the thing that struck me about this (snd I'm all for hype, so that wasn't it) is that the voice of the journalist (Kiran Sande) and the voice of the artist (Jam City a/k/a Jack Latham) are virtually indistinguishable.... thoughtful, super-informed about music history, eloquent.... this seems to be the norm with the nu skool producers coming out of the Garage Continuum (copyright Pitchfork, no comment), they really do know their history and are incredibly articulate and precise about placing what they do in some macro-context, mapping out the flow of influences... which in this case (and increasingly) extends beyond nuum to other zones of the past (other nuums) as well as other zones of the globe (kwaito in Jam City's case) ...

this virtual indistinguishability of tone and discursive mode, it feels like a pretty new development. maybe it's exacerbated by interviews being done by email, therefore thought-about-over-time, written up nice and proper, not having the chattiness and fumbling of a spoken interview, but i don't think that's really it... interviewing artists from the nuum in my experience (which is grime and all stages prior to that), even or especially in written form... there's generally something of a idiolect gap, a marked difference in ways of talking ... this nu-skool of producers in lots of ways is the real blog-house, or blogger-house...

There's a whole axis that's emerged in the last several years, coalescing to some extent out of and to some extent off the back of, the nuum .... postdubstep some call it (ugh) although it's also (as with Jam City) postgrime and post some other things too... but what it really is, this fuzzy region that's sort of blurring the edges of, overlapping and encroaching,the nuum... it's the nu-IDM, i think. (The give-away: Brainfeeder, which virtually is Braindance, as per RePhlex's slogan)(Hyperdub as the new RePhlex? Planet Mu as the bridge between RePhlex and Hyperdub?). But crucially it's IDM, reformed. IDM, with most, if not all, of the blindspots removed. IDM, if it actually was serious about the "dance" bit of Intelligent Dance Music. IDM, hip (acutely hip) to where the real energy centers are. IDM, with none of the parody-it snark/goofiness of drill'n'bass/squarepusher/kid606 (if anything, gone the other way and a wee bit too earnest and reverent). So many of the right moves are made, and so many of IDM's faults reformed, that you can't fault this zone of music really. And I don't. I enjoy a lot it (Jam City mix, very nice). Besides, this is my class,isn't it... where I belong.

And yet...

One of the places where a difference comes through, persists, is actually in the names. "Jam City", it just doesn't quite cut it. (As for Joy Orbison...*) Whereas Ill Blu, or Roska, or Crazy Cousinz, or Perempay, these monikers are in the tradition of Rufige Kru and Boogie Times Tribe and Masterstepz and Dem 2... It is now probably pretty easy to get the music right, you can break down and isolate the formal features of all kinds of real-energy-center type musics and come up with nifty rearrangements of them. But it's the peripheral stuff (names, titles, etc) that is actually where that sort of scene-genealogical transmission of vibe still occurs.

* "Joker" (which has pedigree as slighty used jungle producer alias) and "Cooly G" are right on the edge, name-wise. And right on the edge, musically, come to think of it.