Wednesday, June 27, 2012

smore bits on jackin' house 

in a way it reminds me just a bit of moombhaton, not really in direct sonic terms -- but in the sense of being fresh/buzzy/fun to listen, yet also a reconfiguration of known elements, the established palette, such that it's hard to pinpoint the newness....

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ah seems like Bassline-fiend and North-supporter Continuum did start a Dissensus thread on it a while back, but the response was disinterest / derision from the assembled Dissenserati (and still largely is, now the thread's reactivated)


what is the etymology of this term Electroline then?

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SWAG - a hilarious Jackin' House and Bass blog that Martin Blackdown spotted, which at first I thought had to be a spoof of some kind...


KET, SEX & DC10 NEED I SAY MORE!!!

What a sick tshirt - 3 of our favourite things here at
SWAG blog! For those who do not know what DC10 is, its the home of jackin electro house in Ibiza. Its got red walls and fit lasses walk around in bikinis giving out free cat all night long while you dance the night away to mucky wobblers and deep bouncey chicago electro house beats. Its just round the corner from Cafe Del Mar (Where that song was made from kevin & perry) and the world famous OK Kareoke Bar. Personally i've never been to ibiza but me and the boyos plan to smash openings this year, tom's gonna put half oz of cat up his arse before we get ont plane so we can join the mile high cat club hehe naughty :P
I cant wait for all the ket, sex and kareoke, this lass has got it nailed on with this tshirt, if your wearing something with DC10 on it then you are the definition of SWAG...

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We bet you cant wait to wrap your noses round these unreleased beautys, solid gold and look how shiney they are (wont be shiney when they are brimming with my boom cat :P) we have been busy makin these spoons over the past 2 weeks sorry if we havent been around much bt spoons come first as u all know, whats the point in going out if u dont have a spoon on?

here at swag HQ we are all still onit from weekend. been having a reyt time like, one of us mates went under and lost his clothes, cat, geebs and his spoon! hes proper gutterd... you can even see his cat dick on pic...hate it when that happens but its orite we used our new special program to hide his identificaton.

We all gettin off sesh soon so we save some dollah to get him a new spoon

Nuff luff swagsters!!! 
Keep it swag and Sesh on xxx

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SWAG AS FUCK takes me back to my youth this un getting ketty ont dancefloor cos the girls love bass lol ;) x


what's with all the references to ket and cat?  do people really wear little spoons around their necks?
(a different spin on bumpin beats ....)


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"this un"-- the tune that takes Mr Swag back to his "youth.. getting ketty ont dancefloor" is this, another top MC-based tune, but older -- from 2009


not sure about this one though. not at all


other stuff by this lot, who seem to be versatile to a Romney-like degree, sounds like moombhaton, or botched Tiefschwarz

Tuesday, June 26, 2012



I thought Dot Rotten was this super-underground beat-maker in the mold of Terror Danjah....

what's he doing in the UK charts with this?



ah  - he started making his move towards the Centre a while ago i see, as one of this well-intentioned bunch



"Overload", via this entertaining rundown of the UK Top 40 by Tom Ewing...  in which he manfully tries to find things to like about the contents of the current chart...

It's been funny to watch the poptimists, as they age, gradually lose their love of and feel for pop -- pop as constituted by what actually is selling at any given moment, as opposed to an idée(ology) fixe about what its imperishable essence consists of.  But the onset of curmudgeonhood is to be welcomed if it throws up cracking tropes/thoughts like "bosh’n’bellow", "an idea supervoid", "rhythm guitar presets like wilted lettuce" and "disappointing CGI Perrygeddon chorus". Or indeed the chart-rundown title "It’s The EDM Of The World As We Know It."

Better an honest curmudgeon than a career generalist with Botox prose, say I!

it's grime, oop north (part  3)

tunes like these



                                                        ("hands in the air if you think you're hardcore")




are the continuumation


of tunes like these from four-five-six years ago







a couple more (recent-er) tunes by MC Bonez





that last one's gun-talk seems untypical -- usually the vibe is  less grime, more garage rap  (bouncing flow, party up / nice it up -- as opposed to threats and boasts (the side of grime that went into road rap)




in re. jackin & bass, some people are mentioning donk -- true, another example of rave beats + fast rapping, and from the North - but otherwise can't hear the connection 

but any excuse to post this eh?




another version of Ladies Payback

Monday, June 25, 2012


Dude spots a sound that nobody else (in this sphere) seems to have noticed yet!

Jackin House

As he (Musings of A Socialist Japanologist) concedes there is something a bit
"hyperstatic" /  recent-dance-history-in-shuffle-mode about this Northern mixture of electro house, bassline, speed garage, 2step, dubstep, funky...

but, as in the Grand Tradition, the prominence of MCs lifts it above less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts


lots of luvly nuumy features noted by MoaSJ:

"tracks with a bassline/dubstep wobble are called 'wobblers'"

"tracks using the Double 99/187 Lockdown Speed Garage bass warp are, fittingly, called 'warpers'."

and that hallmark: "the surfeit of cheeky pop tune bootlegs"

by which MoaSJ means current stuff I assume



although he also posts the video for this gorgeously etheralised versioning of a 30 year old R&B hit....




yes that's Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody"....

