look at the pic in this piece -- you can't get much more whey-faced than that!
musically though, as Alex P's profile indicates, Flux P's the roid-stacked child of Rusko & Caspa
bastardised child of a bastardised child
Friday, April 27, 2012
"End of the Road"--probing and super-in-depth piece by Martin Clark for FACT on road rap and its implications for the (uncertain-looking) future of the hardcore continuum
"Pirate radio is being replaced with a primary medium that is indistinguishable from media used by all other musical continuums, road rap is absorbing grime’s road energy into hip-hop’s traditions, house continues to satisfy ravers’ need to dance without a strong sense of local identity, breakbeat/bass science rudeness or flava. Grime and UK funky continue to iterate in interesting ways, ways that show real promise but can’t claim the seismic bursts of intense energy they once saw. Dubstep fans who reject brostep have dispersed into either purist halfstep traditionalist stasis (“the dungeon sound”), floating islands of the post-dubstep archipelago, trad European house and techno, homogenizing crate-digging revivalism and eclecticism, US trap rap and juke. So what’s next?"
"Pirate radio is being replaced with a primary medium that is indistinguishable from media used by all other musical continuums, road rap is absorbing grime’s road energy into hip-hop’s traditions, house continues to satisfy ravers’ need to dance without a strong sense of local identity, breakbeat/bass science rudeness or flava. Grime and UK funky continue to iterate in interesting ways, ways that show real promise but can’t claim the seismic bursts of intense energy they once saw. Dubstep fans who reject brostep have dispersed into either purist halfstep traditionalist stasis (“the dungeon sound”), floating islands of the post-dubstep archipelago, trad European house and techno, homogenizing crate-digging revivalism and eclecticism, US trap rap and juke. So what’s next?"
Thursday, April 26, 2012
and that's why they call it a continuum folks! (part 3974)
[FACT interview with Loefah on his attachment to vinyl and buying old hardcore and jungle 12s]
Q: So hardcore was the real beginning for you.
A: Hardcore was what got me started buying music on vinyl, yeah. And it was literally ‘cos you couldn’t get it anywhere else. I didn’t have decks at the time, I couldn’t mix; I was like 11 or 12 years old. But I used to save my pound lunch money every day, ‘cos the records were a fiver, and on Fridays I’d go down to Wax City Records in Croydon..... At the same time I was picking up flyers and it was like the same thing with that, I started collecting flyers and just….being part of it. Being part of that hardcore thing... It was all about, if you’ve got it, then you were hardcore [laughs]. What I try to do at the moment [with Swamp81] – it’s a similar kind of ethos. The music’s there on vinyl. If you want to go and get it, you can; I’m not gonna shout about it, I’m not gonna try to get it into HMV or whatever the fuck the high street record store is now [laughs], I’m not gonna go digital, I’m not gonna do all that shit… so it’s like, it’s over here. If you want to be part of it, you can be, but you’ve got to make a bit of effort. And that’s kind of what hardcore was about.
If you made the effort to find your local independent record shop, if you made the effort to get the flyer to go to the rave – ‘cos without the flyer you literally wouldn’t know about it, there was no internet, there weren’t many adverts, at least not for the smaller raves – then you were hardcore. If you did make that effort, then you were accepted, you were in a kind of gang, a club. It was a special thing, and it was linked into the record shops, the vinyl, the pirates, the flyers – it was all this one thing together. That was hardcore for me.
chaaaaaaap!
just possibly connected to the whys and wherefores of this being still probably my favorite dubstep tune
along with this one maybe
[FACT interview with Loefah on his attachment to vinyl and buying old hardcore and jungle 12s]
Q: So hardcore was the real beginning for you.
