Acute ruminations on the concept of "revelance" from Man like Luka. Particularly dig the opposition made between
Repetition and Reinvestigation. And the jab at folks in Minnesota making tracks that could have been played on Kool FM in 94--ouch!
The concept of "revelance", along with similar ideas like "street credible", all the things that get your Auspicious Fishes seething (although i notice Nick's a Dizzee admirer now), is something i would have derided back in those blissy late Eighties-- or at least put scare quotes around. Admittedly this would have been a counter-reaction to some of the utter tripe music championed in the name of politics-in-pop by the likes of the NME in those days. but still--what a weird little art-for-art's-sake/pomo-damaged/aestheticisation-of-surrender bubble i must have been living in! Today it seems a matter of urgency that music be something you can tell the time(s) by. It's not the only criteria obviously--sonic strangeness for its own sake, pure enjoyability--but the stuff that does contain some kind of response to the present, or transmit some kind of information, is significantly elevated in my estimation.
That "response" or information need not necessarily be consciously transmitted -- for instance hip hop and dancehall are always going to be something you can tell the time(s) by just because of who's making the music and who it's made for. Same with pirate continuum stuff. It's political but not necessarily politicized. And of course the information may not be good news, heartwarming or hope-inducing.
Friday, January 09, 2004
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Gimme danger
Rather belatedly picking up from Tim Finney’s Skykicking post on drum’n’bass and the loss of its “rhythmic danger” of December 20….
---first, if you’re going to talk about “rhythmic danger” then the role of the bass, and how that changed/deteriorated, is worth considering… “Dangerbass” is what I titled some mystery tune on an early ’94 pirate tape (still never identified, sigh)… back in those days the way the bass moved in relation to the drums, the vibe it created--stealth, trepidation, ominousness, lurking malevolence, a sort of tectonic instability--was crucial to that feel of rhythmic jeopardy Tim talks about… it also strikes me that jungle’s bass-motion was more musical, or musically interesting, than the way bass related to the beats in later drum’n’bass … from techstep onwards, the bass-riffs, as slathered as they are in “evil distortion”, operate in a much more regular and dependable-feeling way…
--- one thing that struck me is how the meaning of speed changed. The first acceleration, the foundational surge in tempo that turned house into hardcore into jungle, was felt as a cataclysmic increase. Catastrophic/revolutionary. Thousands dropped by the wayside, way more left the scene than stuck with it, they just couldn’t cope with both the speed and the choppiness of the breaks. But if you could handle the bpm surge, thrive on that sensation, then you were one of the headstrong hardcore. The headfuck, body-confound of the speed-surge--1991-1994, approx 120 bpm to approx 150 bpm--that was what made people says things like “you can’t dance to it” or “it’s just not music”.
The odd thing, though, is that drum’n’bass carried on getting faster after 94. It probably went up another 30 or 40 bpm in the four or five years after jungle had ‘arrived’ in terms of wider mainstream consciousness. But no one really noticed or commented on that further increase, it didn’t register as an equivalent amplification of intensity, either within the scene or outside it. But some people, some of the original ‘speed tribe’, did notice, and mourn, the way that as the music continued to get faster, all the interesting internal musical relationships of half-speed basslines etc disappeared. The further increase of speed seemed to narrow the music down drastically until all that was left was the sensation of pure linearity. The endless one bar loop chase-scene treadmill.
This suggests that on any axis of change, there is an optimal range, beyond which you enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. You carry on increasing the element or aspect that originally excited before, but the effect is not the same; and eventually if you keep on doing it, it actually becomes a negative.
The ZFI applies to all kinds of things not just music. Drug use, obviously; sex, love, relationships (you can enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification with baby talk and sweet nothings), almost any hobby or obsession, art form or pleasure. But sticking just with music, I’d say that every style of music must have its optimal range and its ZFI range, you could plot them on a graph if you had a mind to. Gabba’s ZFI probably starts around 220 bpm, maybe a bit higher. That’s just tempo, of course, there might be another key axis, or even several axes, of intensification worth calibrating with gabba (distortion of kickdrum; noise; fuck you/kill-yer-mama/nasenbluten-puerility&nastiness). Minimal techno’s ZFI would when it just gets too emaciated, perhaps; microhouse when it gets too subtle, too nouvelle cuisiney. De trop de fromage, avec Gatecrasher-era trance.
