Group Play and Happy Togetherness. Femdom pt 2.
- Thread starter luka
- Start date
"that Kode 9 quote about internalising the structure of jungle" - http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=4592&highlight=kode+jungle
Yes, it comes on page 21 of the July 2006 Wire with Current 93 on the cover, at the end of the interview, when commenting on the last track of the article, which was Mark One ft. Sizzla, "I Got Too."
In response to Walmsley's question (great work as always, DW) about the emptiness of the track, Kode says "But it's still got momentum. It surprises a lot of people how dancefloor friendly dubstep can be. A track like this is so empty it almost makes you nervous and you almost fill in the double time [sic] yourself, physically, to compensate. The way I was thinking about this, it's almost like we've internalised the double-time in Jungle, to the point that we don't really need to hear it anymore."
Walmsley: "The double-time is almost present in its absence."
Kode: "Exactly, but the power of this is that it's got that vocal as well. And to me that's what dubstep has go to do, it's got to get good vocals on top of these sorts of beats. The beats work OK on their own, but I don't think it's got a particularly interesting future if it's just an instrmuemental music." The article ends there.
"I think the reason people find dubstep slow when you come from drum and bass is because there’s so much space in the music. In a sense it’s a more interactive music because you actually have to add yourself, you have to fill in the rhythm between the spaces yourself, make it up yourself, then dance; you know thats what you’re dancing to. So in a way for me it’s interesting because some of the elements that you dance to aren’t there actually but they’re there virtually. Also, it’s not a dance music in which everything is given to you on a plate, you actually have to, I suppose, interact with the music a little bit more and fill in the spaces yourself. But it’s a skanky music, if you can dance to dub you can dance to dubstep. It’s just you have to go down to find the rhythm as opposed to having lots of frantic breakbeats that you simply follow like in drum and bass. I think that’s why people find it difficult. People found jungle when it emerged difficult because they weren’t used to having that much rhythm and so people were confused. Most of the people that produce and deejay dubstep were into jungle and it’s almost like we know jungle so well now that we don’t need to hear the fast breakbeats; it’s in our bodies already. What was exciting about jungle has almost been internalized into our systems, so we don’t need so many elements anymore to get the same vibe. I think that’s maybe part of the issue."
well I'm not saying you should like dubstep luke and barty (in fact i would rather you not tbh) but there was something there in dark garage which you and barty also tempt to dismiss. but i think those 2step beats with negative space was a good impulse. might upload a radio soon, listening to some hardcore acid now before little muhammad goes to sleep.
luka
Well-known member
Well this is it isn't it. Timbaland, the neptunes, 2-step, all that stuff relies heavily on negative space.
Yeh, but with the vocal/jittery vocal 2step it's an accentuation of funk. what I'm talking about is something more spartan and austere, stripping it all out to get to the essence to kind of create an antifunk forcefield.
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Dubstep would have been fine if the people who'd made dubstep had the spiritual courage and conviction to die with dubstep. They did not. Skream is ultimately more morally subsufficient than Mala (even if listening to Mala past 08 bores me).
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
The problem of the narrative of jungle/D&B and the 'dark garage' types Luka makes fun of is that El-B/Horsepower and guys like that left Jungle behind... because there was no space for them to be put on. El hanging around Metalheadz, eagerly pushing his tunes, getting nowhere, and subsequently having a career in Garage engineering for Noodles out of necessity. The scene made itself open FOR HIM. It's like years ago someone mentioned how the guys who produced for Olly Murs have some dance cred.
The Dubstep Producer Phenomenon is that these people functioned like great omnivores; expanding dubstep the way you could expand jungle and contort the meaning didn't mean anything to them, it quickly became a rat race for the fix of the new. Granted it wasn't the fault of the original dubstep producers who were happy to do what they did, but those who were attracted to the sound who quickly realized committing to something dies with something. That whole period of Hyperdub excessively taking pains "Oh we hate the word dubstep" meanwhile it was so essential to convince everyone the validity of what they did!