A: Hardcore was what got me started buying music on vinyl, yeah. And it was literally ‘cos you couldn’t get it anywhere else. I didn’t have decks at the time, I couldn’t mix; I was like 11 or 12 years old. But I used to save my pound lunch money every day, ‘cos the records were a fiver, and on Fridays I’d go down to Wax City Records in Croydon..... At the same time I was picking up flyers and it was like the same thing with that, I started collecting flyers and just….being part of it. Being part of that hardcore thing... It was all about, if you’ve got it, then you were hardcore [laughs]. What I try to do at the moment [with Swamp81] – it’s a similar kind of ethos. The music’s there on vinyl. If you want to go and get it, you can; I’m not gonna shout about it, I’m not gonna try to get it into HMV or whatever the fuck the high street record store is now [laughs], I’m not gonna go digital, I’m not gonna do all that shit… so it’s like, it’s over here. If you want to be part of it, you can be, but you’ve got to make a bit of effort. And that’s kind of what hardcore was about.
If you made the effort to find your local independent record shop, if you made the effort to get the flyer to go to the rave – ‘cos without the flyer you literally wouldn’t know about it, there was no internet, there weren’t many adverts, at least not for the smaller raves – then you were hardcore. If you did make that effort, then you were accepted, you were in a kind of gang, a club. It was a special thing, and it was linked into the record shops, the vinyl, the pirates, the flyers – it was all this one thing together. That was hardcore for me.
chaaaaaaap!
just possibly connected to the whys and wherefores of this being still probably my favorite dubstep tune
along with this one maybe
the same old anti-scene
"What all three tracks share in common is a profound, almost militant, resistance to the immediate, booming gratification that the vast majority of contemporary club music promises. Turning bass-music formulae inside out, they represent the anti-drop. But here's the other thing: these tunes are so extreme, in their own ways, that they don't exactly invite imitation. They're difficult and hermetic; they don't play well with others"--Philip Sherburne.
what Phil's describing in this post The Genre That Shall Not Be Named (Dubstep) -- which itself Spins off the blog Postwutchyalike: we can name it later --is basically what i described (less favorably) a while ago as nu-IDM... and what others have been calling, more as a placeholder than a useful descriptive, post-dubstep
what's interesting is that the very aspects that to me seem frustrating (as a listener) and sterile (as an observer with an ear to the long view) are things that Phil seems to be valorising, or trying to
i mean, man this sounds enticing, don't it?
"Objekt's "Cactus," released in February on Hessle Audio, was the first to catch my ear with a weird inversion of dance-music energies: its bass wobbles with the ferocity of the down-and-dirtiest dubstep, but the rest of the tune feels gutted and hollowed-out.The drum track seems to be missing information, as though a mute button had been pressed or a patch cable had come unplugged; for all its heaviness, it's a weirdly enervated tune, gliding listlessly like a sailboat stuck in the doldrums. I've never heard it in a club, and I can only imagine that it would be tough to play effectively"
the return of "art-techno" (as in the "Fuck Dance, Let's Art" chapter of Energy Flash), that same-old renunciation of what works in the name of "freedom"
what Phil also describes--a lateralism of connections transecting genres--is also the hallmark of hyper-stasis which is criss-crossing journeys back and forth between and across the known, the extant forms rather than forward movement into the unknown
phil pinpoints what may be the most interesting and revealing characteristic of these hybrids, which is that they are one-offs...
"Jabbed like iron rods into the clockwork of the night, they feel less like seeds for potential subgenres and more like weed killer, burning off the overgrowth."
hybridisation, in the analogue era, seemed to take the form of, well, new forms... there was a centripetal logic that created a collective surge, a swarming/flocking to a new sound... the scenius logic of one strong new template that then "seeded" (to use Phil's organicist metaphor) myriad minor variations, and this then created a monolithic vibe that was both absorbingly total (at any given rave or club night) and also had staying power (breakbeat hardcore/jungle/drum&bass lasted six years before starting to calcify)
hybridisation, in the digital era, seems to not lead to anything.... something about it's very fundamental constitutive processes (editing, morphing, etc) is inorganic, hence the non-generative nature of the one-off hybrids, the fact that they don't become genres.... there is a momentary agglomeration of all these networked influences... but it doesn't become a sound that is adopted/mutated/evolved...
