Incredible. This is what I've always wanted pop music to deliver. Pure aural sonic candy that makes you want to dissolve in a wave of jouissance. Not sad and not melancholy, but containing both of those things, whilst still being enslaved to the pure matrix of desire.
The terminal decline of intellectual dance music
- Thread starter Woebot
- Start date
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
I once heard an interview with Robert Wyatt (I think) where he was talking about prog and it's relationship to stripped down R&B. Paraphrasing from memory, he was basically saying that there's an assumption that if you make complicated prog rock it's because you think minimal R&B stuff is stupid and bad and you need to make something that's clever and good, and for his part that wasn't the case - he loved Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Bo Diddly and all that stuff, but for him to just get down and play three cord R&B tunes he'd have to pretend that he'd never heard of Albert Ayler, and that wasn't something that he felt he could do, so he did Soft Machine instead.
Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much of that attitude underpins a lot of the nineties IDM stuff that holds up better? I think the relationship with straight-up dancefloor music is often a lot more complicated than just "look at that rubbish, I hate it..."
Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much of that attitude underpins a lot of the nineties IDM stuff that holds up better? I think the relationship with straight-up dancefloor music is often a lot more complicated than just "look at that rubbish, I hate it..."
Another thing is the time barrier. Matthew is right that until '92 there was not much reggae in hardcore, that its chassy was mostly inherited from hip hop + techno. Where I think his trolling breaks down is when we start getting to '92 - D-Livin' - why has reggae (and dub) as archetypical flava.
A lot of the early IDM bods came from an 88-89 background - if you listen to the first Autechre release it's as '91 ardkore as they come. Same with some of the early stuff on B12 records. Jungleistic hardcore is a '92 and beyond thing, it's a different scene really, hip hop and reggae kids who initially dismissed the more whiter house/techno scene (ragga twins, Eastman, dj hype, SUAD, and many others.)
In many ways '92 was the real ideological war in hardcore, not '93. You had the dark tunes like Terminator, journey from the light, Sudden Death, Crackpotz, We can be Free, Dave Charlesworth bits, waremouse, Rebel MC, then all the pinky and purky tunes played by Slipmatt, and then the eurotechno acidic/gabber stuff, Rotterdam records, Outlander T.Z series, and even people like Automation in the UK.
Ribbing on @luka there has always been a tension of continua in the 'nuum you have people who have more house inclinations (the break away from jungle in London started happening around '94) and then those of hiphop/reggae inclinations. But if you go through discogs, it's not accidental that you can find old boys moaning about all the ragga jungle we all love on here being cheap, cash-in music.
IdleRich
IdleRich
What's the muddler?
IdleRich
IdleRich
I love dancing. The other day I was saying on here how when you go to the cinema, as long as the film you see is above a certain, really quite low, standard, then the dark room and the huge screen can really take you out of yourself - for me it's one of the rare times when you can be awake and outside of yourself. One is absorbed into some other place where for a short time one can totally forget life's pettiness and its trivial problems such as bills etc
It's a very basic and cheap "other world" you access here, I'm making no grandiose claims. It's not enlightenment, it's not the equivalent of that rejection of and rising above the material world that a monk or philosopher can achieve (apparently) by a lifetime of self study, deprivation and so on... but given that what I am talking about is almost instantly available to pretty much anyone at a low price and with almost no demands (in terms of money or time or effort etc) made of the person seeking this escape, it's not bad.
And I think that I said that playing sport is another way to this bargain basement version of nirvana. For the hour you're chasing that ball around you're only in that moment, all else is gone.
But I didn't mention dancing, and I should have done cos that's the other obvious one. Maybe the main one. That's what I was trying to get at in the Neon Screams thread - all the claims he makes (in the intro I mean) may be true and it may very well be that dance music is dead and that the new paradigm is autotune and vocal fx and so on and so forth. But, and it's a big but for me, this new paradigm comes without this built in thing which takes you to a budget version of transcendental contentment... cheapo paradise.
Cos those things I listed above are really the only paradises I'm ever likely to get into it, and so being locked out of - or in fact having to face the idea that The Future has completely removed - one of the extant types is not something I'll accept until I absolutely have to. And when I do I won't pretend to like it.
For the sake of completeness I should probably also mention sex as one of the other times where you can completely become in the moment like this. Perhaps there are some things I've forgotten, perhaps other people have other things that I don't, maybe some people - better people than I am - have trained themselves, or simply instinctively always knew how, to be in that moment all the time. But for me those simple and easily accessible moments of pure being boil down to; going to the cinema, playing sport, sex and dancing. And right now I feel like dancing is the best.
It's a very basic and cheap "other world" you access here, I'm making no grandiose claims. It's not enlightenment, it's not the equivalent of that rejection of and rising above the material world that a monk or philosopher can achieve (apparently) by a lifetime of self study, deprivation and so on... but given that what I am talking about is almost instantly available to pretty much anyone at a low price and with almost no demands (in terms of money or time or effort etc) made of the person seeking this escape, it's not bad.
