rolling back to the future garage/post-dubstep/alt-funkstep/intelli-2step etc thread

surprisingly coherent for a black-out piece

i never remember anything. i dont have to have been drinking all that heavily. id like to know the science behind it. its quite disturbing.

he's gone dudes, quit the rock throwing

I notice he didn't admit nor refute the Enter Shikari bit, which I would personally find more shameful than any false binary talk.

joe_muggs said:

if you want to look at artists like Africa Hitech, or Deadboy, or Mizz Beats, or Kavsrave, or Lunice, or Rustie, or Ras G - or indeed Gremino: yes, they certainly do openly borrow openly from "scene music".

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i'v always dreamed being involved in some local "hardcore scene" (almost every underground electronic music scenes here in finland are mostly middle class) and aim to make "hardcore" music (not purely tho), so tbh i don't feel that home with post-dubstep. so i'm a bit of outsider, as i don't feel very home in post-dubstep, but i'm not also involved in any hardcore scene, so i ended up making my own hardcore. though, the only place to promote it to... is, well, post-dubstep...

ory said:

it's not like i'm going out of my way to find these "binaries". they're right there, and obviously a lot of people here feel the same way -- if not about the same musics then at least for the same reasons. it seems you're offended by this.

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there are differences in approach and scene divisions, of course. but they aren't fixed - there are points of convergence and interesting overlaps. your way of looking at things can't account for champion and terror danjah playing joe tunes, or ossie releasing on lightworks, or funkystepz on hyperdub, or trim mcing over becoming real and dro carey, or mala working with james blake, or petchy and his crew dancing to a joy orbison set at doldrums, or marcus nasty playing ramadanman and mosca tunes

reynolds makes room for stuff like that right? but you lot don't seem to be

^ theres a difference between the odd tune crossing over here and there, and the sort of amorphous soup that Muggs revels in though.

gremino said:

i'v always dreamed being involved in some local "hardcore scene" (almost every underground electronic music scenes here in finland are mostly middle class) and aim to make "hardcore" music (not purely tho), so tbh i don't feel that home with post-dubstep. so i'm a bit of outsider, as i don't feel very home in post-dubstep, but i'm not also involved in any hardcore scene, so i ended up making my own hardcore. though, the only place to promote it to... is, well, post-dubstep...

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i wouldn't worry about it too much Gremino, I really like your stuff.

I took a fairly hardline approach in that debate with Muggs but, of course there are blurred edges to scenes that can allow the odd outsider in, or for odd tunes to crossover. Overall though I still stand by what I said.

PiLhead said:

Binaries are the spice of life / culture

Without them it's all just mush

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It is all a bit of a mush atm though, i'd argue that its very refreshing not having a linear movement. Anything that's good (in the opinion of whoever is making/playing it) goes, then as a listener I just pick the bits I like and leave the rest. I personally am not that convinced there will ever be a "proper" scene created ever again.

I'm all for the 'mess' its in at the moment - directionless maybe but who wants another 'movement'?

mixed feelings about this thread. on the one hand i've found the debate and aggyness quite interesting.. on the other hand it's made me feel that reading all this has basically sucked all the joy out of music and made me feel a but dirty, and that i should just ignore it and spend time and energy just on listening to music / going to nights..

Focus will come eventually.

the fact is there's just not any single form around at the moment that's exciting / revolutionary enough to galvanize people together en masse, in the way that jungle, grime or dubstep dd. Web 2.0 makes it very hard for such scenes to take place anyway, because it removes the private, small-locality embryonic, digestive stage that such scenes need to form. And for sure, such scenes don't take place in university campuses, for whatever reason, they tend to come about in more cash strapped localities. i wouldnt care to speculate why.

But what do you expect these "post-dubstep" artists to do? They are doing nothing other than following their inspirations, which is the only real responsibility an artist has to their audience, and themselves. Charging them with inauthenticity doesn't stick much, if they're being authentic to themselves. Also, almost all of them lovingly and loyally soldiered in narrow scenes (dubstep, jungle, grime) before all of this. That counts, as they aren't the fickle petty, parasitic bourgeois art school types that they're being portrayed to be. Their old scenes were hijacked, remember. Esp dubstep & jungle.

