"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
i should imagine it's for graphic reasons, not being able to get another word on the front cover, that they have left out the 'hardcore'
of course i could be completely getting the wrong end of the stick here and it's some other continuum that he's "throwing new shapes into" - or perhaps it's a reference to the scientific / philosophical concept of continua (which was unaware of, I confess, until someone started giving me stick for misusing the word, and I was like, 'I just thought it was a word that referred to something continuous!' No, but apparently there's some specific meaning it has in, I dunno, physics or geometry or something like that, that means it's highly unsuitable to use when discussing 2 Bad Mice and Dem 2!).
i have liked some of Mumdance's stuff actually
i do kinda wish he wasn't called Mumdance though
nothing against mums (love my mum) and nothing against dancing (love dancing, although it doesn't occur round these parts very often, except round the living room, when a new House seat falls to a Democrat)
Had some hopes for this guy's music a while back there - and hopes for the scene that he represented (or perhaps rather for a particular wing of, or tendency within, that scene: the darker, sparser, bass-ier, doomier, colder imperative).
But then he seemed to disappear from view, and the scene itself seemed to veer away from the interesting impulses within it, the very ones that you were really hoping would escalate and intensify - and instead steered straight for the most straightforward, already-heard-before, residual elements, the most deadening and leaden aspects within its sound-scope.
But Man like Hugo's back with a maxi-EP on Blackdown of tunes from a few years ago, and an accompanying interview with Martin Clark
And below is a recent-ish mix of forthcoming material by Mr Massien.
Closer in spirit to Mark Leckey or The Caretaker's Death of Rave than your typical aunterlogikkal ardkore replica, this project by James Joys (tee hee hee) collides techno and musique concrete and therefore ought to be catnip to my ears.
SUPER_TIDAL tracklist 1. Exit Hum 03:14 2. Memorial Blackout 06:00 3. Of Idioglossiac Bondage 05:15 4. Luxury Mass 05:37 5. Swallowing Geography 06:52 release rationale: Fevered sung or panic-worn. Wound round the room or spread thin against its walls. Everything at once. Time pleated and folded; time tight against itself. A light lit from your last word, sly, in a land of lasted things. Fever sings: a lung coughed up by its whale, washed up to wilt and wheeze, and draw itself around the coral skeleton of its innards. A brief union of silents attendant to the last dying breath as they roll out its remaining air. Its interior breeze an oblation, sighed. A click or a last cluck, dried, on the ocean’s gentle bob. Rolled and carried by a torn tide, flotsam I float I float. I hear the lumpen suck of cold meat on the waters’ deep black braid; feel its breadth and bone-cold breath as if being basted by salt and grain; peeled and bothered by heat. A click. The sun’s bright clap, or the damp crack of a wilting lung. I am over. Like you, under under under. I remember your whole world drained from me. Click. Caught. Choke. Cured. Wake me soon. Gavel rung. Unsung, I once was. credits released October 11, 2018 Recorded, composed, and produced by James Joys from 2014-2018. www.jamesjoys.com
Interview with James Joys at The Thin Air: Brian Coney: Your recently-released EP, Super_Tidal, is a work of “electroacoustic rave entropy”. Very intriguing. Tell us more about what that term means to you. Well, to me it essentially means the persistent threat of disintegration, disorder and collapse. And I like playing with that, compositionally, and certainly in a few tracks the energy of the music kind of uses itself up by the end, in a process of entropy. And then really those two facets and cultures of electronic music that I love equally – electroacoustic music and electronic club music – were the vehicles that I wanted to use to convey that on the album. I really like the sound of those two dramas getting tangled up in each other. ... A big driver of the work was how I could create something that is the equivalent of being in a massive club with lots of different rooms, with all sorts of music blasting away. How could I translate that experience of competing frequencies and tempos and sibilance and pulses into something more than just a kind of record of nostalgic ambience or hazy reminiscence; how could I make it into a palpable entity in itself, you know? What monster could I create using those experiences of these liminal moments in clubs at 4am where you’re skulking from one room to another hunting for a different beat, or you’re in the cold with smoking strangers, or you’re coming up too hard in a toilet cubicle trying to hold it together, you know? Those bits where you’re in-between, and sounds are just beyond reach – behind walls, under your feet, filtered by doors opening and closing. That experience is so thrilling, and of course there’s also the threat of it all turning nightmarish quite quickly. It can be quite a menacing experience. And I can relate a lot of those physiological and psychological experiences – breathlessness, sweating, sensory overload, that focused golden plane on the dance floor when your body and the music and the sound system are just totally fucking conversant – to how specific parts of Super_Tidal make me feel when I listen back to it. It gets my heart racing, makes me want to figure out a way of moving to it. But I’m not interested in any kind of rave hauntology or anything nostalgic; I’m more curious about palpable sensory and sensual excess, especially that particular kind of excess you can only experience in a club, because you might also have a cocktail of alcohol, drugs, endorphins, adrenaline, whatever, coursing through your body. And you take a gamble on that collision of music, vibration, and chemical stimulants as to whether you’re going to have the greatest night of your life, or if you’ll crash and burn in a gurning heap of confusion and tears.
