Can't remember the last time anything by R Hawtin graced my cochlear (i suspect long long long ago it was) so i'm not equipped to comment on this "no longer relevant / sell out" screed, but this contention did have the ring of truth:

"Am I alone in thinking that for all the cutting-edge technology, software and hardware that Hawtin peddles nowadays (he’s a ‘brand ambassador’ for Native Instruments), his sets sound just the same as ever? I’m certainly not an expert in this field, but I’m not convinced that technology has improved his sound. Hawtin rattles on about technology that opens up the possibilities, game-changers... I don’t know what “tools” Richie uses each night, but the tracks he plays are now so totally deconstructed by looping and multiple effects that it’s back to square one – the tracks sound different, but not any better or more interesting. Despite all of these technological “advances”, the sound is the same as it ever was."

That's what I felt about DE9 Closer To The Edit  - it was like a stereo test record, music designed to showcase the capacities of Final Scratch, rather than the other way around.

Does Hawtin really travel between gigs in a private jet? With an entourage of  "similarly-dressed fixers, photographers, helpers and yes-men"?


 Also from this Jody O'Dea / Sabotage Times piece, an enjoyable swipe at Coxy and other superstar deejs:

"Ibiza and Las Vegas are converging. The Balearic island of love and music is where DJs go to die – when you’re as rich and famous as you can possibly get as an entertainer, when you’ve done it all but you don’t want shift into pipe-and-slippers mode, what do you do? You get a season-long show in Vegas of course, just like Celine Dion and Santana. Likewise in Ibiza – glancing up at the billboards which line the highway between the airport and the centre of town, you will see the giant faces of the DJ elderly smiling back at you – the likes of Eric Morillo, Paul Van Dyk and the king of them all, Carl Cox, whose enduring popularity is completely inexplicable. These are DJ slebs who haven’t produced anything remotely interesting for years." 

Did Cox ever do anything of note? Well there was this?

once bitten, now biter

this beat, built by J-Roc and Timbaland (!!), for Jay Z to go through the motions over, sounds quite a bit like Z*mby to me

whatever, sounds great on the radio

particularly like that thrumming, stick-held-against-spokes-of-spinning-bicycle-wheel  sound

bass more forceful  on this lyrics version

old news, a/k/a the mystery of subcultural persistence

I wrote about psy-trance in 1998. and again a couple of years later (for Spin), but even in 1998 it was hardly a new phenomenon, it had been going for several years already

but here's Vice magazine trying to present it as newsworthy!

funny, people still doubt me whem i suggest that there is something eerily inertial about pop (and semipop and unpop and antipop) culture in the 21st Century

movements that don't move, that stay stuck

gabba coming back more or less the same, but with different names(hardbass, jumpstyle etc)

oh and crikey, here's Vice / Noisey trying to make GABBA newsworthy too!

Gabba, which STARTED IN 1992!!

what's up for Episode 3? Drum 'n' bass???!???

more retro-rinse

yet more nowtro jungle-revival-izm

pretty par for the course breakage and choppage until the mad flanged-sideways bassage

(via Michaelangelo Matos)

more retro-junglizm or is it nowtro-junglizm

 
(via like Man like Jack Jambie)

We Buy Gold ? It's an entity JJ's involved in.

freekbeat

Four Tet's "Kool FM"  made me think I should give Kieran Hebden's stuff another "go"  (yes I'm a junglist-sentimentalist, if you hadn't noticed).

Stuff I heard in the early 2000s seemed pleasant, clever, not much more than that...  but people rave about the last two or three LPs. So I emusic-ed Pink and There Is Love In You, along with Late Night Tales,  KH's mix-CD.

Listening to the latter, I got about half way through and was surprised to hear wafting deliriously under and around the track ("Strange Ways" by Madvillainy) one of my all-time ab-fav psychedelic tunes:"Beeside" by Tintern Abbey. Seemingly unconnected to the track itself, like this gaseous emanation seeping across from another dimension. Checked "Strange Ways" on YouTube but not a trace of Tintern Abbey audible.

