Dom at Musings of A Socialist Japanologist with a really interesting post on the sound that's usurped (yet also evolved out of) bassline in the North -- and which he characterises as the nuum (South Yorks/West Midlands division) ruffing up electrohouse as the nuum (London division) did with funky house

more detailed response to it over at Blissblog 

(seems like Bassline-fiend Continuum did start a Dissensus thread on it a while back, but the response was disinterest / derision from the assembled Dissenserati)

(what is the etymology of this term Electroline then?)

love the MC element, reminding me of those bassline-meets-grime (with a Northern accent ) tracks by people like Bonez

("hands in the air if you think you're hardcore")

and also the MC-ing (live on the set and also as featured artist on some of the tracks) in this bumpin mix by Marcus Nasty




some ace tunes dug up by Dom/MoaSJ including this one



and this delish bootleg refix of Chaka's Ain't Nobody

here's a couple of others I really like

in a funny way reminds me just a bit of moombhaton, in the sense of fresh/buzzy yet also a reconfiguration of known elements where it's hard to spot the newness. and also with the slip down in tempo c.f. the precursor sound, bassline.

and finally SWAG - a hilarious Jackin' House and Bass blog that Martin Blackdown spotted, which at first I thought had to be a spoof of some kind...

what's with all the references to ket and cat?  do people really wear little spoons around their necks? if so, puts a different angle on bumpin beats

SWAG AS FUCK takes me back to my youth this un getting ketty ont dancefloor cos the girls love bass lol ;) x

^^^^^^^

here at swag HQ we are all still onit from weekend. been having a reyt time like, one of us mates went under and lost his clothes, cat, geebs and his spoon! hes proper gutterd... you can even see his cat dick on pic...hate it when that happens but its orite we used our new special program to hide his identificaton.

We all gettin off sesh soon so we save some dollah to get him a new spoon

Nuff luff swagsters!!! 

Keep it swag and Sesh on xxx

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

We bet you cant wait to wrap your noses round these unreleased beautys, solid gold and look how shiney they are (wont be shiney when they are brimming with my boom cat :P) we have been busy makin these spoons over the past 2 weeks sorry if we havent been around much bt spoons come first as u all know, whats the point in going out if u dont have a spoon on?

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

KET, SEX & DC10 NEED I SAY MORE!!!

What a sick tshirt - 3 of our favourite things here at SWAG blog! For those who do not know what DC10 is, its the home of jackin electro house in Ibiza. Its got red walls and fit lasses walk around in bikinis giving out free cat all night long while you dance the night away to mucky wobblers and deep bouncey chicago electro house beats. Its just round the corner from Cafe Del Mar (Where that song was made from kevin & perry) and the world famous OK Kareoke Bar. Personally i've never been to ibiza but me and the boyos plan to smash openings this year, tom's gonna put half oz of cat up his arse before we get ont plane so we can join the mile high cat club hehe naughty :P

I cant wait for all the ket, sex and kareoke, this lass has got it nailed on with this tshirt, if your wearing something with DC10 on it then you are the definition of SWAG...

that triffic 91 hardcore set from DJ Dara  (of  NYC jungle scene / Breakbeat Science cru renown) that i linked to before (first aired on Jungletrain. then posted by Blog To the Old Skool)  is now up again at BttOS but this time it's at 320 Kbps and with a proper track list to boot

stumbled on this by chance on eMusic -- disappointingly though, despite the promising artist name and track title,  there's nothing really retro about this (apart from the time-honoured " ardcore.. junglist" sample) and (at least in this excerpt) not a trace of Amentalism ... just yer typical post-98 D&B linear scuttle-beat

the bastard bambini of "Spongebob"

triffic old skool set from the great Dara of NYC jungle scene / Breakbeat Science renown --it's a guest set midway between an also-tasty mix of old skool/jungle from Blog to The Oldskool's Pete,  on the latter's regular Jungletrain radio show

Woebot: Rave Bum from Matthew Ingram on Vimeo.



