i can't work out how the fuck to get that looking normal if anyone else can or gives a damn please do
Beyond hardcore:
I am flattered that Simon Reynolds has
noticed and critiqued my review of Neil
Landstrumm’s Lord For £39 album (The
Year In Reissues, The Wire 299). However,
he makes some assertions that I must take
issue with, not because I see them as a
slight, but because they seem to misjudge
some exciting and innovative musicians.
One, that I “sidestep the counter-case
that this sort of ‘wonky’ eclectronica
is mere post-rave pastiche”. This is
demonstrably wrong: I make this question
a central issue of the review, particularly
in differentiating this album from its
predecessor Restaurant Of Assassins
which is a conscious homage to 1990–92
‘bleep’n’bass’ rave, and I refer repeatedly
to how its assimilation of other influences
expands the record beyond expected and
accepted ideas of rave music.
Two, that the record is indeed “mere
post-rave pastiche”. This is unfair
to Landstrumm, and to his Wonky
contemporaries. There are moments on Lord
For £39 which reference rave motifs, but to
call it pastiche is akin to saying a rave track
is mere post-funk pastiche because it uses
an “Apache” break. There is no space here
for a track-by-track, beat-by-beat analysis,
but the strength of Landstrumm’s works
is that they are not beholden sonically,
rhythmically or technically to rave or any
other specific genre gone past. They
were forged among and designed for the
movement of real bodies in living, vibrant
raves of today, not for the ghosts of parties
20 years in the past. Likewise Rustie, Zomby,
Joker, Ikonika and the other Wonky (or as
Skream has christened it, ‘Mongrel Music’)
producers that Reynolds dismisses in one
sweep: these producers’ radically strange
but immediately effective tunes are quite
plainly not beholden to any one past strain
of music, nor diminished by the memories of
what has come before.
Three, that “glutted musicians make
clotted music”, implying that Wonky
producers are overwhelmed by the current
availability of music. This again is unfair to
the musicians. Like most artists with big
record collections, whether those be digital
or physical, the producers in the Wonky
explosion do pick and choose from past
and present influences, but the suggestion
that they are indiscriminate and try to do
everything all at once – ‘clotting’ their
music – is incorrect. These sharp young and
not-so-young producers use their Max/MSP
patches to make clear links between hyperspecific
points in music history and in so
doing create a variety of very specific and
deliberate dancefloor effects. A track like
Joker & Rustie’s psychedelia-electronicacrunk
collision and key Wonky document
“Play Doe” could not be leaner and more
focused in its aim and effects, as evinced by
its direct and dramatic effects on dancers.
Clotted it is not.
These unfounded claims and wholesale
writing-off of artists are most unlike
Reynolds. However, I think that the reason
for his reaction to this review may perhaps
be found in my central paragraph where I
suggest Landstrumm’s album – and other
Wonky releases – call into question “the
‘’Ardkore continuum’ turned doctrinal”.
The phrase ’Ardkore Continuum as coined
by Reynolds – questionable spelling
notwithstanding – was, and remains,
an extremely useful construct and an
accurate observation of common sonic and
psychological factors between dancehall,
rave, jungle, UK garage, bassline and so
forth. But in the hands of a self-appointed
bloggerati (‘’Nuum Generals’, perhaps?) it
has become a purist, even essentialist faith
which confers validity and worthiness for
analysis on music only if it can be shown to
have some connection to tower blocks in
particular London postcodes and wears a
metaphorical ‘screw-face’. It’s a doctrine
in which, for example, urban Grime must
always trump suburban dubstep for
innovation and ‘realness’ despite any
evidence to the contrary.
Unfortunately for the theory’s adherents,
Wonky throws this into disarray. Trampling
over boundaries, Joker and Starkey ignore
the ‘’Ardkore’ aggressive, masculine purity
of Grime and make it party music above
all else, while others in Bristol, Glasgow,
Nottingham and beyond remind us that
hardcore dance music has always been a
decentralised thing and has never relied
on being created or accepted by a ‘core’ in
the capital. This is music that refuses to be
part of a single lineage, making visible the
mesh of ‘continua’ which have been part of
British dance music from the start: a Disco
Continuum, a Psychedelic Continuum, a
Suburban Continuum, a Euphoric Continuum,
a Punk Continuum, a Tech Continuum, a BBoy
Continuum and many others. ‘’Ardkore’
is but a part of it. And Landstrumm’s current
work is right at the heart of all these.
Wonky, Mongrel Music, or whatever this
explosion eventually becomes, is not going
away and so neither is this debate. Reynolds
is a theorist of great integrity, so I hope
that he can see that others who, as William
Blake might once have put it, were unable
to ‘create a system’ have been ‘enslav’d by
another man’s’ and in so doing robbed his
theory of much of its usefulness, turning
what was once an acute set of journalistic
observations into a value judgement and
party line. British bass music is in an
exciting state of flux and it would be a great
shame to write off sections of it even as
they are being born.
Joe Muggs via email