Carl Craig sonic art space

T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Bristolians also have a chronic inability to banter. they love chillout music and trip hop. stoners all day long. in london you eat 10 grams of hash in yogurt and are totally lucid.

Bristol is an embarrassment to 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
 
sus

sus

Moderator
thirdform said:
and actually you started this by actively claiming to want to erase disco, club electrosoul, and house.

Don't go back on your words and say disco is about songcraft. That does a disservice to disco's intended purpose.
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hahahahaha WHAT

Padraig can attest that I love disco
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
suspended said:
If I thought about music as a signaling vector believe you me, I wouldn't keep any stocks on indie rock. My very commitment, in defiance of all this board's sensibility's, testifies to my pure relationship with songcraft. A relationship that sceney dance people, whose relationship to music is oriented first around drugs and second around doing drugs with friends, would never understand.
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@pattycakes this quite clearly goes back to the cartesian mind body split, which disco cannot conceivably fit into.

Now Gus is going to double down because we've long since demolished his untenable positions.
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Gus wants to make disco rockist like agent nucleus. It's hilarious.

Disco is not like that. It's totally senious and does not place itself on the terrain of innovation like the classical cannon does, it is all about micro innovations of what will rock the floor relative to material need. This is quite apparent with the Walter Gibbons 12 mixes and the evolution from thereon. The same dynamics that propelled hardcore in the UK in the 90s propelled disco in the 70s in the US, and in Europe in the 80s, despite real musicians and real bands being used, disco is in essence a mechanised (machine music) something Kodwo Eshun talks about very eloquently as the black American musical traditions fall from celestial grace and subjection to the industrial assembly line. Hence why disco was so ready to adopt the synthesiser and drum machine, whereas in rock music it has always been an ornament, a form of decoration, how metrosexual is that!

And yet, because of this very roots 'n' phuture aspect of machine music (Funk Masters - Love Money instrumental), Disco has more commonalities with worldwide agrarian folk cultures (funny how we aren't talking about American Indian folk music eh) than songcraft, which in essence descend from the values of western classical music.
Songcraft is not about righting good popular songs or even about vocal led music, in which case dance music, and especially the kind we champion on here, is littered with examples // are samplers integral to songcraft, why/why not? Songcraft is about compositional originality, mental detachment, and hi-falutin conceptualism. For Gus, Colonel Abrams - Trapped (one of the greatest songs in the world) is inherently a song of lesser value compared to Radiohead's creep. Gus's music taste is inherently racist, and quintessentially majoritarian American, insofar as he is decendents of white genociders with no history prior to the 17th century. He is an outsider to the Blues, Negro spirituals, gospel etc, which in any case have a long ancestral pedigree dating back hundreds and thousands of years to West Africa - whereas his indie music was a conscious disavowal of the continued Africanisation of America, a lineage he is able to trivially dismiss with the following: 'A relationship that sceney dance people, whose relationship to music is oriented first around drugs and second around doing drugs with friends, would never understand.'

The problem is we understand it, and we thought it was over by 1977 at the latest. Punk in its fundamental form was a conservative development — an attempt to save hippy culture from its worst excesses. This is why punk ultimately shares The hyperaesthetic concerns of progressive rock, just stripped down to the bone. Punk also detests the jazz/funk combo of jamming (and the deep groove with electrical amplification is machinic) and lengthy improvisations, something not part of either white british or white american musical vocabulary - but that still persisted in the 20th century in most of Asia, Latin America, North Africa etc, due to music being a collective folk form. And I will hasten to add that capital inherently tends to displace these semi-agrarian forms of expression sooner rather than later.

But we digress. The spaces that punk opened up were far more interesting than punk itself, which was an engineered spectacle by art wank middleclass entrepreneurs like Malcolm Mclarin. Hence why Gus is concerned with the Brooklyn mafia, he is averse to reckoning with music on the consumptive terms of the working class. He would do well to read Stuart Hall before circumlocutory prose regarding Bourdieu. The idea is not so banal as to consider culture as social stratification and signification. It is more fundamental than that. It is to see how people relate to culture in different ways within said stratifications. What these forms of culture says about their lived experience. A working class classical aesthete does not necessarily have to position themselves relative to his piers in an attempt to show off moral superiority, and yet, simultaneously, it is also likely that said person is in the upper layers (not always to be sure!) and transitional by virtue of class being inextricably linked to education in the UK. Nowhere is this more clear than with The Beatles who were concomitantly enmeshed in high art forms such as Indian classical and baroque, but who were also the most influential pop band of the post-war generation. These significations are likely to cross realities, because class itself is a relation to ones labour power, itself a commodity subdivided embedded in the personage - class is really fundamentally grounded in the contradiction between use value and exchange value. Here is Hall putting it more eloquently:
 
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T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
From his introduction to cultural studies (1983).

