Neon Screams!

[thirdform]

maybe it exists on youtube instead of the club/IRL gatherings.

Nah, it's the revenge of ambient. A development ive felt ambivalent about.

Muggs of course is a big ambient fan, whereas most of it I can take or leave.

 

[thirdform]

Although my criticism of ambient comes out of different places to it being mellow, soporific or whatever. In seeking to transcend the tyranny of the macho-ism of rock and roll and the tyranny of western pop music it tends to have a limited tonal range, and like minimalism (in classical) aims for a nebulous postmodern timelessness.

 

[woops]

Although my criticism of ambient comes out of different places to it being mellow, soporific or whatever. In seeking to transcend the tyranny of the macho-ism of rock and roll and the tyranny of western pop music it tends to have a limited tonal range, and like minimalism (in classical) aims for a nebulous postmodern timelessness.

alot of the music you post on here is hard distorted very banging noise, not ambient at all. but sometimes when i listen to the gabba stuff you like i hear a singular texture that sits on top of the 200bpm kicks. some of that flashcore you posted is insane as well, but i couldn't listen to it all the time

 

[thirdform]

Deindustrialise your musical imagination. Shut down the failing factories of tired once-futures. Metal Machine Music is no more.

Tear yourself from the shrivelled teat of the twentieth century. Everything about the old future you once loved is rotting and in rigor mortis. Dance music’s done; it’s dead and desecrated with no hope of resurrection. Synthesisers and samplers have been sucked dry and now they’re completely depleted, they have nothing left to give you. You’re not going to get anything new or anything sonically impossible from either of them. Nobody has done for decades. Music doesn’t sound like spaceships and cybermen anymore. Nor does it sound like shrapnel or cold steel. It’s not about rocket-fuelled propulsion or mechanised movement. Robot rhythms are boring now. Techy timbres are trite.

So fuck your dad futures. Fuck all your museum futures and your putrefying futures and your calcifying futures that have formed like plaque in the imaginations of music enthusiasts everywhere. This book isn’t about a pacified pantheon of pre-approved pioneers. It’s not about James Brown or Lee “Scratch” Perry or Public Enemy or Timbaland or Wiley. Nor for that matter is it about acid house or techno or jungle or garage or footwork…. It’s time for new titans to shine and new sounds to astound. Declare gory and glorious jihad on all the jaded journalists writing stillborn obituaries to their distant youths; an insurgency lurks in the shadows.

Nostalgia’s a venom, bleed it out of you. The past is parasitical; cripple it, paralyse it, do whatever you have to do to exorcise its wicked sickness from you. It’s nothing but a chafing, flaking phallus that’s hopelessly being throttled long after it’s been spunked to flaccid defeat. For the love of god let the poor thing go!!!

We’ve been indoctrinated and corrupted by the orthodoxy of the robo-future for far too long; our synaesthesia’s suffocating in moribund musical metaphors and kitsch visions of the centuries and millennia ahead. Free your mind from this conceptual stasis.

For decade’s we’ve witnessed the industrialisation of sonic sensation. From funk’s rhythmic division of labour, to the automation — the electrification, the mechanisation — of the synthesiser era, to rave’s economies of scale in which escalating tempos tracked rising rhythmachinic productivity; house 130bpm >>> hardcore 150bpm >>> jungle 160bpm >>> gabber — with its growling, goose-stepping pistons pounding at maximum capacity — 200bpm+++.

But listen closely enough now and you can hear the generators of the old future winding down; 90bpm <<< 80bpm <<< 70bpm <<< 60bpm… Rhythm is reaching absolute zero; the depowered lethargy zone of anti-grove and counter-momentum. The resting heart rate is now the tempo of tomorrow, the future has become human.

False prophets fearfully warned you that the twenty-first century hailed the end of innovation and the death of progress. They told you it was “the slow cancellation of the future”, but really it was slowness cancelling *a* future in an eruption of creative destruction that gave birth to everything that’s come since. We’re done with the old, codified modes of sonic imagination. New metaphors have been born and our synaesthesia’s being transformed.

So, come smash your old paradigms. Set them ablaze and be amazed by the sounds of the next century. It’s time to define the new musical sublime. There’s a whole new future waiting to derange you.

Strap in…

Superb writing, but like I've said forever, the human is bourgeois, empty, and a dead ritual. It has nothing left to give apart from a bassline modulation. That's what this manifesto misses.

What needs to be done is not to attack robo futurists, but to go deep into Adorno, and claim that all music since Stockhausen and Xenakis has been a conservative development. Not because this is objectively true, but to once again bring to light Adornos criticisms of the routinisation of popular music.

For instance this is so barty it made me chuckle: "Dance music’s done; it’s dead and desecrated with no hope of resurrection."

Ironically all the music he is talking about is in compositional structure basically slavishly dependent on the innovations of dance and dj music. You can dj mix drill, modern dancehall, trap etc, and often in the states, or on bbc 1xtra shows it is consumed this way.

If anything, it is house and techno that is the real anomaly here, because 70s disco does not mix very well with all those acoustic drums. House was compensation for this. It is why Ron Hardy started the edits thing so that he could extend tracks in his dj sets. But hip hop and dancehall have always been geared towards the turntables in a way the big orchestral radio friendly disco was not.