One of the things that’s striking about jungle is that so many things were going on in the music you had multiple axes with the potential for fuck up and going into the Bad Zone and sure enough all of them were taken. The zone of fruitlessly intensified jazziness (think Wax Doctor, the later Good Looking stuff, the stuff Fabio ended up with); the zone of fruitless complexification (think what happened to Reinforced, Vortexion, all that stuff); the zone of fruitlessly exaggerated tumbly-Amen-exuberance (Aphrodite), the ZFI of apocalypticness/darkness (post-No U Turn).
(Mind you, there’s a perspectival element to this obviously. What many would think of as the Optimal Range of Intensification for hardcore>jungle is what a trad househead would think of, and did think of, as a ZFI--“fucking E-heads destroying the music”. And my ZFI for metal might be where thrash/death/black/etc headz think the key threshold into fabulousity actually starts)
In hip hop, an obvious axis on which there’s a ZFI would be Bling, also Thuggizm/Gangsta-Realism. Also, in undie, the encryption/prolixity/too many words to the bar axis.
I don’t think the ZFI is quite the same thing as self-parody. Partly because although the music can start to seem absurd once it enters the Zone, I think it’s more in the sense of a self-defeating dysfunctionality, something that doesn’t work anymore, give you the rush it did-- rather than simple ludicrousness. And in that sense, it’s no laughing matter. It’s also more impersonal and structural than the kind of self-parody that an individual artist can get into (and almost all do). Like, say, Morrissey, where you feel he could maybe have had the discretion to not go that way. With the ZFI it’s more like the evolutionary cycle of a species or something. Maybe it is self-parody, except there’s no self involved, ‘cos it’s collective, a scene or sound that gets mishapen (Echo & the Bunnymen: "losing the point of our mission/will we become/mishapen?"). The sound can carry on following its doomed path deep into the ZFI; meanwhile much of the original massive does the sensible thing and buggers off to something more, ah, fruitful and fruitious(c.f. speed garage in 97).
Now it’d be intriguing to work out what the significant axis on which the Zone of Fruitless Intensification will manifest itself, looking at some current musics. With Grime, one possibility is clunkiness. At the moment the music exploits the aesthetic possibilities of clunky-but-in-a-good way -- the clunk-crunk-funk nexus (the fact that stiff and lurching is actually more funky, or more rhythmically arresting/compelling, than fluid, nimble ‘funky’ playing). But I can already imagine that good-clunk turning to bad-clunk, getting both caned into the ground and exaggerated to the point of non-enjoyability. Same with the bombastic/doomladen post-Swizz/Ludacris fanfare-riff, although perhaps that's just a subset of "clunk".
I’m curious if Screwed as an Aesthetic has its ZFI -- and whether that would be the music getting slower and slower until it’s just this voidal subdrone (I should get Erase the World’s Baal to write this bit for me), a nauseously stretched out brink-of-standstill.
