"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
... and the countless clips of scanty-clad female deejays jiggling as they performatively tweak the knobs
... driving huge crowds inexplicably wild with the tame-old same-old sounds of an endless, extending-into-perpetuity 90s (and not even the good parts of the '90s!)...
in amongst all that, you do come across some nerdily informative reels of a historical bent on Instagram
Such as the triffic little micro-essays done by DJ Zinc, where he'll break down the technology and techniques used in a classic track, enumerate the samples and the breaks... position the track in the unfolding dialectic of the nuum.... maybe even have a tale about where and when it was made and how long it took (usually a matter of hours) ... and often he'll throw in a few personal memories of first-hearing or first-playing it out himself at the Roller Express or somewhere like that
He did DJ Vibes's "Obsession (Music So Wonderful)" the other day... talking about what it was made of... how it came along at this moment when happy hardcore and jungle had still not yet branched off from each other - such that a tune like "Obsession" could be played alongside "The Dark Stranger", Dougal could do a set in between Randall and Hype.
It reminded me what a teeeeeeeearin' tune it was and is
Seemed to be on the pirates incessantly at one point
I always forget it's called "Obsession", so indelible is the hook "Music So Wonderful" (or is it "Music's So Wonderful" - on the original track by Vivian Lee it's definitely "Music's")
But it's aptly titled, it does have a feverishly obsessed feel - that fixated-feeling 4/4/ that comes in every so often before the breaks take over completely
Along with the Think and the Amen and the Vivian Lee vocal and the T99 noise, Zinc indicates a chunk of Alec Empire's "You Must Confront" in there - the doomy horn-like fanfare-blare.
Zinc also had a bit of an exclusive: some prototype artwork for the Asylum label shared by Vibes - mockups done by an artist called Deano or probably more likely Dino (can't trust the AI captioning)
Listening to this perfect little tune - a favorite from 2step garage days - I noticed how the whole track is propelled along by horn fanfares.
I'm assuming they are synth-horns, if only because used in such a programmed riff sort of way, precisely the same in every iteration.
They actually sound quite realistic in timbre, so it's possible the riff was played by a hornsman and then sequenced.
In "Clean Riddem" the way the synthi-horn functions is very different from ersatz-sax is usually deployed in UKG. Typically it exudes a sensual, sultry smoky vibe and it takes the form of parping micro-vamps.
Here it's more like the "jousting" fanfares that Dexys Midnight Runners went in for. Sort of punchy and pugilistic.
"Clean Riddem" and flipside "No Fighting" - ooh gosh! Transfusions of pure joy... ruff 'n' smooth in perfect balance. Unimprovable in every just-so detail.
My Instagram keep throwing up reels of Charlotte de Witte, who apparently is one of the biggest deejays in the world.
I thought I'd check out her stuff, so tried the Mixmag mix she did in 2021
Where I heard this:
Thought it might be some old skool acid from back in the day I'd never heard - but it was originally released in 2019 by one Robert S.
I cannot believe this kind of thing is still being churned out. It's a 39 year old sound!
I used to grumble about the eternal returns of acid in the early 2000s when e.g. Luke Vibert did a record of acid house jams - so I suppose I am locked in my own loop here.
Still, making acid house now, it's like Robert Cray doing the blues in the '80s.
"We're Talking About Acid" should really be subtitled "UnOriginal Mix", then.
Talking of mixes and unoriginality...
The whole of that De Witte mix is full of deja entendu licks and builds, pulses and breakdowns - a completely terra cognita of trance and banging techno. Hyperstasis, without even the hyper bit, the frantic scurrying for an exit off the recombinant plateau.
So then I thought I would try her more recent artist-album of 2025.
Where my eye alighted on the feat. of a familiar name, the sort of ethereal diva that the likes of Future Sound of London / Messiah / The Beloved / Utah Saints would sample way way backintheday: Lisa Gerrard, of Dead Can Dance, 4AD cult legends....
Lisa wafts mystic, effing the ineffable, over pummeling steroid-maxed techno that is like a Creatine-recreation of "Horsepower" by Ravesignal aka C.J. Bolland. (A Belgian, like de Witte.)
Next episode of Of Instagrammatology: Nikolina
Who, not content with peddling Schranz, is now pushing a sound she calls Schroove - a combo of Schranz and Groove, whatever that is.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Talking of eternal returnings, elsewhere on the 'Gram, I saw a reel where someone asserted that tech-house was played out and that UK Garage was the fresh thing coming through.
