For quite a while now, my thinking about the Nuum is that it doesn't really exist anymore, at least as a generative culture-engine.... The new formations stopped coming a while back. Probably the last full-blown paradigm was Funky (although there's some who would say Deep Tech). Many factors here, but the main one would be the eroding away of the infrastructure that supported the heyday succession of sounds - pirate radio, vinyl, record shops. Nowadays music propagates itself immaterially, through internet and social media channels, and the audio is ever more wedded to the video (making it pop, in potential at least, rather than underground).
What remains of the Nuum is:
1/ musicians who came up through earlier phases and are still actively making music informed by that phase and/or drawing on other heyday phases.
2/ Nuum as a site of nostalgia and memorialisation (producers making jungle-replica tracks, auntological ardkore etc.... Back to 92 or Back to 2003 events.... this blog, even!)
3/ half-life traces of Nuum rhythmic patterns or other sonic hallmarks (some argue you can detect these echoes in 2010s-onwards London street sounds like UK drill)
Having been thinking along these lines for approaching a decade now, how surprising it was to see this sign from the window of a bus in London last month!
7 comments:
Not being funny, but if youve only just found out about these DJs/this scene, are you rly the guy to be making the kind of grandiose claims you come out with in the first half of this??? 🤔😬🤔😬
Ok if you want to hang up your raving shoes + grab the pipe and slippers but pleaaaaz have some intellectual modesty!! 🙃🙃 In an ideal world it wouldn't matter whether you give these the thumbs up or down as Genuine Hardcore Continuum. But in absence of of music press or blogs your words are still v influential for a lot of ppl and can legitimise and delegitimise scenes, and that can have irl results for access to +distribution of resources... (around the time of BLM in 2020 a lot of ppl were writing on the impact ofblind spots/exclusion in the music press if you came across it )
Glad you got the rush from seeing this sign. People are doing exciting stuff like they always do. Doubtless it's different from before. You can always dive in properly and get to know. But if you can't be arsed, at least hold your hands up +level with your readers that you don't have a clue on this right now
Hope you choose the fun route 🌝
I suppose I should be flattered that you attribute such enormous sway to my words.
But seriously, do you honestly think that me shooting the shit on a blog about a sign I saw while on holiday in the UK and that I found intriguing, that this would actually affect the prospects of scenes and sounds? You are talking about Afrobeats, right? Something well established, big in the UK for years, a presence in the pop charts, etc.
C’mon! It's just potty.
All this bollocks about thumbs up / thumbs down, legitimizing / delegitimizing - as if A/ that's what this post is doing B/ that's something I've ever been interested in doing C/ something I'd be capable of doing.
"Doubtless it's different from before"
That is actually the point of the post, if you had elementary reading skills.
The kind of people who once gravitated to jungle, UK garage, etc, now gravitate towards other, more internationalized sounds.
Despite that, something – a London vibe - perpetuates itself. It’s not so much in the music as in things that surround the music.
I think that’s interesting – it makes me smile, in the same way that as seeing a friend's kid and noticing the family resemblance.
So I took a listen to this Supa D and Pioneer set at a London festival https://youtu.be/RW5PHqRrDsQ?si=NDA697e4itEmMSBu (which incidentally is on the YouTube channel ‘S-Star TV’ which was a big shuffling channel back during the deep tech days c.2013 if I remember rightly)
and listening through to the MCs it’s very clear that the essence of the nuum lives on. It’s like a greatest hits of all the various stages of the nuum over the last 3 decades.
There’s phrases lifted straight from pirate radio “It’s the right frequency 528”, “who’s ready to rave give me a signal”, constant shouts out “to the ladies”. There’s junglist rudebwoy exhortations “Selecta! Lighter!”. There’s uk funky era nursery rhyme chants “hands in the air let me see the 1 finger dance”, and flows lifted directly from garage classics like ‘A Little Bit Of Luck’. There’s deep tech era shouts “Big up the shufflers on stage”. And if there was any doubt left that this is where the nuum-dna lives, there’s the iconic 1992 rave chant “E-come alive e-come alive e-come alive” repeated throughout!
Of course there are also elements that place it firmly in the present: shouts of “fuck the vaccine!” - roots and (dystopian) future indeed!
the music is amapiano - rather edgeless and mostly unoriginal imo, recombinant without the ravey energy of, say, jackin house. Tbh it sounds very similar to the soulful end of uk funky, all soul’n’bongos, with none of the intensity that made tracks like ‘Migraine Skank’ exciting. There IS a kind of sustained-drone-moodyness throughout the whole set, you can go back to 92 tracks like SLM ‘Nice n Slow’ (actually that track is full of bongos too!) to find this vibe. So there’s some faint echos of continuum-ity. But it’s mostly through the MC chat that the vibe lives on…
Wow that is amazing Spiro - so it is in the surrounding elements of the subculture that the Spirit Abides! I must check out that set
I like amapiano, it's structurally very interesting, and I should imagine in the club it sounds immense. But it is much more of a slow-simmer type vibe. A house-style plateau type energy.
I suppose UKG could be a bit like that, a sustained groovemood of sultry 'n' swinging.
Wow, listening to it now, it's very vibey and as you say totally like a run-through of time-tested-and-true nuumological MC licks and tricks
the "ollie ollie ollie / oi oi oi" is like something MCs would have done in '92.... maybe more just a hoarse "oi oi! oi oi!" back then
IMO the chronology of the nuum doesn't end with funky if you take a extensive/charitable view of the music of the London massive and all its pendulum swings and demographic changes.
It goes something like this:
'ardkore->darkside->jungle->speedgarage->2step->grime and dubstep->funky->uk-drill->amapiano.
The music has gotten more divorced from rave culture as an ideal and shifted from Jamaican to African influences but on a fundamental level all these genres draw from the same rhythmic and cultural sensibilities.
Post a Comment