, frankenstein-monster cyborgianism towards the smooth and seamless surfaces of the painstakingly simulated organically 'pure' sound that has enjoyed dominance lately. Listening to O and N, you're reminded of the cargo-culting, skip-scavenging exuberance of Rufige Kru, Tango and Ratty, even the early Prodigy. You're taken back to that vertiginously exciting moment, or series of moments, when rave's synthetic hyper-energy was swept up into the sorcerous vortex of timestretched breakbeats and hyperdub bass. 

Ms. Dynamite and O and N are being sold as 'garage', but as their interviews on this site show, they are themselves uneasy about the classification. The currents passing through them belong to ragga, rave and hip hop as much as to garage. Essentially, like early jungle, they are hyperpulp. Hyperpulp is a mode of hyperdub, but defined by a particular relation to mass culture; it is a cybernetic monster that feeds on pop culture and trans- [or de-] forms it into a blobby, seething multiplicity. 

Hyperpulp culture finds its model not in the club scene, with its cult of the DJ, but the Jamaican soundclash, with its ruff and rugged indifference to smooth mixing, and the pivotal role it accords to the MC. Oxide and Neutrino - the DJ and MC team - re-effectuate this abstract machine. For those schooled in a white European post-romantic tradition, MCing sounds like something supplemtary to the 'primary text' of the music itself. But in hyperpulp, there is of course no primary text, only an intense multiplexed libidinal experience, which includes and is intensified by the MC's chatting on the mic. The MC's melting of dominant english into the lyrical flow of patois sloganeering functions as an excitation-heightener for those who want to get hyper. 

Like NYC hip hop in its early days, Jamaican dancehall culture is fuelled by the antagonistic energy of competing crews. (It's no accident, of course, that Oxide and Neutrino are part of the So Solid posse.) Whilst the intense competition between collective groups is sometimes transected by hard war gangsta/ yardie territorialized violence, it is essentially a soft war - a gift exchange in which no-one loses, and the pressure to outdo the other crew produces a spiralling intensity of experience for da massive. 

Da massive is crucial in all hyperdub genres, but it is especially important in hyperpulp, which feeds on and amplifies hype-waves. Witness Oxide and Neutrino's sampling of 100,000 Scottish ravers on Up Middle Finger. The sheer size of the collective body is used as an audio-weapon targeted against the closed-system entropy of scenes which pride themselves on their disdain for popularity, as much as it is directed against the dismal tastefulness of overground popculture. O and D's use of samples of the Casualty TV theme and of dialogue Lock, Stock... are acts of audio-abduction or sonic viracy, in which existing mass cultural associations are radically deterritorialized and minoritized; the certainties of spectacular culture are de-faced, contaminated with traces of rogue semiotic virus. 

Where pop tends to interpellate the lone consumer, the solitary spectator, hyperpulp dissloves private subjectivity in the oceanic bassdrome of collective delirium. In overground capitalist popular culture, maturity is signalled by the move from impersonal collective pulp-out into privatized, facialized emotion. Goldie's career offers an exemplary map of this dreary trajectory. Beginning with Rufige Kru and Metalheadz, in which he anonymized/ pseudononymized himself into the collective while simulating the synthetic POV of the terminator and the replicant, he ends up sold as a 'solo' artist, hangs around with saddoes like Noel Gallagher, and devotes much of his last album to baring his soul. 

Soul and soulfulness are of course crucial terms for the anti-pulp purists. It's worth remembering here Foucault's remarks in Discipline and Punish on the production of the modern soul. The soul, Foucault tells us, does not precede modernity's disciplinary institutions: it is precisely constructed by schools, prisons, and factories, all of which act to extract an individual subject from the dangerous, teeming multiplicity of 'compact masses.' Baudrillard's arguments in Symbolic Exchange and Death take Foucault's position further. According to Baudrillard, the arrival of the immortal soul marks the imperialistic triumph of monotheism over primitive cultures, which transforms its swarming pantheon of warring entities into 'demons.' 

The tyrannical domination of Dance's SS - the Style and Soul gestapo - has kept the demons out, but they are everywhere in hyperpulp. (Even Goldie, never fully seduced by the soul paradigm, was still invoking Demons on Saturnz Return.) Hyperpulp trades in sonic fiction, and as such feeds upon pulp modes effectuated in other media, especially Horror and SF video. Video samples, once so conspicuous in jungle and speed garage, have been noticably absent in the re-musicalised, soul-dominated phase of garage. 

Over the years, there has been a remarkable consistency in the sonic textures of the various reactive, boracratic genres Style London has tried to foist on the rest of us. From rare groove through to acid jazz, from 'intelligent' drum and bass through to soulful garage, the same sonic traits are always evident : there's a preference for melody over rhythm, for 'real' instrumentation over the synthetic and the samploid, for personalised emotion over dehumanised abstraction. Naturally, these are reinforced by snooty social codes based on snobbery and exclusivity, which are diseminated by the scene's lapdogs in the depressingly hedonistic dance music media and in the style press - all of whom are dissed, hilariously, by Neutrino on Up Middle Finger. 

The so-called garage wars are nothing new, and in fact date back at least as far as the emergence of jungle. Jungle, don't forget, was so named as an insult. Devotees of the original US garage sound - that finessed-to-the-point-of-body-numbing-tedium 'lush' production identified most closely with that high priest of sonic bureaucrats, David Morales - decried the use of breakbeats, essentially for exactly the same reasons that Style London's current hipoisie are cussing Oxide and Neutrino - lack of purity. 

Purity is no more real in music than in ethnicity, and no more desirable. It is only ever a retrospective simulation, something hallucinated after the fact by a group of control freaks resentfully anxious about its fading status. Inevitably, purity has no positive features of its own, but is defined negatively, by what it excludes. What purocrats hate about hyperpulp is its ruffness, its refusal to close down into a well-formed aesthetic object. But this is precisely what is exciting about hyperpulp - its dubtractive removal of all that we thought we knew about identity, genre, about where sonicultures had come from and where they are going. Subtract identity, contaminate 'purity', and potential is produced. Now that Soul and Style are losing their grip on garage, something new can be heard emerging. 

Hyperpulp has come back to corrupt its illegitimate offspring. Celebrate its return. 

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Up Middle Finger Written by Oxide/Neutrino 

(Up middle finger I show dem) 

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

Later a bitch said to me

We'll never make it with Casualty

Ha ha ha, he he he

Now the silly bitch wants to try and hire we

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Certain guys can't face the fact of

What we've done

Sold over a quarter of a million Casualty went

Straight into No 1

And they still wanna cuss come on

Oh yeah about the Casualty theme

Well no one controls the scene

So you do what you want

And you do what like

And you do what you please

Yeah, guys want to cuss our tunes, say it's shit

Think other people don't like it

But boy we don't care

And we got something for you

This is DJ Oxide playing in front of about a hundred thousand people

Listen to this

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no 

Brand-new anachronism from Z-Neo

Fault-less -  very-nearly-convincing as time travel

release rationale

"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a '92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP's and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".

I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?

The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific  - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!

Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point. 

People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity.... 

Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze.  When you factor in the international factor. 

Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music. 

You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a  Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point... 

