CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Yeah there was a generational shift to occur as well. A lot of the guys who became names in Drill in the 67/Spartans axis specifically were people who had come up underneath the first names in Road Rap such as Blade, Teflon, Mental K etc. Original Road Rap lacked that because it was such a slower moving scene sonically because it wasn't under the international scrutiny, it was moving at a pre-Social Media pace even (itself a whole other pace even from pre-Internet (even if Social Media existed at that time it hadn't become the necessity of measure)). So you have the old footage of the guys in 67 at the beginning of the decade and it's a whole diff. beast.

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Ironically in this era they sound so much more indebted to Chief Keef and US drill than the more popular 'jump-out' material. They were a great foil for the sort of psychedelic vibes of Carns Hill starting to go into sample transforming and his 808 kick lines, which are honestly still so much more aggressive than a lot of US basslines.

That said they were never going to be elevated per se until they already formed their own thing in which watching the older generation try to 'hang' was a bit foolish so it became a whole new movement and style. But unlike the prior generation, they actively encouraged and included the younger talent to join their ranks and swell their numbers. In the case of say, BT and Rendo scooping up Skengdo and AM it worked out great (R6 and ST in 67, less so) but it effectively created a void in their scene where now instead this generation is starting to conform back into the earlier forms, or as well into the afro-swing movement that served as it's foil/rival (moreso than the Grime revival which has clearly proven to have less of a street grounding than it ever did before). There won't be a new movement per se, which is a shame because there was a lot of consideration to hybridize it occuring last year and take it into different directions and it's aborted for the most part.
 

luka

Well-known member
That's more or less Bartys contention, as I understand it. That 67 occupy a transitional space between road rap and what he considers drill proper. That carns develops the new sonic pallete and mood-pallete but not the new rhythmic template. I don't know which producers Barty credits with coining the new rhythmic language but he says it happens early 2017. I hope I've got that right cos I hate it when people put words in my mouth and get it all wrong. If indeed it's over now it should be possible to get an overview of the event and map it's developments and peaks and eccentricities.
 

luka

Well-known member
This needs it's own thread I've asked Barty to start it cos he is/was Prime Evangelist. Ridiculous it has to share space with a 2008 dissensus discovers giggs thread. U.K. Drill in retrospect.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
808 kick lines, which are honestly still so much more aggressive than a lot of US basslines.

t2's 'heartbroken' will go down as a formative influence on drill. it takes the 808 bass of us rap but then does all those bassline lurches into the upper registers.

the sonic ingredients from nuum stuff is all in there. the drums, bass, mcing.
 

luka

Well-known member
Crowl in the USA and Sloane in Western Australia get it first. The distance helps them see what's distinctive about it. They teach Barty and convert him. Then Barty spreads the light.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's like if burial lived up to the hype. This is what it should have sounded like

Rave gone introverted, plangent, London through night bus window streaked with rain, all that carry on they used to come out with
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
In this respect UK drill is closer to Burial’s brand of post-rave ambient melancholia than it is to Chicago drill. His self-titled debut album is set in a near-future South London flooded due to global warming. Its aquatic iconography harkens back to an older rave tradition where water signifies ambience as in 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’ and the ambient-tinged sub-genre ‘liquid’ drum & bass. Drill has vicariously adopted this symbolic lexicon. The terms “splashed”, “wetted” and “dipped” are commonplace, the drums sound like droplets landing on car windows and the abundant use of ‘low-pass filters’ makes the music sound like it’s submerged in water as heard in J Boy’s ‘Mazza’. Even the repeated goading of “Trident”- the Metropolitan’s Police anti-gun crime service- has its maritime connotations.
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Such blurring of boundaries between the individual- and collective- self simultaneously echoes the collectivism of the rave dream and is its moral antithesis. The divergent use of piano in rave and drill is telling. Though central to each genre, in rave the pianos were crisp, staccato bursts of utopian sunshine whereas in drill they’re viscous, nihilistic, murky and grey. This encapsulates one of Drill’s most revolutionary qualities. It’s managed to take the language of the last 30 years of UK dance music and re-contextualize it in a quasi-ambient context. Drum patterns that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in jungle, grime or UK funky become solipsistic and dissociative. They’re removed from their physical urgency and relevance, often to the extent that they’re absent or near-inaudible for large stretches of tracks. Bombastic, shrapnel sounding snare drums were utilized in UK dance music to coerce the body into contorting to onerous rhythmic demands. The pitter-patter snares in drill do no such thing. They’re textural; more reminiscent of rain gently falling on leaves than of the audio warfare of older genres.
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I keep trying to determine how to explain the evolution rhythmically to connect from past to present so to avoid the writing off of Road Rap en totale b/c no offense to Luka but he rightfully bemoans the flatness of it especially as someone who is raised by the electricity and the vividness of 'hardcore continuum' influences MCing, the jungle MCs, the Garage MCs, Grime, etc.... And how that dovetailed into these newer MCs because the flatness is still there in the vocal delivery, just not rhythmically. In fact the MCs who try injecting something more vocally stimulating fail in the field, it's a mutation that can't thrive.

I remember years ago when Giggs was first doing press circulation he said about Grime "It's a lot of guys yelling anything" and while obviously Giggs later adapted his career to court grime's audience to keep himself going, it makes sense that his approach to delivery that was always level and sweeping as opposed to spiking or dipping. That same levelness has mostly maintained with a few exceptions in the current era (MizOrMac from Harlem Spartans in particular is someone you hear a lot of vocal caterwauling. Unknown T to a much lesser degree but enough)

I think maybe the key element is (not to harp on about it) the 808 basslines because they're so prominent and strong and florid, not even just melodic. In the US they're doing a lot of glides with the 808 bass bubbles but here they're coming in very rapid and with a strong audible melodic sense. It doesn't make sense to compete with that constant dynamic riding, so instead they kind of occupy a flatter rhythmic plane and cut along the track, not into it.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
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Imagine those 808s like an acoustic bass or something. It works to move around and slip past, not go up and down against it.

Going back over the various periods of Carns Hill it's something I've truly come to appreciate about his production style. It's initially very very American-influenced for sure but it's got a sense of sweep and flooding past the moment into the senses. The rappers aren't solid presences, they're dissolving and phantomic as they need to be because it's not about attraction of attention. Then it was hiding in the phantom, now it's barking behind the mask, always constantly eluding.

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What's the name of that aborted Burial album again, not to misuse Barty's analogies? "Forbidden Siren"?

It's these mutations of US ideas into UK ideas, supposedly what the nuum is all about. Atlanta, The South of the US and all its splendor is still new to UK culture really, until 2013-14 most of the rap they've digested and internalized is East Coast stuff but now nearly all the East Coast rap is indebted and subservient to Atlanta so you have these new dynamics but done in a way where it's meant to adapt to previously set paces and tempos and to lineages that the US South has stomped out of itself (such as any trace of dancehall influence; that's why only Drake and Tory Lanez do that, it's a Canadian thing, Jamaica hasn't had any real presence in US Black Culture in rapidly approaching a full decade. And even THEN now they pivot hard to Africa because that has somehow overruled Jamaica's credibility (having a larger audience to court helps naturally)).

In nothing short of a few years you watch Carns go from

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to the LD tune to

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luka

Well-known member
Once I got my head around horizontality (of vocals) as a feature, as the whole point, the music suddenly made sense.
 

luka

Well-known member
Unknown T doing a funky house tune with crazy cousins or whoever literally called throwback feels like more than God level synchronicity though. It feels like market research.
 
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