"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
Showing posts with label HARDCORE CONTINUUM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HARDCORE CONTINUUM. Show all posts
... and the countless clips of scanty-clad female deejays jiggling as they performatively tweak the knobs
... driving huge crowds inexplicably wild with the tame-old same-old sounds of an endless, extending-into-perpetuity 90s (and not even the good parts of the '90s!)...
in amongst all that, you do come across some nerdily informative reels of a historical bent on Instagram
Such as the triffic little micro-essays done by DJ Zinc, where he'll break down the technology and techniques used in a classic track, enumerate the samples and the breaks... position the track in the unfolding dialectic of the nuum.... maybe even have a tale about where and when it was made and how long it took (usually a matter of hours) ... and often he'll throw in a few personal memories of first-hearing or first-playing it out himself at the Roller Express or somewhere like that
He did DJ Vibes's "Obsession (Music So Wonderful)" the other day... talking about what it was made of... how it came along at this moment when happy hardcore and jungle had still not yet branched off from each other - such that a tune like "Obsession" could be played alongside "The Dark Stranger", Dougal could do a set in between Randall and Hype.
It reminded me what a teeeeeeeearin' tune it was and is
Seemed to be on the pirates incessantly at one point
I always forget it's called "Obsession", so indelible is the hook "Music So Wonderful" (or is it "Music's So Wonderful" - on the original track by Vivian Lee it's definitely "Music's")
But it's aptly titled, it does have a feverishly obsessed feel - that fixated-feeling 4/4/ that comes in every so often before the breaks take over completely
Along with the Think and the Amen and the Vivian Lee vocal and the T99 noise, Zinc indicates a chunk of Alec Empire's "You Must Confront" in there - the doomy horn-like fanfare-blare.
Zinc also had a bit of an exclusive: some prototype artwork for the Asylum label shared by Vibes - mockups done by an artist called Deano or probably more likely Dino (can't trust the AI captioning)
Fault-less - very-nearly-convincing as time travel
The artwork by one AROE is very in the wildstyle of DJ Trax early releases on Moving Shadow
release rationale
"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a ’92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP’s and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".
On the label Rave Radio Records - a hub of epigonic action
I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?
The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!
Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point.
People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity....
Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze. When you factor in the international factor.
Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music.
You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point...
Convergence of new-olds - here's a nu-gaze group who have gone so far as to take inspiration from the junglistic portions of MBV's 2013 mbv i.e. the bits that would have been the follow up to Loveless
It almost does supply what never actually existed ie. the bang-on-timely jungle-influenced album MBV could conceivably have put out in 1993 or 94
Somehow missed this - from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set
release irrationale
The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.
Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides...
Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It’s a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.
If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down... dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity
SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture’s, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF’s Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture’s work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.
SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.
Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork - Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:
Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw’s Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica’s back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.
A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I’d drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.
One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D’s Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek’s The Water Margin, and Intense’s The Quickening.
During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.
There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF’s 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There’s enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.
Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.
The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles’ 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.
The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle’s genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle’s Johnny, Subnation’s Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer’s Ricky–a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine ‘Somewhere About Town’.
The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM’s DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It’s well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.
Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a ‘first aid kit’, packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn’t take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he’d remind his groggy listeners that it was “time to draw for the First Aid Kit,” creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn’t get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was “a bridge too far,” but if they made it, Jinx would say, “taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton.” Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More (“What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!”), and end with his signature send-off: “Seeeeeeeeee ya!”
I ended up getting my own Sunday morning show on Rude FM 88.2 in the early 2000s, and I often thought of Jinx and my love for his Sunday morning show. In some ways, this study influenced how I approached my own show—not so much in the presentation or music selection, but in understanding the audience and their needs at that time of the morning. The Sunday morning pirate radio aesthetic is something I first referenced on the original 0860 album in the track First Aid Kit, and this tin full of goodies for Slow860 strengthens the bonds, further connects the dots and adds to the lineage of the Hardcore Continuum.
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Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie"
That's from over ten years ago)
Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality
This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"
Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat
Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick
Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew.
release rationale:
I’ve been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn’t know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.
Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG’s London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the “we got the vibes, yo” lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I’m grinning from ear to ear.
Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London’s legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.
Fast forward 30 years, and I’m in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I’ve always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I’ve been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.
Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It’s a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour!
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The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit
Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania
Sourced in "It's Over" by The Funk Master - main sample is at 1.56 - "not a little girl anymore / used to be the one I adore / but there's plenty more fish in the sea / for meee".
