RIP Sly Dunbar

 

just some of the obvious greats...

but Sly (with and without Robbie) did all sorts of odd things 

Dunbar worked on a record by Jackson Browne! 

RIP Chris Hill

 Reposting this blog from earlier in the year about the British funk scene of the 1970s in which deejay Chris Hill was a prime instigator

Fascinating 1980 program presented by Danny Baker, who fiercely argued in the pages of the NME at that time for jazz-funk as the real-deal music c.f. the constipated faux-funk of  A Certain Ratio and Gang of Four, and here takes the battle to the television screen. 

In the program, he just uses the word "funk", though. 

Bunch of things that jumped out at me

1/ The self-conscious organization of the scene around tribes - a local squad or crew like Frontline from Brixton - who then at the dances amalgamate into a mega-tribe, which deejay Chris Hill here describes as the Family. The tribes have their own regalia - sometimes T-shirts with the tribe name, sometimes some other goofy identifying element - and they also often bring banners that they drape over the balcony at the venue. 

2/ You would tend to think of  U.K. working class scenes oriented around black-music to be very much about style and elegance. What surprised me about the Funk All-Dayers captured here is how amiably uncool the dancing and the general larking about is....  It's very much not in the tradition of Mod, it's not about a Face dancing alone in this moat of personal space....  the deejays exhort and entrain the crowd to all kinds of daft behaviour that is collective and synchronised.... they seem to be consciously trying to create the crowd-body consciousness, like in spectator sports with the Mexican wave...  Then there's individual kids who take off all their clothes.... a wonderfully silly mass sing-along 'n' dance to the Ovalteenies theme (you'll recognise that from Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore - "we're happy girls and boys").  And perhaps most bizarre of all - a fad for building human pyramids on the dancefloor (something I've only ever seen at Enter Shikari shows).

As Hill explains - again it's interesting just how self-conscious he is about how it all works as a subcultural machinery - the get-away Weekends at Caister and other seaside resorts are about escalating this sense of the scene as a world unto itself. A world where normal rules of behaviour get suspended and overturned in a carnivalesque fashion (not to put too Bakhtinian a spin on it though -it is also rather  Club 18-30). "Pride and dignity", the soul-boy ethos, doesn't come into it. But it's also very different from how people danced and behaved on the Northern Soul scene.

3/ The other thing that came across was that the fervour seems to be somewhat out of proportion to the music...  Now I love funk, indeed particularly at this time (early 80s) I loved it with a convert's fetishistic passion - but while I wouldn't describe myself as a connoisseur, I always felt that the jazz-funk, especially the UK offerings but most of the US imports then too, tended to be a bit bantamweight.  There are some great tunes but there's a lot of slick 'n'  tepid.  I put that down to the same dynamic on the Northern scene where there's a fetish for obscurity. Instead of rare soul singles that were barely released in 1965 or whenever, in the jazz funk scene it seems to be about a deep cut on an import album, something tucked away on side 2 of a Tom Browne or Grover Washington Jr LP.  

But perhaps the music is simply a pretext for identity, a trigger for fervour, an excuse to mobilize. 

Still, it's a little weird when Hill says that after going to a weekend away in Great Yarmouth, the kids become fully committed, like "they've been on a campaign. And the music is a crusade". 

Once interviewed Randy Crawford, wouldyabelieve?

jump to 4.10 of Fiorucci for the Ovalteenies scene

and 19.18 mins for the Ovalteenies dancealong - singalong in Funk

Danny Baker crusading for the funk cause in the pages of NME - with "intro" from Chris Hill

Hi-Tension bringing the funk to the punks on Revolver

Punk discofunkafied by the Black Arabs, a scene  from Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle 

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

Edmund in Comments directs to another film, from slightly earlier, about the scene - British Hustle -  tons of footage of fervid dancers and Chris Hill emceeing through echo FX

And isn't Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels a recreation of these times - what the Black British kids were into, as opposed to punk... 

RIP Max Romeo

 

Romeo reaches rave through this unlikely conduit 

While we're paying tribute to Max, this tune is oddly topical - reusing the "War Inna Babylon" rhythm 

Would love to read something really probing on the Anti-Papacy subcurrents in Rasta 'n' roots culture. 

Given that Rasta is essentially Afro-Protestant - a  Caribbean cousin of the born-again, fundamentalist, Scripture-is-literal-truth offshoots of Calvinism in America - one explanation would be that it is simply sourced in the anti-Catholic paranoia that impregnates Protestantism from the start: the idea that the Church of Rome is an ungodly perversion of true Christianity.  It taps into the same wellsprings that led to the anti-Catholic secret societies in 19th Century and early 20th Century America, the nativist newspapers with their fears of an influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, changing the fundamental make-up of the country. At its extreme edge, there were fevered fears of the Pope arriving at the head of a new Armada to conquer the USA. 

But perhaps there are some uniquely Jamaican ingredients involved.... 

I seem to remember reading that at dancehall events to this day (or at least whenever it was I read the piece) you would get anti-Pope shout-outs from the deejay

Here's another Vatican-themed tune - Lee Perry, no Max - about the Conclave itself

Here's a really sharp piece of writing about Lee Perry - specifically his way with a kick drum, but also his whole sono-spiritual project - by Nick Coleman at his Substack. There's also some great outlandish quotes from Scratch from an interview Nick did some time ago. 

RIP Terror Danjah

Saddened to learn that Terror Danjah - grime's greatest producer  and co-founder of the Aftershock  label - has died. 

Here is the liner note tribute I did for Gremlinz - the Terror Danjah compilation that Planet Mu put out in 2009. There's also a longer length version of the Q + A with Terror that appeared in Gremlinz . There's also some Danjah-related entries from the Grime Primer I did for the Wire in 2005. 

TERROR DANJAH: THE ALPHA PRODUCER

By Simon Reynolds

Ninety-five percent of grime beats are strictly functional: they're designed as launching pads for an MC's skills rather than as showcases for the producer's virtuosity.  These tracks don't tend to go through a lot of shifts and changes but instead loop a drum pattern and a refrain (typically evoking an atmosphere that mingles menace and majesty, with melody and "orchestration" pitched somewhere between a straight-to-video movie score and a ring-tone).  And that's fine, you know: it's a perfectly valid and valuable craft making this kind of basic MC tool.  It's okay if the tune doesn't go anywhere, because the pirate deejay's only likely to drop a minute-and-a-half before cutting to the next track.  It's alright if it's  thinly textured, a bit 2-D and cheapo-sounding, because  it's going to be largely drowned out by MCs jostling for their turn to spit sixteen bars.  But it stands to reason that few of these tracks are going to be things you'd want to buy and listen to at home.   They're just not built for that purpose.

