DigitalDjigit said:
It's like the blues. What is the blues?

Isn't the blues a type of music originating in the mississippi delta and spreading out from there? What's the hardcore continuum ? a music critics buzzword cos from what i can gather it doesn't come from one place and the geneaology/evolution is sketchy at best.

Now if someone traced the breakbeat continuum that'd be something worth writing a book about. Has anybody done that ?

Don Rosco said:
There's a wikipedia page dedicated to made up laws, albeit named after people:

didn't know that so might try and find it. What thinks you of the dissensus law though ?

notrub225 said:
have you heard anything before 2003? I dunno, i don't think that was that long ago. the halfstep thing is on its way out anyway.

yeah some tempa, ghost, shelflife, texture. The thing is it wasn't called dubstep then and like the tao, once named it becomes limited by definition such that those who know don't say and those that say don't know and some like kode9 say but no one knows what.

I'd be well keen to know what halfstep is being replaced by and by whom ? I hope to hear more like that Darqwan - Rob one seven tune. That shit is bigger than texas and reminds me of a tune called, The dead truth...
 

mms

sometimes
notrub225 said:
yeah some tempa, ghost, shelflife, texture. The thing is it wasn't called dubstep then and like the tao, once named it becomes limited by definition such that those who know don't say and those that say don't know and some like kode9 say but no one knows what.

I'd be well keen to know what halfstep is being replaced by and by whom ? I hope to hear more like that Darqwan - Rob one seven tune. That shit is bigger than texas and reminds me of a tune called, The dead truth...


i think it was pretty much been called dubstep then but yes it was a little bit more abstracted in that you couldn t quite describe what was happening right.

not quite into your tao point since music like this seems to be a balance between recognisability within genre codes and evolution, new ideas and sensations.
dunno if kode 9's album would have worked or would have been possible a few years back.

as for the halfstep thing, i think the mala style rhythmic numbers, more funky jay dee american hip hop styles within halfstep, heavier more aggro faster stuff and pinch's ultra delicate music will eat all the poor clones of loefah and dmz etc..
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
Isn't the blues a type of music originating in the mississippi delta and spreading out from there? What's the hardcore continuum ? a music critics buzzword cos from what i can gather it doesn't come from one place and the geneaology/evolution is sketchy at best.

Now if someone traced the breakbeat continuum that'd be something worth writing a book about. Has anybody done that ?

Some people call Hendrix the blues...or even Led Zeppelin. I mean you can trace things in all sorts of ways and you can't deny that dubstep is closely related to jungle. In 50 years casual observers probably won't be able to tell the difference. So it all just gets grouped into one group. Since nu-skool breaks suck they don't get included the 'nuum. It's shorthand for this thing we dig.

If you don't like it make up your own word and put things you like in there. And explain why they are related.

And there is a book about it. It's called "Energy Flash" though it stops in '97.
 

Troy

31 Seconds
Definition

Entry: con•tin•u•um
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, neuter of continuus
1 : a coherent whole characterized as a collection, sequence, or progression of values or elements varying by minute degrees <"good" and "bad"...stand at opposite ends of a continuum instead of describing the two halves of a line -- Wayne Shumaker>



Seems like “hardcore family tree” could describe all the styles birthed by hardcore. To trace a continuum you would have to decide which genetic trait to focus on. Many here trace the breakbeat, but I prefer to trace the euphoria or the Belgian techno strain
 
Our bloody library doesn't have 'Energy Flash' which is such a bummer. I so need to read it. It had Techno rebel - Dan Sicko so i read that instead.

Not bad but not wide enough in its scope to encompass all that i listened to or all that i'm searching for.
 

tate

Brown Sugar
has the writer he mentions been reading this very thread? :D
Haha, the same thought occurred to me when I read Simon's post. Though I haven't seen the recent issue of Signal to Noise to which SR refers, I do know that Cindy Chen, the mentioned author, has been writing on dubstep in Signal to Noise for a while now: she wrote a favorable and informed review of Burial, and a feature review of three 12"s by Skream, Kode9, and Digital Mystikz, in the fall 2006 issue #43. I also recently noticed that one Brandon Ivers has a nice piece on dubstep (with photos) in the latest issue of Urb.
 

nomos

Administrator
who is the writer he mentions? i was interviewed for the piece but i don't know if i made the cut because i don't have a copy yet. i've critiqued the concept (e.g. in the burial thread, less for its anglocentrism than for its implied supposition of linearity) but not in the interview. certainly haven't engaged in any "back biting," whatever that is.

i've been wanting to do something about the idea on my blog. maybe i'll do that after the magazine arrives.
 
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nomos

Administrator
oh sorry, i meant who was she referring to as having been critical of the idea for its anglocentrism? or does she cite anyone in particular? SR seemed a bit miffed/defensive so i'm curious. but i should be able to read it for myself shortly.
 
