ardkive fever - the eternal returns

Brand-new anachronism from Z-Neo

Fault-less -  very-nearly-convincing as time travel

The artwork by one AROE is very in the wildstyle of  DJ Trax early releases on Moving Shadow

release rationale

"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a ’92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP’s and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".

On the label  Rave Radio Records -  a hub of epigonic action

I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?

The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific  - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!

Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point. 

People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity.... 

Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze.  When you factor in the international factor. 

Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music. 

You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a  Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point... 

Convergence of new-olds - here's a nu-gaze group who have gone so far as to take inspiration from the junglistic portions of MBV's 2013 mbv i.e. the bits that would have been the follow up to Loveless

It almost does supply what never actually existed ie. the bang-on-timely jungle-influenced album MBV could conceivably have put out in 1993 or 94 

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Talking of spectral imaginings... 

Somehow missed this -  from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set 

release irrationale 

The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.

Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides... 

Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It’s a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.

If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down...  dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity

SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture’s, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF’s Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture’s work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.

SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.

Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork -  Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:

Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw’s Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica’s back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.

A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I’d drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.

One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D’s Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek’s The Water Margin, and Intense’s The Quickening.

During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.

There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF’s 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There’s enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.

Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.

The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles’ 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.

The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle’s genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle’s Johnny, Subnation’s Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer’s Ricky–a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine ‘Somewhere About Town’.

The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM’s DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It’s well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.

Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a ‘first aid kit’, packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn’t take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he’d remind his groggy listeners that it was “time to draw for the First Aid Kit,” creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn’t get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was “a bridge too far,” but if they made it, Jinx would say, “taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton.” Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More (“What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!”), and end with his signature send-off: “Seeeeeeeeee ya!”

I ended up getting my own Sunday morning show on Rude FM 88.2 in the early 2000s, and I often thought of Jinx and my love for his Sunday morning show. In some ways, this study influenced how I approached my own show—not so much in the presentation or music selection, but in understanding the audience and their needs at that time of the morning. The Sunday morning pirate radio aesthetic is something I first referenced on the original 0860 album in the track First Aid Kit, and this tin full of goodies for Slow860 strengthens the bonds, further connects the dots and adds to the lineage of the Hardcore Continuum. 

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Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie" 

That's from over ten years ago) 

Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality

This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"

Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat

Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick

Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a  a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew. 

release rationale: 

I’ve been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn’t know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.

Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG’s London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the “we got the vibes, yo” lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I’m grinning from ear to ear.

Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London’s legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.

Fast forward 30 years, and I’m in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I’ve always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I’ve been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.

Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It’s a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour! 

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The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit

Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania

RIP Ken Downie of The Black Dog

Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase.

Here is Matt's lovely tribute to the Black Dog from a few years ago

Here's my own writing about the group:

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

emusic, 2007


A legend in techno circles, The Black Dog’s music is like the missing link between Coil’s eldritch electronica and Carl Craig’s exquisitely-textured elegance. Although the British group--originally the trio of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner--became widely heard as part of Warp Records’ “electronic listening music” initiative of the early 90s, the bedrock of their cult is their hard-to-find first three EPs, 

Did I say hard? Damn near impossible actually, when it comes to The Virtual EP, Age of Slack EP, and The Black Dog EP, vinyl-only 1989-90 releases long out-of-print and each worth a small fortune. Now at long overdue last they are available in their entirety as the first disc of this double-CD retrospective. 

Tracks like “Virtual,” “The Weight” and “Tactile” distil the essence of Detroit techno into an etherealized machine-funk so translucent and refined it feels like you should store it in crystal vials rather than a lowly CD case or hard drive. "Age of Slack” and “Ambience with Teeth” use hip hop breakbeats in ways that parallel early jungle, but there’s a balletic poise and delicacy to the way Black Dog deploy their crisp and rattling drum loops. 

This is rave sublimated into a mind-dance, the shimmying-and-sashaying thought-shapes of some advanced alien species who get together and party via telepathy. 

This set’s second disc, consisting of tracks from three EPS recorded for the GPR label in the early 90s, is also excellent, looking ahead to the Warp-era albums Bytes and Spanners. 

But it’s disc one that captures The Black Dog at their magickal and mysterious best.

[from the liner notes to Artificial Intelligence]

via Dan Selzer, "dot matrix printed welcome screen to Black Dog Productions’ BBS"

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The Black Dog (and Balil and Plaid)  from Energy Flash

The Black Dog – the trio of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie – were almost as hermetic as Autechre, but more committed to traditional art notions of ‘expression’. They once defined their 

project as the quest for ‘a computer soul’, while Ken Downie told Eternity that The Black Dog started in order to fill ‘a hole in music. Acid house had been “squashed” by the police and rinky-dinky 

Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.’ 