Out of the handful of grime producers who've made some beats that work as stand-alone aesthetic objects--Wiley, Target, Wonder, Rapid from Ruff Sqwad--the undoubted ruler is Terror Danjah.  But this 29-year-old from East London is not just grime's most accomplished and inventive producer.  He's one of the great electronic musicians to emerge in the first decade of the 21st Century, a figure as crucial and influential as Ricardo Villalobos or Digital Mystikz. Someone who's kept on flying the flag for futurism at a time when recombinant pastiche and retro-eclecticism have taken over post-rave music just like what happened with alternative rock a couple of decades before.

Like earlier artcore heroes such as 4 Hero and Foul Play (in jungle) or Dem 2 and Groove Chronicles (in 2step garage), Terror Danjah knows how to walk that perfect diagonal between function and form, how to maintain a tightrope balance between rocking the crowd and pushing the envelope.  He has made plenty of MC tools, tracks like his "Creepy Crawler" remix of "Frontline" or "Cock Back" that have become standard beats of the season on the grime scene, enabling MCs he's never met, on pirate shows he's never heard, to show off and sharpen their skills. Terror has also crafted beats tailor-made to a specific MC's talents, like "Haunted" (the instrumental for Trim's classic "Boogeyman") or "Reloadz", whose speeding-up and slowing-down-again rhythm is a perfect vehicle for Durrty Goodz's quick-time style.  (That track is also a kind of living history lesson, cutting back forth between grime's stomping swagger and jungle's breakneck breakbeat sprint, between 2008 and 1994.)

But on this all-instrumental anthology, with the pungent charisma of MCs like Bruza or D Double E removed from the picture, you can really hear all the work that Terror Danjah puts into his tunes.  On tracks like "Code Morse" and "Radar," the intricate syncopations and hyper-spatialised production, the feel for textural contrast and attention to detail, are comparable to German minimal techno producers like Isolee.  But all this sound-sculpting finesse is marshaled in service of a gloweringly intense mood--foreboding and feral-- that is pure grime.   This is artcore: a stunning blend of intellect and intimidation, subtlety and savagery.  Street modernism, in full effect.

Gremlinz is named after Terror Danjah's trademark:  the grotesquely distorted, gloating laughter that makes an appearance in all his tracks, a poisonous giggle that makes you think of a golem, some horrid little homunculus that Terror's hatched to do his bidding.  The gremlin audio-logo crystallizes the essence of Terror Danjah's work and of the London hardcore continuum of which he's such an illustrious scion. It's at once technical (the product of skilful sonic processing) and visceral,  funny and creepy.  Like the catchphrases and vocal-noise gimmicks that MCs drop into their sets or tracks (think D Double E's famous "it's mwee mwee" signal), the cackling gremlin announces that this here is a TERROR DANJAH  production you're listening to.  When a pirate deejay drops one of his tunes, when a crowd in a club hollers for a reload, that slimy little goblin is Terror marking his sonic territory like the top dog, the alpha producer, he is.

Q/A with Terror Danjah

You started out in the late Nineties with Reckless Crew, an East London jungle/drum'n'bass collective of deejays and MCs. How did that come about?

I formed Reckless in 1998. The other members were D Double E, Bruza, Hyper, Funsta, Triple Threat, DJ Interlude and Mayhem. We came to fame from being on Rinse Fm and playing at local clubs and raves including One Nation, Telepathy, World Dance, Garage Nation, and Slammin' Vinyl.

What did you learn, as a producer, from those drum and bass days? Who did you rate at that time and would consider an influence?

I wasn't much of a producer back in them days. I was absorbing the musical sounds from Roni Size, Dillinja, Shy FX, Krust, DJ Die, Bad Company, Andy C and DJ SS. I learned a lot from listening to their music. Jungle was the first British music we could say was ours. I'd grown upon on reggae, R&B, soul. And also house music, on account of having an older brother. I was deejaying on the pirates and I got into producing drum and bass, because I wasn't getting a lot of tunes from producers. They'd be giving me one or two dubplates, but they had the big DJs like Brockie to service first. So I started making my own  "specials" and did loads of tracks. But I didn't put them out, just played them on the radio. My own personal sound.  But DJ Zinc and a few others cut my tunes as dubplates.

When did you make the transition to UK garage and that MC-fronted 2step sound that was the prototype for grime?

 I did two garage tunes and they blew up so I decided to stick with that. In 2002 I did "Firecracker" b/w "Highly Inflammable" on Solid City, Teebone's label.  For a while I was part of N.A.S.T.Y. Crew,  because I'd been at St. Bonaventures [a  Roman Catholic comprehensive school in Forest Gate, London E7] with a couple of members of N.A.S.T.Y.  But all the time I was doing my own thing and eventually just branched off. 

Then in 2003 I formed Aftershock with this guy called Flash, who I'd met at Music House where everyone goes to cut dubplates.  The first two Aftershock releases were Crazy Titch's "I Can C  U, U Can C Me" and N.A.S.T.Y.'s  "Cock Back".  That got the label off to a flying start--everyone was buzzing after those two releases.  Then it was Big E.D.'s "Frontline" and then in 2004 I put out the Industry Standard EP. That’s the one where people thought "this label is serious".

Industry Standard is where you can really hear your three-dimensional "headphone grime" sound coming through, on tunes like "Juggling" and "Sneak Attack".  With those tracks and all through your  music, the placement of the beats, the way sounds move around each other in the mix--it's very spatial.

Some of that comes from listening to a lot of Roni Size and Andy C and producers like that. Lots of abstracty sounds rushing about, coming out of nowhere.  There's a sense of more life in the music.  That’s what I do in my tunes. Drum and bass gave me ideas about layering sounds and placing sounds. But it also comes from studying music engineering at college, doing a sound recording course.  I learned about mic'ing a drum kit and panning.  You've got the pan positions in the middle of your mixing desk, and the crash should be left or right, the snares should be slightly panned off centre, the kick should be in the center. So you've got a panoramic view of your drum structure.

Obviously I went beyond that, started experimenting more.  The bass stays central but the sounds always drift. So each time you listen you’re not just bobbing your head, you’re thinking  "I heard something new in Terror Danjah’s tune". So it always lasts longer.

Industry Standard was the breakthrough release, in terms of people realizing that here was a producer to reckon with. What came next?

Payback was the biggest.  That EP of remixes was one of Aftershock's top sellers. It was getting caned the most, especially my "Creepy Crawler" remix of "Frontline".   That cemented it for us.

Basically you took Big E.D.'s "Frontline" and merged it with your own "Creep Crawler" from Industry Standard.  It's got a really unusual synth sound, harmonically rich, with this sour, edge-of-dissonance tonality. It makes you  feel like you're on the verge of a stress-induced migraine. A sound like veins in your temple throbbing.

It's a normal synth, but where many people would just use it straight out of the module without any processing or texture,  I’ve learned some techniques to give it more.  I add that to it. I can’t tell you how, though. Certain producers might go "ah!"

Those sort of wincing tonalities are a Terror Danjah hallmark.  Another are the bombastic mid-frequency riffs you use that sound a bit like horn fanfares, and that sort of pummel the listener in the gut. They've got  this distorted, smeared quality that makes them sound muffled and suppressed, like their full force is held back. But that just makes them more menacing, a shadowy presence lurking in the mix.  Like a pitbull on a leash, growling and snarling.