Talking of spectral imaginings... 

Somehow missed this -  from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set 

release irrationale 

The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.

Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides... 

Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It's a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.

If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down...  dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity

SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture's, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF's Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture's work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.

SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.

Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork -  Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:

Over the past few years, I've been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw's Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica's back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.

A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I'd drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.

One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D's Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek's The Water Margin, and Intense's The Quickening.

During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.

There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF's 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There's enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.

Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.

The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles' 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd's The Wall, Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, and Future Sound of London's Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.

The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle's genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle's Johnny, Subnation's Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer's Ricky-a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine 'Somewhere About Town'.

The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM's DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It's well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.

Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a 'first aid kit', packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn't take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he'd remind his groggy listeners that it was "time to draw for the First Aid Kit," creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn't get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was "a bridge too far," but if they made it, Jinx would say, "taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton." Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More ("What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!"), and end with his signature send-off: "Seeeeeeeeee ya!"

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Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie" 

That's from over ten years ago) 

Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality

This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"

Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat

Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick

Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a  a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew. 

release rationale: 

I've been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn't know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.

Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG's London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the "we got the vibes, yo" lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I'm grinning from ear to ear.

Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London's legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.

Fast forward 30 years, and I'm in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I've always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I've been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.

Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It's a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour! 

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The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit

Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania

Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase.

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far...

I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the end of time.

Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit?)

So despite the enormity I thought I would give the entire list a listen, in both categories. (There's also a list of mixes). 

I got about a third of the way into the albums, skipping the ones I already knew. But then - as always seems to happen with such undertakings (e.g. the enormous playlists of an artist's entire discography that you might pull together yourself, or of a genre)...  inevitably the will to carry on crumbles away. It's just too daunting. It comes to feel like work. As a way of discovering things, it's not the way that the music you end up loving generally tumbles into your life. Especially not with dance music, which is most meaningfully encountered in a club and in the thick of a crowd. 

But I did hear some things I'd never heard that I really liked, along with quite a lot of things that were excellent but ultimately sounded like superior-sound-design updates of  sono-rhythmic ideas that existed in rawer form in the 1990s.  

As always happens with these canon-making pushes by publications, I was surprised by how few of the artists or works that I love figure in these lists. (And quite often when an artist I like did get mentioned, the track honored wasn't what I would have selected). 

But you know what - people are different!  

So much music - electronic, dance, everything else - came out in the 21st Century that entirely different cartographies and canons can be constructed that barely overlap with your own trajectory as a listener or personal pantheon. 

One new-to-me tune in the RA list that I really liked

Now if you know anything about where I'm coming from, in terms of what I like in dance music, it makes perfect sense that this is a tune that would appeal.   It's fresh and exciting but audibly in the tradition of "Party People". 

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I'm not sure how much this RA list is ultimately based on the votes of the contributors and how much determined by decree from above, but they did ask me for a list of nominations, albeit only in the overlapping categories of hauntology / ambient / conceptronica. This is what I suggested, which is unranked: 

ALBUMS

Boards of Canada - Geogaddi

The Focus Group - Hey Let Loose Your Love

Oneohtrix Point Never - Rifts

Belbury Poly - The Willows

The Advisory Circle - Other Channels

Mordant Music - Dead Air

Moon Wiring Club - An Audience of Art Deco Eyes

Rashad Becker - Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time

Debit - The Long Count

Runners up (unasked for, I couldn't resist supplying)

Lo Five - Geography of the Abyss

Dolphins into the Future - On Seafaring Isolation

Lee Gamble - Diversions -  1994-96

eMMplekz - Rook to TN34

Roj - The Transactional Dharma of Roj

Hybrid Palms - Pacific Image

ML Buch - Suntub

Second Woman - S/W

Huerco S - For Those of You Who Have Never

Burial - debut album

patten - Mirage FM

TRACKS

Mark Van Hoen - Holy Me

eMMplekz - Gloomy Leper Techno

The Focus Group - Modern Harp

Oneohtrix Point Never - Physical Memory

The Advisory Circle - Sundial

Holly Herndon - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

James Blake - If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Burial - South London Boroughs

Belbury Poly - Caermaen

People Like Us - World of Wonder (Why We're Here)

Moon Wiring Club - Mademoiselle Marionette

MIX

bit stumped here, I don't tend to remembrance mixes like other folks do, but then I thought, "oh yes, there's - 

The Arkiteket - The Deep Ark

And then when I saw their list, I slapped my forehead with a 'gah' and realized I really should have - and really would have - included this mix: 

Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo (Japan, 1980-86) - by Spencer Doran

And the follow up Vol 2 was great too. 

It's especially amnesiac of me given that in this big piece on Ambient / New Age as a phenom of the 2010s written for Resident Advisor, these mixes feature prominently (along with the Japanese interior music / 4th world compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 plus quotes from Doran in his Visible Cloaks guise). 

Talking of those who remembrance mixes, here's mixologist (and RA 2000-2025 contributor) Michaelangelos Matos's faves 

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Maybe, maybe,  I'll go back and finish that 2000-2025 albums list... do it in stages... then do the tracks... and maybe even the mixes. 

I already tried and enjoyed this mix which sounded intriguing from the write-up and mixologist Nono Gigsta's side reflections

https://soundcloud.com/gigstab/freerotation-2024-the-house-of-crocodiles-part-2-live-recording

Amid the near-infinity of sources out of which it is woven, this new-to-me tune jumped out particularly

Which itself contains a sample of - or perhaps more accurately, is a re-edit of? - something I dimly recognise (from being sampled elsewhere - some track on Reinforced?) but the source song "Misdemeanor" is new-to-me and quite delicious, sort of avant-ized Jackson 5

Less delicious is learning about the actual misdemeanor the artist would much later commit.... Wiki Fear strikes again, or at least, it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have read the offending entry 

Ah, Anon comes through in the comments with the ardkore jungle tune that samples Foster Sylvers - not 4 Hero and crew but M-Beat 

Here's another use (out of loads and loads in hip hop etc)

Here's a Misdemeanor sample-chain playlist

A long overdue big shout going out to S. Vispi, B. Thomas, D. Duncan aka Intense aka Babylon Timewarp aka various other identities

Here's a disorganized playlist including also some of their celebrated remixers and allies like Little Mat and D.O.P.E.

Always felt this tune by Dev, "In the Dark" - my fave single of 2011 - was a UK garage flashback / rip-off. 

And now I realise that the main reason that it has that association for me is the parping synth-horn vamp that comes in at 32 seconds - a UK Garage hallmark.

Not only are those horns horny, the song itself is about being uncontrollably horny. 

At this point Dev had the sexiest singing voice in the world, simply on the basis of her sampled cameo in "Like A G6" and her one solo hit "In The Dark", which was constantly on the radio in LA

"In The Dark" is from an era when producers were doing starting to do amazing things * in terms of an architecture of harmonies and multiple interlocking vocal parts, texturizing of backing vocals and what I would call side-vocals - or even aside-vocals: a kind of melodic equivalent to the adlib in rap later on.  Working in jitters and stammers and mechanistic syncopations. And voice-as-pure-FX - like the slithery-rubbery vocal ripples in "In The Dark"

It all comes from Dev but with gimmick-attuned producers working with her (the Cataracs in this case), it adds up to the ultimate in ear-candy. An overflowing panoply of hooks - just so many "good bits" that stick in your head,

Other examples of this combo of personality and processing would be Ke$ha songs like "Tik Tok" and especially "Backstabber."

