feel the panic

at The Quietus, an archaeology of the siren as a musical device by Robert Barry

inevitably mentions rave / hardcore en route to the Klaxons


Praga khan - rave alarm by syncrythm









 

rrrrrrginal junglis

fascinating interview with Congo Natty, once upon a time known as Rebel MC, conducted by Joe Clay for Quietus, about new album Jungle Revolution

Q: So you're not looking to innovate?

CN: We have innovated already. Jungle Revolution is innovation. Whether I give you that album in 2013 or I gave it to you 1994, it is exactly the same innovation. All that's happened between '94 and now is this… [gestures to his laptop]

viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiibin off this awesomely monotonoid tune -  from Hemlock Recordings Chapter One, an excellent label comp

interesting thoughts in this recent  Quietus interview with Hemlock bods Jack Dunning (aka Untold), Rohan Walder (aka Randomer) and Andy Spencer

RW: "To be honest, I don't really dig that much new stuff. I'm still digging stuff from the 90s - of so many different genres, and stuff that's really basic, and also really crunchy sounding – B'more, grime, hardcore as well...."

JD:  "... about two months ago I completely switched up my DJ sets...  I realised, 'Hang on, this is jumping around too much, especially in longer sets, this isn't really making a statement, this is just like blegh! [makes vomiting noise] at people'. So I focused in, and now I'm just playing really stripped back percussive stuff. And I'm enjoying the purity I've found in these tracks...

- a lot of them are just tools, from producers and labels I'd never heard of until a few months ago. And since then, I've been enjoying my sets much more - there seems to be a massive reaction to this music that hasn't got much in it at all....   It's quite raw and repetitive - just horrible, banging drug music [laughs]. If you've got a long set, after an hour of playing something with only maybe two or three melodies in it, this peculiar vacuum happens in the room, and if the crowd's with you - and, touch wood, they have been - it starts to become a real tribal thing. It reminds me of times when everyone was off on the same drugs and into some atmosphere and momentum in the room...

AS:  "I think there's a pressure right now to identify a tune straight out - to be the one who identifies it as something that's going to be big. I think that's a particular symptom of where we're at at the minute - everyone's feeling a huge pressure to be on everything all the time, and that content overload is getting in the way. And I guess that's a fairly recent thing. Historically, tunes would take ages to catch on - it'd take a hell of a lot of DJs to play them, a hell of a lot of tape recorders in the rave before a tune became a big deal. So I think you've got to allow yourself space to come back to something and think, 'Oh fuck, that's actually a great tune' - and not kick yourself for not seeing it the first time round."

JD: "That's totally how I'm feeling as well. There is something about that promo listening mentality which is similar to a YouTube or Spotify way of digesting music - it's fingerfood. Like what I was saying before, in finding those new producers - having the pleasure of buying vinyl and having a huge stack to go through - I'd actually listen to them, and then listen to them again. It was like, 'This feels like a weird arcane art!' So I'm having my own personal backlash at the moment, I don't know whether there will be a broader shift."

"too much speed and we see nothing"--Virilio



"I was born with a sense that my time was running out. Not long ago, I too began blaming the speed of the internet and its corresponding mobile, digital technologies. But then I realized that the problem wasn't being able to do more, faster; it was that, faster and faster, I was spending more of my own precious time doing more of less.... We need to slow the internet down, and should probably hurry up about it"

from "Slow Media, & The Occupation Of Online Time", an essay by Ryan Alexander Diduck, at the Quietus