It's funny reading kode9 prattle on about whatever. You'd think his music would be hypercomplex but as I listen to it I'm left wondering what's the big deal and where's the rest of it ? The sonic theorising seems a distraction as maybe once again the emperor appears to be nekkid clothed only in bassweight and verbiage. There in lies the joke methinks. Kode9 is taking the piss.
But no one could have been more clear than Kode 9 himself (in the linked interview with K-Punk) when Kode said that he wanted to keep the music and theory separate. He said that explicitly. I must admit, the old comeback that appoximates, in a thousand different variants, "dude, it's only music, no need to analyze" is sort of frustrating. On the one hand, of course it is only music and words are superfluous, perhaps even distracting. But if every time a person begins to attempt to speak in an informed way about new music, a person then responds with the classic 'too-cool-for-school' attitude of 'don't bother, it's just music,' then that doesn't seem very helpful either. Am not saying that you are doing this, undisputed, am just commenting . . .
In any case, with reference to the things now on the table, I'd just like to say that I'm neither for nor against any of the people/concepts mentioned above, am more interested in subjecting them to scrutiny to see if they hold up rather than supporting/attacking any position in particular.
As for the the claim (original with Eshun in the context of the rave continuum I think, but certainly not new to the history philosophy) that 'the concepts are already contained in the (artwork) music,' the idea refers, I agree, to the sense described by gek, where one track responds to the musical material or ideas, techniques, spatialities, harmonies, rhythms etc etc present (or absent) in the earlier track or style or whatever it is that you are musically 'theorizing' about by composing a new piece. There is a similar idea among poets: a poet will sometimes say that "the best way to respond critically to a poem is to write a new poem, not to write criticism." The statement is usually cited in similar circumstances, i.e., when a poet perceives that a piece of criticism has become so theoretical as to have lost touch with the object supposedly under observation.
In any case, isn't the notion that "the music already contains the concepts within itself" pretty much at the heart of the notion of a hardcore
continuum? That's the ground, so to speak, of the continuum, no? Namely, that you can, from today's vantage point, *hear* the unfolding of musical ideas and approaches that continually expand and implode in relation to each other, with a kind of topography or spatiality that has an audible history? E.g, that jungle was already in a certain way audibly nascent in '91-92 hardcore, or that you can almost hear grime in Pulse X, that you can hear dark garage and breakstep in late 2-step, etc, and halfstep in the latter as well as earlier jungle, etc etc?