Of Instagrammatology (slight return) (the eternal returns of....)

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. 

The whole mix is full of deja vu / 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.)

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

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

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"