Not a single argument can be raised to someone who simply doesn't engage with what they're hearing, and if you need revolutionary, scenius, "street" orientated music to get you going, none of this stuff is going to work much.
But an argument can be raised against someone objecting to non-scene music on purely ideological grounds. Because they're letting intellectual objects / junk skew the felt-sense of openly listening to music. And that is what I feel reynolds is doing.. he's built up a big conceptual frame work, which worked for a time (perhaps not any more?), and is accepting or rejecting music based on how well it fits into that. This is what a lot of blog types (im sorry if that sounds snarky) fall prey to , thinking about music rather than genuinely feel it. Ony reynolds really knows if thats the case however. maybe he just thinks it all sounds like shit. and well, a lot of it does.

there always were middle class or at least suburban types involved in jungle and in UK garage (perhaps not so much in grime)

No U Turn... Danny Breaks... Photek obviously... Rob Playford and Rob Haigh, the Hertfordshire massive

Rob Playford is no gangsta but the partnership of him and Goldie (who did have that street shady past) created results that perhaps would have been out of reach of either of them alone

but with all those sounds/scenes, i think the overall tone was set by the street/road element, that was dominant, calling the tune

the thing people forget is that a lot of this music -- jungle and grime especially -- was aggressive music. forged out of competition

it's not about an authenticity test, it's about the end product.... whether it has the vibe

thats perfectly agreeable but tbh, quite well established. What's perhaps more pertinent is whether that hardcore / street "vibe", is a pre-requisite to music being praise worthy, or at least enjoyable, or not. Some people prefer hardcore nuum music is all, and post-dubstep isn't. Im a bit fucking sick of the nuum for the moment, so im happy to take a break from it, personally.
It would just be helpful if people wouldn't try to assert objective superiority beneath their subjective preference. There isn't an objective forumla to say constrained-scene artist X will be better than loosely-affiliated-individualist artist X. Anyone who says otherwise is entering socialist-worker weekly territory imo.

daddek said:

thats perfectly agreeable but tbh, quite well established. What's perhaps more pertinent is whether that hardcore / street "vibe", is a pre-requisite to music being praise worthy, or at least enjoyable, or not. Some people prefer hardcore nuum music is all, and post-dubstep isn't. Im a bit fucking sick of the nuum for the moment, so im happy to take a break from it, personally.

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I wouldn't say that the "hardcore" quality is something that is a pre-requisite to music being praise worthy, it essentially being a category that contains similar aesthetic and social points between a number of chronologically and geographically connected UK dance genres. It is only ever a pre-requisite for membership within that category. It just so happens that all of the genres you might be able to talk about as fitting into the continuum, whether you fully accept it or not, both achieve two things: they are made for clubs and are aesthetically very unique and distinct from music being made in other parts of the world, though not as distinct and unique from each other. My own personal frustration with recent developments is that you are beginning to see new strains that are considered direct products of these continuum genres (again, whether you believe in such a thing or not - the fact that we are using the terms 'future garage' or 'post-dubstep' says enough) that are neither effective in clubs nor distinct aesthetically from American or Continental electronic music.

My fear is simply that the London-centric pirate radio culture (if you are uncomfortable with saying "the hardcore continuum") that has produced so much of my favourite music is going to stop being the radically unique club music it has been for so long.

Sick Boy said:

that are neither effective in clubs nor distinct aesthetically from American or Continental electronic music.

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Whats that based on??

well said sickboy

muser said:

Whats that based on??

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Mount Kimbie/James Blake/Burial influenced things - along with a smattering of that weird, overdone hip-hop influenced stuff you found a lot more last year - that you hear on people like Blackdown's shows*, and the last two years of turning on Rinse FM and hearing bland, American sounding vocal house. If necessary I will trawl through Boomkat to provide some examples of the former, but I can't provide any examples of the latter because I've never bothered to find out the names.

I'm not all doom and gloom though. I will say this: I like a bit of what Night Slugs do, there is still a lot of nice grime being made courtesy of Oil Gang and Butterz, the kind of thing Slackk is on is excellent, and I really like what funky is doing on the grimer Lil Silva/Ill Blu end of the spectrum

*EDIT: I don't want to go in too hard on Blackdown, I don't dislike everything he plays and he's already taken a bit of a ribbing in this thread. I could say the same thing (if not more) about Hessle Audio, the L2S guys, some Blunted Robots, periphery shit like Jamie xx and Four Tet when they get played by dubstep DJs, Naked Lunch, even some recent Hyperdub etc. etc.