Of Instagrammatology

Had Instagram for ages and ages but never got into looking at it regularly until quite recently....  the algorithm quickly learned to serve me up dance music, as that's what I'd linger on. So what I get is an endless succession of reels of deejays playing tunes, either in their living room, or it's clips of them performing at a rave. 

Occasionally there'll be one where a DJ or producer talks about a classic track,  either their own or someone else's - breaking down its sample constituents, naming its breaks, or talking about the gear used to make it. I also get a fair number of haggard record collectors type sitting in their 'record room' pulling out obscure library or soundtrack LPs, or Old Wave cult items, and mumbling about them.

But what follows here are some thoughts on dance music today informed entirely by the Instagram perspective.

TimeisNOTnow

I say ‘dance music today', but the first thing that comes across on Instagram is not-todayness: how dance music exists in a state of complete atemporality.  Tunes from decades ago sit alongside current tracks that are either incrementally different contributions to a long established and overcrowded tradition (techno, house, D&B, trance) or they are outright retro (with just a glisten of contemporary production polish sprucing up the time travel). Deejays draw from across these huge reserves of material, where the long-ago and the this-minute are equally valid. 

There's a tremendous awareness of history - a lot of clips are like ultra-brief history lessons, on a genre or a sound (like say Reese bass) or an auteur (DJ Zinc just today did a great little potted history of three key tracks by A Guy Called Gerald).  Yet offsetting that historical awareness, the overall effect of the platform interface for users is that chronology gets completely jumbled. There's little sense of a tune's original context (let alone adversarial context) or its place in historical sequence: the platform makes everything current.  

What has completely vaporized is the idea that anything is obsolete or passé. Everything exists in a permanent plateau of equal relevance - which has the side effect of making it impossible for any one sound (should an actually fully new sound ever emerge) to assert itself as supremely relevant and demanding of your undivided attention. Indeed, you could say that our attention is pre-divided, splayed across both an enormously expanded and accessible present and a teeming archival vastness that feels vertiginously limitless. Anything that is new and different, like say amapiano, has to fight against, fights its way through, all this quality music arrayed before our ears.

An example of how these syndromes play out.

The gentleman who calls himself Fish56Octagon - and who deejays in his front room wearing a dressing gown (I'm always expecting it to come open as he jigs about, genitals bouncing forth) and often is nibbling on his breakfast, which appears to be Weetabix bits in what looks like a dog's bowl -   played a nu-UKG tune on this label: 

Timeisnow

Sub-label of Shall Not Fade, specialising in UK bass-driven dance music styles.

Established 2019. Bristol, UK.

The record has a period-perfect title, Bubblers EP, and the sound is spot-on

According to Mr Fish, this labels and others like it have pushed nu-UKG to the point where deejays playing it are getting major sets at festivals all around the world.  

And this makes me queasy....  for all the reasons you can imagine. Like what happened to supercession? The dialectic of dance? Fanatical focus? 

(Mr Fish picks from a huge range of genres and as a working deejay either jumbles it all up in a set OR plays a set dedicated to a single genre but just as one arrow from his quiver)

Atemporality and historical hyper-awareness has some strange kinks.

Here's a nu-UKG label called Move Silent, and Keymag asks the man behind it why the name: “This is really giving up the secret. Years ago, I had this t-shirt that sold really well, and had the phrase “Move Silent”. It embodies how I operate in life. I’m a big believer in the phrase, “empty vessels make the loudest noises”. “

Which is funny to me because I would have 100 percent assumed otherwise it was a nod to  "Bad Boys Move In Silence" - could this dude really not know the foundational UKG track by A Baffled Republic? 

 (Mind you, I only just realised the line "bad boys move in silence" comes originally from Notorious B.I.G.)

Another label Shadow System, the guy behind first heard UKG from his dad playing it!

(Reminds me of another reel I saw recently, a young kid playing "hardcore jungle"  - and the text reads: "When ur dad’s in the crowd so you gotta blend in his favorite tune from back in the day")

Some of these nu-UKG labels are as far flung as Finland and Houston, Texas.  