The latter is not the work of the evil Dr but David Gamson, as in Scritti Politti -  a fact that just added savor to my enjoyment of the song. 

"Backstabber" features an awesome horn part, as it happens, but it's not UKG style - more throwback campy, almost Casino Royale / Herb Alpert. Possibly a sample, as opposed to synthi-horn played on a keyboard.

I should imagine the vocal arrangement virtuosity emerging at that time owes a lot to the late 2000s release by  Antares of the Harmony Engine, a studio tool that made it easy to multiple the singer's voice, stack it, spectralize it, situate it within the sound-space of the recording...

An orchestration of the voice alone, even before you get to all the other things going on in the track 

Like those horny horns in "In The Dark"

* Yeah, yeah, ABBA did this kind of thing in "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and so many other tunes...  and Missy Elliott in a different way. And then there was this from 2005, before the Harmony Engine came on the market

Three pieces very much worth reading: 

1/ James Parker with a short piece at the Atlantic on the mystery of drumming and its relationship to Time and Flow (spinning off a book that also sounds worth reading: John Lingan's Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers 

2/  Ethan Hein blogging about the Amen Break with an inventory of sampled examples of use.

3/ Nick Coleman substacking about Herbie Hancock's  jazzed funk / funked jazz trilogy  of the mid-70s: Head Hunters, Thrust, Man-Child

Some choice portions: 

Parker: 

I love hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat pedal, right foot on the kick-drum pedal, left hand on the snare, right hand on the ride cymbal. When it starts to flow, you're like da Vinci's Vitruvian Man: You're in a holy circle of equilibrium, blissfully distributed, with consciousness diffused to your extremities....   You get better.... via the drummer's version of the grace of God—which is the jolt, the volt, the heavenly bolt, the electromotive impulse that flashes out from the playing of another, much greater drummer, and claims you.... 

[and this fascinating fact, cueing off a section on what happens to drummers as they age, the physical toll of being a drummer]

A 2008 study of Blondie's Clem Burke revealed that, during live sets, he played with the stamina of an athlete, burning about 600 calories over the course of an 82-minute show. 

[fascinating because it underwhelms - just 600 calories? I thought he was going to say something more like 6000 calories and some other statistic like loses five pounds in sweat during a concert! I have gotten near 600 calories just going on the exercise bike for 70 minutes. And I am in pathetic shape]

Hein: 

Here trying to pinpoint just what makes the Amen break so different, so appealing... 

"One factor is just the sound of the drums. Winstons drummer Gregory Coleman hits hard, but with subtlety. Each time he hits the ride cymbal, he gets a slightly different pitch, a slightly different velocity. The same is true with the snares. He's not just pounding out a beat, it's practically a melody. The tape is heavily saturated, bringing out the upper overtones, and the sound is incredibly loud and present.

The rhythm pattern is compelling too. You can understand it in terms of tresillo rhythms displaced by different amounts that are overlaid on a basic R&B backbeat."

[One thing with the Amen and its particular relationship to jungle is that as breaks go, it's not exactly funky. It's just a bit too fast for that slow 'n' sexy feel. It doesn't pull at your hips and waist. That's even in the raw original state - but then when's it sped-up, looped, edited, retriggered etc, it  totally becomes a sound of insurgency and emergency - a militant rhythm. For sure jungle breaks are funkier than the beats in its increasingly estranged sister-genres like techno and trance. But for the most part, although hyper-syncopated, they are not really sexy.  To the extent that a lovers jungle vibe creeps into the genre later on as it matures and sophisticates....  that sexiness is located almost everywhere else in the music than in the drums - it's in the moaning diva vocals, the lightly glancing synth pads, the sensuous glistening textures, sometimes the bass. But the drums remain at odds with that vibe:  all crashy excitement and forward-surge. Often the sexy elements in jungle actually come from house 'n' garage or  R&B.]

Coleman: 

[Thrust's] opening cut, the filthy "Palm Grease"... is so granular, so atomised in its blizzard of harmonic spot-squits, all actually played rather than programmed by the pianist on his battery of ARP hardware, that it has always suggested to me that music still has yet to fully explore every nook, cranny and journeying asteroid in its formal multiverse. Come on now. Why have we heard so little of la musique pointilliste? Herbie Hancock makes an excellent jazz Seurat: the primum mobile of a music that concerns itself principally with its own hyper-precise placing in time and space, within a harmonic structure so dotty that we begin to think less about chordal harmony and more about colour modalities and the formation of clouds ("Uh, thangewverymuch, London! This next piece we have for you tonight is in Sirrus-minor, the greyest and fluffiest of all keys"); music that has become less and less linear in its drive to move its poles away from the banalities of chord "progression" and become more and more concerned with articulations of the endless moment, the unceasing now, the rubber-thewed not-yet. The poetics of utter stillness. But funkily of course."

A parallel thought I had a while ago in relation not to Herbie Hancock but the spin-off band The Headhunters and "God Made Me Funky":

"One of the things about recorded music I love is when you can "see it" - diagrammatically, as blocs of sound distributed across space -  but it also has this totally somatic and haptic impact. This perfectly produced funk track works simultaneously as a mechanism whose moving parts you can gaze at in an almost distanced way and a seething fever reaching into your body, coiling its tightness inside your insides."

Now I think about it, it was something Ethan Hein wrote, a deep structural analysis of "God Made Me Funky", that first introduced me to the track and resulted in obsessive playing of it, especially the minute and a half before the voice comes in. 

Hein also has written about "Watermelon Man" off Head Hunters. 

The track I really love of this Hancock era

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

More on Amentalism - a 2011 piece published in The Economist by Tom Nuttall.

Seven seconds of fire: How a short burst of drumming changed the face of music 

IT IS 3am in a dank, sweaty studio in south London. Ear-splitting basslines pound from the sound system. Some of the young crowd gently bob along. Others are drinking, chatting or lurking in dark corners. Then, suddenly, the music changes. A throbbing pulse gives way to a clattering rhythm. Where there were 130 beats per minute, there are now 170. Where the mood was meditative, it is now maniacal. Within seconds the place is jumping.

This music is called "jungle". Some of the people in the club were probably not alive when it was created. Certainly few would have been old enough to experience it in its heyday. These young revellers have an ear for the next big thing; they find trips down musical memory lane tiresome. Yet nothing seems to animate them like these tracks from almost 20 years ago.

To understand jungle's roots, you must travel yet further back in time. On March 11th 1970 Richard L. Spencer, tenor saxophonist and lead singer for a short-lived Washington, DC, soul act called the Winstons, was awarded a Grammy for "Color Him Father", a sentimental ode to a devoted stepfather released by the band the year before. The record sold well, but unlike some of his fellow winners that day, who included Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash, Mr Spencer was not destined for musical canonisation; the Winstons had already split up and later that year he quit the music business. The song, too, has largely been forgotten.

