thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Your last post I can follow. That makes sense to me. But the other stuff I think you're Missing the thrust of the polemic. It was all to do with the critical discourse, and nothing really to do with dance floors. It was about establishing hardcore as worthy of serious critical appraisal and esteem. And you have to be quite violent to achieve the space for that.

Yeah but in a sense that shouldn't have been done. Post-dubstep was exactly Energy Flash graduates, getting it all wrong.

We don't want our music being critically appraised by the middle classes. Let them think of it as trashy druggy noise.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's a tip off to estate agents that the gentrification process is about to begin. But that's probably inevitable in any case.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
It's a tip off to estate agents that the gentrification process is about to begin. But that's probably inevitable in any case.

tbf if I were Simon I mean Energy Flash was published in 98. By then Kirk was already a Photek boy, he'd signed this to his label, the piece had been made.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Everyone ended up getting a long in the end though didn't they? :) mostly the people I know who are most purist about detroit techno are massive jungle fans.

Jungle itself became canonised in just the same way as Detroit techno was/is


A lot of the rephlex crowd are like this, and Bloc eg https://crackmagazine.net/2015/02/watch-blocs-jungle-is-massive-mini-documentary/

yeah everything's cannonised now.The cannon generally being a code for middle class. Including Grime and Garage.
 

luka

Well-known member
There was a handful of things that were still uncanonised... But then you went and canonised them in your top 100
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
There was a handful of things that were still uncanonised... But then you went and canonised them in your top 100

ha, good thing techno twitter hates me despite me objectively having a far greater knowledge of techno than them..
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket

A primetime 90s techno set on UK dancefloors, about as far away from Kirk Degiorgio's sound as you can get. In fact, here's a quote which is bound to peeve simon...

“While Warp were going in a more academic, white view of synthesiser music, I was still very much into my soul, funk and electro roots,” explains Degiorgio, “and Mo Wax and Excursions picked up on that sound, but the big influence on us at that time was drum & bass. It really divided the techno scene. The Artificial Intelligence artists that were influenced by breakbeat, it was more like a pastiche of drum & bass, like the drill & bass stuff. I started working with Photek, and I was very much into the sound of Peshay and a lot of the artists who did end up on Mo Wax, so there was a divide. Drum & bass really split the camp. A lot of techno guys hated it, and took the piss out of it, but a lot of us loved it because it was in that whole jazz funk roots thing. Techno by that time in the ’90s was very hard and dark, a lot of it wasn’t my kind of thing. It was getting faster and more heavy and industrial, and I didn’t really relate to that scene much at all.”



See Luke? A British thing, not a hardcore vs techno purists thing. Ditch the musical patriotism.
 

luka

Well-known member
youre making a point, which is probably a good point, but it doesn't have anything to do with the original debate as far as I can tell.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Late to this, but I came here for Blackdown and he doesn't even post here anymore.

Though obviously I'd read Reynolds' stuff and I recognize the lineage here. But idk. Over the years I've grown out of his perspective, and I say that as someone who has enjoyed our occasional exchange. Especially the parts where he gets ornery that I'll just refer to him as Reynolds.
 

RWY

Well-known member
Is there a happy hardcore canon yet? Is that still irredeemable prole drug-noise in the eyes of the hipster gatekeepers?

Happy Hardcore had it's attempted gentrification moment quite a while ago. Mumdance seemed to kick it off by playing a load of the early breakbeat tracks in his sets, did this piece for FACT on his top 20 Happy tracks of all time and then included a couple of them on his Fabriclive CD. He also had Slipmatt and Billy Daniel Bunter on his Rinse show and they both played at a few of his nights. Around the same time, LuckyMe put on a Hardcore night with Jackmaster, Rustie and Hudson Mohawke at a venue in Glasgow's West End (i.e. the posh bit.) You also had the Harlecore nights and the Gabber Elegaza project emerge around this time, the later of which, rather than being a nostalgic recollection of the music of their youth (in the case of Mumdance and Jackmaster) or overenthusiastic championing (in the case of Danny L Harle), was a concerted attempt to turn the proletarian culture of global Hardcore into a wanky middle-class art project. I remember there being some backlash from Gabriel Szatan at Resident Advisor against the Elegaza project for the fact it seemed (at least to Szatan with his ultra-woke politics) to be glamourising fascistic aesthetics in the form of it's the blatant fetishization of working-class white culture. Can't really comment on what effect all of this had on the perception of Happy Hardcore in the wider culture other than it probably contributed to the sort of art students already interested in PC Music taking an interest and playing this stuff at their nights.
 
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