And so you know, I want to figure out whether it is possible to construct ‘sound worlds’, as you say, that aren’t nostalgic, aren’t for sad white boys mourning hardcore scenes they read about in Simon Reynolds’s Energy Flash, but are as kinetic, as evolving, as potent, as affective as club experiences can be."
yes - as i just learned in the nick of time, before repeating the mistake already made a few times - the Michael Wells in GTO is not the same Michael Wells in Force Mass Motion
biographical snippet from Discogs
"Heavily influenced by Humanoid's "Stakker Humanoid" and the Sterns club in Worthing. He started making dance tracks in 1989. He was discovered by Colin Faver after sending in a tape to his "Demo DAT Pressure" section on his Kiss FM show. He combined his music production in the early 90s with studying Aerospace Engineering at Kingston University"
Force Mass Motion made many bangers, many many blasters
And actually - I did not know this - a whole album in 1992 for Rabbit City, that may well qualify in the Leaving Earth list of Rave LPs
Which funnily enough seems to have been reissued this very year by a label called Music Preservation Society
from the good old days when "techno" didn't promise hair shirt longeurs and triple turntable tedium - when techno banged, slammed, kicked (and even shoveled, now and then!)... when a tune might actually contain, well, a tune - as opposed to just a grackling sound and a nail-gun beat
GTO - another example of the personnel and sonix flow between industrial and techno
Started as Greater Than One, than proliferated under a thousand aliases, in multiple modes of slammige - bleep, hard techno, near-trance, jungle-ish, gabba
tearin' tune - B-line like concrete liquifying (as the Man like Me said once upon a time)
release rationale: Khalab has summoned a futuristic afro-centric soundscape by weaving a poly-phonic tapestry of future bass, jazz and field recordings. The LP’s title track tells hard truths from the mind of spoken word artist Tenesha The Wordsmith. Along with her words the LP’s title has been augmented with a date marking the arrival of an emancipated future.
‘Black Noise 2084’ casts aside the worn and surface level cliché of black music being soul music. Khalab guides us to the beginning of a journey, the journey of rhythms and he takes us within earshot of the voices and spirits that carried them. Soul gained over aeons of terror and forced transportation, soul driving survival against systematic oppression, wholesale against a people. Khalab looks to the noise, the messages, the spirits, and evokes the light of ‘Black Noise 2084’ out of darkness.
From dystopian roots, the beat marabout Khalab has led his assembly of messengers to invoke this myth of cathartic liberation. ‘Black Noise 2084’ features the voices of musical voyagers seeking new pathways: Shabaka Hutchings, Moses Boyd, Tamar "The Collocutor" Osborn, the master Gabin Dabir, Tenesha The Wordsmith, Tommaso Cappellato, Prince Buju and Clap! Clap! Within the tapestry of Khalab’s ‘Black Noise 2084’ the myth moves through its cycle of life, initiations and ceremonies with a cast of unnamed messengers.
Khalab was invited to work with field recordings from the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa of Bruxelles. The museum’s recordings made for a post-colonial World, hold ethnographic and historical insights into the cultures of the region over the last 500 years. The Museum is far from the horrors that Belgian King, Leopold II unleashed during his colonial reign, however it is a dark legacy that is far from absolved.
‘Black Noise 2084’ opens a portal where displaced rhythms, chants, screams and dreams collide with quaking bass, a vortex of shattering synths, jazz rains and emotion all amalgamate. Empires for millennia thrived across the African continent and Empires are being willed to rise.
As Khalab draws the LP to a close he brings light with ‘Dawn’ ft Moses Boyd. A dawn firmly squared-up by its past, hard truths of a barbaric history embarking on the beginning of reconciliation. Drum beats usher in the arrival home for a new glory. 2084 a time when rhythms have shed the cargo of their haunted odyssey. The myth of ‘Black Noise 2084’ is a new dawn where the ghosts of Leopold and all his kind are finally excised. Atonement in hearing the truths carried across the ages, carried in noise, Black Noise.