Also used is "too many times you made the plunder by tellin' me / You'll be with me"
Amazing how Chris Mack turns that "be with me" into this sensually sinister loop...
Vocal science! Vocal sorcery!
The mood and feel of the original is completely transformed
The track's slinky-and-twitchy production is incredible: a sort of sublime fussiness, a palsied panache.
Those dramatic slashes of.... strings? .... are like intensifications of the way staccato strings are used in Chic to slice across the soundscape.
It's avant-pop where the avant and the pop are equally strong
Flipside also fabulous
What do you know, the Funk Master tune was actually a Top Ten hit in the UK
Chris Macfarlane, true hardcore hero and Exhibit A in the Case for Nuumological Continuumity
A playlist I made of his entire uuurrrvvvv (near as dammit anyway - 164 tunes + remixes) running through hardcore, jungle, UKG, 2step
Another series ofLove Island reaches its finale - and finally it's time to unfurl my "Love Island as Mainstream Outpost of the Hardcore Continuum" thesis.
For starters, there is the theme tune.
An instrumental that lies somewhere between UKG and Deep Tech - it sounds a bit like if an Eski-era grime producer decided to make a house track.
Then there's some of the musical guests on the show, who have either been pure Nuum - Craig David - or Nuum-adjacent (Katy B, Tinie Tempah).
The guests chosen often seem to come from around that 2010-2011 moment - which must be when the typical contestant on the show would have been 9 or 10. Perhaps there's a sort of nostalgia appeal for the contestants, a flashback to watching Channel U or listening to your older brother or sister's music. Although quite a few of these artists would have been on the Top of the Pops.
And then there is the fact that Chris & Kem, from the third season of Love Island, revealed an ability to rap in the Talent Show episode of that 2017 season.
This resulted in their recording a not-bad-at-all grime-ish single that incorporates Love Island-slang and which reached #15 in the charts.
"Little Bit Leave It" came out on Relentless, the UK garage label. Nuumtastic!
Stormzy also made a non-musical appearance in the 2017 season, with a video clip apologizing for a tweet about one of the prominent female contestants. He also gave tips to Kem & Chris about their MC-ing technique: "I can give you advice about the raps - you can't use the phones".
Certain contestants over the years have actually been performers in "urban" bands as singers or backing dancers (e.g. Cach, from the winning couple this year).
Well, Marcel - who's been in it twice, through being in an All Stars season - was in Blazin' Squad, a British rap group who scored a bunch of hits. They started out as a garage rap group: their debut release "Standard Flow" came with remixes from DND and Ras Kwarme and Horsepower, on the label Weighty Plates. You can't get much more Nuum Nuum Nuummy than that.
And how about this with rrrrrrrginal junglists Origin Unknown?
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How about that season finale then?
They should really have bent the rules and allowed two girls to count as a couple, given that Toni and Shakira were clearly the stars of the season and theirs is the true love story here.
Toni has the best tone and cadence since Liza Minelli.
In another era, some impresario would have spotted Shakira's incandescenceand whisked her off to Elstree - or more likely, given her gumption, she'd have made her own way to Hollywood, like Cary Grant and other Brits did did. There she'd have been screen-tested and put through the studio system finishing school (what a shame though for elocution to override that delicious accent) and emerged as a star.
If she can half-way act, it could still happen.
More likely, in this day and age, she'll be famous for being herself, a public personality.
With any luck, she'll drift from entertainment into politics and sort out all our problems.
4 Meg Soundboy with some nifty usage of "Can't turn me away" by Sylvia Striplin
Then there's Smokey Joe with a famous vocal lick
The "Special Request" vocal licks are sampled from Shut Up and Dance's "Rest In Peace" - but where did they get them from?
Another iteration of that vocals lick - as well as another, different "special request" - in this Reinforced tune
Those reggae vocal licks from Smokey Joe's "Special Request" et al recur - alongside JVC Force "Strong Island" riffs - in DJ Double G's UKG classic "Special Request"
Ah (bit nuum nummy this) DJ Double G turns out to be DJ Gunshot as in No U Turn, making the same shift as No U Turn becoming Turn U On, but not sticking with the label
Real name Gordon Gummer, a veteran deejay on Don FM and Flex FM
a different "special request" occurs in this track - and the "special" recurs passim
While we're paying tribute to Max, this tune is oddly topical - reusing the "War Inna Babylon" rhythm
Would love to read something really probing on the Anti-Papacy subcurrents in Rasta 'n' roots culture.
