Sunday, June 8, 2014

a fork in the road(z)?

Dirtnap2 (aka Corpsey of Dissensus) takes issue with my recent blogthought - .
 the techhouse-ificaiton of the London pirates constitutes the End of the Road(z) -  a final fatal break in the continuum....

He wonders if listening to a live recording of Lee B3 Edwards from last Friday  at Opera House, London would change my mind....  "what with the MC and crowd reactions" adding a vybe consistent with and continuumous with funky/grime/UKgarage/etc



In the preceding post based around this live set, Corpsey sounds an optimistic note about the potential of tech-house getting ruffed up just like earlier import sounds did such as US garage in 1997 becoming speed garridge:

"TBperfectlyHonest, I still feel like the tunes I’m hearing in these sets aren’t QUITE “there” a lot of the time - like this is the part of the scene’s history JUST BEFORE it becomes something totally itself and every tune you hear is firing....  I’m basically interested in the last vestiges of ‘straight’ tech/deep house being swallowed and spat up in an altered state by “urban” London’s musical digestive system. This is already happening, in fact - the reverb saturated bleeps and blops are still there, but they’re becoming increasingly syncopated and percussive. The basslines get more and more angular and threatening. Alongside the darkness, samples of RNB singers, even some jungle-ish breakdowns. Sometimes there’s even some silliness going on."

 Listening to it myself , I'm still at the stage he was earlier ("when I first listened
to deep tech it sounded a bit arid and metronomic to me (the large spaces between drum hits and bass-notes, no doubt filled with reverberation in a club)" although those clanky basslines do have a faint tang of xylo-bassy UKG and bleep-era tunes.

To me, there's an odd disjunction between the music and the vybe-elements (all the "Oi!"'and "Sarf London crew" etc, reminding me of everything I've loved before from this subcult matrix - although haven't heard anything on a par with "going out to the Cadbury Creme Egg massive" in this set as yet!).

The well-nuum-y stuff ("the MCs shouting ”Ollie Ollie Ollie”, complimenting ”the lady in the pink dress” on her dancing amid the audible sound of a crowd shouting ”Bo!” and ”Woyyyyrrrr!”)   feels like it's going on in a separate audio channel from the music.  In separate rooms, almost.

Feels like, the MC chat is coming from the endz.  But the deejay mix is coming from The End circa 1998.



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