"autoethnography of the willfully trashy, uncool, and… fun"

one of the few things to intrigue me to check it out on that TMT list of the year's best

"Captagon was the Belgian gabber scene’s drug of choice. No wonder: amphetamines were a minimum requirement to keep up with that sort of rhythm. Then again, the pill was also used to treat children with attention disorders; it was bound to have unexpected side effects sooner or later. A couple of decades past the gabber heyday, DJ Coquelin and MC Cloarec popped a couple of tabs, laid a scattershot but unmistakably demented beat, and started flipping the dial. JE M’EN TAPE was the aural register of such a journey, much more than the sound of an evening spent shaking your head out of its socket. The rush of clarity that the psychostimulant provided them blasted the duo through makina snippets, chopped-n-screwed Zeuhl, German hip-hop sketches, EBM relics, Italian tecnopop, and acid mixes of American pop hits, mapping the outskirts of the European electronic scene that trendy mags usually overlook. The stuff you’d find in gas station discount bins near the once-porous borders that birthed legends like the Gypsy Kings, DJ Bobo, Baccara, Gigi D’Agostino, Laid Back, or Mano Negra. An autoethnography of the willfully trashy, uncool, and… fun in the shape of a cassette. –JRODRIGUEZ6"

Captagon? Specifically favored by the Belgians? Not heard that one before but it's delivered authoritatively. I looked it up and all the articles about captagon seem to be about how it's ISIS troops drug of choice. Shades of this book which is on my must-to-read list... 

Back to the TMT list -  they have Future's EVOL in there - absent in every other end-of-year list - so their planet of sound converges with mine in at least one place. (Although I prefer Purple Reign). (But EVOL does have "Low Life" - jam of the year, unmentioned anywhere  - on it).

Oooh, they also have Jeremih’s Late Nights in their list - another point of convergence

and this particular astonishing track got mentioned in the tracks of year list, i believe



Overall though all the conceptronica and agit-noise and postvaporwave (Yves Tumor, Elysia Crampton, Anonhi, Arca, Babyfather....)   seems most unenticing to me (reasons to be explored more in end-of-yr-list on the main blog ).