sadmanbarty

Well-known member

first thing that popped into my head was that it was too trebbly (it'll be warmer sounds that are immersive), but i don't think that's it.

quickly clicked on it again and in about a second what jumped out at me was the 4x4 kick drum (and general lack of syncopation). it's so rigidly mapping out a grid. it's reiterating a sense of rigidness and stiffness. emotionally guarded and stifled. it doesn't swing (in the metric sense) so it has no curves nor does it have those tresillo syncopations so there's no relationship to my hips. there's nothing tugging me sideways. the lack of hip is also pointing to no libidinal energy.
 

luka

Well-known member
those 4x4 kicks have always been a barrier to me too but it does have an energy all it's own. not one either of us are naturally drawn to perhaps but it exists and sometimes i can feel my way into it. it's partly to do with the huge throb of electricity and the kind of forcefield that it produces. these big vibrating and overlapping grids of electric energy. i'd like to think and talk more about this but i've got someone coming round quite soon.
 

luka

Well-known member
i think it plays into 3rds anti-humanism actually. its on a scale larger than the human and at inhuman rhythms and intensities.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket

It's very romantic, redolent of youthful enthusiasms when murking everyone at footie meant u were on top of the world. There is a real humour in how it is all delivered, but not the humour of lick my nuts but the materialised id of the british. this is why grime could never be UK hip hop. It's too man down the pub for that. It is quite sad those social spaces are disappearing now, we are getting americanised in our mannerisms which is I believe detrimental for the future of the health of our children. but back to the riddim the drums are not as brittle but this is not a problem when you have such a forcefield.

Also the classic riddims had very soulful palliatives, which have always been essential to nuum music.

It's over now.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
those 4x4 kicks have always been a barrier to me too but it does have an energy all it's own. not one either of us are naturally drawn to perhaps but it exists and sometimes i can feel my way into it. it's partly to do with the huge throb of electricity and the kind of forcefield that it produces. these big vibrating and overlapping grids of electric energy. i'd like to think and talk more about this but i've got someone coming round quite soon.

it's funny, Dave Clarke, who is as purist techno as anyone was putting out furious rackets like this in 93. It was another kind of hardcore descended mutant really, it's not really like chicago acid it doesn't really owe much to funk or sex but more the oscillating calioscopic presentist moments in european electronic music. I've said this before I think Si goes a bit hard on techno in the book but i can't blame him as he was trying to make an intervension. but that hardcore of 91-92 disappears collectively in dance music as a hole by 95. and in a way that is a loss because it can only reappear in muted forms later.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the reappearance of the psychedelic hardcore. people say this stuff owes to beep me 911 and that but that's an oversimplification isn't it? 911's rhythm is nimble and sexy. grime beats are like a libido killer. chastisement. and that's why they are great.

 

blissblogger

Well-known member
it's funny, Dave Clarke, who is as purist techno as anyone was putting out furious rackets like this in 93. It was another kind of hardcore descended mutant really, it's not really like chicago acid it doesn't really owe much to funk or sex but more the oscillating calioscopic presentist moments in european electronic music. I've said this before I think Si goes a bit hard on techno in the book but i can't blame him as he was trying to make an intervension. but that hardcore of 91-92 disappears collectively in dance music as a hole by 95. and in a way that is a loss because it can only reappear in muted forms later.


never heard that track (Clarke certainly cleaned up his act within a few years!). starts out pretty exciting, but then in comes the acid-riff which really is like someone squirting you in the eye with a squeezy-plastic-lemon thingy full of bleach.

acid goes from something sinuous and endless gyrating involutions of cosmic strangeness (Chicago, late 89s) to something much narrower and nasty and consciousness-flattening by about 93

but yeah there was a lot of that hard-as-nails sinus-searing techno for pillmonsters music then... Rabbit City did a bunch, lots of other labels i can't even remember. Labworks? Djax as mentioned - banging but spartan. Clubs that never seemed alluring to me - Final Frontier, was that one? Lost? Knowledge I did go to and found very austere.

talking of reappearing in muted forms - i was recently listening to new-ish tracks by a deejay Terence Fixmer whose sound is a shiny digital-now update of that early hard industrial-tinged techno. good stuff but when you strip away the glossy hi-definition sound and the 3D drum production, in its fundamentals it is no further advanced than 80 Aum or something like that


it's not exactly muted, because it sounds monolithic and full-on - but something has gone, perhaps it's the hi-gloss, perhaps it's the very fact that it is a static form, long uncoupled from its moment, when it was emergent and the pulse of the future-now

bit like how Jack White makes fantastic-sounding records that are completely irrelevant because things have moved on since
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
yeah labworks. the dirtiest and nastiest acid came from IF/beverlyhills808303 on bunker and other labels. not cosmic at all more like razer scraping.

If you ever do get to hear one of those pillmonster techno sets it really does feel like you're stuck in a forcefield, esp on acid.

the real anally retentive purists are those guys descended from the south london tech house scene or whatever who went over to minimal and shit, god that was big around 2010. also why i never went fabric except on a drunken night out to see rodigan trying to get down with the kids, and failing... but minimal house: I never liked that sound, it was always US deep house and UK garage for me. which probably explains my antipathy for deeptech.
 
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