-- The Role of social energy. It’s not that drum’n’bass got shit because everyone ran out of ideas (or not only that--I do think most genres have finite possibilities, a seam that gets exhausted). Nor is that all the talented ones moved off to other fields (like steve gurley going into garage, 4 Hero doing broken beat, or Photek moving into house, and then onto hip hop [recent Deuce interview with rupert parkes: “‘s always been my roots, hip hop, honest! Detroit? Never heard of it.”]). A handful of producers did had the suss to move out of the negative vortex of d&B, but by and large it seems like a really high proportion of the original producers--dillinja, andy c, ed rush etc--are still involved, still at the helm. So why haven’t they been able to steer d&B in a better direction? Once a genius, always a genius, surely? It’s because of the massive. (“Scenius” isn’t a collectivized version of auteur theory, because at least 50 percent of “scenius” is the audience input). The jungle massive’s composition changed. It’s a different massive. A more studenty white M/C following embraced drum’n’bass in the late 90s; the orrrrrrrignal junglissss drifted off. Presumably, the new recruits were originally attracted by something “other”, but unconsciously, involuntarily, they gradually changed it back to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates. The DJs are the membrane for this transfer of desire-data. Without necessarily being hyper-conscous about it, the DJs assimilate what the crowd respond to; there’s a positive reinforcement syndrome. The DJs are either DJ/producers and when they make new tracks they’ll consciously or unconsciously amplify the aspects that are getting the best response from the crowd; or they are in close contact with the producers, like Grooverider with his coterie of “boys”, and pass on the data that way, by selecting certain dubs and reject others. Either way the massive actually dictates, through a selective response to the new tunes coming on the scene, the music’s future path. That’s how dance musics evolve in the first place, and that’s how they devolve, in this case.
I noticed a different kind of dancing at a Dieselboy show in NYC in probably-1998, 1999, at any rate one of the last d&b nights for me EVER. There was a lot of energy in the club, but the way people moved was totally different than how people used to dance to jungle or even d&b -- very athletic, they were dancing to the fastest rhythmic element in the music. It was especially striking with these solja-girls dancing real hard, bounding on their feet, almost jogging. There was absolutely no wind-your-waist, no hips or bump’n’grind element in the physical response to the music, because there was no space in the music for that kind of movement. Now, the only place I saw dancing since that which resembled it was, interestingly, at psy-trance parties. Same sort of athletic/amazonian girls dancing very hard and very fast, bounding like antelopes or commandos. So when I said before about the new M/C recruits to d&B unconsciously, involuntarily, changing it to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates -- I guess what I’m saying is they changed jungle into a kind of trance music--propulsive, cold techno-y textures, diminished role of MC, and most crucially the internal musical tensions that made jungle a form of black music gradually flattened out. It was exciting, the Dieselboy show, I’m not saying it wasn’t “valid” or buzz-worthy, but it was nothing to do with jungle. No danger.
Rather belatedly picking up from Tim Finney’s Skykicking post on drum’n’bass and the loss of its “rhythmic danger” of December 20….
---first, if you’re going to talk about “rhythmic danger” then the role of the bass, and how that changed/deteriorated, is worth considering… “Dangerbass” is what I titled some mystery tune on an early ’94 pirate tape (still never identified, sigh)… back in those days the way the bass moved in relation to the drums, the vibe it created--stealth, trepidation, ominousness, lurking malevolence, a sort of tectonic instability--was crucial to that feel of rhythmic jeopardy Tim talks about… it also strikes me that jungle’s bass-motion was more musical, or musically interesting, than the way bass related to the beats in later drum’n’bass … from techstep onwards, the bass-riffs, as slathered as they are in “evil distortion”, operate in a much more regular and dependable-feeling way…
--- one thing that struck me is how the meaning of speed changed. The first acceleration, the foundational surge in tempo that turned house into hardcore into jungle, was felt as a cataclysmic increase. Catastrophic/revolutionary. Thousands dropped by the wayside, way more left the scene than stuck with it, they just couldn’t cope with both the speed and the choppiness of the breaks. But if you could handle the bpm surge, thrive on that sensation, then you were one of the headstrong hardcore. The headfuck, body-confound of the speed-surge--1991-1994, approx 120 bpm to approx 150 bpm--that was what made people says things like “you can’t dance to it” or “it’s just not music”.
The odd thing, though, is that drum’n’bass carried on getting faster after 94. It probably went up another 30 or 40 bpm in the four or five years after jungle had ‘arrived’ in terms of wider mainstream consciousness. But no one really noticed or commented on that further increase, it didn’t register as an equivalent amplification of intensity, either within the scene or outside it. But some people, some of the original ‘speed tribe’, did notice, and mourn, the way that as the music continued to get faster, all the interesting internal musical relationships of half-speed basslines etc disappeared. The further increase of speed seemed to narrow the music down drastically until all that was left was the sensation of pure linearity. The endless one bar loop chase-scene treadmill.
