Leaving Earth's Taninian with a counter view of UK bass, or as he prefers, post-step, to that  argued by Musings's Dominic /Datwun

(it's a follow-up to a much earlier  this year post on post(dub)step - dude posts irregularly but at great length and depth when he does)

these two posts add up to a surprising ideological swerve (basically embracing the Harper/Muggs position) from a chap who even earlier (May) last year was enthusing so infectiously and authoritatively about wobble...  but then again I suppose there's no rule that you have to pick sides between brostep and post(dub)step - indeed while ideologically I'm firmly on the wobble-bro side, in terms of day to day listening I probably listen more to the post_ stuff (but as I said in the earlier post here, that's because it's more compatible with the way I use music, maybe)

still I hope he won't disappoint me further by penning encomiums to vapidwave and cloud rap ;)


To the claims ventured in the latest post, on behalf of the post-....      

the parallel with postpunk can only go so far, I think, because what This Heat, Pere Ubu, Raincoats et al had was an expressive intent and communicative urgency that is simply absent with this posteverything digitronica--  with the postpunk bands, that urgency relates to the individual vision of the artists (their personalities, temperaments, biographies), but also to the fact that even at its most extreme postpunk was nearly always a song-based and lyric-based form that could support "saying stuff".... also, further, it relates to the wider contextual Geist of postpunk as a movement and a cause, carrying with it a moral imperative to communicate, challenge,  oppose, etc ... and moreover its belief that this was possible (postpunk coming not just after  punk, but as its fulfilment / intensification / dialectical next stage)...    .

none of these things apply with post-step, which seems to be about complexity and convolution for complexity and convulotion's sake.... a very pure form of music, in that sense -- but what that means is that it stands or falls on A/  just how experimental /sonically mindblowing you actually find it to be, and B/ how much you value experimentalism/aural-weirdness for their own sake 

in terms of B/ when it comes to dance that's just one of several metrics for me, several considerations -- and in terms of A/ well i'm still processing his many many recommendations (man, the guy's a digger, a chaser!).... for now can't quite hear the  "uncontrolled upsurge of revolutionary modernism" he's talking about...  seems more like Lisa Blanning's verdict on Night Slugs as a mixture not a direction -- i.e. stuck in that zone of addition (this + that + the other) and never quite makes it to the multiplication stage (this x that x the other = ?!%#$?@!?!)

BUT some of the stuff -- taken as an aggregate of established power-moves -- is pretty fucking exciting


i do like the ravey swoops and smears in this 

and in this one 

which almost has a PCP gloomcore feel but with friskier beats -- that oddly and cleverly combine a feeling of monolithic and polyrhythmic -- the effect at once cluttered and slammin'

i think he sells it slightly short by calling it post-step - it doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with Objekt and Hessle and Kimbie and all that abstrusity

the stuff he's celebrated does seems to be constructed around a dancefloor of the mind's ear (whereas postdubstep is increasingly abstracted from any body/crowd scenario)

i'd be tempted to call it ravestep if that wasn't almost as lame a word as post-step