Innovation & Purification

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Like the reasons why you like contemporary dancehall are the reasons why i soured off it, ditto mumble rap. It's hard to speak about this stuff in a detached way when people try to fit everything into a progressive vs reactionary box - i think that's too ontologising, a tune can have progressive and reactionary elements simultaneously if u feel me. further more these are political concepts and they don't map onto music all that well. A reactionary in politics would be someone who would be for the reintroduction of feudalism and the catholic monarchy. I think it would be a stretch to put a disco or 90s ragga purist in the same box.

I find the critical narrative here woefully lacking mainly because (despite what critics would say) they're still basing everything on that punk shit.

maybe purism vs openness are better concepts for the stuff we are talking about. but these again should only be considered as gradations. like it would be better to argue that dubstep is too purist garage than argue that it was reactionary. that just throws a lot of music in the bin. now noone has to like dubstep most of it is shit but we need to not buy into a construct because it sounds evangelical

lots of gems in here, but what really struck me is this that third sees what luke calls 'cultural cowardice' where i would see innovation.

my opinion is that you do something for two or three years, then kill it and don't come back to it and this produces the healthiest innovation. third's possibly more sympathetic to the notion that in doing this you're stifling lots of developments before they an occur or fully crystallise.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
you could caricature these two viewpoints by saying 2step vs breakcore or lil jon vs eminem.

2step is ditching jungle and going for todd edwards and timbaland, whereas breakcore is fully exploring it.

likewise eminem is fully exploring the 'metaphysical, spiritual individual' end of rapping whereas lil jon decided to completely abandon it.

then again, all my main musical loves really belong to one decades-long purification and intensification of the punnai riddim tresillo/clave derived rhythms:



drill is particularly a culmination. the drums are loads of tresillo's piled on top of each other at different speeds and at different parts of the bar. even the rapping is all based on tresillo rhtyhms. i can't really argue it's anything other than purification. particularly given how it emerged from rejecting influences (no more dance music) as opposed to embracing them.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
great thread that i was meaning to start but never got around to, excellent quote from our discussions as well.

the breakcore thing is actually quite interesting. weirdly enough it started off as an intensification of techstep and that period, dj scud, ambush etc etc still sounds very fresh and prescient to me. however there came a point in the mid 00s where it merged with dada absurdism rather than psychedelic disorientation. that may have worked in 92 hardcore but 92 was (as I've said before) a transitional year. It's like when people say 92 was the best year for rave music. yes, totally, only if you take the emerging darkside, some of the piano tunes and the full tilt euro/detroit hard techno into account. but clearly 91 and
93 were the best years when hardcore sounded most like itself.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I guess my question is where do you go once it's purified? I like quite a lot of purist techno but I'm not really sure if that has to do with my love of disco or some of Miles' moments. I'd like to say yeah but I'm not here to do a black athena dissertation am I. and if I'm being honest purist techno that doesn't explore the limitations within that purism also bores me stiff.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
To me the gradation was the important thing. I think gabba got shit when it became less like itself and started putting in all those shlocky metal samples.

But then who defines the gradiant? What's an acceptable purism, or an acceptable eclectism (even) does anyone have a monopoly on that? I'm weary of boiling this down to it's all subjective taste maaan not least because my opinions are not completely individualised (no ones are.)

garage is also an interesting counter-control case here. dubstep tried to focus on 2step and in doing so excluded the majority of the garage scene which was, right up until 98-99 predominantly 4x4 house. really what separated the UK garage from the US garage was the uk tracks being based more on sustained dubby sub bass. it's interesting in that a lot of journalists got on 2step in 99-00 when the scene had long since started to self-contract back into its divergent parts. it would be like a london-based journalist getting into jungle in mid-95, not early 93. it's like you look at the tracklist of this golden era UKG mix from Brackles and yes there's 2step-y bits but it's essentially based on the house template.

MJ Cole - Sincere
Todd Edwards and Tuff Jam - One Day
El-B - Moving Up
Ordinary People - I'll Take You There
Gass - Darkside (MJ Cole Rmx)
Madd Flex - Music in Me (Groove Chronicles RMX)
Tuff Jam - Beautiful
Tuff Jam - Key Dub (version99)
Brasstooth - I Can't Quite
Wookie - What's Goin On
Firm Handed - Mind, Body and Soul
Brasstooth - Pleasure
Colours - Hold On
Somore - I Refuse (Ramsey and Fen RMX)
Kym Mazelle - Big Baby (MJ Cole, Ramsey and Fen RMX)
Lenny Fontana - Spirit of the Sun (Steve Gurley RMX)
Bump and Flex - Are You Sleeping (Todd Edwards RMX)
Sound of One - As I Am (Todd Edwards RMX)
Zoom and DBX - I'm Coming Again


anyway, blessed with another daily/weekly power cut so you might see this message in 6 hours time or 30 minutes time, who knows.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
but then there was an understated or subconscious electro influence in 2step which dubstep could never really get with, unless it was skream or coki...