One of the people who attempts to chart the nature of the cultural changes taking place is Richard Hoggart (1957) in a book called The Uses of Literacy. Hoggart’s background is northern working class; when he writes the book, he was a teacher in adult education; he later became Professor of English and the founder of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is in a sense steeped in the English literary critical tradition. That is to say he is formed, as almost all of us were who went through an English degree at the time, by the ideas of and a contestation with the spirit of F. R. Leavis, to whom I shall return. Thus, when Hoggart writes about culture, he is writing therefore as a literary critic, attempting to do the kind of analysis or reading of real social and cultural life that he would do on a poem or a novel. He is trying to recall the kinds of lives which he and people like him lived in the traditional industrial working class before the war. He sees inscribed, not so much in the political and economic conditions, but in the social and cultural aspects of working-class life in that period, a certain pattern of culture, a certain set of values, a certain set of relationships between people. He sees how people who didn’t have access to a great deal of the material goods made a life for themselves, how they created and constructed a culture which sustained them. Of course, it sustained them in positions of subordination. They weren’t the masters and mistresses of the world. They weren’t people who were going to lead anything, but they were able to survive. And they survived with dignity.

Their lives constituted a pattern of culture: not the authenticated, valorised, or dominant pattern of culture, not the literate and “cultured” pattern of culture, but something he wants to call “a culture” nevertheless. He evokes that early traditional working class—which the leader of the Labour Party has said is disappearing forever—and he tries to “read it” in the same way he would read a piece of prose. He describes the kind of working-class home in which he was raised; he looks at how they arrange their living rooms, at the fact that even if the house is going to rack and ruin, there is always one place in it for visitors. Nobody else in the house ever goes into it. They may be sleeping four in a bed upstairs, but there is always a room to receive someone else. And he says, implicitly perhaps, that that is as much a culture as the culture of the country house or of the bourgeois palace. These are people making a life, giving their life meaning. We studied endlessly in the historical and literary past, interpreting the products of various particular cultures. But this is the culture we never see, the culture we don’t think of as cultivated.

He affirms that culture by describing it, using the tools of intuitive literary critical reading. He is not a sociologist and especially not drawn to quantitative methods. Indeed he has been formed in an English tradition which is deeply suspicious of quantification. Its orientation is expressed in a statement by Coleridge (1817, 109): “Men [by which I hope he meant men and women] … ought to be weighed, not counted.” This was Coleridge’s critique of utilitarianism and political economy, and of what early industrial capitalism had done to people; namely, Coleridge said, they talk about them as “industrial hands,” as if there were a hand out there running the spinning machine, and it’s just fortuitous that there are human beings attached to it! For it is this language that allows you to callously notice that a hundred thousand hands happen to be laid off this year! You can’t count people, you have to weigh them. Hoggart inherits this tradition which has been inserted into the interstices of literary criticism. Rather than counting, he weighs, he describes. Although he is unfamiliar with anthropology, he is doing a kind of ethnography, treating his own life as if it were taking place in a village in the South Seas, looking at the strange things people do and say.

Indeed his methodology is exactly that of an ethnographer, listening first of all to the language, to the actual practical speech which people use, to the ways they sustain relationships through language, and to the ways they categorise things. For example, he is interested in how and why working-class people talk about Fate in particular ways, at particular times. Now “Fate,” with a capital F, might be heard resounding down the corridors of gentry houses, but it’s not really something which puts a stopper to life in the way which it does in the working class. Fate can deal you a very good hand, which means that it only deals it once, and that means you win the pools and you better do something with it ’cause it’ll never come your way again. More often, Fate just deals you the old rough, raw deal you always knew was coming your way. And what happens? Fate. It’s the language of a class without any command on history. It’s the language of a class to which things happen, not of a class which makes things happen. And in that way Hoggart teases out the implications of the implicit value structure of a whole group in society, reading their physical bearing, the way they talk, the way they relate, the way they handle objects, the way they organise into patterns. He knew that these things had meaning, not by reading anthropology (he hadn’t), but by reading literature.

