Nuumology and Nameology

For quite a while now, my thinking about the Nuum is that it doesn't really exist anymore, at least as a generative culture-engine....  The new formations stopped coming a while back. Probably the last full-blown paradigm was Funky (although there's some who would say Deep Tech). Many factors here, but the main one would be the eroding away of the infrastructure that supported the heyday succession of sounds - pirate radio, vinyl, record shops. Nowadays music propagates itself immaterially, through internet and social media channels, and the audio is ever more wedded to the video (making it pop, in potential at least, rather than underground). 

What remains of the Nuum is: 

1/ musicians who came up through earlier phases and are still actively making music informed by that phase and/or drawing on other heyday phases.

2/ Nuum as a site of nostalgia and memorialisation (producers making jungle-replica tracks, auntological ardkore etc.... Back to 92 or Back to 2003 events.... this blog, even!) 

3/ half-life traces of Nuum rhythmic patterns or other sonic hallmarks (some argue you can detect these echoes in 2010s-onwards London street sounds like UK drill)

Having been thinking along these lines for approaching a decade now, how surprising it was to see this  sign from the window of a bus in London last month!

What struck me was how utterly Nuumy most of these names are:

Supa D, Coldsteps, Loyal Squad, Dezy B, Wigman, Spidey G.... 

These could easily be UK Garage era names from 25 years ago. 

I looked it up online and the lineup for this Notting Hill Carnival after-party appears to be largely Afrobeats. 

Which would be one place where the "road" audience went in the 2010s.... another would be drill... . 

I don't hear Nuum-traces in Afrobeats particularly, on a sonic or rhythmic level...  

Yet clearly, in terms of  "vibe", there is a continuity, a persistence....  

Assumed names of artists; track titles;  the names of clubs and raves and record labels.... On the face of it, these would seem to be peripheral elements...  yet for me they feel essential and archetypal 

I smiled with recognition, seeing that sign. 

Despite all the infrastructural shifts, the influx of new sonic influences, the sheer passage of time... something is perpetuating itself.... 

via Phil Zone,chunklets of Ozzy Spengler that (if you subtract the raciological aspect) has some aspects to the problem of "intelligence" in music as commonly understood and celebrated in terms of eclecticism / cosmopolitanism / post-genre-ism / rhizo-deterritorialisation/ deracination etc

"What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking consciousness become more and more dangerous....

Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality, are to one another as the countryside in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilisation is nothing but tension. 
 
Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension.... The advance too, from peasant wisdom - "slimness", mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals on the sensed beat of life - through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence - the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation - can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality.

Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by the exercise of thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejeune. The intelligent visage is the same in all races - what is recessive in them is precisely, race.

Replace the word "race" with "genre", or with "tribe-vibe" , and there you have it...

The cities (post-everything music) depend on the countryside (genres / scenes)