luka

Well-known member
I was thinking about Coltrane in exactly that context yesterday. More than human forces and intensities. Again the scale is not human.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
there are also antihuman impulses in less darker musics like happy hardcore. it's about overloading the organic circuits.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
was at this night, managed to get the recording before it got taken down. this set totally changed how i viewed dance music, I'd heard machine music before and even some/many of these tunes but not put together like this.

I mean I couldn't give deep tech any chance when I wasgetting my mind blown by all this mad shit. i didn't care about its age. mark radford shows sounded basically like darkside donk to me. That's not a compliment. what's endearing about donk is its very northernness. northerners are grim and can't help themselves but in my experience they are very kind people. We're the other way. we're carefree but always not so low key rude and aggressive. We can't help ourselves! its in us.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r1rz0va75bo9czg/paul_damage_hog_20th_22_02_13.mp3?dl=0
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
and here is scud making some of the connections we've been talking about in this thread.

as for the title, i find it quite prophetic. in fact come to think about in some respects we are really living in the end times. compared to the optimism of much religious eschatology where a messiah will cleanse the earth of the unbeievers and the kingdom of god and heaven will be realised on earth, it doesn't even seem there will be an antichrist to resist. the dark forces have run away, they have eluded our control, even the control of the antichrist. what we have to prepare for is protracted and slow starvation. that is why we need machine music for machine times, because ultimately we are the technology. we need to abolish its ownership.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Some good words from blissblogger here.

GABBA AND HARSH-STEP
imports column, Spin, 1998

by Simon Reynolds

Once, there was just "hardcore"--rave music at its most flipped-out and euphoric-aggressive fierce. Then, circa 1992, came the great parting of the ways. English hardcore DJs mixed in hip hop breaks 'n' bass to create a hyper-syncopated bedlam that eventually evolved into jungle. The rest of the world stuck with techno's monolithic 4/4 stomp-beat and kept upping the b.p.m's to ever more punishing extremes. For a while, the Dutch--in the form of the Rotterdam sound called gabba--were harder than the rest. Then other outposts--labels like Brooklyn's Industrial Strength, Milwaukee's Drop Bass Network, France's Gangstar Toons Industry, Australia's Bloody Fist, and many more--took it further still.

By 1996, though, hardcore was banging its head against a brick wall of shlocky ultraviolence and 250-300 b.p.m. velocity. The more astute producers took a step sideways from this braindead end. One escape route, followed by Frankfurt's PCP and its sister-labels Dance Ecstasy 2001 and Cold Rush, involved a style that just cries out for the absurd oxymoron "ambient gabba": an atmospheric, slightly slower sound, heavy on cavernous reverb, glacial textures and sorrowful melodies. Following
awesomely desolate dirges like Renegade Legion's "Torsion", the PCP crew have reached something of an aesthetic pinnacle with Pilldriver's "Apocalypse Never", the tenth Cold Rush release.

Pilldriver is one of many pseudonyms (see also The Mover, Mescalinum United, Alien Christ) used by the mysterious Marc Acardipane, probably hardcore's most visionary producer. "Apocalypse Never" harries the listener with synth-stabs that sound like a swarm of bat-winged and trident-wielding demons, while the unrelenting 4/4 kick-drum is so cleverly inflected you never register it as monotony. For more glorious
gloomcore, check out the PCP compilation Bigger Bolder Better, plus Superpower, a six-track EP collaboration between PCP's Hypnotizer and New York's Oliver Chesler,on the latter's Things To Come label.

Another increasingly popular "step sideways" involves mixing gabba's Teutonic terror-riffs with techstep jungle's paroxysmic breakbeats and murky bombast. From Drop Bass Network's sub-label Ghetto Safari and Frankfurt's Chrome to the Paris imprint No-Tek and London's Ambush, this new hybrid--known variously as "splatterbreaks", "hardbreaks" or "harsh-step"--is the emergent renegade sound at squat-raves.

