"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
"Darkstar
share the official video for ‘Text’, ahead of release of new record ‘Civic
Jams’ out Friday 19 June. Directed by Alex Shilt | https://warp.net/releases/188614-dark... The experiences of everyday
life and beauty and heartbreak it brings offer an important source of
inspiration for Darkstar. In ‘Text’, this plays out in the vocal snippets that
address the experience of losing a loved one and the unflinching grace that
comes with it. In the accompanying video, Darkstar remind us that our memories
are shaped by those we share them with. Black and white home movie footage
capturing family moments is interspersed with imagery of unforgettable football
moments and iconic raves, which blur together like an ephemeral photonegative. Discussing
the video process, Shilt, the director explains: “Living next to Aiden and
briefly in the same flat with James, I was particularly inspired by the
relationship between the two of them. I aimed to create an abstracted visual
dialogue that embodied their brothership and love for their families through
the various personal clips they’ve sent me. We worked together in exploring
various looks inspired by modern communication tools & tactile graphics to
harmonize a visual language that fit with the tune.” On their most personal
record to date, Darkstar counterbalance observations of their home with those
of the community surrounding it. ‘Civic Jams’ is a photonegative of a dance
record shaped by a dialogue between shoegaze atmospherics and UK bass music’s
‘hardcore continuum’."
"Where "WFL" focuses entirely on the sensation of
being a drugged member of a drugged dancefloor, Flowered Up's
"Weekender" documents both the hallucinatory delirium and the
sociocultural framework that both explains and ultimately contains it.
("WFL" might itself have been intended as a component of such a
broader vision; the Bailey Brothers had originally been approached by Happy
Monday's label Factory Records to work on a movie project about Manchester provisionally entitled The Mad
Fuckers). A 15 minute mini-movie that follows a hard day's night in the life of
a working class London youth called Little Joe, "Weekender" is a
mélange of traditional "gritty Brit" social realism (Joe eats his
dinner while his mother neurotically twirls her wedding ring on her finger and
silently watches TV, its screen reflected in her spectacles; Joe smokes a spliff
in the grim hallway of concrete tower block of flats; the sordid sex-and-drugs
squalor of a nightclub's lavatory, seen in a overhead pass that peeks down into
each cubicle in a row of toilet stalls); trippy dancefloor commotion; heavily
symbolic fantasy/hallucination sequences; and urban derive (Joe, still in the
Ecstasy haze, wandering the deserted metropolis in the grey pre-dawn hours).
Think Ken Loach filtered through the prism of MDMA....
"Like Happy Mondays, Flowered Up were a rock band inspired by
and caught up in the frenzy of British rave culture in its early years; despite
its remix by DJ Andy Weatherall, "Weekender" is therefore more a rock
song about the joys and anguishes of the rave lifestyle than an example of where
dance music was at in 1992. Still, Wiz's screenplay and script preempts the
basic narrative arc of all the clubbing-and-drugging movies and fiction
that followed in the Nineties: having the time of your life and then paying
for it, flying high and crashing hard. The film is both a documentary snapshot of
early Nineties London clubland (listening to pirate radio, going down to Quaff
Records to pick up the new house imports and rave flyers) and a more timeless
statement about British proletarian "weekenderism": the
"workhard/play harder" life-cycle that goes back to the pill-popping
mods of Sixties London, via the Northern Soul fans of the Seventies with
their obscure sub-Motown singles and amphetamine wraps, and the jazz-funk and
soul All-Dayers of the early Eighties. Both song and video pay homage to
The Who's mod movie Quadrophrenia: there's a sample of the film's hero
telling his boss to take his job and stick it where the sun don't shine, and
Little Joe is picked up by a friend driving a mod-style scooter.
"More eloquently than Flowered Up's crudely expressed and
sketchy lyric,Wiz's scripted dialogue lays out both the exhilaration and the
impasses of the raver's lifestyle:Joe's feelings of limitless power and
possibility ("when I'm out with my mates, and we're all one on, buzzing off
our nuts, all together, it feels like we could... like we could do fucking
ANYTHING!") versus the eternal return of Monday "like a jail on
wheels" (to quote The Clash), the comedown to a reality with all its limits
intact and un-altered ("I used to feel like that when I was young, but look
at me, I'm still cleaning windows,"responds Joe's older, wiser, and
wearier workmate).
Unlike his mother and his equally crushed, domesticated
sister, jack-the-lad Joe is determined to out-run his inevitable fate
(mediocrity) for as long as he can, fueled by music and drugs. The most
striking sequences in the video depicts him doing just that--a fantasy set-piece
in which Joe sprints full-tilt inside the grooves of a gigantic 12-inch dance
single, giggling with glee despite the malevolent stylus that is hard on his
heels. Redolent of the set-pieces in Julien Temple's musical Absolute Beginners
(his flawed version of Colin MacInnes famous novel about the early,
just-before-mod days of British youth culture/cult of youth), this sequence
vividly captures the sense of dance culture as both groovy and a locked groove.
