potential musical confessions of the 10s you may look back on in years

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm not going to really bother defending deep tech cos although I did get excited about it around the time and I think there were a lot of legit bangers coming out of it for a while, it has faded from my memory now. It's fair to say that dissensus was thirsting (as it always is) for something new and exciting to emerge so probably a few of us got overexcited.

Actually, though, regarding the first point - the same is true for dubstep, which I was MUCH more into. Neither I nor any of my friends who were going to DMZ/FWD regularly, buying all the records and so on seem to EVER listen to those records now. Not that we're the litmus test for everything of course but it's notable that we listen to garage records and even UK Funky records on a fairly regular basis but never the dubstep records.

I put it down to dubstep not really being party music, not music you can put on and chat over. It requires focus. I think that's why it lost a bit of steam once the smoking ban kicked in and people switched from smoking weed to boozing and doing pills at dubstep nights. Could be a cart before horse thing but I think that had something to do with the shift to wobble/jump up dubstep, too.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Even now, though, I can think back on those dubstep nights and remember the intensity of those sets.

Saw Loefah at XOYO last year doing a vintage dubstep set and it took me right back to that mindset. It was almost 100% blokes at the night which was depressing but let's face it dubstep nights were never about pulling.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Perhaps (and I love bleep n bass) - but who was playing bleep n bass in 2017?

I also don't think it was a slavish recreation of bleep n bass. When someone makes a slavish recreation of hardcore in 2019 I'm not interested (perhaps I should be) because it's a sort of period piece.

This is why it was a bit shit when the juke/footwork guys were embracaed by UK rave nerds and started using sounds from 93 jungle. It was a bit too... I dunno. The nerds liked it cos it reminded them of jungle and hardcore not because it WAS jungle/hardcore.

Maybe my stumbling block with deep tech was i was already into house anyway. whereas the kind of dissensus orthodoxy is hardcore continuum vs house purists, which again i tend to part ways with not least because most of the hardcore bods were some of the first to play house in this country, period. long before yer pete tongs who were faffing about with bobby brown and bell div devoe. no disrespect to those rnb artists here...
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
You could be right about that.

I think something similar happened with UK Funky in that people who weren't into house (least of all the funky house that UKF grew out of) were into house, and house heads were saying 'it's just funky house!'
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
for sure. it's also a bit crap to still be propounding in 2019 because bliss bloggers book (whilst excellent on a lot of things with riveting prose that captures the intensity of the rave rush) was fighting it out with other cognoscenti/journalist types who really had more subcultural investments. whereas yer average punters have always been more whatever works, that's why people could go to hardcore nights one day and banging techno the other, not that they were completely separated until late 94 anyway, although there was definitely an irrevocable big split around 93, i agree.

Put it this way, journalists can't really make hardcore and there is a reason for that. too many prescriptive intervensions.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's like you have to be into a lot of trash and that to really be able to make hardcore. if your job is defending this stuff in a high academic context then it will only really be ironic.

british hardcore hip hop, italo house screamers, bad 80s aor. you can't defend most of this stuff as a journalist focusing on experimental music, yet, inexplicably the most experimental music of our times used this detretis as it's chassy.
 
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CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I will admit that while I don't feel necessarily shame for the music I gravitated to in that whole L.A. Beat Scene wave of music (typically everything I liked I still like and everything I hated is just that) I now feel some immense shame at bolstering the tyrannical ego of Flying Lotus like that after realizing how little he truly went Beyond his influences.

Best I can do, I'm not much of a musical regret person, it's more about the personalities for me.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it's like you have to be into a lot of trash and that to really be able to make hardcore. if your job is defending this stuff in a high academic context then it will only really be ironic.

british hardcore hip hop, italo house screamers, bad 80s aor. you can't defend most of this stuff as a journalist focusing on experimental music, yet, inexplicably the most experimental music of our times used this detretis as it's chassy.

Incidentally this is what i was hoping happened with that trashy eurotrance aesthetic that it got reappropriated into something more mindfuck, but instead some people just put 10 minute ableton synths over jersey club beats and called it deconstructed.
 

jorge

Well-known member
I succomed to the promise of future garage to my shame, doomed from the outset, even joined the forum :s . The techno/dubstep crossover that predated it had a lot of tunes that still sound great to me tho, pev, 2562, hessle. heard a few out recently and they sounded amazing amongst the usual techno and house. Appleblim dubstep all-stars is the best one imo

I could never get into jam city et al, was way too 80's for me. Ive learned how to appreciate the 80s since but it's taken some reprograming.
 

luka

Well-known member
I took a principled stand against all this trash. Anyone with an ear could tell it was an in crowd conspiracy as per usual. Popular people with good clothes.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
youre saving grace here is that youre into rashied ali and parmegiani and shit like that so i can respect that stance because u understand what makes most of it musically dull whereas a lot of people just wanted to live in a fantasy land of the continuum still being gangsta lol.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
kinda funny also that deep tech was the pyrrhic victory of the actual tech house purists like mr. c. lol those guys are well annoying pitching down their jeff mills records to -6

i could have gotten a free invite to one of their parties a few years ago but i swear i spoke to some of them in an fb group and they literally had an aversion to anything above 128 bpm it was scary i was like no there might be some women or proper hench blokes there but no. I'm not going to sacrifice my integrity. one of my favourite djs from detroit is dj assault i doubt Stephen's mate Isabella harrington-smythe from the face magazine in the 90s would stand me talking about how the ghettotech djs mixed up all the styles at 150 bpm and above.
 
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chava

Well-known member
yes, i agree about berlin techno. but in terms of skippiness deep tech was a poor mans bleep n bass.

Then there was the Cologne variant, even sparser but heavily influenced by bleep techno, this one in particular an obviously ode to Sweet Exorcist:


Profan was my all time favorite techno label. Arty but you could dance to it, although not many did
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I turned 40 in 2009 and the 2010s were marked by an increasing disengagement from dance music as is right and proper for someone of my senior years.

No doubt some of the nonsense I have been into over the last decade won't age well - but a lot of that has been intentionally risky, experimental and improvised so that's fair enough really.

The late nougties arguments about the fate of the 'nuum look increasingly ridiculous from this distance - especially people trying to justify their own particular subgenre as being some kind of new incarnation of the vital lineage. Like those awful "rock family tree" diagrams that show the various members of King Crimson and what they went on to do.

Also 2010s:

Dub/minimal techno got quite indescribably tedious.

I finally got bored by articles about how exciting and influential UK soundsystem culture is (with the exception of things that were ultra ultra niche like the scene in Huddersfield that I knew nothing about).

The rise and fall of the self-facilitating media node DJ.

Red Bull Music Academy
 
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