there is something inherent in digiculture logic that encourages differentiation, divergence... anti-scenius
at the extreme, even the artist doesn't develop an individual style... doesn't repeat themselves... each new track is another genre-of-one
style after all is related to a measure of inflexibility and a measure of predictability... that's how we recognise artistic signature.... but in the ultra-flexibilized conditions of digi-flux, the artist is encouraged to endlessly differ from himself, is pulled every-which-way
genre is the collectivisation of style, and depends similarly on an element of inflexibilty and predictability...
PS surprised to see Phil, who i'd thought a brother in neologism and nominalism, taking the names=restriction stance this time around!
PPS further thoughts on this zone and "the anti-drop" from Rory Gibb at Quietus : "These very UK-sounding hybrid forms don't exist in a vacuum. They're all held suspended by a tangled web of reference points, connections and affiliations. More so than, say, many early dubstep and grime producers, many of these producers have a deep knowledge of music stretching far beyond their immediate surrounds."
"What all three tracks share in common is a profound, almost militant, resistance to the immediate, booming gratification that the vast majority of contemporary club music promises. Turning bass-music formulae inside out, they represent the anti-drop. But here's the other thing: these tunes are so extreme, in their own ways, that they don't exactly invite imitation. They're difficult and hermetic; they don't play well with others"--Philip Sherburne.
what Phil's describing in this post The Genre That Shall Not Be Named (Dubstep) -- which itself Spins off the blog Postwutchyalike: we can name it later --is basically what i described (less favorably) a while ago as nu-IDM... and what others have been calling, more as a placeholder than a useful descriptive, post-dubstep
what's interesting is that the very aspects that to me seem frustrating (as a listener) and sterile (as an observer with an ear to the long view) are things that Phil seems to be valorising, or trying to
i mean, man this sounds enticing, don't it?
"Objekt's "Cactus," released in February on Hessle Audio, was the first to catch my ear with a weird inversion of dance-music energies: its bass wobbles with the ferocity of the down-and-dirtiest dubstep, but the rest of the tune feels gutted and hollowed-out.The drum track seems to be missing information, as though a mute button had been pressed or a patch cable had come unplugged; for all its heaviness, it's a weirdly enervated tune, gliding listlessly like a sailboat stuck in the doldrums. I've never heard it in a club, and I can only imagine that it would be tough to play effectively"
the return of "art-techno" (as in the "Fuck Dance, Let's Art" chapter of Energy Flash), that same-old renunciation of what works in the name of "freedom"
what Phil also describes--a lateralism of connections transecting genres--is also the hallmark of hyper-stasis which is criss-crossing journeys back and forth between and across the known, the extant forms rather than forward movement into the unknown
phil pinpoints what may be the most interesting and revealing characteristic of these hybrids, which is that they are one-offs...
"Jabbed like iron rods into the clockwork of the night, they feel less like seeds for potential subgenres and more like weed killer, burning off the overgrowth."
hybridisation, in the analogue era, seemed to take the form of, well, new forms... there was a centripetal logic that created a collective surge, a swarming/flocking to a new sound... the scenius logic of one strong new template that then "seeded" (to use Phil's organicist metaphor) myriad minor variations, and this then created a monolithic vibe that was both absorbingly total (at any given rave or club night) and also had staying power (breakbeat hardcore/jungle/drum&bass lasted six years before starting to calcify)
hybridisation, in the digital era, seems to not lead to anything.... something about it's very fundamental constitutive processes (editing, morphing, etc) is inorganic, hence the non-generative nature of the one-off hybrids, the fact that they don't become genres.... there is a momentary agglomeration of all these networked influences... but it doesn't become a sound that is adopted/mutated/evolved...
there is something inherent in digiculture logic that encourages differentiation, divergence... anti-scenius
at the extreme, even the artist doesn't develop an individual style... doesn't repeat themselves... each new track is another genre-of-one
style after all is related to a measure of inflexibility and a measure of predictability... that's how we recognise artistic signature.... but in the ultra-flexibilized conditions of digi-flux, the artist is encouraged to endlessly differ from himself, is pulled every-which-way
genre is the collectivisation of style, and depends similarly on an element of inflexibilty and predictability...