This suggests that on any axis of change, there is an optimal range, beyond which you enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification. You carry on increasing the element or aspect that originally excited before, but the effect is not the same; and eventually if you keep on doing it, it actually becomes a negative.
The ZFI applies to all kinds of things not just music. Drug use, obviously; sex, love, relationships (you can enter the Zone of Fruitless Intensification with baby talk and sweet nothings), almost any hobby or obsession, art form or pleasure. But sticking just with music, I’d say that every style of music must have its optimal range and its ZFI range, you could plot them on a graph if you had a mind to. Gabba’s ZFI probably starts around 220 bpm, maybe a bit higher. That’s just tempo, of course, there might be another key axis, or even several axes, of intensification worth calibrating with gabba (distortion of kickdrum; noise; fuck you/kill-yer-mama/nasenbluten-puerility&nastiness). Minimal techno’s ZFI would when it just gets too emaciated, perhaps; microhouse when it gets too subtle, too nouvelle cuisiney. De trop de fromage, avec Gatecrasher-era trance.
One of the things that’s striking about jungle is that so many things were going on in the music you had multiple axes with the potential for fuck up and going into the Bad Zone and sure enough all of them were taken. The zone of fruitlessly intensified jazziness (think Wax Doctor, the later Good Looking stuff, the stuff Fabio ended up with); the zone of fruitless complexification (think what happened to Reinforced, Vortexion, all that stuff); the zone of fruitlessly exaggerated tumbly-Amen-exuberance (Aphrodite), the ZFI of apocalypticness/darkness (post-No U Turn).
(Mind you, there’s a perspectival element to this obviously. What many would think of as the Optimal Range of Intensification for hardcore>jungle is what a trad househead would think of, and did think of, as a ZFI--“fucking E-heads destroying the music”. And my ZFI for metal might be where thrash/death/black/etc headz think the key threshold into fabulousity actually starts)
In hip hop, an obvious axis on which there’s a ZFI would be Bling, also Thuggizm/Gangsta-Realism. Also, in undie, the encryption/prolixity/too many words to the bar axis.
I don’t think the ZFI is quite the same thing as self-parody. Partly because although the music can start to seem absurd once it enters the Zone, I think it’s more in the sense of a self-defeating dysfunctionality, something that doesn’t work anymore, give you the rush it did-- rather than simple ludicrousness. And in that sense, it’s no laughing matter. It’s also more impersonal and structural than the kind of self-parody that an individual artist can get into (and almost all do). Like, say, Morrissey, where you feel he could maybe have had the discretion to not go that way. With the ZFI it’s more like the evolutionary cycle of a species or something. Maybe it is self-parody, except there’s no self involved, ‘cos it’s collective, a scene or sound that gets mishapen (Echo & the Bunnymen: "losing the point of our mission/will we become/mishapen?"). The sound can carry on following its doomed path deep into the ZFI; meanwhile much of the original massive does the sensible thing and buggers off to something more, ah, fruitful and fruitious(c.f. speed garage in 97).
Now it’d be intriguing to work out what the significant axis on which the Zone of Fruitless Intensification will manifest itself, looking at some current musics. With Grime, one possibility is clunkiness. At the moment the music exploits the aesthetic possibilities of clunky-but-in-a-good way -- the clunk-crunk-funk nexus (the fact that stiff and lurching is actually more funky, or more rhythmically arresting/compelling, than fluid, nimble ‘funky’ playing). But I can already imagine that good-clunk turning to bad-clunk, getting both caned into the ground and exaggerated to the point of non-enjoyability. Same with the bombastic/doomladen post-Swizz/Ludacris fanfare-riff, although perhaps that's just a subset of "clunk".
I’m curious if Screwed as an Aesthetic has its ZFI -- and whether that would be the music getting slower and slower until it’s just this voidal subdrone (I should get Erase the World’s Baal to write this bit for me), a nauseously stretched out brink-of-standstill.