The musical emotions in The Black Dog (and alter egos Plaid and Balil) aren’t the straightforward, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort, but rather more elusive: subtle, indefinable shades of mood, 

ambiguous and evanescent feelings for which even an oxymoron like ‘bittersweet’ seems rather crude. Eschewing live appearances and seldom doing interviews, The Black Dog nonetheless created a 

cult aura around their often hard-to-find discography. One of their chosen mediums was cyberspace: long before the current craze for  techno websites, The Black Dog established a computer bulletin 

board called Black Dog Towers. Visitors could gawp at artwork and learn more about the Dog’s interest in arcane knowledges, such as paganism, out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Kabbalah and ‘aeonics’ 

(mass shifts in consciousness). Ken Downie – the principal esoterrorist in the band – has described himself as a magician. One of The Black Dog’s earliest tracks, ‘Virtual (Gods in Space)’, features 

a sample – ‘make the events occur that you want to occur’ – which gives a magickal spin to the punk DIY ethos. 

Although far from the euphoric fervour of rave, The Black Dog’s early 1990–2 material is remarkably similar to the breakbeat hardcore of the day. Like Hyper-On Experience, DJ Trax, et al., the 

mode of construction is basically the Mantronix collage aesthetic updated for the rave era: incongruous samples + looped breakbeats + oscillator riffs. But the mood of ‘Seers + Sages’, ‘Apt’, ‘Chiba’ and 

‘Age of Slack’ is quirky Dada absurdism rather than Loony Toons zany. The crisp, echoed breakbeat and keyboard vamp on ‘Seers + Sale’ recalls 2 Bad Mice classics like ‘Waremouse’, except that the 

riff sounds like it’s played on a church organ, so the effect is eldritch rather than E-lated. On 1991’s ‘Chiba’, the Morse-code riff has a glancing lightness of inflection that anticipates the Detroit break

beat of Innerzone Orchestra’s ‘Bug in the Bassbin’. 

Carl Craig, the producer behind Innerzone Orchestra, clearly recognized The Black Dog as kindred spirits in sonic watercolours; in  1992, his Planet E label released their classic Balil track ‘Nort Route’. 

Strangely redolent of the early eighties – the Sinophile phunk of Sylvian and Sakomoto’s ‘Bamboo Music’, the phuturistic panache of Thomas Leer – ‘Nort Route’ daubs synth-goo into an exquisite 

calligraphic melody-shape over an off-kilter breakbeat. The track trembles and brims with a peculiar emotion, a euphoric melancholy that David Toop came closest to capturing with the phrase ‘nostalgia for the future’. 

What The Black Dog/Balil/Plaid tracks most resembled was a sort of digital update of fifties exotica. But instead of imitating remote alien cultures, as the original exotica did, it was like The Black Dog were somehow giving us advance glimpses of the hybrid musics of the next millennium: the Hispanic-Polynesian dance crazes of the Pacific Rim, or music for discotheques and wine bars in Chiba City and The Sprawl (the megalopolises in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero). 

While some of the Dog’s later work – on albums like Bytes, Parallel, The Temple of Transparent Balls and Spanners – crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it’s still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that’s unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog’s music often feels like it’s designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an odd number of limbs – not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds. 

The Black Dog's mix of bleep n bass for FACT

Stuff on The Black Dog in this Redbull story about London Techno 

the 21st Century so far

Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far...

I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the end of time.

Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit?)

So despite the enormity I thought I would give the entire list a listen, in both categories. (There's also a list of mixes). 

I got about a third of the way into the albums, skipping the ones I already knew. But then - as always seems to happen with such undertakings (e.g. the enormous playlists of an artist's entire discography that you might pull together yourself, or of a genre)...  inevitably the will to carry on crumbles away. It's just too daunting. It comes to feel like work. As a way of discovering things, it's not the way that the music you end up loving generally tumbles into your life. Especially not with dance music, which is most meaningfully encountered in a club and in the thick of a crowd. 

But I did hear some things I'd never heard that I really liked, along with quite a lot of things that were excellent but ultimately sounded like superior-sound-design updates of  sono-rhythmic ideas that existed in rawer form in the 1990s.  

As always happens with these canon-making pushes by publications, I was surprised by how few of the artists or works that I love figure in these lists. (And quite often when an artist I like did get mentioned, the track honored wasn't what I would have selected). 

But you know what - people are different!  

So much music - electronic, dance, everything else - came out in the 21st Century that entirely different cartographies and canons can be constructed that barely overlap with your own trajectory as a listener or personal pantheon. 

One new-to-me tune in the RA list that I really liked

Now if you know anything about where I'm coming from, in terms of what I like in dance music, it makes perfect sense that this is a tune that would appeal.   It's fresh and exciting but audibly in the tradition of "Party People". 