That's like an orchestral riff.  Again, it's all about the effects I put on it. If you heard it dry you’d think "Is that it?"  It’s the same techniques I use for the giggle.

Ah, your famous hallmark:  the jeering death-goblin laughter.  How did you come up with the Gremlin?

I had a lot of drum and bass sample CDs back in the day and I had that sound from time.  I used it a couple of time in tracks, just to see how it sounds.  Then I stopped using it and everyone was like, "Where is it?!?". I was like, "I don’t want to use it no more".  But everyone was going like "That’s nang! Use it!".  So I switched it up, pitched it down, did all sorts of madness with it.

But Terror Danjah music is not all dread and darkness. You do exquisite, heart-tugging things like "So Sure," your R&G (rhythm-and-grime) classic. Or "Crowbar 2," a really poignant, yearning production draped in what sound like dulcimer chimes,  a lattice of teardrops. That one reminds me of ambient jungle artists like Omni Trio and LTJ Bukem.

I used to listen to Omni Trio and all that, when I was 14 or 15. That R&G style is more me.   Everything you hear is different sides to me, but that sound, I can do that in my sleep.  One day I can be pissed off and make a tune for deejays to do reloads with. And another day I'll do one where you can sit down and listen and relax, or listen with your girl and smooch her.

Do you see anyone else in grime operating at the same level of sophistication, in terms of producers?

I don’t think none of them really. [Aftershock producer] D.O.K. is the closest in terms of subtle changes, and DaVinChe. You've also got  P-Jam.   But I don't really look at anyone and think they’re amazing. Wiley at one point was the guy whose level was what I wanted to get to.  But I don’t think there’s anyone now who’s doing anything different. They’re being sheep.

After the very active 2003/2004/2005 phase, Aftershock went pretty quiet. There were just a few more vinyl releases and then a couple of full-length things.   What happened?  And what have you been up to in recent years?

The label went quiet due to the change of the climate--the introduction of CDs in the underground market place. Because we were so successful with the vinyl format, but it was time to move with the times.  So I released a CD called Hardrive Vol 1, which had ten vocals and ten instrumentals and featured artists like Chipmunk, Griminal, Wiley,  Mz Bratt, Wretch 32, D Double E, Scorcher, Shola Ama.  I also put out an instrumental CD called Zip Files Vol. 1. And I've been working on Mz Bratt's album.

I'm told this compilation was selected out of some 80 instrumentals. Which means 62 weren't used! Does this mean you are sitting on a vast personal archive of unreleased Terror Danjah material?

Definitely. I got billions of tunes stacked on a few Terra Bytes hard drive.

You have Industry Standard Vol 4 on Planet Mu soon, and you recently returned to deejaying with the Night Slugs appearance -- does this mean you are back in the game full force? Do you feel like grime is still an area you want to work within or are you being drawn to other areas, like funky, or the more experimental end of dubstep?

I've always made music what I like, and most of the tracks on 'Gremlinz' were made before there was a genre called  'Grime' or 'Dubstep'.  I started off in Jungle, so I'm not afraid of change! 

Talking of the wacked-out end of dubstep, I can see a lot of your influence with the nu skool producers like Joker, Rustie, Guido, and so forth. Can you hear it yourself and what do you think of this sound people are calling things like "purple" and "wonky"?

 It doesn't bother me, but I personally think a producer/artist should just make the music and let the record/marketing company name it whatever!

from the Grime Primer (The Wire, 2005)

TERROR DANJAH

INDUSTRY STANDARD EP

AFTERSHOCK 2003

VARIOUS ARTISTS

PAY BACK EP (THE REMIX)

AFTERSHOCK 2003

 

Judging by Industry Standard, you could justly describe Terror Danjah as one of the most accomplished electronic musicians currently active. On tracks like “Juggling” and “Sneak Attack,” the intricate syncopation, texturized beats, spatialized production, and “abstracty sounds” (Danjah’s own phrase) makes this “headphone grime”--not something that could be claimed for too many operators on the scene. Yet all this finesse is marshaled in service of a fanatically doomy and monolithic mood, Gothic in the original barbarian invader meaning. The atmosphere of domineering darkness is distilled in Danjah’s audio-logo, a demonic cackle that resembles some jeering, leering cyborg death-dwarf, which appears in all of his productions and remixes. “Creep Crawler,” the first tune on Industry Standard, and its sister track “Frontline (Creepy Crawler Mix),” which kicks off Pay Back, are Danjah’s sound at its most pungently oppressive. “Creep Crawler” begins with the producer smirking aloud (“‘heh-heh, they’re gonna hate me now”), then a bonecrusher beat stomps everything in its path, while ominous horn-blasts pummel in the lower mid-range and synths wince like the onset of migraine. From its opening something-wicked-this-way-comes note-sequence onwards, Big E.D.’s original “Frontline” was hair-raising already. Danjah’s remix of his acolyte’s monstertune essentially merges it with “Creep Crawler,” deploying the same astringent synth-dissonance and trademark bass-blare fanfares (filtered to create a weird sensation of suppressed bombast) but to even more intimidating and shudder-inducing effect. 

JAMMER featuring KANO

BOYS LOVE GIRLS

HOT SOUND 2003

WONDER featuring KANO

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

NEW ERA 2004

TERROR DANJAH featuring KANO and SADIE

SO SURE

AFTERSHOCK 2004

 

The backing tracks are fabulous--Jammer’s frenetic snare-roll clatter, Wonder’s tonally harrowed synths, Danjah’s aching ripples of idyllic electronics--but it’s the MC who really shines. With some grime rhymesters, the flow resembles an involuntary discharge (D Double E being the ultimate exponent of MCing as automatic poetry). But even at his most hectic, as on “Boys Love Girls,” Kano always sounds in complete control. All poise and deliberation, Kano invariably sounds like he’s weighing up the angles, calculating his moves, calibrating which outcomes serve his interests.  That’s blatant on “Boys” and “What Have You Done”, both cold-hearted takes on modern romance that depict sex in transactional terms, a ledger of positives and minuses, credits and debits; a war of the genders in which keeping your feelings checked and maintaining distance is strategically crucial.  But it comes through even in the gorgeous ballad “So Sure,” on which Kano blurs the border between loverman and soldier drawing up plans for conquest: “ain’t got time to be one of them guys just watching you and wasting time/next time I’m clocking you I’m stopping you to make you mine.” As much as the acutely observed lyrical details, it’s the timbre of Kano’s voice that’s enthralling: slick yet grainy, like varnished wood, and knotty with halting cadences that convince you he’s thinking these thoughts aloud for the very first time. 

