Thursday 3 March 2011

Enter the darkness

Among other things I like heavy drum n bass, dark breakcore and fucked up noise. If you are at a party, stood in front of a big black stack of speakers, surely you want to hear the filthiest, sonically interesting shit the DJ can throw at you.

Panacea - Reality



In 'Running on Empty' Mark Fisher worries that "cultural resources [are] running out in the same way as natural resources are." This statement seems to say more about Fisher's slightly neurotic worldview than anything else (check out his book Capitalist Realism for a hand-wringing realisation that oh no, capitalism is really insidious nowadays ).

Of course it's fashionable to say things are getting worse and perhaps they are politically but music evolves constantly, in a series of cycles and I see no reason to fear that our cultural productivity is drying up. The underground doesn't stop.

It just always needs new blood.

Venetian Snares - Winnipeg Is A Dogshit Dildo



Fisher expands his point with the comment that "The current decade, however, has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration." I think he's confusing the personal and the political here - we all slow down as we age and like any old DJ I tend to loiter on the dancefloor thinking about how much better I'd play. In fact I remember interviewing the programming brains who hooked up with Richard Fearless for Death in Vegas (it was at the Blue Note in Hoxton, so it was indeed that long ago) and him stating something very similar about how he couldn't be bothered to go out anymore becuase he'd always feel he could do it better. I didn't really get him then but now i do. Just getting old, innit.

The only way we can talk about deceleration is in speed, since all this grime / dubstep / whatever the fuck skrillex is making is very very slow. But if you care to look, there's still plenty of stuff going on in the fields of breakcore and speedcore.

This isn't where the money is. And the people making extreme music don't add lyrics saying it's "not about the money" when really it is [yeah that's a sideswipe right there]. They aren't selling out because their music has a certain politics of self-expression to it that any mainstream style simply lacks.

A friend who has a sound system told me at the last party that he really likes the meshing together of breakcore and speedcore, to the point where "you don't know how to dance any more."

Commercialise that! Or this:

Depizgator - Tratataboomterere

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