Dissensus Raw: The Compilation - A Thread

wektor

Well-known member
my track title appears to have changed - should read ESCAPE FROM PRESET 13 🙏. cheers
soz, fixed.
Risky: he might not like it.

The album needs to be released under cover of darkness and if anyone spots it we need some sort of excuse ready.
I think it is a risk worth taking, worst case scenario we get publicly bashed and then make a comeback with DISS002: The Worst Of All.
 

Leo

Well-known member
I actually made the Joe Muggs comment in jest (see "neon screams" thread). I believe his wire review even includes veiled swipe at dissensus.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Certain linguistic tics, his conception of modernity and his musical canon pre-2010 align him with the online culture of self-referential chat groups and forums personified by Dissensus: overwhelmingly white male spaces, fond of fierce genre delineation, proprietary neologisms and endlessly argued hierarchies, and beholden in turn to the critical voice of the inky music press of the 1980s. Simon Reynolds, high priest of this enduring movement, cements this lineage by adding his name and an excitable foreword to this book: oddly, erasing a number of mainly Black rap writers (try Simone White and Jesse McCarthy’s brilliant trap focused poetry and essays to name just two) as he suggests Mackintosh’s “crucial intervention” is operating in terra incognita.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Kit Mackintosh, still in his twenties, is a glorious prose stylist and DJ. His radio sets will pepper gamma-radioactive bashment with Squarepushersounding chiptune and psych-funk freakouts, making dazzling instinctive leaps, illuminating unlikely connections and holding everything together with sheer brightness, intensity and velocity. Likewise his text ping-pongs around historically and thematically through modern 808 and Auto-Tune sounds, provoking, stimulating and grabbing attention, surfing waves of superlative music, maniacally pattern-spotting and then presenting those patterns as a holy truth. He makes explicit his desire to be the wild prophet of a musical paradigm change or jihad, breaking from the dads and university students of the critical and club culture establishments. But in this hubris there’s also tragedy – in the OG Greek, bleak irony sense.

Tragedy number one: he has shackled himself to an archaic critical framework to do this. Certain linguistic tics, his conception of modernity and his musical canon pre-2010 align him with the online culture of self-referential chat groups and forums personified by Dissensus: overwhelmingly white male spaces, fond of fierce genre delineation, proprietary neologisms and endlessly argued hierarchies, and beholden in turn to the critical voice of the inky music press of the 1980s. Simon Reynolds, high priest of this enduring movement, cements this lineage by adding his name and an excitable foreword to this book: oddly, erasing a number of mainly Black rap writers (try Simone White and Jesse McCarthy’s brilliant trap focused poetry and essays to name just two) as he suggests Mackintosh’s “crucial intervention” is operating in terra incognita.

And this community, where living scenes and sounds are bickered over like Pokémon, is prone to some pernicious issues. One of these, which Mackintosh repeats, is something that has been a recurring problem for Reynolds. Mackintosh in this book is attempting to create, as the book’s publicity puts it, a grand “unified field theory” of ultra synthetic urban Black music: a gathering of disparate threads into a strictly delineated category that’s explicitly more radical than and superior to adjacent sounds – and a clear attempt to repeat Reynolds’s “hardcore [or ’ardkore] continuum”. But, like the (conti)nuum, this stark line drawing involves a starting assumption that Black music is authentic and worth serious attention when it is transgressive, macho, cybernetic, instinctive – and inauthentic and lightweight when it is harmonious, accomplished, inclusive, rooted. This led to Reynolds writing jazzy jungle, soulful house and broken beat out of his narrative of the UK’s underground sounds despite their inseparability from their darker musical cousins, making his nuum historically partial in all senses – and it leads Mackintosh to insist, for example, that the vast area of Afrobeats is “tame... pop rather than future music”, even though it is inseparable from drill in the ever fertile flux of the UK rap/dance landscape. One shudders to think what he thinks of rappers working with musicians from London’s currently vital neo-soul and jazz scenes.

These kinds of grand sheep and goats divisions are really only possible for those whose attention is focused on online ivory towers more than the living realities of music production and consumption. Thus Mackintosh tries to separate UK drill not just from Afrobeats but from dance music as a whole, which makes no sense when, if drill is heard out, it is more likely than not to be in the mix with bashment, Afrobeats, R&B, grime, other rap, UK funky, resurgent UKG, and lately South African amapiano.