 

[thirdform]

alot of the music you post on here is hard distorted very banging noise, not ambient at all. but sometimes when i listen to the gabba stuff you like i hear a singular texture that sits on top of the 200bpm kicks. some of that flashcore you posted is insane as well, but i couldn't listen to it all the time

Indeed, I find noise itself to be inherently more textured than the airy synth washes of a lot of ambient. It is for this reason I'm big into oud playing. Melody and rhythm are completely blurred.

 

[woops]

Superb writing, but like I've said forever, the human is bourgeois, empty, and a dead ritual. It has nothing left to give apart from a bassline modulation. That's what this manifesto

What needs to be done is not to attack robo futurists, but to go deep into Adorno, and claim that all music since Stockhausen and Xenakis has been a conservative development. Not because this is objectively true, but to once again bring to light Adornos criticisms of the routinisation of popular music.

For instance this is so barty it made me chuckle: "Dance music’s done; it’s dead and desecrated with no hope of resurrection."

Ironically all the music he is talking about is in compositional structure basically slavishly dependent on the innovations of dance and dj music. You can dj mix drill, modern dancehall, trap etc, and often in the states, or on bbc 1xtra shows it is consumed this way.

If anything, it is house and techno that is the real anomaly here, because 70s disco does not mix very well with all those acoustic drums. House was compensation for this. It is why Ron Hardy started the edits thing so that he could extend tracks in his dj sets. But hip hop and dancehall have always been geared towards the turntables in a way the big orchestral radio friendly disco was not.

the critics will inevitably miss the manifesto quality of the writing. it's a polemic, designed to annoy people entrenched in former narratives. this is what we call rhetoric. he dismisses synthesiser music in his intro, drum machines etc, as if the tracks he discusses weren't made with 808 sample packs and synth bass. he wants us to concentrate on the vector going forward

 

[thirdform]

the critics will inevitably miss the manifesto quality of the writing. it's a polemic, designed to annoy people entrenched in former narratives. this is what we call rhetoric. he dismisses synthesiser music in his intro, drum machines etc, as if the tracks he discusses weren't made with 808 sample packs and synth bass. he wants us to concentrate on the vector going forward

Of course. And that's why I want him to go more communist in his next book, and completely alienate the critics. hip hop, jungle, house did not take place. Similar to Baudrillard's Gulf War did not take place. All music in the 2020s is simulation and simulacra. The only future is a mathematical revolution, hardcore eclecticism.

 

[thirdform]

here is the hardcore eclecticist manifesto

 

[woops]

completely alienate the critics

as i'm sure you know, baudrillard took his inspiration from girardoux's le guerre de troie n'aura pas lieu, which ends with the trojan wars very much taking place.

 

[thirdform]

honestly people need to bore off with the 'white dude' shit already. Most of the world does not have a sense of journalistic music critique like the UK and US. In the middle east criticism is conducted in traditional aesthetic terms, and any kinds of zines/mags are directly influenced by the anglo-american punk context. But criticising aesthetics necessarily requires one to take a polemical stance.

 

[thirdform]

as i'm sure you know, baudrillard took his inspiration from girardoux's le guerre de troie n'aura pas lieu, which ends with the trojan wars very much taking place.

Yes!

 

[luka]

the 'white dude' thing, particularly coming from very very white dudes like muggs is just another weapon in the music critic turf wars.
you use any blunt or bladed instrument you can get your hands on.

 

[thirdform]

the 'white dude' thing, particularly coming from very very white dudes like muggs is just another weapon in the music critic turf wars.
you use any blunt or bladed instrument you can get your hands on.

Yeah, I mean Reynolds is technically less white than Muggs due to the Indian ancestry on his fathers side, if we really wanted to be nit picky about it.

 

[woops]

he's a white dork but not like us white dorks, he's a good white dork

 

[woops]

as you can tell by his appreciation of jazzy jungle, i'm getting bored of this now

 

[thirdform]

I do think Muggs raises some very valid points in that tumblr post but then one has to ask: if Reynolds and his discoursive framework is so irrelevant, why bother engaging with it? Cos the good stuff is buried amongst a load of resentment.

 

[woops]

well it's cos reynolds had been teasing him pointing out that it actually is relevant and muggs lost his rag

 

[thirdform]

as you can tell by his appreciation of jazzy jungle, i'm getting bored of this now

hes tbf right about that, inasmuch there has always been an upwardly mobile sophisticated side to the hardcore continuum, (like broken beat has more in common with garage except the drums than it does '93 darkside) but again its cloaked in all this resentment. MMS is right, the key is Belgium.

Belgium doesn't figure in blackdown and crews ideas of the hardcore continuum either, and thats why their history is incomplete.

 

[thirdform]

Well belgium, Holland and German but you get what I'm saying. A significant part of jungle is descended from a euro lineage which later continuum offshoots absorbed rather than referring to it directly like jungle did.

 

[wild greens]

Havent read the book yet but nice to see that the discourse around these things never changes.

I might be white but I'm culturally less white than the other white bloke who is also not culturally white but is more white than me lol

Some great tunes in these playlists though