Woebot: Rave Bum from Matthew Ingram on Vimeo.


the first single off Hallo, the great new album by Woebot

i'm not too surprised at the persistence and wide dispersal of the term "post-rock", it's sufficiently vague and elastic and evocative to lend itself to many purposes

i am a bit surprised at the half-lives of the term neurofunk, another of my creations (i did coin that one, as far as i can tell; post-rock as a term goes back as far as 1967, but it was me that affixed it to its 1993-onwards meaning, although that has since drifted some way from what I envisaged)

yeah but neurofunk -- that was always, well, if not quite a joke, then certainly there was an undercurrent of malice

i disliked that direction in drum and bass, it left me cold .. up to a point i could appreciate some of the production and the atmosphere-sculpting but it just didn't give me the rush i got from "Renegade Snares", "Terrorist", "Helicopter Tune", "Supersharp Shooter", "Shadowboxing", "Squadron", etc etc

it had turned into something else, something that required a name

so I tried to come up with as unappetising a name as possible

ArtCore and Ambient Jungle has become compilation titles, so I really hoped that some label would heist the term and (as with Artcore and Ambient Jungle) hasten the acceleration of the sound away from that direction, make it as short-lived as possible

or even kill it off

of course that didn't happen and as this shows, the style abides as basically the dominant strain in drum'n'bass

what i get from this video mix of landmark tracks in the genre's evolution from 1997 to round about now is not really "the evolution of neurofunk", but a sense of stasis -- not only does the style not appear to have made any giant leap forward, it often sounds like more or less the same bassline (certainly on a timbral level, but even the way the B-lines are patterned), and the same basic beat, in all these songs

the main evolutionary leap seems to have been from what I was talking about in that December 97 Wire piece (more clinical Optical/Jonny L) to the Bad Company sound at the end of the 90s. and then it doesn't seem to make any leaps as such

(BC who i briefly rated as the Motorhead of D&B but in retrospect seem more like the Judas Priest)

further to the previous

this wobble anthem on a label (Wicky Lindows) hailed by Leaving Earth reminded me of this movie I once saw on TV -- can't remember the title (perhaps an East European cinema buff can identify it ) but some scenes from it have always stuck in my memory. Czech,  possibly...  made in the Nineties but set in the Fifties or early Sixties -- there's a school and this rebellious boy, who's into rock'n'roll and all things American, and at some point he manages to take over the school tannoy system, i think ... and declaims a bunch of insurrectionary nonsense, including the rallying cry "LONG LIVE THE IDIOT".

and from one black sheep of the postrave family to another....

Leaving Earth with a top 10 list of Wobble Records

and he's not talking about circa-2006-halfstep-wobble-when-it-was-good

he's talking filthstep, grosstep, abjectionstep, vomstep

his  first choice for the top 10 "immortal wobble objects for posterity" =

Leaving Earth's mysterious Taninian opines, persuasively:

"The wobble aesthetic now seem to be fusing with electro house, to form a new all purpose rave music, much like punk rawness/intensity eventually ended up as a part of a wider “real rock” sensibility in the eighties. It’s all about the Skrillex/ Deadmau5-axis, of course, and while Deadmau5 doesn’t seem all that exciting to me, Skrillex is actually pretty good. Sure, he might not have that many tricks up his sleeve so far....  but he’s nevertheless really good at using wobbles potential for catchiness and dynamics, redefining it to meet his own ends. It would be tempting to go all the way and see him as some sort of, I dunno, dubstep's Sex Pistols, but ... perhaps something like Metallica is probably a better comparison."

At the MTV Movie Awards the other night, the warm-up deejay Martin Solveig was dropping nonstop wobble (the Skrillexy maximalist wibble-tendril type, rather than Stenchman-style diarrhea-step, but still)  to the assembled celebritati and industry people.