TRIM

BOOGIEMAN

AFTERSHOCK 2004

BRUZA

NOT CONVINCED

AFTERSHOCK 2005

 

Like most producers in most dance genres, grime beat-makers typically invent a striking sound, then wear it out with endless market-milking iterations. Terror Danjah has often approached that dangerzone, but on “Boogieman,” he shows how much scope for inventive arrangement remains in the “Creep Crawler” template. You can hear the cartoon-comical wooh-wooh ghostly touches best on the instrumental version, “Haunted” (on Aftershock’s Roadsweeper EP). “Boogieman” itself is a showcase for rising star Trim, here honing his persona of  scoffing imperturbality: “I’m not scared of the boogieman/I scare the boogieman.”

 

On “Not Convinced,” Danjah draughts a whole new template that reveals the producer’s roots in drum’n’bass (the track’s futuristic tingles vaguely recall’s Foul Play “Being With You” remix). Again, though, the MC makes it hard to focus on the riddim. More than anyone apart from not-grime-really Mike Skinner, Bruza incorporates British intonation and idiom into a totally effective style of rapping, in which the not-flow of stilted English cadences becomes a new flow. It sounds “brutal and British,” as Bruza puts it. As his name suggests, the MC has also perfected a hardman persona that feels authentically English rather than a gangsta fantasy based on Compton or Kingston. He exudes a laconic, steely menace redolent of bouncers. “Not Convinced” extrapolates from this not-easily-impressed persona to create a typology of character in which the world is divided into the serious and the silly, the latter lacking the substance and conviction to give their words authority.  Bruza addresses, and dresses down, a wannabe MC: “I’m not convinced/Since you’ve been spitting/I haven’t believed one word/Not one inch/Not even a millimeter/To me you sound like a silly speaker/Silly features in your style/You spit silly.” 

We Were E

 RIP the legendary Lennie De Ice

Real name Lenworth Green. A first name I've never seen before. The whole name sounds like a place. 

I can't remember what I was watching - an old episode of Snub seen many years after its 1988 broadcast ? - but can remember my surprise on encounteringthe source of that almost distraught-with-XTC "we are e-e-e-e-e"

Rai'd on tyme. 

It was on the indie-alt TV show Snub  because Factory licensed the rai track and put it out late 1987. 

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

Lennie made a load of other solid tunes without ever reapproaching the 'lightning captured in a bottle' effect of that debut 

Mixed at the Dark Side Studio - quite early for that concept to be in circ. 

Like the use of the wonderful phased vocal intro bit - "no time for no time for criticizing / music's hypnotizing" - from Raw Silk's "Do It To The Music" (postdisco classic, bought this at the time - heard the first time on Top of the Pops and was floored) 

A reflicker here of the bliss-stricken "we are eeeeeee" sample

Smackman on the right geeking out 

Getting intelligentish in a sort of Bodysnatchish way

Which is funny cos one of his alter egos was called Body Snatcher

I like the use of the word 'terrible' in this next title -  the Ivan / sublime awe-ful majesty vibe of it undercut by the blokey bathos of 'well' 

The best things he did apart from 'I.E' were as part of Dubb Hustlers  

"Jungle Tremble" -  cool, odd title that

One more time for the all-time classic  - the original remastered (and on Hooj Choons for some reason)

RIP J. Saul Kane

 

Well, it had to be this one I posted, didn't it? 

That macabre sing-song sample - "did you ever think / when the hearse goes by / that some day you are going to die?"

Also on the theme

Younger than me, by a half-decade...  sobering, eh? 

I reviewed Depth Charge  - or is it Depthcharge? - a couple of times in a Melody Maker Singles column, and each time the release brightened that week's rather barren haul

from October 1989

DEPTHCHARGE

"Depthcharge"

(Vinyl Solution)

     Inconsequential but captivatingly labyrinthine "dance" record that reminds me vaguely of Arthur Russell's bathyscopic odyssey "Let's Go Swimming". Over a bubbling cauldron of deep-sea dub bass, drifts a sargasso sea of sonic flotsam, sonar blips, smeared Kung fu samples, anemones and polyps.  If Sun Ra thought he was from Atlantis rather than Saturn, was into Adrian Sherwood, and had an obsession with martial arts, he might make records like this. (That's a lot of "ifs", I s'pose, but there you go...)

Kind of Renegade Soundwave-y, without the grating Guy-Ritchie-movie voices.... 

Sort of anticipating trip hop, but not really... 

 And in some ways also anticipating Big Beat. 

The other Depthcharge single I reviewed, from early 1990

Bit Wu-y in his predilections...  

Vinyl Solution label mate  with the also-departed Eon a/k/a Ian Loveday. He went quite a while back.... 

Anticipating darkcore

This even earlier tune has quite a darkside title, if not the sound or vibe really

I guess it's just the Pulp Continuum - video-nasty bizniz

Also as The Octagon Man, this has neat beats

Here's an obituary for Jonathan Saul Kane by Carl Loben at DJ magazine

He seems to have rubbed shoulders with a lot of people from that "DJ Records" moment in the late '80s - Mark Moore, Tim Simenon - and also the aforementioned Renegade Soundwave. 

Here's a reminiscence / tribute I've borrowed wholesale from Danny Briotet of RSW. 

"One upon a time in West London, in a place called Ladbroke Grove, there was a band of (very) young brothers that went under the name of Krew.

"Krew, multi-racial, comprised of MCs, DJs, breakers and graffiti artists and were one of the 1st hip hop crews anywhere outside of the US (we’re talking early ‘80s). 

"At tangents from Krew there were myself and a kid called Jonathon. Jonathon began DJing mostly at local hip hop jams on the manor, which often descended into mayhem and violence. Jon (sometimes wearing a black cape) was unphased by this – as well as having DJ skills decades before the term ‘turntablist’ was even thought of, he was also well-versed in martial arts (a theme than ran throughout his career) and could look after himself. 

"When I first knew Jon he lived at his mum’s in Powis Sq and had a massive scaffolding construction in his room to house his decks and records...

"By the mid-80s we were both playing at illegal warehouse parties in places like Shoreditch (then a barren wasteland with just a few Bengali families living there) or under the Harrow Road roundabout at Paddington. 

"Jon started releasing records around the time of the 1st RSW releases, on the Vinyl Solution label (the original shop was opposite my flat), first as Grimm Death, with MC Tony Tone from Krew. 

"Then Jon brought out the 1st Depth Charge record at the same time as we released The Phantom, and the 2 records would find themselves together in so many DJs' boxes, although they sped DC up to fit with 120 bpms of the Rave scene, (although Jon was always tea-total and never went anywhere near a pill). 

"We used to talk, at the time, about how we’d both done these tunes, completely independently of each other, but kind of coming from the same place. The Depth Charge records were massive, and it goes without saying how big an influence they were on the Chemicals, Wall of Sound and so many others in that amazing post-acid house period when alternative became mainstream.

"As things progressed, Jon and I would find ourselves on the same bill in all sorts of weird and far-flung places and he was often late – I remember sitting on planes ages after they were meant to take off, only for Jon to stroll on, record box in hand.

