Online (post-geographic) Localism.

[luka]

Anyway my point is I'm retreating from the world this is my only window on it. From now on I will only listen to music made by people on here and posted here. I won't interact with anyone except people here and when I'm forced to at work. I don't want to be connected with the whole world. It's too large and I don't care about them anyway

 

[luka]

I'm a Kurd called Levent. I like to write poetry and discuss ideas and share lighthearted banter with the lads and when I inadvertently overstep the line I feel guilty about it for weeks.

 

[pattycakes_]

I watch the odd Boiler Room thing but on the whole I don't think clubs/raves should be filmed and broadcast - even worse is a club/rave even that is being run TO BE FILMED (and sold alongside rolling adverts for JD Sports.)

boilerroom is cancer

 

[droid]

Anyway my point is I'm retreating from the world this is my only window on it. From now on I will only listen to music made by people on here and posted here. I won't interact with anyone except people here and when I'm forced to at work. I don't want to be connected with the whole world. It's too large and I don't care about them anyway

Sorry.

 

[pattycakes_]

I remember watching the early ones and being into it, back when it was pretty much just the DJs with a few people getting stoned on a sofa in the back. These days it seems to be some sort of 'brand' with a load of corporate money flowing through it and fingers in many pies.

I actually watched a recent set the other day and the whole thing just seemed off. I was into the music, but the crowd and setting just didn't feel "real", it looked as though everyone was extremely conscious of being filmed and slightly embarrassed by it.

It's all way too self aware for me. It's one of those things that DJs think is a good thing to have on the CV, just like playing Berghain. But then when they get there they play their safest shit. The crowds are almost always shit. But somehow BR still seem to think they're underground. Annie Mac did a video feature on the state of club culture ages ago and talked to to some of the BR bods. They were going on about wanting to have live GoPros in the crowd for a more immersive experience sometime in the future. What bothers me more than anything though is the fact that kids who are too young to go out are watching BR now, thinking that that's what it's all about. They're gonna go to clubs and want to stand next to the DJ and take selfies and wait for the hands in the air moment. There are a few DJs out there who I really respect who have yet to do one and I hope it's because they see through it (dj sprinkles, maurice fulton, osunlade for eg)

But this is the way shit is going, so even really respected people (from back when the word underground meant shit as crazy as no corporate sponsorship) are doing it now. So I feel like King Canute sometimes. Except I'm shouting at the tide from within.

 

[thirdform]

the leftfield kids aren't really going out anymore. that's the thing. loads of my mates just can't be arsed.

As in, the 'leftfield' as identity kids are going out, the ones into the deconstructed club in a huge way, but our leftfield crowd into experimental garage or jungle or concrete or hardcore acid are just out of it.

You lot can mock breakcore all you like, but at least there was an impulse there to kick against the established dance music scene, it's just ashame the scene is dead and turned into igorrr, who was a wicked industrial hardcore producer in the earlier days but now doing that weird classical breakcore lmao.

 

[thirdform]

the mainstream end of house/techno is just progressive house for 2019 and everything in dance music, even scenes not remotely affiliated with that axis, are somehow refracted through it because the big pr bosses have all the clout there.

 

[luka]

There's something deeply embarrassing about being'a dj' in 2019. Like, you'd be embarrassed to admit it. It'd be a shameful secret.

 

[pattycakes_]

There's something deeply embarrassing about being'a dj' in 2019. Like, you'd be embarrassed to admit it. It'd be a shameful secret.

pretty much. it's like having a sleeve tattoo or a fancy beard. played out.

 

[luka]

No positive social function. Just vapid narcissism. The supporting context has gone. No justification for it any more.

 

[Corpsey]

I often wish I'd become a DJ, or tried to.

Narcissism comes into it, as it comes into anything people do, but isn't it something akin to what we do on here when we share choons? Look at me and look at this.

I get a buzz from other people loving what I love. (Because it means they love me? Or because it means I love it?)

What has changed since the time of "The Wasteland"? I am looking at it thinking he already said everything about the bric a brac of modernity, of the chaos and distraction of it. Perhaps today it's simply heightened.

Sometimes now the same group of friends and I conduct the same conversation but flit between WhatsApp and Instagram. We don't talk in person, and even in the techno space we don't stick to one sphere.

 

[pattycakes_]

No positive social function. Just vapid narcissism. The supporting context has gone. No justification for it any more.

That could be applied to almost anything people do creatively at this point in history. Djs are easy targets. Internet + capitalism = whatever the fook you call this gory state of affairs.

 

[Corpsey]

Re: the "left field" that got appropriated by VICE and absorbed into the web media like everything else

I suppose the old media had the advantage of having censorship in place so that it couldn't really absorb certain cultural forms but now everything is permitted, it all profits someone.

The underground is exposed and becomes banal. Even videos of people being beheaded and burned in cages are algorithm grist.

 

[droid]

DJ till I die.

 

[droid]

The problem is that craft has been marginalised. You can hear quality when it is there, the hard graft implicit in hours, days and weeks trying to find the perfect mix, the absorption of thousands of hard lessons expressed in sound, flow and composition. Remove the barriers to entry required by being forced to learn the technical skills and that graft and it's accompanying quality disappears.

 

[pattycakes_]

Hipsterism is the bric a brac of this century. Vice the manifesto. Dependent on being in the know. Consuming whatever obscure flight of fancy until the next one comes along in 4 days time. Underground music being prime currency to drop casually into conversation. Narcissism 2.0. Immune to criticism and inspection, hidden behind protective walls of ironic isolation. Cultural stalemate.

 

[Corpsey]

Hipsterism is what

A sideshow?
A flowering?

Of the society wide omniculturalism

I recently was at pickle factory, Josey Rebelle playing jungle, and I didn't feel excited, the crowd were not a jungle crowd, they just liked a bit of jungle (they were really there for the techno and house), it was a far cry from drum n bass nights I'd gone to in the past, where everyone was so into drum n bass, they didn't like anything else

Perhaps this is my own version of the right wing mindset - out with all this confusing multiculturalism, let's get back to people just do only something.

Lukas talked about this dressing up box thing before.

 

[firefinga]

I have written it here already a couple of times, and it'S worth repeating: The audiences for live music as well as DJs (as in clubs and parties) are rapidly declining and ageing at the same time. A viscious cirlce. Not a very motivating factor if you're young to start DJing or let alone a band. Plus: there is less and less money in the game, even if money isn't your first motivational factor, in the past you could at least support your "leftfield"-DJing or even make a little money from it. Today, absolutely impossible.

 

[luka]

https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...tmund-english-crowds-age-of-rage-barney-ronay
Football version

 

[sadmanbarty]

Hipsterism is what

http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=14458