the (digital) hardcore continuum - no, seriously
- Thread starter padraig (u.s.)
- Start date
0bleak
Well-known member
yeah, it's good. although I prefer his techstep as that is where his too teutonic and funkless to be jungle tendancies excel.
In the mid 00s there was a movement called trance n bass but it didn't at all sound like this kind of dribbling euro acid.
That's a mad album cover
dilbert1
Well-known member
dilbert1
Well-known member
Looks like @thirdform’s precious Scud did production on a couple of the tracks, but Carl Crack’s contribution takes the cake for me
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
One of the worst things I've ever heard, but then I've not explored this thread yet
anyway I don't think Scud is precious @dilbert1 - I just think he understands the discipline of urban music in a way people like Empire, De Babylon, etc don't.
I read an interview with him where he said he wanted to turn the ultra-high-fructus euphoria of 91-92 populist rave into just nutter music, and I think he is successful at that. Whereas the others are too beholden to basicbitch liberal narko punk ideology. Panacea does get it though yes, as do the rest of the position chrome possee. But probably as they started off with techstep.
i find it ironic you are championing these guys though given you hate online n64 anime jungle given that its the exact same impulse to refuse to confront the truly dangerous and sexy, just inverted for the serine glide of the digital screen.
I read an interview with him where he said he wanted to turn the ultra-high-fructus euphoria of 91-92 populist rave into just nutter music, and I think he is successful at that. Whereas the others are too beholden to basicbitch liberal narko punk ideology. Panacea does get it though yes, as do the rest of the position chrome possee. But probably as they started off with techstep.
i find it ironic you are championing these guys though given you hate online n64 anime jungle given that its the exact same impulse to refuse to confront the truly dangerous and sexy, just inverted for the serine glide of the digital screen.
dilbert1
Well-known member
@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.
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.
0bleak
Well-known member
De Babalon isn't trying to produce the same music as Scud, though.
As for Empire, he has his good moments, but there is too much to wade through.
dilbert1
Well-known member
Oh no you didn’t!
dilbert1
Well-known member
But this is the part I like! Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not an ideological purist, and I don’t think of politics and aesthetics on the same register. I don’t need to approve of anyone’s thoughts to try and explore and enjoy this music and think about what their vision was, or “champion” something to see value in it.
Now, this does deserve to be called liberal, since its ‘committed art’ and expressing a certain (post-)political petit-bourgeois radlib attitude. Frankly its a politics I particularly despise because of my personal proximity to late punk subculture. But expressing a politics explicitly in art is the gaudy thing, no matter if its bohemian black bloc brain fog or scientific council communism. I don’t go to art for good politics, and bad politics can coincide with great art.
As for the comparison with anime video game jungle, simply lazy smear.
DHR was contemporaneous with jungle/early dnb’s heyday, was nationally distinct, and fused the music they were importing with their own sensibility, birthing a whole new (if regrettable) style of music, breakcore.
The latter online stuff is a nostalgic-amnesic, internet-enabled recapitulation of ambient jungle, misrecognizing itself as breakcore and misrecognizing jungle as the provenance of mass entertainment and corporate IP.