Matt was kind enough to send me a mini-comp of funky house. It was nothing like what I'd expected. It was actually not that far off Tiefschwarz (which I guess explains why in his post Matt used the word "electro-house"). Good stuff (especially Volta's "Robot Needs Oil"), with a real in-your-face, goes-for-the-throat quality--I liked it lots. What intrigued me was that it appeared to have absolutely no sonic connection to the Nuuum, in terms of the constituents of the style. Accordingly, the picture that came to mind listening to it was not a London black-white-all-shades-in-between crowd brocking out, but a much more Euro tableau--elegantly wasted Berliners in a near pitch-black bunker or decommisioned electrical plant.

So is this total dis-placement, this migration to a sound that has no organic roots to the tradition and the locale, is this really--as Matt suggested-- the end of the line for the Nuum? Are all its dialectical possibilities exhausted? Was the Burial album really a funer(e)al eulogy, an outsider's audio-essay written as a tribute to something whose time has now definitively passed? I'm struck again by the sample in "Gutted":

“me and him, we’re from different, ancient tribes… now we’re both almost extinct -- sometimes… you got to stick with the ancient ways… old skool ways”