Merry X-Mas

 

(gloomkore-junglizm via CardrossManiac2)

more yuletide ardkore jungle tekno donchaknow

phin 'n' games (don't fear the reaper)

Got into a nice discussion about the philosophical issues pertaining to "new old skool" with major exponent-proponent Tim Reaper  and Pete Devnull over at the Retromania blog, in the comments after this post....  (Third Form from Dissensus also chipping in with some unusual angles)

Tim and Pete were kind enough to point me in the direction of superior examples of the form

And I must say this chap Phineus II does blast away my hackles

It's like a perfect combo of the period-precise replication so uncanny it's like time-travel, but with a degree of intricacy that befits this obsessive-compulsive age. 

As Pete says: 

"it's jungle, classic sounding jungle, made on Amigas and Akais with 90s synths and nothing that would tip you off to it being made 25 years later. But the level of detail to the tracks is just so intense, you'd be hard pressed to find many (any?) actual 93-95s release with that amount of work. People simply didn't have time to do all that back then, since the scene was changing so fast. They didn't have 10,12,15, however many years Mikey [Phineus II] has been doing this to really dig into a particular style, figure out all the rules, and then cheekily start messing with them. At the same time, it still has that 100% rugged bedroom studio feel to it, not some overpolished aseptic "mastery" of a genre." 

2-Tone / Rough Tone

been thinking about connections between 2-Tone and rave / nuum

there are samples

                                            

Those from The Specials ("Friday Night, Saturday Morning" and "Monkey Man" respectively)

Another Specials sampling tune - this time "Gangsters" - by MC Duke under an alias.

I'm sure there's one on Formation that samples the "heavy heavy monster sound" bit from Madness's "One Step Beyond"

Ah it came to me belatedly - Mastersafe, "Monster Sound"

                                        

The Madness tune is itself based on sampling - or rather it interpolates from Dave and Ansell Collins's "Monkey Spanner"

Nuumtastic. 

And then wheeling a lot further along the timeline - didn't Kode9 do a version of "Ghost Town"?

Yes indeed - him and Spaceape (RIP)

I'm sure there are others...

But this here is an unusually direct connection, if we count UB40 as on the edge of the ska / 2-Tone moment, which I think they were:

Rough Tone Recordings - UK Hardcore/Jungle/Drum & Bass Label set up in 1992 as a side project by UB40 member Earl Falconer together with Reggae trumpet player Patrick Tenyue and sound technician Gerry Parchment. They also formed the main act E.Q.P. and promoted the Earthquake raves in Birmingham.

Sublabels

EQP Music, Rough Tone Records

and 

And lo and behold a sample from the Specials - "Why" - the same EP that produced the "No Sleep Raver" / 4 Hero sample,  "Friday Night, Saturday Morning" being the other of the two B-sides to "Ghost Town". On TNT's "Till the Last Sucker Drops" on the EQP label. 

EQP's real claim to fame, this demented tune

More tuff tuneage from Rough Tone Recordings 

decent tuneage 

nuum echoes

 

                                                                (via Kit Mackintosh, via Luke Davis)

you'd think they'd be too young to remember "Pow" 

track is titled "Lethal B" and there's an oddly subdued interpolation of the "Pow" chorus

"we got the Brahms and the Husker Du"

 is how I always mishear the lyric in this... 

Man, used to love Mantronix. 

As great to theorize off of as to listen to. 

why won't you give a little loooooooooooooooove

source for this 

 

another dubby version - give a little dub

the full vocal original 

premature prodge

 

Bingen tune mate!

 

"The female vocal  sampled in "The Sun Rising" is from a song titled "O Euchari" which appears on the album "A Feather On The Breath Of God" composed by Abbess Hildegard Of Bingen and sung by Emily Van Evera who was a member of the vocal ensemble Gothic Voices in 1981 when the album "A Feather On The Breath Of God" was originally recorded." - Wiki

from Tank magazine conversation between Huw Lemmey and Hans Ulrich Obrist, titled "Unknown Language:

"Lemmey's latest novel is unusual in that it was written in collaboration with a co-author who lived over 800 years ago. In Unknown Language, Lemmey channels the voice of medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, recasting key passages from her visionary writings into a work of polyphonic authorship. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist spoke with Lemmey about his collaboration with Hildegard and the affinities between her eschatological visions and our own extreme present.

HUO .... I’ve always been very inspired by Hildegard. For me, she’s the mystic of mystics, a mystic like no other. How did this historic collaboration between you and Hildegard come about?