Again with the flashbacks, this time to the end of the '90s, very early 2000s, when both sounds were in the ascendant in their respective - wholly unconnected - corners of the dance scene.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The other thing I'm seeing a lot of is hakken reels - people showing how to dance to gabber and its variants like hardstyle, etc.
It looks a bit.... goosesteppy, to be honest, at times.
But I suppose more wholesomely, hakken - also known as hakkûh - could be seen as being in the tradition of all-the-action-is-below-the-knee pan-European folk dance styles, from Morris Dancing to that Irish riverdance style to I dunno Tyrolean frolics beyond my ken
Hakken today seems slightly different to jumpstyle, involving more of the whole leg - so all-the-action-is-below-the-waist maybe. Still, a stampy sort of dance
There is a sort of rolling looseness to the way the legs are unfurled in the dance now - it actually reminds me as much of people on a treadmill at the gym as of folk-dance.
My God, you'd have to be so fit to do this for any duration. Or pilled to the gills.
According to Wiki, hakken comes from a Dutch word meaning the heels of the feet
I thought it had something to do with a Teutonic word that would be the root of our "hack", as in hack with an axe.
I do remember the word being around in the '90s and I naively took it to be a kind of garbling of "hardcore".
This also files under "eternal returns of....." but with variations - new complexifications (backsteps and what have you... dancers raising a knee at an angle and slapping their ankle... ) added to the stompy stampy core of it.
A sort of volkist version of Baraka's "changing same"
I was quite taken with the Bass-O-Matic album, cringe though the band name is
In the review, I make that cardinal rockcrit error of looking for the dance artist who can sustain at album level. Writing still from outside the culture at this point (October 1990, a year before the Conversion).
A similar sort of conceptual-ideological blunder was made in my review of Bomb the Bass's Unknown Territory, and this time it's only a couple of months away from Seeing the Light - the Damascene experience at Progeny
Bomb The Bass
Unknown Territory
Melody Maker, August 17 1991
We need a new category – something like "progressive dance", or prog funk – to describe the new post-acieed groups like 808 Slate, Bass-O-Matic and The Shamen, who are as effective at album length as they are in the condensed format of the club-targetted 12-inch. Coming an unaccountably long time after the Into The Dragon debut, Unknown Territory is a great advance in the cause of dance albums that aren't just the singles plus a heap of filler.
Unknown Territory also shows the extent to which the post-house revolution is a reprise or resurrection of the avant-funk of the early Eighties. Ideas first explored by the likes of A Certain Ratio, Byrne and Eno, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, On U Sound, Material et al, have migrated from the margins to the mainstream, in the process swapping their dank and forbidding aura of "subversion" for hedonistic, populist appeal.
'Throughout The Entire World', the opener, is as pan-global as its title suggests, mixing an Afro-centric cauldron of funk ferment with bamboo music trills and pipings. 'Switching Channels' is a murderous miscegenation of rock and hip hop; pyrotechnical guitar licks lash and singe a tapestry of magisterially interwoven and inter-bled samples. 'Love So True' is marred a little by the focal effect of the soul-rich vocals, but its sensurround soundscape opens up your senses like a night-time stroll in a rainforest, every corner of the mix murmuring and quivering with detail.
'Winter In July' you should know and adore by now: the rustling canopies of Gamelan chimes, the heartquake bass, the jewel-encrusted, ambient swathes. Would that the melody was sung in Icelandic or Liz Fraser-ese, for it's only the ungainly homilies and sound advice of the lyrics that hold this back from divinity.
'You See Me In 3D' is marauding, voracious techno-funk, 'Liquid Metal' a furore of drum machine mayhem. 'Run Baby Run' is swaggering rock/house, its soundscape honeycombed with enclaves of uncanny acoustics and pockmarked with perplexing sounds. 'Understand This' toils and bubbles, spraying raucous rockist blare in the style of Public Enemy's '911 Is A Joke' and 'You're Gonna Get Yours'. 'The Air You Breathe' reprises the crater-bass currents and hymnal poignancy of 'Winter In July', but isn't quite as molten and majestic.
On the CD, there's a drastic rewrite of 'Winter' as sweltering jungle-funk, topped with a tangled lattice of humid, jazzy pipes. 'Pressure Point' is the only lapse into the unacceptable side of the "prog" connection, being a jam session between drum machines, defaced by ugly guitar solos. With a clinical metal riff reminiscent of Clail's 'Human Nature', this track will doubtless end up, like so much prog rock, as the theme tune for a sports programme.
