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"

Of Instagrammatology

Had Instagram for ages and ages but never got into looking at it regularly until quite recently....  the algorithm quickly learned to serve me up dance music, as that's what I'd linger on. So what I get is an endless succession of reels of deejays playing tunes, either in their living room, or it's clips of them performing at a rave. 

Occasionally there'll be one where a DJ or producer talks about a classic track,  either their own or someone else's - breaking down its sample constituents, naming its breaks, or talking about the gear used to make it. I also get a fair number of haggard record collectors type sitting in their 'record room' pulling out obscure library or soundtrack LPs, or Old Wave cult items, and mumbling about them.

But what follows here are some thoughts on dance music today informed entirely by the Instagram perspective.

TimeisNOTnow

I say ‘dance music today', but the first thing that comes across on Instagram is not-todayness: how dance music exists in a state of complete atemporality.  Tunes from decades ago sit alongside current tracks that are either incrementally different contributions to a long established and overcrowded tradition (techno, house, D&B, trance) or they are outright retro (with just a glisten of contemporary production polish sprucing up the time travel). Deejays draw from across these huge reserves of material, where the long-ago and the this-minute are equally valid. 

There's a tremendous awareness of history - a lot of clips are like ultra-brief history lessons, on a genre or a sound (like say Reese bass) or an auteur (DJ Zinc just today did a great little potted history of three key tracks by A Guy Called Gerald).  Yet offsetting that historical awareness, the overall effect of the platform interface for users is that chronology gets completely jumbled. There's little sense of a tune's original context (let alone adversarial context) or its place in historical sequence: the platform makes everything current.  

What has completely vaporized is the idea that anything is obsolete or passé. Everything exists in a permanent plateau of equal relevance - which has the side effect of making it impossible for any one sound (should an actually fully new sound ever emerge) to assert itself as supremely relevant and demanding of your undivided attention. Indeed, you could say that our attention is pre-divided, splayed across both an enormously expanded and accessible present and a teeming archival vastness that feels vertiginously limitless. Anything that is new and different, like say amapiano, has to fight against, fights its way through, all this quality music arrayed before our ears.

An example of how these syndromes play out.

The gentleman who calls himself Fish56Octagon - and who deejays in his front room wearing a dressing gown (I'm always expecting it to come open as he jigs about, genitals bouncing forth) and often is nibbling on his breakfast, which appears to be Weetabix bits in what looks like a dog's bowl -   played a nu-UKG tune on this label: 

Timeisnow

Sub-label of Shall Not Fade, specialising in UK bass-driven dance music styles.

Established 2019. Bristol, UK.

The record has a period-perfect title, Bubblers EP, and the sound is spot-on

According to Mr Fish, this labels and others like it have pushed nu-UKG to the point where deejays playing it are getting major sets at festivals all around the world.  

And this makes me queasy....  for all the reasons you can imagine. Like what happened to supercession? The dialectic of dance? Fanatical focus? 

(Mr Fish picks from a huge range of genres and as a working deejay either jumbles it all up in a set OR plays a set dedicated to a single genre but just as one arrow from his quiver)

Atemporality and historical hyper-awareness has some strange kinks.

Here's a nu-UKG label called Move Silent, and Keymag asks the man behind it why the name: “This is really giving up the secret. Years ago, I had this t-shirt that sold really well, and had the phrase “Move Silent”. It embodies how I operate in life. I’m a big believer in the phrase, “empty vessels make the loudest noises”. “

Which is funny to me because I would have 100 percent assumed otherwise it was a nod to  "Bad Boys Move In Silence" - could this dude really not know the foundational UKG track by A Baffled Republic? 

 (Mind you, I only just realised the line "bad boys move in silence" comes originally from Notorious B.I.G.)

Another label Shadow System, the guy behind first heard UKG from his dad playing it!

(Reminds me of another reel I saw recently, a young kid playing "hardcore jungle"  - and the text reads: "When ur dad’s in the crowd so you gotta blend in his favorite tune from back in the day")

Some of these nu-UKG labels are as far flung as Finland and Houston, Texas.  

So it's not just atemporalized, dance music, it's really postgeographicalized too - unrooted from any location socially and spatially. 