HL Ben Vickers and Sarah Shin of Ignota Books approached me with the opportunity, asking me if I wanted to read her works and reimagine them within a novel form – in both senses of the word – to make them more accessible for people today. Her work is extremely rich but very dense. There’s a lot of repetition of the same ideas to reiterate and strengthen them, which makes it quite hard going to read. They knew that a lot of my previous work dealt with a sort of eschatological vision of desire and worlds that are moving towards a catastrophe or crisis, and within Hildegard’s own theology there’s a strong eschatological or millenarian idea of an end of the world. Based on her distinct visions, I had to narrativise her cosmology and her teachings. This came quite easily because it feels like we’re living in a world which is on a similar sort of eschatological brainwave, in terms of climate catastrophe and imminent political breakdown.... 

HUO ... The structure of the book mirrors the choir singing Hildegard’s great work. It’s polyphonic. Hildegard said, “Those voices you hear are like the voice of a multitude, which lifts its sound on high; for jubilant praises, offered in simple harmony and charity, lead the faithful to that consonance in which is no discord.” Could you tell me a little bit about the polyphony of the book?

HL ... The nature of the book, as a dialogue that emerges between myself and Hildegard, is very much about allowing myself to become a medium for her ideas. My contribution is a technical novelistic framework which provides a tempo and a pace for the ideas and for the narrative. So the narrative is produced, but then the real flesh of the book, the cosmology, the ideas around grace and spirituality, are all Hildegard’s. It was a matter of trying to find within my own work the space and the silence in which her work could speak.

"....  it was a very easy book to write. Because Hildegard had already written the meat of the cosmology, once I found myself in a creative state I felt like I understood what she was trying to say and I understood what I wanted to do....  I felt like a bit of a jobbing author, like I was ghostwriting the story that she’d already told in her visions.

... Her ideas are mystically revealed, and therefore potentially at odds with the mainstream theology of the Church. She’s a rebel when she emerges, but by sheer luck or serendipity, she becomes somebody whose visions are accepted, which gives her enormous earthly power. Within her work there’s this constant tension between the established Church and what she regards as the revealed truth. My interest, politically, is in her relationship with God the Father as a patriarchal figure, and then God the Spirit, the entity who delivers grace..... 

.... The only way you can really understand her life is through its tensions. The tension between her visions and the strict form of the Catholic Church, and the extremely physiological tension between her sickness and her visions and her sickness and her work. She was a very unwilling subject for the visions that manifested in her and felt a deep sickness whenever they arrived. She experienced them as something painful and unpleasant that had to be made manifest in order to almost exorcise them from her, and yet she recognised them as communication from God.... 

HUO...  Ben Vickers suggested we discuss the erotics of spirituality. Is there a relationship between queerness and its speculative dimension, between Hildegard and queerness?

HL I was very influenced by Elvia Wilk, who writes amazingly about female mystics in the Middle Ages and the relationship they had towards the body. One of the only ways in which female mystics could contextualise or survive their experiences was through their relationship with the body...  Elvia talks a lot about the embodied knowledge of female mystics and their relationship towards Christ being one of sublimated sexuality, which is unsurprising given the material conditions in which nuns were living at the time. Hildegard spent her entire adolescence locked in a single room with an anchoress, one other woman. Hildegard was very unusual as one of the few women in the medieval Catholic Church who could preach, and that was partly because of the force of her revelations and her mysticism being based on the body. People very much understand that relationship when they talk about her illness, but less so when they talk about her sexuality. Calling that queerness is maybe pushing it. It’s impossible to retroactively fit contemporary notions of sexual identity back onto people for whom sexuality was not necessarily a discrete part of identity but rather just a series of acts. Certainly though, her vision of the body and of sexuality is not one that fits comfortably into a lot of binaries around gender and sexual orientation that we have today and is much richer for it. There is a strange, sensual, erotic aspect to a lot of her writing and it’s quite literally very fluid. There’s a lot of discussion of bodily fluids and the vitality of things that flow.... It’s about her relationship with the natural world as well as her embodied relationship with God’s grace. She believed in this idea of viriditas, of greenness, which is a sort of early ecology stating that there’s an ecosystem of living things that are all interrelated in order to sustain the worship of God...

HUO Do you think Hildegard had drugs?

