the 21st Century so far

Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far...

I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the end of time.

Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit?)

So despite the enormity I thought I would give the entire list a listen, in both categories. (There's also a list of mixes). 

I got about a third of the way into the albums, skipping the ones I already knew. But then - as always seems to happen with such undertakings (e.g. the enormous playlists of an artist's entire discography that you might pull together yourself, or of a genre)...  inevitably the will to carry on crumbles away. It's just too daunting. It comes to feel like work. As a way of discovering things, it's not the way that the music you end up loving generally tumbles into your life. Especially not with dance music, which is most meaningfully encountered in a club and in the thick of a crowd. 

But I did hear some things I'd never heard that I really liked, along with quite a lot of things that were excellent but ultimately sounded like superior-sound-design updates of  sono-rhythmic ideas that existed in rawer form in the 1990s.  

As always happens with these canon-making pushes by publications, I was surprised by how few of the artists or works that I love figure in these lists. (And quite often when an artist I like did get mentioned, the track honored wasn't what I would have selected). 

But you know what - people are different!  

So much music - electronic, dance, everything else - came out in the 21st Century that entirely different cartographies and canons can be constructed that barely overlap with your own trajectory as a listener or personal pantheon. 

One new-to-me tune in the RA list that I really liked

Now if you know anything about where I'm coming from, in terms of what I like in dance music, it makes perfect sense that this is a tune that would appeal.   It's fresh and exciting but audibly in the tradition of "Party People". 

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I'm not sure how much this RA list is ultimately based on the votes of the contributors and how much determined by decree from above, but they did ask me for a list of nominations, albeit only in the overlapping categories of hauntology / ambient / conceptronica. This is what I suggested, which is unranked: 

ALBUMS

Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

The Focus Group – Hey Let Loose Your Love

Oneohtrix Point Never – Rifts

Belbury Poly – The Willows

The Advisory Circle – Other Channels

Mordant Music – Dead Air

Moon Wiring Club – An Audience of Art Deco Eyes

Rashad Becker – Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

The Caretaker – Everywhere at the end of time

Debit – The Long Count

Runners up (unasked for, I couldn't resist supplying)

Lo Five – Geography of the Abyss

Dolphins into the Future – On Seafaring Isolation

Lee Gamble – Diversions -  1994-96

eMMplekz – Rook to TN34

Roj – The Transactional Darma of Roj

Hybrid Palms – Pacific Image

ML Buch – Suntub

Second Woman - S/W

Huerco S – For Those of You Who Have Never

Burial – debut album

patten – Mirage FM

TRACKS

Mark Van Hoen – Holy Me

eMMplekz – Gloomy Leper Techno

The Focus Group – Modern Harp

Oneohtrix Point Never – Physical Memory

The Advisory Circle – Sundial

Holly Herndon – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

James Blake – If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Burial – South London Boroughs

Belbury Poly – Caermaen

People Like Us – World of Wonder (Why We’re Here)

Moon Wiring Club – Mademoiselle Marionette

 

MIX

bit stumped here, I don't tend to remembrance mixes like other folks do, but then I thought, "oh yes, there's - 

The Arkiteket - The Deep Ark

And then when I saw their list, I slapped my forehead with a 'gah' and realized I really should have - and really would have - included this mix: 

Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo (Japan, 1980-86) - by Spencer Doran

And the follow up Vol 2 was great too. 

It's especially amnesiac of me given that in this big piece on Ambient / New Age as a phenom of the 2010s written for Resident Advisor, these mixes feature prominently (along with the Japanese interior music / 4th world compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 plus quotes from Doran in his Visible Cloaks guise). 

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Maybe, maybe,  I'll go back and finish that 2000-2025 albums list... do it in stages... then do the tracks... and maybe even the mixes. 