Well not completely  - in the Keymag article, one of the Finnish nu-UKG dudes (the label is Polar Dance) says: 

"I’ve been cutting icicles from roofs because when you snap it off, it makes an amazing sound rhythmically. There is a traditional Finnish instrument called a kantele, which is like a sitar. I've been trying to use it on some tracks as well."

The Keymag writer Nathan Evans notes of the Houston nu-UKG bods: 

"Aside from the way they literally went back in time with a black mask and comically large knit sack and stole from the Nice ‘N’ Ripe mixing desk, what struck me about Houston’s UKG is how there is even a label pressing limited-run vintage garage vinyl at all. It speaks to shockwaves of the revival, that’s enough to traverse space and time simultaneously."

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

Another new-to-me genre  has popped up in these reels - not the living room ones but the (usually female deejay) playing to a big room.

The name of this genre is schranz. It designates - I assume onomatopeia-cally in German - a sort of hard, fast, banging techno with a scrapy, dirtily abrasive sound. 

I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the term has existed since the late '90s, albeit very much a local-to-Germany term, associated with Chris Liebing… and it appears to have crept forward gradually to some kind of larger semantic currency without ever really taking off. 

I listened to a Chris Liebing associated album (Metalism) the other day and  thought it was rather good - and then with a shock realized it was over 20 years old. 

The female deejays playing hard as nails tekkkno brings me to InstaGrammatological observation number 2

DJ as showman not shaman

The hyper-visibility of social media and the influencerization of dance has turned deejaying into a performance style rather than a technical craft - or rather the craft aspect of working the deck has itself become spectacularized.

In these clips - at home alone as much as in front of a crowd - the deejays are really working those mixer controls. They are dancing while mixing and whooping it up -  as if the jock was a punter rather than a punter-pleaser. The etiquette of deejaying has vastly changed from back in the day when jocks were still figures, impassive and grave as they went about their work, their sobriety in marked contrast to the abandon of the revelers,  as if to say "this is serious work, I'm a professional."  Deejays never danced; their job was to make others dance. But nowadays deejays performatively flaunt their own pleasure, erasing the distance between the professionals and the crowd. If female, they are usually glammed up and often scantily dressed - blurring the roles of deejay and podium dancer.

Male or female, these deejays work the mixer frenziedly, fussily tweaking the EQ knobs and finessing the fader. There is a kind of performative rhetoric where the arms are tensed as they reach for the knob and they pull away the hand and arm after tweaking it with a dramatic flourish. All while jigging around sinuously and often drawing on a cigarette (tense business, deejaying)

But... as far as I can see,  little of this flaunted physicality is really necessary - the exertions are extraneous to the modest physical effort that is actually required.  It’s all for show - and in that sense similar to, indeed possibly inspired by, the rock guitarist’s gestural repertoire, the expressive pantomime of “guitarface”. You can make massive, devastating noises on the guitar with very small movements, thanks to amplification and effects. You can make them sitting down, as Spacemen 3 proved, without all the strutting or headbanging. And so it used to be used to be with deejaying (often the deejay was nowhere in sight, tucked away in some alcove).

I have seen a few Insta reels that prove my point: here the deejay goes against the norms of hyper-visuality and goes about their work in a low-key sort of way, minus the histrionics. Instead of all that mixological performative hoo-hah, the jock - usually filmed in the domestic space - is subdued, limply moving their arm to tweak the knob and then withdrawing their hand slowly, without any flamboyantly flecked gesture that says "decisive mix move just made"

Also - this happens with the tracky techno and house above all - more often than not I cannot hear any substantial difference made by these decisive moves to change the EQ or cut out a frequency band. It all chugs on much as before without a dramatic change - certainly not a wrenching shift that would require such gestural flourish. Perhaps the very smoothness and seamlessness of the transitioning erases its own achievement?  

DJ tools-y techno seems to me to be the most static of artforms, really unchanged in its fundamentals since the late '90s.

Let's Not Push Things Forward

 

A celebrated remix of The Streets's "Turn the Page"

What its existence would seem to demonstrate, though, is inability to turn the page of this particular book of history. 

(What you'd want, really, is not even a new chapter, but a whole new volume).

But this is Overmono whose debut album Good Lies was hailed by the Guardian as “UK rave history... distilled to perfection” 

I'm trying to think who would've been the equivalent in rock  - when this stage of "history" getting  "distilled to perfection" would have got underway..

Oasis seems too obvious, and also belated... I feel like the process was well underway by the mid-Eighties.