The same is not true for "Amen, Brother", the B-side to "Color Him Father". It is not immediately apparent why this should be. The two-and-a-half-minute instrumental, a funk update of an old gospel standard, is sprightly enough; the casual listener might be diverted by the energetic horn line. But there is little to distinguish it from hundreds of similar records released around the same time. The band recorded it quickly, says Mr Spencer; they needed a B-side and didn't have any other songs.

Seven seconds of this track were enough to guarantee its immortality. One minute and 26 seconds in, the horns, organ and bass drop out, leaving the drummer, Gregory Coleman, to pound away alone for four bars. For two bars he maintains his previous beat; in the third he delays a snare hit, agitating the groove slightly; and in the fourth he leaves the first beat empty, following up with a brief syncopated pattern that culminates in an unexpectedly early cymbal crash, heralding the band's re-entry.

"Amen, Brother" lay dormant for almost two decades. But in 1986, as the nascent hip-hop scene in New York was entering the musical mainstream, the song cropped up on the first volume of "Ultimate Breaks and Beats", a compilation of tracks with "clean", drums-only segments. DJs and producers using turntables had long used breaks from old funk tracks as backing material for rappers; the compilation made their lives easier. Combined with the sampler, a new piece of digital hardware that recorded snippets of sound for deployment in other contexts, it allowed producers to create extended loops over which rappers could perform.

The first hip-hop producers to use what became known as the "Amen break" did so with no great ambition. Many looped only the first two, "straight" bars of the four-bar break. Amen was simply one of many tools in the producer's kitbag.

When jungle was massive

A journey across the Atlantic liberated the break. In the early 1990s British producers in the rapidly evolving dance-music scene were seeking new sources of inspiration. The repetitive grooves of American house and techno provided one; the reggae sound systems operated by Anglo-Jamaicans were another. But more than anything it was the sampler that galvanised these producers. Their tracks developed a distinct identity, supported by a complex infrastructure of record shops, pirate radio stations, nightclubs and raves: they sped up, acquiring an urgent, almost manic quality, relying increasingly on the creative possibilities for rhythmic experimentation opened up by the sampled breakbeat.

The producers of what was coming to be known as jungle found a number of old breakbeats that suited their needs. As these beats began to crop up in more and more records—they were, in the parlance, "rinsed"—fans began to recognise them, and to compare the ways in which producers had manipulated them to generate distinct effects.

Chief among these breaks was Amen, which many producers first heard on "King of the Beats", a six-minute instrumental collage of hip-hop beats and other samples released by Mantronix, a New York producer, in 1988. The track made extensive use of the Amen break, but in a fresh way: segments from the loop were chopped up, layered and processed so that the drums became central to the track rather than simply a rhythmic bedding.

Like a virus, once the Amen break had taken hold among jungle producers it began to propagate, and to mutate. It was used on hundreds, possibly thousands of records (some claim that "Amen, Brother" is the most sampled track in the history of music). For a time anyone trying to build a name in the scene had to turn their hand to Amen. "The musicians chose to limit themselves in order to express creativity within boundaries," says Simon Reynolds, a journalist and author who chronicled the rise of jungle in Britain.

As the music grew more sophisticated (and the technology more powerful), the manipulation of the break grew wilder; producers engaged in a sort of Amen arms race. "It was a battle to see who could do more with it," says Karl Francis, who, recording as Dillinja, was one of the more radical Amen experimentalists. "But the tunes still had to work in the club. Sometimes I made tracks that went too far and people would just stand on the dance floor looking confused." Listeners grew attuned to the break's sonic elements; before long the merest hint of Amen was enough to drive crowds into a frenzy. Coleman's seven-second break had entered the collective aural unconscious of a generation of young Britons.

A Proustian snare drum

Why was Amen so popular? One answer is that it fulfilled a need: easy to sample and manipulate, it offered producers a straightforward way into jungle. Many amateur producers, including this correspondent, have been surprised to discover how easy it is to make the junglist equivalent of instant noodles by sampling, looping and speeding up the break. Eventually Amen acquired critical mass; producers used it because everyone else did.

But Amen also has certain sonic qualities that set it aside from its rivals. Rather than keeping time with a hi-hat, Coleman uses the loose sound of the ride cymbal, filling out the aural space. And the recording has a "crunch" to it, says Tom Skinner, a London-based session drummer: "That quality is appealing to beatmakers." The pitched tone of the snare drum is particularly distinctive; as any junglist will tell you, a snare can be as evocative as a smell.

The displaced snare of the third bar and the syncopated last bar became signature elements of many Amen tracks. At 170 beats per minute the jumpiness of these parts of the break becomes urgent. Mr Reynolds talks about the "panic rush" of the break at this tempo, the "state of emergency" it created among clubbers.

Mr Skinner draws attention to the way deft producers would emulate drummers' tricks in their manipulation of the break, creating "ghost notes"—rhythmic shuffles of sound that help the beat swing. Others introduced hyperactive snare rushes or stop-start mini-loops, and deployed the cymbal crash to signify not the beat's conclusion but rather its ongoing pressure. "It's language that existed before, but you had never heard a drummer playing quite like that," says Mr Skinner.

Like all musical movements rooted in a particular period, jungle slipped first into a decadent phase, and then became a nostalgia piece. The futuristic frenzy became routine; beats became metallic and funkless; the sampled break was often replaced by the drum machine. Elsewhere the lilt of the accelerated breakbeat, its harsher edges smoothed away, proved attractive to makers of commercials and composers of television-title tunes. Many Americans first encountered Amen like this; it crops up, for example, in the theme of the popular cartoon series "Futurama".

Before long the merest hint of Amen was enough to drive crowds into a frenzy

But Amen never went away. Some keepers of the flame continued to use it to signal their devotion to the good old days, or to conclude what they considered to be unfinished business. Guitar bands occupying different musical universes from jungle producers, such as Oasis, found uses for this most versatile of breaks.

Today, when the generation that first exploited Amen is nudging middle age, a younger wave of musicians has begun to uncover new meanings in this loop. Some use it to express a stern oath of fealty to a movement they were too young to experience. In the tracks of others you hear a plaintive yearning for a simpler time, when producers could use breakbeats without feeling that they were freighted with meaning. A sample that once encapsulated dreams of the future now struggles to escape its past.

"A lot of young people are nostalgic for things they weren't there for," says Micachu, a 24-year-old London-based musician. For her own Amen project, with Pete Wareham, a jazz saxophonist, she ruled that the only permissible sounds were Mr Wareham's sax and her treatments of the break: "Every producer should give their take on the Amen break. It's like a composer doing a chorale." (Mr Wareham says that he had not heard of the Amen break by name before, but that when he sought it out "the last 20 years flashed before my eyes.")

If the Amen break belongs to anyone, the 1990s generation who performed their extraordinary acts of alchemy on it would seem to have a strong claim. But in a much more tangible sense, the break, along with the rest of "Amen, Brother", belongs to Mr Spencer, who retains the copyright to the Winstons' back catalogue. The band's former front-man says that neither he nor Coleman, who he says died in poverty in 2006, received any royalties from the extensive reuse of Amen. Mr Spencer says he only became aware of its rebirth in 1996, when he was phoned by a British music executive seeking the master tape of "Amen, Brother".

