sadmanbarty

Well-known member
a more nuanced thing to say is that there were people on dissensus who rightly said there was something missing in funky, but they misidentified the problem. funky didn't need to get darker, harder or more grimey. it needed to create it's own, less derivative rhythmic idiom.
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
i'm sure some ppl thought that cos they came from the perspective of being into grime/jungle etc. (me included, i should think)

but from where i sit now i don't think funky was missing anything really - crazy cousinz tunes from that time are basically perfect...

mind you i do wonder if there was a pathway that might have been headed down based on the energy of the MCs on Petchy's sets
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
reminds me of what blissblogger said about analogue/digital

funky was one of the last scenes where analogue stuff was still applicable - although obviously a lot of djs were using CD-Js by that point, you still had white labels, pirate radio (though more internet radio by that point), tape packs (albeit DVD packs), etc. there was a sense that it was taking place somewhere IRL
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
in the uk the internet's ushered in a hyper-localisation because you can broadcast your own little tower block or whatever to the whole world. drills far more place oriented than the nuum stuff isn't it?
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
having typed a few responses...

i'm not going to talk about drill anymore cos i don't really listen to it or know anything about it
 

CORP$EY

no mickey mouse ting
all i was going to say was that drill seems almost TOO place specific to be as popular as previous nuum genres were outside of its locale (south london but also similar areas across the UK and who knows maybe even elsewhere)

as you say its very place specific - most of the comments underneath youtube videos at least appear to be by people who know about the gang wars going on (barely) behind the scenes... and of course names like 67 (as i had explained to me on here) are literally about place

and it's not just the culture that is place specific, but the music itself - this is where i'm on shaky ground, but what i've heard of drill doesn't seem to be as imaginatively removed from the streets as grime was - the aesthetic of the beats is sometimes dramatic, but in a quite restrained way (Actually, I don't get a sense of place from American trap production, either, as opposed to say houston rap from the mike jones/paul wall era - this goes back to the atlanta thread, talking about how a brits vague picture of what LA 'is' matches up or doesn't match up with what LA rap sounds like)... it's a bit like comparing mobb deep to wu tang - in that mobb deep's music SOUNDS LIKE queensbridge streets, like rain-drenched (cliche cliche cliche), whereas Wu Tang's sounds like kung fu meets noir...

i mean i can't help self-depreciate here cos i feel like i am very likely talking a load of old bollocks - which is what happens when you use something you're not that familiar with as a launching pad for theories
 

continuum

smugpolice
(It'd also be nice if someone says that it's in fact not dead and then posts a few nondescript tracks that they wrongly feel signify it's continued health and vibrancy)

Following up on the above:

Where does the hardcore continuum head next?

So we’ve reached Deep Tech, or we did in about 2013, so what happens or has happened next? I think last time I wrote about this I said that we had gone full circle and were basically back at Acid House again with Deep Tech. Since this statement I’ve done a bit of research and discovered that this may not be entirely the case. Deep Tech seems to be moving slowly towards a a harder more hardcore vibe in some areas with DJs like Jack n Danny and Aaron Vybe and Perch MC (who have handily just released a new mix which is well worth a listen):

Aaron Vybe & Perch MC - Devastation Mix

Having said that, I still hear less hardcorey and more stripped down sets from Deep Tech DJs like Majesty and Lee Edwards that are also interesting in the paths they are exploring. More trad house but still with a that darker hardcore edge in there. Perhaps where Majesty and Lee Edwards might fail is perhaps an over reliance on darkness. Jack n Danny and Aaron Vybe are not quite as dark and therefore more appealing I think.

Another development seems to be the Bassline / Bass House area which from a few bits I’ve read and listened to say it started getting interesting again around 2015 (please correct me if I’m wrong on the date). Bassline appears to have gotten slower bpm wise while still sounding roughly the same albeit with a bit more Skrillex / maximalism thrown in. It sounds a bit more professional now and not quite so underground and this seems to be reflected in the videos of raves where this is being played and that I’ve been to. Girls are into it for one thing and not just working class girls (which seems to be more true of girls at Deep Tech events - again correct me if I’m wrong - but also middle class white girls. Importantly the music is really good if you ignore some of the more soulless EDM bits. It’s like Bassline has looked at EDM and its success and gone ‘we can do that but actually make the music good at the same time’. What you are also seeing in the Bassline scene is a merging of Bass House and other similarly named sub genres circling around the same sweet spot. Jamie Duggan mentions it in THIS recent interview:

In your capacity as a DJ, you are one of the originators of bassline as it is known. How has the sound grown up over the years?