Aha, turns out it's a remix by one Koushik  of Stone's Throw label, that's what's used by KH, not the original.  In this megamix it comes in about at 4.50 ...

here's the source

and a longer version

another sweet jam from Koushik -- reminds me a bit of Avalanches

Four Tet's own recent work? Pleasant, clever, inventive. Did strike me still as a bit too amalgamative to be astounding. Perhaps hidden depths will reveal on future plays. But did instantly dig this tune though:

I think of KH as the archetypal Invisible Jukebox artist. It's almost a genre. Such exquisite, wide-ranging taste....  A lot of interesting things to say about the things played. A lot of connections made, genealogies traced....

But the influence-palette never strays anywhere near cheese, close to the plebeian. The feral.

It's still the Good Music Society.

Well, it's very similar to Tortoise... "we know what's good". Is that enough, though? To colour in the spaces between the lines you've drawn, or perceived, that criss-cross between Terry Riley and Theo Parrish,  Terry Callier and Maurizio.....

I suppose that was always going to be the fault-line, the danger, with the post-rock project.

If you're unrocking rock, then you're not going to gravitate to the things in the genres you're now being inspired by (hip hop, house, techno, Jamaica, etc) that are slamming. That also, in their own way, rock. 

So is this an anomaly?

Not really, because A/ it doesn't really slam, it falls a little short of the full rinse  B/ doing a jungle homage in 2013 is like Tortoise or the Orb in the early Nineties homaging dub,  nigh-on two decades ago bizniz.  C/ jungle entered the Soul Jazz / Steve Barker canon several years back.

Do a track called "Beatport" and you'd really be shaking things up... 

false jungle memories

"If the effect is eerily close to the lo-res drift of a pirate station as heard through a roving car stereo, then that’s intentional. [Paul]Woolford has explained that he achieves his [Special Request] sound by actually broadcasting audio via an FM transmitter and sampling the signal as it waxes and wanes"
-- Angus Finlayson  on the spate of retro-jungle and hardcore-homage tunes, - which includes Demdike Stare, Mordant Music, and Four Tet alongside Special Request - at Pitchork's new blog The Pitch.
 

 

Four Tet's forthcoming album is apparently titled Beautiful Rewind.

Don't really hear the junglizm in that one, it's industrial music innit. Meat Beat Manifesto-y, maybe. Good stuff though as always from Baron Mordant.

retro-junglizm or nowtro-junglizm?

Enjoying mightily the Hardcore EP by Special Request (aka Paul Woolford), especially the track "Broken Dreams".

And the forthcoming Special Request LP Soul Music  is even more enjoyable, even more mighty.  Like the EP, it's out on Houndstooth/Fabric Records, in late September.




At something of a loss to justify my mighty enjoyment, though...

It's not nostalgic (for that I would just go straight to something like this) and nor is it Jack-Whitey-Black-Keys-y "at last! back to proper music!".  Really it's more like a feeling that perhaps, give or take brostep's bass-blasts and footwork's tom-rolls,  this really was as far as things ever got.  (In terms of structuration features, at any rate:  sound design / sound quality / imploded intricacy, the 21st Century has definitely taken those further, MAXed them out). So building on that moment of outermost extension, or even just reiterating it,  seems a justifiable move. Especially when everybody else is going back even further, to things (house, or techno, or 80s "boogie", or pre-drill'n'bass IDM) that were already outflanked by that moment of utmost extension.

This effort and this effort and possibly this effort too by Demdike Stare (in their Testpressing series) are maybe an attempt to build sideways from that outermost moment. Although "Collision" does sound just a tiny bit like a No U Turn record played at 33 rpm instead of 45.

the narcissism of small differences

... and yet i would almost bet money that this satirical piss-take mash-up-mix of EDM's most generic drops (all figuring in Beatport's current chart) is actually more pulse-quickening than Daleri's own music

let's see shall we?

Oh yes, instincts infallible...

And, further, pot / kettle, anybody? Paint-by-numbers electro-house, surely? Not a  filter-scree or a build you've not heard one thousand times before.

"bring us back in time where we belong"

Early-nineties-retro  from Annie and Richard X

Utrecht Amiga Squad, "Punishment Dance", teehee!