Whose break is this?

Mr Spencer is not interested in the digital age and its remix culture. He dismisses the music spawned by the track as "plagiarism" and "bullshit", considering it another chapter in the plundering of African-American cultural patrimony. "[Coleman's] heart and soul went into that drum break," he says. "Now these guys copy and paste it and make millions."

It is a tricky area, acknowledges Mr Reynolds. He notes that had Mr Spencer received a fraction of what he considers to be his dues he could have retired early and put his children through college. On the other hand, he and Coleman have achieved a sort of immortality: "It's a bit like the man who goes to the sperm bank and unknowingly sires hundreds of children." Mr Skinner agrees that it is a shame the original musicians earned nothing from the reuse of their work, but says, "you don't want a world where sampling can't happen."

The legal infrastructure surrounding sampling has become more robust. Yet even if the legion of small-time producers who were using sampled breaks 15-20 years ago could somehow have been identified and challenged, it is not as if Mr Spencer would have received anything; jungle would have taken a different form—or perhaps simply been crushed. That would have counted as one of the music world's minor tragedies.

I have long delighted in this 1957 quote from Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo - what a name! - on the subject of rock and roll and dance mania. Don't think I was able to deploy it in Energy Flash itself but it got included in my Rave Theory Toolkit:

"Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!" The call repeats itself into the infinite, and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions -  as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock 'n' roll is a sign of depersonalization of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity. If we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances. The dance craze is the infantile rage and outlet of our actual world." 

Although written in flowery and windy style, this grave warning is fairly typical of the scaremongering reactions to dance crazes associated with youth music (meaning in fact black music made for all ages that suddenly connects with young white people). This discourse about the degrading and de-civilizing effects of rhythm erupted around rock'n'roll ("jungle music", leads to sex before marriage and venereal disease, etc).

 But they are also very similar to the frightened responses to jazz  from the elder-and-squarer(-and-whiter) generation when the hot sound first seethed out of the disreputable quarters of New Orleans to conquer America and the world. Very similar analogies or connections were made to narcotic drugs, loosening of sexual inhibition, coke-crazed flappers etc.  

And of course the exact same sort of phobic hysteria erupted around acid house in the UK tabloids. 

Read the whole Feb. 23, 1957 article in New York Times in which the Meerloo quote appeared and the hysterical tone is something else: 

EXPERTS PROPOSE STUDY OF 'CRAZE'; Liken It to Medieval Lunacy, 'Contagious Dance Furies' and Bite of Tarantula

Psychologists suggested yesterday that while the rock 'n' roll craze seemed to be related to "rhythmic behavior patterns" as old as the Middle Ages, it required fullstudy as a current phenomenon. One educational psychologist asserted that what happened in and around the Paramount Theatre yesterday struck him as "very much like the medieval type of spontaneous lunacy where one person goes off and lots of other persons go off with him." A psychopathologist, attending a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association at the Park Sheraton Hotel, feared that this was just a guess. Others present noted that a study by Dr. Reginald Lourie of Children's Hospital, Washington, indicated in 1949 that 10 to 20 per cent of all children did "some act like rocking or rolling." The study went into detail on the stimulating effects of an intensi fied musical beat. Meanwhile, a parallel between rock 'n' roll and St. Vitus Dance| has been drawn by Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo, associate in psychiatry at Columbia University, in a study just completed for publication.

Echo of Fourteenth Century

Dr. Meerloo described the "contagious epidemic of dance fury" that "swept Germany and spread to all of Europe" toward the end of the fourteenth century. It was called both St. Vitus Dance (or Chorea Major), he continued, with its victims breaking into dancing and being unable to stop. The same activity in Italy, he noted, was referred to as Tarantism and popularly related to a toxic bite by the hairy spider called tarantula. "The Children's Crusades and the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin," Dr. Meerloo went on, "remind us of these seductive, contagious dance furies."

Dr. Meerloo described his first view of rock 'n' roll this way: Young people were moved by a juke box to dance themselves "more and more into a prehistoric rhythmic trance until it had gone far beyond all the accepted versions of human dancing." 

Sweeping the country and even the world, the craze "demonstrated the violent mayhem long repressed everywhere on earth,' he asserted. " He also saw possible effects in political terms: "Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!" The call repeats itself into the infinite, and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions -  as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment."

Dr. Meerloo predicted that the craze would pass "as have all paroxysms of exciting music." But he said that the psychic phenomenon was important and dangerous. He concluded in this way: "Rock 'n' roll is a sign of depersonalization of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity.

"If we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances.

"The dance craze is the infantile rage and outlet of our actual world. In this craze the suggestion of deprivation and dissatisfaction is stimulated and advertised day by day. In their automatic need for more and more, people are getting less and less."

"The awareness of this tragic contradiction in our epoch," Dr. Meerloo said, "must bring us back to a new assessment of what value and responsibility are."

Now if you look at some of Meerloo's many other books, the good doctor does seem persistently preoccupied with loss-of-mental-control under the influence of sinister powers, the de-invidualizing dark side of crowd psychology, etc:  

Delusion and Mass-delusion (1949)

Patterns of Panic  (1950)

The Rape of the Mind: the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing (1956).

Suicide and Mass Suicide (1962)

Intuition and the Evil Eye: The natural history of a superstition (1971).

"Menticide"!

Now someone who lived through the Nazi conquest of their homeland (the Netherlands) might well have a particular and pained interest in irrationality: the fragility of the civilized mind in the face of a barbarian insurgency. 

And here's yet another book by Meerloo that makes the connection explicit:

Total War and the Human Mind: a psychologist's experiences in occupied Holland.

But, and here it gets interesting, somewhere between his remarks to the New York Times reporter Milton Bracker and his 1960 publication The Dance: From Ritual to Rock and Roll - Ballet to Ballroom,  Meerloo's attitude to rock 'n' roll seems to have softened somewhat, succumbed to a fascination...

This is even more apparent in the book's alternate title: 

Dance Craze and Sacred Dance: an outlook on the eternal rock 'n' roll.

Far from some fly-by-night teen craze, rock'n'roll is "eternal" now - tapping into some undying capacity within humans to escape through trance.  Its precursors echo down through the ages to primeval man. And if the (almost certainly bow-tied) Dr Meerloo is still made a little uncomfortable by its latest manifestations, the "eternal" aspect seems to give it a certain dignity. 

As does the word "sacred". He seems to come round a bit to the idea that terpsichorean movements can be a form of worship. 

Hark also at the German title of the book, which translates as "Rhythm and Ecstasy" 

So naturally I had to get hold of the book - and found it easily, in the wonderful library of CalArts.

It's a beautiful looking book with loads of photographs of dancers from different cultures around the world - the photos take equal billing with the text, in fact - and there's some nice drawings too. The writing fuses the scholarly and poetic registers. In some places, the text breaks up into aphorisms and short bursts - it's as though exposure to all that syncopation has loosened Meerloo up as a writer and thinker. 

