building and burning

missed this Trenchant piece by James Keith from last month, about the building blocks of jungle - informative and surprising!

“The More Nose Bleed The Better”

Remixes of "Hardcore You Know the Score" by Oliver Chesler & John Selway (as Disintegrator) and others to arrive soon.

The original



I always forget about Rising High

It's one of the great label names

And they always had a way with a title - "Night of the Livin' E Heads", "God of the Universe" (you can see why Man like Horrorist liked 'em), "A Modern Prometheus", "Death In Frankfurt", "Death by Dub"

Caspar Pound is also a really good name for a hardcore label CEO.

Mr Pound gave good quote too: "Hard as fuck! It's the rock of the future". "The best thing about hardcore is all the soul's been taken out. We've had 200 years of human element in music and it's about time for a change".

Still, the tracks - bangin, slammin, kickin, and shovellin though they indubitably were - have never quite lodged in my heart and memory like others from that era.

Very much like Kickin Records in that respect - although they did put out a few true faves of mine.

Indeed those two labels go together in my mind, in terms of their sonic and historical location in the UK Rave Story.

Their reign came at that moment just before the breakbeat thing really takes off... when Britcore is still in thrall to the Belgian Sound



This one is very Cubic 22 frinstance



Although there are breaks in quite a few the Rising High and The Hypnotist tracks, the overall feel is still bludgeoning and pummelling and pell-mell.







Then at the critical fork in the road, Rising High veered in the trance / nu-acid direction



Now this is a good tune



I have a lot of their stuff, as 12 inches, and on CD comps and such like... but I'm struggling to dredge specific highpoints from memory.

Well, okay, there was these two





And not forgetting this triffic Top Buzz rmx



Oh and then there was the Project One stuff - proper jungle techno







But this one - despite the promising title - is a bit clumpy and lumpen



Audio Assault, Earth Linkage Trip, Interface, Friends Lovers & Family, Knight Phantom... it all becomes a bit of a crude and chugging blur - the aim is anthem-hood but it rarely gets there.

Although I do remember liking something by C of E (short of Church of Extacy - our pals Lee Newman and Michael Wells again)

Not sure if it was this, or a different mix of same.



Later on, Rising High get much kudos for releasing Wagon Christ and the Plug EPs (well, significantly less kudos for those, although they were great fun at the time - but Throbbing Pouch is the eternal classic). Not forgetting Bedouin Ascent. Or indeed the Irresistible Force aka Mixmaster Morris.



Caspar Pound died tragically young, but the labels appear to be carrying on in some form - perhaps mainly archival - in the hands of his daughter Sapho (who had a sub-label or side-division imprint named after her - dedicated to more experimental releases).

now what continuum would that be then, eh?

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)

but the conjunction is somehow off-putting

hardcore continuem

separated at birth

B-line!



B-line!


i thought that wicked wicked B-line was invented by 33 1/3 Queen, but he done nicked it off Gerald!

not so much Nu Groove as Old Groove then (albeit only 2 years earlier)

i'm sure there's a Horrorist or SuperPower tune that uses the same supremely nifty B-line

or was it Green Velvet?


A Guy Called Gerald - the greatest two-act career in UKdance?

metal man

well i never even knew this existed

dream team up

nor these actually- another suitable pairing, the Aphysia EP (Landstrumm deejaying in NYC was where I first heard Horrorist's "Dark Invader")

Detroit breakbeat

ready or not (Size matters)

right on one, matey

goodness me, i never saw this until this minute - it's like a Poundshop Residents, visually.

go on, let's have some more then - cheap n crappy but in rear-view mirror charming and indicative acid-house and rave videos



























suggested by Ian S in the comments, this slice of classic bouncy Scottish core



and another late addition, stumbled on by yours truly

London Massien

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.



Here's another recent tune

oi and my heart was going like mad and oi i said gissa nother pill oi oi OI !!!!

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.

