Proper shitposting (as I am now, too).It's great this interview btw I've paid it the ultimate unhygeinic compliment of taking my laptop into the toilet with me to carry on reading it
Ah, that was a reference to his AMA where people kept trolling him by asking him about Morbius.Shots fired @luka (shame you didn't ask them about ghostbusters)
... we came from an electro background, you know, we were trying to make electro that was developing in the same way that it had been developing. It’s just that electro stopped developing in the mainstream because it fell out of fashion, but we just carried on thinking about what that might mean.
Taking it forwards in the direction that we felt that it was already going in before we started. And so I don’t feel like that, that it is avant garde, I feel like it’s really accessible. To me, as a kid who’s grown up with electro, it’s totally accessible. I’ve talked to Detroit heads. A lot of the OG Detroit guys really rate what we’re doing, and I think that they get it because they were there as well, and they know what we’ve done, they can see what we’ve done.
So much on NTS Sessions seems to offer a hypothetical alternate timeline to ’80s electronic music: What if it all just kept growing? What if each and every Latin Rascals razor blade micro edit was to re-edit itself violently? What if the stuttering vocals of Miami bass dubs were to develop sub-stutters? If all the acid house squelches grew into roars? If the extended DJ mixes lasted for entire days? And what if all the oh-shit moments that first came with these innovations were still central to the enjoyment of contemporary dance music? It would, presumably, keep evolving until it was no longer even recognizable as such.
You speak as if this was a coincidence. 😅there are a lot of interesting "from the horse's mouth" moments for the autechre defense squad around here. covers our usual talking points about how they do make electro, they do make danceable music, they do make music with emotional affect... and does so way more thoroughly than i've seen before.
but yeah that quote for example is almost verbatim what noz said in his nts review:
was really reminded of this listening to the first few tracks of nts 3 the other day. the constituent parts of the beat will often be very weirdly syncopated and off the grid. you could make comparisons with j dilla or wonky, or even with the "country time" of old blues recordings, where you have the main artist and then, say, a bunch of their family members playing supporting instruments, each slightly out of time in their own way in a metronomic sense, but in such a way that the whole thing grooves harder than that sort of rote adherence ever would.Even just taking a loop of some almost random sounding stuff, and then looping it in the right way, and suddenly, it’s got this kind of lurch to it and this movement that kind of gets you. It’s kinda like about finding this thing that makes you go: ‘Oooph, fucking hell’. And it’s funny when I hear producers who have a similar rhythmic template in all their stuff and I think: ‘How are you not intrigued by all the other funks that there are, there’s so many ways that you can have funk in a track.’ And when I hear people doing a new one, I get really drawn in.
They stood out in the 90s cos of this I think. The only artists in that scene that could really create and sustain a groove.yes, appreciate the very deliberate yet innocent sounding questions. like when you mention their sense of groove sean immediately goes "there’s so many things I could say about this, it could be another interview in of itself"—because it's a huge part of their aesthetics yet journalists who listen to a release once and decide their music is random noise never ask them about it.
This is what's mvuent's always stressing about them:
"listen to Untilted ... pretend kurtis mantronik didn't release anything after music madness and then after 20 years came out with this."
Something like dj hype or a droppin science isn't a further development and intensification of electro, as much as it will have memories of a breakdancers body, (witness A) the white euro ravers horror at jazz jungle, and B) the way most jungle producers got lost when it came to using drum machines instead of breakbeats.) Electro pushed to its limit precisely necessitates the anti-groove abstraction you're railing against.
"And I think that this is based on the idea that – and it may sound quite harsh this, but I’ll just say it – this idea that people, usually from a black background, but sometimes if you’re British, it’s from a working class background – aren’t capable of being geeky, and so we must be bringing it in from somewhere else. It’s sort of this tacit implication that if we took hip-hop in a direction that makes it sound, like a little bit more brainy, that those brains have had to have been glued on from some other place, that can’t be something that we found within it, or ourselves, and that we’re amplifying, and exaggerating."
SHOTS FIRED AT DISSENSUS
@blissblogger is still reticent about this. but as I said on his blog
People will attempt to deny it, but jungle as much as it owed a lot of its chassy to hip hop, also owed quite a lot to the jazz dance scenes of crackers, global village, and then Electric Ballroom etc. And then Trevor Shakes.
This scene is not written about at all and even one of the first guys to play house in London, Noel Watson, dismissed that crowd as too straight and too conformist. Which, granted, they were, but they were also 90%+ black, with a few Greeks involved, George Power etc.
Certainly mainstream London cottonned onto house quite late, but that doesn't mean there weren't heads in north and east who weren't on it since day dot. Jazzy M, Colin dale/faver, Fab and Groove, Dave Angel, etc, etc...
To illustrate my point here is a hardstep tune which juxtaposes hip hop sampling with elegant jazzual vibes. You can here literally no electro in this. The traces of electro, so much so that they did exist, were over by 94, for the most part.
A lot of the break chopping is an attempt to reduce the jazz funk to something more utilitarian. You can hear this in potential bad boy tunes. If house was a reduction of disco to become its own thing, then jungle was a reduction of funk. Not machine funk, definitely its own thing, but a reduction nevertheless.
Really, the irony in the Kirk Degiorgio position is he tends to align himself with the most europhile of post-disco scenes and has to overcompensate. Otherwise he is not always wrong, but his perspective makes a great deal more sense when applied to jungle. Detroit techno owes way more to euro synth pop than jungle ever could or would.