Wednesday, August 7, 2013

retro-junglizm or nowtro-junglizm?

Enjoying mightily the Hardcore EP by Special Request (aka Paul Woolford), especially the track "Broken Dreams".




And the forthcoming Special Request LP Soul Music  is even more enjoyable, even more mighty.  Like the EP, it's out on Houndstooth/Fabric Records, in late September.




At something of a loss to justify my mighty enjoyment, though...

It's not nostalgic (for that I would just go straight to something like this) and nor is it Jack-Whitey-Black-Keys-y "at last! back to proper music!".  Really it's more like a feeling that perhaps, give or take brostep's bass-blasts and footwork's tom-rolls,  this really was as far as things ever got.  (In terms of structuration features, at any rate:  sound design / sound quality / imploded intricacy, the 21st Century has definitely taken those further, MAXed them out). So building on that moment of outermost extension, or even just reiterating it,  seems a justifiable move. Especially when everybody else is going back even further, to things (house, or techno, or 80s "boogie", or pre-drill'n'bass IDM) that were already outflanked by that moment of utmost extension.

This effort and this effort and possibly this effort too by Demdike Stare (in their Testpressing series) are maybe an attempt to build sideways from that outermost moment. Although "Collision" does sound just a tiny bit like a No U Turn record played at 33 rpm instead of 45.

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