stirrings of a backlash against the nu-eclectronica

robin howells at the quietus, at the end of a piece on Live FM and DJ/MC crew Petchy, Topsee & Dream, upholding the scenius-as-fount-of-militant-euphoria principle:

"Looking at some recent journalism, one peculiarity of this might be that idiosyncratic and atomised individuals are favoured. You could conclude it helps if they can be held up as exceptional in some of the following terms: they're free from "genre restrictions"; they avoid "formula"; they defy "geographical boundaries", either because they "join dots" between improbable genres, or because they work in a genre from an improbable location. This is fine, although the above qualities are starting to look fairly commonplace. Anyway, there's no reason why music that isn't like that can't be interesting too."

no reason at all!

(i heard one of the petchy topsee dream sets people were bigging up a whiles back, really enjoyed the mc-ing and banter'n'badinage, classic num-num-nuum stuff in the "hold tight the cadbury's cream egg massif" vein.. the music itself - funky - was more variable, to me anyways. funny though isn't it how nuum veers off in one direction or the other (darkness/abstraction at one pole, housey sensuousness at the other) but always, always comes back to its preferred median zone, which is ruff, jagged, cheaply-and-quickly produced yet fundamentally groovy beats + MC-ing. That is its sweet spot, all the way through

meanwhile over at dissensus, some tittersome barbs thrown at nuum-idm here, such as:

twinklestep versus brostep


"Dubstep nights now mean to me:
1. Most of the good shit will be funky/house strangely masquerading as dubstep
2. WWE-anthem esque boner wobble, during which all the 17-year-old white males take their shirts off
3. Hilariously precious reactionary anti-brostep dubstep: everyone in their late twenties start to enjoy themselves, one of the aforementioned shirtless kids shouts "play some dubstep", and the entire set sounds like a baby whale singing over a little girl's musical box."

twinklestep, teehee

also some more serious commentary:

"this ecleticism in current state of bass music is great, but tbh i'm starting to miss focus"

"This is what I miss about dubstep as it was when I got into it. The unity of sound, the 'hub' events (DMZ/FWD/Leeds), the tribalism of it even... I think it's great that people can play different stuff and there are a lot of good nights playing that kind of range of music but I wouldn't mind something as focussed as dubstep was appearing again. UK Funky I suppose?

"The thing is the internet has changed everything. Eclecticism is almost simply natural for an audience which can now hear practically everything with a few clicks of a mouse."

Right there about the internet, but i would say that eclecticism, as a praise-concept, has been bankrupt since the late 90s, in dance music certainly (probably much earlier in rock), so that is long before the internet really had a major effect on people's access to music and the amount and range that they could check out cost-free. Also,impurism has always been a shaky ideology, guaranteeing neither virtue nor enjoyment.