Shakers rattle and roll

But he's still a scholar and he's really done his research: just look at the contents pages: 

Published by Rolling Stone Books in 1976

Which is pretty quick off the mark (and again, another strike against the idea of the blinkered rockism and exclusionism of the rock press)

Abe Peck was a serious journalist, whose pedigree included stints on the Underground press of the Sixties

What I like about Dancing Madness is how different its perspective is from the disco scholarship of recent decades

The culture's historical origins are in there but mostly it is about disco as a mass phenomenon - discotheques not just in New York, San Francisco and Miami but in towns all across America - and the world, as the global reports included show.

And it is a distinctly cheesy subculture - all about learning dance steps, dancing in formation, singles bars, glitzy escapism, tacky clothes.

Basically there is a refreshing dearth in Dancing Madness on the Record Pool or what was played on April 12 1978 at the Loft.

Peck's book precedes by three years Albert Goldman's Disco, which is a slumming highbrow's quasi-anthropological take on disco: the word "Dionysian" crops up, the fascination for Doors fan Goldman is "dancing madness": the insanity and excess of disco as craze, a kind of sociological disease. But the book is well researched and thorough and it's enjoyable to read precisely because of the gap between Goldman's windy locutions and the vulgar vernacular decadence of what he is documenting.

More images from Dancing Madness.

Fascinating piece at the Graun by Daniel Dylan Wray about the links between amusement parks and the lumpen-futurist end of UK dance music - hardcore, donk, etc - with a specific focus on the Hull Fair, where the most emetically rotational rides (Waltzers) double as sound systems. They have not just resident deejays but guest sets, and MCs who chant their throats raw during sessions that can go on for 11 hours. One of the chants is the classic ardkore "oi oi oi!" shout-out.

I had never heard of Hull Fair, which is enormous ("16 acres, 300 attractions".. 600,000 attending over the course of its week-long annual existence) and honestly it looks from Wray's description to be my idea of hell: the roar of the burger grease, the smell of the crowd, the blare of the rides, the glitz blitz of the lights.  And also the aroma of fresh vomit, according to Wray. 

The names of the Waltzers (another term I never heard of - I'm not an habituee of these places - but I like the echo of the waltz,  originally a lumpen, for-its-time raunchy dance before being gentrified) sound like back-in-the-day raves or deejay names:  Hell-Blazer,  Atmosphere Creator.

This connection between fairgrounds and the rougher-but-cheesier end of rave was forged pretty early on. I remember when first writing about hardcore, someone telling me that it was all you ever heard at funfairs these days. 

And then from the other side of the equation, the raves themselves had gyroscopes and  merry-go-round rides and even bunjee jumping from very early on. 

I remember a Raindance advert on the pirates listing "the biggest free funfair we've ever had!!" as a prime reason to go.

Other evidences include the "Fairground Mix" of The Prodigy's "Everybody In the Place". 

On the B-side of "Everybody" there was a track called "G-Force", which I guess doubled, or tripled, as a reference to the music's rush-inducing torques, the accelerant thrills of pills, and the extreme sensations of fairground rides.  

"Rides are bumping against the limits of physics and the human body to deliver experiences that are more death-defying than ever before. There are hyper-coasters (more than 200 feet tall), giga-coasters (more than 300 feet tall), and strata-coasters (even taller) capable of hurtling people at 120 miles an hour. A 640-foot-tall "exa-coaster" more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty will open soon in Saudi Arabia, and will reach speeds of 155 miles an hour.

"The goal is not just to delight but to overwhelm."

Compare this from Wray's piece: 

"What we do takes people away from the pain and sorrows of life," says Willy G, passionately. "It's like a big wonderland. And if we can create that for people … what more can you do?"

"Walt Disney pioneered the art of micromanaging visitors' experiences when, 70 years ago, he opened his first park, Disneyland, in California. To prevent life's unpleasantness from impinging on his utopia, he did not allow the sale of newspapers...." 

Other snippets: 

"But even as rides have become more complex, the storylines behind them have gotten quicker and simpler to accommodate shrinking attention spans. "You have to create these moments where they are impactful, but they're not long enough to bore you. It's like, 'Wow, this is great.' BOOM—and then you're just jumping on to the next one," Thierry Coup, a former Universal executive who oversaw the creative development of Epic Universe, told me. "It's more like the TikTok philosophy."

"At Universal's parks, Kevin explained, "everything is as it should be in a perfect world." Harry Potter's Paris at Epic Universe, for example, has magical creatures and no cigarette butts. "Obviously, if you go to Paris, you're going to see Paris as it really is," he said. His frown made clear that "Paris as it really is" was indisputably a bad thing."

"For all the warm and fuzzy feelings they engender, theme parks spend an astronomical amount of effort and money to simulate the feeling that they are trying to kill us. Stardust Racers, the sinewy roller coaster that towers over Epic Universe, shoots bodies through the sky at more than 60 miles an hour and plunges them toward the surface of the Earth from the height of a 10-story building. On a roller coaster, the theme park commands your full and undivided attention."

"Roller-coaster aficionados have their own extensive vocabulary to catalog all of the techniques that rides use to give you the impression you're going to die. Stardust Racers, which a roller-coaster critic called "one of the greatest on the planet," has "top hats" (abrupt rises and falls mimicking the shape of Abraham Lincoln's stovepipe hat); "airtime hills" (which make you feel like you're floating); "ejector airtime" (which tosses your body into the ride's restraints); a "zero-g roll" (a 360-degree twist that spins you upside down and makes you feel weightless); "crossovers" (where the track loops back on itself); and several "head-choppers" (moments where the coaster seems like it'll rip your skull off)."

"One of the challenges of building coasters is that each one is, essentially, a prototype—Stardust Racers is the only ride in the world that weaves two groups of people around each other and upside down, mid-air—and these prototypes must work safely and reliably from opening day, 14 hours a day, hundreds of days a year, for 30 years (the estimated lifespan of a coaster).

A roller coaster's first riders are usually about 170 pounds with a head, torso, legs, and no arms. These dummies—human-shaped plastic bags filled with water to mimic the weight of real riders—can be outfitted with sensors, then loaded on a coaster to test whether speeds and g-forces conform to the computer's predictions. Tweaks are rare, but sometimes necessary: a section of track might require reconstruction or brakes might need to be introduced to slow an unexpectedly speedy stretch. Disconcertingly, one can find videos online of dummies flying off rides during testing, though a 2005 survey of a decades' worth of fatalities in the U.S. found that an average of four people die annually from coasters, fewer than the number killed by kitchen appliances."

"Roller coasters were once limited by technology, but now it's our bodies that are holding them back. Coasters can subject riders to g-forces more powerful than those typically experienced by astronauts—people on Stardust Racers will experience more than 4 g's of force, compared with the 3 g's typical during a space-shuttle launch—though industry guidelines limit how long riders should be made to endure such strong accelerations. At upwards of 4 g's, the human heart struggles to pump blood; you should experience this for no more than two seconds, per the standards for rides in the U.S. "The time is very important here because you don't want people graying out or maybe even blacking out," Daniel Schoppen, a roller-coaster designer with the firm Intamin, which has built attractions for Universal's parks, told me. "This is not enjoyment. This is not fun."

And this is interesting in re. the music connection:

"Once a coaster has been deemed safe, its designers ride it over and over to further finesse the experience. To Schoppen, the best coaster is like a piece of music: "Every part has its own motif, has its own feeling," he told me."