-- The Role of social energy. It’s not that drum’n’bass got shit because everyone ran out of ideas (or not only that--I do think most genres have finite possibilities, a seam that gets exhausted). Nor is that all the talented ones moved off to other fields (like steve gurley going into garage, 4 Hero doing broken beat, or Photek moving into house, and then onto hip hop [recent Deuce interview with rupert parkes: “‘s always been my roots, hip hop, honest! Detroit? Never heard of it.”]). A handful of producers did had the suss to move out of the negative vortex of d&B, but by and large it seems like a really high proportion of the original producers--dillinja, andy c, ed rush etc--are still involved, still at the helm. So why haven’t they been able to steer d&B in a better direction? Once a genius, always a genius, surely? It’s because of the massive. (“Scenius” isn’t a collectivized version of auteur theory, because at least 50 percent of “scenius” is the audience input). The jungle massive’s composition changed. It’s a different massive. A more studenty white M/C following embraced drum’n’bass in the late 90s; the orrrrrrrignal junglissss drifted off. Presumably, the new recruits were originally attracted by something “other”, but unconsciously, involuntarily, they gradually changed it back to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates. The DJs are the membrane for this transfer of desire-data. Without necessarily being hyper-conscous about it, the DJs assimilate what the crowd respond to; there’s a positive reinforcement syndrome. The DJs are either DJ/producers and when they make new tracks they’ll consciously or unconsciously amplify the aspects that are getting the best response from the crowd; or they are in close contact with the producers, like Grooverider with his coterie of “boys”, and pass on the data that way, by selecting certain dubs and reject others. Either way the massive actually dictates, through a selective response to the new tunes coming on the scene, the music’s future path. That’s how dance musics evolve in the first place, and that’s how they devolve, in this case.
I noticed a different kind of dancing at a Dieselboy show in NYC in probably-1998, 1999, at any rate one of the last d&b nights for me EVER. There was a lot of energy in the club, but the way people moved was totally different than how people used to dance to jungle or even d&b -- very athletic, they were dancing to the fastest rhythmic element in the music. It was especially striking with these solja-girls dancing real hard, bounding on their feet, almost jogging. There was absolutely no wind-your-waist, no hips or bump’n’grind element in the physical response to the music, because there was no space in the music for that kind of movement. Now, the only place I saw dancing since that which resembled it was, interestingly, at psy-trance parties. Same sort of athletic/amazonian girls dancing very hard and very fast, bounding like antelopes or commandos. So when I said before about the new M/C recruits to d&B unconsciously, involuntarily, changing it to something more “suited” to their class/race coordinates -- I guess what I’m saying is they changed jungle into a kind of trance music--propulsive, cold techno-y textures, diminished role of MC, and most crucially the internal musical tensions that made jungle a form of black music gradually flattened out. It was exciting, the Dieselboy show, I’m not saying it wasn’t “valid” or buzz-worthy, but it was nothing to do with jungle. No danger.
Saturday, December 27, 2003
STRANGE LIMBO BETWEEN XMAS AND NEW YEAR’S EVE READING BONANZA
And a belated merry Boxing Day to our Great Britain and Commonwealth readers!
Worlds of Possibility with tthe Beatnik’s eye view of the year
heronbone with the AvantYob take, + prognosis for Grime in the04
what technicolor got in its Xmas stocking
Woebot sets the tone for 2004 with a splendid ragga-jungle 94 bizniz mix… well I haven’t actually downloaded it yet, it would take about 5 hrs on my set-up, but just the tracklist alone gave me a mighty memory-rush
In the basement, where the storage lockers are, I was looking for the tree decorations, saw a cardboard box fulla cds, ‘oh go on then’. Ah! A rich seam of jungle cd comps. Deemed at some point ‘second division’ and packed away-- what was I thinking? Jungle Hits Volume 2 with lots of Tom & Jerry, junglized versions of dancehall tunes by Capleton, Half Pint, Frankie Paul, Ninjaman), Jungle Hits Volume 3 (with Splash’s incredible “Babylon”--“alla da youth shall witness tha day that Babylon shall FAAAAAAAAALL!”, even more dancehall remakes); Drum & Bass Selection 5 on Breakdown, edging into that spare militant/minimal 95 hardstep/rollers/jump-up sound, still quite a bit of ragga vibe in there though--SS remixing Cutty Ranks ‘Limb by Limb’--H.M.P. [how long did it take me backintheday to realise that stood for Her Majesty’s Prison], Pure’s “Anything Test” as included in the Woebot Mix, stuff by Bizzi B & Pugwash, Rude Bwoy Monty, Zinc, Phantasy, and Ganja Max's fabulous "Rinse Out."
