that Kode 9 quote about internalising the structure of jungle

swears

preppy-kei
Is that when you hear the bare bones of a jungle beat in a dubstep track, and then your inner ear fills in the details?
Something like that, unless I'm confused. I think K-punk mentioned it in a blog entry a while back, but I'm not sure about the original Kode 9 quote.

EDIT: Inner ear? That's just some part of your...ear. I meant to say "mind's ear" as in "mind's eye", if you catch my drift. Like when you hear an instrumental and you can almost hear the vocal over the top...or something..
 
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tate

Brown Sugar
think it's from Wire's Invisible Jukebox w/ him. Current 93 cover.
Yes, it comes on page 21 of the July 2006 Wire with Current 93 on the cover, at the end of the interview, when commenting on the last track of the article, which was Mark One ft. Sizzla, "I Got Too."

In response to Walmsley's question (great work as always, DW) about the emptiness of the track, Kode says "But it's still got momentum. It surprises a lot of people how dancefloor friendly dubstep can be. A track like this is so empty it almost makes you nervous and you almost fill in the double time [sic] yourself, physically, to compensate. The way I was thinking about this, it's almost like we've internalised the double-time in Jungle, to the point that we don't really need to hear it anymore."

Walmsley: "The double-time is almost present in its absence."

Kode: "Exactly, but the power of this is that it's got that vocal as well. And to me that's what dubstep has go to do, it's got to get good vocals on top of these sorts of beats. The beats work OK on their own, but I don't think it's got a particularly interesting future if it's just an instrmuemental music." The article ends there.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Hmm, is anyone convinced by this "present in its absence" thing tho? I mean, fair enough if yr talking about a bass kick/snare pattern effectively at 69 bpm and hi hats, delay patterns and bass rhythm at 138 bpm, but if every element snaps to 69, then its just turgid bollocks as far as I'm concerned. Its getting the double-time to sit half and half, snapping between them in that Timbaland like manner that interests me. And how DO most of you guys dance to dubstep anyway? If its actually locked in fully to a half step then its a pretty slow zombie stomp, its only when those flickering elements of double-time kick in that shocking out can be fully achieved...
 

Logos

Ghosts of my life
Thats why the best stuff expresses balance in such a joyful way...Mala or Coki, Kode, Pinch. Is Blue Notes half time or not? - no, its somehow somewhere in between.

I think jungle has been internalised, but not in just an obvious sense as rhythm.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Blue Notes is ace- really weird and fucked up. That in-between thing is vital, keeping it angular and spacious, rather than trudgingly monotonous... I'm surprised no-one has done 1/4 step yet tho, I was building a beat last night in that style... it gives you a ridicuous amount of space for syncopation, and when it snaps to quadruple time its absurd! I suspect its not a viable dance form tho :eek:
 

synaptic

Global multinuum
Saw it on a blog somewhere, anyone know the original source?
He developed this point in an interview in Paris in January 2006:
http://www.dubstep.fr/index.php/kode9-interview-part1

"I think the reason people find dubstep slow when you come from drum and bass is because there’s so much space in the music. In a sense it’s a more interactive music because you actually have to add yourself, you have to fill in the rhythm between the spaces yourself, make it up yourself, then dance; you know thats what you’re dancing to. So in a way for me it’s interesting because some of the elements that you dance to aren’t there actually but they’re there virtually. Also, it’s not a dance music in which everything is given to you on a plate, you actually have to, I suppose, interact with the music a little bit more and fill in the spaces yourself. But it’s a skanky music, if you can dance to dub you can dance to dubstep. It’s just you have to go down to find the rhythm as opposed to having lots of frantic breakbeats that you simply follow like in drum and bass. I think that’s why people find it difficult. People found jungle when it emerged difficult because they weren’t used to having that much rhythm and so people were confused. Most of the people that produce and deejay dubstep were into jungle and it’s almost like we know jungle so well now that we don’t need to hear the fast breakbeats; it’s in our bodies already. What was exciting about jungle has almost been internalized into our systems, so we don’t need so many elements anymore to get the same vibe. I think that’s maybe part of the issue."
 