It's definitely changed a lot but the vibe of it still remains. People still love to hear a big dirty wobbler dropped no matter what!

I think the difference today is that there's a lot of bass and bassline sub-genres this time around, and a lot of different and new producers / sounds from up and down the UK, which are all merging together in each other’s sets. Which in turn is gathering huge fan bases from everywhere and spreading like wildfire!

The genre is branching out to Lost & Found, Reading & Leeds and Parklife Festivals, as well as traditionally house based clubs like Fabric. Where do you see it heading next?

Honestly, you never know. It's huge at the minute and forever growing with no signs of slowing or hitting a brick wall anytime soon, so the sky's the limit!

Similarly Holy Goof touches on the subject in THIS interview:

In a nutshell then, how would you best describe your sound?

A sound people can party to! There's so many elements within my music: garage, bassline, grime, house and more! I don't really think there's a label as of yet that people call this sound. I guess it gets branded under the 'UK bass' umbrella which is so wide at the moment.

The Holy Goof interview is from 2016 so maybe this has changed but he seems to infer that the sound they are developing is or was in it’s what do you call it moment.

For me then there are currently two or maybe three strands that show potential as becoming or having become the next stop on the hardcore continuum. Personally I believe that Deep Tech will go the same way as Bassline and Bass House and get more hardcorey à la Aaron Vybe and Jack n Danny and maybe meet up with the Bassline / Bass House strand at some point. The more trad house orientated Deep Tech DJs such as Majesty and Lee Edwards I see being subsumed into trad house. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
actually when benny posted that mixcloud he's doing collecting old funky sets i was a bit taken aback by how housey it all was (to be fair there are sets where i don't get that feeling). funky was at it's best (or at least most vital) when it was broken-beat-that's-not-shit. that strand of it should have been bigger really.

which ones did you think were too housey? When you say 'housey', do you just mean 4x4 kicks, cos I think one thing thing funky proved is that you can do really interesting polyrhythmic stuff and still have a 4x4 undertow - there wasn't much funky that had that monolithic untz untz thing that you generally associate with straight house. The 4x4 kick pattern, when it was there, tended to be lower in the mix to give space to the percussion.

If you´re looking for a set that illustrates this well, I can recommend this all instrumental special from marcus nasty 🔥🔥🔥

 
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Benny Bunter

Well-known member
a more nuanced thing to say is that there were people on dissensus who rightly said there was something missing in funky, but they misidentified the problem. funky didn't need to get darker, harder or more grimey. it needed to create it's own, less derivative rhythmic idiom.

there were people on here arguing for 'dark funky' at the time, which is fine but the real problem on the funky thread for a while was refugees from dubstepforum posting loads of watery post dubstep until luka made an intervention´to save the thread iirc :cool:

don't agree that funky 'needed to create it's own, less derivative rhythmic idiom' though.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
there was a noble effort over a couple of years between funky and some of that post-dubstep to try and redeem broken beat. make it seem like it'd been worthwhile. just about worked i'd say.

any rhythmic innovation is only going to make sense in it's relation to the body. broken beat was actually a rhythmic innovation but it was unremarkable because it played down it's physiological potency (through mixing, through the drum timbres, through the other instrumentation, probably it was too slow). it was so keen to come across as 'cleaver' and cerebral that it ended up being completely delibidinized; completely devoid of physicality. the one way i think you can put funky on the pedestal with other nuum genres was the fact that it was the genre to fully realise this new rhythmic idiom.



the insturmental breaks in this:

 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Well there were some connections with broken beat (that signature apple clattery beat was ripped off wholesale from a bugz in the attic tune iirc, but it was originally built as a grime tune though) but I think its a mistake it frame it as funky making some kind of conscious effort to try and 'redeem' broken beat.

According to Marcus Nasty uk funky really became its own thing and got interesting when he went round a load of ex grime producers and badgered them into making house.
 
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