sideways not forwards

[blissblogger]

here's an interesting piece by Chal Ravens, following her proclamation of "this is the Future" about that Afrocentric techno mix by Shannen S-P

https://djmag.com/longreads/uk-club-music-evolving-how

it's about a sound that has emerged in recent years on the UK scene that people just call "club", based in a transnational eclecticism unified by a certain vibe (percussive, jolting, lots of flashy deejay tricks) and by its relative lack of relationship to either the sound system / nuum tradition or to 4/4 house / techno (it'll use elements from both here and there, but the vibe and the groove is quite different in feel - drawing more on gqom, Jersey club, etc )

the major points:

"sideways not forwards" is the axis on which this music moves i.e. it doesn't have a romance of the future, it has a romance of the exotic and far-flung.

mediated largely through the internet, netlabels, etc

"It’s music to stay on top of rather than music to get lost in" (a very sharp description of how the jolting beats put you on edge, you don't trance out)

but unlike it's precursor, deconstructed club, it's very much banging, hedonistic, celebratory, exuberant

Manchester is the centre for this scene/sound, not London

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

she makes it sound exciting

and I enjoyed this line about a new generation of UK producers who are more in tune with a virtual community of SoundCloud bedroom producers "than the fusty-seeming legacy of the hardcore continuum"

i suppose if there's a philosophical wrinkle in the project, it's the fact that the style is dependent on the kind of regional sounds that the UK itself is not able to generate anymore - all those African or US-city based genres that it draws from

 

[thirdform]

I have some friends in this circuit who are playing a lot of old wonky/bleep techno so im not sure how much the descriptor 'club' sticks. Some people have been asking me for experimental jungle recs and having their minds blown. i think it's a case of speaking too soon here. the MCR scene is just a meeting point more than a defined momentum, either forwards or sideways. which is pretty cool with me, like, I think community hubs are a good idea in the 2020s because the mass cultural moment to cohere either a house/techno or nuum scene has past. hardcore eclecticism but not eclecticism for eclecticism's sake, if you know what I mean.

 

[blissblogger]

here's a sort of companion piece by Ravens about changing deejay techniques due to technology

https://djmag.com/longreads/decade-djing-how-technology-changed-art-form

 

[thirdform]

i think the good thing here is that people can play old records without the cultural baggage that existing nuum or house/techno initiates have. i think that's very fresh in a way deep tech wasn't.

 

[thirdform]

although she doesn't mention the faktion crew, which are my mates. probably because they have more a grounding in computer musics, noise and techno and hence are not promotable.

 

[thirdform]

i think the good thing here is that people can play old records without the cultural baggage that existing nuum or house/techno initiates have. i think that's very fresh in a way deep tech wasn't.

Conversely i heard Finn play out around 2016 times, x-103 eruption into some turn of the century hardtrance and it was appalling.

 

[thirdform]

well this is my main bone of contension with dance music writing right. usually forward does not mean the forward development of an aesthetic but the bohemian tyranny of freedom of choice and fetishising the accelerationist processes of capitalism. like I'm more inclined to pay attention to someone who stuck with dnb during its frankly crap times during the late 90s and early 00s rather than just jumped ship to garage. this isn't a diss of Simon or anything, and nothing accounts for personal choice, but there is a serious lack of ideological coherency in dance music, hence conceptronica and deconstructed club.

EDIT: mvuents deleted post.

 

[shiels]

Out to the ideologically coherent gang. I want to take the piss here but I can see a bit of truth in what you're saying in terms of a longing for some rootedness. There's a quite abstract eclecticism even with the earliest forms of this stuff with night slugs etc in early 2010s

 

[catalog]

'sideways not forwards' and 'club'. do me a favour - gonna have to do better than that. might as well say 'dance' instead of club. this is a poor piece of writing - feels like they were asked to do something to sum things up. it's lazy and not really saying anything. i know i should give reasons but i can't be bothered. all i'll say for now is that to mention manchester but not twh is a fucking travesty.

 

[luka]

How's this different to the '00s when people were pretending to like 'Baille funk'

 

[luka]

Diplo set mixing 'Baille Funk' with ' crunk music' It's just killing time till something Happens isn't it. Thumb twiddling.

 

[luka]

Chal Ravens | The Guardian
Search domain www.theguardian.com/profile/chal-ravenshttps://www.theguardian.com/profile/chal-ravens
Chal Ravens is a freelance writer and host of Top Flight on Red Bull Radio. December 2019. Beatrice Dillon: the most thrilling new artist in electronic music.

Chal Ravens writes about new electronic music. Her route into journalism was relatively conventional, writing a blog and rising through the ranks of her student newspaper, before an opening at FACT magazine gave her an introduction to the lightning-paced world of digital media.
Top Flight with Chal Ravens | Mixcloud

Search domain www.mixcloud.com/ChalRavens/https://www.mixcloud.com/ChalRavens/
The Top Flight archive! Some of the best episodes of Chal Ravens' Red Bull Radio show dedicated to new and experimental club music. Expect bass, breaks, riddims and deconstructions from London and around the world: footwork, gqom, jungle, dancehall, reggaeton, kuduro and all kinds of 'nuum outgrowth.
RA: What can dance music do about the climate crisis?

Search domain www.residentadvisor.net/features/3476https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/3476
To launch a new series on RA dedicated to electronic music and the climate crisis, ChalRavens assesses some of the key reasons behind the scene's outsized carbon footprint. The environmental crisis is now so real that it has acquired a bizarre unreality.

Who am I? | helium raven
Search domain chalravens.com/about/https://chalravens.com/about/
A freelance writer and noise-maker locked on in Dalston, LDN. Lately I've written for Fact, The Wire, Loud And Quiet and Dummy. I can write about things other than music too - for master's degree at Goldsmiths, my research interests included embodiment, technology, capitalism, spectacle, attention and the ethics of the spectator. For writing duties or general chatter, tweet me or…

 

[Simon silverdollarcircle]

I realise this is an unpopular opinion on dissensus, and may be undercuts the whole point of the place, but I think you really have to reserve judgement on stuff like this. Is it good or bad? Who knows? To find out you'd have to go to the raves with a gang of mates and find out. But we're not gonna do that, most of us. Too old. But it's impossible to know what's going on in the rave without being at the rave

 

[luka]

But wouldn't you just have a laugh and enjoy the music?

 

[luka]

Anywhere you can listen to loud music and get off your head and dance with your mates probably you'll have a laugh so long as you've got the right drug-music interface and the right people around you.

 

[baboon2004]

I realise this is an unpopular opinion on dissensus, and may be undercuts the whole point of the place, but I think you really have to reserve judgement on stuff like this. Is it good or bad? Who knows? To find out you'd have to go to the raves with a gang of mates and find out. But we're not gonna do that, most of us. Too old. But it's impossible to know what's going on in the rave without being at the rave

This kind of reasonable, level-headed approach is outrageous.

 

[Simon silverdollarcircle]

We should have a dissensus outing to a UK bass rave in a hackney wick warehouse and find out. I suspect wed hate it and spend the night complaining about all the other punters but we can never know for sure

 

[pattycakes_]

Lol have been thinking this lately with all the heavy analysis, cancelled musics and assorted moaning, realising dissensus is not the best place to talk about music for actually having fun in a club to

 

[pattycakes_]

There's some amazing baile funk. Once it's little moment of intl. attention passed it carried on doing its own thing, unhindered. It's a whole world unto itself. Rhythmically much more interesting and way better for dancing than half the new club stuff that gets talked about on here.

 

[luka]

No sure, but it's Brazilian.