You'd probably have to wind it back to earlier in the (re)Creation arc - to Primal Scream

All that said, listening to Good Lies for the first time, I'm enjoying it. There's cleverness, there's craft, it's made up out of or in reference to things I already reverence... but the echoes, allusions and twists are subtly done. In a certain sense, what's not to like?  

I was always a bit more vulnerable to the appeal of "record collection rock" than I would have liked. I couldn't quite ever be as stern about it as Mark Fisher. 

Still, it's an odd thing  - given that the foundational principle of the culture is F-FWD - to listen to this 

Apart from the overall sound quality -  clean and crisp in a 2023 upgraded sort of way - there is nothing about this track that would sound out of place in 2000. It sounds like Groove Chronicles.  

I mean, maybe the wibbly synth wouldn't have been there but it could have been, if GC had wanted it to be. 

Surging styles become settled styles.

Bit like how groups operating today can be described as - can describe themselves as - "postpunk". 

It's a stable, if not utterly static, form - akin to the blues, or folk. 

yet already flashbacking in 2009 to 2004?

This "Dubstep Heritage" series only got to two episodes!

this is really good....




but I am having difficulties in establishing in my mind in what ways precisely it is different from the music being made circa 1998-2000


these are also really good....

but again I am having difficulties in establishing in my mind in what ways precisely they are different from the music being made circa 1997-2000

they are different, but it's the gloss and thickness of the music mainly, the size of the production, an illusion of expense (rendered meaningless because everybody can access that level of deluxe now)... perhaps increments in the intricacy of detail and sculpting

but substantially, at the level of structuration, of bones - this is a music that has already been and gone, that had its Moment....

its return (embraced, apparently, by young people, by young people in America particularly) as if it were new, with seemingly no awareness that it actually is a return... a reversion to a superceded stage

speaks to the disappearance of  the dialectic in dance music (aka FWD>>>, aka the modernist logic of supercession)

and its replacement by a new anachronic logic - "two steps back, one step sideways" (two steps sideways if you're lucky)

which counts for the uncanny feeling of contemporaneity and recapitulation,  nowness but not newness, when listening to things like Disclosure

(but of course I'm recapitulating myself here, aren't I... dunno, just get freshly amazed-fascinated-perplexed-disoriented by the phenomenon, each time I collide with it)

Leaving Earth's Taninian with a counter view of UK bass, or as he prefers, post-step, to that  argued by Musings's Dominic /Datwun

(it's a follow-up to a much earlier  this year post on post(dub)step - dude posts irregularly but at great length and depth when he does)

these two posts add up to a surprising ideological swerve (basically embracing the Harper/Muggs position) from a chap who even earlier (May) last year was enthusing so infectiously and authoritatively about wobble...  but then again I suppose there's no rule that you have to pick sides between brostep and post(dub)step - indeed while ideologically I'm firmly on the wobble-bro side, in terms of day to day listening I probably listen more to the post_ stuff (but as I said in the earlier post here, that's because it's more compatible with the way I use music, maybe)

still I hope he won't disappoint me further by penning encomiums to vapidwave and cloud rap ;)


To the claims ventured in the latest post, on behalf of the post-....      

the parallel with postpunk can only go so far, I think, because what This Heat, Pere Ubu, Raincoats et al had was an expressive intent and communicative urgency that is simply absent with this posteverything digitronica--  with the postpunk bands, that urgency relates to the individual vision of the artists (their personalities, temperaments, biographies), but also to the fact that even at its most extreme postpunk was nearly always a song-based and lyric-based form that could support "saying stuff".... also, further, it relates to the wider contextual Geist of postpunk as a movement and a cause, carrying with it a moral imperative to communicate, challenge,  oppose, etc ... and moreover its belief that this was possible (postpunk coming not just after  punk, but as its fulfilment / intensification / dialectical next stage)...    .

none of these things apply with post-step, which seems to be about complexity and convolution for complexity and convulotion's sake.... a very pure form of music, in that sense -- but what that means is that it stands or falls on A/  just how experimental /sonically mindblowing you actually find it to be, and B/ how much you value experimentalism/aural-weirdness for their own sake 

in terms of B/ when it comes to dance that's just one of several metrics for me, several considerations -- and in terms of A/ well i'm still processing his many many recommendations (man, the guy's a digger, a chaser!).... for now can't quite hear the  "uncontrolled upsurge of revolutionary modernism" he's talking about...  seems more like Lisa Blanning's verdict on Night Slugs as a mixture not a direction -- i.e. stuck in that zone of addition (this + that + the other) and never quite makes it to the multiplication stage (this x that x the other = ?!%#$?@!?!)