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I'm not sure how much this RA list is ultimately based on the votes of the contributors and how much determined by decree from above, but they did ask me for a list of nominations, albeit only in the overlapping categories of hauntology / ambient / conceptronica. This is what I suggested, which is unranked: 

ALBUMS

Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

The Focus Group – Hey Let Loose Your Love

Oneohtrix Point Never – Rifts

Belbury Poly – The Willows

The Advisory Circle – Other Channels

Mordant Music – Dead Air

Moon Wiring Club – An Audience of Art Deco Eyes

Rashad Becker – Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

The Caretaker – Everywhere at the end of time

Debit – The Long Count

Runners up (unasked for, I couldn't resist supplying)

Lo Five – Geography of the Abyss

Dolphins into the Future – On Seafaring Isolation

Lee Gamble – Diversions -  1994-96

eMMplekz – Rook to TN34

Roj – The Transactional Dharma of Roj

Hybrid Palms – Pacific Image

ML Buch – Suntub

Second Woman - S/W

Huerco S – For Those of You Who Have Never

Burial – debut album

patten – Mirage FM

TRACKS

Mark Van Hoen – Holy Me

eMMplekz – Gloomy Leper Techno

The Focus Group – Modern Harp

Oneohtrix Point Never – Physical Memory

The Advisory Circle – Sundial

Holly Herndon – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

James Blake – If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Burial – South London Boroughs

Belbury Poly – Caermaen

People Like Us – World of Wonder (Why We’re Here)

Moon Wiring Club – Mademoiselle Marionette

 

MIX

bit stumped here, I don't tend to remembrance mixes like other folks do, but then I thought, "oh yes, there's - 

The Arkiteket - The Deep Ark

And then when I saw their list, I slapped my forehead with a 'gah' and realized I really should have - and really would have - included this mix: 

Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo (Japan, 1980-86) - by Spencer Doran

And the follow up Vol 2 was great too. 

It's especially amnesiac of me given that in this big piece on Ambient / New Age as a phenom of the 2010s written for Resident Advisor, these mixes feature prominently (along with the Japanese interior music / 4th world compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 plus quotes from Doran in his Visible Cloaks guise). 

Talking of those who remembrance mixes, here's mixologist (and RA 2000-2025 contributor) Michaelangelos Matos's faves 

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Maybe, maybe,  I'll go back and finish that 2000-2025 albums list... do it in stages... then do the tracks... and maybe even the mixes. 

I already tried and enjoyed this mix which sounded intriguing from the write-up and mixologist Nono Gigsta's side reflections

https://soundcloud.com/gigstab/freerotation-2024-the-house-of-crocodiles-part-2-live-recording

Amid the near-infinity of sources out of which it is woven, this new-to-me tune jumped out particularly

Which itself contains a sample of - or perhaps more accurately, is a re-edit of? - something I dimly recognise (from being sampled elsewhere - some track on Reinforced?) but the source song "Misdemeanor" is new-to-me and quite delicious, sort of avant-ized Jackson 5

Less delicious is learning about the actual misdemeanor the artist would much later commit.... Wiki Fear strikes again, or at least, it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have read the offending entry 

Ah, Anon comes through in the comments with the ardkore jungle tune that samples Foster Sylvers - not 4 Hero and crew but M-Beat 

Here's another use (out of loads and loads in hip hop etc)

Here's a Misdemeanor sample-chain playlist

"a long shout"

 

A long overdue big shout going out to S. Vispi, B. Thomas, D. Duncan aka Intense aka Babylon Timewarp aka various other identities

Here's a disorganized playlist including also some of their celebrated remixers and allies like Little Mat and D.O.P.E.

Those Horny "Horns" (slight return)

Always felt this tune by Dev, "In the Dark" - my fave single of 2011 - was a UK garage flashback / rip-off. 

And now I realise that the main reason that it has that association for me is the parping synth-horn vamp that comes in at 32 seconds - a UK Garage hallmark.

Not only are those horns horny, the song itself is about being uncontrollably horny. 

At this point Dev had the sexiest singing voice in the world, simply on the basis of her sampled cameo in "Like A G6" and her one solo hit "In The Dark", which was constantly on the radio in LA

"In The Dark" is from an era when producers were doing starting to do amazing things * in terms of an architecture of harmonies and multiple interlocking vocal parts, texturizing of backing vocals and what I would call side-vocals - or even aside-vocals: a kind of melodic equivalent to the adlib in rap later on.  Working in jitters and stammers and mechanistic syncopations. And voice-as-pure-FX - like the slithery-rubbery vocal ripples in "In The Dark"

It all comes from Dev but with gimmick-attuned producers working with her (the Cataracs in this case), it adds up to the ultimate in ear-candy. An overflowing panoply of hooks - just so many "good bits" that stick in your head,

Other examples of this combo of personality and processing would be Ke$ha songs like "Tik Tok" and especially "Backstabber."

The latter is not the work of the evil Dr but David Gamson, as in Scritti Politti -  a fact that just added savor to my enjoyment of the song. 

"Backstabber" features an awesome horn part, as it happens, but it's not UKG style - more throwback campy, almost Casino Royale / Herb Alpert. Possibly a sample, as opposed to synthi-horn played on a keyboard.