Actually the true comparison would probably be with Lee Gamble's Diversions 1994-1996
- not rave remembrance but rave dismembrance.

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."

bedside manners

Not exactly the Lord of Darkness you imagine when listening to his tunes!

What a sweet, amiable, cuddly fellow - that Doc Scott






















and the last truly immortal d&b tune?

mouth music (mumbledelia)

slammige cru #2 (let us now praise hardcore's other Michael Wells)

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

you can hear the whole thing here



Music Preservation Society has quite a trove of slammige on YouTube - stuff that it is reissuing in remastered form on vinyl

slammige cru (let us now praise Lee and Michael)

tuff tune, with delicious proto-vocal-science of that elf-girl gurgle at 0.57 seconds and passim

heard while making my way through the Leaving Earth list of rave LPs

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)

another version












fame at last

mouth music (afrotronica)

[via Nick Zurko]

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. 

credits

and that's why they call it...

Slimzee remembering sneaking, aged fifteen, into Labrynth, his first club, in 92-93, with his mate Geneeus

i wondered if i rubbed shoulders with these lads



Labrynth,  a few years later, in full junglistic mode

the Donae'O dada

rave LPs

Completely missed this enjoyable and extremely thorough survey - by Leaving Earth's Taninian, from a couple of months ago - of the single-artist Rave Album

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.

However -  quite a few are on Spotify! So if you've got a spare 7 hours...

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!

Like Liquid's album, which I actually reviewed  - not at the time (1995) but many years later for eMusic.

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.

just 4 u london

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.

prehistory to the nuum's London-love








postscript: a suggestion of the illustrious Selectabwoy



perhaps slightly outside the lineage


STOP PRESS/ LATE SUGGESTIONS AND ADDITIONS

a funky example, from man in the comments



dissensus bods suggestions (ta lads)

deep and rude

a deep tech tune from this year that attempted to put some sorely needed rudeness back in the music

courtesy of Lady Saw, via a 2step banger of yore by M-Dubs

sample trails

this



came out of this



(who knew seals & croft had some use?)


this



came out of this



but that (or a speck of it anyway) also reappears in this

the core of the core

fab pair of mixes by Selectabwoy collating the sample-sources for classic Reinforced and Tom+Jerry tunes and contrasting them with what the Dollis Hill crew did with them





mix rationale over here at Two Hungry Ghosts blog


more Selectabwoy mixes here

Miller time

a surprisingly faithful cover that gives the (fuck me is it really 40 years old? yes it is) song a digimax-shiny big BIG sound that's totally now

rather like the odd loping almost-breakbeat in the background, the least faithful bit of the rendition (the voice is very close to Daniel M's in its accent and phrasing)

yet for all that ultimately it is inexplicably unexciting

or should I say, explicably unexciting?

because trying to be soul-less and machinic just like in the Good Old Days is as empty and pointless a procedure as Adelle trying to be soulful and human just like in the Good Old Days...

ah this dude Fixmer is in a collaboration with the vocalist from Nitzer Ebb, who in the late Eighties already seemed decidedly behind the times with their DAF tribute act



That said, they were a very entertaining and committed live band, the Ebb - saw them rock a stage  hard at the Fridge in Brixton



What a load of Krupps, eh?



Did they secretly wish to title the album That Totalitarian Age?





"don't be lazy!"



sinewy, sweaty and shouty - a work aesthetic

aha of course of course




here's me on Mute and its story and legacy, recently, here

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

here's me on industrial dance music from 1991 but with no mention of the Ebb I don't think

here's me on Front 242 from around about the same time

it's coming back big time, the EBM / industrial-for-discos thing, apparently - and hey, this Holly Dicker piece from Resident Advisor takes the Ebb anthem "Join in the Chant" for its title!

of the other groups in this area, I was quite taken with Consolidated, because of their unusual strident Leftism, and with KMFDM, for reasons I can't remember. I'm not sure which was the album I kidded myself into thinking was worthy of a feature at Melody Maker - the one with this Carl Orff sample?



if they'd just pushed a little bit further, they could have been T99!

but the beat really is like jackboots

Skinny Puppy, we were all enamored with at MM - well, my crew anyway

But I found that you only needed one or two - perhaps just one - Skinny Puppy album in your life

Live, they were an endurance test

Akron Techno

1980  - easily as advanced as what Cybotron were doing, possibly more advanced.

