"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
Bit of fun here from Orbital with a track / video that garbles the first four years of UK rave - sped-up breaks + acid wibbles, animation likewise compacted out of received images and notions (rave as anti-Thatcherism)
What was that Springsteen line about middle-aged folks sitting around with nothing to do but wheel out the same old "boring stories of glory days"?
Brothers Hartnoll gave me my first in the flesh sight of a 303 when I went to interview them in Sevenoaks in early '92 - I wonder if they are still using the same unit?
‘Diversions 1994-1996′ is made up entirely from samples from the collection of Lee Gamble’s Jungle cassette mixtapes. The audio has been subjected to analog and digital deformations, whilst trying to extract, expand upon and convey particular qualities emblematic of the original music. The effect is that of a musical body scan, all that is solid melts into air. Sounds are unearthed, dissected on the operating table, melted and unlocked , evoking sonics not unlike the heavy dub processes of Jah Shaka and Scion in a INA GRM frame of mind or bearing a similar methodological approach with what explored Mark Leckey in his piece “Fiorucci Made me Hardcore”. It can be heard as a ‘memory’ of a period of music and for some could work as a ‘cued recall’, which is a form of memory retrieval.
Lee Gamble started out as a teenager dj-ing on pirate radio and on the emerging Jungle scene, however his own approach to music has taken a more experimental direction. Exploring the outer realms of abstraction through digital synthesis/resynthesis, Lee has described his current compositional process as: “…The configuration of material (ex nihilo) via various digital synthesis methods, prompts further disfigurations and reconfigurations. What you then have left is often the detritus or debris of an idea. Phantasms of both previous and current musical, pseudo-scientific and sculptural influences are manifest as new material abstractions, created from the digital blank canvas. This abstraction allows several interests to appear in the works simultaneously…”. He is a also a founding member of the UK-based CYRK collective and has curated/co-curated several Cyrk events. He has also produced and curated three radio series for London based radio station Resonance104.4FM and he continues to DJ. Lee has released his computer compositions on the Entr’acte label and has collaborated with composer John Wall and artists Yutaka Makino and Bryan Lewis Saunders. ‘Diversions 1994-1996′ E.P is is the beginning of a longer-term collaboration with PAN which also includes a full length album later this year.
The 12″ is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. It is pressed on 140g white vinyl which itself is housed in a silk screened pvc sleeve with artwork by Kathryn Politis & Bill Kouligas. 4 Hero / Reinforced cru reference! Deep Blue reference!
bleep retro!
lickle bitta breakbeat house for a change of pace:
"Rave and Hardcore YouTube Comments Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity"
Pays to be a little wary of Vice articles, but this piece by Clive Martin seems to be a genuinely moved (and moving) appreciation of the wistful, earnestly reflective comments left by old E heads underneath YouTube clips of house anthems and vintage rave footage
The comments are screen grabs so can't select any, but here are a couple of Clive's annotations:
"If you were being cynical.. you could dismiss their
exhortations of the "old days" as merely the rueful people who can't
grasp the modern dance world, with its live streams, forum trolls, and
LiveNation wristband raves. And that may or may not be true. But it doesn't matter, because what
these people are expressing through the unlikely medium of YouTube
comments is pure romance. Regardless of what Positiva release caused
their Proust-on pills recollections, these people seem to be genuinely
conjuring up fragmented glimpses of a lost past, something that is
infinitely more life-affirming and valuable than anything spat out by
the usual "Hey, remember Pogs!?" school of internet nostalgia....
"I like to imagine misty-eyed men and women staying up late in their
newly built homes, waiting for their kids to go to bed before they can
transport themselves back to their carefree, wide-eyed, hands-in-the-air
youths spent blissfully blowing holes in their psyche in New York
warehouses and on Balearic beaches. It might be a bit tragic if they
were still showing up at Warehouse Project three speckled Doves deep,
still losing their shit to "Voodoo Ray" as Joy Orbison plays it 25 years
later. But they aren't, I don't think. These are people who know that
their raving days are over, and are looking back on them rather than
trying to recreate them in some Hacienda historical reenactment society.
In that way, these are examples of wistful longing rather than
regressive nostalgia. "
One particular comment he re-presents - from a MrCockPirate, which moniker sabotages the poignancy a tad - goes like this:
Life has always disappointed me since those great days. Always remembered, never repeated.
Another, MyJamsta, concludes his or her reminiscence with:
I am still struggling to understand where it all went - it fooking kills me.
Those comments reminded me of "Weak Becomes Heroes" - Mike Skinner's finest moment maybe - and specifically the line "my life's been up and down since i walked from that crowd" - that's what a lot of those YouTube comments are mourning, essentially: leaving the ecstatic crowd, returning to atomised normality, the privatised life of go-it-alone striving, where collectivity reduces to the dimensions of domesticity, the family unit
The next album, Skinner captured the bleaker side of clubbing excess... how you can be lonely in the crowd