It’s telling that the word dance appears dozens of times in Neon Screams but hardly ever in connection to the act of dancing. Every single time it is a reference to dance music, something he casts as antithetical to rap, again forcing a false dichotomy to reinforce his theory. There is no mention at all of dancing in drill videos, though unlike their lyrics they’re way more likely to feature skanking than shanking. Though Mackintosh writes thrillingly and compellingly about these sounds as disembodied, virtual, Tron-like – representative of an alienated online world – there’s a whole world of existing moving bodies that is erased in this anti-dance view.

All of which, again, is in many ways fine. As when he emphasises the narcotic nature of mumble rap, neglecting its other more mundane but deeper roots in Southern US accents and slang, or claims jungle was imprecise in its rhythms in order to emphasise drill’s precision, it’s the natural theoretical overstatement of a provocateur and evangelist. And yes, there should be more discourse around these music styles. Mackintosh might not be the first to talk about, say, the cyborg-Luciferic force set loose in Jamaican music by Vybz Kartel but it’s a narrative that bears repeating, especially with his level of vigour and style which, like his DJing, brings already vivid records further to life. But by shackling himself to a discursive voice, and a dogmatic Year Zero idea of modernity, that dates back to post-punk and was already showing its cracks by the 90s, he does himself no favours.

Thus the second, and most immediate tragedy: with Reynolds’s big splash endorsement, however awkward, his protégé will sell a significant amount of more books, make an instant name for himself, razz up plenty of staid rap/reggae/dance traditionalists, and get reviews like this – but Mackintosh’s own individualist light is ironically dimmed in the process. Without it, this by turns glorious and frustrating book would have reached far fewer eyes but would have been a first step in the much harder graft involved in finding a voice that’s as new and as true to himself as he’s capable of being, and which the music as a whole deserves. Maybe – hopefully – if Mackintosh untethers himself from his own critical dads, that can still happen.
 

woops

is not like other people
it's ok to like broken beat if that's your thing. just write an article about how good broken beat is instead of complaining that someone else doesn't like it. not really sure what it is myself
 

Arthur Brick

Mortar Life
Is it possible (when it goes live) to share it with my followers on bandcamp? Or will I just have to put a link in a message to them all?
 

polystyle

Well-known member
Kit Mackintosh, still in his twenties, is a glorious prose stylist and DJ. His radio sets will pepper gamma-radioactive bashment with Squarepushersounding chiptune and psych-funk freakouts, making dazzling instinctive leaps, illuminating unlikely connections and holding everything together with sheer brightness, intensity and velocity. Likewise his text ping-pongs around historically and thematically through modern 808 and Auto-Tune sounds, provoking, stimulating and grabbing attention, surfing waves of superlative music, maniacally pattern-spotting and then presenting those patterns as a holy truth. He makes explicit his desire to be the wild prophet of a musical paradigm change or jihad, breaking from the dads and university students of the critical and club culture establishments. But in this hubris there’s also tragedy – in the OG Greek, bleak irony sense.

Tragedy number one: he has shackled himself to an archaic critical framework to do this. Certain linguistic tics, his conception of modernity and his musical canon pre-2010 align him with the online culture of self-referential chat groups and forums personified by Dissensus: overwhelmingly white male spaces, fond of fierce genre delineation, proprietary neologisms and endlessly argued hierarchies, and beholden in turn to the critical voice of the inky music press of the 1980s. Simon Reynolds, high priest of this enduring movement, cements this lineage by adding his name and an excitable foreword to this book: oddly, erasing a number of mainly Black rap writers (try Simone White and Jesse McCarthy’s brilliant trap focused poetry and essays to name just two) as he suggests Mackintosh’s “crucial intervention” is operating in terra incognita.

And this community, where living scenes and sounds are bickered over like Pokémon, is prone to some pernicious issues. One of these, which Mackintosh repeats, is something that has been a recurring problem for Reynolds. Mackintosh in this book is attempting to create, as the book’s publicity puts it, a grand “unified field theory” of ultra synthetic urban Black music: a gathering of disparate threads into a strictly delineated category that’s explicitly more radical than and superior to adjacent sounds – and a clear attempt to repeat Reynolds’s “hardcore [or ’ardkore] continuum”. But, like the (conti)nuum, this stark line drawing involves a starting assumption that Black music is authentic and worth serious attention when it is transgressive, macho, cybernetic, instinctive – and inauthentic and lightweight when it is harmonious, accomplished, inclusive, rooted. This led to Reynolds writing jazzy jungle, soulful house and broken beat out of his narrative of the UK’s underground sounds despite their inseparability from their darker musical cousins, making his nuum historically partial in all senses – and it leads Mackintosh to insist, for example, that the vast area of Afrobeats is “tame... pop rather than future music”, even though it is inseparable from drill in the ever fertile flux of the UK rap/dance landscape. One shudders to think what he thinks of rappers working with musicians from London’s currently vital neo-soul and jazz scenes.

