This sort of thing

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Peruvian-chullo-hat.jpg
 

bun-u

Trumpet Police
I also think that often with this kind of thing, of finding a charm in something that was previously hateful, it's because there's little at stake anymore. The war is over. Whereas at the time, if you're listening to say underground resistance or jungle or whatever and this kind of shit comes out you have to resist it. You have to engage with it as a counter revolutionary force that must be nullified. But now the war is over, and jungle won, we can magnanimously acknowledge that yeah this sort of thing had its charm

I had a similar thing with the more po faced meditate on bass weight 2005-2006 dubstep stuff. Which I disliked on principle at the time cos it wasn't grime. But now in hindsight I can see its appeal I guess

Which is all a long winded way of saying I'll be on dissensus in 15 years reappraising mark fell and generously singing his praises as a true auteur
Simon is right. I can understand the appeal of this to someone who isn’t (and is much younger than) me. In the mid 90s I was on a forum called uk-dance - @john eden was there so was @blissblogger and this represented everything that was wrong (compared to our jungle and then garage) So v tough on a personal level reappraise it
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Dub gets slagged for his tips on where to by clothes: "Top Man on Oxford Street. Cheap and good variety. People who think they know Top Man and haven't been for a while will be surprised at what you can get there."
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I also think that often with this kind of thing, of finding a charm in something that was previously hateful, it's because there's little at stake anymore. The war is over. Whereas at the time, if you're listening to say underground resistance or jungle or whatever and this kind of shit comes out you have to resist it. You have to engage with it as a counter revolutionary force that must be nullified. But now the war is over, and jungle won, we can magnanimously acknowledge that yeah this sort of thing had its charm

I had a similar thing with the more po faced meditate on bass weight 2005-2006 dubstep stuff. Which I disliked on principle at the time cos it wasn't grime. But now in hindsight I can see its appeal I guess

Which is all a long winded way of saying I'll be on dissensus in 15 years reappraising mark fell and generously singing his praises as a true auteur

This is the journalists war. it's irrelevant though. it's a bourgeois pyrrhic victory. jungle didn't win, trance did. globally speaking. And that's the tragedy.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I feel quite defensive of the Megadog / Mixmaster Morris wing of this scene, and those parts of the mix I can feel almost wistful towards. First experiences of clubbing and that, but where those crunchy and 'wonky' beats come in it's just revolting. It's like the hole that Squarepusher crawled through.

I'm the opposite, the more megadog end of it makes me think hippies, good times puritans, not avant-funk.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
ok thoughtful response incoming:

The problem is the value set of the 90s critic is different to the 00s-2010s punter. For 90s critics, on both sides of the spectrum, be that jungle or ambient/'intelligent' techno, the future was at stake (not just musically but culturally.) We lived that future that the 90s windbags harped on about, and far from being either dystopian or utopian, it was all too boring. Capitalism has not managed to really pioneer anything above the smartphone in the last 15 years, which makes the accelerationists look a bit dim witted. Capitalism is accelerating, but only in terms of numbers and fictitious currency, not in terms of any great seismic or cultural innovation. Even musically the cataclysmic innovations in production technology were mostly over by 2002 (this is different to k-punks argument about electronic music not sounding like the future, I'm talking about the actual technology.) All the algorithmic automation that people are fretting about is just an amplification of computer processing power and a development that was already under way well into the 60s - the proletarianisation of the peasantry and their divorce from their household subsistence economies in the developing countries. For me the question was never is jungle or techno futuristic - I think free jazz is in many ways more mutable and hence more reflective of the future (jungle is ultimately dj mix music and as mind bending as its peak was, it always had to appeal to the mundane present.) But how the future is contextualised and recontextualised.