This one has real drums on (the shuffle bit in the title, no doubt) and therefore suggests Heldon and DAF more than Detroit or electro.



These three are slightly more trad analog-synth epic style but impressively bombastic and gloom-doomy.







Who was this Denis DeFrange dude then?

He has six tracks on the Akron-Cleveland compilation Bowling Balls From Hell (on the electro-redolently named label Clone, but in fact started by Ohio quirkwavers the Bizarros) and five of them are above ("Pyrenees" isn't on YouTube for some reason. I have it though - starts very impressively with lugubrious vapors over ruined planet type intro but then turns into a rather slight, brightly chattering synth interlude).

But apart from that, no trace of anything else!

Unless

pirates RIP (so sez NYT)

A piece at the New York Times reports that London's terrestial-broadcast pirate radio stations are on the way out, killed by a/ the internet, and b/ legalisation (or at least the issuing of licenses to those prepared to go through all the bureaucratic hoops)

Well, that's a bit old-news in this parish, I'm sure, but still - cool that the Paper of Record would, er, record their having once been vital, albeit not at the actual time they were vital (although they probably get a passing mention in the jungle feature i did for them backintheday now I think about it)  

In all honesty I am surprised that there are even fifty of them still left. 

The writer Annalisa Quinn notes:

"Now that Rinse is a licensed station, the contrast with Kool, a former competitor, is stark. Kool operates out of a grim warehouse with flickering bulbs and patchy black paint, but Rinse has leather couches, its own record label, and corporate partners like Smirnoff"

The Nuum was not built on leather couches and vodka sponsorships, that's for sure! 

I tried listening to Rinse online the other month.. but found it completely dispiriting...  literally, all the energy and interest in my bodymind seemed to just drain away as I clicked through the site, checking in on this, looking in on that...   The format, or platform, or site structure, or user-interface - whatever the right word is, I'm not sure -  so so enervating. And the shows themselves: vibeless... airless.  Even Uncle Dugs doing the old vintage hardcore, playing classic anthem after classic anthem, doing his best to make it hype -  it  just seemed to be going out into the void. The nonspace of the net.  And when I put on the Mark Radford show it felt like I had become that void. 

Here's a comment on an old thread at Dissensus (an Autopsy for the Hardcore Continuum) where I get into some structural analysis of how the pirates worked and what got lost when they started to fade:

"f there was a single pulse that you could track as the life-line, the vital sign [for the flourishing of the hardcore nuum] , i'd argue that it's the vibrancy and the essential role of the pirates

there is something about real-time terrestrial broadcast to a geographically restricted audience that creates community and a sense of synchronisation - everyone within the same forward-surging temporality

as soon as it became about the internet and netradio, you are leaving behind analogue culture - you are into geographically scattered audiences whose identity is primarily through identification with genre (whereas with jungle, UKG, grime et al - the identity came from the genre-identification but also a host of social and racial factors). 

you are also into desynchronisation - the ability to listen to shows when you feel like, when it's convenient, as podcasts or archived shows

this is just my experience, but living in NYC and then in LA i could never bring myself to listen to netradio of nuum-type music - it just felt wrong - i was listening too far away from the source, and at the wrong time of day

i think hardcore continuum is fundamentally an analogue-era culture - you can see that with the way it stuck with vinyl and with the dubplate long after other kinds of music had abandoned those for digital modes (there were still really shitty-sounding bassline 12 inches you could buy in 2008 - a phenomenon of persistence completely different from the vinyl revival going on elsewhere, which was the musical equivalent of artisanal cheese - almost literally, given that you could buy 40 dollar vinyl albums in Whole Foods here)

