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. 

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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. 

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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"

jumpstyle versus slumpstyle

Kieran Press-Reynolds with a guest piece at Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor, while the main man takes a vacation. 

It's a report on "the holy hell of cursed jumpstyle" - a zoomer-oriented TikTok-propelled twist to the gabber continuum.  

"vyrval’s ballistic banger is the biggest tune in a growing wave of psychotic jumpstyle music that seems made to express existential fears: technology has gone too far, we’ve broken the world beyond repair, autocratic autobots will soon seize control...  In the comments of the clips that accompany these songs, people write what’s basically apocalyptic science-fiction, imagining grim future scenarios: “Me watching an AI generated video of me doing the most atrocious War crime ever.” The visual aesthetic mirrors the freakiness: unsettling cyber graphics are superimposed on neon landscapes, with distorted limbs and objects."

"At its most baleful, these songs obliterate any and all melody, leaving listeners with no chance for reprieve from their unrelenting assault. Dj Svevsx’s “jumpstyle (1)” has over 8 million plays and it’s just a 42-second spasm of feculent kicks." 

Looks bit like the Moving Shadow logo, that silhouette. 

Weathered legend returns to youth currency 

What K calls "peak slumpstyle" - the slowed + reverb remix 

Lithuian "nu-jumpstyle Jesus" Yabujin 

And his alter-ego

"What makes this internet-addled aesthetic so addictive is the way it taps into the younger generation’s collectively fried childhoods. It’s a shitposty Tower of Babble that crosses countries and languages."

Talking of shitpostmodernism, Kieran is quoted in this Kyle Chayka article in The New Yorker on corecore and "The Dada Era of Internet Memes"

Check out also K P-R's piece at No Bells on the Bushwick nightclub Rash, which was attacked by an arsonist in what may well be a hate-crime a few years ago, but has now been rebuilt and relaunched. 

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The uglier aspects of this nu-jumpstyle scene reminded me a bit of this spoof  and spoof pt 2 I concocted back in 2007 (inspired by guesswho)

Old post on hardstyle, a related genre that has some militaristic undercurrents... well, overcurrents really

Jumpstyle in simpler, happier, more innocent days. 

kicky and volky (hardcore, intellectualized)

Intellectualized in an essay by Jeppe Ugelvig titled "Hardcore as Folklore" (at NERO Editions)

It's about the other hardcore though.

The Eurorave continuum - Belgcore> gabber >jumpstyle > hardstyle

The peg = an exhibition, Capriccio 2000. Which "traverses electronic dance music cultures in millennial Italy—particularly hardcore—to propose a sensory tableau: of listless bodies, ritualized gestures and neon hues amidst the detritus of suburban life."

Some snippets from Ulgelvig's essay:

 "Compared to techno and house, hardcore is a type of electronic dance music still waiting to be fully understood. Low-brow, peripheral and nihilistic, it stands in stark contrast to the cultures surrounding its related genres, now firmly canonized and critically recouped for their social, political, and musical importance to cultural history.* Conventionally regarded as non-queer, non-black, and non-urban, hardcore is, in fact, antithetical to the three things that have historically defined electronic dance music. Even so—or perhaps exactly because of this—hardcore seems to have seeped into the aesthetic subconscious of continental European youth culture in the new millennium, becoming integrated as a part of a mass-cultural vocabulary.... . Hardcore, I want to propose, may slowly be developing into its very own example of European folklore, complete with its own set of myths, fantastical motifs, and fabled characters"

Some thoughts on gabber-as-folk at the end...

"From its onset, hardcore was reactionary to the fashionable and opulent party scenes of metropolitan cities like Amsterdam and London, cladding itself in a working-class, anti-fashion aesthetic."

True in one sense - opposed to chic elites. But then again, hardcore of every type has always had its own street fashion look. Gabbers played a small fortune for their favored brands of Australian sportswear. Junglists were style-conscious and similarly coughed up a fair amount of dough to look sharp.

