Glitchcore? Cybergoth? Post-hardcore? Breakcore? Weirdcore?

luka said:

he's already reviewed jungle

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thirdform said:

But when he stops thinking in terms of beginning, middle, climax, end, then it will all become apparent. An intransigent flow with no end. And technos parsimony is the ideal way to do that for todays yout.

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suspended said:

this is good, Im close, keep going

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It’s also true that, to a person whose ears are finely tuned into all the things that make rock ‘tick’, techno is… arid, to say the least. This is music (if indeed it is music), that has been shorn of almost everything that’s considered ‘musical’ by most traditions. Au revoir my sweet chord progression; farewell my cherished verse/chorus/verse; goodbye my lovely lead singer (and your hairdo and abusive personal life); so long my sweet, phallic props.

There’s nothing of that in techno. Even among other forms of electronic music, there’s not much to cling on to. Trance, at least, has huge melodies, harmonic progressions and roller coaster breakdowns; house, meanwhile, has funky basslines and vocals – when we surrender all this, what are we left with? No human voice, no songs, no hooks, very little melodic development, and almost no audible ‘human’ musicianship. Just endless sets of incessant machine-generated drum patterns cycling for hours at allegro-ish tempos between 125-140 BPM, almost none of which stray far from the basic pattern of four crotchet kicks to the bar interspersed with snares and hats every second or fourth beat. Yes, you’re right, it really is mostly just ‘doof doof doof’. So yeah – just what is it about techno that I like?

Well, I like it for all the features just described: the inhumanity, the aridity, and yes, the repetitiveness. Techno is repetitive, but all rhythm is repetition. And by getting rid of almost everything else, we can get deeper into the deep, incessant joy of the groove – the very same thing that made James Brown squeal and call for his cape. As Berghain’s resident DJ Marcel Dettmann said, all a good techno track has to have is ‘character, soul and a kind of hypnotic, industrial feeling.’ You surrender almost everything else, and in return, you get ‘clarity, deepness and simplicity.’ It’s simple, no mistake. But that’s what’s good about tracks – what’s good about sets, sequences of tracks that go on for hours and hours and hours. Isn’t it repetitive? Doesn’t it get boring? Well, yes and no – maybe to you… what’s good about it is actually very similar to what’s good about test cricket.

A lot of people in Australia – mostly the kind who find techno deadly boring – spend their summers giving their passionate enthusiasm to watching the tests… events which, like techno sets, are considered baffling, boring or even downright stupid by many. Let’s just say you’re a pole-vaulter from Bratislava on holiday in Melbourne over January and you turned on the telly of an afternoon – I’m sure you would wonder what the hell was going on. Why is everyone standing around? Why do they perform the same action over and over and over, where are their poles… and when is ‘it’ going to happen?

What the Slovak with the penchant for bendy staves would be missing is the fundamental enjoyment of test cricket, a pleasure that it shares with techno. A test match, like a good set of techno, is an epic, one that unfolds on a grand scale. On this kind of massive canvas, you have to surrender your desire for instant gratification, in exchange for the thorough and complete ‘testing’ that comes out in the slow unfolding of strengths, movements, flows and impacts. Be patient, keep watching, have a beer, talk to your friend, and slowly but surely, the accumulation of numbers slowly turns into results: things shape up, and gradually this determines the outcome of the match or set. Your enjoyment is only limited by your lack of knowledge of each of the elements, your lack of awareness of the skills with which the person delivers them, and your ignorance of what came before. As when you enter a nightclub at 2am (no mean feat in the 3000s of ’08), turning on the cricket at 2pm every day with the ignorance of a Slovakian pole-vaulter would reveal a spectacle that appears to be always the same – unlike a marriage or an assassination, there’s never one decisive, irreversible moment that changes everything. In a way, ‘it’ never happens. But in another way, this is just because it’s always happening: it’s not about the moment, it’s about the movement. Techno sets, like cricket matches, are a sustained, gradual, accumulative and almost inexhaustible polyrhythmic revelation of a group of enthusiastic, skilled people’s most continued and attuned engagement with their instruments.

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luka said:

i always remember when my Texan friend who is a fanmous 'math-rock' musician and composer was round mine and i had basic channel on and after about 5 minutes he said, "it just changed" i said eh? he said, it just changed for literally the first time in the whole song

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AnonymousJuly 23, 2008 at 8:11 PM
". It’s just a shame that, for the most part, there’s been very little stylistic or technological innovation in rock in the past ten years."

Absolutely the same thing can be said about techno.

After all, isn't 2008 year of classic techno and deep house comeback (which is a great thing btw.)? Stuff what Dettman or Dehnert or Dodge are doing is amazing, but it's hardly great innovation in style or technology.

Sleeparchive was big and "fresh" few years ago, but Sahko did exactly the same thing (IMHO better) ten years before him. Or take for example Klettermax and their self titled EP from 1998 - it doesn't seem that mnml moved much forward from that...