 I like this formulation: 

"For now, it might be fair to call Jackin one of the first Metamodernist dance scenes, neither straight forwardly postmodern/revivalist nor jetting off into a modernist future"

which MoaSJ parallels with a lyric from the Majestic track in this Marcus Nasty mix

"We can't go back,
That's in the past when I reminisce now 
Bring on the future, here for the day,
I'll be making music come what may.
I don't come from the Old Skool,
But I got to big up the Old Skool"


we can't go back but (equally) the past is more present to us, more ransackable, than ever -- hence the way that "Ain't Nobody' sits next to Drake sits next to  Peggy Lee's "Fever" sits next to Notorious BIG next to MIA next to "Fix Up Look Sharp' in the bootleggers arsenal

then again, "metamodernist" is kinda where the nuum has always been at, if you think about it -- metamodernist is a flava-free synonym for "roots and future"










if nothing else (c.f. New Jersey Club)  it's a new twist in the ouroboros

triffic 91 hardcore set from DJ Dara  (of  NYC jungle scene / Breakbeat Science cru renown), first aired on Jungletrain and now up at 320 Kbps c/o Blog to the Old Skool, with a tracklist
talking about bass action...



but how do you go from that, to this?


and this?!



Thursday, June 14, 2012


sub mission


 



the new issue of The Wire is a fun one: a special issue dedicated to bass, with four essays exploring aspects of low end theory and 75 micro-features celebrating favourite B-lines, bass sounds, baritone riffs, tectonic timbres, seismoscapes, etc.  I contributed three of these and they're all on the one page, because the list is alphabetical and my choices happen to start with T, U, and W.  About those particular riffs I'll say no more, but here's some other bass-faves I suggested but didn't write about.



                                    











and there I'll stop, although there's more, so many more...

one of the above, someone else wrote about in The Wire special -- have a guess which track

three of the above are played by the same bassist -- have a guess which ones and who

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and hark, what's this? Meditate on Bass Weight - a Quietus piece on the bassic affinity between the Sunn O))) live concert experience and dance music.  Angus Finlayson deploys Julian Henriques's concept of Sonic Dominance  to explore and exalt the sub-rational impact of "primal frequencies that are felt not heard, resonating through the chest and the bowels, vibrating the soul" .... a rapture that hovers at "the border between tyranny and ecstasy"... Finlayson characterises Sunn O))) 's ritualistic performances as  "a kind of anatomical probing: where are our limits? What's the tipping point? About half an hour in, we reach it. By now, bass has filled the theatre, clogging every pore, an immaterial but impossibly imposing presence"

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Q: Would it be possible to have a special issue about Treble? If not, why not?
caressing my cochlea lately....




It's been a good year for  Lieven Martens, or Lieven Moana as he is billed here.  His LP for Underwater Peoples, Canto Arquipélago, was, I noted a while back, probably his best since 2009's  On Seafaring Isolation... (which was also reissued on CD this year by Fonal). But this C38 for NNA Tapes A Star Maker, Strange Dreams, and Clairvoyance is even more his best since 2009'S On Seafaring Isolation...  Especially the spacey incantatory vocal stuff. 



The latest from Hiroshima-based Paul Thomsen Kirk, a/k/a Akatombo, falls between two stools, or rather, between two posts: post-punk and post-rock. A good place to fall. 


An Analord-type move, this new offering from Bass Clef  -- embracing the relative limitations of analogue, the same set of tools used by the Detroit and Chicago people. And it pays Analord-level dividends. Improbably fresh even when that exhausted instrument the Roland 303 hoves into earview. (Oddly, I recently picked up a copy of the novel that inspired the title Reeling Skullways, Brian Aldiss's Barefoot in the Head, which I always meant to read during my s.f. fiend teens but never got around to).




New signing to Kid Shirt/Hacker Farm's "nano-label"19F3. Very vaguely puts me in mind of.. Gavin Bryars.



The difficult second album. The roughage is all there, the chewy tunes aren't giving themselves up as freely and instantly as with Jewellery. But I'm confident they will.


Fresh as they were, Halo's offerings of last year had a definite tang of early-mid Nineties about them: R&S, Ken Ishii, and so forth. Quarantine is a lot less taggable, to the point where the thought occurs, at several junctures: is this actually a New Sound?


Hyperdub, running things, pt 2.  Cooly G's debut starts off a little languid, but then spirals out into dubby cascades of psychedelic erotica. One of the songs is a Coldplay cover, apparently. Which one, I don't want to know


 

In a text for the Mark Leckey retrospective at the Serpentine last year, I averred that the audio component of "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" was "a remarkable piece of sound art in its own right". Here it is, on vinyl
 



More sound art, on vinyl. INA-GRM gems reissued via Mego's new imprint Recollection GRM.