These kinds of grand sheep and goats divisions are really only possible for those whose attention is focused on online ivory towers more than the living realities of music production and consumption. Thus Mackintosh tries to separate UK drill not just from Afrobeats but from dance music as a whole, which makes no sense when, if drill is heard out, it is more likely than not to be in the mix with bashment, Afrobeats, R&B, grime, other rap, UK funky, resurgent UKG, and lately South African amapiano.

It’s telling that the word dance appears dozens of times in Neon Screams but hardly ever in connection to the act of dancing. Every single time it is a reference to dance music, something he casts as antithetical to rap, again forcing a false dichotomy to reinforce his theory. There is no mention at all of dancing in drill videos, though unlike their lyrics they’re way more likely to feature skanking than shanking. Though Mackintosh writes thrillingly and compellingly about these sounds as disembodied, virtual, Tron-like – representative of an alienated online world – there’s a whole world of existing moving bodies that is erased in this anti-dance view.

All of which, again, is in many ways fine. As when he emphasises the narcotic nature of mumble rap, neglecting its other more mundane but deeper roots in Southern US accents and slang, or claims jungle was imprecise in its rhythms in order to emphasise drill’s precision, it’s the natural theoretical overstatement of a provocateur and evangelist. And yes, there should be more discourse around these music styles. Mackintosh might not be the first to talk about, say, the cyborg-Luciferic force set loose in Jamaican music by Vybz Kartel but it’s a narrative that bears repeating, especially with his level of vigour and style which, like his DJing, brings already vivid records further to life. But by shackling himself to a discursive voice, and a dogmatic Year Zero idea of modernity, that dates back to post-punk and was already showing its cracks by the 90s, he does himself no favours.

Thus the second, and most immediate tragedy: with Reynolds’s big splash endorsement, however awkward, his protégé will sell a significant amount of more books, make an instant name for himself, razz up plenty of staid rap/reggae/dance traditionalists, and get reviews like this – but Mackintosh’s own individualist light is ironically dimmed in the process. Without it, this by turns glorious and frustrating book would have reached far fewer eyes but would have been a first step in the much harder graft involved in finding a voice that’s as new and as true to himself as he’s capable of being, and which the music as a whole deserves. Maybe – hopefully – if Mackintosh untethers himself from his own critical dads, that can still

Kit Mackintosh, still in his twenties, is a glorious prose stylist and DJ. His radio sets will pepper gamma-radioactive bashment with Squarepushersounding chiptune and psych-funk freakouts, making dazzling instinctive leaps, illuminating unlikely connections and holding everything together with sheer brightness, intensity and velocity. Likewise his text ping-pongs around historically and thematically through modern 808 and Auto-Tune sounds, provoking, stimulating and grabbing attention, surfing waves of superlative music, maniacally pattern-spotting and then presenting those patterns as a holy truth. He makes explicit his desire to be the wild prophet of a musical paradigm change or jihad, breaking from the dads and university students of the critical and club culture establishments. But in this hubris there’s also tragedy – in the OG Greek, bleak irony sense.

Tragedy number one: he has shackled himself to an archaic critical framework to do this. Certain linguistic tics, his conception of modernity and his musical canon pre-2010 align him with the online culture of self-referential chat groups and forums personified by Dissensus: overwhelmingly white male spaces, fond of fierce genre delineation, proprietary neologisms and endlessly argued hierarchies, and beholden in turn to the critical voice of the inky music press of the 1980s. Simon Reynolds, high priest of this enduring movement, cements this lineage by adding his name and an excitable foreword to this book: oddly, erasing a number of mainly Black rap writers (try Simone White and Jesse McCarthy’s brilliant trap focused poetry and essays to name just two) as he suggests Mackintosh’s “crucial intervention” is operating in terra incognita.

And this community, where living scenes and sounds are bickered over like Pokémon, is prone to some pernicious issues. One of these, which Mackintosh repeats, is something that has been a recurring problem

between @diggedyderek and @blissblogger, we've got dissensians with highest-level connections to The Wire, there's our "in" for a review!
No sheep and goats division sighted @ Dissensus Raw 1
 

wektor

Well-known member
Looks like this. Big day today, will publish it later in the afternoon.
About the youtube thing, will have to see after I wrap up my 54h working week.
Zrzut-ekranu-2021-08-20-o-07-26-45.png
 
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