"Hardcore’s one-dimensional and almost childish intensity is often affiliated with the deprived, post-industrial landscapes of Europe, while its participants—dressed in cheap sportswear, and with soft skinhead references—are often referred to as an embodiment of the “chav,” “tamarro,” “dresiarz” or “proll” aesthetic. In Italy, for example, the northern region of Pianura Padana became a hub for the hardcore sound in the late 1990s, as it gained traction in enormous “super clubs” along the A4 highway from Bergamo to Venice (connecting the cities of Brescia, Verona, and Padua)."

The "chav" archetype, as a locus of anxiety and condescension, is a Europe-wide phenomenon - and most likely a world-wide syndrome, given that class structures and tensions recur on much the same lines everywhere. Similar social formations crop up - if not necessarily identical in terms of music orientation.

One example is Catalonia, where the raver mentalist sound of the Nineties was called bakalao - after the local foodstuff bacalao, dry salt cod - presumably it has the same "crudely pungent" connotations as "cheesy," with a bit of territorialised regional patriotism thrown in. Note also the mispelling with a "k" in the lumpen-rave tradition of tekno and ardkore.  All the clubs were clustered along a road in  Valencia nicknamed Ruta Destroy, which became the hub of sleepless weekends fueled by pastillas ye drogas of all kinds, with people driving in from all over the country to party there.




Love the raver style touch here of people cooling themselves with black-and-white fans! I remember the daughter of a professor in Valencia  (who had me over to lecture on UK rave and Ecstasy culture in the late nineties) telling me about the scene: how mental it was, people dancing in the most full-on crazed way, jabbing the air with cigarettes almost like stilettos, the bakalao kids clad in black and white clothes. Just before I flew back home, I went to get CD comps of bakalao from a local music megastore, but they sounded fairly cheesy - in the processed, flava-less sense - when I got back to NYC.







Another example is Córdoba, Argentina, where working class and lumpen youth rally to a sound known as cuarteto - which is not electronic but based around high-energy live-bands. It's territorialized: youth follow a particular band and band-leader (the most famous is La Mona Jimenez) year after year. They go to see these bands perform more or less the the same show - raucous, risque - every week, in all-night parties that really kick off in the small hours and apparently get pretty wild. Raves, then, just without rave music.




Back to Ugelvig's essay:

"With over thirty years of endured presence in European music culture, hardcore can no longer be understood as a mere trend or fad, but qualifies instead as a kind of abstract aesthetic motif recognized by a broad range of Europeans born in the last two decades of the 20th century—from the right-leaning hooligan of the suburbs to the fashion worker of the metropolis, crafting fashion editorials that glamorize its pseudo-skinhead aesthetic.... These plural, contradictory, and mythological connotations of hardcore—escaping exact definition, yet seemingly omnipresent as an aesthetic motif—perfectly qualify it as a kind of folk culture."

One thing I'd add here on the subject of "folklore": there is something going on with the dancing in  gabber / jumpstyle / hardstyle that plugs into folk music traditions in Northern Europe. I don't want to say the music has "reactivated a race-memory," as that makes it sound dodgier than it needs to be. But there is something that's seemingly resurged instinctively within the younger generation (who probably have had only a limited exposure to traditional music and its attendant dance modes) where they move to these Eurocore beats in ways that come from the same place as Morris dancing and Irish "step dancing" (as in "Riverdance") and doubtless forms of Dutch and German etc dancing I'm unaware of. The dancing largely takes place below the knee, and doesn't involve the hips or the pelvis much at all. The body stays perpendicular and straight-spined; the arms swirl around almost like the ribbons of a Maypole, with the body as the pole.  It's not groovy, it's kicky - kicky moves for kick drum dominated / domineering music. Unfunk, perhaps even anti-funk in a sense - but it looks like a lot of fun.





Ugelvig mentions in passing an exhibition in the Netherlands three years ago called "Energy Flash - the Rave Movement"

Now admittedly I don't own the words "Energy Flash" - Joey Beltram does if anyone - but still..

Cossack race memory?


no, it's international - or at least Pan-European

First Bohemian Hard Bass Assault!

"long live the idiot"

Pan-Slavic, definitely

you can really hear the donk in that one 

no, it is international

hyperstatic reformulations of the already-done of course (gabba - hardstyle - jumpstyle - donk - )
but more fun that some of the more tepidly tasteful hyperstasis on offer