Reynolds hardcore continuum event

[nomadthethird]

Of course! You and zhao must be co-conspirators.

Anyway, Whatever, here are a couple of measures from the beginning of R.I.P.

The drums are going to take forever, if I really bother, esp considering I'm not sure what's "snare" and what isn't because it's drum machiney to the max.

But I have it in D flat minor, which is a way great key that I love. Correct me if I'm wrong before I go any further. I also chose 3/4 for the vocals 1, 2, and 3 but I was thinking 6/8 for the percussion. This could be wrong. Correct me, formally trained one.


http://g.imageshack.us/img3/remarc.jpg/1/

 

[fokse vektaire xeven]

Jungle rewrote the rulebook on what could be done with a sampler.

 

[nomadthethird]

What do you mean? The vocals or percussion or what?

 

[petergunn]

Jungle rewrote the rulebook on what could be done with a sampler.

yunno, i was not going to post anything in this thread as i am fond of jungle (and actually R.I.P is one of my fav tunes and i was cracking up picturing Nomad w/ a pencil transcribing that "R-I-P" vocal melody), but that's a silly statement...

the house w/ breakbeats thing that led to hardcore and all that was done VERY well by Frankie Bones and Todd Terry... Hear the Music/Bounce by Gypseymen (todd terry) is a ridiculous track with sampling, breaks, etc...

only thing i CAN credit as unique to jungle (and so important in 2009) is the emphesis on SUB... yeah, there were miami bass records that had sub melodies in 88, but they weren't being played in NYC...

but, in terms of the sampler, please... early NYC cats ran that shit backwards and forwards... talking to my man Sam Sever about what he and Mantronix did... like playing a record +8 at 45 in order to maximize the 10 second sampling time on a SP12... i mean, dudes like Marley Marl, Prince Paul, and the Bomb Squad definitely pushed sampling to the extreme... again, i love jungle, i appriciate the idea of tracing it back to hardcore and forward to grime and whatever, but all this talk of french philopshers and politics and science leaves me out in the cold... maybe i will watch the talk when i have a chance...

 

[nomadthethird]

yunno, i was not going to post anything in this thread as i am fond of jungle (and actually R.I.P is one of my fav tunes and i was cracking up picturing Nomad w/ a pencil transcribing that "R-I-P" vocal melody), but that's a silly statement...

the house w/ breakbeats thing that led to hardcore and all that was done VERY well by Frankie Bones and Todd Terry... Hear the Music/Bounce by Gypseymen (todd terry) is a ridiculous track with sampling, breaks, etc...

only thing i CAN credit as unique to jungle (and so important in 2009) is the emphesis on SUB... yeah, there were miami bass records that had sub melodies in 88, but they weren't being played in NYC...

but, in terms of the sampler, please... early NYC cats ran that shit backwards and forwards... talking to my man Sam Sever about what he and Mantronix did... like playing a record +8 at 45 in order to maximize the 10 second sampling time on a SP12... i mean, dudes like Marley Marl, Prince Paul, and the Bomb Squad definitely pushed sampling to the extreme... again, i love jungle, i appriciate the idea of tracing it back to hardcore and forward to grime and whatever, but all this talk of french philopshers and politics and science leaves me out in the cold... maybe i will watch the talk when i have a chance...

heh, that's just the first couple of synth bars, i didn't even get to the vocals yet.

it would probably take about 10 hours to get that whole thing down.

anyway, it's not like i absolutely hate jungle and i'm saying it's bad--i actually like the production values quite a bit--it's just that i don't know if it's as insolated in its brilliance as SR is saying. i figured that there were definitely new york dudes doing the same shit with samples, whether long before or concurrently doesn't really matter...

 

[Ory]

re: transcribing jungle tunes

the map is not the territory. there are no theoretical terms to accurately describe the outlandishness of some of these tunes, and I don't know why you'd even want to. you'd never come up with KMA's twisted basslines if you used classical music theory as a basis for creating music.

re: relative innovation of the nuum vs. other dance musics

I thought it was a fairly common notion that house, techno, trance etc, as good as a lot of it is, has evolved at a much slower rate than the nuum. compare '89 deep house to the '09 equivalent... no surprises there. again, this says nothing about the worth of those musics, but it does show how unique the nuum is.

 

[Chris]

?!