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's funny cos when I got into dubstep it was long after all the El-B/Horsepower stuff, I didn't really think of it as being very garage-related. There was Mala of course but the dominant sound was halfstep - probably why it was so easy for drum n bass heads like I was to transition into dubstep, it was like ultra slowed down drum n bass. It was also close to grime, there was a degree of crossover (skepta vocalling midnight request line), the grime heads on drum n bass arena basically thought dubstep was grime for 'neeks' who were too scared to go to grime raves.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket

weird how the germans got that dnb had to merge with the electro/gabba continuum to continue to sound relevant. of course the UK dnb was already digging itself into a hoary stadium rock vomet fest.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's funny cos when I got into dubstep it was long after all the El-B/Horsepower stuff, I didn't really think of it as being very garage-related. There was Mala of course but the dominant sound was halfstep - probably why it was so easy for drum n bass heads like I was to transition into dubstep, it was like ultra slowed down drum n bass. It was also close to grime, there was a degree of crossover (skepta vocalling midnight request line), the grime heads on drum n bass arena basically thought dubstep was grime for 'neeks' who were too scared to go to grime raves.

Well, 2step was essentially the post-97 dnb beat housified, that is to say endowed with the nyc shuffle which made it swingy and skippy. if you listen to enough 4x4 garage this becomes clear enough.

So going back to wobble was a logical option to draw in more crowds, and avoid the tired white rasta pitfalls. but of course a lot of the people were not having that el-b as hanging around metalheadz not getting his foot in. nope, no, nata. the dem 2 bloke making destiny in 95. nope (by far one of the best takes on avant-house.)

and hence when dbridge and instra:mental did their autonomic thing people were debating whether it was speeded up dubstep or not which was missing the point entirely. that's the biggest con of dance music in the UK. you shift downbeats to hit on 1-3 or snares to go on 2-4 or 3-4 and suddenly its something entirely new and you must disavow everything else. again, bad dissertations on race and multiculturalism, as I keep saying. 'dnb is too white.' they moan. well yeh if you keep codifying it that way and make garage this angry year 0 breakaway rather than a scene that was undergoing its parallel and intersecting evolution then of course your perspective is going to be skewed isn't it. and of course most garage heads went back to house when the grime and dubwhatsits happened, they were just not havin any of it. now I don't necessarily agree with that but i can see why they did that, because london has always had that house continuum. why it never really had a truly multicultural techno continuum is another debate really... you should check out freek fm from 95, matt jam lamont 94 and maybe a chicago/relief thing from 95 hmm...

For fuck's sake, the aborted coup attempt has made everything 10x worse here can't even get a decent half day of electricity anymore. let's see if i can get em from my history as no internet at the moment...

 

mvuent

Void Dweller
the idea of going into a self-imposed artistic "groundhog day" scenario has always kind of appealed to me. ignoring new trends and exploring the possibilities of styles and resources that were available at a given time to an absurd extent. for me there are a lot time-specific aesthetics that seem, frustratingly, not to have reached to their full potential—so doubling down would make sense.

the problem is, in “intensifying” a style, some of what made it appealing in the first place tends to get lost. as pointed out in energy flash, breakcore is “mosh-able not dancable.” and as the GOAT rapper said about eminem, “Fuckin' dweeb, all you do is read the dictionary and stay inside.” this relates to the usual critical complains about virtuosity. (to clarify though I’m not talking about specific techniques or forms—more about “visions” in a less concrete sense.)

so as far as innovation vs. purification, there’s a bit of a tug of war effect for which I like better as a general approach.

and to what extent is purification / perfection really possible? maybe it isn’t a process of new generations improving upon prior efforts—since as mentioned, they don’t have the same vision. instead it has to happen when the initial burst of inspiration is realized so thoroughly that it doesn’t leave room for improvement. in other words, if you're a producer and you're onto the "next big thing", one might say that... You better lose yourself in the music, the moment
You own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
'Purity' is a weird concept for an artform, anyway, isn't it? House isn't a chemical, there's no fixed point at which it is 100% itself and nothing else.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think Ive lowered my IQ by about a half cos in all honesty I don't understand this thread at all.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
it's a palette cleanser. it wipes the slate clean. it means you can begin your next god project without being bogged down in the residue of your old ideas and stimuli. you unclog all the inputs and become porous once more. you'd become stale, bored and boring otherwise.
 
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