rouge's foam
a deadly secretion
Joe Muggs began by criticising the notion of the 'thingness' of the nuum, saying that it wasn't a thing but a 'set of relations, a set of tendrils' (maybe not verbatim). His main problem, and I couldn't agree with him all the way here, was that the traditional nuum idea ignored a lot of music that was simply considered uncool - jazz, detroit techno, happy hardcore, more upbeat ravey stuff etc (surely a notion of what's cool goes a long way in constituting a musical tradition? but) he claimed that many of the figures involved in the music also had very un-nuum interests that are played down. During a later discussion on the role of value-judgments, Muggs piped up 'value-judgments or cool judgments'?what are the grounds for rejecting the idea completley, from their points of view?
Dan Hancox's talk was an elaboration on his Generational Resentment piece really. His main problem was the imposition of a theoretical template that was formed in 1999 looking backwards and then projected forwards in a way that compromises perception. He emphasised the factor of dancability, and claimed that some of the pessimism about the state of UK hardcore was greatly unjustified, concluding with something along the lines that it was 'as good as ever'. He said the elephant in the room was that 'Reynolds is in New York and doesn't go to raves any more' (not verbatim), and during the talk he got into an exchange with k-punk over whether history had ended or not, which he concluded with 'well it's doing pretty well at the moment'.
Just saying, if anyone knows where the audio is online, or has access to the tapes - would they be able to put a link to them here?