Shouldn't the distinct sound of Jungle, its overall sonic gestalt, the strikingly novel effect of its formula, especially in the context of what had come before, be more than enough in itself to convince anyone that it was clearly, ridiculously new at the time? There was nothing as inverted, warped, and reality-fucking in existence! It's not so much that it didn't borrow some old elements or techniques, which is just the name of the game, its the fucking monstrosity that it created in the brew. It just... sounded really new... and that's innovative enough in itself, in the most basic, immediate way. Fuck academic musical training (which I have myself, and it's nothing in the face of having a good ear and creativity) and a formal approach to music theory. Music majors are clueless twats that have no idea what's going on in music right now. They're obsessed with playing jazz and classical the "right way". How insanely beyond missing the point is that? I'm, by the way, not saying I'm against theorizing about music, which I'm obvs really into, I'm addressing the idea that Jungle might not have been innovative by the boringly defined and clueless perspective of music majors. It's not the just the techniques that were new, it was the resultant sound that was new, which should almost be undeniable.

But I feel like I'm just stating the competely obvious, how can there even be any argument about Jungle being innovative? Especially on this board?

That someone could write down the notes of the synth or bassline proves nothing either.* Obvs you could do that with traditional and new sounds because all music works within the same basic parameters and elements that can be transcribed. "It uses rhythm and tone? How dull!" Suggesting that for music to be innovative people need to invent new laws or something is almost like saying visual art can't progress until someone invents a new primary color. It's what people creatively DO with this stuff that's amazing.

*Is the implication here that truly innovative music couldn't be written in normal notation? (if so, Jungle/DnB actually qualifies in a lot of the more alien aspects; the tones, modulations, textures, the weird enunciations and contortions in the bass.. there aren't terms in classical notation. some related terms I guess, but nothing worthy of its qualities).


But anyways.... the Nuum. For my part, I've always believed it a good way to describe a strain of obviously connected genres (or successive variations within a larger, shifting, but somewhat contained system) that definitely deserves a name, and I don't quite get the contention right now.

 

[Sick Boy]

i figured that there were definitely new york dudes doing the same shit with samples, whether long before or concurrently doesn't really matter...

It seems like Reynolds is mostly interested in the British tradition of rave music though when it concerns the HCC. Linking all the innovations in British dance music and pointing out their roots and connecting parts. I don't know if he'd argue this. He didn't in the presentation.

Maybe K-Punk said something different?

 

[evergreen]

Classical music is weird in that it gives so much privilege to the written form, as if notes were data whose artistic value could be quantified. This makes most sense in a scene where everyone else is writing their music, too. But in the same way that an actual performance of written music completes the picture, the elements of jungle that you generally can't transcribe -- the shifting timbre of the drums, the sense of space, the ease/non-ease of mixing the tune, the way it relates to other dubs floating around (a key one, since literally mixing the music together made this a functional scene, more than an intellectual one), the danceability of the overall form -- are literally what make it jungle. And these are obviously factors that are intuited from using the machines, rather than from conceptualizing and writing new ways to work with rhythmic or tonal systems. How do you transcribe mentasm?

Also, how did avant-classical composers influence funk and jazz artists? "Foreshadowing" or "prefiguring" rhythmic or textural ideas is one thing; but direct influence?

 

[nomadthethird]

Classical music is weird in that it gives so much privilege to the written form, as if notes were data whose artistic value could be quantified. This makes most sense in a scene where everyone else is writing their music, too. But in the same way that an actual performance of written music completes the picture, the elements of jungle that you generally can't transcribe -- the shifting timbre of the drums, the sense of space, the ease/non-ease of mixing the tune, the way it relates to other dubs floating around (a key one, since literally mixing the music together made this a functional scene, more than an intellectual one), the danceability of the overall form -- are literally what make it jungle. And these are obviously factors that are intuited from using the machines, rather than from conceptualizing and writing new ways to work with rhythmic or tonal systems. How do you transcribe mentasm?

Also, how did avant-classical composers influence funk and jazz artists? "Foreshadowing" or "prefiguring" rhythmic or textural ideas is one thing; but direct influence?

No, "classical music" doesn't privilege the written form, if anything it privileges performance as the be-all end-all. The point in bringing up formal aspects of jungle is to point out that there's nothing that formally innovative about jungle.

If "anything that sounds new to x person's ears" counts as an innovation, then for me a vast majority of songs I hear count as innovative. Personally I take a more formal approach to the idea of "innovation" in music. If others don't, that's obviously fine, and their prerogative. I just don't agree with thm.

I'm not a music major, and as far as I know, nobody here is.