I should imagine the vocal arrangement virtuosity emerging at that time owes a lot to the late 2000s release by  Antares of the Harmony Engine, a studio tool that made it easy to multiple the singer's voice, stack it, spectralize it, situate it within the sound-space of the recording...

An orchestration of the voice alone, even before you get to all the other things going on in the track 

Like those horny horns in "In The Dark"

* Yeah, yeah, ABBA did this kind of thing in "Knowing Me, Knowing You" and so many other tunes...  and Missy Elliott in a different way. And then there was this from 2005, before the Harmony Engine came on the market

Amen to that / give the drummer some / da funk pointilliste

Three pieces very much worth reading: 

1/ James Parker with a short piece at the Atlantic on the mystery of drumming and its relationship to Time and Flow (spinning off a book that also sounds worth reading: John Lingan’s Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers 

2/  Ethan Hein blogging about the Amen Break with an inventory of sampled examples of use.

3/ Nick Coleman substacking about Herbie Hancock's  jazzed funk / funked jazz trilogy  of the mid-70s: Head Hunters, Thrust, Man-Child

Some choice portions: 

Parker: 

I love hitting the goddamn drums. Left foot on the hi-hat pedal, right foot on the kick-drum pedal, left hand on the snare, right hand on the ride cymbal. When it starts to flow, you’re like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man: You’re in a holy circle of equilibrium, blissfully distributed, with consciousness diffused to your extremities....   You get better.... via the drummer’s version of the grace of God—which is the jolt, the volt, the heavenly bolt, the electromotive impulse that flashes out from the playing of another, much greater drummer, and claims you.... 

[and this fascinating fact, cueing off a section on what happens to drummers as they age, the physical toll of being a drummer]

A 2008 study of Blondie’s Clem Burke revealed that, during live sets, he played with the stamina of an athlete, burning about 600 calories over the course of an 82-minute show. 

[fascinating because it underwhelms - just 600 calories? I thought he was going to say something more like 6000 calories and some other statistic like loses five pounds in sweat during a concert! I have gotten near 600 calories just going on the exercise bike for 70 minutes. And I am in pathetic shape]

Hein: 

Here trying to pinpoint just what makes the Amen break so different, so appealing... 

"One factor is just the sound of the drums. Winstons drummer Gregory Coleman hits hard, but with subtlety. Each time he hits the ride cymbal, he gets a slightly different pitch, a slightly different velocity. The same is true with the snares. He’s not just pounding out a beat, it’s practically a melody. The tape is heavily saturated, bringing out the upper overtones, and the sound is incredibly loud and present.

The rhythm pattern is compelling too. You can understand it in terms of tresillo rhythms displaced by different amounts that are overlaid on a basic R&B backbeat."

[One thing with the Amen and its particular relationship to jungle is that as breaks go, it's not exactly funky. It's just a bit too fast for that slow 'n' sexy feel. It doesn't pull at your hips and waist. That's even in the raw original state - but then when's it sped-up, looped, edited, retriggered etc, it  totally becomes a sound of insurgency and emergency - a militant rhythm. For sure jungle breaks are funkier than the beats in its increasingly estranged sister-genres like techno and trance. But for the most part, although hyper-syncopated, they are not really sexy.  To the extent that a lovers jungle vibe creeps into the genre later on as it matures and sophisticates....  that sexiness is located almost everywhere else in the music than in the drums - it's in the moaning diva vocals, the lightly glancing synth pads, the sensuous glistening textures, sometimes the bass. But the drums remain at odds with that vibe:  all crashy excitement and forward-surge. Often the sexy elements in jungle actually come from house 'n' garage or  R&B.]

Coleman: 

[Thrust's] opening cut, the filthy “Palm Grease”... is so granular, so atomised in its blizzard of harmonic spot-squits, all actually played rather than programmed by the pianist on his battery of ARP hardware, that it has always suggested to me that music still has yet to fully explore every nook, cranny and journeying asteroid in its formal multiverse. Come on now. Why have we heard so little of la musique pointilliste? Herbie Hancock makes an excellent jazz Seurat: the primum mobile of a music that concerns itself principally with its own hyper-precise placing in time and space, within a harmonic structure so dotty that we begin to think less about chordal harmony and more about colour modalities and the formation of clouds (“Uh, thangewverymuch, London! This next piece we have for you tonight is in Sirrus-minor, the greyest and fluffiest of all keys”); music that has become less and less linear in its drive to move its poles away from the banalities of chord “progression” and become more and more concerned with articulations of the endless moment, the unceasing now, the rubber-thewed not-yet. The poetics of utter stillness. But funkily of course."

A parallel thought I had a while ago in relation not to Herbie Hancock but the spin-off band The Headhunters and "God Made Me Funky":

"One of the things about recorded music I love is when you can "see it" - diagrammatically, as blocs of sound distributed across space -  but it also has this totally somatic and haptic impact. This perfectly produced funk track works simultaneously as a mechanism whose moving parts you can gaze at in an almost distanced way and a seething fever reaching into your body, coiling its tightness inside your insides."

