sadmanbarty

Well-known member
jesus christ si! at least give me a few days to be chuffed with myself!

bet he goes around at christmas telling kids santa isn't real.

not cool man.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
in the film there'd be the bit when he's a young, fresh faced, rosy cheeked scallywag and he runs up excitedly to paul morley or jon savage or something and says "gee whizz mister, i've written an article comparing johnny marr's guitar to hi life. it'd be ever so kind if you could take a look and tell me what you think" and they just rip it up in front of him and say "we've had enough of this paul simon shite here boy, come back when you've got something proper to say".

this would be the bit where we suddenly realise he's become the monster. he's al pacino at the end of godfather (luke's diane keaton).

let a boy dream si. that's all we've got left.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I guess so. In a self-conscious and therefore mannered way. There's nothing more cringey than reggae vocal samples in dubstep. Makes you want to shrivel up and die.

but that's just the inversion of the intelligent junglists. like i hear someone the other month telling me ragga was cheesy and made him want to shrivel up and die. don't equate your personal tastes with trying to develop an analytic framework. not that music can be overanalysed other as we kept saying you'll end up at Xenakis and Radigue.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
problem with all this shockwave stuff is there are literally splits in the og hardcore as well, like you'll literally get mans who said it was dead by 92 when all the pianos came in. and then you'll get mans who said it was dead by 93 with all the white horror film samples and shit.

That's why i'm a bit wary of making it an absolute geographical/cultural thing. I tend to see it in terms of lines and overlapping convergences rather than a linear progression. the linear thing is not very.. dialectical.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
anyway blissblogger had the right idea in the book about avant proletarian pop noise but the more he tries to justify it online to middle class wankers the more he shoots himself in the foot. the most solid defence of the nuum is not in its networks but the chapters onn accelerating hardcore, pirate radio, baby talk, technical prowess, etc.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
if bliss blogger was a rare groove head and hated post-punk he wouldn't be able to write a book on the nuum is my point. the whole construction is an extension of working to lower middle class avant-gardism. it would end up like Kirk Degiorgio or the 4hero crew writing a book on the subject. It would be more genre fundamentalist.

So like we can talk about academies, about youth centres and social clubs being shut down, a deliberately enforced policy of atomisation, flexitime and other tyrannical practices, racist club policing, it goes on and on.
 

luka

Well-known member
I thought this thread was going well last time I posted on it. Now it's a dogs dinner.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
meh this is old now hardcore continuum theory was basically a big defence to tell south london tech house and soulboy mafia to fuck off. that crowd doesn't exist anymore.

this is why trilliam won't get it north london are house heads but u guys have the delights of mr.c and friends who are basically exactly the embodiment of the caricature anal genre purist blissblogger talks about in his book. pretentious south londoners thinking they are all uppedy because they've read one amiri baraka book on jazz after sniffing solvents when they were 14. burn it to the ground, especially crystal palace. unceasing venom for crystal palace as a gunner.
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
meh this is old now hardcore continuum theory was basically a big defence to tell south london tech house and soulboy mafia to fuck off. that crowd doesn't exist anymore.

this is why trilliam won't get it north london are house heads but u guys have the delights of mr.c and friends who are basically exactly the embodiment of the caricature anal genre purist blissblogger talks about in his book. pretentious south londoners thinking they are all uppedy because they've read one amiri baraka book on jazz after sniffing solvents when they were 14. burn it to the ground, especially crystal palace. unceasing venom for crystal palace as a gunner.

You're punching at people who aren't there. Put down the machete and learn to weave before you dive in hacking.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
You're punching at people who aren't there. Put down the machete and learn to weave before you dive in hacking.

i mean im just having a bit of fun I'm sure Trilliam actually knows more about what London is listening to in 2018-19 of that i have no doubt. I am quite isolated from the community.

But these narritives always tend to end up reverting to discussions of capitalist innovation dynamics and actually validate woebot rather than talking about collective mnemonics. yes dnb is just repeating the past but so is rock, soul, non-pop hip hop and everything else.

I don't think it's really possible to be an enduring poptimist and by poptimist i don't mean pop is the best music more that I don't think pop can really reflect the human condition if left to its internal evolution dynamics. It always needs the outsider, the other to intrude. hardcore, garage, timbaland cribbing jungle beats, etc.