Adding to this sense of a loop,a deadening dead-end, is the image that opens
and closes Wiz's mini-movie:Joe--gaunt, pallid, a devitalized ghost of himself,
an ember of the disco inferno--descending the side of a huge office building in
his window cleaner's pallet; literally coming down after the high.
"Focusing on the story of one face in the crowd (a Face
in the Sixties mod sense: a figure "on the scene"),
"Weekender" represents one attempt to circumvent the problem of
techno's facelessness, its lack of a performance model or star glamour..." excerpt from my Oberhausen Film Festival talk / Stylus magazine essay Seeing The Beat: Retinal Intensities in Techno and Electronic Dance Videos (2002) Really unconvinced / turned-off by Flowered Up's first forays into "Southern Baggy"
... but came around to them, somewhat, with "Weekender" Northern sister songs to "Weekender":
on the dayjob as music technology lecturer and scaling it back for sanity's sake:
"I still have that captive audience a couple of times a week and I have a story to tell, which is more important and beneficial to the students than impedance or identifying room modes. I secretly tell them things I should not, life is happening. The value of music is that of a vehicle for emotional well-being, not as a career"
drumtrip = "rhythmic psychedelia" (copyright moi 1995, maybe 94 actually)
(actually that track's not where I got the notion from - it was the reversed drums on Omni "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)" and just darkcore generally)
that's all done with retriggering on a MPC right (same with "Waremouse")
astonishingly basic technology (pre Cubase etc) used to astonishing effect / astonishingly effectively
a last blast of mousely magick (and only really truly amazing thing on the Two on One series)
This is an EP I regret not picking up with the pic cover and all, although the contents go a bit too far into minimalist moodscapery. main claim to memory is on the technical level.
Hype darking it up
Mice on the auto-rmx
pretty sure I got that square shaped (pic disc also?) 10-inch remix release -- more compelling to look at than listen though as i remember
what ho?! not heard / seen this before
there's lot more great early 2 bad Mice / kaotic kems stuff of course, plus the E-pochal remixes like Blame
this is a fave - esp the woozy "don't wanna lose your love" carousel bit
Pearsall mix of DJ Hype that traces a year-by-year (four tunes from each annum) chronology of pre-jungle to post-jungle - from nuttE on-1 darkcore to the Enshitenment aka 1000 Year Reich of Linear Fastplod
Or so I assume (my ears have only got to "Shot in the Dark"). Looking at the tracklist, the last 12 tunes (96-97-98) don't ring any bells at all, not even as titles. Maybe they're good? I doubt it though, the power of scenius tends to push all but the most resilient auteurs into the Shitezone.
1993
01. DJ Hype - The Chopper (Suburban Base) 02. DJ Hype - The Trooper (Scratch-A-Snare Mix) (Suburban Base) 03. Gappa G & Hyper Hype - Information Centre (DJ Hype Remix) (Ruff Kut) 04. DJ Hype - Shot In The Dark (Gunshot Mix) (Suburban Base)
1994
05. Fallen Angels - Hello Lover (DJ Hype Remix) (iQ Records) 06. DJ Hype - Roll The Beats feat. MC GQ (Inject the Bass Mix) (Suburban Base) 07. Dopestyle - Fade Away (Ganja) 08. DJ Hype - Tiger Style (Ganja)
1995
09. DJ Hype - Doomed To Fail (Breakdown) 10. DJ Hype - Going Out for da Loot (Ganja) 11. Marvellous Cain - The Hitman (DJ Hype Remix) (iQ Records) 12. Remarc - RIP (DJ Hype Remix) (Suburban Base)
1996
13. DJ Hype - Freestyles of Bass (G-Line) 14. Dr. Octagon - Blue Flowers (DJ Hype Remix) (Mo'Wax) 15. Bally Sagoo - Chura Liya (DJ Hype Remix) (Higher Ground) 16. DJ Hype - True Playa'z Anthem (Parousia)
1997
17. DJ Hype - Peace, Love & Unity Remix (True Playaz) 18. Armand van Helden - Ultrafunkula (Ganja Kru Remix) (ffRR) 19. Ganja Kru - Plague That Never Ends (Parousia) 20. Freestyles - Attack (True Playaz)
1998
21. DJ Hype - Barking Bass (Global Thang) 22. Freestyles - Musically Dope (Ganja Kru Remix) (True Playaz) 23. DJ Hype - The Big 3Oh (True Playaz) 24. DJ Hype - Closer to God (True Playaz)
