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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