Wednesday, January 30, 2019

spasm #2



not dance music, but some kind of postpostmetal blast beat hyperspasmus

sounds like it could be programmed or drum machined into existence

but who knows eh? it's a one-man band at any rate.

wouldn't it be funny if metal - which one tends to think of as supremely physical music, strenuous in excelsis, muscled, sweaty - became a subset of electronic music?  all the "effort" vaporized into sets of digital decisions, blocs of information dragged and tweaked

perhaps some of it already is

(via andrew parker)

Monday, January 28, 2019

spasm #1



well that is pretty mad

a recommendation from my boy Kieran

he also likes this, which is not as manic but pretty peculiar, droopy, tone-smeary stuff





all unfamiliar stuff to me really, games music - i must have played a video game perhaps a dozen times in me life. completely bypassed me.

Thursday, January 24, 2019

watch ya bass bins

sometimes i think this crazy archival (ardkival, even) culture of ours has gone a bit far, stripping the mystery a little as the frontiers of non-knowledge get pushed back further and further, everything documented and annotated and mapped -  tidied up



but then on t'other hand,  it is kinda cool that someone at The Ransom Note has dug up the story behind the voice that goes "watch ya bass bins i'm tellin ya" on Altern-8's "Infiltrate 202"

Turns out they they it sampled from a Sheffield pirate radio station - not necessarily this particular show, but this station - SRC aka Sheffield community Radio, which then became Fantasy FM - and this deejay duo, Astrix & Space



i went a-lookin' on account of this wikkid UKG tune that Cardrossmaniac2 dropped earlier this week



which doesn't as far as i can tell actually feature the vocal bit from  Chris Duckenfield  (aka Astrix - he also worked for Warp in the shop and various other functions)

just a folk memory allusion, maybe, or simply a perennially applicable warning! (you got bass bins, you better watch 'em)

the oil-slick noxious B-line on the G.O.D. tune made me think of another Sheffield connection - a later temple of bass boom - Niche



see, it's all connected...  there's these threads...  there's a word for it, it's on the tip of my tongue...






Astrix & Space i.e. Duckenfield and partner Richard Benson pop up here actually remixing "Infiltrate 202" !





other remixes, one by an illustrious name but not really lustrous






Ah Duckenfield and Benson it seems were RAC, a Warp act whose name rings a faint bell (stands for Richard And Chris)



That would qualify as late bleep maybe -  from 92

And this is arguably very late bleep  - from 1994





The sound getting a bit clean and fiddly by this point - not a great need to be keeping a watchful eye on those bass bins anymore



Yeah bleep to bassline via UKG - that would be the better line to follow




Monday, January 21, 2019

Never Lost His Dreams



23 years old!

god bless whomsoever playeth that synth lick that come in at about 3.48  - sublime wisp of wistful melody cycling sensuously around and around and around

and god bless Lyn Eden

this selection triggered by the tunes Cardrossmaniac2 be dropping


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

well, how nuum nuum nummy is that - 50 percent of Smokin Beats = Neil Rumney, aka N.R.G., as in "I Need Your Lovin'" and "He Never Lost His Hardcore".

i did not know that when i started this little post - just now idly checked discogs -  you learn something every day, even an accredited historian of the subject such as moi

Rumney's pedigree goes back to the bleep era, his first tunes are on Chill Records

Although this debut from 1991 is more like breaks 'n' bleeps



and hark ye! it's got one of the same samples as the more famous later "Terminator", as well as near enough the same title

it's Rufige Cru who'll do a much better job with the samples from the movie and sonically live up to the lethal promise of the title 




flipside to "Never Lost His Hardcore" - but it's not that ruff in all honesty



back to Smokin Beats

he / they seem to have switched back over to house 'n'  g as early as 1994

a LOT of releases

bit daunting, i don't have the heart for a proper delve - perhaps someone else can tell me if there's anything as magic as "Dreams" in there?

odd, the proximity of N.R.G. to N'n'G, another UK garage outfit helmed by an old hardcore vet (Grant Nelson)

if Neil R had stuck with N.R.G. as his UKG alias, then the scene would have had an N.R.G. and an N'n'G - causing all kinds of name confusion

these are the thought-phantoms that beguile the brain of a nuumologist late at night


Saturday, January 19, 2019

protoIDM



from 1983

but then again perhaps IDM is just 'minimal synth' continued

(via dave segal)

Wednesday, January 16, 2019

militant step












step-related



not actually one of my fave FPs










Tuesday, January 15, 2019

Nightcores on Edm street





Shitecore, more like!

"Most nightcore artists traffic in distorted edits of tracks—mostly Top 40, J-pop, and K-pop—sped up to 160+ BPM, with vocals so cartoonishly high-pitched they could easily come from a starry-eyed anime idol"



"a healthy dose of parodic absurdity", zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

this one is at least overloaded and diabetic-coma-y - 



"a frenetic cacophony of jittering vocals and accelerating rhythms that spiral into shimmering, fragmented chaos"

but really, isn't it just Rustie  x PC Music = hearditbefore? 

with some glitchcore, and The Speedfreak, thrown in?



quite enjoyable in its way, but leaves you with a sinking feeling: will we never leave -  get past, go further than -  the Nineties?

adding to that sense of terminal entropy, ever decreasing (re)cycles.... c.f.  'wave' a couple years ago

Friday, January 11, 2019

nudark




i don't get what they're trying to put across with the video though

in a way reminded me of this quote from Marc Acardipane about his Eighties attempts to make hip hop, inspired by Public Enemy and NWA (from my Voice profile)

 “But there came a time when I had to look in the mirror and realise, ‘You don’t come from Compton!’ We had to look for the street sound of Europe.”