PS surprised to see Phil, who i'd thought a brother in neologism and nominalism, taking the names=restriction stance this time around!
PPS further thoughts on this zone and "the anti-drop" from Rory Gibb at Quietus : "These very UK-sounding hybrid forms don't exist in a vacuum. They're all held suspended by a tangled web of reference points, connections and affiliations. More so than, say, many early dubstep and grime producers, many of these producers have a deep knowledge of music stretching far beyond their immediate surrounds."
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
shurely shome pishtake?
1~100 100 Variations for solo hoover (04'38'')
ARTIST NOTE
Written by Stephen Sharp and Roc Jimenez de Cisneros, 2011. Each disk in this edition of one hundred contains a unique 04:38 track.
All tracks are based on the very same four note sequence. Play loud!
CD NOTE Extending the formal and aesthetic aspects of the works that Sharp and Jimenez de Cisneros gather under the term Rave Synthesis, "100 variations for solo hoover" touches upon issues such as part/whole relationships, the notions of symmetry, similarity, boundaries and other pertinent topics (see Appendix ).
Appendix:
(1) Ordinary sortal predicates typically express maximal properties, where a property, F, is maximal, roughly, if large parts of an F are not themselves Fs. A large part of a house-all of the house save a window, say-does not itself count as a house. A large part of a cat-all of it save the tail, say-does not itself count as a cat. Otherwise in the vicinity of every house there would be a multitude of houses; in the vicinity of every cat there would be a multitude of cats. The linguistic conventions governing 'cat' and 'house' do not count large undetached parts of cats and houses as cats and houses; therefore the properties these predicates express are maximal properties. Maximality is a kind of border-sensitivity: whether something counts as a house or cat depends on what is going on around its border.
Sider, Theodore. ''Maximality and Microphysical Supervenience''. In Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (2003): 139-149.
(2) In 1987, Peter van Inwagen asked a good question. (Asking the right question is often the hardest part.) He asked: what do you have to do to some objects to get them to compose something—to bring into existence some further thing made up of those objects? Glue them together or what? Some said that you don't have to do anything. No matter what you do to the objects, they'll always compose something further, no matter how they are arranged.
Sider, Theodore. ''Ontological Realism''. In Metametaphysics, edited by David Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009): 384-423.
(3) Many philosophers accept what I shall call the Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts (DAUP). Adherents of this doctrine believe in such objects as the northern half of the Eiffel Tower, the middle two-thirds of the cigar Uncle Henry is smoking, and the thousands (at least) of overlapping perfect duplicates of Michelangelo's David that were hidden inside the block of marble from which (as they see it) Michelangelo liberated the David. Moreover, they do not believe in only some "undetached parts"; they believe, so to speak, in all of them.
Van lnwagen, Peter. "The Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts". In Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 62 (1981): 123-137.
(4) Suppose (as a proponent of modes would have it) the sphericity of one beetroot were numerically distinct from (that is, not strictly identical with) the sphericity of another. We might explain the beetroots' similarity by noting that they had similar (though numerically distinct) properties. But what is the basis of the similarity exhibited by these properties? Armstrong has an answer: identity; the properties are strictly identical. In giving up strict identity, we give up this elegant explanation. We would, in that case, need to fall back on primitive or brute similarity holding among the properties. (...) A proponent of modes can freely speak of objects 'sharing' properties, or of distinct objects possessing 'the same' property. In these cases, however, 'same' indicates not self-sameness—strict identity-but exact similarity. We speak of two stockbrokers wearing the same tie, meaning only that they are wearing exactly similar ties. Two diners share a taste for anchovies, not in the sense that the diners possess a single gustatory system; rather they have similar culinary preferences. Henry, we say, has the same breakfast every morning: each breakfast is not strictly identical with, but is exactly similar to the others.
