Explain Electro To A Sweet Boy

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this is also why anarcho punk and punk today in general is bourgeois. not because of an enemy class colonising it, although that does factor into it, and not because the politics have been recuperated (although again, that does factor into it.) It's because the infrastructure for music to indicate totemic and seismic changes in consciousness no longer applies. I find that the curse of UK drill. it's from youtube views to pop sensation. there is no infrastructure to move the discourse forward, it's purely quantitative. that's also why it won't be able to break the song form. whereas grime did have that infrastructure as it was at the tail end of internet 1.0.. This is also why i can't do drill outside the disinterested scholar really. It's not my experience but in grime that wasn't an issue 1) because of its disappearing london centricity and 2) because of its abstraction. whereas drill is the most compartmentalised postcode music. I think that's a shit trend in all honesty. It's a bit like those cities in China being reflected in music where we'll all be fucked off to the suburbs and will have to commute to work in the smog and filth where london becomes this city of plastic personalities and insidious advertising never getting out of your face. And one must of course never fail to mention that all advertising as a product of abstract labour contains the embryos of fascism in it. Goebbels was into Edward Bernays for a reason.
 
Last edited:
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the thing is it's easy to slate goldsmiths people fetishising grime instrumentals but you can't deny those antihumanist techno impulses did exist there for a while. some darq e freaker beats as well. basically broken beat techno.

I mean this is basically steve poindexter in London.


That 4x4 hell mix that grievous did as well. basically techno.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like i said there is a military aspect to it, not in the fetishising of guns or whatever, but the way our daily rhythms are militarised. a lot of traditional and funk rhythms are too loose and sexualised for the 21st century. this was the beauty of 93-95 era jungle, skirting that dialectic where it tried to recover that funk feel but because the breaks were put through machines they couldn't lift off and became very gravitational, very calculated. a drummer trying to drum jungle beats would be too loose or would make it sound like dnb.

 
version

version

Well-known member
I recently read a decent piece on DeLillo's Cosmopolis and the seeming impossibility of resistance to capitalism:
thepointmag.com

Foes of God | The Point Magazine

It wouldn’t be absurd to describe Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis as the most prescient American novel of the last fifteen years.
thepointmag.com
In a 2005 interview with the French magazine Panic, DeLillo outlined part of the problem:

'You know, in America and in Western Europe we live in very wealthy democracies, we can do virtually anything we want, I’m able to write whatever I want to write. But I can’t be part of this culture of simulation, in the sense of the culture’s absorbing of everything. In doing that it neutralizes anything dangerous, anything that might threaten the consumer society. In Cosmopolis [a character] says, “What a culture does is absorb and neutralize its adversaries.” If you’re a writer who, one way or another, comes to be seen as dangerous, you’ll wake up one morning and discover your face on a coffee mug or a t-shirt and you’ll have been neutralized.'

What’s unsettling about the phenomenon DeLillo describes is that it doesn’t seem to depend on anybody’s intentions. It’s just how consumer culture works: an impersonal mechanism with an apparently limitless capacity to assimilate dissent, as though every effort to evade the system’s logic were somehow always and already enclosed within it. From his limo, Packer watches as anti-capitalist rioters attack banks and fight with the police in the heart of New York—another of the book’s prophetic details, this time of the Occupy protests—but still he thought “there was a shadow of a transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systematic hygiene … It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.” You don’t need a sharp eye to pick up on the autoreferential subtext here: the demonstration that Packer regards as so ineffectual is already “contained” within the novel Cosmopolis, a marketized commodity. (One character goes so far as to call the riot a “market fantasy,” which it literally is.)

For decades a certain kind of left-wing cultural theory has been formulating and reformulating the same impasse. Is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture? Certainly in the West, after the Cold War, it has become extraordinarily difficult to believe that any amount of satire or critique could add up to systemic change. Quite the opposite: we’ve learned there’s no such thing as a work of art or philosophy that’s too dangerous to commodify. Packer’s observations about the protest in Times Square come during a break in a lengthy conversation between himself and his “chief of theory” Vija Kinski, a corporate oracle who spouts slick aphorisms about the nature of time and money while people die and buildings burn around her (a grim caricature, perhaps, of the fate of radical theory after the end of history). The subject of their conversation is whether capitalism has a limit or not. It is Kinski who says that the market is total. The protest is a symptom of the destruction capitalism leaves in its wake, an anger that can only express itself in shapes that the market has already classified and absorbed years before. The demonstrators are “quotations,” the burning man is a “quotation”: nothing they do can threaten the basic conditions of their habitat. “There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.” Meanwhile, Packer watches as the anarchists flail uselessly around his car, as untouched as the system he represents.
 
