shoegazetronica (unexpected return) (blub is thicker than water)

release rationale: 

"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’."

Blubstep - the return!

when the Levy breaks

(aka Back to the Old Schoolly)

YouTuber says they used to play this at 45 rpm at hardcore raves

More Barrington bizniz








postscript:

Spiro in comments points out this Levy-boosted beauty

The Mad Fuckers (flowers in the dustbin)

"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": 

tek no prizna

duck it

could almost be something on Ghost Box, by Roj or somebody like that



the whole album



another whole album by Duckett




the artist interviewed 

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"

an earlier EP



a mix

duckett · Rinse FM Podcast - Hessle Audio w/ Ben UFO + Duckett

“Building a set for me is usually like having a hundred jigsaw pieces from a hundred different jigsaws"

should imagine this a common predicament in the age of choice-oversupply, Ableton, etc

mouse is a feeling

as deep, dark, minimal, mysterious, serious, as anything out of Detroit

the raw-ngredients riginal



E-ternal techno roller




the raw-ngredients rmx



wannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaEwannaE




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



ruff-hewn riginal

fade aways

fading backwards through time












different fade away chain

hype the funk

Pearsall · Gimme The Funk Gimme the Funk (DJ Hype 1993-1998)

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)