why does the darkside only really exist in the US and the UK?

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
was thinking about this after the Principe thread. yes you'll get raucous, almost industrial ragga tracks, power soca at carnival can be as intense as gabba, chabi can be overstimulating in the hands of the right practitioner I.E: sadat or Islam Chipsy.

But the paranoid, lost in the void aesthetic only really seems to exist in US and UK creole musics. from 88 chicago acid to horrorcore to drill to dubstep. Obviously I'm overgeneralising. yes there is some EBM that hits that level, a lot of industrial techno, but again in the case of the latter the best stuff in that genre (hard to avoid value judgments here) is indebted more to chicago than it is coil or whatever. Obviously a lot of nerd electronics.

But why is this?
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
But even if we go outside the dance music continuum. It really seems Sabbath could have only really originated in birmingham. not because of Ozzy's lyrics which can be pretty pantomime but because of Iami's guitar tone. there is a very haunted resonance to it. what cultural dynamic pushes us to these aesthetics?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's always something that I've thought about especially when i hang out with people who have newly migrated to London or not had much interaction with anglo-american culture. I'm always stumped when i try to explain it, in the sense that it just seems like totally natural to me.
 

muser

Well-known member
I dunno Ive seen a few genres go a bit darkside in other countries, gqom and recent baile funk come to mind (listen to production by dj R7) but maybe it's not darkside in the traditional hardcore sense, definitely more menacing and sparse though. I have this theory that genres go through these cycles but might just be connecting dots that aren't really there.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
What about the Dutch? (bunker etc) and have to 2nd muser on the baile funk. Some of that stuff is like funky dril. The new thing is 150bpm funk. Lots of darkside in there.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
also, doesn't Germany qualify with all that Frankfurt gabber, PCP, dance exstacy 2000, etc?
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i wasn't talking about all darkside was i! by that metric we could include power electronics and dark ambient. i was specifically speaking about diasporic musics.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
there might be dark batita productions but can you imagine nights themed around solely darkside batita? ditto gqom. darkside bashment, darkside chabi. not gonna happen.

yet darkside acid, darkside hardcore-jungle, horrorcore, etc etc are a standard space that are inhabited by a certain type rather than being an outgrowth of the more euphoric or raucous or whatever.

im not orientalising here, im not saying that the darkside is an exclusive anglo-american thing, I'm saying that as a defined sound world, a defined scene(s) and a shared set of values it seems to predominate in the US and the UK. why is that?

As for gabba, the stuff you're talking about is the nitch end of it really, we tend to call it hardcore techno and stuff like babyboom etc is the Dutch stuff. but yes, good point. there is also some dark trance.

tbf i can hardly remember why i created this thread now last night. it was listening to an amnesia house tape from 93 and something struck me but i can't remember now.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I guess there's a strain in European culture - the gothic strain, churchyards, ruins, ghosts, crypts - that perhaps feeds into this. This stuff is in the air, on TV, etc. Spooky stuff. Howling winds. Perhaps it's being surrounded by so much visible history?

And the US inherited that stuff too. Halloween is huge in America, innit?

It is an interesting question.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'd say it's something to do with religion here. The death of it. The lingering ghosts of it. Perhaps even a hungering for it. It's like the Scandinoir thing - something of a cliche but also something that really exists and for reasons related to the landscape.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
yeah interesting points corpsey.

Although dub was not darkside per se it was spiritually militant. which makes sense as to why darkside hardcore (pre-ragga jungle proper) used the half speed gliding basslines as opposed to the more bumping dippy ones in hardcore.

Strangely enough, juke also uses the dippy basslines. in fact if you divide a 170 juke track into triplets and do it right you can mix with a track around 128 bpm. good luck trying it though.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
would love to hear what that sounds like, got any links?

I'm really bad with collecting names n stuff but what about this one


Doesn't exactlyf fit the mode we may be looking for but the attitude is all there
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Surprised this hasn't been taken up

Perhaps ground that's been covered elsewhere? Or just so many brilliant threads lately it's hard to compete out here.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Thinking of how inspired by American sci fi darkside jungle was and wondering why that dystopian sci fi didn't get into American music in the same way? (I'm sure it did actually and someone will point that out.)
 

DLaurent

Well-known member
One word, climate.

Or you could go back in French music history. Milhaud blamed the loss in the Franco-Prussian war to effeminate culture and yet composed ballet. So there's always elements of history that run through things.
 
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