"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
It's nearly always the case that the things that are touted for their supposedly superior musicality, are actually - on inspection - rather meagre, musically speaking.
Timbrally and tonally impoverished.
Especially when compared to the alleged hoi polloi of the day.
Far more startling melody-dissonance clashes and harmonic strangeness to be found in the jungle tekno of the time.
(And we won't even mention the rhythmic shortfall).
But I am preaching to the choir here, no doubt!
"Mondrin" - I assume there's an "a" missing here?
I liked the title of their second full-length effort, which was three years a-comin', Time Tourist but not sure I ever listened to it.
Yet like so many IDM-ers they had a perfectly solid pre-career doing hardcore
Like this moderately entertaining bit of novelty bleep-acid
This one even has a breakbeat-y groove and a mentasmic synth-smear
This has a piano vamp and a nice curl of diva vocal
A blippy chugger with a fairground Waltzer-like riff
Moderately bangin'!
But then within a year or so, they opted for restraint and politesse
Another good title
from a less-good titled EP Retreat from Unpleasant Realities
There's a doc about Victoria Beckham on the streamers (not as engaging as the David Beckham one) and that's my cue to dredge up this moment of genius.
The doc doesn't mention this track - which got to #2 in the charts - at all, but according to the life chronology that the doc follows, this would be from her flailing-around-a-bit period, after the Spice Girls split but before she launched her super-successful fashion and cosmetics business. A time when she was some combo of WAG and celeb-without-portfolio, drifting and dabbling, and mostly just existing to be photographed and to be seen at her husband's side.
But if this is Posh Spice flailing... well, all former pop stars should flail so fabulously!
Listen past the Auto-Tune gloss and it's one of the more avant hit singles in UK chart history.
Truesteppers - Jonny L and Andy Lysandrou - mash up the breaks 'n' bass and the stinging techsteppy stabs, but embed all that Nuummy Nuum stuff in a poptastic setting of nu-R&B meets 2step.
There's a tuffer 12-inch mix for the clubs.
"This tune's gonna punish you..."
A remix by credible UKG artists 10degrees below versus X-Men - not nearly as exciting!
Oh I didn't realise she had another intersection with UK Garage
Todd-ified
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What is funny about "Out of Your Mind" to me is that Andy Lysandrou was, only 7 or 8 years earlier, doing things like this track "Pain" under the name Kid Andy, for his hardcore label Boogie Beat Records, which turns around a huge chunk of "Careless Whispers". I remember ads for this track on the pirates, which was surprising because you rarely had a record advertised on a pirate and if you did, it would be compilation. They must have expected big things of it.
Then come 2000 and the astonishing total takeover of pop by UK Garage, he's no longer cheekily and sneakily lifting a pop star's vocal as a sample, he's able to work directly with Posh - a rough female equivalent of George Michael*, both in scale of fame and also regional / class location (George was from Bushey, Posh grew up in Goffs Oak - Hertfordshire massive, both of them - and self-made middle class).
So actually not really "chav-ant garde" although the hypergloss aesthetic of the clothes and the video is totally lumpen-futurist.
The whole look that Posh and Dane Bowers are rocking is very much a peek ahead to Love Island aesthetics. Which as has been established is entwined with the Nuum to a surprising degree.
*Suddenly struck me that maybe Lysandrou chose the George Michael sample not just because it's so chuneful and well-known but because George was of Greek ancestry - he would have been the most successful Greek-British singer ever, I should think, so perhaps a point of pride.
There was a cluster of Greek Cypriot involvement in nuum, UK clubscene, pirate radio - Nick Power, and influential instigator brother George Power (deejay, cofounder of Kiss FM etc etc).