BUT some of the stuff -- taken as an aggregate of established power-moves -- is pretty fucking exciting


i do like the ravey swoops and smears in this 

and in this one 

which almost has a PCP gloomcore feel but with friskier beats -- that oddly and cleverly combine a feeling of monolithic and polyrhythmic -- the effect at once cluttered and slammin'

i think he sells it slightly short by calling it post-step - it doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with Objekt and Hessle and Kimbie and all that abstrusity

the stuff he's celebrated does seems to be constructed around a dancefloor of the mind's ear (whereas postdubstep is increasingly abstracted from any body/crowd scenario)

i'd be tempted to call it ravestep if that wasn't almost as lame a word as post-step

Interesting state-of-dance overview by Philip Sherburne over at Spin. 

It starts with the idea that "we've reached peak dubstep, folks"..(And after Bieber and Muse have hijacked the rhythmic undercarriage and bolted What They Do on top -- and not uneffectively, either, although in Bieber's case the song and the substructure seem to bear no real relation to each other beyond adjacence for the duration of the single-- that would be seem to be a logical and inevitable development). And then Phil points to how that's left a gap in the aesthetic-ideological market that's yet to be filled: "a vacuum in electronic dance music's whirling vortex, contributing to a nagging sense of rudderlessness throughout the year."

"Despite the rise of trap, there wasn't really anything to take dubstep's place as dance music's Next Big Thing. And it didn't feel like there was anything new on the horizon — at least, not a "scenius"-level newness, a collective movement towards something greater than the humdrum now. Everything kept getting bigger, but behind the breathless boosterism of overground and underground alike, there was a sense of spinning wheels. Economists have a word for this: "Stagflation."

Ah, stagflation. Now this was a term that I really wanted to work into Retromania , in the conclusion chapter when I wheel out the concept of hyperstasis. Partly in hopes of tightening the rather loose economic/finance-capital analogies I'd made, but also simply because it's such an ugly word.  But in the end I went with the trope of "ever accelerating circles."

Phil continues:

"Legacy genres like house, techno, drum and bass, and trance soldiered on, as they must. No slight to them; just as Japandroids proved the enduring pleasures of back-to-basics rock’n’roll, there was no shortage of if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it classicism in dance music, particularly in that nameless space between underground and overground." 

I love this term "legacy genre", and the more general use of  "legacy" as an adjectival noun, which I've seen cropping up increasingly in the last year or so.  One of those vague but evocative terms that does the job in  an open-ended sort of way.  Perhaps it has some business world or media world usage I'm unaware of, to do with branding or marketing or something like that  ...  but the idea I get from its use in a music context is "established, time-honoured, with a history behind it". A history that then becomes capable of being revisited.

So the transition from emergent genre to legacy genre is the very threshold at which retro becomes possible, in all its permutations (commemorative releases, oral histories, reissues, revivals, homages etc).

In between though there must be a stage of reasonable duration where the genre is neither unknown nor over-familiar but is in its prime: freshly accepted, but still surprising, still growing. Perhaps that corresponds to what some call the Imperial Phase (usually with an artist not a genre:  when a group or performer is at at the top of the world AND the top of their game, creatively -- just runnin' tings). 

"Legacy" is  a nice way of saying "old news". Which is a way of saying, "something you can't be an early adopter with, because you're too late, mate". For journalists, "legacy" also means: hard to get an assignment to write about in magazines, apart from specialist publications. ("What's the story, here? "Techno, Still Pretty Good"?!?!)

Perhaps when a genre reaches the legacy phase, it has a history behind it - but it can no longer make history. Its normalisation -- its acceptance -- is both its triumph and its downfall, because it's just part of the landscape now. 

(Is there a subtle difference between "legacy" and "heritage"? Legacy perhaps leaves open some kind of functionality in the present ("a living legacy"), an ongoing state of relative vitality, the mature refinement and perfection of the already-formulated. "Heritage" just seems to suggest a museum culture, a style of music to be documented, studied,  memorialized preserved - propped up with reverence. 