I already tried and enjoyed this mix which sounded intriguing from the write-up and mixologist Nono Gigsta's side reflections

https://soundcloud.com/gigstab/freerotation-2024-the-house-of-crocodiles-part-2-live-recording

Amid the near-infinity of sources out of which it is woven, this new-to-me tune jumped out particularly

Which itself contains a sample of - or perhaps more accurately, is a re-edit of? - something I dimly recognise (from being sampled elsewhere - some track on Reinforced?) but the source song "Misdemeanor" is new-to-me and quite delicious, sort of avant-ized Jackson 5

Less delicious is learning about the actual misdemeanor the artist would much later commit.... Wiki Fear strikes again, or at least, it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have read the offending entry 

Ah, Anon comes through in the comments with the ardkore jungle tune that samples Foster Sylvers - not 4 Hero and crew but M-Beat 

Here's another use (out of loads and loads in hip hop etc)

"a long shout"

 

A long overdue big shout going out to S. Vispi, B. Thomas, D. Duncan aka Intense aka Babylon Timewarp aka various other identities

Here's a disorganized playlist including also some of their celebrated remixers and allies like Little Mat and D.O.P.E.

Those Horny "Horns" (slight return)

Always felt this tune by Dev, "In the Dark" - my fave single of 2011 - was a UK garage flashback / rip-off. 

And now I realise that the main reason that it has that association for me is the parping synth-horn vamp that comes in at 32 seconds - a UK Garage hallmark.

Not only are those horns horny, the song itself is about being uncontrollably horny. 

At this point Dev had the sexiest singing voice in the world, simply on the basis of her sampled cameo in "Like A G6" and her one solo hit "In The Dark", which was constantly on the radio in LA

"In The Dark" is from an era when producers were doing starting to do amazing things * in terms of an architecture of harmonies and multiple interlocking vocal parts, texturizing of backing vocals and what I would call side-vocals - or even aside-vocals: a kind of melodic equivalent to the adlib in rap later on.  Working in jitters and stammers and mechanistic syncopations. And voice-as-pure-FX - like the slithery-rubbery vocal ripples in "In The Dark"

It all comes from Dev but with gimmick-attuned producers working with her (the Cataracs in this case), it adds up to the ultimate in ear-candy. An overflowing panoply of hooks - just so many "good bits" that stick in your head,

Other examples of this combo of personality and processing would be Ke$ha songs like "Tik Tok" and especially "Backstabber."

The latter is not the work of the evil Dr but David Gamson, as in Scritti Politti -  a fact that just added savor to my enjoyment of the song. 

"Backstabber" features an awesome horn part, as it happens, but it's not UKG style - more throwback campy, almost Casino Royale / Herb Alpert. Possibly a sample, as opposed to synthi-horn played on a keyboard.

I should imagine the vocal arrangement virtuosity emerging at that time owes a lot to the late 2000s release by  Antares of the Harmony Engine, a studio tool that made it easy to multiple the singer's voice, stack it, spectralize it, situate it within the sound-space of the recording...

An orchestration of the voice alone, even before you get to all the other things going on in the track 

Like those horny horns in "In The Dark"

* Yeah, yeah, ABBA did this kind of thing in "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and so many other tunes...  and Missy Elliott in a different way. And then there was this from 2005, before the Harmony Engine came on the market

Amen to that / give the drummer some / da funk pointilliste

Three pieces very much worth reading: 

1/ James Parker with a short piece at the Atlantic on the mystery of drumming and its relationship to Time and Flow (spinning off a book that also sounds worth reading: John Lingan’s Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers 

2/  Ethan Hein blogging about the Amen Break with an inventory of sampled examples of use.

3/ Nick Coleman substacking about Herbie Hancock's  jazzed funk / funked jazz trilogy  of the mid-70s: Head Hunters, Thrust, Man-Child

Some choice portions: 

Parker: 

I love hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat pedal, right foot on the kick-drum pedal, left hand on the snare, right hand on the ride cymbal. When it starts to flow, you’re like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man: You’re in a holy circle of equilibrium, blissfully distributed, with consciousness diffused to your extremities....   You get better.... via the drummer’s version of the grace of God—which is the jolt, the volt, the heavenly bolt, the electromotive impulse that flashes out from the playing of another, much greater drummer, and claims you.... 

[and this fascinating fact, cueing off a section on what happens to drummers as they age, the physical toll of being a drummer]

A 2008 study of Blondie’s Clem Burke revealed that, during live sets, he played with the stamina of an athlete, burning about 600 calories over the course of an 82-minute show. 

[fascinating because it underwhelms - just 600 calories? I thought he was going to say something more like 6000 calories and some other statistic like loses five pounds in sweat during a concert! I have gotten near 600 calories just going on the exercise bike for 70 minutes. And I am in pathetic shape]

Hein: 

Here trying to pinpoint just what makes the Amen break so different, so appealing... 

