c/o FACT TV here's the podcast of my talk about the hardcore continuum plus onstage dialogue with Mark Fisher

^^^^^^^

the nub, or one of the nubs, here addressing counter-theories based around notions of deterritorialisation and unrootedness:

"I do try hard to be fair so I'm going to attempt to see why those theories and the artistic practice that accompanies them might appeal, where its element of idealism is. And I would say that it relates to a utopianism of space--that's really what makes it so 1990s, so early days of the web--the idea of connectivity, of postgeographical flows, of things that are remote being brought close, the separate and far-flung become one in the mix.

"Now the hardcore continuum operates through a different kind of utopianism, not constituted through space but through time. Oh, it does have a romance of place--the Just 4 U London thing. But I think time is the crucial axis. I always come back to this phrase I use a lot, the title of a track by a hardcore outfit called Phuture Assassins: "roots 'n' future". If you look at the hardcore continuum you can see a consistent impulse running through it that simultaneously casts backward to the past and forward to the unreachable horizon of the future.... It's like people in the scene having a heightened and highly charged sense of temporality... This utopianism of time is something that threads through the culture in strange loops because when you listen, as a fan, to stuff from all across its breadth and length, you get these uncanny timewarp sensations--you hear things in 1990 bleep tune that are future-ghosts of sounds in grime or dubstep or bassline. It's almost like any track from any point in the continuum contains all the past and all the future of this music inside it. Like DNA or something."

^^^^^^^

Talking of time, for those who don't have a spare 1 hr 52 mins, later in the week I'm going to be putting the text of the talk up here plus preprepared riffs addressing various points, which i'd meant to use during the dialogue part but time ran out