Neon Screams!

[woops]

my bookshelf

Right next to my food free dining table

 

[craner]

this is the infamous joe muggs review copy which turned up in a stoke newington charity shop 4 days before the actual release date

Does it have underlinings and angry exclamation marks?

 

[woops]

Does it have underlinings and angry exclamation marks?

the corner of page 2 is folded down

 

[craner]

the corner of page 2 is folded down

The peak of his anti-Reynolds rage?

 

[craner]

What is the significance of page 2?

 

[luka]

thats where he stopped reading

 

[thirdform]

his main thing is stuff like 4-tet, broken beat etc the polite, gilles peterson adjacent end of dance music but he tries to scoop up
everything he can, becasue he needs to put food on the table like everyone else

Kinda. his interests in that Gilles Peterson continuum springs out of balearic, drug dub, early prog house, ambient folksy electronica like Ultramarine, and things close to that. A lot of the records he valourises highly would be utterly detested by the Peterson types, cos they are (not to put a premium on it) very sonically white.

 

[thirdform]

Gilles Peterson and Four Tet have a sense of aesthetic taste, even if it's a sense we disagree with. It's very much rooted in the 70s as the gold standard of music (and in some ways they have a point, but push it beyond all reason and sense.) Muggs likes anything and everything, which is precisely why his writing is consumer guide. He's personally much closer to the populists blissblogger and bart man champion, in a hilarious turn of irony. Because a heavy investment in aesthetics is delineated by capital, right. Where Muggs fails is that he has that cultural capital, and the populists don't, so it can often look a bit weird oooh why is this posh dude into this music, be it ruff or sophisticated.

The key, as I have always told you, is to abolish western tonality. Smoothness is fine so long as it goes between the notes of c and c# - Rupture to his credit understands this, Zhao not so much.

 

[thirdform]

Hmmm. Anyone want to buy me this book? I'm broke atm.

I feel like given some of my posts here I've earned like, at least a lousy shrunken PDF of the book

Can sort you out epub, dm me.

 

[thirdform]

feel a bit sorry for the k-punk defence league these days tbf. hopelessly washed-up and resigned to the dustbin of academia fad history. that 'acid communism 2021' conference in berlin must've been a front for covertly financing terrorism somewhere - or just a nice schmoozy networking event for the Academy

I tbf doubt anyone went to it lol. Certainly Lucius didn't.

 

[thirdform]

Gilles Peterson and Four Tet have a sense of aesthetic taste, even if it's a sense we disagree with. It's very much rooted in the 70s as the gold standard of music (and in some ways they have a point, but push it beyond all reason and sense.) Muggs likes anything and everything, which is precisely why his writing is consumer guide. He's personally much closer to the populists blissblogger and bart man champion, in a hilarious turn of irony. Because a heavy investment in aesthetics is delineated by capital, right. Where Muggs fails is that he has that cultural capital, and the populists don't, so it can often look a bit weird oooh why is this posh dude into this music, be it ruff or sophisticated.

The key, as I have always told you, is to abolish western tonality. Smoothness is fine so long as it goes between the notes of c and c# - Rupture to his credit understands this, Zhao not so much.

In this sense Muggs is neither rockist nor poptimist, but to @blissblogger 's credit, he takes a side and thats why he's infinitely more readable and one can debate with him. For instance I said this yesterday:

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah, one funny thing about all of this is the book is actually quite critical of the Reynolds 'retromania' stance but, unlike Muggs, Reynolds is an adult who you can actually have a conversation with.

 

[IdleRich]

I think Muggs was at uni with the Spymania lot and I think of his writing as associated with that.

 

[luka]

what was spymania?

 

[IdleRich]

I mean Jamie Liddell, Christian Vogel, Simon Begg... I dunno.

 

[IdleRich]

Not an expert but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spymania

 

[CrowleyHead]

I see, I only asked because a cursory glance at Twitter makes him seem quite omnivorous.

That omnivorous appearance is in part affected by the demands of the profession. If you are only talking about your own interests and not contributing you get seen as a nuisance and a weirdo. This is why there is a certain cynicism to be found in these critics who all talk about each another's chosen 'worthy' examples from whatever fields they're into. Not to say he can't enjoy all kinds of music, just that Third and Luka are responding more to what his passion/niche is rather than whatever he speaks his mind on.

 

[thirdform]

I think Muggs was at uni with the Spymania lot and I think of his writing as associated with that.

Oh sure, but he said in his fact mag memoir that he was a revelation for him. you're actually making me dig out the passage!

