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"
10 comments:
Was the revolutionary potential of dance music in the 90s always an illusion? Was it co-opted from without by malign forces or did it always contain the potential to become a commodity as interesting as white bread (surely acid house is the white bread of dance music). I guess a Marxist might say it was always a bourgeois movement despite its working class trappings and thus was counterrevolutionary. I don't know about that. As an Old who lived through the 90s, it felt like more than that to me and my memories intensify every year. It is indeed depressing to see what it is and represents now. Even the brief flickering of underground rave pre-COVID in places like NYC seemed more like cosplay and conscious re-enactment of ancient rituals, like a tribute band to a prior revolutionary movement, or a cargo cult.
I recently heard that Leopold Aschenbrenner, the 24 year old ex-OpenAI employee whose AGI-focused hedge fund recently imploded, had a "Berghain-themed" room at his wedding. Dance music has become the soundtrack for the would-be ruling class - even if it had revolutionary potential, that energy is now turned against the people.
The future of the 80's and 90's was the last time we had a future. The future of now just lies in the past.
I keep coming back to a distinction I’ve been working with: a genre can be transmitted, a style can be prolonged, but a threshold is crossed only once.
Acid, jungle, UK garage or gabber can all return, mutate and remain powerful, but that is different from the historical moment when the vocabulary itself was still unstable and nobody quite knew what it was becoming. Your idea of “hyperstasis” gets very close to that distinction: the forms remain mobile, while the underlying historical rupture cannot simply be replayed.
Re. Berghain themed room at the techbro's wedding - I was just watching a drama series based on that crypto-currency dude Sam Bankman-Fried and in one scene they have a big celebration (can't remember if it's anniversary of launch, or going public) and it's a big EDM rave with every dancer waving fluoro inflatables
Also the rave in Succession in some deep chamber under a railway bridge
Also the role of clubbing and hard-as-nails drug-monster techno in Industry...
I mean I can remember people from the City or top barristers that you would seen in clubs back in the day or in a place like Trade, but it felt more like they had been captured by the culture, rather than the culture had been captured by them
Yeah the threshold crossed... I am biased in favor of emergence.
But I think that bias is dying out, or doesn't compute for younger generations. In part because they've not experienced the sensation much, but also because of the atemporal simultaneity of everything.
If you try to reinvoke that idea, you can come across like the character in "Losing My Edge" who insists they were there, at all these critical junctures of breakthrough
When I teach, I am continually trying to convey that things that are familiar to my students didn't always exist. I'll be saying "I'm old enough to remember a time before rap". Suddenly, there was rap. Before, there wasn't. Same with punk, same with rave.... I can't really tell if it computes for them. I sense a scepticism.
(Historical revisonism also works to erode this, because you can point to all the proto-punk precursors to Punk.... there are many things that anticipate rapping, if you want to play that game... Last Poets, Bo Diddley, but even further - blues, the dozens etc)
Genre creation is basically dead. Everything is just a micro variation of a variation. The last new genre/subculture was probably Vaporwave? Scenes popping up in a specific geographic location or city where everyone is learning from each other and trying to one up each other -- that is surely dead. It happened on the internet with genres like cloud rap and vaporware, but in the last six years or so, it seems like we have truly reached the end of the new. So much of this has to do with the stagnation of technology. There hasn't been an innovative new piece of hardware, software, or plugin in over a decade. Hard to create new sounds when they most likely have all already been created.
I'd argue that the dance sounds coming out of South Africa are genuinely of the New, but they are also coming from a specific cultural context that is stripped in the export process, denuding them into the same atemporal mix.
I think the precursor problem actually helps sharpen the distinction. A threshold needn't mean “without antecedents”. You can trace punk backwards through proto-punk, or rap through the Last Poets, Bo Diddley, the dozens, etc., indefinitely.
What might distinguish a threshold is contemporary category instability: the practice exists before the vocabulary around it has settled. Competing names, disputed boundaries, records or events that don't quite fit the existing bins. In that sense the evidence shouldn't depend on having “been there” at all; it ought to be recoverable from flyers, charts, shops, fanzines, interviews, etc.
Darkside into jungle seems a good small test case: not unprecedented materials, but a period in which the thing was moving faster than the category that would eventually contain it.
So perhaps the threshold isn't where genealogy breaks. It's where classification temporarily fails...
The wot-you-call-it phase!
Semantic interregnum. Cognitive paralysis.
Don’t know where to put this so wanted to tell Simon that Skanna “Night Stalker” has been made available on streaming and hoooooolllly shit what a cut
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