Namelogy (Beyond the Nuum)

Sometimes - when I have a real binge of listening to old dance music, meaning mostly the '90s - I am overcome with affection for the culture.

Not just the obviously beloved Nuumy strands of it, but almost the whole worldwide width of it. 

Particularly the first half of the '90s, nearly all of it tickles me, in nearly all aspects  - the graphic language, the clothes, the dancing....

But above all the names.  

The artist aliases, the track titles, the monikers of labels, promoters, raves, clubs... 

Even if the track is shit, or lost to time, just a faint after-image of a function long since exhausted... the names endure. 

Quite often, more mischief and creativity and spirit seems to have gone into the goofy throwaway title given to a remix than to the rather rote remix itself. 

Belgian hardcore and gabber are particularly thick seams of nomenclative delight.

But most of the genres during this era come up with the goods - wordplay, puns, jokes, unlikely references, mockalyptic bombast....   

I started scribbling them down on the back of a notepad, further data in support of A Theory of Names*. 

Ilsa Gold

Emmanuel Top

"Moby Tits" 

Koenig Cylinders

Spastic Egg

"Entropy Step"

Public Energy

"Chronoclasm"

"Nightmares Are Reality"

Labworks

"Reptilian Tank"

Egma

"Stomach Basher"

"Korrekte Atmosphere"

"Trip to E-Land"

 Hypp & Krimson,

"Techno Cat (Dance Like Your Dad)"

"Tibetan Jazz"

"Are Am Eye"

 Aldrin Buzz

Edge of Motion

 "The Glitch Relapse"

"Zombies in the Mist"

 "Sick (Dominator Is Dead)"

"Space Luxury"

"God Shave the Queen"

"Locked in Madness"

The Dead Kirks - "Mr. Kirk (Death Mix)"

"Cyclotron"

"Lost and Intellect"

"The Realm of Spoo"

 "Faces of the Moon"

Meng Syndicate

"(Heinous Scream Version)"

"Ravedrug"
 "Rush Bubble Mix"

Pneumatic Distress

"Fulminic"

Aquastep - "Oempa Loempa"

Tones Energy

"Tone Exploitation"

"(Fratty Energy Version)"

Master Techno

"Time Problem"

Problem House

 "Rhyde the Rithum"

"Twin Freaks"

Pot Cycl

80 AUM

E-Dancer

"My First Fantastic F.F."

"Tunnel Inspection"

"Franthic Thigh"

Sulfurex

"I Still Want Ya (the Nooshty Mix)"

Severe Damage - "Red Alert (Tremble Mix)"

"Afro Compressor"

 "Sugar Robots" 

"Mindcontroller (The Obscure Mix)"

"The Kraken"

"Fairy Dust"

"Chiswick Days"

"Air Bounce"

"Megadrôme D'Yore"

"Jungle (Flappy Ears Version)"

Techno Trash Volume II - "Noise!"

"Mastercore (Brain Mix)"

Phase Phorce

"Industrial Metal"

"Face the Mastermind"

"Turntable Tribal"

4-Nu-Tek

Exoterrorist

"Cybernatic Noisefly"

"God's Percussion Dream"

"The Dove (Coloured Dream)"

"Planet Jupiter (Raggae Dream)"

"Acid Heartcore"

"Mutation Step"

"Technoblast"

"Biolunch"

"Single Minded People"

"Acid Creak"

"Trac-X"

Numbers & Feelings

"(Sexx Ambient Mix)"

Charlie Lownoise

Syncope

"Explosion of a Dancemode"

"X-Plosion of a Dancemode"

"Stronger Than Steel"

"Trance? Never Heard Before"

"Microillusions (Day-Mix)"

"Illegal Consume"

"Hatt Flash"

"Victim of Hardware"

"Bash Your Brains In"

"Night of the Neon Maniacs"

Pultec

"Drugtrash"

"Psycho Drums"

Dutch Department of Techno

Xylem Tube

"Space Metal (Pt 1 and Pt 2)"

"Sulphur Stories"

"The Ravesignal"

"Demonomania"

"Walk on Base"

Spiritual Combat

"Lake of Dreams (Bay of Rainbow Mix)"

"Lake of Dreams (Dream of Drums)"

"Original Mix with Bats"

Force Mass Motion

"Feef Logic"

The Brotherhood of Structure EP

"First Fright (Video Mix)"

"Space Paranoia"

"Psycho Fly"

"Cosmonoise"

Generator - Belgium Calling (Clash Mix)

Generator - Narcomaniac (Adrenochrome Mix)

D.B. Hazard - Detro Mental

Mental & Dangerous - Xtrosy (Mary Poppins Hardcore Mix)

It seems like the names and the titles - just like the record artwork and typography... the flyers.... the promo videos with their corny and dated FX....   all of this para-sonic stuff is equally as important as  the music in constituting a massive surge of urge-to-newness.... that took off from the end of the '80s and carried on deep into the '90s...    

