amapianuumo

I am honestly not particularly invested in whether the hardcore continuum, er, continues * 

But it is funny - and delightful - that things like this still happen: an amapiano remake by DJ Eastwood of "Cape Fear", the dark garage classic by KMA.  

A tune that came out in 1996 - almost 30 years ago!

Blimey, here's an earlier prototype, I think done as a pirate radio show ident. From 1995 - fully 30 years ago!

The mighty original, meaning the record that was actually released 

Such a thick, humid, balmy, sticky, swimmy, brimming, subaquatic sound. 

Flipside 

The mighty follow-up - breakbeat garage but much more enticing than what that term later came to signify

Another dubplate prototype - again a pirate station ident for Six's brother DJ Maddness - his partner in KMA. Track titled "Kaotic Maddness" with the extra 'd' at this point. 

Here's a handy playlist I made of the almost complete works and various refixes

And here's one DJ Maddness made that has various oddments in its, some decent remixes they did for various units.

On the basis of "Cape Fear", "Kaotic Madness" and the Re-Con Mission EP, I thought of Six as potentially a Goldie-type auteur. (KMA even did a dubplate track titled "Kemistry"). 

He certainly talked a good game.  (But then it all fizzled out...)

"This is a line to the future" 

This stuff does have that soul-smeared edge-of-atonal quality of prime Reinforced, when they were "jazzed" but not yet actually jazzy or jazzual

Here's DJ Maddness operating as a YouTube UKG historian with the series Pirate Chronicles 

KMA - just one of those outfits who come along, have their moment, make their contribution.... and then that's it.  Operators at that cusp between genius and scenius.

The Nuum is littered with them. 

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

* on the continuum's continuance and not being that bothered whether it does

It had a really good run there....  20 years plus...  covered a huge amount of ground....  laid down a legacy, comparable in richness and duration to reggae's prime or hip hop's heyday....  to expect another convulsion or major-phase would be almost greedy...   

And in truth nothing really seismically major has come along since funky - i.e. fifteen years plus ago.

For sure, there are diasporic tendrils still wriggling out there.....  DNA flickers in otherwise completely other genres. 

And yes the people who came up during its different phases and are still active, they do "continue" - refining and extending their thing 

But for the most part Nuum is now a site of memorialization and archiving (as with the Pirate Chronicles series) 

And then there's the much younger artists who extract juice of varying pungency and nutritional content out of fundamentally settled styles that originally emerged out of unfolding dialectical becoming...  in much the same ahistorical way that a current band can describe what it does as "postpunk" when it is a/ blatantly not - simply because of chronology, how much has happened in between b/ contra the originating spirit of postpunk.

Some young-people-of-today juice extraction that is fairly blatantly squeezing "Cape Fear"

big up the Originals raving cru

A while ago Spiro alerted me to this great mix of amapiano from a few year back, this outdoor festival in London called The Originals. He pointed out that while the music didn't have any real connection to the Nuum, the peripherals - the MC-ing - were soaked in the London vibe. And it's true - there are points where the MC chants "oi oi!" just like his ancestors would at the Labrynth in '92. 

There's one at 36 mins 55 or so, where the MC asks the crowd "who's a true raver?" and then leads a call-and-response of "oggy oggy oggy, oi oi oi".

Listening again, I noticed another nuumological flicker - it occurs at 31.15 or thereabouts, the MC goes into this chant that sounds like "E come E come alive E come alive" (it might actually be "you come alive you come alive you come alive")

"E come E come alive E come alive" is a nigh-on thirty-year-old catchphrase from this Xenophobia tune "Rushing The House" that was big in '92. I associate it with Spiral Tribe, on account of the Spiral-connected MC Scallywag being on the record. But it was produced by Grant Nelson aka Wishdokta aka the G in N'n'G aka Bump & Flex aka dozens of aliases up and down the length of the nuum from ardkore to 2step.

It recurs again in the Supa D amapiano mix at about 37.15 reworded as "you come alive, I come alive, you come alive, I come alive". Just before, the MC talks about how he feeds off  the buzz from the audience and then gives it back to them. The chant "you come alive, I come alive, you come alive, I come alive" crystalizes the feedback-loop between crowd and MC+DJ beautifully.

It's noticeable also that most of the MC-ing is Jamaican flavored in slang and accent - "big up", "pon" etc. And in this next Originals set, lots of "my selector" "wanna reload?", etc 

.

Also at 37.57 or so, there's a shout-out to the four quadrants of the city - "North London, South London, West London, East London", flashing back to the opening interpellation in Gant's "Soundbwoy Burial (187 Lockdown Dancehall Mix)"

Echoes of jungle and UKG, in 2023-  a quarter-century later. And the whole thing representing yet another of those only-in-London recombinations of the Caribbean, the Black American, and now the African. 

Looking up the Originals festival online, I see the slogan: It's A London Thing.