Now I think about it, it was something Ethan Hein wrote, a deep structural analysis of "God Made Me Funky", that first introduced me to the track and resulted in obsessive playing of it, especially the minute and a half before the voice comes in. 

Hein also has written about "Watermelon Man" off Head Hunters. 

The track I really love of this Hancock era

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

More on Amentalism - a 2011 piece published in The Economist by Tom Nuttall.

Seven seconds of fire: How a short burst of drumming changed the face of music 

IT IS 3am in a dank, sweaty studio in south London. Ear-splitting basslines pound from the sound system. Some of the young crowd gently bob along. Others are drinking, chatting or lurking in dark corners. Then, suddenly, the music changes. A throbbing pulse gives way to a clattering rhythm. Where there were 130 beats per minute, there are now 170. Where the mood was meditative, it is now maniacal. Within seconds the place is jumping.

This music is called “jungle”. Some of the people in the club were probably not alive when it was created. Certainly few would have been old enough to experience it in its heyday. These young revellers have an ear for the next big thing; they find trips down musical memory lane tiresome. Yet nothing seems to animate them like these tracks from almost 20 years ago.

To understand jungle's roots, you must travel yet further back in time. On March 11th 1970 Richard L. Spencer, tenor saxophonist and lead singer for a short-lived Washington, DC, soul act called the Winstons, was awarded a Grammy for “Color Him Father”, a sentimental ode to a devoted stepfather released by the band the year before. The record sold well, but unlike some of his fellow winners that day, who included Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell and Johnny Cash, Mr Spencer was not destined for musical canonisation; the Winstons had already split up and later that year he quit the music business. The song, too, has largely been forgotten.

The same is not true for “Amen, Brother”, the B-side to “Color Him Father”. It is not immediately apparent why this should be. The two-and-a-half-minute instrumental, a funk update of an old gospel standard, is sprightly enough; the casual listener might be diverted by the energetic horn line. But there is little to distinguish it from hundreds of similar records released around the same time. The band recorded it quickly, says Mr Spencer; they needed a B-side and didn't have any other songs.

Seven seconds of this track were enough to guarantee its immortality. One minute and 26 seconds in, the horns, organ and bass drop out, leaving the drummer, Gregory Coleman, to pound away alone for four bars. For two bars he maintains his previous beat; in the third he delays a snare hit, agitating the groove slightly; and in the fourth he leaves the first beat empty, following up with a brief syncopated pattern that culminates in an unexpectedly early cymbal crash, heralding the band's re-entry.

“Amen, Brother” lay dormant for almost two decades. But in 1986, as the nascent hip-hop scene in New York was entering the musical mainstream, the song cropped up on the first volume of “Ultimate Breaks and Beats”, a compilation of tracks with “clean”, drums-only segments. DJs and producers using turntables had long used breaks from old funk tracks as backing material for rappers; the compilation made their lives easier. Combined with the sampler, a new piece of digital hardware that recorded snippets of sound for deployment in other contexts, it allowed producers to create extended loops over which rappers could perform.

The first hip-hop producers to use what became known as the “Amen break” did so with no great ambition. Many looped only the first two, “straight” bars of the four-bar break. Amen was simply one of many tools in the producer's kitbag.

When jungle was massive

A journey across the Atlantic liberated the break. In the early 1990s British producers in the rapidly evolving dance-music scene were seeking new sources of inspiration. The repetitive grooves of American house and techno provided one; the reggae sound systems operated by Anglo-Jamaicans were another. But more than anything it was the sampler that galvanised these producers. Their tracks developed a distinct identity, supported by a complex infrastructure of record shops, pirate radio stations, nightclubs and raves: they sped up, acquiring an urgent, almost manic quality, relying increasingly on the creative possibilities for rhythmic experimentation opened up by the sampled breakbeat.

The producers of what was coming to be known as jungle found a number of old breakbeats that suited their needs. As these beats began to crop up in more and more records—they were, in the parlance, “rinsed”—fans began to recognise them, and to compare the ways in which producers had manipulated them to generate distinct effects.

Chief among these breaks was Amen, which many producers first heard on “King of the Beats”, a six-minute instrumental collage of hip-hop beats and other samples released by Mantronix, a New York producer, in 1988. The track made extensive use of the Amen break, but in a fresh way: segments from the loop were chopped up, layered and processed so that the drums became central to the track rather than simply a rhythmic bedding.

Like a virus, once the Amen break had taken hold among jungle producers it began to propagate, and to mutate. It was used on hundreds, possibly thousands of records (some claim that “Amen, Brother” is the most sampled track in the history of music). For a time anyone trying to build a name in the scene had to turn their hand to Amen. “The musicians chose to limit themselves in order to express creativity within boundaries,” says Simon Reynolds, a journalist and author who chronicled the rise of jungle in Britain.