also feel like the broadcast nature of pirates contributed to a certain (delusional?) grandiosity - the DJs and MCs could actually say and feel, "this one goes out to the London massive" or whatever - the music is addressed to a whole city and its population (in potential, at least) - a lot more people were aware of the pirates than actually liked them (indeed they found them a nuisance)

in that sense it was a public culture

internet is narrowcast


Bonus bit - a piece by Ben Murphy for Red Bull on the best pirate radio documentaries on YouTube etc

sweet reggae music pon the teevee

funky kota

Indonesian music writer Gembira Putra fills me in on the electronic dance action in his country, which centres around a style known as "funkot" - short for funky kota, a mixture of breakbeat, trance, house and an Indonesian pop form known as dangdut.

Top tunes recommended by Gembi 

Pacar Lima Langkah - TerbujurKaku remix from Faris Shidqi on Vimeo.

And here's a piece, translated into English,  by Gembi on the history of Indonesian electronic dance music

when the old sounds newer than the new

two philosophically suspect but undeniable banging tunes from Pearsall's mix of "new old skool"



mix-rationale in full here

excerpts

"If we’re honest, most of the tracks on this mix betray precisely no influence from musical developments of the last 20+ years, something that, to me, brings up many interesting questions.

"This is because the original hardcore rave sound arose in a musical, social and political context that is very different from the one we experience today, a whole confluence of events that cannot be recreated. It also can’t be ignored that the scene was like a huge hive mind focused on relentless change and innovation – the speed of change was breathtaking, and probably without much parallel in recent musical history....

"So it’s an interesting paradox with tracks like the ones I’ve selected for this mix, in that they are very consciously imitating a moment in time when musicians were desperately trying not to imitate, but to innovate and to keep progressing. It’s a bit like modern guitar bands still reaching for that classic garage punk sound, in a sense.

"But the question is: does it matter? If the music sounds good, if it is fun and gets people dancing, who cares if it was made in 1992 in a studio in Hertfordshire stacked high with primitive synths and samplers or in 2018 in a bedroom in the Netherlands on a laptop loaded with soft synths?

I guess for me it doesn’t really matter. (Otherwise I wouldn’t be spending so much money buying this stuff on vinyl, duh).

And I don’t think it really matters for the artists or labels, either – sometimes music is just there to be enjoyed, so maybe I should shut up, stop overthinking things, and have some fun, right?"

rewind

cool piece on the history (and prehistory) of the rewind ritual in rave by Harold Heath at DJ Tech Tools

"There’s a clear line of influence from Kingston Jamaica straight to, for example, the Four Aces club in Dalston which housed the legendary hardcore night Club Labyrinth...  a sprawling venue, formerly a West Indian drinking club which had featured appearances from reggae acts like Desmond Dekker, Jimmy Cliff and Dennis Brown. The rewind was already at home at the Four Aces, and it quickly became part of the hardcore ravers scene there. Lots of rave and hardcore DJs had West Indian backgrounds, so incorporating rewinds into their rave DJ sets was a logical progression."

"just a couple of miles down the road from Labyrinth was the legendary Telepathy raves in Stratford, co-promoted by Bret Telepathy [who explained]: “We…come from West Indian backgrounds. We grew up here. The Reggae flavours we incorporated, things like the MC because that what we were used to. Things that are industry standard now like rewinds – we created that at Marshgate Lane. We said, “Tell ‘em “Stop the tune. Rewind it.” (Brian Belle Fortune All Crews, 2004)."

the absence of these demographic links and migration of rituals explains why it never caught on in e.g. hard banging techno, house, or trance. but as the piece also explains it wouldn't have fit the vibe:

"DJs like Sasha and Digweed were celebrated for long drawn-out transitions between tunes, ravers at seminal London tech house nights Wiggle and Heart & Soul would whoop with joy as the hi-hat on a new tune was bought in, cheering the mix as well as the tune. Trance DJs might mix a pair of key-matched tunes together for minutes on end; this was not a DJing environment in which ripping the record back to the beginning was appropriate. House and techno tracks had long intros and subtle builds, they didn’t tend to have a well-known intro that would immediately send a crowd into paroxysms of joy and wild abandon"

vintage 96 rollige

except it was recorded in 2017!



no, but it's great stereo-panning rhythmic psychedelia

like a lost batch of barely recognisable remixes of Goldie tunes done by Source Direct and Hidden Agenda

lead track of OneMind's debut album OneMind presents OneMind



(via Tim Finney)

sweird

it still sounds

like

the future

to me

very odd, that - cos i know it's not, that it's a now classic sound-style...

that it's history... legend...

a mythic and mythologized era

(hell, I done mythologized it myself - not single-handedly but certainly made an outsize contribution there!)

i know that we've gone past this and are looking back at it in the rear-view mirror

except that listening, it feels open and wide and forward-leaning - a full-speed ahead windshield view

perhaps it's just a trick of memory, how I felt then flooding back involuntarily

or that it's all so imprinted in my neurology and brain pathways that those sounds can't be heard any other way

it's not like I don't feel that feeling about some things happening today

(more so than 2009-2010)

but yeah, it feels like  my ears are staring out at a vista, a frontier, when I listen to it

if i played it to my beats and bleeps mad son, I wonder if he's be able to tell it was from the past ?

(not literally from the past obviously, in actual fact made virtually yesterday)

EBM

cool super in-depth piece by Holly Dicker for Resident Advisor on the history - and contemporary influence / resurgence - of EBM  - aka Electronic Body Music

I often used to de-abbreviate the term incorrectly as European Body Music - which i actually think is a better term, given the ancestral role of DAF, Liaisons Dangereuses, Die Krupps, etc

if I was to do Energy Flash again, one of a bunch things I'd add is more on the non-disco, non-American, Euro-industrial prehistory of rave

it's there implicitly and name-checked with the coverage of Belgium, gabba etc - but there is more to say about this other dance-oriented club culture of the Eighties that was going on at the same time as the black street sounds like electro, synth-funk, freestyle, early minimalist rap and proto-house - a scene / sound that was stompy, Euro, and descended out of industrial if veering often into a sinewy sort of fun

mind you, i never found it easy to dance to industrial -  i remember going to a place with the Stud Bros and Stubbs (champions of Front 242, Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, a; grumh, et al at Melody Maker), right in the centre of London - it might have been a particular at Gossips now I think about it - and it was dedicated to industrial and EBM - and recall finding that the beat got tiring quickly -  too hard stomping, too nail-gun regular  - there was something missing, a shimmy that house added

an old piece of mine about what I called "industrial disco" circa 1991

starshine

a fan video but conveys / intensifies the nova-psychedelica of now better than any of their own efforts

AfroRetro2

the retrovirus spreads deeper into rap culture (see previous episode)

lame video for mystifyingly poor single choice off otherwise largely splendid album


this is a bit better video wise, and a thrilling single out of many potential ones

nuum nuum nuum - the Matos pirate radio deejay set selection 1989 - 2008

almost every set mentioned in Michaelangelo Matos's Wire Primer on pirate tape recordings from April 2018 issue - UPDATE - MISSING MIXES NOW PROVIDED BY MATOS!!!!

https://www.thepiratearchive.net/kiss-ldn/

Danny Rampling, Kiss FM, London (December 25, 1988)—labeled simply as 1988 (39 min.)

https://www.mixcloud.com/Radionecks/pressure-fm-1004-london-dj-target-mcs-wiley-riko-buckie-1st-february-1998/

  

https://www.mixcloud.com/Radionecks/mission-fm-906-london-the-heartless-crew-may-1998-side-b/

Heartless Crew, Mission FM 90.6, London, part two (May 1988)