A curious artifact, with a checkered history, and an uncertain market, for sure... but T makes a good case for some classics that came out in the period 1991-1992: the apex of rave as a mass phenomenon
Among the ones I've heard and own, I concur heartily with the verdicts (Experience is the gold standard, Rhythmatic's Energy on Vinyl is a lost gem, as is Sonz's Flowers in My Garden, but Eon's surprisingly unmemorable despite the run-up of killer singles etc etc)
ss
What surprised me: how many I didn't know about....
Especially when it came to the Euro end of things - Germany, Holland, Belgium - where, according to T, there's a shitload of ace full-lengths, with album tracks as fierce and full-on and inventive as the well known singles
Some of these LPs would be pretty challenging to find, I should think - you might find them going very cheap, but it would probably entail hours digging through vinyl junkyard basements.
I couldn't think of any omissions really. Unique 3's Jus' Unique has some great tunes on it but it came out in 1990 so doesn't qualify. Likewise - although it's been a long time since I've heard it - i feel a case could be made for The Shamen's En-Tact as both a good album and genuinely part of the rave culture, but that 1990 too. As for their Boss Drum - I can't remember a thing about it, but I don't think any of it really qualified as 'rave', not even Ebeneezer Goode", by then they'd have been on the progressive/trance tip if anything, I should have thought. Tracks featuring vocals by Terence McKenna.
Utah Saints had an album out in 1992 but vaguely recall it being plodding stuff, "Something Good" withal.
Bizarre Inc released the album Energique in '92 but I should imagine they would have shifted towards house music by that point. (More curious about their 1989 album Technological, which is described at discogs as "techno". 1989 is early for a UK techno full-length - who else was there doing that? A Guy Called Gerald, 808 State.... a few more house or sample-cut-up in style like S'Express and Bomb the Bass and Coldcut).
Smart E's actually released an album in '92, would you believe.... and some people rate it
There's a coda to the Leaving Earth survey, which looks at albums that came out after the cut-off point that T's imposed - belated full-lengths that already seemed like curios by the time they were released, what with the music having moved on a long way, in multiple increasingly divergent directions.
Here I can think of one or two that might have been included - except that they're not very good, so perhaps would / should be filtered out accordingly!
I don't think T included the Messiah album 21st Century Jesus, from 1993 - but then again, I'm not sure if was any cop at all.
A very belated debut album is Baby D's Deliverance, which came out in 1996 - and from descriptions seems like its contents are largely radio-friendly toned-down versions of the classic hardcore tracks from several years earlier.
Then there's Genaside II's New Life 4 the Hunted, also from 1996, which suffers from eclecticism - the misplaced desire to show versatility and genre non-confinement.
Well, the one arguable major omission in the missed-the-boat category is Gerald's 28 Gun Bad Boy, from '93, but perhaps that is being construed by T as simply too dark, too jungalistic, to count as "rave"?
Tragic cases of rave-era artists who never made an LP?
Acen would be #1
And a close-behind #2 - Hyper-On Experience.
UPDATE # 11/26/2018
a few other semi-contenders for inclusion:
Sweet Exorcist, Clonk's Coming CD (perhaps too intelligent / subtle to be considered rave)
Nightmares On Wax, A Word of Science (ditto, plus some of it downright mellow, "smoker's music")
Taninian mentions this album
but there's also this one by the same artist, Martin Damm, although perhaps this is too full on gabba-ish albeit fun-spirited
Oh and then a serious omission - i think if we're being honest - is The KLF's The White Room, some of which is well ravey if in a pop-rave style.
that tune and the two videos got me thinking about the tradition within the nuum of songs about London or repping for specific bits of London - here's a backwards lineage (suggestions of flagrant omissions please) where it's either in the title, the main vocal lick, or in the lyrics
(late addition via Sadmanbarty)
(ditto)
(ditto)
"Love for the London Streets" is the title and vocal lick of this 2 Wisemen tune
(with Stamp Crew, wait for the vocal lick at 47 seconds in and repeatedly after)
intro to this ruffhouse monsta divides the city into four quadrants and hails them all
missing in this london patriotism lineage are contributions from two significant phases - I couldn't think of a deep tech or a funky anthem that references london or london massive or even a specific area of the city ... is that because both styles were already succumbing to digi-era delocalisation? Funky if it references anywhere at all it would be a vague Africa. And deep tech is the least London-y of all these sounds.