As the music grew more sophisticated (and the technology more powerful), the manipulation of the break grew wilder; producers engaged in a sort of Amen arms race. “It was a battle to see who could do more with it,” says Karl Francis, who, recording as Dillinja, was one of the more radical Amen experimentalists. “But the tunes still had to work in the club. Sometimes I made tracks that went too far and people would just stand on the dance floor looking confused.” Listeners grew attuned to the break's sonic elements; before long the merest hint of Amen was enough to drive crowds into a frenzy. Coleman's seven-second break had entered the collective aural unconscious of a generation of young Britons.

A Proustian snare drum

Why was Amen so popular? One answer is that it fulfilled a need: easy to sample and manipulate, it offered producers a straightforward way into jungle. Many amateur producers, including this correspondent, have been surprised to discover how easy it is to make the junglist equivalent of instant noodles by sampling, looping and speeding up the break. Eventually Amen acquired critical mass; producers used it because everyone else did.

But Amen also has certain sonic qualities that set it aside from its rivals. Rather than keeping time with a hi-hat, Coleman uses the loose sound of the ride cymbal, filling out the aural space. And the recording has a “crunch” to it, says Tom Skinner, a London-based session drummer: “That quality is appealing to beatmakers.” The pitched tone of the snare drum is particularly distinctive; as any junglist will tell you, a snare can be as evocative as a smell.

The displaced snare of the third bar and the syncopated last bar became signature elements of many Amen tracks. At 170 beats per minute the jumpiness of these parts of the break becomes urgent. Mr Reynolds talks about the “panic rush” of the break at this tempo, the “state of emergency” it created among clubbers.

Mr Skinner draws attention to the way deft producers would emulate drummers' tricks in their manipulation of the break, creating “ghost notes”—rhythmic shuffles of sound that help the beat swing. Others introduced hyperactive snare rushes or stop-start mini-loops, and deployed the cymbal crash to signify not the beat's conclusion but rather its ongoing pressure. “It's language that existed before, but you had never heard a drummer playing quite like that,” says Mr Skinner.

Like all musical movements rooted in a particular period, jungle slipped first into a decadent phase, and then became a nostalgia piece. The futuristic frenzy became routine; beats became metallic and funkless; the sampled break was often replaced by the drum machine. Elsewhere the lilt of the accelerated breakbeat, its harsher edges smoothed away, proved attractive to makers of commercials and composers of television-title tunes. Many Americans first encountered Amen like this; it crops up, for example, in the theme of the popular cartoon series “Futurama”.

Before long the merest hint of Amen was enough to drive crowds into a frenzy

But Amen never went away. Some keepers of the flame continued to use it to signal their devotion to the good old days, or to conclude what they considered to be unfinished business. Guitar bands occupying different musical universes from jungle producers, such as Oasis, found uses for this most versatile of breaks.

Today, when the generation that first exploited Amen is nudging middle age, a younger wave of musicians has begun to uncover new meanings in this loop. Some use it to express a stern oath of fealty to a movement they were too young to experience. In the tracks of others you hear a plaintive yearning for a simpler time, when producers could use breakbeats without feeling that they were freighted with meaning. A sample that once encapsulated dreams of the future now struggles to escape its past.

“A lot of young people are nostalgic for things they weren't there for,” says Micachu, a 24-year-old London-based musician. For her own Amen project, with Pete Wareham, a jazz saxophonist, she ruled that the only permissible sounds were Mr Wareham's sax and her treatments of the break: “Every producer should give their take on the Amen break. It's like a composer doing a chorale.” (Mr Wareham says that he had not heard of the Amen break by name before, but that when he sought it out “the last 20 years flashed before my eyes.”)

If the Amen break belongs to anyone, the 1990s generation who performed their extraordinary acts of alchemy on it would seem to have a strong claim. But in a much more tangible sense, the break, along with the rest of “Amen, Brother”, belongs to Mr Spencer, who retains the copyright to the Winstons' back catalogue. The band's former front-man says that neither he nor Coleman, who he says died in poverty in 2006, received any royalties from the extensive reuse of Amen. Mr Spencer says he only became aware of its rebirth in 1996, when he was phoned by a British music executive seeking the master tape of “Amen, Brother”.

Whose break is this?

Mr Spencer is not interested in the digital age and its remix culture. He dismisses the music spawned by the track as “plagiarism” and “bullshit”, considering it another chapter in the plundering of African-American cultural patrimony. “[Coleman's] heart and soul went into that drum break,” he says. “Now these guys copy and paste it and make millions.”

It is a tricky area, acknowledges Mr Reynolds. He notes that had Mr Spencer received a fraction of what he considers to be his dues he could have retired early and put his children through college. On the other hand, he and Coleman have achieved a sort of immortality: “It's a bit like the man who goes to the sperm bank and unknowingly sires hundreds of children.” Mr Skinner agrees that it is a shame the original musicians earned nothing from the reuse of their work, but says, “you don't want a world where sampling can't happen.”