Perhaps they correspond to stages of life....

emergent / childhood-teenage
imperial / young adulthood-thirtysomething
legacy / middle age 
heritage / old age )



Back to the Phil S piece: somewhat contradicting the "rudderlessness" accusation made at the start of the article, he tacks to a more positive view of hyperstasis as a roil of endlessly morphing  nano-generic possibility - the Harper position, basically, but really a glass half-full view of the exact same condition seen as glass half-empty by such as moi:

"Outside the EDM bubble, deep in the underground — the realm of boutique labels, small-cap rooms, and idiosyncratic festivals — lo-fi textures, counterintuitive structures, and a general disregard for convention resulted in some of the year's most exciting electronic and dance music. Genres mattered less and less. House and techno and the broken beats of what we've settled on calling "bass music" ... kept getting more and more tangled up. There was no one sound that felt new, just a steady stream of short, sharp shocks that pulled the rug out from under dancers' feet, and forced them to think and move in new ways."

"It's been an intriguing year for fans of dancefloor music especially: where previously it was possible to pick out definite wider trends running through club floors, what's been most striking about 2012 has been its almost total lack of anything concrete to hang on to. Instead the most exciting music has come from the margins. Certain common tendencies have seen a lot of activity - the crossover region where noise and techno overlap has continued to produce some fascinating music - but individual artists working within those regions tend to be ploughing their own distinct furrow rather than engaging with any larger narrative. Which is great; at the moment these regions (tentatively approached by people discussing 'outsider dance', 'technoise' and so forth) feel fragile and fertile enough that they're best allowed to find their own paths." -- Rory Gibbs on the year in dance over at Quietus

a scene based around borderzones and solitary trajectories seems a bit entropic to me... at once congested but lacking the heft of converged energy....

still Rory's right about that Container album, ruff - this isn't even the fiercest track on it but it's all that's on YouTube

looking at this column and also the FACT albums of the year, i'm struck by the sort of unconscious collective decision not to even cursorily inspect EDM (or the bro-y / wobbly sectors of dubstep)... same total blanking towards all that electrohouse/digimax stuff out there...  it is assumed, i presume, to be beneath consideration ... but (being massively popular and all!) it would appear to be THE "definite wider trend", the "anything concrete" that Rory says is absent 


made me wonder,  is anybody listening to it (EDM/electrohouse/bro) and assessing it critically, or is this a scene without a discourse around it?  (meaning serious in-depth writing rather than online likes and chitchat and YouTube comments)

weeeeeeell there is this magazine that I saw in Target the other week - Elektro  - launched earlier this year

Has artists like Swedish House Mafia. Tiesto, Guetta,  on the cover...  inside acts like Boys Noize, Zedd, Bassnectar, Martin Solveig

yes the covers are quite shuddersome...

Gingerly picking one up I scanned through and did not recognise a single byline -- nobody in the electronic music journalism field, or the blogosphere that i'd come across before, anyway -- suggesting perhaps they are recruiting young ... from the generation that's embraced EDM and that doesn't, perhaps, know or care much about the history that informs the kind of writing done in FACT/Resident Advisor

I was going to say "an American Mixmag" but Mixmag always had (when I read it, which is 90s, anyway) a bunch of good writers (and a couple of great ones: Bethan Cole, Tony Marcus), these were informed, knowledgeable, scene-insider folk...   so maybe the proper analogy is with that magazine that Ministry started (called Ministry? i forget, which is my brain doing its job). I.e. shrewd investors spotting a gap in the suddenly swelling market.

A random swatch of text from the Elektro website, picked because it's one of the few convergences with FACT/Hyperspecific/etc world...

"Coming soon on Hot Flush Recordings (December 10th) is UK producer, Scuba’s new track “Hardbody.” This brand new production is a deep-house single that showcases Scuba’s ability to create clean and effective dance tracks. “Hardbody” focuses on Scuba’s layering, bringing together multiple electronic effects, resulting in a dancefloor banger that is built for the sound systems of the world’s biggest dance clubs. With this impressive production, Scuba is set for big things in the dance music world."

perhaps unfair to judge this (presumably this is more news item, than a review? ) against the FACT and RA's of the world....

next time I'm in Target I'll take a proper look... 

(i suppose it's interesting that it takes print form at all -- given that its target market probably are totally digitalized and smartphone / PC / tablet oriented )