There’s an elephant in the room, here, and it smells of patchouli and rollies. The biggest problem with getting to grips with jungle was that I was by this stage, essentially, a hippie. Acid and speed and weed were the drugs, and there was enough of the acid in particular flowing round my veins to convince me that ancient knowledge and futuristic technology were combining to create some new kind of collective consciousness and… oh honestly my anus is cringing just thinking about it. Part of it, of course, was that I was a fairly asocial youth being given access to teeming social milieu while hopped up on goofballs, so of course dancing crowds seemed like something new and alien. Also I was extraordinarily skinny and looked not a million miles from a young Mick Jagger, so I managed to pull off tumbling henna-ed hair, scented oils and billowing shirts without getting the stomping I probably deserved.
It wasn’t 100% socially unacceptable to be a total space-case either: this was the era of Mondo 2000, of Douglas Rushkoff being a thing, of The Shamen having hit records referencing Terrence McKenna and saying “ooh coming on like a seventh sense”. You couldn’t turn round in a rave of any kind without bumping into someone who believed that aliens seeded civilisation, that if you put 23 speakers in a circle their soundwaves would create a crystal formation and invoke higher intelligences, that ketamine turned your brain into an astral aerial etc etc etc. And despite all the silliness, musically, this wasn’t such an awful place to be. The free parties on the beaches and the South Downs attracted all walks of raver life and were often glorious, and nights like Megadog and Megatripolis were incredible parties, with their omnipresent UV and alien motifs creating a space for total abandon. Dancing in a Club Dog “BOIL YOUR HEAD” t-shirt in the middle of the floor to Aphex Twin and Orbital live sets at the Megadog /Midi Circus tour, on my 19th birthday, then stumbling over the road to fire bolts of pure blue lightning out of my face into the night sky* definitely counts as one of the most intense experiences of my life.
The soundtrack to my daytime life consisted almost entirely of two tapes: one that Simon had by DJ Remould and one I found on a market by Andy (as he was then) Weatherall, both of them in their way space cadet music. Remould was an Oxford DJ and lived in a double decker bus; ‘Maniac Music’ [stream above], with its crossfader madness to match anything Carl Cox was doing at the time, perfectly caught the moment at the start of ’93 when breakbeat hardcore, Euro and Detroit techno and hard trance had not yet separated from each other; when brilliant, prankster-ish silliness and intense darkness not only coexisted but reinforced one another. The Weatherall mix [wrongly tagged as a Hacienda set on the embed below] was just called “Studio Mix” on my tape, and also touched on trance and techno, on Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia and Blake Baxter, but it was the yin to ‘Maniac Music’s yang, with impossibly smooth blends instead of brutal chop-and-change, long seductive narrative arcs instead of barrelling headlong into the abyss, a night-glide through a sci-fi city instead of a Mad Max bacchanal.
I like to think I would have grown out of mushroom-fried alien worship naturally, but who knows. Maybe if it hadn’t been for a few fortuitous meetings I’d have ended up selling beads in Goa or going full Syd Barrett – but as it happened, in my second year at university, I started knocking about with (OK, selling weed to, then knocking about with) some rather more interesting people with music taste that bust me out of getting locked into a musical trance. In the new intake of students were a bunch of Essex music freaks and skaters and a couple of their Londoner and Brummie mates, who were hilarious, had amazing Detroit techno collections, read Robert Anton Wilson, and one of whom even owned an SH-101.

We had set up a university “Trancendental Society”** by this point, pretending to be a spiritual organisation in order to get funding for parties and meet people who might want to buy weed – it was at one of these I did my first White Dove as it happens – and I invited these boys to come and play at one of our parties alongside some crusty hard techno DJs from the Brighton scene. They rocked up, deeply stoned, and proceeded to play gabber, Wu Tang Clan and gun-crazed dancehall 7”s, horrifying a lot of the hippies, including me at first… until I realised that this was the greatest thing ever. I don’t tend to believe in epiphanies, but having the nice linear groove of the rave broken by these massive pisstakers was definitely one. A few of them would shortly after go on to set up the Spymania label to release tracks by their old schoolfriend Tom ‘Squarepusher’ Jenkinson – and this would become quite a big part of my life.

Joe Muggs is a Rubbish Raver - Fact Magazine

All week on FACT, we’re celebrating #RaveWeek. First, we ran a FACT mix from pioneering Detroit techno producer Kevin Saunderson,…

www.factmag.com

 

[thirdform]

what was spymania?

Deleuzian techno geezers on drugs at 4 AM. you'd like them. Don't care for the theory but the stuff that EG Si Begg has put out is mental.

But for the complete package, theory, music, brain drilling psychosis Praxis wins every time.

Praxis

Label and record shop for harsh experimental electronic music led by Christoph Fringeli based in Berlin (first located in London/UK, then in Berlin/Germany, then in Basel/Switzerland, now again in Berlin/Germany). Catalog numbers are not chronological, so it is not unusual to find a release...

www.discogs.com

@john eden had to hide his trance habit from them, you know they're on the right path!

 

[thirdform]

Oh sure, but he said in his fact mag memoir that he was a revelation for him. you're actually making me dig out the passage!

Joe Muggs is a Rubbish Raver - Fact Magazine

All week on FACT, we’re celebrating #RaveWeek. First, we ran a FACT mix from pioneering Detroit techno producer Kevin Saunderson,…

www.factmag.com

this is tbf valid even though Luke will say its not.

Meanwhile, my friends at home who had been consistently laughing at my failure to get jungle, finally cracked me with that Ray Keith ‘Terrorist’ / ‘Something I Feel’ 12” on one visit back to the Shire – and with the fervour of a true convert I immediately went hell-for-leather digging into all the jungle I could find. Probably out of guilt at my previous dismissal of all the MC chatter and gunshots, I went straight for the rudest tunes and DJs too – looking down on the other students around me who were getting into “intelligent jungle”, piling up DJ SS, Kemet Crew, Tom & Jerry and Shy FX 12”, and making awkward spidery attempts to “brock out” to Jumping Jack Frost and Dr S Gachet. I finally got my own decks and finally learned to mix – still trying unlikely and wrong combinations, but just occasionally making it work this time.