Superficially, harsh-step seems to have much in common with Alec Empire's Digital Hardcore, which also combines gabba's killer-bee drones, sped-up breaks and fuzzguitar-like midfrequency noise. But unlike Digital Hardcore's adrenalizingly one-dimensional scree, the Ambush producers leaven their assault with a superior sense of dynamics and space. Jackal & Hide's Escape From South London EP is a lo-fi holocaust of industrial effluent,eardrum-shredding snares and low-end turbulence. Aphasic & Scud's Welcome To The Warren EP sounds like metal-bashers
Einsturzende Neubauten getting on the good foot. Best of the lot is the Give Up EP by David Hammer (a.k.a DHR artist Shizuo),who interweaves different kinds of distortion with a sensuous awareness of audio-tactile texture.

Although Ambush's sound verges on outright avant-gardism, DJ Scud--who recently played New York's Soundlab alongside DJ Spooky, Alec Empire and Manhattan's own harsh-step crusader I-Sound--says his real inspiration is the populist rave of 1991. Scud wants to bring back "the madness and intensity" of early hardcore, "but not its happy-happy, hands-in-the-air vibe". Hence the dystopian aura and abstract
militancy of Ambush's four releases to date. Sidestepping DHR's full-frontal approach (sloganeering harangues), harsh-step's anarcho-politics are more subtle --articulated in techno-theory zines like Break/Flow, Datacide and Scud's own Fallout, hinted at in the paramilitary imagery of track titles and band names, and most of all, incarnated in the music itself. At once savage and sophisticated, harsh-step is the sound of insubordination--not just against sonic stagnation but against cultural lockdown too: the urban politics of gentrification and ghettoization, the insidious normalization of surveillance. If gabba was
techno-as-heavy-metal, harsh-step is new millennium punk-funk.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
i mean im similar to scud in that i was first into all the chipmunky noise factory, M&M i feel this way piano bits, krome and time the slammer. I was being semi-sardonic with that whole ellis dee is a bit cheesy last night. I mean yes that is true but that is the hardcore i was into before the experimental one offs or b-sides. I was just trying to provoke barty into admitting he's from surrey but that didn't work. but i realised that short of falling into a brain bashing happy hardcore rut it was necessary to become fully electronic, not electric. happy hardcore is electric and uses electronic sounds but it isn't a music of electricity. this is also my problem with all that gabba with metal samples. not really into it either save a few occasions as it like happy hardcore whilst being antihuman cannot explore the true potentials of the machines. this stuff in that scud mix does.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
We do need to explain why fascists have been attracted to machines and why there are fash in noise and power electronics scenes. i have some thoughts but later.
 

luka

Well-known member
The music should always be ahead of the theory. Nomos' book understands this. Theory just tries to explain the realities artists bring into being. Any attempt to put the cart before the horse is doomed.

Edit in light of what baboon says beneath replace artists with THE PEOPLE! Or the unconscious as desiring machine if you're nomos or whatever
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
That wouldn't be any more resistant to capitalism than the individual though, would it? The capitalists own and manufacture the machines.

I think it potentially would be - for the masses to see themselves as precisely that is necessary for any bid to freedom. Individualism is a bit of a plague, really. (Also shit for music).
 
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luka

Well-known member
Wyndham Lewis sneered at the futurists saying they were not modern at all but merely romantics romanticising machines. Backwards Italians. Not from proper capitalist industrial economies
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
sure, but it's descriptive rather than prescriptive. you have to realise what you are before you can resist, and how you have been changed and reprogrammed in the service of capitalism (and made complicit in your own dehumanisation). so in that sense antihumanism is a reality check.
 

luka

Well-known member
The project of art is not as narrow nor as time bound as resistance to capitalism. That's little man thinking.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is so crucial and so fundamental that I have to spell it out before third form calls me borgeious
 

luka

Well-known member
Our task is to liberate the imagination to realise it's true scope and dimensions and any attempt to limit it to a particular issue or problem is doomed. Why anti humanism is simply this
The imagination reaches out and finds as limits the individual subject and its pre-set affects, its shells. Its task at this stage of its development is to reach out beyond that cell into matter and forces. It is part of a development programme.
 
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