Pure Inspiration

Well, I may not have provoked a musician to pen a retaliation tune (unlike my own flesh and blood, who recently joined a select pantheon of irritant critics). 

But I can now bask in having inspired a song, and one made by a well-known and highly regarded group too: electronic act Overmono. 

Their single "Lockup" - which heralds a new album Pure Devotion - apparently came from reading not Energy Flash, like you would probably have expected in the circumstances, but the other book of mine that people like.

 According to the Overmono duo, brothers Tom and Ed Russell:  

"We’d been reading rip it up and start again by Simon Reynolds and just generally on a massive post punk binge trying to find out as much as possible about how some of those records were made and the philosophy behind them". 

"We got so obsessed with the all tactile soundscapes, the chaotic mix decisions, the use of physical processes and spaces and probably most importantly the approach to trying to break as many things as possible in the process of creating something new. "

For "Lockup", Overmono  sampled "What A Waste" - not the Ian Dury song, but a tune by Birmingham postpunk outfit Fast Relief, who I've never heard of (call yourself a postpunk historian!)

It's on this comp of Midlands postpunk on the Easy Action label

Which you can hear on the streamers - like here at Tidal

Update: Stylo finds it on YouTube too

And here's a photo of the group, who appear to only made the one recording, as excavated for Un-Scene!

They could hardly look more postpunk. Flute in the line-up too.

Listening to "Lockup" I'm not really hearing the connection to postpunk beyond the sample. But it's a cool track - I like the way they loop the yammering vocal from "What A Waste", making it sound almost like bhangra. 

I seem to remember enjoying Overmono's earlier stuff while feeling they were, if not outright retro-rave, then consolidators of the tradition.

But then people making music today in most fields are unavoidably history-conscious, given the  accumulation of all that music behind them.

Whether it's rave or rock or rap, the tradition exists as a fact, a pre-existing thing, an arrayed archive of massed material - something to work with, to rework...  

It's in the way, and the only way forward is to go through it... 

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

I await the album with interest, curious to see if there are other manifestations of postpunk

PiLheads in the garridge?

i wonder if this was inspired by "Swan Lake" aka "Death Disco" by PiL?



seems unlikely with your nuum, but you never really know

quite a few of them have a secret postpunk connection

e.g. Dem 2 would you believe, one of them had a postpunk past

either that or a 2-Tone one




ah but talking about the ska / rocksteady traces in nuum

this, this here could quite possibly be a sideways inspiration for "Death Disco"



and hey i did not know that Madness did a version, and in more or less the same time-period as PiL





that's weird that cos in the 2-Tone chapter in Rip It Up - which follows directly after the PiL / Metal Box chapter, i start by contrasting "Gangsters" and "Death Disco", the Specials mono debut LP and the stereodubspacious Metal Box...


That version of "Swan Lake" by, hahahaha, Swan-E  - a cover which is funnily enough titled "Gangster" -  weird chains of echoes here - that was on the Cage Underground label.

The same little short-lived label that put out the marvellous Napa-Tac trak








"L-o-o-o-ndon Massive!"

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