He brings a kind of literary imagination to bear on the analysis of a culture. And if this locates him within the traditional literary cultural tradition, he is also outside of it, because that tradition had never taken the sorts of things he is writing about as worthy of any attention at all. If you began talking to Leavis about the front living room of a working-class house in Leeds, he wouldn’t know what you were talking about! And what’s more, he would not have thought that it was what “culture” was about. Hoggart, formed by that tradition, is trying to bring it to bear on the neglected, the excluded part of culture. So in that sense he was both inside and outside of the tradition which formed him. He was breaking from it, using it to deal with his own experience, and to generalise from it.
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T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
In Gus's worldview, he is able to annex disco and absorb it into his whyyyte personal cannon due to the passage of time and the actual context of disco being erased from the popular imagination - the anti-disco backlash was not limited to white rockers, and really this problematises his truncated understanding of class, because he is always looking for ways to be optimally political, which in essence is a surface level bohemian concern.

quoting @blissblogger

The ‘Disco Sucks’ phenomenon recalls the Nazi book burnings, or the exhibitions of Degenerate Art. Modern-day spectacles of kultur-kampf like Comiskey were impelled by a similar disgust: the belief that disco was rootless, inauthentic, decadent, a betrayal of the virile principles of the true American volk music, rock ’n’ roll. Hence T-Shirts like ‘Death Before Disco’, hence organizations like DREAD (Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco) and Dahl’s own ‘Insane Coho Lips Antidisco Army’.

Discophobia wasn’t just limited to white rockers, though; many blacks despised it as a soul-less, mechanistic travesty of da funk. And so the sleeve of Funkadelic’s 1979 album Uncle Jam Wants You bore the slogan ‘it’s the rescue dance music “from the blahs” band’. Funkateer critic Greg Tate coined the term ‘DisCOINTELPRO’ – a pun on the FBI’s campaign to infiltrate black radical organizations like the Panthers – to denigrate disco as ‘a form of record industry sabotage … [which] destroyed the self-supporting black band movement out of which P-Funk … grew’. In 1987, Public Enemy’s Chuck D articulated hip hop’s antipathy to house, disco’s descendant, telling me: ‘it’s sophisticated, anti-black, anti-feel, the most ARTIFICIAL shit I ever heard. It represents the gay scene, it’s separating blacks from their past and their culture, it’s upwardly mobile.’

Chicago house music was born of a double exclusion, then: not just black, but gay and black. Its refusal, its cultural dissidence, took the form of embracing a music that the majority culture deemed dead and buried. House didn’t just resurrect disco, it mutated the form, intensifying the very aspects of the music that most offended white rockers and black funkateers: the machinic repetition, the synthetic and electronic textures, the rootlessness, the ‘depraved’ hypersexuality and ‘decadent’ druggy hedonism. Stylistically, house assembled itself from disregarded and degraded pop-culture detritus that the mainstream considered passé, disposable, un-American: the proto-disco of the Salsoul and Philadelphia International labels, English synth-pop and Moroder’s Eurodisco.
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Someone authentically following in Gus's lineage will claim 92 nutter ardkore to be musical, pace the inevitable implosion of club culture over the next decade or so, ardkore as musical relative to tech house, or minimal techno. But that's of course not how it happened in reality. Ardkore was seen as mechanised, amusical noise. Which in essence traps Gus in a double contradiction, as the analytical incoherency of his initial statement means he has to conceive the music he thinks is not about songcraft as being about songcraft.

I'm too familiar with the material he's referencing and his play the alt-white social justice warrior to be thrown by his mind games. I would expect you lot to be more vigilant and skewer him like a good ripe shish kebab.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
thirdform said:
Gus wants to make disco rockist like agent nucleus. It's hilarious.

