philblackpool

gamelanstep
I've just reviewed em live - been aware of em for many years of course but never seen em before. They were very very good but the audience were like they were North Koreans brought out for a political rally. Also, I can't really fault their legendary volume, cos it did weird things to my body that I can't remember any other music ever doing, but purely in terms of listening to it, it sounded far better on the few occasions I dared briefly take the earplugs out but I think I'd never have been able to listen to any music ever again if I tried the whole gig without em. One notch down, abandon the earplugs, bask in the sound?
 

Leo

Well-known member
I'm not saying I don't like em (damn, that's the point of the thread), but does anyone anywhere ever criticise Swans?!

i'd be afraid to, frankly.

actually, swans are a band who i've lost interest in over the years, partly turned off by the hero-worship (not their faults, obviously), partly that michael gira's schtick kind of wore off on me. woe is me, life is hard. we get it.
 

philblackpool

gamelanstep
I especially didn't get why his vocals were SO loud, like several steps above the already notoriously loud band. I suppose it is just genuinely meant to make you feel ill :-D

Another along similar lines (sort of) - Sun Ra. I mean, again, he's great, but you never hear anyone coming anywhere near saying "I don't like him" or even "I don't like the group without him", which is sorta impressive when you think about the reaction loads of groups get when they soldier on without the main man.
 

philblackpool

gamelanstep
On U Sound: again, I'm not saying I dislike em, much of it is great, but I wouldn't say anywhere near all that 80s stuff has aged well yet you never hear anyone saying that...
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Tim Finney

The only thing that anglo-aussie got right was that 2step garage has more in common with the 1 bar supremacy of 'whiter than white' techstep. Needless to say this problematises the nuum, on a musicological level.. Because if structurally 2step is the same as jumpup and techstep, then the problem with techstep is it's not populist enough, that it is actually too avantlumpen, not that 2step restored what was lost in the transition from jungle to dnb. Honestly some of youse on this forum should learn to dj mix.

I like Simon's phrase at the time circa 1999. Adult Hardcore. So blatantly oxymoronic and yet so brilliant for that. But he's not come up with something as good since.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
LOL...the only thing? nothing else? everything else he wrote was "wrong"?

Yes all of it. euro mnml/electrohouse heads should never be trusted. He's listening to Leftfield on ilx now! Soon he'll be in full joe muggs core bigging up Guerilla records. The horror!
 
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luka

Well-known member
two things tim is/was very good at is a)methodical step by step construction of an argument (the opposite of third who has never lowered himself to constructing an argument in his life needless to say) and b) detailed and evocative description of sound and the its effect on the listener
 

Leo

Well-known member
I like Simon's phrase at the time circa 1999. Adult Hardcore. So blatantly oxymoronic and yet so brilliant for that. But he's not come up with something as good since.

another reason why we love you, third: even when you find something to praise, at the same time you also can't resist throwing shade.
 

luka

Well-known member
theres no doubt that he has middlebrow taste but this partly operates in a gay way and gays dont seem to like kylie in the same way as straights do theres some witchcraft here i dont claim to totally understand
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
The clear generational divide is that we're all too busy forcing the words out and our brains have been altered far too long by chat boxes that we don't read the same as y'all. Third is arguing with the world and thus is both too broad and too specific for unique individual understandings. Plus he's an intellectual mean where he wants to needle and scalpel whereas most of you folks want to just do schoolyard roughhousing stuff.
 

luka

Well-known member
i cant remember what he called himself on here btw. i tried searching for TimF and variations of but no joy
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Don't know how to quote from other threads properly, but this is a post of Tim F's that I always remember from that infamous 2stepintellipostdubstep thread

Probably the most pernicious binary is the one between binaries or their lack: as if the self-evident truth that a theory of music or set of aesthetic preferences cannot explain all that is good about music necessitates their abandoment in favour of pure flux.

Most of the things talked about in this thread are tendential: the existence of a continuum, the importance of "street"/"rudeboy" elements, the music's relationship to questions of class. Like anything tendential, contradictions and counter-examples abound.

If SR was on this thread he would say the same, and further, that those contradictions and counter-examples feed back into the overarching structure of the trend, that e.g. Foul Play gentrifying (from the OG "Open Your Mind" through to "Being With You" et. al) really established the limits of what "rudeboy" possibly could mean (and undeniably, there is a trip-limit there, where "intelligent" jungle stops signifying hardcore, but where that limit is precisely not surprisingly is and always has been contested).

Marcus playing Ramadanman or Mosca is another example of this. But as a fact in and of itself its capacity to illuminate is limited. The next question is: which Ramadanman and Mosca, and why? Which Dennis Ferrer and which Feliciano and which Bugz in the Attic and which dutch electro-house, for that matter? There is a process of discrimination at work here, divining a possible logic amongst all of these things that couldn't have been identified before, but cannot be summarised as "Ramadanman and Mosca and Dennis Ferrer and Feliciano and..." as if you could take any tune by these artists and find the results the same.

Scenes are like constellations if the stars in the sky were all pushed together, such that the stars forming the outer edge of one constellation also formed the outer edge (or even inner structure) of others. Notwithstanding this, each constellation shows a different imagined picture, and usually the ones we are drawn to are those which seem brightest and most fully formed as a constellation, rather than just a random collection of stars.

PS. Cheers for the nice words Luka.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
two things tim is/was very good at is a)methodical step by step construction of an argument (the opposite of third who has never lowered himself to constructing an argument in his life needless to say) and b) detailed and evocative description of sound and the its effect on the listener

the type of music journalism you exalt doesn't have arguments. Crowley is right. It's roughhousing. You can't expect me to lay out an argument and not look like a twat in the process.
 
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