I've only read the first 4 pages of this thread so forgive me if this point has already been covered, but the one thing people seem to be missing here is that the transition from Jungle to 2-Step wasn't a seamless one. Circa 94-46 UK Garage was a solely four to the floor genre. The thing about 2-step is that it was embraced by those 4 to the floor DJ's & producers, not the drum & bass scene. That is why many people would say that 2-step evolved from 4/4 garage, not Jungle. But fair enough, that process would have never happened if Jungle didn't exist, after all, Garage was more or less House designed to appeal to London clubbers who unlike the Americans had a history of the whole arkcore thing.

When you think about the really early 2-step tracks, there were a handful. You had Tina Moore's 'Never Let you go', which was a US producer who was commissioned to do a few remixes of the tune and thought that for the B-side he'd do something a little different. He was very suprised when it was the obscure 2-step version that was getting the most airtime in the UK. Given his US location it could be assumed that Kelly G hadn't been exposed to D&B all that much. Then you have the Roy Davis Jnr tune 'Gabriel', again tooled by a Yank. 4 to the floor was his bread & butter but like Kelly G he consigned the strangest remix to the B side of his EP. Incidentally, Gabriel doesn't have a strictly breakbeat drum structure, as the kickdrum is effectively 4 to the floor but there is no 2nd kick.

Then you have the British producers. Dem 2's 'Destiny' is sometimes regarded as the first 2-step track. I don't know whether they have a history in Rave or Jungle, but they were stalwarts of the 4 to the floor scene back in the day when the idea of tunes not being 4/4 was unthinkable. SkyKap's 'Endorphins' was another early track, but I don't know anything about their history. There was also the First Steps (aka Groove Chronicles, of which El-B was a member) remix of N-Tyce's 'Telefunkin' track, which was notable for it's strong bassline. As far as I can work out, Groove Chronicles were making 4 to the floor stuff before this 2-step thing came out, though I don't know this for a fact. It's possible that this was El-B's first 'Garage' track, but discogs seems to suggest otherwise.

What I'm getting at here is that the importance of 4 to the floor garage has been overlooked in this continuum concept. Old Skool Junglists like Steve Gurley & Chris Mac (aka Potential Badboy) pioneered the 2-step sound, but the former probably had some involvement in the 4/4 garage scene before he went into the studio, and the latter probably was one of the breed of producers who came into garage direct from D&B.

Dont forget the foor to the floor!

Oh, and someone wrongly thought that Dubchild & Darqwan/Oris Jay were one and the same. Dubchild comes from Leicester and Oris is from Sheffield. I once herad them both speaking together on a radio show.

http://darksidesophistication.blogsome.com/
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I've only read the first 4 pages of this thread so forgive me if this point has already been covered, but the one thing people seem to be missing here is that the transition from Jungle to 2-Step wasn't a seamless one.
Yeah, I've never seen how jungle - 2-step can be considered a continuum in the same way that ardkore - jungle was. The latter is a fairly smooth (if rapid) variation of sounds - each new progression of ardkore could be played as part of a DJ set of slightly earlier tunes for instance. The move to 2-step seems to have involved junglist memes infecting a different genre. Could you mix early 2-step with jungle from the same era, for instance? If not, I'd say you've got two different sorts of continuity...

I guess my personal problem with the 'nuum is that it's a rather unneccessary addition of a new (meta) genre to the already complicated tangle of dance music subgenres, and that it brings with it all the assumptions, prejudices, isolationism, nitpicking and general bollox that genres normally have. IMO the really thing is understanding the concepts that unite or drive the sounds we think of as the continuum - bass, dubplate pressure, pirate radio, e, rhythmic innovation, soundsystem centricism and so on - rather than attempting to isolate certain sets of sounds that have at certain times embodied some or most of those ideas.
 

Buick6

too punk to drunk
I get confused as I though this thread related to the continuum of US hardcore-punk...

Wasn't A Hippy, A Homeboy and a Funky Dread the Godfathers of ardkore drekno? And what about Stakker Humanoid?
 
We all know that a fair few Jungle producers moved over into 2-step. But there were actually a few 'old' tracks that were adopted by the 2-step scene. The hard to categorise Dee Patten- 'Who's the Badman' is the more obvious example, but Reel 2 Reel/ Lennie de Ice's 'We are IE' was a big fave of DJ EZ; heard other Dj's play it too. RIP Productions made a remix of it in 97.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
partway through that article, and some of these youtube clips are extraordinary, just extraordinary.

i had a moment of doubt while watching the Daddy Freddy video as to whether the unsettling Roy Castle had been the subject of paedophile allegations. thankfully google has confirmed that he has not, although one forum poster feared that if such allegations should come to light, his whole childhood would be revealed as a sham.

only for that hijack song (so bizarre that i have absolutely no idea how to feel about it) to immediately put the doubts right back in my head. "His watch says 3 o'clock and it's time to hit the sweetshop/A full grown man, buying sweeties??" Is there a whole subgenre of british public service announcement hip hop that I don't know about?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Maybe this is old news to some of you, but here's John Morrow of Foul Play making some Deep Tech under the alias Skeleton Army:

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also from him:

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