"One factor is just the sound of the drums. Winstons drummer Gregory Coleman hits hard, but with subtlety. Each time he hits the ride cymbal, he gets a slightly different pitch, a slightly different velocity. The same is true with the snares. He’s not just pounding out a beat, it’s practically a melody. The tape is heavily saturated, bringing out the upper overtones, and the sound is incredibly loud and present.

The rhythm pattern is compelling too. You can understand it in terms of tresillo rhythms displaced by different amounts that are overlaid on a basic R&B backbeat."

[One thing with the Amen and its particular relationship to jungle is that as breaks go, it's not exactly funky. It's just a bit too fast for that slow 'n' sexy feel. It doesn't pull at your hips and waist. That's even in the raw original state - but then when's it sped-up, looped, edited, retriggered etc, it  totally becomes a sound of insurgency and emergency - a militant rhythm. For sure jungle breaks are funkier than the beats in its increasingly estranged sister-genres like techno and trance. But for the most part, although hyper-syncopated, they are not really sexy.  To the extent that a lovers jungle vibe creeps into the genre later on as it matures and sophisticates....  that sexiness is located almost everywhere else in the music than in the drums - it's in the moaning diva vocals, the lightly glancing synth pads, the sensuous glistening textures, sometimes the bass. But the drums remain at odds with that vibe:  all crashy excitement and forward-surge. Often the sexy elements in jungle actually come from house 'n' garage or  R&B.]

Coleman: 

[Thrust's] opening cut, the filthy “Palm Grease”... is so granular, so atomised in its blizzard of harmonic spot-squits, all actually played rather than programmed by the pianist on his battery of ARP hardware, that it has always suggested to me that music still has yet to fully explore every nook, cranny and journeying asteroid in its formal multiverse. Come on now. Why have we heard so little of la musique pointilliste? Herbie Hancock makes an excellent jazz Seurat: the primum mobile of a music that concerns itself principally with its own hyper-precise placing in time and space, within a harmonic structure so dotty that we begin to think less about chordal harmony and more about colour modalities and the formation of clouds (“Uh, thangewverymuch, London! This next piece we have for you tonight is in Sirrus-minor, the greyest and fluffiest of all keys”); music that has become less and less linear in its drive to move its poles away from the banalities of chord “progression” and become more and more concerned with articulations of the endless moment, the unceasing now, the rubber-thewed not-yet. The poetics of utter stillness. But funkily of course."

A parallel thought I had a while ago in relation not to Herbie Hancock but the spin-off band The Headhunters and "God Made Me Funky":

"One of the things about recorded music I love is when you can "see it" - diagrammatically, as blocs of sound distributed across space -  but it also has this totally somatic and haptic impact. This perfectly produced funk track works simultaneously as a mechanism whose moving parts you can gaze at in an almost distanced way and a seething fever reaching into your body, coiling its tightness inside your insides."

Now I think about it, it was something Ethan Hein wrote, a deep structural analysis of "God Made Me Funky", that first introduced me to the track and resulted in obsessive playing of it, especially the minute and a half before the voice comes in. 

Hein also has written about "Watermelon Man" off Head Hunters. 

The track I really love of this Hancock era

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More on Amentalism - a 2011 piece published in The Economist by Tom Nuttall.

Seven seconds of fire: How a short burst of drumming changed the face of music 

IT IS 3am in a dank, sweaty studio in south London. Ear-splitting basslines pound from the sound system. Some of the young crowd gently bob along. Others are drinking, chatting or lurking in dark corners. Then, suddenly, the music changes. A throbbing pulse gives way to a clattering rhythm. Where there were 130 beats per minute, there are now 170. Where the mood was meditative, it is now maniacal. Within seconds the place is jumping.

This music is called “jungle”. Some of the people in the club were probably not alive when it was created. Certainly few would have been old enough to experience it in its heyday. These young revellers have an ear for the next big thing; they find trips down musical memory lane tiresome. Yet nothing seems to animate them like these tracks from almost 20 years ago.

To understand jungle's roots, you must travel yet further back in time. On March 11th 1970 Richard L. Spencer, tenor saxophonist and lead singer for a short-lived Washington, DC, soul act called the Winstons, was awarded a Grammy for “Color Him Father”, a sentimental ode to a devoted stepfather released by the band the year before. The record sold well, but unlike some of his fellow winners that day, who included Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash, Mr Spencer was not destined for musical canonisation; the Winstons had already split up and later that year he quit the music business. The song, too, has largely been forgotten.