Funny thing, at the time--1994--the ragga-jungle vibe was a tiny bit oppressive just because that was pretty much all you could hear at raves. The only Moving Shadow stuff that got played would be ‘Terrorist’ by Renegade aka Ray Keith (#1 Amen tune ever) or ‘Dred Bass’ by Dead Dred, and they weren’t exactly archetypal Shadow. (And now those tunes sound better than an awful lot of the more "less obvious", "less crowd-pandering" Shadow stuff of the time). But all that ‘ambient jungle’/intelligent-leaning stuff, it got a tiny bit of play on the pirates, but on the floor, forget it: you’d go to an event and it would be wall to wall ragga-jungle and “The Burial” played once an hour. That’s why Speed was initially a sound initiative, just to showcase the stuff that wasn’t get played out. And initially Speed wasn’t at all successful. I don’t think it ever did draw da massive, as such, just a mixture of inner-scene producers and trendies.
Now, in one of the closets, I have a whole box full of Kool FM tapes…
And a belated merry Boxing Day to our Great Britain and Commonwealth readers!
Worlds of Possibility with tthe Beatnik’s eye view of the year
heronbone with the AvantYob take, + prognosis for Grime in the04
what technicolor got in its Xmas stocking
Woebot sets the tone for 2004 with a splendid ragga-jungle 94 bizniz mix… well I haven’t actually downloaded it yet, it would take about 5 hrs on my set-up, but just the tracklist alone gave me a mighty memory-rush
In the basement, where the storage lockers are, I was looking for the tree decorations, saw a cardboard box fulla cds, ‘oh go on then’. Ah! A rich seam of jungle cd comps. Deemed at some point ‘second division’ and packed away-- what was I thinking? Jungle Hits Volume 2 with lots of Tom & Jerry, junglized versions of dancehall tunes by Capleton, Half Pint, Frankie Paul, Ninjaman), Jungle Hits Volume 3 (with Splash’s incredible “Babylon”--“alla da youth shall witness tha day that Babylon shall FAAAAAAAAALL!”, even more dancehall remakes); Drum & Bass Selection 5 on Breakdown, edging into that spare militant/minimal 95 hardstep/rollers/jump-up sound, still quite a bit of ragga vibe in there though--SS remixing Cutty Ranks ‘Limb by Limb’--H.M.P. [how long did it take me backintheday to realise that stood for Her Majesty’s Prison], Pure’s “Anything Test” as included in the Woebot Mix, stuff by Bizzi B & Pugwash, Rude Bwoy Monty, Zinc, Phantasy, and Ganja Max's fabulous "Rinse Out."
Funny thing, at the time--1994--the ragga-jungle vibe was a tiny bit oppressive just because that was pretty much all you could hear at raves. The only Moving Shadow stuff that got played would be ‘Terrorist’ by Renegade aka Ray Keith (#1 Amen tune ever) or ‘Dred Bass’ by Dead Dred, and they weren’t exactly archetypal Shadow. (And now those tunes sound better than an awful lot of the more "less obvious", "less crowd-pandering" Shadow stuff of the time). But all that ‘ambient jungle’/intelligent-leaning stuff, it got a tiny bit of play on the pirates, but on the floor, forget it: you’d go to an event and it would be wall to wall ragga-jungle and “The Burial” played once an hour. That’s why Speed was initially a sound initiative, just to showcase the stuff that wasn’t get played out. And initially Speed wasn’t at all successful. I don’t think it ever did draw da massive, as such, just a mixture of inner-scene producers and trendies.