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
If this genre becomes about halfing fractions, I'm going to go to bed that night very upset.

Haha, indeed.


Hmm, is anyone convinced by this "present in its absence" thing tho?

Fair point, and thinking about it, you could argue the notion of "present in its absence" doesn't really work in music like dubstep which is, primarily, physical. The amount of bass in dubstep does create a kind of vacumn, though, which you kind of yearn is filled with something else. And yearning creates tension, certainly... but yeah, arguably you don't get the "money shot" of the snare salvo or whatever.

Dubstep is a very effective canvas for playing out these kind of tensions. However, I'm not always convinced is much more than that. Personally, I have no idea how to dance to dubstep; and unlike "proper" dub, there isn't always for me that kind of soulfulness or emotional investment that really makes you want to dance to it. Dancing to it seems somewhat empty to me, in the same way and for the same reasons as I don't like dancing to dub in that kind of ultra-physical, running on the spot type way. Dunno, there needs to be some kind of "investment" for me to dance to something.


In response to Walmsley's question (great work as always, DW)

Ah, cheers!
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Derek: I agree it lacks the "soul" (for want of a better word) of analogue dub, the messiness and eeriness of versioned songs on grainy tape... but this is why it can be something entirely different to dub, or certainly more than just hyper-inflated digi-dub. Its why I always groan a tad when producers reach for the obvious dub signifiers, it just sounds a mite plastic... its really sub-step, not dub step (if you want to think literally about it)... I would enjoy hearing some different "dub" signifiers actually... insane dub fx would be good, or different at least, rather than skanking off beat guitar samples/synths...
 
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Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
Derek: I agree it lacks the "soul" (for want of a better word) of analogue dub, the messiness and eeriness of versioned songs on grainy tape... but this is why it can be something entirely different to dub, or certainly more than just hyper-inflated digi-dub...

What I like about dubstep is the collision between a very deep, spiritual style (dub) and a unrepentently trashy, plasticky one (two-step). A lot of dubstep is very trashy, digital, low-grade sound, like this faux-oriental melodies that are ripped from console games and skream's blip pile-ups. It's the tension between that and the yawning bass that gives it such a wierd feel.

Consumer society is about creating a total enviroment, like a virtual reality. If you take elements of that out of context, you get tension - like pop art, or even rubbish dumps (consumer detrius washed up in an industrial, non-human enviroment). This is what I got off on in hardcore and dubstep, at it's best, is a continuation of that.

I want to develop this but I'm late for work - I might post a bit more tonight.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
I still feel the pull into dub-centricism is a massive massive false path, and that a minimal sub-bass led music need not have anything per se to do with dub bar an investigation into the potential of creating alien sensations of 3-dimensional spatiality in sound. All the cheesy signifiers are a bit dumb, a bit too easy. It should be about creating something as alien as dub was in the 70s but for today... it need not be about some postmodernist tension, but rather pure modernism, pushing the idea of dance music into an alien place, alien of texture, emphasis and tempo, whilst maintaining a certain simplicity and elegance of means which prevents a slide into that hell which is modern IDM (and which is deeply un-funky)
 
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Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
Laudable idea gek... the tricky part is executing it!

Dub wasn't totally alien, it was the result of specific cultural and musical factors in Jamaica at the time. Obviously it took a fair bit of genius to alchemize that into a radical form like dub, but the point is that new styles never emerge from a vacuum. There has to be cultural pressure within the scene to push them into being. What's interesting is when scenes split off from the mainstream and mutate within themselves - because in a closed-off scene with a small demographic reach, ideas can spread very quickly, and pull in all sorts of wierd stuff. I wrote about this a bit in a blog piece i did on Clockwork Orange.

