'auntological 'ardcore?

their maker Sam Purcell (of Blank Mind Records), interviewed here, says: 

"I’m really obsessive about dance music, and yknow I kinda want to hear everything! It had become an addiction, I would access a certain period or style for the first time and get all hyped – and then when I’ve binged on that I’ll just move on and get into something else… All this eventually led me backwards towards hardcore, which was a really pivotal time in shaping electronic music in the UK – …And, that music just completely hit the sweet spot yknow. I was hooked, it’s such a rich tapestry to tap into. I was listening to Fabio & Dr S Gachet sets, discovering Moving shadow, Production House – tonnes of stuff. I loved the immediacy of the music, the functional rhythms, cheesy sped up samples, the weird FX – the rush. You can hear how everyone was so pilled up, and it’s a really interesting pocket of time which is kind of lost on my generation. I was really inspired, I love the wide eyed sincerity of it all and that feeds into the tracks for sure. There’s also an element of lament, looking back on a time when music was such a different thing. Raves really were pilgrimages, and you would have to listen in to the radio show, or dig through crates or go to raves in order to hear this music you love so much – and that effort makes the music a much more personal and rewarding thing. You might hear a track just one time, and that memory – informed by the context, your mood that moment, that soundsystem all constitute that experience, and it’s special."

he further says of current conditions of listening: "the concerns I have is that we can become saturated from over listening as we are constantly faced with so much choice and instant access. The problem with this is that I think it means that we are often listening to music on a lower level, or more impatiently – also it means that music becomes closely connected with screen and website type interfaces. Personally speaking, I listen to music in a more impatient way when I am listening via the internet or iTunes – due to cyber interfaces, e.g. timelines, tabbed browsing etc. Accordingly it’s had a positive influence in allowing people to discover music that you would otherwise be unaware of, and I have it to thank for discovering the music that has brought about the first two releases. Distinctions between eras and contexts are kind of blurring, Kodwo Eshun used the term ‘intimate distance’ to describe this – and I think it’s a really nice term, we feel very closely connected to things which maybe geographically or temporally are far removed. So, as with most things it’s a bit of a double edged sword that you need to be able to navigate. You need to impose limits as to not get overwhelmed by all the information"

more tunes under his DANCE moniker are in this realnice mix of his presented at Inhabit

INHABIT MIX 020 %u2013 DANCE by Inhabit-Online on Mixcloud

The Junglist Soldier- The Life and Times of Stevie Hyper D by Matthew Gale on Mixcloud

skrillex, "cinema", hard summer, 2012

Listening again to that famous (among Those Who Know) pirate set by Petchy, Topsee + Shantie from April 17th 2010, I caught some lines I missed on previous playthroughs:

Smack bang wallop
Smack bang wallop
Got your wifey acting a trollop
Got your wifey acting a trollop

It would take a very stern fellow to stay unsmiling through that.. 
 

A classic set, almost enough to finally convert me to funky...

Here's an old piece at Quietus by Robin Howells on P, T & S's "Militant Euphoria" at Live FM and Deja Vu

Massive stash of pirate sets by Petchy & Topsee, and others, archived by Man like Benny

The access you kids today have to all this music is unbelievable... i can remember, way way way back in those early 2000s, there was hardly any nuum-stuff to be found on the net...  barely a mix or a MP3, let alone video footage of the MCs doing their stuff

i had to plead and wheedle for London people to tape me sets of grime on cassette and mail them to me in NYC

or get the old boombox radio/tape-recorder out of storage when we were over in the UK and tape early dubstep before it was even called dubstep shows 

nowtro

retrodance

FACT's Angus Finlayson on how dance music's neophiliac tendencies are counterbalanced by
"an ever-present appetite for the old"  

"Recently, though, it feels like this habit of retrospection has gone into overdrive. House music, in particular, seems to ache for its past – although precisely which bit of it isn’t quite clear. Re-pressings of long-coveted twelves, extensive reissues of label and artist discographies, and selectors carving an identity out of the bricolage of lost classics ensure that youngsters are more clued-up than ever about every obscure corner of their lofty inheritance. The internet is central to this: the fact that a forgotten Roy Davis Jr. production is no longer consigned solely to dusty bargain bins in necrotic record stores – that it is, in fact, just one “related videos” click away – makes cultural archeology a more viable and accessible pastime than ever before.

"The effects of this shift on the creative output of the present are, frankly, mixed. Of course, the ways in which old records are revived and recontextualised can feasibly cause fresh sparks to fly, and an aesthetic focussed on the past isn’t necessarily moribund... It feels like the scales have tipped somewhat. And while I love early 90s New York house, jacking acid tracks, primitivist 808 workouts and the rest as much as the next dance music anorak, the proliferation of homages to, and watery imitations of, these styles made by young producers today is both fatiguing and depressing.

 "It’s almost as if, confronted with the genius of their forefathers at every turn, young artists are struggling to imagine novel forms for house music beyond the boundaries already drawn. Instead, intuiting the house music mantra that not every stylistic break needs to be a radical one, they settle for variations on a shrinking pool of themes, trying on past genre-configurations like so much costumery, reinforcing old, safe values rather than attempting to forge new ones....

 "My gut feeling is that house music, in the broadest sense, could do with a sturdy voltage to the chest right now."

Angus then goes on to praise Mark Fell and Vessel for going against this retro-reverential tendency.

Certainly on the reissue front it's striking that you have had in just the last month or two:

curatorial repackaging and re-presentation of the unjustly forgotten: Strut's This Ain’t Chicago anthology of early UK house  (check out compiler Richard Sen's oral history over at Neufutur magazine, an in-aptly titled publication in the case of this particular story!)


individual artists giving themselves the Legacy Treatment as regards even relatively recent output: DJ Q's The Archive, Pinch's MIA 2006-2010 (both great, by the way)

while hipstahouse seems to be going from "strength to strength"

^^^^^^^^^^^

For a more optimistic reading of dance music nostalgia check out Michaelangelo Matos's piece on "permaretro" from 2010.

dj destructo, aka gary richards of Hard festival, w/ tasty mix



what's the rmx of girl unit's "wut" here?

dark side of the nuum, a mix by pearsall

http://sonicrampage.org/blog/2012/10/pearsall-dark-side-of-the-nuum-raggajungle/