So it's not just atemporalized, dance music, it's really postgeographicalized too - unrooted from any location socially and spatially. 

Well not completely  - in the Keymag article, one of the Finnish nu-UKG dudes (the label is Polar Dance) says: 

"I’ve been cutting icicles from roofs because when you snap it off, it makes an amazing sound rhythmically. There is a traditional Finnish instrument called a kantele, which is like a sitar. I've been trying to use it on some tracks as well."

The Keymag writer Nathan Evans notes of the Houston nu-UKG bods: 

"Aside from the way they literally went back in time with a black mask and comically large knit sack and stole from the Nice ‘N’ Ripe mixing desk, what struck me about Houston’s UKG is how there is even a label pressing limited-run vintage garage vinyl at all. It speaks to shockwaves of the revival, that’s enough to traverse space and time simultaneously."

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

Another new-to-me genre  has popped up in these reels - not the living room ones but the (usually female deejay) playing to a big room.

The name of this genre is schranz. It designates - I assume onomatopeia-cally in German - a sort of hard, fast, banging techno with a scrapy, dirtily abrasive sound. 

I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the term has existed since the late '90s, albeit very much a local-to-Germany term, associated with Chris Liebing… and it appears to have crept forward gradually to some kind of larger semantic currency without ever really taking off. 

I listened to a Chris Liebing associated album (Metalism) the other day and  thought it was rather good - and then with a shock realized it was over 20 years old. 

The female deejays playing hard as nails tekkkno brings me to InstaGrammatological observation number 2

DJ as showman not shaman

The hyper-visibility of social media and the influencerization of dance has turned deejaying into a performance style rather than a technical craft - or rather the craft aspect of working the deck has itself become spectacularized.

In these clips - at home alone as much as in front of a crowd - the deejays are really working those mixer controls. They are dancing while mixing and whooping it up -  as if the jock was a punter rather than a punter-pleaser. The etiquette of deejaying has vastly changed from back in the day when jocks were still figures, impassive and grave as they went about their work, their sobriety in marked contrast to the abandon of the revelers,  as if to say "this is serious work, I'm a professional."  Deejays never danced; their job was to make others dance. But nowadays deejays performatively flaunt their own pleasure, erasing the distance between the professionals and the crowd. If female, they are usually glammed up and often scantily dressed - blurring the roles of deejay and podium dancer.

Male or female, these deejays work the mixer frenziedly, fussily tweaking the EQ knobs and finessing the fader. There is a kind of performative rhetoric where the arms are tensed as they reach for the knob and they pull away the hand and arm after tweaking it with a dramatic flourish. All while jigging around sinuously and often drawing on a cigarette (tense business, deejaying)

But... as far as I can see,  little of this flaunted physicality is really necessary - the exertions are extraneous to the modest physical effort that is actually required.  It’s all for show - and in that sense similar to, indeed possibly inspired by, the rock guitarist’s gestural repertoire, the expressive pantomime of “guitarface”. You can make massive, devastating noises on the guitar with very small movements, thanks to amplification and effects. You can make them sitting down, as Spacemen 3 proved, without all the strutting or headbanging. And so it used to be used to be with deejaying (often the deejay was nowhere in sight, tucked away in some alcove).

I have seen a few Insta reels that prove my point: here the deejay goes against the norms of hyper-visuality and goes about their work in a low-key sort of way, minus the histrionics. Instead of all that mixological performative hoo-hah, the jock - usually filmed in the domestic space - is subdued, limply moving their arm to tweak the knob and then withdrawing their hand slowly, without any flamboyantly flecked gesture that says "decisive mix move just made"

Also - this happens with the tracky techno and house above all - more often than not I cannot hear any substantial difference made by these decisive moves to change the EQ or cut out a frequency band. It all chugs on much as before without a dramatic change - certainly not a wrenching shift that would require such gestural flourish. Perhaps the very smoothness and seamlessness of the transitioning erases its own achievement?  

DJ tools-y techno seems to me to be the most static of artforms, really unchanged in its fundamentals since the late '90s.

N'Joi'd that

 

Sourced in

Isn't she lovely?