Playstation seems to be a massive part of the dubstep soundworld - a lot of the melodies and synth FX in the tracks lift ideas from the kind of incidental music you find in computor games. In a more lateral way, dubstep's paradoxical feeling of twitchy inertia references the playstation state of mind - physically slothlike, mentally hyper-alert. I spent a lot of my youth smoking weed, listening to hardcore and playing SNES - for a lot of jungle hedz this, rather than raving, was how the subculture operated on a daily basis, and dubstep seems to have internalized this impulse in the music and taken it onto the next stage. Because it's taking a feeling from jungle, rather than narrowly musical template, it doesnt sound anything like jungle to someone outside the scene - but if you've ridden with it for 10 years, the evolution of jungle into dubstep makes sense because it's pushing those same psychological buttons. I think this is what Kode 9 is getting at.

Dubstep now is in a similar position to jungle in '95 - during the crucial years of it's development it moved away from being purely 'dance' music because it was more of a radio/mixtape phenomenon than a club phenomenon. This liberated producers to explore more nuanced moods in the music, and push it into places that dance music on it's own couldn't go to. But as it's re-emerged, raves have got bigger and it's had to deal with the problem of getting the 'dance' back into the music without jettisoning what makes it unique. Jungle never really managed to do this - techstep and liquid d&b are far more successful as dance music than '94-era artcore, but only because the producers have trimmed the music to fit the templates of more mainstream styles like house & trance, and lost the magic in the process. If dubstep has to move towards the mainstream, I hope the scene splits and leaves the spliffhead cargo-cult side behind as post-millenial mood music underground.

I'd disagree that the use of decontextualized cultural elements in this way is postmodernist - PoMo is inevitably ironic, and irony requires conscious mastery of the signs, whereas the use of consumer signifiers in dubstep and other 'nuum music is happening on a subconscious level which is why it comes out so jumbled. Whereas ironic use of signs de-intensifies thier alienness, subconscious use is about loading objects with private meaning - it's the foothills of schitzophrenia, basically. This process, where music splits off form the mainstream and starts to take on cult-like aspects, will become increasingly common as music de-centralizes through the communications networks of the 21st century - it doesnt seem to have a name yet (sectifying?).

Sorry, this is a rambling post and I'm straying into areas that I don't really have the theoretical knowledge to do justice to.
 
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bassnation

the abyss
Dubstep now is in a similar position to jungle in '95 - during the crucial years of it's development it moved away from being purely 'dance' music because it was more of a radio/mixtape phenomenon than a club phenomenon. This liberated producers to explore more nuanced moods in the music, and push it into places that dance music on it's own couldn't go to. But as it's re-emerged, raves have got bigger and it's had to deal with the problem of getting the 'dance' back into the music without jettisoning what makes it unique. Jungle never really managed to do this - techstep and liquid d&b are far more successful as dance music than '94-era artcore, but only because the producers have trimmed the music to fit the templates of more mainstream styles like house & trance, and lost the magic in the process. If dubstep has to move towards the mainstream, I hope the scene splits and leaves the spliffhead cargo-cult side behind as post-millenial mood music underground.

there were lots of jungle raves and club nights in 95. the whole pirate scene was not in any way separate from that. you even had a club dedicated to playing artcore (bukem's speed). the biggest sound was jump-up which is as far from nuanced as you can get. the audience that listens to liquid funk / techstep is a very different one to back then.

the techstep movement was a reaction from the producers to jungles huge popularity (and perceived possible compromise of artistic ideals). remember goldie's mixmag interview where he talked about taking it back the darkside? it was their retreat from the mainstream that killed old skool jungle, but ironically the contemporary form has more listeners around the world than ever.

i'd hate to see the same happen to dubstep. i think its more important to embrace things like vocals and to keep changing the template - just as long as its not a long drop into the dirge and a return to boys only club nights. and personally, i like reggae samples. makes the music more vibey, and human too.
 

swears

preppy-kei
What dubstep has to really offer is it's sparseness. I would like to hear a bit more of that about, as opposed to the same boring old rolling breaks.
 
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