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!
