Tuesday, June 10, 2014

deep-DEEPER

Dominic Morris aka Datwun is also enthused about the nu tech-house, or "deep tech", and points to this scene anthem as undeniable:




Do dig its slinky-but-slammin trackiness



The bass pumps

Here's another one Dom recommends



That reminds me nicely of early house, the syncopated crashy snares redolent of Nitro Deluxe or the more tracky Chicago stuff, the blind urgency

But it doesn't really sound dated, like a throwback...  it's not retro-dance

And here's another



Tuff little unit! Feeling all those the wibbles and warples  in the bass regions

It's the bass that makes it distinctive (the drums seem like they're very much in the Roland 909 palette, same sounds and similar sort of deployments as 'brutal house", jack tracks, early Detroit). But the bass -- the wet-look texture, the quiveriness, the surging mobility. A tremolo penetrativeness that must really rock your body through a club system, get deep-deep-deep inside.  



Also what I appreciate in a way is the samey-ness, the consistency - how all the tracks are like chips off the same block.  Strung together they enforce a vibe. Another version of dark-swing, menacing sensuality. 

Another goodie by Tazer



The element of "new" here is micro - the subtle tweakage and sculpting of the bass bits -- but as with a lot of the music around (e.g. the rachet 'n' B/Mustard/Power FM rap I'm so into) the overall sound also has that NOW!-ist quality  - an extreme gloss and slinky texturised sheen that's very 21st Century. Digimaximalist in feel yet, structurally, still pretty minimalist.  Almost like the Rustie sound but applied to a less-is-more, tracky aesthetic. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^

I don't know if it's really left the zone I would call Hyperstasis, though. Not yet.

(C.f. Cold Recordings, or the Offmenut stuff Dom also pointed me towards)

A crafty rearrangement and recombination of the well-known, an intensification of the established

(Or in Offmenut's case, the regurgitate that ensues from an omnivorous gorging up-and-down the length and breadth of nuum history: all 25 years of it - bleep to bassline, jungle to jackin)

The hyperstatic aspect can even be seen in the name "deep tech"



Two modifiers of house (deep and tech) coagulating and losing the noun they were originally appended to!

"Deep" and "tech" both being slightly unappetising words from my perspective anyway

The Nominalist Reluctance fascinates me with current dance music in general -- this sort of shying away from, shrinking back from, the coining of new genre names - so different from the nominalist mania of the 90s, when new names bubbled up constantly, an organic byproduct of the scene's relentless mutational drive. The genre names were, for the most part, generated internally rather than imposed from outside by critics and the industry.

New Musics, historically, have announced themselves. Proclaimed their difference from the immediate past, the precursors they patricidally stomp down into passé irrelevance.  Jazz, rock'n'roll, funk, reggae, rap, acid house, techno, jungle, etc etc.  (This reflexivity of the New is totally different from the postmodern reflexity of revivalist and retro currents within pop. "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay", or "Junglist" did not refer back to something from the archive of pop history, they announced the arrival, the emergence, of something).

But now the new waves of producers and fans happily situate themselves within existing, long-established genres.

That in itself must be indicative of something. Too much roots, not enough future.

Reminds me of the custom in some cultures or classes of naming the first-born son after the father.  So it's the next generation, the inheritor, but it has the same name: John Jnr, Alexander Hewison II.


1 comment:

Blackdown said...

"- this sort of shying away from, shrinking back from, the coining of new genre names"

O RLY? ... http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=13352

;)

blackdown