Energy Flash

2009-12-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

alternative design for energy flash done by graphic designer joe street

i prefer this to the actual cover

2009-12-09T10:07:00.000-08:00

via blog to the old skool

a late 1994 BBC 2 documentary on jungle!

part one
part two
part three

what's more, it's a masterclass in rockist ideology virtually from start to finish

not from the doc-makers or presenters, oh no

from the djs, producers, and scene-makers

2009-12-08T13:53:00.000-08:00

2009-12-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

2009-11-25T17:55:00.001-08:00

Knowledge interview from earlier in the year about the hardcore continuum with me plus Martin 'Blackdown' Clark, Gabriel 'Heatwave' Myddleton and MC Sway

2009-11-03T12:18:00.000-08:00

RENEGADE ACADEMIA: THE Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
director's cut of unpublished feature for Lingua Franca, 1999; short remix appeared in Springerin, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Smack in the middle of the United Kingdom, Leamington Spa is like a less picturesque Bath--genteel, sedate, irredeemably English in a Masterpiece Theater sort of way. But the town has darker undercurrents: Aleister Crowley was born here in 1875, and today it's home to a mysterious entity called Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. Now in its third year of existence, CCRU's institutional status is, to say the least, disputed. Which is why its membership is currently holed up in an office on The Parade (Leamington's main street), rather than working c/o the Philosophy Department of Warwick University a few miles away, as was the case the last academic year.

Since my knowledge of CCRU stems from its disorientating textual output--the journal Abstract Culture--plus a few wilfully opaque email communiques, I've scant idea what I'll encounter after pressing the button marked 'Central Computer'. Inside CCRU's top-floor HQ above The Body Shop, I find three women and four men in their mid to late twenties, who all look reassuringly normal. The walls, though, are covered with peculiar diagrams and charts that hint at the breadth and bizareness of the unit's research.

But before I can enquire further, I'm entreated to sit in the middle of three ghettoblasters. CCRU have prepared a re-enactment of a performance-cum-reading given at their Virotechnics conference in October 1997. The first cassette-player issues a looped cycle of words that resembles an incantation or spell. From the second machine comes a text recited in a baleful deadpan by a female American voice--not a presentation but a sort of prose-poem, full of imagery of "swarmachines" and "strobing centipede flutters". The third ghettoblaster emits what could either be Stockhausen-style electroacoustic composition or the pizzicato, mandible-clicking music of the insect world. Later, I find out it's a human voice that's been synthetically processed, with all the vowels removed to leave just consonants and fricatives.

Even without the back-projected video-imagery that usually accompanies CCRU audio, the piece is an impressively mesmeric example of what the unit are aiming for--an ultra-vivid amalgam of text, sound, and visuals designed to "libidinise" that most juiceless of academic events, the lecture. CCRU try to pull off the same trick on the printed page. Their "theory-fiction" is studded with neologisms, delirious with dystopian cyberpunk imagery, and boasts an extravagantly high concentration of ideas per sentence. Bearing the same distillate relation to its sources (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Paul Virilio,William Gibson) that crack does to cocaine, CCRU-text offers an almighty theory-rush.

What CCRU are striving to achieve is a kind of nomadic thought that--to use the Deleuzian term-- "deterritorializes" itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism). It's a project of monstrous ambition. And that's before you take into account the the most daring deterritorialisation of all--crossing the thin line between reason and unreason. But as they say, later for that.

Founded in the 1960s, Warwick rapidly became the epitome of a modern university.
Through the early to mid Seventies, the university was rife with militancy--not just student unrest, but discontent amongst the staff (70 percent of whom at one point gave a vote of no confidence in the Vice Chancellor). Socialist historian E.P.Thompson was a "thorn in the side of the adminstiration", recalls one Warwick veteran, and eventually left because he wasn't given the Labour History Unit he was promised. At the same time, Warwick was ahead of its time in terms of seeking corporate funding, such that by the mid-Eighties Margaret Thatcher could describe it as her favourite university. "Warwick University Inc." (as E.P. Thompson titled a book) is financially buoyant compared with other British universities, and well prepared for any future withdrawal of government funding that may be up the current Labour administration's sleeve.