It's normal though. Progression in art is never in leaps. Few steps at the time / check your surroundings / check your past...

"...sustained, gradual, accumulative and almost inexhaustible polyrhythmic revelation of a group of enthusiastic, skilled people’s most continued and attuned engagement with their instruments" could be directly applied to, say, music of Lightning Bolt (just one of the many amazing rock bands playing now).

There are techno records from 2008 sounding like 1995 stuff, just as there are rock bands that sound like 1995 rock bands. There are of course rock bands from mid 70's like for example This Heat who still sound fresher and more innovative than most later era bands, just as there are early / mid 90's releases which beat crap out of most of recent productions.

The point is, it's "happening" and "not happening" at the same time in both techno, house, rock or improv, but also in illustration, graphic design, painting, film etc...

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NORMAN JAY
The black-run parties always got busted. Yet the white ones, like Battle Bridge Road, even the ones that used to go on in Curtain Road, never had the grief we got. We would be playing up Hackney Road surrounded by police, yet down in Curtain Road, fucking thousands of people going mad and there’s not an Old Bill in sight. So I said to [DJ Judge] Jules, “The only way around this is if you front them.” He was terrified of that. I gave him a script, telling him what to say, and I said, “When you’re talking to them, use an Oxbridge accent on them and don’t look away. You look ’em right in the eye and you tell ’em.” And it worked for us all the time. We never got bothered after that.
My mate [Young Disciples’] Femi used to go to college with Jules, because they were both at LSE [London School of Economics]. Femi said he had a good crowd. The main thing was, he was white. His crowd would help the racial mix of the crowd, to make it more socially acceptable to the police. Anyway, I went down to check him out one Friday, and as sure as Femi’s word was, he played abysmally. He was crap. The vibe, however, was really good. He played a mishmash of black records, which I owned and liked, but in a very amateurish sort of way. But his heart was in the right place. I approached him about doing parties and he said he was doing something with Soul II Soul the following week in King’s Cross. Jazzie was astute: get in with some white dudes and your party won’t get busted. It was basically Jazzie’s party, with Jules fronting it.

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London Warehouse Parties Pre-Acid House: An Oral History

An oral history of the late ’80s warehouse party scene that primed London for the explosion of rave culture

daily.redbullmusicacademy.com

It is an inevitable phenomenon, rooted in the course of development, that people from what have hitherto been the ruling classes should also join the militant proletariat and contribute cultural elements to it. We clearly stated this in the [Communist] Manifesto. But here there are two points to be noted:
First, in order to be of use to the proletarian movement these people must also bring real cultural elements to it. But with the great majority of the German bourgeois converts that is not the case. Neither the Zukunft [Future] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [New Society] have contributed anything which could advance the movement one step further. Here there is an absolute lack of real cultural material, whether concrete or theoretical. In its place we get attempts to bring superficially adopted socialist ideas into harmony with the most varied theoretical standpoints which these gentlemen have brought with them from the university or elsewhere, and of which, owing to the process of decomposition in which the remnants of German philosophy are at present involved, each is more confused than the last. Instead of thoroughly studying the new science themselves to begin with, each of them preferred to trim it to fit the point of view he had already, made a private science of his own without more ado and at once came forward with the claim that he was ready to teach it. Hence there are about as many points of view among these gentry as there are heads; instead of producing clarity in a single case they have only produced desperate confusion – fortunately almost exclusively among themselves. Cultural elements whose first principle is to teach what they have not learnt can be very well dispensed with by the Party.
Secondly. If people of this kind from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first condition is that they should not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices with them but should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian point of view. But these gentlemen, as has been proved, are stuffed and crammed with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas. In such a petty-bourgeois country as Germany these ideas certainly have their own justification. But only outside the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. If these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc. But in a workers’ party they are an adulterating element. If reasons exist for tolerating them there for the moment, it is also a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in the Party leadership and to remain aware that a break with them is only a matter of time. The time, moreover, seems to have come. How the Party can tolerate the authors of this article in its midst any longer is to us incomprehensible. But if the leadership of the Party should fall more or less into the hands of such people then the Party will simply be castrated and proletarian energy will be at an end.

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padraig (u.s.) said:

The last I'm gonna say on the nonce thing is there's a difference between noting the pedophilic overtones etc of memecore (or whatever it's called) - sure, - vs calling telling a brand new person "you're a nonce, piss off to a nonce forum with that". Of course that got a hostile reaction, how could it not. That is all.

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DannyL said:

Or mates of mine moreso, where the whole humour rests on saying upsetting things. It can be hilarious but also gets a bit tiresome.

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thirdform said:

That's all i was saying really, not that I didn't find it hilarious, cos I did. But I mean @gnasher has oxford in his/her location! Although that might even egg Luke on even more, which I'm all for, not gonna lie.

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