HL No. There’s a lot of discussion around the nature of her visions. There’s a very interesting essay by Oliver Sacks which suggests that what she experienced might be something similar to what contemporary migraine sufferers would understand in those terms....

follow follow follow

 

Ten Cities - a coeval chronicle of internatty club sounds

                                                      

Ten Cities tells a transnational tale of club culture across six decades, 1960-2020, focusing on five European and five African cities: Lagos, Luanda, Berlin, Bristol, Johannesburg, Kiyv, Nairobi, Lisbon, Naples, and Cairo.  Edited by Johannes Hossfeld, Joyce Nyairo and Florian Sievers and published by the art book imprint Spector Books, it weaves together contributions from 20 writers and 19 photographers from those ten cities. 

Release rationale: 

In Africa as well as in Europe, club cultures create free spaces that can function as nocturnal laboratories for societies. Nightclubs are hubs in a complex global network – and at the same time they are manifestations of very local and specific practices. This book tells the story of club music and club cultures from 1960 to the present in ten cities in Africa and Europe: Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Berlin,Naples, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol, Lisbon. It expands the focus beyond the usual North Atlantic narrative of centres and periphery and instead aims at a coeval narrative. In 21 essays, playlists and photo sequences the book draws intimate portraits of these cities’ subcultures, their transnational flows, as well as the societies from which they evolve and which they, in turn, influence. An urban and political rhythm-analysis from the viewpoint of sound and night. 

                                    

More information about Ten Cities here at the Spector Books website.  

An earlier blogpost of mine about Ten Cities and "xenotronica". 

a bloke, or a beam?

The title seemed wonderfully mysterious.... I used to think, "is it meant to suggest the track is like a beam - a sonic laser beam -  a ray that zaps you and sends you into a voodoo trance?"

Then I thought, "actually perhaps it's a nickname or an alias... 'm'name's Voodoo Ray!'", "that's Voodoo Ray, e's a legend!", "watch out for that Voodoo Ray, a dodgy geezer". 

(Accidental or unconscious echo of  Velvet Underground, "Sister Ray" maybe. Or Suicide, "Mr Ray" )   

Voodoo Ray - a drug dealer,  a "here comes the nice" / "Mr Pharmacist"  kind of personage. Ebeneezer Goode even.    

Voodoo Ray - a shaman. Pagan mystic. 

Voodoo Ray - someone who's done too many trips and gone doolally. A lost-eyed casualty. Bit cracked in the head. Babbles on about cosmic paranoia type stuff.  

The reality is, as everybody knows by now, I'm sure, that the end of the word got cut off the sample. Track should have been called "voodoo rage". And in fact did become "Voodoo Rage" again,  in a drum-and-bass era refix

the source, endlessly amusing on many levels, being this sketch about white Brit bourgeois and their projections onto black music. 

scratchadelikizm

 

"This event includes strong language and references to drug culture"

Election Eve anxiety was momentarily alleviated  last Monday when I got to moderate a really fun discussion about rave culture's visual aesthetics and its ongoing legacy in graphics, fashion, music and pop culture. Title "The Spirit of Rave" and involving Jeremy Deller, Martine Rose, and Trevor Jackson, the conversation - convened by The Design Museum as part of its current exhibition Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers - goes out live on Thursday, November 12th, at 7pm UK time.  Information about tickets can be found here. 

From The Design Museum's announcement for The Spirit of Rave:

Rave was a defining counterculture movement in Britain. Responding to the social, political and economic conditions of the 1980s and 90s, it joyfully disregarded design convention from cut-n-paste techniques to neon colours and brash imagery.

Join artist Jeremy Deller, fashion designer Martine Rose and graphic designer / deejay / producer Trevor Jackson and music author Simon Reynolds for a talk exploring the legacy 90’s British rave culture has left in art and design today.

Please note that this event includes strong language and references to drug culture.

Telepathy, man!

 

cool interview with Sting the guy who founded legendary hardcore rave jungle club Telepathy and also Deja Vu FM - and is the voice on those Telepathy ads 

(via Luke Davis)

I've got more Telepathy ads with Sting's voice on various old tapes, digitized but not yet video-ized - soon come (also larger and potentially endless undertaking to do with pirate radio adverts)

Ah! I see somebody has had the same idea as me....