Best comes last, with 'Moody', a brilliant version of a forgotten classic by early Eighties avant-funk group ESG, an all-female unit who were likened at the time to a cross between Motown and Public Image Limited. With its costive bass lines and clipped, glowering vocals, the superbly baleful and tensile 'Moody' was a prototype for house music.
On Unknown Territory, Tim Simenon's avant-funk roots are showing, and 'Moody' confirms and acknowledges the connection. Yesterday's "unknown territory" is contemporary chartpop's terra firma.
Also a neater inversion in the final line would be "yesterday's 'unknown territory' is contemporary chartpop's terra cognita"
But back to Bass-O-Matic
The technorave-chillout yen for Pink Floyd is worth a mini-essay - wasn't there some ambient house (89-90 phase) track that samples "Wish You Were Here"? Consults faded regions of the back brain - ah yes, Innocence, "Natural Thing"
The Orb obviously....
The KLF too.
And there was an ardkore track by the wonderfully named E that interpolated from The Wall - "Nobody's Home", the line "I've got a little black book with my poems in" became "oi! I've got a little black disk with me tune on it", and I think a bit of David Gilmour soloing also got sampled at the end. It's the first tune here
The technoptimism of this end of '80s /start of '90s moment is endearing - painfully poignant too, considering all that has happened since, from world stuff to the "bright promise of digital technology" going rancid.
All this stuff - Shamen and Deeelite particularly, but also The Grid, Adamski, Bomb the Bass, Coldcut, The Orb, KLF, 808 State , Underworld, Humanoid / very early Future Sound of London etc, One Dove, Hypnotone, ie. for the most part house music made by former rock people - all of it flashes me back to smart drinks, flotation tanks, Mondo 2000, Terence McKenna books, Nicholas Saunders, Fraser Clark, "zippies", etc etc
These blogs are Ciccone-free zones but "Ray Of Light" was one of Madonna's more bearable singles. I hope William made a lot of money off it and the album.
This is an Orbit tune the heads love
I am not sure I ever traced the William Orbit trail back to Torch Song
Joy pipes up: "I loved that song! I didn't know it was William Orbit!"
Still, there are two turntables - plus bonus feature of a built-in cassette recorder!
This slight return is picking up on the earlier post about the extensive prehistory of discotheques and "disco music" - prior to disco as we have come to misunderstand it.
A time when the music was as likely to be some form of rockin' pop as it was soul. And deejays used a a microphone more than a mixer, since patter was a big part of their performance.
Trawling through a load of early '70s MM's, Sounds, NME's, it is striking how they increasingly have disco sections in the advertising pages, speaking to the burgeoning market for mobile discotheques and all the attendant gear.
Such emotional subtlety to almost anything Steve Gurley touches
The other versions - nice 'n' slinky Ray Keith (+ Nookie) work-over
in two parts
and then the Shades of Rhythm version, the "Hard"
Halfway through there's the pleasant surprise - what the Nuumologist lives for - of the Rufige Cru "Menace" diva sample appearing. Here it's much closer to its original speed of the Urban Soul source track, rather than the ooh-oohing whipped-soulcream of "Menace", that gaseous bliss-overdose
Still pretty woozy bliss in the original but as the whisked-up tempo drops down, the Urban Soul diva is revealed to be a dude
Back to Shades of Rhythm - where oh where is the "Peace Sign (Classic Piano Mix)"?
Fun and fascinating - with fabulous fotos - Danceteria oral history by Joy Press, aka the missus, who was a regular at the legendary New York club in the 1980s.
Everyone from Madonna and Fab 5 Freddy to Marc Almond and Johnny Rotten to Beastie Boys and Butthole Surfers (worth reading the whole article just for the "piss wand" story) makes an appearance.
Something in the air clearly - in freaky synchrony the final Soft Cell album is titled Danceteria, while Madonna has a single out called "Danceteria". Joy was working on this story for months before discovering these unexpected pegs for the piece.
"John Sex was singing there..."
(and in reference to the late Anita Sarko who deejayed at Danceteria)
“I said to Anita, ‘Play me what I want to hear’ / She said, ‘Dear, I’m not a DJ I’m an atmosphere engineer.’”