"Jonathan’s approach to DJing was same as his approach to life – uncompromising. He didn’t suffer fools lightly and it wasn’t hard to lock horns with him over anything from samples to football, which he loved – when I first knew him, he played in a team of local Arab kids.

"I woke up this morning to see Zaf’s post about his passing, and I was deeply shocked and upset – it’s a strange sign of the times when you learn on social media of the death of someone you’ve been friends with for over 4 decades, and whose life ran parallel with yours in so many extraordinary ways. I knew he was ill, and only bumped into him very rarely – he became reclusive. I got a message from a mutual friend just now, that said they saw his house getting cleared out a while ago but didn’t put 2 and 2 together. I also heard he’s been gone for months, and no-one knew – well, tragic though that may be, I can’t help the feeling that Jon might get a chuckle out of that, as the enigma continues to grow. Respect, brother, really."

In Memoriam Achim Szepanski

It's that melancholy time of life when every so often you wonder, "who's going to be next out of my contemporaries, all the people I've known, to go?". 

Today's answer is Achim Szepanski, founder of Mille Plateaux and its sister-labels Force Inc and Riot Beats (to name just a few). 

Through these imprints Achim put out so many cool records between the early '90s and early 2000s - artists like Oval, Gas, Porter Ricks / Thomas Koner, Curd Duca,  Biochip C, Alec Empire, Panacea, Cristian Vogel, Microstoria, Vladislav Delay, Alva Noto, the Clicks and Cuts compilations, In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze .... on and on and on. Encompassing a stunningly diverse sonic spectrum, these records often came with release-rationales and theory-framing attached that were  genuinely provocative and thought-provoking - conceptronica when it was a new thing, a refreshingly unusual approach, before rigor became de rigeur. 

In recent years, Achim had been writing and publishing books prolifically.  There was also a short book of Szepanski interviews from the mid-90s, including my 1996 Mille Plateaux feature for The Wire and another by Katja Diefenbach. 

Fond memories of hanging out with Achim when spending a couple of days in Frankfurt to do that feature (see below - along with a review of the Deleuze tribute Achim curated). He liked to talk theory and he liked a drink. A bunch of us took the 30-minute train ride to Mainz to visit a club tucked away inside the foundations of a bridge that spanned the Rhine. Gene Farris from Relief / Cajual played a fabulous set, I heard tracks like "Flash" by Green Velvet for the first time. Things got very merry. I picture Achim in the throng waving a bottle in one fist and shouting, "Gene Farris is the best house deejay in the world!!!!". 

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MILLE PLATEAUX 

The Wire 

April 1996

by Simon Reynolds 

        Frankfurt is simultaneously Germany's financial capital and a longstanding centre of anti-capitalist theory.  Most famously, it gave the world the 'Frankfurt School' of Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer et al: neo-Marxist thinkers who fled Nazism and landed up in Southern California,  where their eyes and ears were affronted by the kitsch outpourings of Hollywood's dream-factory.  

Today, the Frankfurt School is mostly remembered for its snooty attitude towards popular culture, which it regarded as a soul-degrading inferior to High Modernism, and as the 20th Century's opiate-of-the-people.  Adorno, in particular, has achieved a dubious immortality in the cultural studies world, as an Aunt Sally figure ritually bashed by academics as a prequel to their semiotic readings of "anti-hegemonic resistance" encoded in Madonna videos and 'Star Trek'.

     There's no denying Adorno deserves derision for his infamously suspect comments about the "eunuch-like sound"  of jazz, whose secret message was "give up your masculinity, let  yourself be castrated...and you will be accepted into a  fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you".  But in other respects Adorno's critique of pop culture's role as safety valve and social control is not so easily shrugged off. 

Witness these remarks from his essay "On The Fetish Character in and the Music and Regression of Listening":  "Their ecstasy is without content... It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals".  Adorno's verdict on the swing inspired frenzies of the 'jitterbug'--"merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence"--could easily be transposed to '90s rave culture, which--from happy hardcore to gabba to Goa trance--is now as rigidly ritualised and conservative as heavy metal.

     Mille Plateaux shares something of Adorno's oppositional attitude to mass culture.  For label boss Achim Szepanski, Germany's rave industry--which dominates the pop mainstream--is so institutionalised and regulated it verges on totalitarian. Adorno-style, he psychoanalyses Ecstasy culture as "a metonymic search for mother-substitutes (Ecstasy can be your new mommy)".  Alec Empire, a Mille solo artist and prime mover in his own Berlin-based anti-rave scene Digital Hardcore, is more blunt: "rave is dead, it's boring!  House is disco and techno is progressive rock".  As for Oval, Mille Plateaux's 'star act'... When asked about their relationship to techno, they simply reply: "Relationship?!"

     Influenced by post-structuralist theory and named after a gargantuan tract by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux release deconstruction techno. Situating their activity both within and against the genre conventions of post-rave styles like electronica, house, jungle and trip  hop, Mille Plateaux point out these musics' premature  closures and seize their missed opportunities. The  results may not offer the easy satisfactions of less ambitious techno labels/auteurs, but they do constitute  the most consistently stimulating catalogue in the post-rave universe.

    I meet Szepanski at his apartment, which doubles as HQ for his four labels (Force Inc, Mille, Riot Beats and Force Inc USA), and is located in Frankfurt's sleazy equivalent to King's Cross (handy for trains, lots of junkies and hookers). Having read his Deleuze-style press releases (lots of  "sound-streams" and "disjunctivesingularities") and conducted a theory-dense E-mail conversation, I'm expecting a rather severe individual. But over the course of the weekend, Achim reveals some unexpected sides to his character: a dry sense of humour, a soft spot for plastic pop (he confesses to buying CDs by TLC and Kylie) and an awesome talent for piss-artistry.

     Plagued by a mystery ailment, he spends most of Saturday sipping homeopathic remedies and complaining that he's too poorly to undertake a planned excursion to see Chicago house DJ/Force Inc artiste Gene Farris spin at a club in nearby Mainz. At midnight, he decides he's just about up to it.  For the first five hours, Achim's spirits remain low, despite an alcohol intake rate of three beers to my one: 

But by 6AM and the magic number Beer #12, Achim can be found flailing on the dancefloor, enraptured by Farris's trippy set. Every three minutes, he accosts someone to blearily proclaim: 'Gene Farris is the best house deejay in THE WORLD, I don't care, I will tell anyone--Josh Wink, Laurent Garnier--to their face, Farris is the BEST".

  

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Now aged 35,  Szepanski got involved in student politics in the radical, post-1968 climate of the mid-'70s. He read Marx, flirted with Maoism, protested conditions in the German prison system. Later in the decade, he immersed himself in the post-punk experimentalist scene alongside the likes of D.A.F., playing in the industrial band P16D4. In the '80s he went back to college, watched the Left die and got very depressed, consoling himself with alcohol and the misanthropic philosophy of Cioran.