Disco is not like that. It's totally senious and does not place itself on the terrain of innovation like the classical cannon does, it is all about micro innovations of what will rock the floor relative to material need.
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it was the pinnacle of analog recording. after that everything went digital. not getting into the analog/digital debate because it's been done to death with no satisfying answer. i love both for different reasons, (and yes, digital can sound 'warm') but for analog recording, disco is as good as it gets. the top stuff anyway when it was in it's prime. that's the technical side out of the way. but musically it also represents an apex. you had people who grew up playing jazz, funk and soul taking all that incredibly rich rhythmic and harmonic knowledge (they'd spent the last few decades taking all of that as far out and hard as they could) and then stripping it down to the very barest of bones. through the likes of Hamilton Bohannon taking the first steps from funk & soul with his 4 on the floor through to groups like First Choice flipping it into something so far removed from what preceded it that it was naturally maligned by purists as these things always tend to do, ho hum. but the fact that these were musicians who could more or less play anything they wanted but chose to strip things down in such a way, occasionally flashing a subtle musical flourish here, or a (at the time) futuristic spaceship sounding effect there, (not to mention the synths ffs!) teasing and hinting at their musical and studio chops in the instrumental sections of the extended 12" cuts, you had this incredibly new and exciting music being played in clubs on what (even by todays standards) were the finest sound systems in the world, and by attending those nights you were very firmly seated in the cockpit of the SS Funkterprise blasting out through the cosmos. all under the backdrop of the space age and quite likely on hallucionogenics to boot.

thirdform said:
This is quite apparent with the Walter Gibbons 12 mixes and the evolution from thereon. The same dynamics that propelled hardcore in the UK in the 90s propelled disco in the 70s in the US, and in Europe in the 80s, despite real musicians and real bands being used, disco is in essence a mechanised (machine music) something Kodwo Eshun talks about very eloquently as the black American musical traditions fall from celestial grace and subjection to the industrial assembly line. Hence why disco was so ready to adopt the synthesiser and drum machine, whereas in rock music it has always been an ornament, a form of decoration, how metrosexual is that!
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we're overlapping now, because yes, like hardcore it was very much the sound of the future, all the tech being pushed to it's limits, although without a focus on sound quality until a few years later which i think for many of you here signified the end of the good old days anyway. but disco a mechanised machine music? nah man. take the blinkers off. you know even our man Hardy was playing the sweet and loose just as much as the robotic, in fact that's what made him so exhilarating. he'd be beating the crowd to a pulp with some tape edit acid jams and ebm alien funk and then drop something like


which was for so many there the peak of the whole shebang. a release of all the tension. that's what made him a fucking genious. sweet n sour. yin n yang, baby.

thirdform said:
And yet, because of this very roots 'n' phuture aspect of machine music (Funk Masters - Love Money instrumental), Disco has more commonalities with worldwide agrarian folk cultures (funny how we aren't talking about American Indian folk music eh) than songcraft, which in essence descend from the values of western classical music.
Songcraft is not about righting good popular songs or even about vocal led music, in which case dance music, and especially the kind we champion on here, is littered with examples // are samplers integral to songcraft, why/why not? Songcraft is about compositional originality, mental detachment, and hi-falutin conceptualism.
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this is an example of complexity which is fairly advanced by even disco standards, but disco djs were always looking for these kinds of cuts with the off kilter, witty unpredictable factor. that's how you set yourself apart. anyone can mix a bunch of relentlessness together and make a crowd go nuts. but the real art, and why for me, disco and that time in clubbing in general is so exciting is because they were playing with your expectations. those 11 minute tracks where the vocal doesn't come in until the 7 minute mark and yet you've already been on the jounrey of a lifetime but now, what the? here's a lady singing songs and stories connecting directly to your soul and there's still time to go. and yeah there was also shit like


but that was part of the fun too. another massive factor. this music like any good art was exploring life in all it's forms

thirdform said:
For Gus, Colonel Abrams - Trapped (one of the greatest songs in the world)
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❤️
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
The shroom trip I reported a few years ago, walking through the little rain forest above São Paulo when my phone's shuffle dj'ed the the set of it's life and dropped this in the midst of a bunch of tripped out acid house n tech madness


as far a song writing, lyrics and music combined go, just had me in total awe and in love with the world
 
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