Now, in one of the closets, I have a whole box full of Kool FM tapes…
Monday, December 22, 2003
Xmas Reading Bonanza
STOP PRESS: ONE XTRA--da missus on best of teevee 2003
Woebot on his mate Gwen the nutty record collector/dealer--lots of lovely full color scans (note to self: must MUST get a scanner) of the covers of incredibly pricey/obscure records as touted by Gwen. Matt in agony about the $1000 records he covets but can't buy. I am so out of these guys league, i don't think I've ever spent more than $28 in real money on a single slab of vinyl. (When i say real money i mean not the monopoly money you get from Music & Video Exchange when you trade stuff in for exchange which doesn't count cos its promo lead into gold yagetme)
k-punk awakes with a speculation on the future madeleines/involuntary mnemonic triggers for 2003. a hard one to guess, this, the most unlikely tunes remind me of past years, often ones i didn't consciously register at the time or particularly care for
technicolor with an amazingly thorough overview (scroll down a bit) of the year. must concur especially with the comments on Grime (amazing, yes, but it could have moved so much further/faster) and dance (the glut expands but who on earth is buying the stuff?). Exhibiting true obsessive-compulsiveness Jess then returns a bit later with a list of great tunes he forgot to include, reminding me of one i forgot: Kanye West, "Thru the Wire". Love the way that this is basically just a guy playing a portion of one of his favorite records over and over, pitched up ardkore stylee so that Chakha sounds even more heliumgasmic, over this great sloppy-seeming beat. Another fave i forgot: Field Mob, 'Sick of Being Lonely', crunk but amiable, even plaintive.
skykicking with a thought-provoking post on
the disappearance of "rhythmic danger" from drum'n'bass--triggered quite a few thoughts at this end which hope to put down here sooner rather than later
bit late on this one but just in case anyone's not checked it a terrific piece on the 'screwed and chopped' phenomenon in texas rap by tufluv--the entry is Wednesday December 17
todd burns on best xmas album EVER Crunk and Disorderly
--on which subject, i'm no scholar of this particular form, but it strikes me that Ying Yang Twins "Salt Shaker" is a pretty advanced production. Lots of interesting sounds whizzing about in them; multilayered bass noises, farty eruptions. Sorta like Rabelaisian bleep'n'bass, where LFO stands for Lewd Frequency Oscillations. [You have to admire also the frugality of the 'Salt Shaker' video. One location--a fire station; one prop, a fire truck; a few models (c.f. the hundreds of scanty clads in your average rap video). No special FX. If they skipped on catering and just got several tubs of chicken wings and a dozen supersized sodas in , well the budget could come in under.. 10 thousand? That's chicken feed!]
Naked Madja with Part 2 of the epic year round-up.
Interesting comments on Grime's inhumanity and absence of a redemptive vision. I get where marcello's
coming from but for me the coldness and harshness
and uninvitingness of the music IS the humanity, IS the emotion. That's how the world/life has treated these guys and that what's coming out in the music: the sonic equivalent of the skrewface. that was what was fascinating about the Wiley interview at hyperdub, the way he related to the coldness in his music to the
cold rage when he was kicked out by his granny because he'd been getting into trouble
with the law; he felt totally abandoned yet knew it was his fault, except on another level it wasn't,
'society is to blame' -- but that to me shows how there's a total existensial/emotional AND social/political dimension to these bleak impersonal-seeming machinic instrumentals. that said, for sure, there's much tonnage of shite grime trackage or pure functional mc tools
silver dollar circle has a great little rant (might have to scroll down a bit) about all the things wrong with modern culture, i found myself in total agreement, EXCEPT that the trigger for the rant is Daft Punk, who don't to me seem the embodiment of emptiness and blank irony Simon takes them as. Things like "One More Time" and "Digital Love" seem full of pure openhearted love and joy, and also really potent ammunition for those who argue that irony and awe can coexist and are not mortal enemies. (Whereas The Darkness, say, seem like really potent ammunition for the opposed view).