If you look from turkish pop, for instance, from 2000-2019, it's basically an incessant regurgitation of the esperanto dance pop formula. That's internal driver. it has no intruder, nothing to shake it up. this is in a way we have to look at the nuum on its own antimusical terms.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
and then the people doing replica jungle or ardkore-retro tracks are equivalent to rockabilly revivalists like the Polecats or Stray Cats

#postsyoufeelpersonallyvindicatedby

it's weird making music now. setting out to purposely make something new doesn't work. it feels like all the hauntology going on is basically inevitable but it just doesn't contain the level of potency as what's being copied does. there's people putting breaks back into club tracks again (which i'm all for) and they sound crispier and more hi def than ever which is the main thing distinguishing them from the originals. but as a maker of music there's a certain sense of futility in making something so derivative. having said all that, i still have plenty of fun dancing to tracks old and new if the dj knows the score. so maybe this feeling is just something to get over and run the risk of being seen as a revivalist. the party must go on, i guess?
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
There's an interesting thing I'd stickle against though;

So OK, if jungle/drum & bass revisitation and re-enactment is meant to be like say, the Rockabilly Revival, this doesn't work really because there's still a pre-existing Drum & Bass scene culture that's gone on to it's present day incarnation. Albeit, one that probably lacks the 'purity' of the original (the same way EDM-ready dubstep is a diff. beast to its origins) but has traces and continued practitioners from those earlier incarnations. Rockabilly Revival bands emerged to regenerate a lack, because it'd been long outmoded and the scene didn't exist as it once did (if at all really).

So in the case of Drum & Bass you have it's initial scene, then the scene of the tasteful revivalists doing it in a modern form (your Special Requests and all that) who keep it seperate from that larger scene. These are two dance cultures with two differing levels of participation, engagement, dancing etc. Then you've got the sort of soundcloud Old-Skool Jungle/darkcore/hardcore artists I know blissblogger often posts about on his blogs in which, are those even engaging in either scene? Or do they just half-live on the net as a community that celebrates itself without transposing itself into the physical world less its construction not hold up in the proper context of being dance music (something that ultimately defines all Rockabilly Revival because it's primarily dance music, even in the rock context).
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
There's an interesting thing I'd stickle against though;

So OK, if jungle/drum & bass revisitation and re-enactment is meant to be like say, the Rockabilly Revival, this doesn't work really because there's still a pre-existing Drum & Bass scene culture that's gone on to it's present day incarnation. Albeit, one that probably lacks the 'purity' of the original (the same way EDM-ready dubstep is a diff. beast to its origins) but has traces and continued practitioners from those earlier incarnations. Rockabilly Revival bands emerged to regenerate a lack, because it'd been long outmoded and the scene didn't exist as it once did (if at all really).

So in the case of Drum & Bass you have it's initial scene, then the scene of the tasteful revivalists doing it in a modern form (your Special Requests and all that) who keep it seperate from that larger scene. These are two dance cultures with two differing levels of participation, engagement, dancing etc. Then you've got the sort of soundcloud Old-Skool Jungle/darkcore/hardcore artists I know blissblogger often posts about on his blogs in which, are those even engaging in either scene? Or do they just half-live on the net as a community that celebrates itself without transposing itself into the physical world less its construction not hold up in the proper context of being dance music (something that ultimately defines all Rockabilly Revival because it's primarily dance music, even in the rock context).

stickle is a good word!

it's not an exact analogy but i think it works

you have the original rockabilly / fifties rock'n'roll, which evolves into Sixties beat music, then into psych, then into various early 70s forms prog / heavy metal / glam, then into punk, then into etc etc. it's all rock music - guitars, bass, drums - and it carries on evolving, shifting, expanding, contracting again - but there's a line there back to Chuck Berry etc

but then at a certain point you start to get rock'n'roll revivalists fixating on this early phase of explosive teen wildness / innocence, and associated stylistic tropes (quiffs etc etc), trying to bring it back to life, or just stay there in that golden moment forever

i mentioned Polecats and Stray Cats, i.e. outfits after punk, but there were r'n'r revivalists going back as early as 1968-70 - Shakin' Stevens actually started in the early 70s, playing Communist Party dances in Wales!... you also had high-profile figures like Lennon saying there's been nothing better than Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, making his music more raw and simple, then doing his r'n'r covers album.

