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

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"

RIP William Orbit

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.

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

Yikes, "progressive dance". Double-yikes, "prog funk".

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!"

She thinks she must have heard it at Danceteria. 

Mixmag's 15 recent dance music books you should read this summer

  

Thanks to Gemma Ross for including Futuromania in the Mixmag list of summer reading for dance music fiends 

The full list is here, a worthy bunch to sit alongside indeed 

Before the Deejay Was Cool (slight return)

 

From a 1971 issue of Melody Maker

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.