You look at someone like Visionist who I mostly like these days and his career having gone from Grime as a teen, to dubstep, to fake juke, to his current music and it's a completely naturalized lack of dedication until something 'clicks' but it involves so much transitionary demand for recognition by following trends.
They follow a narrative without understanding and ultimately come out like a ton of Diplos/Squarepushers with no conscience.
The Dubstep Producer Phenomenon is that these people functioned like great omnivores; expanding dubstep the way you could expand jungle and contort the meaning didn't mean anything to them, it quickly became a rat race for the fix of the new. Granted it wasn't the fault of the original dubstep producers who were happy to do what they did, but those who were attracted to the sound who quickly realized committing to something dies with something. That whole period of Hyperdub excessively taking pains "Oh we hate the word dubstep" meanwhile it was so essential to convince everyone the validity of what they did!
You look at someone like Visionist who I mostly like these days and his career having gone from Grime as a teen, to dubstep, to fake juke, to his current music and it's a completely naturalized lack of dedication until something 'clicks' but it involves so much transitionary demand for recognition by following trends.
They follow a narrative without understanding and ultimately come out like a ton of Diplos/Squarepushers with no conscience.
well luke thinks that when hardcore-jungle became 'jungle proper' is when jungle inadvertently started to decline. so end of 94 criminal justice bill. which tbh im inclined to agree with but then it puts the whole nuum as aesthetic barometer narritive into doubt, and opens the back door in for acid freaks, cockney squatters, coventry lads, brummies etc etc. nuum just then becomes a self-evident sociological factoid. I don't mind or even have a problem that but it will cause sperm retention problems for the middle class rudeboys. and actually open up uncomfortable racial can of worms, because the nuum discourse has always revolved in expunging those elements coded as white as much as possible, not to get down with the black kids mind, (more black kids like jump up than dubstep) but because its a safehouse for doing race politics, blackness and black music serves as spiritual comfort and militancy because as i said white music has not had a single original idea since post-punk and te extreme metal variants. everything else, even the hardcore acid i like was based on trends from the anglo-american mixed communities.
half of the dubstep guys aren't even into bogwoppa or dance bass, let alone kemet crew, it's this pernicious narritive that it was only photek and source direct who innovated. and yes the original producers helped push this narritive. loefah saying we liked reinforced but not the horrorcore darkside. so reinforced wasn't a part of the horrorcore then? huh? loads of dubstep heads banging on about timeless as this crowning achievement of goldie when by far his innovative stuff all came before that. sinister and knowledge, internal affairs, fabio/rider's ghost etc etc.
And it was the fucking bourgeois media savvy junglists who perpetuated this narritive. the type of dance music people who can navigate the critical consensus always find musical conservatism to be an intellectual safehouse. that's why i started listening to xenakis and parmegiani in 2015. because ultimately it's not just enough to find the avant-garde in pop. you have to go all the way.
half of the dubstep guys aren't even into bogwoppa or dance bass, let alone kemet crew, it's this pernicious narritive that it was only photek and source direct who innovated. and yes the original producers helped push this narritive. loefah saying we liked reinforced but not the horrorcore darkside. so reinforced wasn't a part of the horrorcore then? huh? loads of dubstep heads banging on about timeless as this crowning achievement of goldie when by far his innovative stuff all came before that. sinister and knowledge, internal affairs, fabio/rider's ghost etc etc.
And it was the fucking bourgeois media savvy junglists who perpetuated this narritive. the type of dance music people who can navigate the critical consensus always find musical conservatism to be an intellectual safehouse. that's why i started listening to xenakis and parmegiani in 2015. because ultimately it's not just enough to find the avant-garde in pop. you have to go all the way.
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another thing is a lot of ravers went to garage in 95, not 97. we're still talking visibility of ragga jungle although jump up creeping. the politics are way more complicated, Luke seems to get this but not many others on the forum. some people talk about the 2step beats uniquely junglistic but that just goes to show they haven't listened to enough US garage and UK 4x4, the two step beats were just the shuffly break sections at the beginning or in the drop of some house tunes extended into infinity. A development I wholly support but let's be real here.
