infinite hype
versus
infinite calm
“The word vast is a vocable of breath. It is placed on our breathing, which must be slow and calm.... I begin to think that the vowel a is the vowel of immensity. It is a sound area that starts with a sigh and extends beyond all limits.... Like some soft substance, it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. With it, we take infinity into our lungs”
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
"It seems that the immense void, in suddenly discovering an action, becomes a particularly clear image of cosmic anger. We could say that the raging wind is the symbol of pure anger, anger without purpose or pretext.... An initial anger is a sign of fundamental will. It attacks the work to be done. And the first thing to be created by this creative anger is the whirlwind. The primary object of homo faber dynamized by anger is the vortex....
"In reverie on the storm, it is not the eye that produces
images, but rather the startled ear. We participate directly in the drama of
violent air."
- Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement.
A celebrated remix of The Streets's "Turn the Page"
What its existence would seem to demonstrate, though, is inability to turn the page of this particular book of history.
(What you'd want, really, is not even a new chapter, but a whole new volume).
But this is Overmono whose debut album Good Lies was hailed by the Guardian as “UK rave history... distilled to perfection”
I'm trying to think who would've been the equivalent in rock - when this stage of "history" getting "distilled to perfection" would have got underway..
Oasis seems too obvious, and also belated... I feel like the process was well underway by the mid-Eighties.
You'd probably have to wind it back to earlier in the (re)Creation arc - to Primal Scream
All that said, listening to Good Lies for the first time, I'm enjoying it. There's cleverness, there's craft, it's made up out of or in reference to things I already reverence... but the echoes, allusions and twists are subtly done. In a certain sense, what's not to like?
I was always a bit more vulnerable to the appeal of "record collection rock" than I would have liked. I couldn't quite ever be as stern about it as Mark Fisher.
Still, it's an odd thing - given that the foundational principle of the culture is F-FWD - to listen to this
Apart from the overall sound quality - clean and crisp in a 2023 upgraded sort of way - there is nothing about this track that would sound out of place in 2000. It sounds like Groove Chronicles.
I mean, maybe the wibbly synth wouldn't have been there but it could have been, if GC had wanted it to be.
Surging styles become settled styles.
Bit like how groups operating today can be described as - can describe themselves as - "postpunk".
It's a stable, if not utterly static, form - akin to the blues, or folk.
This "Dubstep Heritage" series only got to two episodes!
Kieran Press-Reynolds with a guest piece at Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor, while the main man takes a vacation.
It's a report on "the holy hell of cursed jumpstyle" - a zoomer-oriented TikTok-propelled twist to the gabber continuum.
"vyrval’s ballistic banger is the biggest tune in a growing wave of psychotic jumpstyle music that seems made to express existential fears: technology has gone too far, we’ve broken the world beyond repair, autocratic autobots will soon seize control... In the comments of the clips that accompany these songs, people write what’s basically apocalyptic science-fiction, imagining grim future scenarios: “Me watching an AI generated video of me doing the most atrocious War crime ever.” The visual aesthetic mirrors the freakiness: unsettling cyber graphics are superimposed on neon landscapes, with distorted limbs and objects."
"At its most baleful, these songs obliterate any and all melody, leaving listeners with no chance for reprieve from their unrelenting assault. Dj Svevsx’s “jumpstyle (1)” has over 8 million plays and it’s just a 42-second spasm of feculent kicks."
Looks bit like the Moving Shadow logo, that silhouette.
Weathered legend returns to youth currency
What K calls "peak slumpstyle" - the slowed + reverb remix
Lithuian "nu-jumpstyle Jesus" Yabujin
"What makes this internet-addled aesthetic so addictive is the way it taps into the younger generation’s collectively fried childhoods. It’s a shitposty Tower of Babble that crosses countries and languages."
Talking of shitpostmodernism, Kieran is quoted in this Kyle Chayka article in The New Yorker on corecore and "The Dada Era of Internet Memes"
Check out also K P-R's piece at No Bells on the Bushwick nightclub Rash, which was attacked by an arsonist in what may well be a hate-crime a few years ago, but has now been rebuilt and relaunched.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The uglier aspects of this nu-jumpstyle scene reminded me a bit of this spoof and spoof pt 2 I concocted back in 2007 (inspired by guesswho)
Old post on hardstyle, a related genre that has some militaristic undercurrents... well, overcurrents really
Jumpstyle in simpler, happier, more innocent days.