Might be mistaken here, but this LP has been unavailable for decades, right? I've only ever had it on cassette, taped off a friend. Wyatt's 1970 debut solo album, for CBS, which apparently at one point was considered one of the labels for "progressive  music" . Now reissued by Esoteric, a division of Cherry Red.

and there's other stuff ..

Ariel P's Mature Themes (very good)... and Ku Klux Glam naturally

Woebot, Hallo, obviously

the Ad Hoc compilation (or parts of it, it's bloody long, something like 46 tracks!) ...

the if-I-were-Carpenter-ism of Drokk...

Shackleton's Music For The Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ ...



Sunday, June 10, 2012

Wednesday, June 06, 2012




this wobble anthem on a label (Wicky Lindows) hailed by Leaving Earth reminded me of a movie I once saw on TV -- can't remember the title (perhaps an East European cinema buff can identify it) but some scenes from it have always stuck in my memory. Czech,  possibly...  made in the Nineties but set in the Fifties or early Sixties -- there's a school and this rebellious boy, who's into rock'n'roll and all things American, and at some point he manages to take over the school tannoy system ... and declaims a bunch of insurrectionary nonsense throughout the building. Including the rallying cry "LONG LIVE THE IDIOT".

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

and from one black sheep of the postrave family to another....

Leaving Earth with a top 10 list of Wobble Records

and he's not talking about circa-2006-halfstep-wobble-when-it-was-good

he's talking filthstep, grosstep, abjectionstep, vomstep, splatterstep

his  first choice for the top 10 "immortal wobble objects for posterity" =




Leaving Earth's mysterious Taninian opines, persuasively:

"The wobble aesthetic now seem to be fusing with electro house, to form a new all purpose rave music, much like punk rawness/intensity eventually ended up as a part of a wider “real rock” sensibility in the eighties. It’s all about the Skrillex/ Deadmau5-axis, of course, and while Deadmau5 doesn’t seem all that exciting to me, Skrillex is actually pretty good. Sure, he might not have that many tricks up his sleeve so far....  but he’s nevertheless really good at using wobbles potential for catchiness and dynamics, redefining it to meet his own ends. It would be tempting to go all the way and see him as some sort of, I dunno, dubstep's Sex Pistols, but ... perhaps something like Metallica is probably a better comparison."

At the MTV Movie Awards the other night, the warm-up deejay Martin Solveig was dropping nonstop wobble (the Skrillexy maximalist wibble-tendril type, rather than Stenchman-style diarrhea-step, but still)  to the assembled celebritati and industry people.


Then, in that comedy skit taking the piss out of Emma Stone before she got her "Trailblazer" Award, where the mirth-premise was that in real life she's a horrible arrogant unsweetheart, one of the faux-nasty comments from Mila Kunis was "Emma says she invented dubstep"

So it really has crossed over.

Or at least it will have done, completely, when Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something similar replaces the rockor mortis of moments like this:


Back to the Leaving Earth list--which inexplicably is unaccompanied by YouTubes, I expect he expects you to search out and buy these records -- reading it I found myself wondering whether the actual tunes could possibly live up to descriptions such as these:

"the EP [Tomba's Brace For Impact] excels at the 'grunt-step” wobble variety, like a horde of towering, Godzilla-sized pig-robots marching through a nocturnal megapolis, crushing everything in their way while puking out cascades of green ooze through writhing hydraulic cyber-snouts"



It does actually


Another of Leaving Earth's choices: Doctor P's "Gargoyles"



All this metal-ic grotesquerie-imagery reminds me of that notion I mooted a few years back: wobblestep (d)evolving towards a kind of slowed-down gabba...

so maybe the dungeon style of dubstep is the "intelligent"/ambient/atmospheric version of that -- equivalent to gloomcore? 



Macabre Unit as a label name -- how gloomcore is that?

Monday, June 04, 2012



the new issue of Dancecult journal  is out and it's particularly cultic: a special issue focusing on "The Exodus of Psytrance", with essays by Graham St John, Joshua I. Schmidt,  Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten, Erik Davis, Dave Mothersole, Chiara Baldini, and more
 







postpunk archaeology, parts 1 and 2


1/ Brian Stefans's blog dedicated to Los Angeles Postpunk, with four double-disc compilations of super-obscure art-punk and new wave for you to download, and more to come I beleve

2/ via FACT, the lowdown on Irish postpunk from Darren McCreesh, compiler of Strange Passion: Explorations in Irish Post-Punk DIY and Electronic Music (forthcoming on Finders Keepers)




Friday, June 01, 2012


at Spin, Philip Sherburne with a personal list  of fave 2step and UKG tunes

Dissensus's Wise pointed out a gem I missed


an omission all the more heinous and inexplicable given that i actually have this (a 10 inch if memory serves)