The legal infrastructure surrounding sampling has become more robust. Yet even if the legion of small-time producers who were using sampled breaks 15-20 years ago could somehow have been identified and challenged, it is not as if Mr Spencer would have received anything; jungle would have taken a different form—or perhaps simply been crushed. That would have counted as one of the music world's minor tragedies.

Joost an illusion?: Dance Literature (and Anti-Dance Literature)

I have long delighted in this 1957 quote from Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo - what a name! - on the subject of rock and roll and dance mania. Don't think I was able to deploy it in Energy Flash itself but it got included in my Rave Theory Toolkit:

"Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!" The call repeats itself into the infinite, and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions -  as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment.... Rock 'n' roll is a sign of depersonalization of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity. If we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances. The dance craze is the infantile rage and outlet of our actual world." 

Although written in flowery and windy style, this grave warning is fairly typical of the scaremongering reactions to dance crazes associated with youth music (meaning in fact black music made for all ages that suddenly connects with young white people). This discourse about the degrading and de-civilizing effects of rhythm erupted around rock'n'roll ("jungle music", leads to sex before marriage and venereal disease, etc).

 But they are also very similar to the frightened responses to jazz  from the elder-and-squarer(-and-whiter) generation when the hot sound first seethed out of the disreputable quarters of New Orleans to conquer America and the world. Very similar analogies or connections were made to narcotic drugs, loosening of sexual inhibition, coke-crazed flappers etc.  

And of course the exact same sort of phobic hysteria erupted around acid house in the UK tabloids. 

Read the whole Feb. 23, 1957 article in New York Times in which the Meerloo quote appeared and the hysterical tone is something else: 

EXPERTS PROPOSE STUDY OF 'CRAZE'; Liken It to Medieval Lunacy, 'Contagious Dance Furies' and Bite of Tarantula

Psychologists suggested yesterday that while the rock 'n' roll craze seemed to be related to “rhythmic behavior patterns” as old as the Middle Ages, it required fullstudy as a current phenomenon. One educational psychologist asserted that what happened in and around the Paramount Theatre yesterday struck him as "very much like the medieval type of spontaneous lunacy where one person goes off and lots of other persons go off with him.” A psychopathologist, attending a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association at the Park Sheraton Hotel, feared that this was just a guess. Others present noted that a study by Dr. Reginald Lourie of Children's Hospital, Washington, indicated in 1949 that 10 to 20 per cent of all children did "some act like rocking or rolling." The study went into detail on the stimulating effects of an intensi fied musical beat. Meanwhile, a parallel between rock 'n' roll and St. Vitus Dance| has been drawn by Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo, associate in psychiatry at Columbia University, in a study just completed for publication.

Echo of Fourteenth Century

Dr. Meerloo described the "contagious epidemic of dance fury" that "swept Germany and spread to all of Europe" toward the end of the fourteenth century. It was called both St. Vitus Dance (or Chorea Major), he continued, with its victims breaking into dancing and being unable to stop. The same activity in Italy, he noted, was referred to as Tarantism and popularly related to a toxic bite by the hairy spider called tarantula. “The Children's Crusades and the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin," Dr. Meerloo went on, "remind us of these seductive, contagious dance furies."

Dr. Meerloo described his first view of rock 'n' roll this way: Young people were moved by a juke box to dance themselves "more and more into a prehistoric rhythmic trance until it had gone far beyond all the accepted versions of human dancing." 

Sweeping the country and even the world, the craze “demonstrated the violent mayhem long repressed everywhere on earth,' he asserted. " He also saw possible effects in political terms: "Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!" The call repeats itself into the infinite, and liberates the mind of all reasonable inhibitions -  as in drug addiction, a thousand years of civilization fall away in a moment."

Dr. Meerloo predicted that the craze would pass "as have all paroxysms of exciting music." But he said that the psychic phenomenon was important and dangerous. He concluded in this way: "Rock 'n' roll is a sign of depersonalization of the individual, of ecstatic veneration of mental decline and passivity.

"If we cannot stem the tide with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances.

"The dance craze is the infantile rage and outlet of our actual world. In this craze the suggestion of deprivation and dissatisfaction is stimulated and advertised day by day. In their automatic need for more and more, people are getting less and less."

"The awareness of this tragic contradiction in our epoch," Dr. Meerloo said, “must bring us back to a new assessment of what value and responsibility are."

Now if you look at some of Meerloo’s many other books, the good doctor does seem persistently preoccupied with loss-of-mental-control under the influence of sinister powers, the de-invidualizing dark side of crowd psychology, etc:  

Delusion and Mass-delusion (1949)

Patterns of Panic  (1950)

The Rape of the Mind: the psychology of thought control, menticide, and brainwashing (1956).

Suicide and Mass Suicide (1962)

Intuition and the Evil Eye: The natural history of a superstition (1971).

