Gabber: Square wave bludgeoning

[forclosure]

There's also the fact that it's the genre i associate with either goth raves or dirty white guy drug addled filth, there's a joke i heard on an old rap podcast where one of the guys said drunk euros loved that awful Crookers version of Kid Cudi's day n nite cause it's got a four to the floor beat to make them think they can dance to it. This goes even further than that its only "dance" in the sense that its under than umbrella and other stuff came before it. but the most i've ever seen is people jumping up and down to it and out of nowhere a beach ball is there for some reason.

listening to a bunch of Traxx/Mick Wills/Jamal Moss made me realise that actually there is some EDM out there that i can like and its not just the gas mask bondage gear goth stuff that i find deeply embarassing but as mentioned before outside of the 2 tracks that third posted in his top 100 generally don't like the stuff

i meant to say EBM in the 2nd paragraph sorry bout the confusion

 

[luka]

say what you like about third but he is undeniably a scholar.
and his music taste, by ditching notions like cool and good taste,
made everyone elses look conservative overnight. he mounted a
kind of putsch in that sense in which he recast reynolds zone of
fruitless intensity as an acheived and occupiable plataeu
chemsex robobumming as an impersonal and tireless piston

 

[luka]

no peaks no troughs no modulation of pressure

 

[Corpsey]

I was just going to say how before thirdform turned up on here I'd have outright dismissed gabber as unlistenable shit

Whereas now I listen to it with interest

 

[Corpsey]

What you said there is formatted like a poem

 

[luka]

it probably wont get printed in the LRB though

 

[luka]

this is partly what i was saying the other day where my position in the dialectic of taste has been absorbed and superceded

 

[luka]

to the point where i consider myself completely obsolete

 

[Corpsey]

Does anyone even read the poems in the LRB though?

 

[shakahislop]

it probably wont get printed in the LRB though

you could buy a copy and write it on with biro

 

[forclosure]

I was just going to say how before thirdform turned up on here I'd have outright dismissed gabber as unlistenable shit

Whereas now I listen to it with interest

i mean i still pretty much do but i have a better understanding of it

 

[okzharp]

At the end of the world what else is there but bendy legs and Jurassic apex predator arms?




This guy is probably quite good at this, whatever that means



It's the faces that fascinate me. The pleasureless anhedonia. The glimmers of effort.

 

[thirdform]

say what you like about third but he is undeniably a scholar.
and his music taste, by ditching notions like cool and good taste,
made everyone elses look conservative overnight. he mounted a
kind of putsch in that sense in which he recast reynolds zone of
fruitless intensity as an acheived and occupiable plataeu
chemsex robobumming as an impersonal and tireless piston

Yes. I mean, this was an argument I was trying to have with patty. Love electronic music, love raving, dancing, whatever, but hate the whole airport like security to get into clubs, the constant surveillance by bouncers, the idea that at any point you can be kicked out so not to soil the reputation of their aura of cool, (although evidently people puking all over the place is cooler than having a bit of a flipped out moment on lsd.)

Simon for obvious reasons wasn't really revaluating this stuff from the standpoint of the nutter, whereas I'd say I certainly used to be a bit of a mental headcase. Hardcore techno taps into that lineage for me, in that I like the component bits of clubbing, but am fairly indifferent towards club culture itself. For me it's about sound and sonification of environments, whereas for most clubbers the important thing is to have a good party. But I don't really know what is to be celebrated in that sense. When you have a well calibrated and tuned sound system, you inevitably have to move because of the physical changes in your body, the way in which you quite literally feel the frequencies and it is too much for the body to process in merely an aural way. That might sound very abstract and outlandish in theory but in practice its very concrete.

And hardcore techno is one of those experiences which can enable you to reach that state, as can dub reggae.

 

[thirdform]

Also I'm not hamstrung by having to contrast this cerebral art form techno to the uncouth hardcore, which was a debate amongst mostly detached observers. Whereas everyone else knows that Jeff Mills was playing gabber-y things in '93.

 

[thirdform]

1993 german hardcore played by Jeff

 

[IdleRich]

Third doing the lord's work here. The mid-90s Dutch novelty chart-pop gabber is grotesquely fascinating:


And of course Technohead's "I Wanna Be A Hippy" which crossed over to the UK.

For a sec I thought "are these all the same guy?" and then I thought "oh no, it's just that everyone involved in gabber is a gaunt, bald Dutch speed freak clad in a tracksuit" - or are they just the same guy I dunno, I actually have a real problem recognising people and distinguishing faces. It reminds me of those "once seen" ads you get where people attempt to get in contact with someone they fancied from the bus or whatever and Shoreditch Twat did one for Trade "I'm desperately looking to meet up with someone I made lingering eye contact with at Trade - you were topless with huge sweaty muscles and a shaved head - I was the guy with no top, huge sweaty muscles and a shaved head".

 

[IdleRich]

At the end of the world what else is there but bendy legs and Jurassic apex predator arms?




This guy is probably quite good at this, whatever that means



It's the faces that fascinate me. The pleasureless anhedonia. The glimmers of effort.

The ones that are outside on a sunny day with pleasant green trees around... that just doesn't seem right somehow.
I like the one where it shows you his moves in glorious slo-mo. Fair enough he is doing some different stuff though - looks as though above the waist he's doing something almost like locking and popping, and below the waist he's doing riverdance.

 

[thirdform]

I'd say the only really worthwhile thing clinging onto in dance/rave culture is this idea of gnostic communion, of dissolving into the sound. Even for me the drugs are secondary to that. When I was in Leeds I went to a few disco/house parties in a student house share, stuff that the old bill over there turn a blind eye to if it's a fairly clean affair. Yes, good music, but I was left wondering why I was there when I could probably play a much wider range of music. Those nights the speed also made me feel fairly agitated and irritable, because there was no tempest, as it were.

 

[thirdform]

Basically my main demonology is that mixmaster morris plays some of the best music in the absolute worst possible way, which is quite an achievement of English incompetence, I guess. See ambient jungle, it should feel like you're in the ocean, or in a jakuzi, swamped in the thing. you have to turn that shit right up, maybe even more than the ragga in some senses because the ragga stuff has clattering breaks which are easy to sonify in most indoor environments.

 

[IdleRich]

It's the faces that fascinate me. The pleasureless anhedonia. The glimmers of effort.

The face is always interesting. Not just in gabber but in lots of dancing there is a question about what to do with the face... the fixed rigid rictus grin of backing dancers in pop music shows is always a bit weird. I guess choosing to do anything particular is a bit sort of dishonest... but if you don't and just let it be then who knows what you will get? I'm thinking a kind of vacant concentration, a bit like the face they show on tv if someone is having a shit - not straining, more of a relaxed one I mean - with this acknowledgement that something is going on in the background but that they are not really that directly involved with it.