Also this:  "Braving a ride offers "a sense of assurance that you will survive no matter what is going on, what trials and tribulations you may be undergoing," the Disney historian and former "Imagineer" Tom Morris told me. "It's a way of proving that you can get through it." When the world scares us, people turn to the controlled terror of theme parks."

There's a doc about Victoria Beckham on the streamers (not as engaging as the David Beckham one) and that's my cue to dredge up this moment of genius.  

The doc doesn't mention this track - which got to #2 in the charts - at all, but according to the life chronology that the doc follows,  this would be from her flailing-around-a-bit period, after the Spice Girls split but before she launched her super-successful fashion and cosmetics business. A time when she was some combo of WAG and celeb-without-portfolio, drifting and dabbling, and mostly just existing to be photographed and to be seen at her husband's side.  

But if this is Posh Spice flailing... well, all former pop stars should flail so fabulously! 

Listen past the Auto-Tune gloss and it's one of  the more avant hit singles in UK chart history.  

Truesteppers - Jonny L and Andy Lysandrou - mash up the breaks 'n' bass and the stinging techsteppy stabs, but embed all that Nuummy Nuum stuff in a poptastic setting of nu-R&B meets 2step. 

There's a tuffer 12-inch mix for the clubs.

"This tune's gonna punish you..."

A remix by credible UKG artists 10degrees below versus X-Men  - not nearly as exciting!

Oh I didn't realise she had another intersection with UK Garage

Todd-ified

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What is funny about "Out of Your Mind" to me is that Andy Lysandrou was, only 7 or 8 years earlier, doing things like this track "Pain" under the name Kid Andy, for his hardcore label Boogie Beat Records, which turns around a huge chunk of "Careless Whispers". I remember ads for this track on the pirates, which was surprising because you rarely had a record advertised on a pirate and if you did, it would be compilation. They must have expected big things of it. 

So actually not really "chav-ant garde" although the hypergloss aesthetic of the clothes and the video is totally lumpen-futurist. 

The whole look that Posh and Dane Bowers are rocking  is very much a peek ahead to Love Island aesthetics.  Which as has been established is entwined with the Nuum to a surprising degree.

*Suddenly struck me that maybe Lysandrou chose the George Michael sample not just because it's so chuneful and well-known but because George was of Greek ancestry - he would have been the most successful Greek-British singer ever, I should think, so perhaps a point of pride. 

There was a cluster of Greek Cypriot involvement in nuum, UK clubscene, pirate radio - Nick Power, and influential instigator brother George Power (deejay, cofounder of Kiss FM etc etc). 

Excerpt from 

Raver's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1996 edition)

passing through  

(sometimes pronounced "passing troo" or "passing truh";  modified variations include "just passing through")

Rave buzz-phrase usually voiced by an MC either live at a rave or on a show broadcast by a pirate radio station. 

Evokes the transitory mode of the raver, moving through a club, or moving between clubs during the course of a night. It could also apply to a DJ or MC who has several engagements that night and thus is just passing through one particular club / rave on the way to another.  

Possible undertone of soundwaves (or radio waves) passing through the crowd body, through building walls and across the city.  

Some more fanciful observers of the raving culture have detected a near-mystical existential undertone to the phrase, viz. the transience of life itself. 

https://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/jgblostnovel.html

 Reposting this blog from earlier in the year about the British funk scene of the 1970s in which deejay Chris Hill was a prime instigator

Fascinating 1980 program presented by Danny Baker, who fiercely argued in the pages of the NME at that time for jazz-funk as the real-deal music c.f. the constipated faux-funk of  A Certain Ratio and Gang of Four, and here takes the battle to the television screen. 

In the program, he just uses the word "funk", though. 

Bunch of things that jumped out at me

1/ The self-conscious organization of the scene around tribes - a local squad or crew like Frontline from Brixton - who then at the dances amalgamate into a mega-tribe, which deejay Chris Hill here describes as the Family. The tribes have their own regalia - sometimes T-shirts with the tribe name, sometimes some other goofy identifying element - and they also often bring banners that they drape over the balcony at the venue. 

2/ You would tend to think of  U.K. working class scenes oriented around black-music to be very much about style and elegance. What surprised me about the Funk All-Dayers captured here is how amiably uncool the dancing and the general larking about is....  It's very much not in the tradition of Mod, it's not about a Face dancing alone in this moat of personal space....  the deejays exhort and entrain the crowd to all kinds of daft behaviour that is collective and synchronised.... they seem to be consciously trying to create the crowd-body consciousness, like in spectator sports with the Mexican wave...  Then there's individual kids who take off all their clothes.... a wonderfully silly mass sing-along 'n' dance to the Ovalteenies theme (you'll recognise that from Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore - "we're happy girls and boys").  And perhaps most bizarre of all - a fad for building human pyramids on the dancefloor (something I've only ever seen at Enter Shikari shows).

As Hill explains - again it's interesting just how self-conscious he is about how it all works as a subcultural machinery - the get-away Weekends at Caister and other seaside resorts are about escalating this sense of the scene as a world unto itself. A world where normal rules of behaviour get suspended and overturned in a carnivalesque fashion (not to put too Bakhtinian a spin on it though -it is also rather  Club 18-30). "Pride and dignity", the soul-boy ethos, doesn't come into it. But it's also very different from how people danced and behaved on the Northern Soul scene.

3/ The other thing that came across was that the fervour seems to be somewhat out of proportion to the music...  Now I love funk, indeed particularly at this time (early 80s) I loved it with a convert's fetishistic passion - but while I wouldn't describe myself as a connoisseur, I always felt that the jazz-funk, especially the UK offerings but most of the US imports then too, tended to be a bit bantamweight.  There are some great tunes but there's a lot of slick 'n'  tepid.  I put that down to the same dynamic on the Northern scene where there's a fetish for obscurity. Instead of rare soul singles that were barely released in 1965 or whenever, in the jazz funk scene it seems to be about a deep cut on an import album, something tucked away on side 2 of a Tom Browne or Grover Washington Jr LP.  

But perhaps the music is simply a pretext for identity, a trigger for fervour, an excuse to mobilize. 

Still, it's a little weird when Hill says that after going to a weekend away in Great Yarmouth, the kids become fully committed, like "they've been on a campaign. And the music is a crusade". 

If I was to make an inventory of My Favorite Sounds in Dance Music....  high up would be the horn sounds in UK garage. 

"Horns" - because they are nearly always done with synths.  The timbre is obviously ersatz and the "action", in terms of playing, is not quite right.  

But in this case, they are vastly preferable to the Real Thing. Imagine how awful it would be to have actual saxophonists or trumpeters playing on UK garage tracks! 

Oh I know there's the odd example of real soloing  and indeed the main one that springs to mind - the musky, languid sax on Groove Chronicles' "Stone Cold" -  is great. 

But generally the horns in UKG are completely synthetic and all the better for it.

It's one of the defining features of speed garage and 2step, right up there with the woody drum sounds and  those xylo-bass percusso-riffs.

I think what I like about the sound is precisely the sophistication-on-the-cheap quality. 

