Dantronix

 

"dantronix in the house" - inspired aliasing! 

Listening to this when it came out really rammed home the hardcore / Brit B-boy connection for me. 

Mantronix as  gateway drug to Amentalism  - via "King of the Beats"

                            (I talk a bit about Mantronix and going to UK Fresh in '86 in this podcast C86 Books )

Skratchadelicism   distils the equation: hip hop + E = ardkore 

Flowers In My Garden - luvved-up hardcore as hip hop pastoralized

And of course, the sample, the sample is from Woodstock the movie  - John Sebastian (ex of the Lovin' Spoonful) announcing the birth of a baby at the festival  - "that kid's gonna be far out"  (at 19.40 in this clip)

Danny Break'z was how he monikered himself early on !

The apostrophe got lost 

Then it resurfaced with the new name Droppin' Science, presumably inspired by this track 

Style Warz - flying that flag high! 

"I was more into the music than the rapping" - Danny Breaks, in this 1995 interview for German TV, dropping science on his beat-science

                                                                   (via Blog to the Old Skool, via Droid)

Handy playlist I made of Dantronix trax -  appropriately it goes in a strange loop da loop, starting  with the first Droppin' Science material and goes forward through those peerless releases, until - after "The Bear" - it doubles back to the Sonz of the Loop Da Era, er, era -  but goes reverse-chronology, from "What The..." to "Far Out".   Some remixes by him in there, and remixes of his tunes by others. It's quite a body of work 

My interview with Danny Breaks from October 1995

Quite Viberty, what he went on to do 

"we got the Brahms and the Husker Du"

 is how I always mishear the lyric in this... 

Man, used to love Mantronix. 

As great to theorize off of as to listen to. 

shoegazetronica

Says Chal Ravens, "really enjoying The Primitive Painter reissue coming on Apollo – glittering cybertech waters, distant polygonal islands, '90s digiutopics, that sort of thing"

Now I was wondering if the artist name (an alter ego for Alter Ego, apparently - i'm stealing a Youtuber's quip here) was a reference to Felt

... and thought "nah, more likely it's directly referring  to Lascaux"

But lookee here, a nod to The Waterboys

and "Cathedral" - as in the proverbial "sonic cathedral" for 4AD-ish religiose reverb aesthetic?

Felt had this proximately titled song

and this even more proximately titled song




ah - and, stop press - as Cesar in comments points out, there is also this Felt song 

so clearly formatively rooted in mid-80s Anglo-indie this The Primitive Painter chap - or chaps, rather, since Alter Ego = duo 

now I'm wondering if that song is named after the House of Love offshoot captained by Terry Bickers of vitreous-guitar showering you with crystalline splinters renown?

The shoegaze into post-rock evolution is well documented and logical

But the shoegaze into the electronic listening music / chill out / IDM side of techno is less delineated

Chapterhouse got that album remixed by somebody or other IDM-ish (Global Communications? Future Sound of London? )

Morr Music

a German friend of mine Heiko Hoffmann - long time editor of electronic music magazine Groove, until recently - did a shoegaze compilation back in 2003

the texturitis and blissy feeling of dreampop / shoegaze was a gateway drug for E-lectronic dance and non-dance, for some, maybe

for me as a writer, maybe that applies too - texture-attentiveness (texture > text) vis-a-vis MBV et al, sets me up well for texturrythm-attentiveness about rave .... ditto "the politics of ecstasy" becomes "the politics of Ecstasy" (although in both cases I would say now that it's more like an "anti-politics" - for better or worse, and increasingly, i think worse) 

but as a listener I was into club music and synth-abetted funk right from the start of the 80s

and in fact would write about things like Mantronix  in that engineer-as-poet / new sonic architecture mode well before I became a raver - at the exact same time as I was hymning A.R. Kane in similar sort of terms (not man-machinic but certainly the human figure disappearing into the miasma of sound)

same kind of becoming-abstract, depersonalized, sensation-not-significance approach

"against interpretation" (before I'd even read Sontag's essay)

Deleuzian, before I'd ever cracked open A Thousand Plateaux 

one instinctively know what is right

and this was the right response to what the music was doing 




the missus reviewed this gig (where they were supported by The House of Love) 

later we saw Felt's final gig together