After N’Joi, Saffron fronted - front being the operative word  - this Republica tune that I file with a lineage of excitable go-for-it ladette pop (Icona Pop, "I Love It", Pink "Coming Up", Spice Girls's "Wannabe", Ke$ha "Tik Tok" / "We R Who We R", Martin Solveig + Dragonette "Hello", Ting Tings "The Drums", right through to Charli xcx)

Even more delightful in this mode I think

Too exuberant and boisterous to be glamorous, too insolent to be elegant 

Lily Allen hovers on the edge of this lineage, as a spiritual sister, a cheeky monkey, but her tunes are a bit too chill and leisurely in tempo yet also laden with meaning, lyrics-wise. Too fraught with grown-up anxieties and recriminations, too, whereas these girls are out to party and have not a care in the world.

Of course that's pretty much where Charlie XCX started her career, so it's make a nice loop of party-hard girl-pop

“Ready to Go” is a very calculated record - let's merge dance and Britpop - but for all that a perfect slice of mid-Nineties energy - a time when things were a lot better than we tended to think at the time  (all that pre-millennium tension bollix, darkness shtick) compared with the next three decades of steady descent into hell

N-Joi, I've never found anything else by them quite as exciting as "Anthem"

But the Untouchables had another amazing moment

Shattering ecstasies

Part of its own mini-lineage of 'distraught divas' tunes - Johnny Jungle "Flammable", Omni Trio  "Mainline" , Acen's "Trip"

Talking of being "taken away" and shattering ecstasies

N'Joi played an important role in my life insofar as they were one of four rave acts playing live at a major conversion moment in my journey towards becoming a raver. The headliner, in fact, so I would have been peaking when they came on....

Ahoy there, me hearties (pirate encounters)

Well, a dream comes true - I appear on a pirate radio station. Except it's legal now, but still - Rinse FM!

I am talking - alongside Martin Clark aka Blackdown - about Burial's debut album, which came out 20 years ago - on Eclecticist's show on Rinse.  

Now I think about it, I have been on a pirate before - twice in fact. 

The first time was inadvertent: BBC radio (I think Radio 4) had done a report on jungle, then emerging, in the summer of 1994, and the reporter came around to our flat to get some quotes from me. And immediately after it aired, one of the pirates - Kool FM if I recall right - pirated it. Played the whole program a few times on the radio. So there I was, coming over the airwaves of the station I most  frequently tuned into at that time. (In 1994, after 8 years living in South London, I had finally made it North of the River and was living in Belsize Park, slipping out of range of my beloved Don FM but in compensation able to pick up Kool and other pirates that had mostly been out of reach when living in Brixton). 

Another time I actually deejayed on a pirate - but this was not a nuum pirate, it was a sort of hipster pirate in Williamsburg.  Sometime in the early 2000s. I played gloomcore and stuff like that, but the guy before me played Anthony Braxton and such. So the station was a bit like The Wire on the air.  I have no idea if anyone listened. Still, a buzz to do. 

A few times I have been inside an actual functioning London pirate station - Flex FM at the height of 2step in 2000, that was in South West London, a big if delapidated house, when reporting on UK garage for Spin. Deekline was spinning.

And then in 2005, again reporting for Spin, this time on grime, I got to go inside Rinse FM's HQ, a basement of a building near Whitechapel. It had once been a travel agents and it was surprisingly smart looking still (compared with Flex FM). They even had a sort of ante-room with a sofa in it, and then the actual room where the deejaying took place - the Ruff Sqwad followed by Roll Deep - was quite tidy. And actually now I recall it was Martin Clark who made the connection for me and came long to the session (thrilling to watch close up - the young Skepta was there). So big up Blackdown. 