The same is not true for “Amen, Brother”, the B-side to “Color Him Father”. It is not immediately apparent why this should be. The two-and-a-half-minute instrumental, a funk update of an old gospel standard, is sprightly enough; the casual listener might be diverted by the energetic horn line. But there is little to distinguish it from hundreds of similar records released around the same time. The band recorded it quickly, says Mr Spencer; they needed a B-side and didn't have any other songs.

Seven seconds of this track were enough to guarantee its immortality. One minute and 26 seconds in, the horns, organ and bass drop out, leaving the drummer, Gregory Coleman, to pound away alone for four bars. For two bars he maintains his previous beat; in the third he delays a snare hit, agitating the groove slightly; and in the fourth he leaves the first beat empty, following up with a brief syncopated pattern that culminates in an unexpectedly early cymbal crash, heralding the band's re-entry.

“Amen, Brother” lay dormant for almost two decades. But in 1986, as the nascent hip-hop scene in New York was entering the musical mainstream, the song cropped up on the first volume of “Ultimate Breaks and Beats”, a compilation of tracks with “clean”, drums-only segments. DJs and producers using turntables had long used breaks from old funk tracks as backing material for rappers; the compilation made their lives easier. Combined with the sampler, a new piece of digital hardware that recorded snippets of sound for deployment in other contexts, it allowed producers to create extended loops over which rappers could perform.

The first hip-hop producers to use what became known as the “Amen break” did so with no great ambition. Many looped only the first two, “straight” bars of the four-bar break. Amen was simply one of many tools in the producer's kitbag.

When jungle was massive

A journey across the Atlantic liberated the break. In the early 1990s British producers in the rapidly evolving dance-music scene were seeking new sources of inspiration. The repetitive grooves of American house and techno provided one; the reggae sound systems operated by Anglo-Jamaicans were another. But more than anything it was the sampler that galvanised these producers. Their tracks developed a distinct identity, supported by a complex infrastructure of record shops, pirate radio stations, nightclubs and raves: they sped up, acquiring an urgent, almost manic quality, relying increasingly on the creative possibilities for rhythmic experimentation opened up by the sampled breakbeat.

The producers of what was coming to be known as jungle found a number of old breakbeats that suited their needs. As these beats began to crop up in more and more records—they were, in the parlance, “rinsed”—fans began to recognise them, and to compare the ways in which producers had manipulated them to generate distinct effects.

Chief among these breaks was Amen, which many producers first heard on “King of the Beats”, a six-minute instrumental collage of hip-hop beats and other samples released by Mantronix, a New York producer, in 1988. The track made extensive use of the Amen break, but in a fresh way: segments from the loop were chopped up, layered and processed so that the drums became central to the track rather than simply a rhythmic bedding.

Like a virus, once the Amen break had taken hold among jungle producers it began to propagate, and to mutate. It was used on hundreds, possibly thousands of records (some claim that “Amen, Brother” is the most sampled track in the history of music). For a time anyone trying to build a name in the scene had to turn their hand to Amen. “The musicians chose to limit themselves in order to express creativity within boundaries,” says Simon Reynolds, a journalist and author who chronicled the rise of jungle in Britain.

As the music grew more sophisticated (and the technology more powerful), the manipulation of the break grew wilder; producers engaged in a sort of Amen arms race. “It was a battle to see who could do more with it,” says Karl Francis, who, recording as Dillinja, was one of the more radical Amen experimentalists. “But the tunes still had to work in the club. Sometimes I made tracks that went too far and people would just stand on the dance floor looking confused.” Listeners grew attuned to the break's sonic elements; before long the merest hint of Amen was enough to drive crowds into a frenzy. Coleman's seven-second break had entered the collective aural unconscious of a generation of young Britons.

A Proustian snare drum

Why was Amen so popular? One answer is that it fulfilled a need: easy to sample and manipulate, it offered producers a straightforward way into jungle. Many amateur producers, including this correspondent, have been surprised to discover how easy it is to make the junglist equivalent of instant noodles by sampling, looping and speeding up the break. Eventually Amen acquired critical mass; producers used it because everyone else did.