An across-the-board push by the mostly-really-young to make an adventure out of their time.  To jettison as much of the old and the still-lingering as they could, on all fronts - sound, dance, fashion, graphics, slang...

* A Theory of Names, aka Nameology. 

I've mooted this before, based on ample empirical evidence that the shitness /  non-shitness of a genre is in direct relation to the shitness / non-shitness of its artist names and track titles. (Same applies to the decline of a once-great genre - the canary in the coalmine is the enshittification of names, titles, graphics).  

To me it makes sense - the names and titles would be a textual efflorescence of the music, reflecting and revealing its inner essence. 

The milquetoast mildness of most postdubstep is given away at the pre-auditory stage from the aroma wafting off  the artist aliases and the opaque titles they come up for their tunes.... Ditto broken beat, ditto downtempo, ditto all the other tasteful, "good music society", cosmopolitan / cosmigroovy sounds.  

The you-won't-like-this-steer-clear of most contemporary music (not just dance, across the genrescape) alerts my antennae through the advance warning system of  names (the album artwork is also a fairly reliable giveaway - has it ever been shitter than the present era?).  

But that corny-yet-awesome spirit of the '90s survived in pockets into the 21st Century...  flickering in bassline, in donk, in brostep, a little bit in deeptech....   UK drill too...  and I daresay it is out there to be found even now. 

** Rivals to rave?

The original "neophiliac" era, the 1960s - that would be the real rival. But it had older sonic forms embedded within it - blues, soul, folk, country....  Although FX, electrification, amplification, and studio tricknology increasingly come into play, the instrumental line-up is largely shared with earlier forms of popular music like jazz: drums, guitars, horns, bass.  So not quite as a big a break as the digital 90s.

New Wave is another rival (especially with all the  inorganic fabrics and hair-dyes... the angular graphic language and dance-moves... the quirky vocal styles and herky-jerky rhythms and melodies). But New Wave was largely based in rock's well-established instrumental template (gtr-bs-drms)  and it had echoes and deliberate reach-backs to the Sixties in much of it. Rather than synths, New Wavers tended to use keyboards - 60s-style organs, Farfisa etc. So overall it doesn't match the tekno-rave era for full-bore futurism . The first half of the '90s had all these newness-enabling tools to work with (samplers, digital audio workstations). 

Eighties synthpop, yes - but it is still tied to the Song, and to the impassioned human voice - to the idea of  "soul"  and to actual influences from soul music (think of all those fire-and-ice singer + synthesist duos). 

Electro... yes, especially with the clothes and the dancing. But it was over a bit too quick. Perhaps it is like a preliminary stage, a dry run, for the '90s eruption (so many ravers had electro childhoods). Mantronix and Nitro Deluxe in particular seem like bridges between electro and the house-techno-rave moment. 

Nuumology and Nameology

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!

What struck me was how utterly Nuumy most of these names are:

Supa D, Coldsteps, Loyal Squad, Dezy B, Wigman, Spidey G.... 

These could easily be UK Garage era names from 25 years ago. 

I looked it up online and the lineup for this Notting Hill Carnival after-party appears to be largely Afrobeats. 

Which would be one place where the "road" audience went in the 2010s.... another would be drill... . 

I don't hear Nuum-traces in Afrobeats particularly, on a sonic or rhythmic level...  

Yet clearly, in terms of  "vibe", there is a continuity, a persistence....  

Assumed names of artists; track titles;  the names of clubs and raves and record labels.... On the face of it, these would seem to be peripheral elements...  yet for me they feel essential and archetypal 

I smiled with recognition, seeing that sign. 

Despite all the infrastructural shifts, the influx of new sonic influences, the sheer passage of time... something is perpetuating itself....