"Everybody here is a work of art"
Here's a real-time tribute by Soft Cell, shaped by their New York clubland adventures, when they hooked up with a character called Cindy Ecstasy. She has a spoken-word on the re-recorded version of "Memorabilia" that appeared on Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing. This was one of the very first remix albums, alongside The Human League's Love and Dancing (released under the alias The League Unlimited Orchestra) and The B-52s Party Mix!
Really like the echo-chambered horn section on this, which reminds me a bit of "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone"
"Memorabilia" is much more in the zone of avant-funkers like 23 Skidoo and A Certain Ratio than the Northern Soul meets Suicide smashes that made Soft Cell pop stars.
Later Almond - veering away from the overlit pop world to the arty dark demimonde - would perform at Danceteria as part of the Immaculate Consumptive, an abject cabaret revue involving Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and Clint Ruin.
Had Instagram for ages and ages but never got into looking at it regularly until quite recently.... the algorithm quickly learned to serve me up dance music, as that's what I'd linger on. So what I get is an endless succession of reels of deejays playing tunes, either in their living room, or it's clips of them performing at a rave.
Occasionally there'll be one where a DJ or producer talks about a classic track, either their own or someone else's - breaking down its sample constituents, naming its breaks, or talking about the gear used to make it. I also get a fair number of haggard record collectors type sitting in their 'record room' pulling out obscure library or soundtrack LPs, or Old Wave cult items, and mumbling about them.
But what follows here are some thoughts on dance music today informed entirely by the Instagram perspective.
TimeisNOTnow
I say ‘dance music today', but the first thing that comes across on Instagram is not-todayness: how dance music exists in a state of complete atemporality. Tunes from decades ago sit alongside current tracks that are either incrementally different contributions to a long established and overcrowded tradition (techno, house, D&B, trance) or they are outright retro (with just a glisten of contemporary production polish sprucing up the time travel). Deejays draw from across these huge reserves of material, where the long-ago and the this-minute are equally valid.
There's a tremendous awareness of history - a lot of clips are like ultra-brief history lessons, on a genre or a sound (like say Reese bass) or an auteur (DJ Zinc just today did a great little potted history of three key tracks by A Guy Called Gerald). Yet offsetting that historical awareness, the overall effect of the platform interface for users is that chronology gets completely jumbled. There's little sense of a tune's original context (let alone adversarial context) or its place in historical sequence: the platform makes everything current.
What has completely vaporized is the idea that anything is obsolete or passé. Everything exists in a permanent plateau of equal relevance - which has the side effect of making it impossible for any one sound (should an actually fully new sound ever emerge) to assert itself as supremely relevant and demanding of your undivided attention. Indeed, you could say that our attention is pre-divided, splayed across both an enormously expanded and accessible present and a teeming archival vastness that feels vertiginously limitless. Anything that is new and different, like say amapiano, has to fight against, fights its way through, all this quality music arrayed before our ears.
An example of how these syndromes play out.
The gentleman who calls himself Fish56Octagon - and who deejays in his front room wearing a dressing gown (I'm always expecting it to come open as he jigs about, genitals bouncing forth) and often is nibbling on his breakfast, which appears to be Weetabix bits in what looks like a dog's bowl - played a nu-UKG tune on this label:
Timeisnow
Sub-label of Shall Not Fade, specialising in UK bass-driven dance music styles.
Established 2019. Bristol, UK.
The record has a period-perfect title, Bubblers EP, and the sound is spot-on
According to Mr Fish, this labels and others like it have pushed nu-UKG to the point where deejays playing it are getting major sets at festivals all around the world.
And this makes me queasy.... for all the reasons you can imagine. Like what happened to supercession? The dialectic of dance? Fanatical focus?
(Mr Fish picks from a huge range of genres and as a working deejay either jumbles it all up in a set OR plays a set dedicated to a single genre but just as one arrow from his quiver)
Atemporality and historical hyper-awareness has some strange kinks.
Here's a nu-UKG label called Move Silent, and Keymag asks the man behind it why the name: “This is really giving up the secret. Years ago, I had this t-shirt that sold really well, and had the phrase “Move Silent”. It embodies how I operate in life. I’m a big believer in the phrase, “empty vessels make the loudest noises”. “
Which is funny to me because I would have 100 percent assumed otherwise it was a nod to "Bad Boys Move In Silence" - could this dude really not know the foundational UKG track by A Baffled Republic?