Here's what I wrote about Burial in 2006 when I reviewed it for The Observer Music Monthly

Burial

Burial

(Hyperdub)

The mystery-shrouded artist known only as Burial is affiliated to the dubstep scene, a  sister-genre to grime that this year looks set to eclipse its waning sibling. Running in parallel for the past half-decade, both these London underground sounds rely on the same pirate radio infrastructure and share a common history in UK garage and jungle. But dubstep is a largely instrumental style bigger on mood than personality (no shouty MCs here). It’s also a site-specific music, its bass-heavy menace achieving full impact only through a massive sound system in a dark, crammed club. Burial’s self-titled debut is the first record from the scene to transcend that context. It evocative atmospherics and enfolding  ambience make it a perfect lose-yourself soundtrack for headphones or lights-low living room listening

“Distant Lights” blueprints the basic Burial sound: an ominously amorphous bass-rumble and a frantic-yet-subdued 2step beat are countered by the slow-motion mournfulness of the track’s other elements, a yearning vocal sample and a reverb-blurry trumpet, like Kenny Wheeler wilting in a Temazepam swoon. Titles like “Night Bus” pinpoint Burial’s subject as the melancholy and anomie of city life, while “Southern Comfort” localizes the vibe further to South London. But the feeling this music creates--imagine The Blue Nile of “Downtown Lights” but with the euphoria turned to sorrow--is something any metropolis-dweller anywhere on the planet will understand: sensations of  grandeur and possibility battling with desolation and entrapment.  There’s a simmering, suppressed violence bubbling inside Burial’s music, hinted at in titles like “Wounder,” which conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on others. But there’s also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of Wings of Desire, a quality that emerges most clearly on “Forgive,” a beatless ache of sound threaded with the sounds of cleansing rainfall.

This album actually comes complete with a concept (it’s a sound-portrait of a near-future South London submerged under water, New Orleans-style) while the most persuasive readings of the album hear it as a requiem for the lost dreams of  rave culture. But the non-specific sadness that shimmers inside this music ultimately transcends attempts to pin it to a place, period, or population. You can imagine Burial’s tremulous poignancy reaching out to hurt and heal all kinds of listeners--fans of David Sylvian and Harold Budd, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada, Radiohead and Joy Division. This music can go far. 

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I am reading Moby Dick at the moment - it's incredible, but it's taking me a long time - and one thing that surprised me is that seafaring men of that era did actually address each other en masse as "me hearties" e.g. "pull hard, my hearties" when rowing a small boat in pursuit of a whale

Pure Inspiration

Well, I may not have provoked a musician to pen a retaliation tune (unlike my own flesh and blood, who recently joined a select pantheon of irritant critics). 

But I can now bask in having inspired a song, and one made by a well-known and highly regarded group too: electronic act Overmono. 

Their single "Lockup" - which heralds a new album Pure Devotion - apparently came from reading not Energy Flash, like you would probably have expected in the circumstances, but the other book of mine that people like.

 According to the Overmono duo, brothers Tom and Ed Russell:  

"We’d been reading rip it up and start again by Simon Reynolds and just generally on a massive post punk binge trying to find out as much as possible about how some of those records were made and the philosophy behind them". 

"We got so obsessed with the all tactile soundscapes, the chaotic mix decisions, the use of physical processes and spaces and probably most importantly the approach to trying to break as many things as possible in the process of creating something new. "

For "Lockup", Overmono  sampled "What A Waste" - not the Ian Dury song, but a tune by Birmingham postpunk outfit Fast Relief, who I've never heard of (call yourself a postpunk historian!)

It's on this comp of Midlands postpunk on the Easy Action label

Which you can hear on the streamers - like here at Tidal

Update: Stylo finds it on YouTube too

And here's a photo of the group, who appear to only made the one recording, as excavated for Un-Scene!

They could hardly look more postpunk. Flute in the line-up too.

Listening to "Lockup" I'm not really hearing the connection to postpunk beyond the sample. But it's a cool track - I like the way they loop the yammering vocal from "What A Waste", making it sound almost like bhangra. 

I seem to remember enjoying Overmono's earlier stuff while feeling they were, if not outright retro-rave, then consolidators of the tradition.

But then people making music today in most fields are unavoidably history-conscious, given the  accumulation of all that music behind them.

Whether it's rave or rock or rap, the tradition exists as a fact, a pre-existing thing, an arrayed archive of massed material - something to work with, to rework...  

It's in the way, and the only way forward is to go through it... 

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

I await the album with interest, curious to see if there are other manifestations of postpunk