Last edited:
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
“What a culture does is absorb and neutralize its adversaries.” If you’re a writer who, one way or another, comes to be seen as dangerous, you’ll wake up one morning and discover your face on a coffee mug or a t-shirt and you’ll have been neutralized.'
Click to expand...
Well this is it isn't it? But once you start thinking about this everything is kinda fucked. It's like the end point of all debates. I think you have to kind of ignore this. Like in music or art or whatever, you can have it explained why nothing is good and you're bored of everything - and then suddenly you see something that you know is theoretically rubbish but you are really blown away by it and excited again.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
version said:
I recently read a decent piece on DeLillo's Cosmopolis and the seeming impossibility of resistance to capitalism - https://web.archive.org/web/20160809052249/https://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/foes-god

In a 2005 interview with the French magazine Panic, DeLillo outlined part of the problem:

'You know, in America and in Western Europe we live in very wealthy democracies, we can do virtually anything we want, I’m able to write whatever I want to write. But I can’t be part of this culture of simulation, in the sense of the culture’s absorbing of everything. In doing that it neutralizes anything dangerous, anything that might threaten the consumer society. In Cosmopolis [a character] says, “What a culture does is absorb and neutralize its adversaries.” If you’re a writer who, one way or another, comes to be seen as dangerous, you’ll wake up one morning and discover your face on a coffee mug or a t-shirt and you’ll have been neutralized.'

What’s unsettling about the phenomenon DeLillo describes is that it doesn’t seem to depend on anybody’s intentions. It’s just how consumer culture works: an impersonal mechanism with an apparently limitless capacity to assimilate dissent, as though every effort to evade the system’s logic were somehow always and already enclosed within it. From his limo, Packer watches as anti-capitalist rioters attack banks and fight with the police in the heart of New York—another of the book’s prophetic details, this time of the Occupy protests—but still he thought “there was a shadow of a transaction between the demonstrators and the state. The protest was a form of systematic hygiene … It attested again, for the ten thousandth time, to the market culture’s innovative brilliance, its ability to shape itself to its own flexible ends, absorbing everything around it.” You don’t need a sharp eye to pick up on the autoreferential subtext here: the demonstration that Packer regards as so ineffectual is already “contained” within the novel Cosmopolis, a marketized commodity. (One character goes so far as to call the riot a “market fantasy,” which it literally is.)

For decades a certain kind of left-wing cultural theory has been formulating and reformulating the same impasse. Is it possible to mount any meaningful resistance to capitalism on the level of culture? Certainly in the West, after the Cold War, it has become extraordinarily difficult to believe that any amount of satire or critique could add up to systemic change. Quite the opposite: we’ve learned there’s no such thing as a work of art or philosophy that’s too dangerous to commodify. Packer’s observations about the protest in Times Square come during a break in a lengthy conversation between himself and his “chief of theory” Vija Kinski, a corporate oracle who spouts slick aphorisms about the nature of time and money while people die and buildings burn around her (a grim caricature, perhaps, of the fate of radical theory after the end of history). The subject of their conversation is whether capitalism has a limit or not. It is Kinski who says that the market is total. The protest is a symptom of the destruction capitalism leaves in its wake, an anger that can only express itself in shapes that the market has already classified and absorbed years before. The demonstrators are “quotations,” the burning man is a “quotation”: nothing they do can threaten the basic conditions of their habitat. “There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.” Meanwhile, Packer watches as the anarchists flail uselessly around his car, as untouched as the system he represents.
Click to expand...

Debord was talking about this too in his analysis of spectacle. he thought the left was the spectacle and it was necessary to break with it (something Brand didn't get.) the problem is back then there was still a primitive stalinism to fight against (I mean stalinism is basically democracy in an economy that needs to be concentrated in thehands of the political state.) You can't really have peasant democracies outside of territorial soviets and even then subsistence is based on patriarchal and natural land forms. But now Stalinism has won. It's not that there is a Stalinism to fight against, it's that Stalinism is the common sense of Europe and the eastern bloc and US, and increasingly the BRICs. That is what most liberals and Marxists missed.
 
Last edited:
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this is basically why i am neither a 'libertarian anarchist' or Leninist. Anarchist anti-authoritarianism can sometimes be an inversion of the leninist vanguard party model (not a transcendence of it.)