They also contribute to the sultry sexiness of the genre. 

But because they are played on a keyboard, they have a particular function:  parping vamps that propel the groove along, just like every other single musical element in the mix. 

But what is he talking about, you are saying? 

There's also a two-note horn vamp in their "It's My House (The Bashment Mix)", from about 48 seconds in.

Another example: the Steve Gurley remix of Baffled Republic's "Things Are Never" - again, just a micro-riff, kicking in about 1.31, Really just a kind of thickening agent to the hyper-syncopated stew. 

In this immortally insane track by Stephen Emmanuel presents Colours, a single shrill note of horn -  more a beep than a parp - punctuates the madness repeatedly. Jump in at about 47 seconds. And it's particularly clear from 1.50 when the track strips down.

Here in Echo Ltd 9's "Happy Times", there's more of a developed melodic role - starting at about 2.14 -  but still mechanistic

Conversely, Dreem Teem's remix of Amira's "My Desire" is largely horn-free but then there's an odd little stunted solo at around 3.56

The Ramsey & Fen remix of Fabulous Baker Boys' "Oh Boy" has an almost-solo coming in at 3 minutes on the dot - and then 3.44, recurs with some slightly different vampige. 

Sort of makes me think of an animatronic jazz band... 

This Grant Nelson production starts a parpin' at 47 seconds...  the horn is basically doing the same sort of job as the "organ" pulse

A modern example, ominously titled "Sax", does indeed deliver at cheesy solo of sorts at 4.30

Can't tell if that's a real horn or still the keyboard approach...  A keyboard, I think.

Either way, yeuuch

See, what I like about this kind of thing is that it gestures at jazz but doesn't deliver it

"Jazz" in air quotes. 

"Jazzy" is good in Nuum... actual jazz, not so much. The methodologies don't gel.

In all these UKG tunes, the jazziness is subordinated entirely to the groove function. 

It's also almost always a chirpy, cheerful, extrovert sound. There's none of the blues aspect of saxophone, the sensual melancholy. It's a brisk, get-busy sort of feeling.

Another thing is the eerieness or just off-ness that occurs when an instrumental sound is played on a keyboard, rather than the sounding mechanism of whatever instrument it is meant to be: strings and horsehair with a violin, brass and fiddly little stops and fingertips with horns (not forgetting the embouchure of the blower). 

With the UKG horns, the attack and decay of the sound is wrong. ("Envelope", is that the term?)

But this wrongness then becomes its own kind of rightness.

A similar thing happens with the Mellotron and the Chamberlin (its precursor instrument). Brief swatches of instrumental timbre - brass or woodwind or strings or whatever - are on loops of tape that are triggered by a keyboard. So you have a trumpet or a cello sound but they are played pianistically. Very much proto-sampler, except it's like a Fairlight that only has the preset, built-in timbres, it doesn't have the ability for the user to make new samples.

The classic example of this natural-sound-made-denatured, as heard in all sorts of dance music is vocal samples arrayed on a keyboard and played in a clearly not-what-a-mouth-and-lungs-would-do way

But the estrangement effect works just as well as with instruments that aren't made of flesh and sinew, the external instruments as it were. 

See also that other hallmark of the nuum:  pizzicato "string" parts. 

Even more horny horn examples.

Actually this one, by Doolally, "Straight To The Heart", at 1.46, is different. It's much more like 2-Tone and the trombone sound in ska. With a bit of dubby reverb on it at points. 

More in the classic UKG parptastic mode: Nu-Birth, "Anytime", from 2 minutes in.

In the Somore, a voice seems to be saying "blow your horn" - sampled from some classic American garage track, maybe? 

See, I had been hoping that this was some unique UKG invention, but of course it turns out that the first to do the fake-sax are your American maestro progenitors, like Masters At Work

Okay, then, like always, the Americans start it. 

But, like almost always, the Brits take it further. 

That would apply to the vocal cut-ups, the hard-swung woodblock snares, too.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And of course - American sourced, yet a UKG cornerstone, and saxy - there's this 

That, I'm almost certain, is real saxophone - there's a lightness of touch to it, and inflection, that's entirely absent from UKG hornery,

Which is usually sort of stubby, is the word I would use to describe those parped toots. 

It's real sax in "Gabriel" but I wonder if it is sampled or whether Roy Davis got someone in to play it. 

Update 1/13/2026 

As pointed out in comments, a/ it's a trumpet in "Gabriel" i.e. the instrument favored by the archangel and b/ it's actually played by the guy who sings on the track, Peven Everett.  He's performed with Wynton Marsalis and Branford Marsalis so proper jazz credentials there.

^^^^^^^^^^^

Started pondering the mystery of the UKG horn and what it connotes while watching this objectively poorly executed doc that is just about worth sitting through for the snippets of old footage...

Initially read "Mc BRISK" as McBrisk -  as in a Scottish name, rather than MC Brisk as in an MC

Sourced in "It's Over" by The Funk Master - main sample is at 1.56 - "not a little girl anymore / used to be the one I adore / but there's plenty more fish in the sea / for meee".

What do you know, the Funk Master tune was actually a Top Ten hit in the UK

Chris Macfarlane, true hardcore hero and Exhibit A in the Case for Nuumological Continuumity 

A playlist I made of his entire uuurrrvvvv (near as dammit anyway - 164 tunes + remixes) running through hardcore, jungle, UKG, 2step 

Wonder what he's doing now...

An instrumental that lies somewhere between UKG and Deep Tech - it sounds a bit like if an Eski-era grime producer decided to make a house track. 

Then there's some of the musical guests on the show, who have either been pure Nuum - Craig David - or Nuum-adjacent (Katy B, Tinie Tempah). 

And then there is the fact Chris & Kem from the third season of  Love Island, revealed an ability to rap in the Talent Show episode of that 2017 season. This resulted in their recording a not-bad at all grime-ish single that  incorporates Love Island-slang and which reached #15 in the charts and 

"Little Bit Leave It"  came out on Relentless, the UK garage label. Nuumy!

Stormzy also made a non-musical appearance in the 2017 season, with a video clip apologizing for a tweet about one of the prominent female contestants and also giving some tips to Kem & Chris ("I can give you advice about the raps - you can't use the phones")

Certain contestants over the years  have actually been performers in "urban"  bands as singers or backing dancers (e.g Cach, from the winning couple this year).

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

How about that season finale then? 

They should really have bent the rules and allowed two girls to count as a couple, given that Toni and Shakira were clearly the stars of the season and theirs is the true love story here. 

Toni has the best tone and cadence since Liza Minelli.

In another era, some impresario would have spotted Shakira's incandescence and whisked her off to Elstree - or more likely, given her gumption, she'd have made her own way to Hollywood, like Cary Grant et al did. There she'd have been screen-tested and put through the studio system finishing school (what a shame though for elocution to override that delicious accent) and emerged as a star.

If she can half-way act, it could still happen. 

More likely, in this day and age, she'll be famous for being herself, a public personality. 

With any luck, she'll drift from entertainment into politics and sort out all our problems.

Barbara Tucker diva loop - brilliantly stuttered and ghostified - is taken from what might well be my favorite house track that isn't by Todds Terry or Edwards

sourced deeper