Given that Rasta is essentially Afro-Protestant - a Caribbean cousin of the born-again, fundamentalist, Scripture-is-literal-truth offshoots of Calvinism in America - one explanation would be that it is simply sourced in the anti-Catholic paranoia that impregnates Protestantism from the start: the idea that the Church of Rome is an ungodly perversion of true Christianity. It taps into the same wellsprings that led to the anti-Catholic secret societies in 19th Century and early 20th Century America, the nativist newspapers with their fears of an influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, changing the fundamental make-up of the country. At its extreme edge, there were fevered fears of the Pope arriving at the head of a new Armada to conquer the USA.
But perhaps there are some uniquely Jamaican ingredients involved....
I seem to remember reading that at dancehall events to this day (or at least whenever it was I read the piece) you would get anti-Pope shout-outs from the deejay
Here's another Vatican-themed tune - Lee Perry, no Max - about the Conclave itself
Here's a really sharp piece of writing about Lee Perry - specifically his way with a kick drum, but also his whole sono-spiritual project - by Nick Coleman at his Substack. There's also some great outlandish quotes from Scratch from an interview Nick did some time ago.
I am honestly not particularly invested in whether the hardcore continuum, er, continues *
But it is funny - and delightful - that things like this still happen: an amapiano remake by DJ Eastwood of "Cape Fear", the dark garage classic by KMA.
A tune that came out in 1996 - almost 30 years ago!
Blimey, here's an earlier prototype, I think done as a pirate radio show ident. From 1995 - fully 30 years ago!
The mighty original, meaning the record that was actually released
Such a thick, humid, balmy, sticky, swimmy, brimming, subaquatic sound.
Flipside
The mighty follow-up - breakbeat garage but much more enticing than what that term later came to signify
Another dubplate prototype - again a pirate station ident for Six's brother DJ Maddness - his partner in KMA. Track titled "Kaotic Maddness" with the extra 'd' at this point.
Here's a handy playlist I made of the almost complete works and various refixes
And here's one DJ Maddness made that has various oddments in its, some decent remixes they did for various units.
On the basis of "Cape Fear", "Kaotic Madness" and the Re-Con Mission EP, I thought of Six as potentially a Goldie-type auteur. (KMA even did a dubplate track titled "Kemistry").
He certainly talked a good game. (But then it all fizzled out...)
"This is a line to the future"
This stuff does have that soul-smeared edge-of-atonal quality of prime Reinforced, when they were "jazzed" but not yet actually jazzy or jazzual
Here's DJ Maddness operating as a YouTube UKG historian with the series Pirate Chronicles
KMA - just one of those outfits who come along, have their moment, make their contribution.... and then that's it. Operators at that cusp between genius and scenius.
The Nuum is littered with them.
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* on the continuum's continuance and not being that bothered whether it does
It had a really good run there.... 20 years plus... covered a huge amount of ground.... laid down a legacy, comparable in richness and duration to reggae's prime or hip hop's heyday.... to expect another convulsion or major-phase would be almost greedy...
And in truth nothing really seismically major has come along since funky - i.e. fifteen years plus ago.
For sure, there are diasporic tendrils still wriggling out there..... DNA flickers in otherwise completely other genres.
And yes the people who came up during its different phases and are still active, they do "continue" - refining and extending their thing
But for the most part Nuum is now a site of memorialization and archiving (as with the Pirate Chronicles series)
And then there's the much younger artists who extract juice of varying pungency and nutritional content out of fundamentally settled styles that originally emerged out of unfolding dialectical becoming... in much the same ahistorical way that a current band can describe what it does as "postpunk" when it is a/ blatantly not - simply because of chronology, how much has happened in between b/ contra the originating spirit of postpunk.
Some young-people-of-today juice extraction that is fairly blatantly squeezing "Cape Fear"
Jack Marlow's debut album was titled 2002, but the follow up is called Tastes like the 90s, so he appears to be burrowing back in time, before he was born
Talking of retro-UKG, Kieran turned me onto this one, which has a "Cape Fear" vibe to the vocal
"i always feel like UK Hard House has been snubbed from being part of the "hardcore continuum"...... like listen to this and tell me it wasnt massively influenced by jamaican soundsystem culture"
- says someone on Twitter, completely misunderstanding how the nuum works (it's not like a party you're invited or not to invited to... or a club with a strict bouncer - me! - at the door. Hard house is not nuum because they were no hard house pirate radio stations, no MCs or rewinds or dubplates etc etc)
Anyway I love this idea that a random Musical Youth sample is indication, nay proof, of the deep connection between hard house and Jamaican music!