"The German Workers' Councils
Between 1920 and 1923, the KAPD acted as an extra-parliamentary opposition. Do you consider this essential?
Yes. It educated people to act on their own political initiative, independently of any representatives.
At the time, this expressed itself not only as extra-parliamentary opposition but as anti-parliamentary opposition. Did you consider it essential that the working class should struggle against parliamentary institutions?
Definitely. You must remember that at the end of 1918 there was a revolutionary situation in Germany. Participation in parliamentary activity was, we felt, a betrayal. Parliament, amongst other things, was held responsible for the war. During 1919 almost the whole of left politics took place within the workers' councils, not in the trade unions or in parliament. The councils were extra-parliamentary, and potentially anti-parliamentary institutions. The trouble was that in these councils the Social Democrats were in a majority. They put forward economistic rather than political demands, and reformist rather than revolutionary demands. The Social Democrats, however, did not impose these views. Their majority reflected the will of the broad mass of the workers inside the councils, and that even during a revolutionary situation.
A Leninist would argue that what was missing was a leadership party which would have exposed the policies of the Social Democrats on the war and that it was the lack of such a party that prevented the revolutionaries from bringing the revolutionary situation to a conclusion.
The conditions in Germany differed considerably from those in Russia. Russia was emerging from centuries of autocratic rule. The whole social atmosphere was ripe for a fundamental change. Germany had a tradition of parliamentary institutions, a tradition of government by elected representatives. In such conditions, revolution is much harder, because it appears as coercion against democratically-elected representatives. After all the years of a bourgeois majority in parliament, the victory of the Social Democrats appeared as a decisive victory for the left. It is true that the decisive arena of struggle for political power was within the workers' councils, but, for the reasons mentioned earlier, any action against the elected government appeared out of the question, especially whilst the government had a majority within the councils."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/reichenbach/1969/retrospect.htm
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
here's a 91-94 darkside hardcore mix that shows hardcore's roots in the darker anti-human techno impulses. this will probably make what me and luca are making clearer. eliss dee is a bit of a cheesy dj tbh. nothing wrong with that but a lot of hardcore was dark music even before 93. this is the real shit. pulse fm vibes.

 
Last edited:
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
actually listen to this one first if you're going to choose between the two mixes. the real brutalist oldskool with not a 93 tune in sight.

Eon "Fear: The Mindkiller" - Vinyl Solution 1991
Undercover Movement "Moonstompin" - Strictly underground 1991
The Unknown "Put your F... Hands in the air" - Hithouse 1991
The Hypnotist " Rainbows in the sky" - Rising High 1991
Holy Noise "Father forgive them" - Hithouse 1990
Hackney Hardcore "Dancehall dangerous" - Strictly Hardcore 1991
Sonic Experience "Protein (hardcore innovator mix) - Strictly underground 1992
The Energizer "vol.1" - Energizer 1991
Smart Systems "The Tingler" - Jumpin' & Pumpin' 1991
The Hypnotist "Night of the living E heads" - Rising High 1991
N.R.G. "The Terminator" - Chill 1991
Meng Syndicate "Sonar System" - Hithouse 1991
Outrage "Too much energy" - Pure Bhoomie 1991
The Psychopaths "Killer Mummy" - Elicit 1991
G double E "G-theme part 2" - Hardcore Urban Music 1991
G double E "Fire when ready" - Jumpin' & Pumpin' 1991
Genaside II "Death of the Kamikaze - Remix" - Jumpin & Pumpin' 1990
Genaside II "Death of the Kamikaze" - Jumpin' & Pumpin' 1990
Genaside II "Sirens of Acre Lane" - Hardcore Urban Music 1991
Intense "The Doctor" - Underground Level 1992
Genaside II "Narramine" - Hardcore Urban Music 1991
Holy Noise / Global Insert project "The Nightmare" - Hithouse 1991
Eon "Spice" - Vinyl Solution 1990
GTO "Elevation (Troll Mix) - React 1992
DD Hass "Who's Hous'N" - Underground Connection 1991
Silver Bullet "20 seconds to comply" - Tam Tam 1989
Genaside II "The Alchemist" - Jumpin' & Pumpin 1990
Renegade Soundwave "Biting my nails - instrumental dub 1988" - Mute 1990
Genaside II "The Alchemist" - Jumpin' & Pumpin 1990 (EXERPT)
Renegade Soundwave "Biting my nails - Bassnumb chapter" - Mute 1990

https://www.discogs.com/group/thread/660435
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
thirdform said:
like i said there is a military aspect to it, not in the fetishising of guns or whatever, but the way our daily rhythms are militarised. a lot of traditional and funk rhythms are too loose and sexualised for the 21st century. this was the beauty of 93-95 era jungle, skirting that dialectic where it tried to recover that funk feel but because the breaks were put through machines they couldn't lift off and became very gravitational, very calculated. a drummer trying to drum jungle beats would be too loose /QUOTE]