     Two late '80s breakthroughs pulled him out the mire: his encounter with the post-structuralist thought of Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, et al, and his excitement about hip hop and house. While still working on a doctorate about Foucault, he started the first DJ-oriented record store in Frankfurt and founded the Blackout label.   By the early '90s, Szepanski was tripping out to Deleuze & Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia", a colossal tome that Foucault hailed as "an introduction to the non-fascist life". 

For Achim, the experience was revelatory and galvanising, because Deleuze & Guattari's theories showed him "that you don't have to be negative or sad if you want to be militant, even if what you fight against is very bad. The Frankfurt School and Marxism has a very linear interpretation of history and a totalising view of society, whereas  Deleuze & Guattari say that society is more than just the economy and the state, it's a multitude of sub-systems, and local struggles."

     From this, Achim conceived the strategy of  context-based subversion which informs his labels: hard-techno and house with Force Inc, electronica with Mille Plateaux, jungle with Riot Beats, trip hop with the "Electric Ladyland" compilation. These interventions are somewhere between parody and riposte, demonstrating by deed not discourse what  these genres could really be like if they lived up to or exceeded their accompanying 'progressive' rhetoric.

     Founded in 1991, Force Inc was initially influenced by Detroit renegades Underground Resistance: not just sonically, but by "their whole anti-corporate, anti-commodification of dance stance". In its first year, Force Inc's neo-Detroit/nouveau aciiied sound had a lot of impact.  At the same time, the Force crew were involved in the underground party scene, organising "guerrilla events at strange locations, without all the tricks and special effects that you get at normal discos". But as the aciiied revival took off and trance tedium took over in 1992, Force Inc "made a radical break," towards a breakbeat-oriented hardcore that weirdly parallelled the proto-jungle emerging in Britain.

      Szepanski & Co deserve massive respect  for recognising so precociously the radicalism of the then universally deplored 'ardkore. They even loved the much derided sped-up 'squeaky voice' tracks that ruled in 1992.

      "Maybe it was just our peculiar warped interpretation, but the sped-up vocals sounded like a serious attempt to deconstruct some of the ideologies of pop music. One dimension to this was using voices like instruments or noise, destroying the pop ideology that says that the voice is the expression of the human subject." 

     And so Force Inc embarked upon its own "abstract industrial take on UK breakbeat", mashing together harsh sonorities and angelic samples over ultra-fast breakbeats, as on Biochip C's marvellous "Hells Bells", available on the recent Force anthology "Rauschen 10". Achim also licensed UK tracks like NRG's super-sentimental "I Need Your Lovin'" and stuff by Force Mass Motion.  "We did some great parties, our DJ friend Sasha playing much faster than the English DJ's, at 200 bpm, using an altered Technics cranked up to + 40. At this velocity, it was very abstract, coming at you like a sound wall. It worked good for us but nobody else! We were very isolated in Germany".

      In 1993-94, Szepanski watched aghast as rave went overground in Germany, with "the return of melody, New Age elements, insistently kitsch harmonies and timbres". With this degeneration of the underground sound came the consolidation of a German rave establishment, centred around the  party organisation Mayday and its record label Low Spirit, acts like Westbam and Marusha, and the music channel Viva TV. The charts were swamped with Low Spirit pop-tekno smashes like 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' and 'Tears Don't Lie', based on tunes from musicals or German folk music. And the alleged 'alternative' to this dreck was middlebrow trance, as represented by Frankfurt's own Sven Vath and his Harthouse label. 

       For Achim, what happened to German rave illlustrated Deleuze & Guattari's concepts of  'deterritorialisation' and 'reterritorialisation'.  Deterritorialisation is when a culture gets all fluxed up--punk, early rave, jungle--resulting in a breakthrough into new aesthetic, social and cognitive spaces.  Re-territorialisation is the inevitable stabilisation of chaos into a new order: the internal emergence of style codes and orthodoxies, the external co-optation of subcultural energy by the leisure industry.  Szepanski has a groovy German word for what rave, once so liberating, turned into: 'freizeitknast', a 'pleasure-prison'.  Regulated experiences, punctual rapture, predictable music. "Boring!".

     Would he go so far as to see kind of aesthetic fascism at work in rave culture?  "The techniques of mass-mobilisation and crowd- consciousness have similarities to fascism. Fascism was mobilising people for the war-machines, rave is mobilising people for pleasure-machines...".

   In 1994, Achim started Mille Plateaux. Just as Force Inc worked with and against the demands of the dancefloor, Mille is a kind of answer to 'electronic listening music' and the ambient boom. Achim sees Mille Plateaux output as the musical praxis to Deleuzian theory, fleshing out concepts such as the rhizome (a network of stems that are laterally connected), which is opposed to hierarchical root-systems like trees. In music, 'rhizomatic' equates with the Eno/dub  idea of a democracy of sounds, a dismantling of the normal ranking of instruments in the mix (usually privileging the voice or lead guitar).  Instead, says Achim, there's a "synthesisation of heterogenous sounds and material through a kind of composition that holds the sound elements together without them losing their heterogeneity".

Anticipated by the fractal funk and chaos theorems of Can and early '70s Miles (the 'nobody solos and everybody solos' principle), rhizomatic music today takes the form of DJ cut'n'mix (at its rare, daring best), avant-garde hip hop and post-rock. Oh, and the output of Mille Plateaux, of course! 

        Another key Deleuze & Guattari trait shared by Mille Plateaux is an interest in schizophrenic consciousness. Achim talks of admiring darkside hardcore  for its "paranoia", and mourning the way jungle traded its vital madness for "serious" musicality. "Since the Fifties, in musique concrete, in industrial music, in techno, one heard diverse noises, screaming, creaking, hissing--all noises one related more to madness.  Echo-effects allow sound hallucinations to occur, they delocalise the perception apparatus, allowing forms of perception to emerge that one had previously attributed to lunatics or schizophrenics".  For Achim as for Deleuze & Guattari, such sensory disorientation is valuable, acting as a deconstruction of "subjectivity".

     Last year, Szepanski contacted Deleuze himself, sending material by Oval and other Mille artists, and asking if he'd write an essay for Achim's planned anthology of techno theory, 'Maschinelle Strategeme'.  The great man wrote back saying he couldn't do it, but gave his blessing to the label, and said that he particularly dug Oval. "He even wrote about specific tracks! Later, the German publisher of 'A Thousand Plateaux' told us this was really quite unusual, to get such a letter."

     Not long after, the terminally ill, 70 year old Deleuze committed suicide. Szepanski immediately organised  the double-CD tribute "In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze". Featuring contributions from American post-rockers Rome and Trans Am,  DJ-philosopher Spooky, a gaggle of Achim's old allies in the European experimental music scene, and all the usual Mille Plateaux affiliated suspects (Oval, Mouse On Mars, Cristian Vogel, Ian Pooley, Scanner, Gas, etc), "In Memoriam" is probably the best thing the label's put out yet. Stand-outs include the electro-acoustic jiggery-pokery of Alec Empire's "Bon Voyage", the musique concrete jungle of Christophe Charles' "Undirections/Continuum", and Rome's Cluster-like drone- mosaic "Intermodal".

