I am honestly not particularly invested in whether the hardcore continuum, er, continues *
But it is funny - and delightful - that things like this still happen: an amapiano remake by DJ Eastwood of "Cape Fear", the dark garage classic by KMA.
A tune that came out in 1996 - almost 30 years ago!
Blimey, here's an earlier prototype, I think done as a pirate radio show ident. From 1995 - fully 30 years ago!
On the basis of "Cape Fear", "Kaotic Madness" and the Re-Con Mission EP, I thought of Six as potentially a Goldie-type auteur. (KMA even did a dubplate track titled "Kemistry").
He certainly talked a good game. (But then it all fizzled out...)
"This is a line to the future"
This stuff does have that soul-smeared edge-of-atonal quality of prime Reinforced, when they were "jazzed" but not yet actually jazzy or jazzual
Here's DJ Maddness operating as a YouTube UKG historian with the series Pirate Chronicles
KMA - just one of those outfits who come along, have their moment, make their contribution.... and then that's it. Operators at that cusp between genius and scenius.
The Nuum is littered with them.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* on the continuum's continuance and not being that bothered whether it does
It had a really good run there.... 20 years plus... covered a huge amount of ground.... laid down a legacy, comparable in richness and duration to reggae's prime or hip hop's heyday.... to expect another convulsion or major-phase would be almost greedy...
And in truth nothing really seismically major has come along since funky - i.e. fifteen years plus ago.
For sure, there are diasporic tendrils still wriggling out there..... DNA flickers in otherwise completely other genres.
And yes the people who came up during its different phases and are still active, they do "continue" - refining and extending their thing
But for the most part Nuum is now a site of memorialization and archiving (as with the Pirate Chronicles series)
And then there's the much younger artists who extract juice of varying pungency and nutritional content out of fundamentally settled styles that originally emerged out of unfolding dialectical becoming... in much the same ahistorical way that a current band can describe what it does as "postpunk" when it is a/ blatantly not - simply because of chronology, how much has happened in between b/ contra the originating spirit of postpunk.
Some young-people-of-today juice extraction that is fairly blatantly squeezing "Cape Fear"
3 comments:
Love KMA productions - their stuff is very much in line with the strung-out, coke-psychosis darkside garage sound that was arguably the precursor to dubstep (whereas MC-fronted garage ended up becoming grime). As for amapiano I think it’s culturally ‘Nuum but in actual sound utterly defanged of the intensity of such… although the videos you posted of the MCing and the droney sound of remixes like this are interesting in and of themselves but I highly doubt they indicate a new direction per se
IMO the last new genre that came out of the Nuum that was properly creative was oddly enough UK drill seeing as it was road rap x chicago drill + elements of Nuum genres suggestive of folk-memory of garage, jungle, and grime. That being said, the peak creative period where that all took place was almost a decade ago and there hasn’t been (to the best of my knowledge as someone from the states) any significant innovation since then
talking about post-2010s music in relation to the nuum is always going to be reductive, and, frankly, quixotic — people looking for minor parallels as an overarching make-believe goldsmiths cultural studies dissertation. I think a lot of this comes out of the fact that most people opining on the nuum are less familiar with what exactly hardcore was in 90-91, especially the UK stuff which was very heavily influenced by both the bass weight of reggae sound systems (and more importantly, techno/acid.)
We've started a 1991 thread on dissensus where we try to go deep on drawing out that primordial soup: https://www.dissensus.com/threads/18382/
I feel that people should just say black british music instead of trying to link every urban development to the nuum. But what do I know. Deep tech had more in common with the nuum's core audience than UK drill ever did...
It's funny, people are happy to talk about memories of jungle/garage in UK drill which again are minor parallels but were aghast at the actual direct invocations of jungle you would have in say, broken beat, early dubstep, etc. Not that I'm taking sides here, I should add.
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