Today I bought a book called Rhythmanalysis. I didn't think I'd heard of it before but apparently it was mentioned in a film I watched last week. Anyway I don't know anything about other than I love the idea of it and if it's the book I want it to be of course it will ask these kind of very important questions
Click to expand...
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Foucault is another thing I've barely read but my impression is he also talks about this stuff. Soon I will have the piss I am busting for and expand on these very important fascinating points.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
induct barty into the cult of real hardcore though, fantazia and dreamscape are a bit of a joke aren't they. you must have some pulse and chillin fm tapes.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Walking round London during office hours youare made very vividly aware of the imposed rhythms, which are natural only to the extent that they are regulated by the time scales of addiction and hunger and to a lesser extent, attention.

The workers are kept in their pens until caffeine or nicotine or food craving affects productivity. Then they're allowed outside to make the necessary biochemical alteration. The scale of it and the synchronisation of it is a powerful, even overwhelming experience. This is of course not remotely profound or original but every time you're made aware of it its a shock.

I very much like the modern architecture which lays this bare. The huge segmeted transparent building eith the hundreds and hundreds of work pods in endless rows within. It's like a sexy version of the matrix. It allows you to visualise these units as batteries.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this J Rolla mix as well.


01: t. power & the sandman - oedipus complex (bonus beats) [soapbar]
02: s.m.f. - aardvark [rugged vinyl]
03: hannibal lector - suicide [asylum]
04: doctor g - the beeline [g-spot]
05: bizzy b - brainstorm [brain]
06: kev bird & the wax doctor - airspace [basement]
07: reel II reel - private & confidential (B1) [reel 2 reel]
08: megadrive - mega 1 (B) [f project]
09: dj spice - brand new (stressed out mix) [soapbar]
10: nick power & dj ku - mus' get dark [ruff tuff & wicked stuff]
11: structural damage - really livin [symphony sounds]
12: tom & jerry - we can be free [tom & jerry]
13: a guy called gerald - darker than I should be [juice box]
14: specky ranx & navigator - wild & free [x amount]
15: cool hand flex - your risk [de underground]
16: foul-play - feel the vibe [oblivion]
17: nebula II - peace maker [reinforced]
18: johnny jungle - I like to cry [face]
19: bad influence - such a feeling [bad influnce]
20: the good, 2 bad & hugly - know how to rock [ruff kut!]
21: the impact crew - feels good [u no dat]
22: sublove - drum + bass programme [earth]
23: metal heads - knowledge [synthetic hardcore phonography]
24: bay-b-kane - hello darkness [ruff guidance]
25: s.l.m. - the horror [tone def]
26: the good, 2 bad & hugly - got to release [ruf kut!]
27: dj clarkee - have a good time [red zone]
28: biology productions - stop cry [biology]
29: sound corp - security overload [tone def]
30: body snatch - esoterics (dark mix) [big city]
31: acen - obsessed [production house]
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
thirdform said:
induct barty into the cult of real hardcore though, fantazia and dreamscape are a bit of a joke aren't they. you must have some pulse and chillin fm tapes.
Click to expand...

All my tapes are gone except a kool fm one I made as 93 became94 (we are ie is the tune they drop at midnight) and I still have my grime tapes (although slackk had them on grimetapes so they'll be mp3s of a lot of them circulating online)

I don't understand what happened to them. They just dissolved into antimatter over the years I guess. Lost. Stolen.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
All my tapes are gone except a kool fm one I made as 93 became94 (we are ie is the tune they drop at midnight) and I still have my grime tapes (although slackk had them on grimetapes so they'll be mp3s of a lot of them circulating online)

I don't understand what happened to them. They just dissolved into antimatter over the years I guess. Lost. Stolen.
Click to expand...

shame the few pulse fm tapes on mixcloud are wicked, serious beats with not many pianos.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I don't know actually, in any detail, what various hardcores there might be, or how yours might contrast with Bartys. I don't revisit it very often but it's in my DNA. I was very young and just listened to the radio obsessively. Pulse always until things started to shift towards proto-jungle I guess. Then rush and kool. That's really it.

Matthew for example went to Speed. I just listened to kool. That alone accounts for our differing interpretations and valueings.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top