"Menticide"!

Now someone who lived through the Nazi conquest of their homeland (the Netherlands) might well have a particular and pained interest in irrationality: the fragility of the civilized mind in the face of a barbarian insurgency. 

And here's yet another book by Meerloo that makes the connection explicit:

Total War and the Human Mind: a psychologist's experiences in occupied Holland.

But, and here it gets interesting, somewhere between his remarks to the New York Times reporter Milton Bracker and his 1960 publication The Dance: From Ritual to Rock and Roll - Ballet to Ballroom,  Meerloo’s attitude to rock 'n' roll seems to have softened somewhat, succumbed to a fascination...

This is even more apparent in the book's alternate title: 

Dance Craze and Sacred Dance: an outlook on the eternal rock 'n' roll.

Far from some fly-by-night teen craze, rock'n'roll is "eternal" now - tapping into some undying capacity within humans to escape through trance.  Its precursors echo down through the ages to primeval man. And if the (almost certainly bow-tied) Dr Meerloo is still made a little uncomfortable by its latest manifestations, the "eternal" aspect seems to give it a certain dignity. 

As does the word "sacred". He seems to come round a bit to the idea that terpsichorean movements can be a form of worship. 

Hark also at the German title of the book, which translates as "Rhythm and Ecstasy" 

So naturally I had to get hold of the book - and found it easily, in the wonderful library of CalArts.

It's a beautiful looking book with loads of photographs of dancers from different cultures around the world - the photos take equal billing with the text, in fact - and there's some nice drawings too. The writing fuses the scholarly and poetic registers. In some places, the text breaks up into aphorisms and short bursts - it's as though exposure to all that syncopation has loosened Meerloo up as a writer and thinker. 

Shakers rattle and roll

But he's still a scholar and he's really done his research: just look at the contents pages: 

The word "epidemics" in the section that includes rock 'n' roll  - "Modern Dance Epidemics" -  has the sniffy, "this is a social problem" tang of the New York Times quotes, which are probably taken from a scholarly article now I think about it. 

But the actual entry on rock 'n ' roll is not as hostile or harshly judgmental - the tone perhaps is condescending, but trying to understand.

 

In the course of the writing of this section, Meerloo moves from consternated to....  accepting. His researches into the history of ritual dance have shown him that youth is not in fact permanently damaged or corrupted by these epidemics of frenzy.... that after the bacchanal burns itself out, people return to their normal social selves and functions.  In tone it recalls Adorno on the jitterbug and the swing bands: 

"They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence"

"Their ecstasy is without content.... The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character....  It has convulsive aspects reminescent of St Vitus's dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. ... The same jitterbugs who behave as if they were electrified by syncopation, dance almost exclusively the good rhythmic parts" 

Except that in the Meerloo writing, after a stretch of what reads as condemnation, there is the sudden unexpected  concession of  the phrase "vitalizing regression". The thought that going-back (for Meerloo both to premodern, even pre-Christian ritual dance and to childhood's uncontrolled emotions) is healthy and invigorating, an outlet in a society that is otherwise a spiritual wasteland. Perhaps these crazes are benign forms of madness? "Is it all bad?", he thinks aloud?

In the next section, there is a similar movement - from equating, or seeing an affinity, between frenzied dancing and fascism, towards a viewpoint that sees liberation in ecstasy, a renewal of the spirit. 

It's almost as though he's so attached to his earlier formulations - the bombastic rhetoric of civilization collapsing - that he wants to recycle  them (the precise phrasings as used in the NY Times piece) in the new text, even as he is being carried towards a different conclusion altogether: that ritual dance and Dionysian frenzy has a purgative effect that is societally healthy and that it can transport the individual to higher planes of (un)(self)consciousness.   A kind of elective and cathartically cleansing form of brainwashing, even. 

What did I tell you? A bow tie!

Couldn't find much information about Meerloo out there... there's a Wiki that fills in his experience during the war....  and the ideas of his most famous book Rape of the Mind....  which came out during an era of great concern about brainwashing (as in The Manchurian Candidate etc) . Meerloo’s experiences of Nazi occupation (he joined the resistance, adopted a Dutch-er and more Teutonic sounding first name, Joost, rather than the Jewish Abraham) are what gave him his abiding interest in collective madness and mass hypnosis. 

But I can't help wondering if the exposure to rock and roll and the research on all its ancestors did not have a subtly depraving effect on the good doctor, at least in the sense that it opened up his overly reason-bound mind to the possibility of other planes of consciousness. That there might be more to the human mind than the mind. 

For one of his later publications has a little bit of a late-period Colin Wilson flavour: 

Hidden communion: studies in the communication theory of telepathy

More from The Dance

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"Walking is a rhythm too!"

I wonder what Dutchman Meerlo would have had to say about gabba and jumpstyle!

Some more anti-jazz scaremongering:

Some acid house scaremongering