But Amen also has certain sonic qualities that set it aside from its rivals. Rather than keeping time with a hi-hat, Coleman uses the loose sound of the ride cymbal, filling out the aural space. And the recording has a “crunch” to it, says Tom Skinner, a London-based session drummer: “That quality is appealing to beatmakers.” The pitched tone of the snare drum is particularly distinctive; as any junglist will tell you, a snare can be as evocative as a smell.

The displaced snare of the third bar and the syncopated last bar became signature elements of many Amen tracks. At 170 beats per minute the jumpiness of these parts of the break becomes urgent. Mr Reynolds talks about the “panic rush” of the break at this tempo, the “state of emergency” it created among clubbers.

Mr Skinner draws attention to the way deft producers would emulate drummers' tricks in their manipulation of the break, creating “ghost notes”—rhythmic shuffles of sound that help the beat swing. Others introduced hyperactive snare rushes or stop-start mini-loops, and deployed the cymbal crash to signify not the beat's conclusion but rather its ongoing pressure. “It's language that existed before, but you had never heard a drummer playing quite like that,” says Mr Skinner.

Like all musical movements rooted in a particular period, jungle slipped first into a decadent phase, and then became a nostalgia piece. The futuristic frenzy became routine; beats became metallic and funkless; the sampled break was often replaced by the drum machine. Elsewhere the lilt of the accelerated breakbeat, its harsher edges smoothed away, proved attractive to makers of commercials and composers of television-title tunes. Many Americans first encountered Amen like this; it crops up, for example, in the theme of the popular cartoon series “Futurama”.

Before long the merest hint of Amen was enough to drive crowds into a frenzy

But Amen never went away. Some keepers of the flame continued to use it to signal their devotion to the good old days, or to conclude what they considered to be unfinished business. Guitar bands occupying different musical universes from jungle producers, such as Oasis, found uses for this most versatile of breaks.

Today, when the generation that first exploited Amen is nudging middle age, a younger wave of musicians has begun to uncover new meanings in this loop. Some use it to express a stern oath of fealty to a movement they were too young to experience. In the tracks of others you hear a plaintive yearning for a simpler time, when producers could use breakbeats without feeling that they were freighted with meaning. A sample that once encapsulated dreams of the future now struggles to escape its past.

“A lot of young people are nostalgic for things they weren't there for,” says Micachu, a 24-year-old London-based musician. For her own Amen project, with Pete Wareham, a jazz saxophonist, she ruled that the only permissible sounds were Mr Wareham's sax and her treatments of the break: “Every producer should give their take on the Amen break. It's like a composer doing a chorale.” (Mr Wareham says that he had not heard of the Amen break by name before, but that when he sought it out “the last 20 years flashed before my eyes.”)

If the Amen break belongs to anyone, the 1990s generation who performed their extraordinary acts of alchemy on it would seem to have a strong claim. But in a much more tangible sense, the break, along with the rest of “Amen, Brother”, belongs to Mr Spencer, who retains the copyright to the Winstons' back catalogue. The band's former front-man says that neither he nor Coleman, who he says died in poverty in 2006, received any royalties from the extensive reuse of Amen. Mr Spencer says he only became aware of its rebirth in 1996, when he was phoned by a British music executive seeking the master tape of “Amen, Brother”.

Whose break is this?

Mr Spencer is not interested in the digital age and its remix culture. He dismisses the music spawned by the track as “plagiarism” and “bullshit”, considering it another chapter in the plundering of African-American cultural patrimony. “[Coleman's] heart and soul went into that drum break,” he says. “Now these guys copy and paste it and make millions.”

It is a tricky area, acknowledges Mr Reynolds. He notes that had Mr Spencer received a fraction of what he considers to be his dues he could have retired early and put his children through college. On the other hand, he and Coleman have achieved a sort of immortality: “It's a bit like the man who goes to the sperm bank and unknowingly sires hundreds of children.” Mr Skinner agrees that it is a shame the original musicians earned nothing from the reuse of their work, but says, “you don't want a world where sampling can't happen.”

The legal infrastructure surrounding sampling has become more robust. Yet even if the legion of small-time producers who were using sampled breaks 15-20 years ago could somehow have been identified and challenged, it is not as if Mr Spencer would have received anything; jungle would have taken a different form—or perhaps simply been crushed. That would have counted as one of the music world's minor tragedies.