Heil, John. From an Ontological Point of View. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2003).
ARTIST BIO Since the late nineties, Roc Jimenez de Cisneros and his collaborators have been producing what they call "computer music for hooligans", inspired by geometry, metaphysics, noise, cosmology and rave culture.
A vortex of generative basslines, air horns and fuzzy arpeggios, their music displays a radical and playful approach to algorithmic composition, with works available on Entr'acte, Mego, Presto!?, Diskono, Scarcelight, fals.ch and their very own ALKU.
In 2003 the group started an ongoing series of electroacoustic pieces entitled Punani, built around the implementation of generative techniques, cosmology and psychedelia in what Kristian Vester defines as Radical Computer Music.
Occasional EVOL members since 1996 have included Stephen Sharp, Ruben Patiño, fMiguel Ferrer, Jakob Draminsky Hojmark, Joe Gilmore, Anna MarÃa Ramos, and Andy Davies. The name of the project comes from Sambucus Ebulus (in Catalan, evol), a herbaceous species of elder with a characteristic foetid smell. It is also a fully Lagrangian self-adaptive parallel Fortran95 code by the Padova N-body code for cosmological simulations of galaxy formation and evolution, speciï¬cally designed for simulations of cosmological structure formation on cluster, galactic and sub-galactic scales. Reference: www.vivapunani.org
more on EVOL's "computer music for hooligans" at FACT magazine: http://www.factmag.com/2012/04/16/evol-on-rave-synthesis-hoover-abuse-making-computer-music-for-hooligans/
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
the original ravers
(sharper image version at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/jan/12/humphrey-lyttelton-london-jazz-1950-video - part of jon savage's series at guardian trawling through the Pathe news reel archives to for teenkultur gems)
more trad jazz footage
(sharper image version at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/jan/12/humphrey-lyttelton-london-jazz-1950-video - part of jon savage's series at guardian trawling through the Pathe news reel archives to for teenkultur gems)
more trad jazz footage
another great tune dug up on the ILM thread about "Jungle Rhythms" (which features Tim Finney droppin' good science... and is also enjoyable for the lone dissenting voice's complaints re. 'undanceable rhythms that just code as "wacky" and purposeless to me' and 'a lot of this stuff seems really really sexless and unsensual to me'... difficult to take such a person seriously after such deeply revealing remarks... if one ever did, of course)
Monday, April 9, 2012
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
a three-way conversation from a couple of years ago between me, Mark Fisher and Francesco Tenaglia published in KALEIDoSCOPE magazine in Italy, addressing futurism in British dance music with specific reference to the hardcore continuum
http://kaleidoscope-press.com/issue-contents/stories-of-glory-days-francesco-tenaglia-simon-reynolds-and-mark-fisher-in-conversation/
this got edited down a fair amount... i will post the extended mix in due course
http://kaleidoscope-press.com/issue-contents/stories-of-glory-days-francesco-tenaglia-simon-reynolds-and-mark-fisher-in-conversation/
this got edited down a fair amount... i will post the extended mix in due course
benny B(rassic) at dissensus points to these dudes (from philly) as much faster and madder than the jersey club stuff
and you know what he could be right
it's gabbatastic
and here's that Benny B jersey-mix again -- http://www.mixcloud.com/bennybrassic/new-jersey-club/
and you know what he could be right
it's gabbatastic
and here's that Benny B jersey-mix again -- http://www.mixcloud.com/bennybrassic/new-jersey-club/
cor and crikey -- the entire run of Synapse, the 1970s electronic music magazine, digitized for our perusal, here
an Order of the British Empire to whomsoever is responsible, say I!
check out also this fun blog called RetroSynthAds
http://retrosynthads.blogspot.com/