I don't think jungle sounds that new, even by "newness to my ears" standards. I like the bass-heaviness of it, though, and the spacey production.

 

[nomadthethird]

re: transcribing jungle tunes

the map is not the territory. there are no theoretical terms to accurately describe the outlandishness of some of these tunes, and I don't know why you'd even want to. you'd never come up with KMA's twisted basslines if you used classical music theory as a basis for creating music.

re: relative innovation of the nuum vs. other dance musics

I thought it was a fairly common notion that house, techno, trance etc, as good as a lot of it is, has evolved at a much slower rate than the nuum. compare '89 deep house to the '09 equivalent... no surprises there. again, this says nothing about the worth of those musics, but it does show how unique the nuum is.

Whether you like it or not, jungle does fit into the same theoretical framework that most western music does--same tonal system, same time signatures, same keys, same harmonics, melodics, etc. If anything the thing that makes it stand out is its use of technological innovation to overcome the limitations of the human voice, i.e. when it speeds up vocal samples to a frequency/pitch that most people can't sing. I like that, I think that's pretty cool sounding. I like that in the newer stuff like funky or bassline too.

 

[nomadthethird]

That someone could write down the notes of the synth or bassline proves nothing either.* Obvs you could do that with traditional and new sounds because all music works within the same basic parameters and elements that can be transcribed. "It uses rhythm and tone? How dull!" Suggesting that for music to be innovative people need to invent new laws or something is almost like saying visual art can't progress until someone invents a new primary color.

No, it's nothing like saying that.

Most of the innovations in pop music that "outpace" what had already been achieved in Western music happen due to technological advances, and the fact that many people making popular music jumped on the chance to use these technologies as they became more and more accessible, thus taking their music farther and farther away from the standard formalisms or norms even as they simplified and built on already existing genres/forms/standards.

It's not dull that the HCC music uses rhythm and tone at all, and that's not even close to what I said. What I said was that I don't think that jungle is as far and away in a class of its own in terms of electronic innovation, at least in the way Simon Reynolds seems to claim in that presentation. Maybe that is not what he meant, but that is what it seemed to me like he was saying at a few points there.

That is not such a strange statement objection to make. Music is full of people with different opinions. My 'objections' to jungle has nothing to do with dullness, or inventing "new laws", whatever that means, and everything to do with matters of personal taste, since I don't like breakbeats so much. Big deal. I'm sure I like things that you don't like either, and I probably think things are innovative that you don't. You just slagged off a bunch of formalisms that you clearly don't know about yourself, there.

 

[nomadthethird]

Fuck academic musical training (which I have myself, and it's nothing in the face of having a good ear and creativity) and a formal approach to music theory. Music majors are clueless twats that have no idea what's going on in music right now.

Well, I don't know any music majors. But I do know something about what's going on in music stateside. And I do have a good ear, a near technically perfect one. It's always a good strategy to attack someone personally because you have different taste in music than they do, though. Excellent stuff.

But anyway, what would a good ear and sillly contrived classic ideas like that have to do with enjoying jungle, which is obviously supposed to be listened to on a more visceral, kinesthetic level?

 

[evergreen]

No, "classical music" doesn't privilege the written form, if anything it privileges performance as the be-all end-all. The point in bringing up formal aspects of jungle is to point out that there's nothing that formally innovative about jungle.

Why did you put classical music in quotes? In the classical scene, performance is important insofar that it either fulfills the promise of or brings new light to the written tonal structures. So, yes, it returns to a certain rational understanding of how sounds in music can be analyzed. Glenn Gould would be an extreme case of that. But this is what underlies (what appears to be) your concept of formal innovation -- the complexity or at least newness of musical concepts as circumscribed by notation. A new formal paradigm like twelve-tone is an innovation in the context of written composition. It's not necessarily a global innovation for music at large.

So "jungle does fit into the same theoretical framework that most western music does--same tonal system, same time signatures, same keys, same harmonics, melodics, etc." -- but this is a pretty empty concept, given that Western systems of analyzing music are the same ones meant to define and delimit the quality of specific Western musical practices.

 

[Sick Boy]

It's weird this has gone on for so long because the two main points are ones that can't be resolved, namely:

1) That the hardcore continuum is responsible for any and all musical innovations in the last 20 years. I don't think Simon made this point, and I think he would also tell you the same thing. For me, it mostly seems like he is trying to draw some lines to illustrate a running tradition and inter-relatedness in one particular area of musical innovation: british “rave” music.