with ardkore, you have a similar trajectory - starts chaotic, raw, primitive, often made by teenagers... gets more sophisticated / heavier - and taken seriously by your bourgeoisie just like with rock'n'roll in the Sixties - it goes through various phases and permutations - one branch of it keeps shifting and evolving (UKG etc)- and another (drum and bass) gets fairly fixed and narrowed in focus (i would compare that to the heavy metal line out of rock'n'roll, with Bad Company as Motorhead)

but meanwhile you have figures popping up fixated on the earlier primal innocence, or doing little fun excursions into the nostalgia zone

the first one i noticed was Jega - out of that Mike Paradinas cluster - who in 1998 did a fun facsimile of the Noise Factory type sound called "Card Hore"

so that is six years after the fact, a slightly accelerated original era >>> nostalgia process, but not that much faster than with Fifties rock'n'roll which starts to get retro remakes and nostalgia nods in 1968 with Zappa's doowop project, Beatles' "Back in the USSR", the Move's "Fire Brigade" with its Duane Eddy lick - so that's like a 10 to 12 year interval.

late Seventies rockabilly revival was a dance-driven thing, you are right there - it blew up around the same time as the ska revival and mod revival - when there was a demand for some high-energy fun sounds after punk

i should imagine some of the producers making homages to hardcore or jungle are trying to make tracks that would get a crowd moving, and perhaps there are djs doing whole sets in that vein, i don't know - but there's others where it's more like a ghostly echo 'revenant rave' thing they are doing, and it exists mostly on the internet.
 

luka

Well-known member
The nice thing you can do with a shockwave is that you can posit the point of impact at the point of maximum intensity and then have the reverberations move and register both forwards and backwards into time. Like this ))))))):love:(((((((
 

droid

Well-known member
I think there are some differences between 50's rock revival and revivals of jungle and other contemporary forms.

1. Time compression. 1950-1980/90's etc is a far greater gap culturally and psychologically than 90s'-2010's, primarily due to the ubiquity and persistence of digital media.

2. Scene persistence. In many cases the revivals today are happening with the same people (or their descendants), in the same places, with the same rituals in the same buildings using (fundamentally) the same technology. You dont have to get in a jukebox and a corvette and curate an entire aesthetic to recreate jungle, you just need a basement, decks and some ravers.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
I wouldn't call the current jungle "revival" really a revival, it's more a - somewhat marginalized - part of the original jungle/DnB scene still doing their thing and following the "jungle"-Tradition - chopping up breakbeats + combining that with a heavy bass and samples of various sources fpr dancefloor bliss.

It's a mixture of veterans (like artists like Digital, Labes like Metalheadz and so on) and young recruits who carry that particular torch. After all, this scene is going on at least for 15 or more years meaning as a sort-of split from the DnB mainstream in the eraly 2000s. There are parties like Rupture or Jungle Syndicate going on for years now as well. They got a bit more exposure lately on websites like Resident Advisor or Fact and such.

A bit like the gabba/hardcore/french-core techno (sub)culture which is going on for over 20 years now totally outside of (established dance-)media coverage
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
yeah rupture and jungle syndicate were where i got my real dark choppage/drumfunk/whatever baptism. especially rupture around 8-9 years ago, unbeatable crowd. mantra used to play some of the hardest breaks only sets, you would hardly hear a 2step beat back then.

RA was still recovering from its embarrassing minimal house/progressive house phase.

then you had parties like Colony that were sort on the edge of UK bass/techno who would book peverelist and equinox (of bizzy b+equinox fame) on the same line up, in the same room. alongside the mental techno, electro and garage. there is not so much a continuum here but a kind of non-mainstream dance culture which is where i have always been that intersects and heavily crosses with the mainstream nuum nuum proper (if you will) and is indebted to it. i don't think it's leaching though, it's not like talking loud w dnb or footie firms cashing in on grime. It's just certain tendancies that are antithetical (in the longterm) to the club as enforced capitalist realism. Those choppage sets would not work in a mainstream club precisely because they make you feel uncomfortable and paranoid, you feel insulated skrewface, etc. it's a different vibe. whereas jump up is perfect for the lad who needs to get laid (and let us not forget it, relationships and the resulting babies that result from them are wonderchilds for capitalists.) Like pop music club music proper needs something to shake it up in the UK. in the US that is less the case because of the historical queer cultures.

Mind you, with people like Jossy Mitsu on rinse those boundaries now seem to be dissolving as well. i think continuum's point of an omnidigital dance music is a good one. ultimately we're just talking about moving kicks and snares from one time to another at different tempos. in that sense dance music is quite inherently limited but also within those very rigid limitations are infinite permutations.
 
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luka

Well-known member
This highlights on of the perverse aspects of dissensus. Me and barty couldn't give a shit about clubs. They're not formative or even remotely important experiences for either of us.
 
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