the unrevived and the unrevivable

 Shawn Reynaldo's latest newsletter starts by asking what are the defining sounds of the first half of 2020s and then talks about how the current scene is dominated by revivalism, before reaching its reall subject (wait for it):

Yet even as dancefloors have warmed to a wider range of tempos and drum patterns, they’ve also remained stubbornly in thrall to the past. Recycling has always been big in dance music, and the 2020s have put that tendency into overdrive. Aside from the aforementioned revivals, the past few years have also seen large-scale flirtations with electroclash, bloghouse, trip-hop, progressive house, Eurodance and numerous other ghosts of dance music’s past, many of them from the late ’90s and early ’2000s. In purely aesthetic terms, Y2K-era cosplay has dominated the decade to date, and that, in combination with the current affinity for breakbeats, should have theoretically cleared the way for one specific sound to come steaming back into the dance music conversation.

That sound? Nu-skool breaks, which oddly doesn’t seem to be one anyone’s radar...

The readable-by-nonsubscribers bit ends there, which is a good cut off point, because 

a/ it's where I burst out laughing

b/ it's a nice cliffhanger (have to wait until the whole newsletter becomes readable to all to find out what his argument in favor of nu-skool breaks having its moment in the retro sun would be)

It did get me wondering though

1/ What would be Shawn's argument in favor of nu-skool breaks having untapped revival potential? 

2/ Has everything else that could be revived already been revived, in fact? What are the other things that haven't been recycled yet? (Thinking specifically in dance music, but could be a wider span).

3/  What things are unrevivable? That no one will ever touch with a retro bargepole?

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I have to say, I find the idea of the Y2K as a rich seam for revivalists to be a bemusing idea - here's a real-time Year 2000 piece I wrote about the slim pickings (nu-skool breaks glancingly mentioned)  organized around the concepts of The Next Medium-Sized Thing and "plausible deniability" 

RIP J. Saul Kane

 

Well, it had to be this one I posted, didn't it? 

That macabre sing-song sample - "did you ever think / when the hearse goes by / that some day you are going to die?"

Also on the theme

Younger than me, by a half-decade...  sobering, eh? 

I reviewed Depth Charge  - or is it Depthcharge? - a couple of times in a Melody Maker Singles column, and each time the release brightened that week's rather barren haul

from October 1989

DEPTHCHARGE

"Depthcharge"

(Vinyl Solution)

     Inconsequential but captivatingly labyrinthine "dance" record that reminds me vaguely of Arthur Russell's bathyscopic odyssey "Let's Go Swimming". Over a bubbling cauldron of deep-sea dub bass, drifts a sargasso sea of sonic flotsam, sonar blips, smeared Kung fu samples, anemones and polyps.  If Sun Ra thought he was from Atlantis rather than Saturn, was into Adrian Sherwood, and had an obsession with martial arts, he might make records like this. (That's a lot of "ifs", I s'pose, but there you go...)

Kind of Renegade Soundwave-y, without the grating Guy-Ritchie-movie voices.... 

Sort of anticipating trip hop, but not really... 

 And in some ways also anticipating Big Beat. 

The other Depthcharge single I reviewed, from early 1990

Bit Wu-y in his predilections...  

Vinyl Solution label mate  with the also-departed Eon a/k/a Ian Loveday. He went quite a while back.... 

Anticipating darkcore

This even earlier tune has quite a darkside title, if not the sound or vibe really

I guess it's just the Pulp Continuum - video-nasty bizniz

Also as The Octagon Man, this has neat beats

Here's an obituary for Jonathan Saul Kane by Carl Loben at DJ magazine

He seems to have rubbed shoulders with a lot of people from that "DJ Records" moment in the late '80s - Mark Moore, Tim Simenon - and also the aforementioned Renegade Soundwave. 

Here's a reminiscence / tribute I've borrowed wholesale from Danny Briotet of RSW. 

"One upon a time in West London, in a place called Ladbroke Grove, there was a band of (very) young brothers that went under the name of Krew.

"Krew, multi-racial, comprised of MCs, DJs, breakers and graffiti artists and were one of the 1st hip hop crews anywhere outside of the US (we’re talking early ‘80s). 

"At tangents from Krew there were myself and a kid called Jonathon. Jonathon began DJing mostly at local hip hop jams on the manor, which often descended into mayhem and violence. Jon (sometimes wearing a black cape) was unphased by this – as well as having DJ skills decades before the term ‘turntablist’ was even thought of, he was also well-versed in martial arts (a theme than ran throughout his career) and could look after himself. 

"When I first knew Jon he lived at his mum’s in Powis Sq and had a massive scaffolding construction in his room to house his decks and records...

"By the mid-80s we were both playing at illegal warehouse parties in places like Shoreditch (then a barren wasteland with just a few Bengali families living there) or under the Harrow Road roundabout at Paddington. 

"Jon started releasing records around the time of the 1st RSW releases, on the Vinyl Solution label (the original shop was opposite my flat), first as Grimm Death, with MC Tony Tone from Krew. 

"Then Jon brought out the 1st Depth Charge record at the same time as we released The Phantom, and the 2 records would find themselves together in so many DJs' boxes, although they sped DC up to fit with 120 bpms of the Rave scene, (although Jon was always tea-total and never went anywhere near a pill). 

"We used to talk, at the time, about how we’d both done these tunes, completely independently of each other, but kind of coming from the same place. The Depth Charge records were massive, and it goes without saying how big an influence they were on the Chemicals, Wall of Sound and so many others in that amazing post-acid house period when alternative became mainstream.

"As things progressed, Jon and I would find ourselves on the same bill in all sorts of weird and far-flung places and he was often late – I remember sitting on planes ages after they were meant to take off, only for Jon to stroll on, record box in hand.

"Jonathan’s approach to DJing was same as his approach to life – uncompromising. He didn’t suffer fools lightly and it wasn’t hard to lock horns with him over anything from samples to football, which he loved – when I first knew him, he played in a team of local Arab kids.

"I woke up this morning to see Zaf’s post about his passing, and I was deeply shocked and upset – it’s a strange sign of the times when you learn on social media of the death of someone you’ve been friends with for over 4 decades, and whose life ran parallel with yours in so many extraordinary ways. I knew he was ill, and only bumped into him very rarely – he became reclusive. I got a message from a mutual friend just now, that said they saw his house getting cleared out a while ago but didn’t put 2 and 2 together. I also heard he’s been gone for months, and no-one knew – well, tragic though that may be, I can’t help the feeling that Jon might get a chuckle out of that, as the enigma continues to grow. Respect, brother, really."

The Ravers

 

I love this whole other meaning the word "raver" had in the 1960s - basically a sexually wild 'n 'free young woman

The solicitous, condescending tones of the interviewer in this Man Alive report are something else 

Simon Dupree and the Big Sound was the pop-psch band of Ray Shulman (A.R. Kane producer / mentor ) and his brothers  - which then turned into the ultra-prog outfit Gentle Giant

This was SD & the BS's big hit

The Associates, under an alias - 39 Lyon Street -  covered it