Friday, August 15, 2014

junglestalgia

This recent-ish tune by the legendary Jonny L is like a flashback to 1995



But oddly "Remember" doesn't really sound  like the stuff he used to do -- more like something by Aphrodite maybe, or perhaps Rogue Unit

Love-love all these retrojungle tunes and rave-replicas that are being made, even while painfully aware of their dissonance with the original spirit that drove jungle and ardkore and D&B

Viz this exchange between Source Direct's Jim Baker and interviewer Harry Sword in a recent Quietus interview

HS:  The music you made as Source Direct was concerned with the future, technology and how you could push sounds into interesting new spheres. Whereas now, particularly within techno, for example, there have been many producers looking back nostalgically to, say, the sounds of Detroit fifteen years ago. When you were producing music as SD, what were your thoughts on 'the future' conceptually? Were you literally trying to come up with sounds that had never been heard before, and if so, in the next stage of production, is that going to be an idea that will equally inspire you?

JB: You've hit the nail on the head with that one. [laughs] When Goldie made that tune 'Terminator', it incorporated technology in the way you can twist a break up in ways that I've never heard a break twisted up before. He'd taken the visual concepts from the Terminator film and put it into a track, in a way that enabled you to visualise the whole film and concept. To me that was a very futuristic thing and pushed the boundaries. I remember playing that out at my own parties and thinking 'Jesus Christ, this tune is going off, everyone is going nuts to it', and for me, Source Direct was about trying to create something new. Push the boundaries, while keeping within certain limitations of what you can do within dance music. You need to stick to the sixteen bars, otherwise no bugger is going to be able to mix it; then you've got the little 32 bars at the beginning, giving it to DJs to mix as an intro; fills on the end of the eights for cutting and that....So you start with boundaries, and then you push the envelope and introduce concepts and choose where you want to take it." 

This bit from the Quietus interview also tickled me:

HS: You're DJing more now than during the mid 90s; are you playing mainly older stuff?

JB: I'm mixing it up. As long as I have the crowd I'll play all sorts, tear-out Amen tracks, something that's just rolling, a whole mixture of old and new, combined and thrown together to make a good, happy party atmosphere. I've had some comments from people that come up to me and say 'What's this tune, when is this coming out?' 'It came out twenty years ago mate!' and the shock on their face, they can't believe it. [laughs]

"Shock on their face"  reminded me of Mark Fisher's "past shock" concept / mental-exercise... Except it's the other way around. Instead of Mark's imaginary time-travel teleportation scenario where people from the past get confronted by a record from 2014 and they're shocked that it sounds so familar, so non-futuristic, so close still to how music is in their time..... this is  a non-imaginary scenario, where something from decades ago gets heard today and listeners assume it's some next-level shit, a this-minute sound ...  What would you call that, then?  Future-passed shock? Insofar as it's a future that we've gone past, left behind (or rather retreated from). A future that nobody since has been able to surpass.

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