(Mind you, I only just realised the line "bad boys move in silence" comes originally from Notorious B.I.G.)
Another label Shadow System, the guy behind first heard UKG from his dad playing it!
(Reminds me of another reel I saw recently, a young kid playing "hardcore jungle" - and the text reads: "When ur dad’s in the crowd so you gotta blend in his favorite tune from back in the day")
Some of these nu-UKG labels are as far flung as Finland and Houston, Texas.
So it's not just atemporalized, dance music, it's really postgeographicalized too - unrooted from any location socially and spatially.
Well not completely - in the Keymag article, one of the Finnish nu-UKG dudes (the label is Polar Dance) says:
"I’ve been cutting icicles from roofs because when you snap it off, it makes an amazing sound rhythmically. There is a traditional Finnish instrument called a kantele, which is like a sitar. I've been trying to use it on some tracks as well."
The Keymag writer Nathan Evans notes of the Houston nu-UKG bods:
"Aside from the way they literally went back in time with a black mask and comically large knit sack and stole from the Nice ‘N’ Ripe mixing desk, what struck me about Houston’s UKG is how there is even a label pressing limited-run vintage garage vinyl at all. It speaks to shockwaves of the revival, that’s enough to traverse space and time simultaneously."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Another new-to-me genre has popped up in these reels - not the living room ones but the (usually female deejay) playing to a big room.
The name of this genre is schranz. It designates - I assume onomatopeia-cally in German - a sort of hard, fast, banging techno with a scrapy, dirtily abrasive sound.
I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the term has existed since the late '90s, albeit very much a local-to-Germany term, associated with Chris Liebing… and it appears to have crept forward gradually to some kind of larger semantic currency without ever really taking off.
I listened to a Chris Liebing associated album (Metalism) the other day and thought it was rather good - and then with a shock realized it was over 20 years old.
The female deejays playing hard as nails tekkkno brings me to InstaGrammatological observation number 2
DJ as showman not shaman
The hyper-visibility of social media and the influencerization of dance has turned deejaying into a performance style rather than a technical craft - or rather the craft aspect of working the deck has itself become spectacularized.
In these clips - at home alone as much as in front of a crowd - the deejays are really working those mixer controls. They are dancing while mixing and whooping it up - as if the jock was a punter rather than a punter-pleaser. The etiquette of deejaying has vastly changed from back in the day when jocks were still figures, impassive and grave as they went about their work, their sobriety in marked contrast to the abandon of the revelers, as if to say "this is serious work, I'm a professional." Deejays never danced; their job was to make others dance. But nowadays deejays performatively flaunt their own pleasure, erasing the distance between the professionals and the crowd. If female, they are usually glammed up and often scantily dressed - blurring the roles of deejay and podium dancer.
Male or female, these deejays work the mixer frenziedly, fussily tweaking the EQ knobs and finessing the fader. There is a kind of performative rhetoric where the arms are tensed as they reach for the knob and they pull away the hand and arm after tweaking it with a dramatic flourish. All while jigging around sinuously and often drawing on a cigarette (tense business, deejaying)
But... as far as I can see, little of this flaunted physicality is really necessary - the exertions are extraneous to the modest physical effort that is actually required. It’s all for show - and in that sense similar to, indeed possibly inspired by, the rock guitarist’s gestural repertoire, the expressive pantomime of “guitarface”. You can make massive, devastating noises on the guitar with very small movements, thanks to amplification and effects. You can make them sitting down, as Spacemen 3 proved, without all the strutting or headbanging. And so it used to be used to be with deejaying (often the deejay was nowhere in sight, tucked away in some alcove).
I have seen a few Insta reels that prove my point: here the deejay goes against the norms of hyper-visuality and goes about their work in a low-key sort of way, minus the histrionics. Instead of all that mixological performative hoo-hah, the jock - usually filmed in the domestic space - is subdued, limply moving their arm to tweak the knob and then withdrawing their hand slowly, without any flamboyantly flecked gesture that says "decisive mix move just made"
Also - this happens with the tracky techno and house above all - more often than not I cannot hear any substantial difference made by these decisive moves to change the EQ or cut out a frequency band. It all chugs on much as before without a dramatic change - certainly not a wrenching shift that would require such gestural flourish. Perhaps the very smoothness and seamlessness of the transitioning erases its own achievement?
DJ tools-y techno seems to me to be the most static of artforms, really unchanged in its fundamentals since the late '90s.