STOP PRESS: ONE XTRA--da missus on best of teevee 2003
Woebot on his mate Gwen the nutty record collector/dealer--lots of lovely full color scans (note to self: must MUST get a scanner) of the covers of incredibly pricey/obscure records as touted by Gwen. Matt in agony about the $1000 records he covets but can't buy. I am so out of these guys league, i don't think I've ever spent more than $28 in real money on a single slab of vinyl. (When i say real money i mean not the monopoly money you get from Music & Video Exchange when you trade stuff in for exchange which doesn't count cos its promo lead into gold yagetme)
k-punk awakes with a speculation on the future madeleines/involuntary mnemonic triggers for 2003. a hard one to guess, this, the most unlikely tunes remind me of past years, often ones i didn't consciously register at the time or particularly care for
technicolor with an amazingly thorough overview (scroll down a bit) of the year. must concur especially with the comments on Grime (amazing, yes, but it could have moved so much further/faster) and dance (the glut expands but who on earth is buying the stuff?). Exhibiting true obsessive-compulsiveness Jess then returns a bit later with a list of great tunes he forgot to include, reminding me of one i forgot: Kanye West, "Thru the Wire". Love the way that this is basically just a guy playing a portion of one of his favorite records over and over, pitched up ardkore stylee so that Chakha sounds even more heliumgasmic, over this great sloppy-seeming beat. Another fave i forgot: Field Mob, 'Sick of Being Lonely', crunk but amiable, even plaintive.
skykicking with a thought-provoking post on
the disappearance of "rhythmic danger" from drum'n'bass--triggered quite a few thoughts at this end which hope to put down here sooner rather than later
bit late on this one but just in case anyone's not checked it a terrific piece on the 'screwed and chopped' phenomenon in texas rap by tufluv--the entry is Wednesday December 17
todd burns on best xmas album EVER Crunk and Disorderly
--on which subject, i'm no scholar of this particular form, but it strikes me that Ying Yang Twins "Salt Shaker" is a pretty advanced production. Lots of interesting sounds whizzing about in them; multilayered bass noises, farty eruptions. Sorta like Rabelaisian bleep'n'bass, where LFO stands for Lewd Frequency Oscillations. [You have to admire also the frugality of the 'Salt Shaker' video. One location--a fire station; one prop, a fire truck; a few models (c.f. the hundreds of scanty clads in your average rap video). No special FX. If they skipped on catering and just got several tubs of chicken wings and a dozen supersized sodas in , well the budget could come in under.. 10 thousand? That's chicken feed!]
Naked Madja with Part 2 of the epic year round-up.
Interesting comments on Grime's inhumanity and absence of a redemptive vision. I get where marcello's
coming from but for me the coldness and harshness
and uninvitingness of the music IS the humanity, IS the emotion. That's how the world/life has treated these guys and that what's coming out in the music: the sonic equivalent of the skrewface. that was what was fascinating about the Wiley interview at hyperdub, the way he related to the coldness in his music to the
cold rage when he was kicked out by his granny because he'd been getting into trouble
with the law; he felt totally abandoned yet knew it was his fault, except on another level it wasn't,
'society is to blame' -- but that to me shows how there's a total existensial/emotional AND social/political dimension to these bleak impersonal-seeming machinic instrumentals. that said, for sure, there's much tonnage of shite grime trackage or pure functional mc tools
silver dollar circle has a great little rant (might have to scroll down a bit) about all the things wrong with modern culture, i found myself in total agreement, EXCEPT that the trigger for the rant is Daft Punk, who don't to me seem the embodiment of emptiness and blank irony Simon takes them as. Things like "One More Time" and "Digital Love" seem full of pure openhearted love and joy, and also really potent ammunition for those who argue that irony and awe can coexist and are not mortal enemies. (Whereas The Darkness, say, seem like really potent ammunition for the opposed view).
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