When Stockhausen was shown the music of Aphex, Richie Hawtin etc, of course his post-african repetitions comment was racist, but not because he didn't understand either African music or techno (he understood both) and he was right that IDM (and jungle for that matter) producers take a small segment of an African rhythm and loop it, but in traditional African music you will have multiple rhythms in multiple timings sprawling and evolving past each other. For instance the best moroccan gnawa is actually always changing. No, Stockhausen was racist precisely because he absolutely hated music as an ambience, and thought good music absolutely refused to make any concessions to anything other than the intellect. Both IDM and jungle for him would make concessions. IDM for him is precisely not real intellectual music because it's after party comedown gear.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
As for the cleanliness vs dirt debate. take any modern piano house production and compare it with any of the 90s music in this mix and you'll see that this stuff sounds dirty in comparison. Dance music *sounds* better than ever, which is precisely why it is so stale today. So in that sense you can't beat todays futurism.

In the 90s dance music was mostly an English, American and german thing. now it's evolved far beyond that. Dance music is bigger in Latin America and Russia than it is in the UK on the whole. But of course its neither jungle nor purist detroit techno that's big there, it's precisely the mixmaster morris and sasha/digweed derived new agey trancey/prog business. Same in India.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Both jungle and IDM were very musical, at least when the darkside in jungle mutated to the ambient direction on one hand and the ragga direction on the other. the real ammusical stuff was basically danny tenaglia type 'tribal house', just hours of percussion loops, smeared samples and disembodied vocals. no real hook or anything. and of course the free party speedcore.

Here's a review i wrote for a record on discogs:

No-Tek + Jdc - 1 as reviewed by glitchtrauma November 23, 2020

Epochal speedcore here. unrelenting grinding machinery that never, ever lets up. no cheap gimmics here just hard double timed kicks and grainy nuclear wasteland textures. Real austere music for persecuted protestants, no melodies, no hooks. But when you can tune in, its an experience like no other. A lot more futuristic than much mainstream club techno of the 95-96 era. Respect.

This kind of music really renders the human obsolete. of course the human makes it, but not to communicate an idea or to stir up emotions in people, just banging anonymous uninterrupted gear. It's pure conveyor belt production. It's disco meeting its maker and realising that no, god was not merciful after all.. Whereas disco in its original form was the initial marvel of commodity production in the modern era, the almost jawdropping initial feats of capitalist production. the progressive development of the economic productive forces. Whereas speedcore the sonic representation of where capital itself becomes a fedder on the productive forces and can only consume unprofitable capital via the state and must regurgitate the same warlike trajectory.

Jungle on the contrary, as much as Craner might recoil from it, is completely modernist, but in the post-bop art blakey sense. It is indeed taking dance music to its absolute limit, but still within the confines of the club, in the same way that bebop was danceable jazz taken to its breaking point. The jungle and jazz parallels are not unwarranted, but they have to be situated in context. The drop in jungle is like dropping the bomb in Art Blakey's jazz messengers, where the double bass drops with the drums to create a rhythm which the other instrumentalists must orbit over. In free jazz the bass becomes more gliding, more improvisatory. Yes, it still keeps time but it's allowed to divorce itself from adhering to a steady motif.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
There was more eclecticism to things like Megatripolis and Megadog than maybe there appears to be in retrospect.

Megatripolis was not bad for a mid week club night in central London. The talks in the room upstairs included mad hippie shit that Luka likes (McKenna, Ruper Sheldrake, that bloke that wrote the book about MDMA) but also Class War (in a "spikey vs fluffy" debate iirc) and Stewart Home. There were stalls selling literature that included druggie nonsense but also the counter culture of the time - opposition to the Criminal Justice Bill being a big thing.

Musically, Mixmaster Morris was a fixture, but Weatherall and Colins Faver and Dale also played.

Megadog has your awful trance but also more credible sets from Aphex Twin, Orbital, PWOG and others.

Basically both these things brought together home counties kids who would probably have been into indie otherwise. So they acted as gateway drugs to other things - some people embraced Banco De Gaia and Infected Mushroom but others dug deeper.

The weird hippy trappings were just as present in things like Spiral Tribe - just not in the music.
 
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