In some senses dubstep can serve as a counter-argument to happy hardcore in terms of scene politics. happy hardcore was .. rave will never die. it was never accepted by any right thinking journalist, people are still unaware to this day just how big it was, etc etc. yet eventually it killed itself through dodgy distribution deals and the same 5-10 djs monopolising the scene.
Dubstep was the exact opposite. started around 5-10 producers and the journalists literally said ta very much, this is ours now. If anything signalled the death of the continuum it wasn't the dubstep sound so much as how it was propelled and interpretted. it gave a huge victory to the north and bassline. Dubstep literally needed the journalists to defend it, not because as a sound it inherently wouldn't appeal to london, merely because so much of it was so self-concious that its internal arts core, all the things that happen subconsciously and even below the producers radar (that collective accumulation of labour) was exposed in a very capitalist manner from the outset as a job of proficiency and excellency, it became a 'job music.'
Dubstep was the exact opposite. started around 5-10 producers and the journalists literally said ta very much, this is ours now. If anything signalled the death of the continuum it wasn't the dubstep sound so much as how it was propelled and interpretted. it gave a huge victory to the north and bassline. Dubstep literally needed the journalists to defend it, not because as a sound it inherently wouldn't appeal to london, merely because so much of it was so self-concious that its internal arts core, all the things that happen subconsciously and even below the producers radar (that collective accumulation of labour) was exposed in a very capitalist manner from the outset as a job of proficiency and excellency, it became a 'job music.'
mvuent
Void Dweller
of the quoted content this was what resonated with me the most the first time I read it. just a way of being receptive/attuned to what different music does, rather than selectively looking for certain qualities and missing what’s actually interesting about the thing in front of you. (not that’s inherently bad, or that we don’t do it most of the time.)
maybe part of the idea is to get past boring good/bad 3.5/5 stars type judgments—but it does seem to give an idea of what music succeeding means: basically ‘vividness’ of qualities like the ones described (e.g. sense of motion is an important one). but if music doesn’t strike you as vivid in any sense, it might not be that whoever made it failed, but that their creative energy was focused on qualities that are still undiscovered to you.
(probably still missing how this connects to the other stuff at this point)
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sadmanbarty
Well-known member
masculine music is the phenomenology of velocity, feminine music is the phenomenology of physiology.
this speaks to the cognitive processes of of fight vs surrender. movement vs rest.
feminine music intimately and precisely maps out the body; breathy vocals, the way it textural on the skin, it's preoccupation with taste. these are only entertained by our cognition when we're inactive.
when you get punched you don't actually feel the pain till after the fight's over. masculine music is about processing of events and information (often rapidly).
this speaks to the cognitive processes of of fight vs surrender. movement vs rest.
feminine music intimately and precisely maps out the body; breathy vocals, the way it textural on the skin, it's preoccupation with taste. these are only entertained by our cognition when we're inactive.
when you get punched you don't actually feel the pain till after the fight's over. masculine music is about processing of events and information (often rapidly).
This makes me think that third's thing of antihuman machine music has to lean toward the masculine.
That's actually quite interesting. It's why I'd like to hear more about this transtronica thing. it seems to occupy a strange liminal zone between inactive pleasurely cognition and hyper-militarisation. in some senses its asking us to conceptualise a new way to listen to music, a new musical vocabularly. It's not militant like jungle, but it's not slinky like vocal 2step or even cisgender gay like disco (although many transmasc and transfemmes were involved in disco...)
What barty says about velocity, fight, movement, processing of events and information all strike me as qualities of the machine; rest, breath, taste, surrender and skin being qualities of the human. Obviously both apply to the human, but only one applies to the machine.
I can accept that 92 nuttercore tilts to the masculine even with its hypergasmic diva vocals. but what about happy hardcore? that was a conscious perging out of the overtly masculine coded elements.
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they are qualities mediated through the human though. this is why its not possible to have a wholly antihuman music. it .. wouldn't make sense. its a tendancy, not a declamatory statement.