The Archaic Avant Garde

Melmoth

Bruxist
How much of Grime is archaic and how much is avant-garde? Do these distinctions make sense? Are they useful or should they be abandoned?
 

echevarian

babylon sister
I'm not quite sure what you mean, are you talking about the actual age of the tracks involved? Are you asking if they sound like the past or what we imagine the future to be?

Personally I think the only way to find the future in music is to know the past. Grime for me sounds a lot like the potential that some techno, industrial and hiphop have had. There is an interest in grime to "push things forward", but a lot of the sound has a basis in that strange nexus between UK Garage, dancehall, and hiphop. So more avante-garde than archaic. Although I wouldn't call it that.

And grime as a tag is just a label, there are a lot of emcees and producers who would call it something else.
 

satanmcnugget

Well-known member
exactly...i dont even know what grime is anymore...i used to think of it as the music made by people like Dizzee(Brit-hop?)...but apparently, it's also a hard and heavy style of dnb (like Plasticman)
 

echevarian

babylon sister
dizzee would be the first to tell you how much he loved drum and bass/ jungle

its all connected, and a lot of its really good so who cares what its called
 
My first reaction to some of the Wiley/Roll Deep productions was that it was a bit of a 'throw-back' in terms of the fairly transparent production techniques, similar to the clear, relatively simple production values and limited sound-pallets of Chicago House, bleep n bass etc. All the emphasis was on programming the beats/riffs and not much in the way of heavy sound-bending audio manipulation accociated with DnB. Same with some of the Electroclash stuff - it doesn't sound like they spent hours (days?) working on getting the hi-hat textures just so or chopping breaks up into microscopic edits. Many of the sounds used in Grime seem like instant, off-the-shelf plug-ins. But that's quite a fresh approach. Perhaps some of the 'FWD' stuff like Plasticman moves more towards production/FX but that's probably because it's designed to work as an instrumental track in it's own right.

the really innovative thing about Grime is the rhythms. Even at it's most extreme, DnB was still essentially endless convoluted abstractions on the rhythmic template laid down by 70's funk. The beats in Grime just seem to have come out of nowhere. they're not obviously 'groovy' and danceable. a truly new form of machine funk. James Brown really IS dead...
 
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Melmoth

Bruxist
scarboi said:
I'm not quite sure what you mean, are you talking about the actual age of the tracks involved? Are you asking if they sound like the past or what we imagine the future to be?

I'm not sure if I know what I mean myself. I'm enoying these responses though :)

On reflection, there's a quote from Walter Benjamin that I've always loved. He's talking about his time in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and he says 'In the Moscow street, the Russian village plays hide and seek'. I guess one aspect of what he's talking about there is the co-existence of 'archaic' ways of life with the radical innovations of the revolution. You get that now in parts of most major western cities: sleek modernity alongside the visible signs of those other ways of living that migrant communities sometimes preserve. You certainly do in London. And sometimes I find this too when I'm listening to the pirates, a mix of the future and the past, technology articulated with what Raymond Williams called 'structures of feeling' that seem part of folk rather than popular culture.
 
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