i loved degenerate and although yeah as the person a few posts up said this is more openly derivative than that, prob cos of the era/style he is homaging is totally my thing, im more forgiving. i suppose it would have been cool to get a vexd-style take on the more sources you can hear here. but in an interview i read he said that degenerate was more to do with roly from vexd than him so maybe thats why. and well a lot of the drums are still very much of the now though they never really dominate, its always about the synths on this album. i wouldnt mind hearing someone like el-p remix some of these tracks to make the hip hop influences more explicit.
Perhaps it's an album that'll turn out to be emotionally rich enough for it's derivative qualities not to matter.
The interview on Blackdown's blog is very interesting. It seems like there's a lot of anxiety around at the moment viz. futurism, especially (exclusively?) in dance/electronic music. Sort of reminds me of a Ballard quote I read somewhere (probably very famous) where he says that his biggest fear is that we are already living in the future, and that the future will in fact be monotonous, endlessly repetitious, ultimately very static and banal.
The album sounds very good from the clips. The first track is just gawjuz. I don't really mind that it sounds retro (which it DOES, to me). It's not as if I can't listen to old music because I've heard it before... Although I'm sure many would argue that producers have a responsibility to tread new ground.
Interesting what he says (and Crowley above) about the trap influence. I can barely hear it on those clips, I must say... I mean, I CAN hear it because he's mentioned it. And the juke influence. I just wonder - in BOTH those scenes/genres I don't really get the impression that there's much 'futurist' drive in those producers at all. It's very functionalist music on one level, and the originality you can find in it is sort of a product of catering to audience/dancer/rapper's demands and having to carve out a niche for yourself in order to stick out from the pack. And of course raw invention without the burden of 'futurism' on your back.
Finally listening to this Araab Muzik album as I type, sounds sorta brilliant.
dude - wheres that Ballard quote from??
Seems strange, what with all the talk of futurism, to release the album on cassette, mind you. I suppose you could argue that it's an attempt to reestablish the format as part of the future. I dunno.
I thought he was trying to get away from the retro thing and use sounds he thought were universally futuristic rather than futuristic in a certain context. There was a bit in one of the recent interviews when he said he thought the sounds had an inherent feel of the future to them, regardless of context, and that's why people first saw them as futuristic.
It does feel retro to me though.
Regardless, it's possibly the best album I've heard this year.