@thirdform its not jungle and its not dance music and its not passing itself off as that like maybe Empire and de Babalon might. Shizuo and Bomb20 are something else, its very aesthetic and intellectual, closer to the ethos of noise music and sound art, like the very early industrial music. Oppositional, (anti)artistic, extremist and juvenile like punk, but more self-reflexive and self-critical, more formally open and, having ‘learned’ from dance and electronic music, distanced from rock/pop (what ATR supposedly wanted to be but ended up seamlessly in the rockstar trap).
Like how Shizuo is playing with the riffs in sampling a punk song on “Punks,” there’s something about the comical excess and futility of the rebellious gesture as it breaks down sonically, becomes strange and liquidates itself in redundant skeletally sequenced rhythms. There is no programming finesse, and no acceding to the regime of standardization, its an explicitly de-skilled approach that I don’t appreciate as a music listener. But its less tunes and more an aesthetic cipher into the degeneration of (radical) politics at the end of the 20th century.
I love jungle and the ascetic, selfless labor of submitting to the dancefloor regime, but these efforts can be appreciated on another register, these guys are like “Oh wow, the English have done something crazy, so now that’s happened and has to be reckoned with. Obviously this is an essential point of reference as the most advanced music, but a result of (and even transcending) this technical achievement is the projection of a potent youthful energy and spirit of rebellion, new homespun means of cultural combat that prove more fierce than what we’re being fed from above. We’re not English, we can’t nor would we want to keep up or compete on that terrain, but we can and will seize on some of that energy, opportunistically, parasitically, like a sampler, and channel it for our own differently inflected projects.”
They knew what ‘real jungle’ was, just listen to Carl Crack’s ‘Lion MC’ mixtape, impeccable taste. They just had other more violent less musical plans.