And I think that I said that playing sport is another way to this bargain basement version of nirvana. For the hour you're chasing that ball around you're only in that moment, all else is gone.
But I didn't mention dancing, and I should have done cos that's the other obvious one. Maybe the main one. That's what I was trying to get at in the Neon Screams thread - all the claims he makes (in the intro I mean) may be true and it may very well be that dance music is dead and that the new paradigm is autotune and vocal fx and so on and so forth. But, and it's a big but for me, this new paradigm comes without this built in thing which takes you to a budget version of transcendental contentment... cheapo paradise.
Cos those things I listed above are really the only paradises I'm ever likely to get into it, and so being locked out of - or in fact having to face the idea that The Future has completely removed - one of the extant types is not something I'll accept until I absolutely have to. And when I do I won't pretend to like it.
For the sake of completeness I should probably also mention sex as one of the other times where you can completely become in the moment like this. Perhaps there are some things I've forgotten, perhaps other people have other things that I don't, maybe some people - better people than I am - have trained themselves, or simply instinctively always knew how, to be in that moment all the time. But for me those simple and easily accessible moments of pure being boil down to; going to the cinema, playing sport, sex and dancing. And right now I feel like dancing is the best.
Last edited:
sex is pretty boring though. not like dropping 15 tabs of acid, you just bang until a bit of runny ejaculate comes out, but it's really not transcendent. One can easily not moan and remain totally impassive when having an orgasm if one is from London, it's really no big deal.
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Wirehead (science fiction) - Wikipedia
other_life
bioconfused
i saw you posting about mouse on mars on twitter, third
i listened to an ~8 minute live joint of theirs once because someone in the Shallow Rewards circuit posted it and was surprised with how much it dovetailed with exactly the kind of improvised electronic ~rock~ and drone that i bang on about (even though it definitely had, like, a techstep rhythm to it). it reminded me of a wilder autechre. i probably even had the same train of thought that i'd unfairly written them off as 'indietronica', they were in my parents' cd books as a wee.
i have a terrible attention span but i should get more into them.
i listened to an ~8 minute live joint of theirs once because someone in the Shallow Rewards circuit posted it and was surprised with how much it dovetailed with exactly the kind of improvised electronic ~rock~ and drone that i bang on about (even though it definitely had, like, a techstep rhythm to it). it reminded me of a wilder autechre. i probably even had the same train of thought that i'd unfairly written them off as 'indietronica', they were in my parents' cd books as a wee.
i have a terrible attention span but i should get more into them.
other_life
bioconfused
from moomins
IdleRich
IdleRich
A lot of films are boring too. And sometimes you play shit at football and you get dicked on or sent off or whatever. I'm not exactly claiming these things are good exactly, or not necessarily so. I'm just saying they are moments where you can get totally caught up and taken out of yourself and can rest your mind. And this is a very valuable thing to me. Maybe not to everyone, I dunno.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Ah, I have only the vaguest of memories of Moomins, I guess I never watched it properly.
IdleRich
IdleRich
I might be talking total bollocks of course.
For me, there was a moment when I suddenly thought about how while playing sport my mind sort of switches off and I realised it was the same in a few other situations. And as I realised that consciously, I immediately understood that I had always known it on another level... and from there I assumed it was universal and everyone would be nodding along in agreement, but perhaps that was a mistake, perhaps everyone is shaking their head sadly, disappointedly even, saying to themselves "now what's he wittering on about... ah who gives a fuck anyway".
IdleRich
IdleRich
Yeah you do have to ration pretty much everything or you get too used to it.
Of course a lot of things are just bad for you if you do them too often, but beyond that most things you can get bored of or accustomed to.
I've definitely said this before but this is both a strength and weakness of humanity. The eg I used before was Liam Gallagher so let's stick with it; for 25 years or whatever he's yer average bloke - was he a brickie or something? - limited amount of money, dreams about rockstar superstardom, money, models, marching powder and so on. Then one day they have a hit there's a hint the dream might really happen, a few incredibly exciting months as it comes together, it looks as though it really might happen... it does!
And then a few months or maybe even a year of walking on air, but soon, he's used to it. He doesn't wake-up every morning and punch the air shouting yes I've done it, all my dreams have come true oh my fucking god yeah. More likely he just wakes as Liam Gallagher rockstar, totally used to it, moaning cos he's run out of bogroll or whatever.
And that's totally obvious I suppose, but imagine that he could preserve that feeling of excitement, wake up every day vividly conscious that his life has magically changed in the best imaginable way. Why shouldn't that be possible?
I guess the other side of this is that as a result people can survive and adjust to huge reverses and decreases in their standards of living.
Last edited:
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Hedonic treadmill - Wikipedia
william_kent
Well-known member
that's some hardcore Moomin knowledge! I've posed for a photo with "Sniff" at the Moomin theme park in Japan, but I still had to check the wiki to find out that the Muddler is Sniff's dad.. respect! I'm humbled...