militant step

step-related



not actually one of my fave FPs

Nightcores on Edm street

Shitecore, more like!

"Most nightcore artists traffic in distorted edits of tracks—mostly Top 40, J-pop, and K-pop—sped up to 160+ BPM, with vocals so cartoonishly high-pitched they could easily come from a starry-eyed anime idol"



"a healthy dose of parodic absurdity", zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

this one is at least overloaded and diabetic-coma-y - 



"a frenetic cacophony of jittering vocals and accelerating rhythms that spiral into shimmering, fragmented chaos"

but really, isn't it just Rustie  x PC Music = hearditbefore? 

with some glitchcore, and The Speedfreak, thrown in?



quite enjoyable in its way, but leaves you with a sinking feeling: will we never leave -  get past, go further than -  the Nineties?

adding to that sense of terminal entropy, ever decreasing (re)cycles.... c.f.  'wave' a couple years ago

nudark

i don't get what they're trying to put across with the video though

in a way reminded me of this quote from Marc Acardipane about his Eighties attempts to make hip hop, inspired by Public Enemy and NWA (from my Voice profile)

 “But there came a time when I had to look in the mirror and realise, ‘You don’t come from Compton!’ We had to look for the street sound of Europe.” 

building and burning

missed this Trenchant piece by James Keith from last month, about the building blocks of jungle - informative and surprising!

“The More Nose Bleed The Better”

Remixes of "Hardcore You Know the Score" by Oliver Chesler & John Selway (as Disintegrator) and others to arrive soon.

The original



I always forget about Rising High

It's one of the great label names

And they always had a way with a title - "Night of the Livin' E Heads", "God of the Universe" (you can see why Man like Horrorist liked 'em), "A Modern Prometheus", "Death In Frankfurt", "Death by Dub"

Caspar Pound is also a really good name for a hardcore label CEO.

Mr Pound gave good quote too: "Hard as fuck! It's the rock of the future". "The best thing about hardcore is all the soul's been taken out. We've had 200 years of human element in music and it's about time for a change".

Still, the tracks - bangin, slammin, kickin, and shovellin though they indubitably were - have never quite lodged in my heart and memory like others from that era.

Very much like Kickin Records in that respect - although they did put out a few true faves of mine.

Indeed those two labels go together in my mind, in terms of their sonic and historical location in the UK Rave Story.

Their reign came at that moment just before the breakbeat thing really takes off... when Britcore is still in thrall to the Belgian Sound



This one is very Cubic 22 frinstance



Although there are breaks in quite a few the Rising High and The Hypnotist tracks, the overall feel is still bludgeoning and pummelling and pell-mell.







Then at the critical fork in the road, Rising High veered in the trance / nu-acid direction



Now this is a good tune



I have a lot of their stuff, as 12 inches, and on CD comps and such like... but I'm struggling to dredge specific highpoints from memory.

Well, okay, there was these two





And not forgetting this triffic Top Buzz rmx



Oh and then there was the Project One stuff - proper jungle techno







But this one - despite the promising title - is a bit clumpy and lumpen



Audio Assault, Earth Linkage Trip, Interface, Friends Lovers & Family, Knight Phantom... it all becomes a bit of a crude and chugging blur - the aim is anthem-hood but it rarely gets there.

Although I do remember liking something by C of E (short of Church of Extacy - our pals Lee Newman and Michael Wells again)

Not sure if it was this, or a different mix of same.



Later on, Rising High get much kudos for releasing Wagon Christ and the Plug EPs (well, significantly less kudos for those, although they were great fun at the time - but Throbbing Pouch is the eternal classic). Not forgetting Bedouin Ascent. Or indeed the Irresistible Force aka Mixmaster Morris.



Caspar Pound died tragically young, but the labels appear to be carrying on in some form - perhaps mainly archival - in the hands of his daughter Sapho (who had a sub-label or side-division imprint named after her - dedicated to more experimental releases).

now what continuum would that be then, eh?

i should imagine it's for graphic reasons, not being able to get another word on the front cover, that they have left out the 'hardcore'

of course i could be completely getting the wrong end of the stick here and it's some other continuum that he's "throwing new shapes into" - or perhaps it's a reference to the scientific / philosophical concept of continua (which was unaware of, I confess, until someone started giving me stick for misusing the word, and I was like, 'I just thought it was a word that referred to something continuous!' No, but apparently there's some specific meaning it has in, I dunno, physics or geometry or something like that, that means it's highly unsuitable to use when discussing 2 Bad Mice and Dem 2!).

i have liked some of Mumdance's stuff actually

i do kinda wish he wasn't called Mumdance though

nothing against mums (love my mum) and nothing against dancing (love dancing, although it doesn't occur round these parts very often, except round the living room, when a new House seat falls to a Democrat)

but the conjunction is somehow off-putting

hardcore continuem

separated at birth

B-line!



B-line!


i thought that wicked wicked B-line was invented by 33 1/3 Queen, but he done nicked it off Gerald!

not so much Nu Groove as Old Groove then (albeit only 2 years earlier)

i'm sure there's a Horrorist or SuperPower tune that uses the same supremely nifty B-line

or was it Green Velvet?


A Guy Called Gerald - the greatest two-act career in UKdance?