2) That in order for music to be innovative, the innovations need to be formal. This is a point you can either agree or disagree with. Nomad agrees, and most people on this board don't. Since we've established that I'm not sure what much more can be said on that issue, and it is only very marginally related to discussion of the continuum because of point 1)

 

[dominic]

it seems to me that the argument shoud run something like this =

Accepting that there was (1) a continuum of sounds running from breakbeat hardcore---->jungle---->uk garage----->2-step, from roughly 1991 to 2001, and accepting (2) that this movement was more innovative and changed more rapidly and drastically than any other area or zone of music during the 1990s . . . . then what questions follow?

(A) Do more recent sounds like grime, dubstep, bassline, funky and wonky belong to the same continuum? Or do they depart from the continuum in certain crucial ways? And if so, what are the key departures, the new vistas?

(B) Is the rate of innovation among the sounds of the 00s less than the rate obtained by the sounds of the 1990s? If the supposed rate of innovation is slower, would this not seemingly contradict any claim that grime, dubstep, et al, have crucially departed from the hardcore continuum? For if the departures have been crucial departures, then surely these must represent key innovations? Or can crucial departures be not at all innovative but simply symptoms of radical decline or loss of energy?

(C) If the movement from uk garage to its various successor sounds like grime, dubstep, funky, bassline has not been witness to much in the way of innovation or development, then is there any place else in the wider zone of dance music that has seen a comparatively greater rate of innovation? Anywhere else beneath the umbrellas of house, techno or hip hop? Anywhere else within the field of Western pop music in general?

(D) If the answer to the questions posed in part (C) are in every instance No, then what might this mean?

(E) Or does all of this bring right back to question of how to recognize and define innovation in music???

 

[Ory]

Most of the innovations in pop music that "outpace" what had already been achieved in Western music happen due to technological advances, and the fact that many people making popular music jumped on the chance to use these technologies as they became more and more accessible, thus taking their music farther and farther away from the standard formalisms or norms even as they simplified and built on already existing genres/forms/standards.

then wouldn't you agree that nothing indeed sounded like jungle, simply because the technology required to make it didn't exist before the early 90's?

 

[dominic]

It seems like now we've got to grime / dubstep giving way to bassline / funky in terms of whatever it is qualifies something to be part of the nuum, we've more or less reverted to some sort of underlying East London working class dance music thing that's pretty much free from the aftershocks of hardcore and E and orbital raves. Like the natural state of the system is some sort of cheesy <-> dark oscillation and always has been, but hardcore represented some sort of peturbation of the system that gradually dispersed and reverted to the original pattern...

And it seems to me that Slothrop was on to something here, only to have it buried by all the successive pages of this thread

 

[blissblogger]

innovation shminnovation

kinda amusing, i did a "wordfind" on the text of thetalk, and whaddya now, the words "innovation" and "innovative" do not appear once in the talk. possibly in the discussion with K-punk.

probably synonyms like "change" or "experimental" do crop up but i don't generally bang the innovation drum that hard, really

of course i do think HCC was remarkably innovative, in the context of dance music and pop music in general. Within the global post-house/techno dance scene I can't think of another strand of music that changed so fast, and so drastically, while still hanging together as a scene.

In the talk I bring up two parallels -- hip hop and reggae/dancehall -- as similarly fast transforming yet remaining-cohesive music cultures.

but innovativeness and moving-forward-fast aren't the only things the HCC has had going for it. Others include, to various degrees at various times:

-- vibe
-- danceability
-- social energy/resonance
-- bliss
-- hyper-soul (all the vocal science)
-- playfulness/humour/fun/daftness
-- weird collisions of emotion (dark/light, sinister/soppy, etc etc)
-- a maximalist aesthetic (tracks that go through loads of changes, bridges, arrangement ideas, etc, relative to many other forms of dance music that tend to stick to one tracky furrow)
-- probably some more but i gotta dash to pick my daughter up

so it's the combination of ALL this stuff, plus the innovation, that makes this area of music so absorbing/rewarding/fascinating/thrilling for me

but -- OF COURSE -- it's not the only area of music, or even of dance music, that is innovative or has things (some of the same things; completely other things) going for it.

Energy Flash covers LOTS of other things besides HCC. The new updated version has stuff on psy-trance, electroclash, minimal, filter house etc etc-- often
sympathetic.

off to get Tasmin

 

[Corpsey]

Kode almost giving reynolds a blogocking, deleting the post in the spirit of bromanticism, anyone?