"Contemporary and futuristic"

 

After the graphic and some of the titles ("Lost World", "Black Mist", "Dank") the actual music is fearfully uninteresting - fearfully lacking in fearfulness.

Of Instagrammatology (think Zinc)

 

In amidst the endless how-to-hakken reels....

... and the countless clips of scanty-clad female deejays jiggling as they performatively tweak the knobs 

... driving huge crowds inexplicably wild with the tame-old same-old sounds of an endless, extending-into-perpetuity 90s (and not even the good parts of the '90s!)... 

in amongst all that, you do come across some nerdily informative reels of a historical bent on Instagram

Such as the triffic little micro-essays done by DJ Zinc, where he'll break down the technology and techniques used in a classic track, enumerate the samples and the breaks...  position the track in the unfolding dialectic of the nuum....  maybe even have a tale about where and when it was made and how long it took (usually a matter of hours) ... and often he'll throw in a few personal memories of first-hearing or first-playing it out himself at the Roller Express or somewhere like that

He did  DJ Vibes's "Obsession (Music So Wonderful)" the other day...  talking about what it was made  of...  how it came along at this moment when happy hardcore and jungle had still not yet branched off from each other - such that a tune like "Obsession" could be played alongside "The Dark Stranger", Dougal could do a set in between Randall and Hype. 

It reminded me what a teeeeeeeearin' tune it was and is

Seemed to be on the pirates incessantly at one point

I always forget it's called "Obsession", so indelible is the hook "Music So Wonderful" (or is it "Music's So Wonderful" - on the original track by Vivian Lee it's definitely "Music's")

But it's aptly titled, it does have a feverishly obsessed feel - that fixated-feeling 4/4/ that comes in every so often before the breaks take over completely

Along with the Think and the Amen and the Vivian Lee vocal and the T99 noise, Zinc indicates a chunk of Alec Empire's "You Must Confront" in there - the doomy horn-like fanfare-blare.

Zinc also had a bit of an exclusive: some prototype artwork for the Asylum label shared by Vibes - mockups done by an artist called Deano or probably more likely Dino (can't trust the AI captioning)

those not-horny horns (slight not-return)

 

Listening to this perfect little tune - a favorite from 2step garage days - I noticed how the whole track is propelled along by horn fanfares.

I'm assuming they are synth-horns, if only because used in such a programmed riff sort of way, precisely the same in every iteration. 

They actually sound quite realistic in timbre, so it's possible the riff was played by a hornsman and then sequenced.

In "Clean Riddem"  the way the synthi-horn functions is very different from ersatz-sax is usually deployed in UKG. Typically it exudes a sensual, sultry smoky vibe and it takes the form of parping micro-vamps. 

Here it's more like the "jousting" fanfares that Dexys Midnight Runners went in for.  Sort of punchy and pugilistic. 

"Clean Riddem" and flipside "No Fighting" - ooh gosh!   Transfusions of pure joy...  ruff 'n' smooth in perfect balance. Unimprovable in every just-so detail. 

I did a whole post on  Angel Farringdon a while back

And here is the original Those Horny Horns post 

(oh and another slight return to the subject)

Of Instagrammatology (slight return) (the eternal returns of....) (unOriginal Mix)

My Instagram keep throwing up reels of Charlotte de Witte, who apparently is one of the biggest deejays in the world.  

I thought I'd check out her stuff, so tried the Mixmag mix she did in 2021

Where I heard this:  

Thought it might be some old skool acid from back in the day I'd never heard - but it was originally released in 2019 by one Robert S.

I cannot believe this kind of thing is still being churned out. It's a 39 year old sound! 

I used to grumble about the eternal returns of acid in the early 2000s when e.g. Luke Vibert did a record of acid house jams - so I suppose I am locked in my own loop here.

Still, making acid house now, it's like Robert Cray doing the blues in the '80s. 

"We're Talking About Acid" should really be subtitled "UnOriginal Mix", then.

Talking of mixes and unoriginality... 

The whole of that De Witte mix is full of deja entendu licks and builds, pulses and breakdowns - a completely terra cognita of trance and banging techno. Hyperstasis, without even the hyper bit, the frantic scurrying for an exit off the recombinant plateau. 

So then I thought I would try her more recent artist-album of 2025.

Where my eye alighted on the feat. of a familiar name, the sort of ethereal diva that the likes of Future Sound of London / Messiah / The Beloved / Utah Saints would sample way way backintheday: Lisa Gerrard, of Dead Can Dance, 4AD cult legends....

Lisa wafts mystic, effing the ineffable, over pummeling steroid-maxed techno that is like a Creatine-recreation of "Horsepower" by Ravesignal aka C.J. Bolland. (A Belgian, like de Witte.)

Next episode of Of Instagrammatology: Nikolina

Who, not content with peddling Schranz, is now pushing a sound she calls Schroove - a combo of Schranz and Groove, whatever that is. 

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

Talking of eternal returnings, elsewhere on the 'Gram, I saw a reel where someone asserted that tech-house was played out and that UK Garage was the fresh thing coming through. 

Again with the flashbacks, this time to the end of the '90s, very early 2000s, when both sounds were in the ascendant in their respective - wholly unconnected - corners of the dance scene. 

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

The other thing I'm seeing a lot of is hakken reels - people showing how to dance to gabber and its variants like hardstyle, etc. 

It looks a bit.... goosesteppy, to be honest, at times. 

But I suppose more wholesomely, hakken - also known as hakkûh - could be seen as being in the tradition of all-the-action-is-below-the-knee pan-European folk dance styles, from Morris Dancing to that Irish riverdance style to I dunno Tyrolean frolics beyond my ken

Hakken today seems slightly different to jumpstyle, involving more of the whole leg - so all-the-action-is-below-the-waist maybe.  Still, a stampy sort of dance

There is a sort of rolling looseness to the way the legs are unfurled in the dance now - it actually reminds me as much of people on a treadmill at the gym as of folk-dance.

My God, you'd have to be so fit to do this for any duration. Or pilled to the gills. 

According to Wiki, hakken comes from a Dutch word meaning the heels of the feet 

I thought it had something to do with a Teutonic word that would be the root of our "hack", as in hack with an axe. 

I do remember the word being around in the '90s and I naively took it to be a kind of garbling of "hardcore". 

This also files under "eternal returns of....." but with variations - new complexifications (backsteps and what have you... dancers raising a knee at an angle and slapping their ankle... ) added to the stompy stampy core of it. 

A sort of volkist version of Baraka's "changing same"