     The ubiquitous Jim O'Rourke also appears, and is working on a sort of O'Rourke Vs Mille Plateaux remix project, using the entire Mille catalogue as source material.  Techno-Animal may also be doing a remix project based around the 'versus' concept, "Techno-Animal Vs Reality", which will involve five guest collaborators; material will be shuttled back and forth between each artist and the band, eventually resulting in ten versions of five tracks. And then there's Oval, who are currently scheming their way towards a sort of Listener Vs. Oval scenario: a digital authoring-system that will enable the punter to make their own Oval records.

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    Interviewing Oval is, shall we say, challenging. Their methods are obscure, their theory fabulously rarified, their utterances marinated in irony. All that can be safely said is that Oval's "music"--however irrelevant aesthetics may be to the trio--offers an uncanny, seductive beauty  of treacherous surfaces and labyrinthine recesses. 

     Ironically, given Oval's polemical engagement with digital culture, our encounter takes place in one of Frankfurt's new cyber-cafes. Immediately, there are communication problems. Humble enquires about backgrounds and influences are met with rolling of the eyes, sniggers, and 'next question!'.  Tentative characterisations of their activity are treated as a reduction or misrepresentaiton of the Oval project. So what ARE they trying to do?

      Put as simply as possible, Oval is "not so much about music as the technical implementation of notions of music", says Markus Popp. "It's an effort in sound-design rather than music with a capital M. The main content of our effort is to have an audible user-interface."

     In nuts and bolts terms, this means fucking with the hardware and software that organises and enables today's post-rave electronica. Most critical of these technologies is is MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), which allows different pieces of equipment to be co-ordinated like the players in a band, or instrumental 'voices' in an orchestra. For Oval, this is precisely the problem. "MIDI is basically a music-metaphor in itself, one that's so deplorably dated. It's so constraining in every way, you have to go beyond these protocols".

     Despite, or rather because of, this technology's reliance on "traditional music syntax and semantics", Oval deliberately use the set-up, because their real interest is in standardisation. Their first Mille Plateaux release 'Systemisch', says Sebastian Oschatz, "was done with a very cheap MIDI set-up and a borrowed copy of Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works Vol II".  This later turns out to be an Oval in-joke; apparently, Richard James is one of many artists who've claimed that 'Systemisch' was based on his material.  "That album is composed of material that is really old, and it got edited, layered and recombined so many times, it's stupid to ask 'whose music is this?'," says Popp. "That is the only truly negligible aspect in our music. Most of the CDs we used were rented, and often they didn't have their covers!"

     Going back to MIDI and sampler/sequencer software like Cubase, Popp compains: "There is so much determinism within these programmes, working with them involves so much compliance to principles that are highly critical. In a social context, these technologies are mostly used in a controlling way: monitoring the workplace, workplace efficiency, optimising the user-interface.  On-line newsgroups are full of people who E-mail back to the manufacturers saying 'we'll need this, change that', and all of this keeps them in front of their computers even longer. Our way of dealing with this is to overcome the manufacturer's distinction between 'features' and 'bugs'".

     Which brings us to the famous Oval deployment of deliberately damaged CD's to generate the raw material of their music: the glitches, skips, and distressed cyber-muzik that makes 'Systemisch' and its sequel '94 Diskont' so ear-boggling.  The CD-thang is another 'reduction' that irks Oval: "we did use CD's, but that is neglectable, there are so many other things we could have used... The important point was that the CD-player has no distinction if it's an error or a proper part of the recording, it's just doing calculations, algorhythms."

     This recalls, say, Hendrix's aestheticisation of feedback, a 'bug' or improper effect immanent in the electric guitar but hitherto un-exploited.  Oval reject terms like 'sabotage' to describe the CD-treaments and the more esoteric forms of algorhythmic mischief they wreak within hardware.  But they do use the word 'disobedience', which also has a frisson of subversion.

     Perhaps the closest term to describe Oval's methods is deconstruction, at least in its precise original meaning: Derrida & Co's close, rigorous reading of philosophical texts in order to unsettle the terms of post-Enlightenment thought from within.  Deconstruction involved unravelling the rhetorical tropes and purely literary sleights that compose any text's supposedly rational argument; it meant exposing the text's blindspots, paradoxes and hidden complicities. Oval similarly talk of engaging in a kind of non-antagonistic dialogue with corporate digital culture, with Sony, IBM, Microsoft, et al.

     Contradictions abound in Oval's own rhetoric. They speak in almost punk anyone-can-do-it terms of deliberately keeping their activity at the "lowest entry-level", of not wanting "to convey an image of arcane technology and years of expert study in digital signal processing and programming". Yet their discourse is often absurdly forbidding and user-unfriendly. Then there's the way they deny any musical intentions, only to later come  close to characterising their project as an enrichment of music. They talk of not wanting to produce a merely "predictable outcome" of the hardware and software, of wishing to "offensively suggest" the existence of soundworlds "from 'outside' the digital domain", of  having invented a "completely new music-paradigm."

    Says Popp, "Another aspect of what we wanted to achieve musically is to generate a new kind of perception.  In the beginning, some labels sent back the demo tapes because they said 'there's no music on it'!". In that respect, Oval's audio-mazes induce a 'perceptual dissonance' akin to the Op- Art of Bridget Reilly, or the perspectival chaos of Escher. Sebastian adds: "it works the other way: obvious mis-pressings on the albums, or DAT drop-outs on certain compilation tracks, don't get spotted during the production process!"

     Future Oval projects include some kind of EP for Mille Plateaux; the US release of 'Systemisch' and 'Diskont', accompanied by "exclusive material, possibly predating 'Systemisch'," via ultra-kool label Table of the Elements; an 'interactive' product designed in collaboration with British computer boffin Richard Ross.  

"It's not exactly CD-ROM or hypertext", explains Popp. "But it will involve guiding the user through some kind of design-environment, and basically enabling people to do Oval records themselves. The working title is 'The Public Domain Project', and it will involve a lot of work. We also want to investigate the forthcoming video-disc, maybe there are  ways to work with the combination of optical and audio, new potentials. And we are thinking about using the sounds of data processing itself--the sounds the computer or sampler generate when they calculate or process the sound. For there is always sound somewhere in the mixing desk, when stuff is stored or window-boxes get closed or opened. We are thinking of recording this because it is basically the sound of the user-interface itself."

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     At the other extreme from Oval's oblique strategies lies Alec Empire's insurrectionary anarcho-tekno. Empire and the Oval boys appear to have had some sort of ideological rift, in fact. Popp refuses to comment, but Empire makes a veiled jibe about Oval doing "their music from this very intense theory, whereas I do it not only from books but from what I feel."