Mind you, it's a pretty exciting track. Reminds me of the Commander Tom "Are Am Eye" killertune - not nuum, but Noom
I heard this the other day for the first in a decade probably and was struck by how Eurorave it was - that Nordic race memory coming through the Dutch / Afrikaans thing
I kinda would like to have liked Hard House more, just cos it's so pillhead lumpenprolekult....but it's a bonebrained stomp too far for me.
Bit like the Liberator squat acid thing - I loved the whole "It's not Intelligent, It's not from Detroit, But it's fucking 'avin it" stance - and probably would have vicariously enjoyed the mad-for-it vibe in a squatrave. But when it comes to actually listening habitually to that kind of thing...
For further poeticism, one track is called "Heaven"
And the other is "Vision"
Here's a nice tune under his alias Code Blue - with more "poetics of air" imagery: "Angels In Rhythm", "Angels in Dub"
The latter, the A-side, is unusually literal in its dubbiness
"Angels" - like heaven - connotative of elevation, ascension, altitude.... purity... serenity... radiance... light and lightness... the ether and the ethereal... the immaterial
"If we want really to know how delicate emotions develop, the
first thing to do... is to determine the extent to which they make
us lighter or heavier. Their positive or negative vertical differential is what
best designates their effectiveness, their psychic destiny. This, then, will be
my formulation of the first principle of ascensional imagination.... all
metaphors, metaphors of height, elevation, depth, sinking, and the fall are the
axiomatic metaphors par excellence. Nothing explains them, and they explain
everything.... These images have amazing power: they govern the dialectic
of enthusiasm and anguish…. It is
impossible to express moral values without reference to the vertical axis.
".... Every valorization is a verticalization"
- Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement
(The French title L'Air et les Songes translates as Air and Reverie, or Air and Reflections - which would be closer to Bachelard's meaning, as he is not talking about the dreams of sleep but of daydreams and poetic contemplation
More aeriality from Justin Cohen, in collaboration with Darren Beale, as Atlas
A "second heaven" !
Not Slipmaster J / Cohen, actually an early alias of Grooverider, but on the Dee Jay Recordings label and with similar ascensional imagery:
From The Vision EP, probably the most known tune in Slipmaster's J slender uuurv is "Symphonic"
Earliest effort, with DJ Crystl
Crystl on the remix tip, with "Angels In Dub"
Justin Cohen - a low-key figure, but clearly - especially with running those labels - a hardcore hero
A while ago Spiro alerted me to this great mix of amapiano from a few year back, this outdoor festival in London called The Originals. He pointed out that while the music didn't have any real connection to the Nuum, the peripherals - the MC-ing - were soaked in the London vibe. And it's true - there are points where the MC chants "oi oi!" just like his ancestors would at the Labrynth in '92.
There's one at 36 mins 55 or so, where the MC asks the crowd "who's a true raver?" and then leads a call-and-response of "oggy oggy oggy, oi oi oi".
Listening again, I noticed another nuumological flicker - it occurs at 31.15 or thereabouts, the MC goes into this chant that sounds like "E come E come alive E come alive" (it might actually be "you come alive you come alive you come alive")
"E come E come alive E come alive" is a nigh-on thirty-year-old catchphrase from this Xenophobia tune "Rushing The House" that was big in '92. I associate it with Spiral Tribe, on account of the Spiral-connected MC Scallywag being on the record. But it was produced by Grant Nelson aka Wishdokta aka the G in N'n'G aka Bump & Flex aka dozens of aliases up and down the length of the nuum from ardkore to 2step.
It recurs again in the Supa D amapiano mix at about 37.15 reworded as "you come alive, I come alive, you come alive, I come alive". Just before, the MC talks about how he feeds off the buzz from the audience and then gives it back to them. The chant "you come alive, I come alive, you come alive, I come alive" crystalizes the feedback-loop between crowd and MC+DJ beautifully.
It's noticeable also that most of the MC-ing is Jamaican flavored in slang and accent - "big up", "pon" etc. And in this next Originals set, lots of "my selector" "wanna reload?", etc
.
Also at 37.57 or so, there's a shout-out to the four quadrants of the city - "North London, South London, West London, East London", flashing back to the opening interpellation in Gant's "Soundbwoy Burial (187 Lockdown Dancehall Mix)"
Echoes of jungle and UKG, in 2023- a quarter-century later. And the whole thing representing yet another of those only-in-London recombinations of the Caribbean, the Black American, and now the African.
Looking up the Originals festival online, I see the slogan: It's A London Thing.