"Wonderwall" vandalism, love it

Deja Vu in the grime years

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)

peace of mind piece of memory

one of those early 94, back in the UK (after living in NYC for 18 months) tracks that blew my mind - sounded so fragrant, so spring breezy on the pirates in January, February, March - listening in the kitchen in the Belsize Park flat

"Music Box" = my kind of jazz jungle - sparing

never thought til now to wonder where the sample is from




this one, from the same sort of time, another favorite with a similar vibe, but less chilled - more disjointed - a panicky bliss



but no one seems to know the sample sources

once, after we'd moved back to America,  so later into the Nineties, I was calling up some doctor's office or official building of some sort or other, and got put on hold - and then I heard it, as muzak - the original sample-source as used by Gappa G and Hyper Hypa!!!!  it got played over and over (they kept me waiting a long time)

but there was no way to find out then  - no Shazam

I think the Ron version was the mix that got the play and that I particularly loved but there were many others

Some rate the Bizzy B highly





Hyper Hyper getting remixed by Hype - could be confusing



Think there was some kind of double-pack, two 10-inches in a gatefold job maybe

ah i was right 

i have it but i'm not sure with the pic sleeve

now is this the original or the Ray Keith? (the labels got mixed up apparently)




This (people seem to agree) is the actual original original mix



it's great - only a notch behind the Ron version

And then this...



(there were also a bunch of later remixes i discover, from after the enshitenment of d&b, so with useless skitter beats underneath)

I don't know anything about Gappa G and Hyper Hypa

How interesting!

"DJ/Producers from Luton, UK. Played on Herts pirate radio station Perception FM." 


Luton - not far from where I grew up. Another Hertforshire/hardcorecontinuum connection (Omni in Hatfield, Moving Shadow in Stevenage, Source Direct / Photek in St Albans, others too I think)

Perception FM! Had no idea there was ever a Herts pirate -  I would have stayed up all night secretly at my parents, on visits back to Berko, to tape it, if I had known. 


They did loads of other tunes, Gappa and Hyper

This is the next best after "Information Centre"




But I came in with "Music Box"

What about its remixes?



Is that the only one? It's very subtle. I suppose how could you improve on perfection? (not that this has stopped umpteen remixers in any number of genres I suppose).

I must have got it only on CD (the last track on Drum & Bass Selection 1, that Breakdown comp)  because I have no recollection of its vinyl incarnation with this Krust tune on the flip

more brilliant than the sun

slightly more than seven minutes in...

never understood why they didn't title it "Long Dark Tunnel", as opposed to "Valley of the Shadows"








tee hee

garage revival

An extensive and intricate piece on the resurgence of UK garage, by Gabriel Szatan for Resident Advisor

A lot to take in

Came away wondering just a couple of things

- how big is this scene, or scenes multiple?

- it wasn't clear to me, from reading it, if anyone was doing anything new with either the UKG 4-to-floor classic sound or the 2step template... 

if it's just a reiteration of those sounds, then it might well be highly enjoyable (sometimes I find myself in agreement with young Jess Harvell, who once declared that speed garage was his absolute favorite sound to dance to  - to which I'd add only that 2-step, while more formally radical and interesting to the ear, felt a lot tricksier on the moving-and-grooving side... basically you have to be a much better dancer than I ever was to do it justice)

but (and you know what's coming) a replay would be somewhat letting down the original push-things-forward, mutational spirit that led to UKG and 2step coming into being in the first place

from which light, the title of Szatan's piece rings ironic: Like A Battle: The Push For UK Garage's Future

still  - as recombinant repro-antique biznis goes, this choon (via Rudewhy at Dissensus) is really good




whereas this is sort of the ghost of Ghost



freezeframing that darkgarridge moment before Horsepower Productions galloped up a historical cul de sac

lived it once mate! didn't love it that much even then (gimme the rude 'n' cheesy any day... the silly novelty tracks)

yeah as a general principle sort of thing -

even the most bandwagon-jumping, mercenary-minded, shamelessly derivative track from 97/98/99/2000 has more spiritual-philosophical-ontological integrity (for want of a better word)

than

the most scholarly, meticulous, well-informed and well-intended reproduction-antique effort from now

because the former are participating (even if exploitatively) in a real-time wave of innovation as it unfolds, rather than going back and freezeframing that moving moment

which is why you (meaning me obviously) can get a buzz off of a shoddy third-division tune from backintheday, that you simply can't get from the most immaculate recreation

the buzz of historicity, of something happening for the first time, trapped in amber? 

i do believe so

this principle applies to everything

the other garage revival (punk)

but also digi-dub, Detroit-venerators, you name it

Still I expect I will wade my way through many of the names and labels mentioned in the Gabriel S piece, when I have a mo



CCRU fans clearly, if erratic spellers!