    An  engaging fellow who's constantly laughing, usually at his own utterances, Alec Empire divides his energy between recording solo albums for Mille Plateaux (the sombre electronica of "Low On Ice", the zany Sun Ra meets Perrez Prado avant-EZ-listening of "Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5"), and fostering the Berlin-based Digital Hardcore scene.   This two-pronged campaign reflects Empire's interestingly jumbled background. On one hand, he studied music theory for a while and, unusually for a techno artist, uses notation when composing his own music. On the other hand, he was a breakdancer at the age of 10 and playing in a punk band by the time he was 12. 

     At the end of the '80s, Empire got swept up in Berlin's underground party scene. Despite being anti-drugs himself, Empire embraced aciiied's cult of oblivion.   "For a lot of people at the acid parties, it was about escaping from reality. At the time it made sense, politics seemed futile, with the Left dead, and even the autonomists seeming like silly kids rioting for fun". The German scene quickly turned dark and nihilistic: "People got into heroin and speed, there were parties in East Berlin with this very hard industrial acid sound, Underground Resistance and Plus 8, 150 b.p.m.". 

Empire dug the way this aggressive sound reflected the kids' frustration, and, influenced by the abstract militancy of Underground Resistance, he formed the agit-tekno band Atari Teenage Riot. Atari signed to a major label, but were dropped before they released an album. Wrecking a recording studio's amplifier and running up huge cab bills by stopping off at record stores, they were just too much trouble. 

By this point--the end of '93--Alec had already released around 15 EP's of solo material on Force Inc and other labels, including "Hunt Down The Nazis" and "SuEcide". Meanwhile, he was experimenting with a Germanic jungle sound for Riot Beats, drawing on the influence of  UK 'darkside' tracks by Bizzy B and the Reinforced crews.Darkcore remains an influence on Digital Hardcore, which is both a scene and a label. "Our beat are fast and distorted, but the programming is not as complex as the UK producers."

Breakbeat appealed as both an antidote to Germanic techno's Aryan funklessness, and as a multicultural statement. "I did 'Hunt Down The Nazis' at a time when skinheads were attacking immigrants. Then you'd discover, talking about the attacks to people on the rave scene, that a lot of people were quite racist. At the Omen Club, Turkish kids were turned away for no reason. There was quite a nationalistic aura to German techno, 'now we are back on the map'. Mark Spoon from Jam and Spoon made a comment on MTV, about how white people had techno and black people had hip hop, and that's the way it should stay.  One neo-Nazi magazine even hailed trance techno as proper German music."

Ironically, Empire now reckons that UK jungle has gotten too funky. "The energy is missing. I don't care about them taking Detroit strings, 'cos I like Detroit, but jungle is just not forceful enough, and a whole night of it is just too flat. 

The idea of mixing, of fading tracks into each other smoothly, is over-rated. Pirate radio was better before the DJ's learned to mix properly. DJ technique is just like a guitarist who knows how to make a really complicated guitar solo. A Stooges riff can mean much more, with just three notes. If the energy's not there, what's the point?"

With its speedfreak tempos and brutalist noise aesthetic, Digital Hardcore has less in common with jungle than it does with that other descendant of the original 1991 pan-European hardcore: the terror-gabba and speedcore sounds of labels like PCP, Kotzaak, Fischkopf,  Cross Fade Entertainment, Praxis and Gangstar Toons Industry (many of whom can be found on the Empire-compiled "Capital Noise Chapter 1" CD). DHR's own acts, like EC80R, Moonraker, Killout Trash and Sonic Subjunkies, mash up 200 bpm breaks, ultra-gabba riffs, thrash-metal guitar, Riot Grrl shouting, and loads of midfrequency NOISE.  "In techno, in jungle,  the middle frequencies are taken out, it's all bass and treble. But the  middle frequencies are the rock guitar frequencies, it's where the aggression comes from."

As well as 'boost the midrange, cut the bass', Digital Hardcore's other key precepts are 'tempo changes keep it exciting' and 'faceless techno PA's are boring'. At their parties, DJ's favour a crush-collision mess-thetic of mixed up styles and b.p,m's, and there are always bands playing. Instead of hypnotising the listener into a headnodding stupor, Digital Hardcore is meant to be a wake-up call.     

So if rave is heavy metal (rowdy, stupefying) and electronica is progressive rock (pseudo-spiritual, contemplative), does that mean Digital Hardcore (angry, speedy, 'noise-annoys'-y) is punk rock? "The only similarity with punk is the frustration. And that's also where our stuff differs from Mille Plateaux: it's less theoretical, and perhaps more negative. All the kids are into chaos and anarchy, because nothing else seems to work. 

"You know, there's this foundation of musicians who used to play at parties and have now been put out of business by DJ's, " laughs Empire, "German Rock Musicians Against Techno, and we want to join it." He adds, "Just to take the piss", but, y'know--I think he means it, man.

One of my fave things Mille Plateaux put out

Intimate immensity

It's everything you want it to be and it's GAS

I really liked this guy Christophe Charles's track on In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze

A-maze-ment

PORTER RICKS,

live at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage

Village Voice,  Tuesday, Jul 3 2001

by Simon Reynolds

No doubt about it, the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage is an amazing space. As a music venue, though, this gloomy maze of looming, steep-sided chambers leaves a lot to be desired: Performers tend to drown in a quagmire of reflected sound. On June 28, the final installment of Creative Time's annual series of avant-electronica events (a 10th birthday bash for Frankfurt's Force Inc and its sister label, Mille Plateaux) saw some groups faring better with the acoustics than others. Panacea's 180-b.p.m. Gothkore bombast suited the medieval ambience, but Kid606's set was too busy and event-crammed (Boredoms do IDM) to thrive in this catacomb. SND suffered from the opposite syndrome: Too sparse even for the Anchorage, they sounded like an ailing metronome trapped in an echo chamber.

Luckily, Porter Ricks fit the space like a glove. Thomas Köner and Andy Mellweg first came to acclaim with their late-'90s releases on Chain Reaction, Berlin's "heroin house" label. Combining Köner's texturology (he's an avant-garde composer renowned for bleak arctic dronescapes) with Mellweg's grasp of house's pump-and-pound rhythm, Porter Ricks make formlessness funky.

But that's no preparation for how hard they rocked tonight: Imagine Eno's On Land meets the Stooges. Porter Ricks use a guitar processor on all their synth sounds, which helps explains the added grit in their grind. Early in the set, the songs felt like spelunking through spongy-walled caverns flushed with foamy water: total body-massage. But as the beat got steadily more bangin' and the texture-riffs flared fierce like magnesium, Porter Ricks hit a sublime pitch midway between warm pulse and cold rush: a sound as visceral as hardcore, as sensuous as deep house, as abstract as glitch. The combination of this glorious roar and the Anchorage's architecture was like being teleported through time-space to Berlin's legendary early-'90s club E-Werk, a disused power plant. Finally, the Anchorage became the rave temple it has always promised to be.