"bowel-evacuating bangers" / uncanny-valley retro-rave

via FACT, Special Request aka Paul Woolford promises "bowel-evacuating bangers" only on his new LP  Vortex (the first of four albums in quick succession apparently) which is out the end of May.

"Fuck all that conceptual guff m888..." Woolford says, a rallying cry I can co-sign. "I had a right fucking doss making this."

That said, it don't sound that bowel-evacuating to me... a bit clean, a bit digi-crisped.

Despite being produced in his underpants apparently! 

I've liked the Special Request stuff before - he's captured that thick gritty churning "rollidge" / "ruffige" breaks sound, almost a time travel effect





Talking about doing-it-clean and the time-travel perplex:  here's another mix of new-old darkcore from Pearsall - "93" but made NOW



at his blog Pearsall continues the discussion he and I have been having about the pleasures and pitfalls of retro-rave

to my point as about H-core being "an unrepeatable moment – a whole confluence of factors (state of technology, state of the outside world, the surrounding music-scape esp hip hop and dancehall and R&B but top 40 pop, the drugs, the relative youth of the movement and its lack of history and self-consciousness, but also lack of sense of itself as an industry and a career structure / profession) produced this sound suffused with Zeitgeist and impelled with chaotic energy … seemingly out of control, set on an evolutionary course whose destination nobody knew…. a thrill-ride on a big dipper that was still under construction,,, a plunge into the unknown" 

which I contrast with retro-rave's "meticulous reconstruction of the known, done with love and desperate longing" 

Pearsall muses whether "these reconstructions are a bit too perfect" resulting in an effect analogous to uncanny valley effect in robotics - an excess of symmetry and proportion.

"Modern producers working in this genre are working with 25 years’ worth of information – they have seen which elements work on the dancefloor, they have vastly superior tools available for composing, editing and mixing down tracks, and they also have a better understanding for how to structure tracks to be both easily mixable and dynamic for crowds. This is a collectively build knowledge that they can draw on" 

cf. .the freestyle making-it-up as they went along of darkcore93 producers and the far crapper technology at their disposal: 

"Amateurish productions, wobbly levels, bizarre (and frankly stupid) samples, keys clashing, different elements not properly in time with each other … if you are a crate digger who is interested in this period, as I am, over time you hear some really bizarre and terrible stuff, the kind of stuff that gets ignored in modern throwback mixes or lists of ‘the best early rave tracks’.But this stuff wasn’t ignored at the time! It would get played at raves and on the radio, so when you listen to some of these old recordings you get these moments where just you furrow your brow and go, ‘what the hell is that?’"

with nu-dark you never get that "what the fuck?!?",  totally floored (in the good + bad senses)  because it's flaw-less

"These recreations are lots of fun," Pearsall further muses, "How could they not be when the original concept is so great? – but taken as a whole they are almost too perfect, too precise, and they are missing the messy, experimental edge to the original early 90’s tracks."