Then, in that comedy skit taking the piss out of Emma Stone before she got her "Trailblazer" Award, where the mirth-premise was that in real life she's a horrible arrogant unsweetheart, one of the faux-nasty comments from Mila Kunis was "Emma says she invented dubstep"

So it really has crossed over.

Or at least it will have done, completely, when Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something similar replaces the rockor mortis of moments like Johnny Depp guest riffing with the Black Keys.

Back to the Leaving Earth list--which inexplicably is unaccompanied by YouTubes, I expect he expects you to search out and buy these records -- reading it I found myself wondering whether the actual tunes could possibly live up to descriptions such as these:

"the EP [Tomba's Brace For Impact] excels at the 'grunt-step” wobble variety, like a horde of towering, Godzilla-sized pig-robots marching through a nocturnal megapolis, crushing everything in their way while puking out cascades of green ooze through writhing hydraulic cyber-snouts"

It does actually


Another of Leaving Earth's choices: Doctor P's "Gargoyles"

All this metal-ic grotesquerie-imagery reminds me of that notion I mooted a few years back: wobblestep (d)evolving towards a kind of slowed-down gabba...

so maybe the dungeon style of dubstep is the "intelligent"/ambient/atmospheric version of that -- equivalent to gloomcore? 

Macabre Unit as a label name -- how gloomcore is that?


more from the Leaving Earth list:

the new issue of Dancecult journal  - Dancecult  4.1  -- is out and it's particularly cultic 

as it is a special issue focusing on "the exodus of psytrance"

articles include:

Seasoned Exodus: The Exile Mosaic of Psyculture --  Graham St John

Full Penetration: The Integration of Psychedelic Electronic Dance Music and Culture into the Israeli Mainstream - --- Joshua I. Schmidt

“What are we doing here?” Nostalgic Desires for a Cosmopolitan Sensory Aesthetic in the Amsterdam-based Psytrance Scene --- Eva-Maria Alexandra van Straaten

Spaces of Play: The Spatial Dimensions of Underground Club Culture and Locating the Subjunctive

--- Alice O'Grady

Aurora Festival and the Sacred Rituals of Samothraki: Past, Present... What Future?

--- Chiara Baldini

Tribal Revival: West Coast Festival Culture -- Kyer Wiltshire and (me old mucker) Erik "Techgnosis" Davis

 

Unveiling the Secret: The Roots of Trance --- Dave Mothersole (not quite me old mucker but the brother of an old mucker -- an actual Stud sibling -- yes the real life brother of one of the (Legendary) Stud Bros (Ben) and the person I first ever heard about Goa from (this  a good few years before the words "Goa Trance" ever uttered, back  in 88 when it was all Front 242 and Pet Shop Boys 12 inch remix instrumental versions that got played at the beach raves)

Philip Sherburne, at his Spin column Control Voltage, looking at the emergence of "hipster house" via the Portland micro-scene around Miracles Club + their label's new comp Ecstasy


"there's a certain curatorial sensibility at work, which has occasionally led these artists to be branded with the unfortunate tag of "hipster house." But the reality is that a huge swathe of the house and techno community is currently preoccupied with retro forms. Artists as diverse as the Dutch analog maverick Legowelt and Boston's 1990s-obsessed Soul Clap balance on the edge between paean and pastiche. And while the comp includes some seriously retro jams, like Emotion II Emotion's "Night and Day," songs like Leech's "Edgewise" and Garben Eden's "Feel Good Agency" twist up old-school machine vibes into sounds untethered from any particular era"

any excuse to post this again

"I love the frisson that comes from hearing lines like "Don't give up your buttercup" delivered in a voice as deeply masculine as Everton Barnes', with multi-part harmonies that recall a doo-wop chorus down on one knee. From a cracked-pavement backdrop of shuffling snares, grunts, and sternum-thumping bass shoots up a yellow flower: It's as irresistible as it is absurd" -- Philip Sherburne at Spin with his own list of fave UKG and 2step tracks