Warwick also has a very modern Philosophy Department. It is Britain's largest graduate school in philosophy outside Oxford, with about 120 postgraduate and masters students, and a similar number of undergraduates. The majority are lured by the department's reputation as the country's leading center for Continental Philosophy. Events like the October 1997 "DeleuzeGuattari and Matter" seminar and "Going Australian", a February 1988 conference devoted to the new school of Australian feminist philosophy, indicate the kind of work going on at Warwick. It is to this cutting edge Philosophy Department to which CCRU was linked in a fatally ambigous fashion.

In a typically gnomic e-mail, CCRU outlined its history. "Ccru retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. ...Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers +.... At degree-O Ccru is the name of a door in the Warwick University Philosphy Department. Here it is now officially said that Ccru does not, has not, and will never exist'. " CCRU sees itself as the academic equivalent of Kurtz, the general in Apocalypse Now who used unorthodox methods to achieve superior results than the tradition-bound US military. CCRU claim that its frenzied interdisciplinary activity embarrassed the Philosphy Dept, resulting in the termination of the unit. Just as Kurtz disappeared "up river" into the Vietnamese jungle, the CCRU have strategically withdrawn to their operational base above the Body Shop.

"There is no conspiracy, it's so pedestrian," insists Professor Andrew Benjamin, Director of Graduate Studies at Warwick's Philosophy Department. Benjamin is a well-respected post-structuralist scholar with numerous books to his name. As editor of the Warwick Studies in Philosophy (the best-selling Continental Philosophy series in the English language), he's responsible for anthologies like The Difference Engineer: Deleuze & Philosophy Audibly beaming with pride, the Australia-born Benjamin talks up Warwick as "an incredibly fabulous philosphy dept where Deleuzians lie down with Derrideans, and even lie down with analytic philosphers. Basically, there isn't any postmodern crap done here, it's quite rigorous stuff."

According to Benjamin, CCRU was originally set up for Dr Sadie Plant, freshly recruited from Birmingham University to be a Research Fellow attached to Warwick's Faculty of Social Science. But the unit--organised around her interests in cyber-theory and involving a number of postgraduate students she'd brought over from Birmingham--was initially tied to the Philosophy Department, owing to Plant's particular interests, like Deleuze & Guattari. The plan was for the unit to become an independent, freestanding entity, with the postgrads registered as CCRU rather than philosophy students. But Dr Plant unexpectedly quit her job March 1997, before the paperwork was completed. The university decided to wind CCRU down, with Plant's main ally at Warwick, Nick Land, taking over her role as Director for the unit's final year of official existence.

But when Benjamin elaborates on the procedural intricacies, it's easy to empathise with CCRU's paranoia. "See, there isn't such a thing as the CCRU," he insists. "Within the university system you can set up a thing called a center for research, then you take the planned center to various committees and put it through this system in whose terms that center would be legitimised, have an external committee overseeing standards, et cetera. Because Sadie left early, that procedure didn't happen. Officially, you would then have to say that CCRU didn't ever exist. There is, however, an office about 50 metres down the corridor from me with CCRU on the door, there's a group of students who meet there to have seminars, and to that extent, it it is a thriving entity. Informally, it did exist, still does, lots of things go on under its aegis. But that office will disappear at the end of the year. A number of students thought there was a conspiracy, there's a lot of gossip and carry-on, but the fact is--had Sadie decided to pursue an academic career, CCRU would have been a viable, ongoing entity."

Thin as rake in her brown leather jacket, dragging on a Camel Light, Sadie Plant looks every bit the cyberpunkette. Currently, she's the most famous "media academic" in Britain--writing for quality newspapers, pontificating on the famous BBC Radio programme "Start The Week" (a sort of highbrow Howard Stern) alongside Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. Plant's elevation to intellectual celebrity status began well before the late 1997 publication of her acclaimed Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. Although she's far from happy with the marketing of Zeros as a Nineties cyberfeminist equivalent to The Female Eunuch, there are striking parallels between Plant and Germaine Greer (who taught at Warwick's English department before quitting to write Eunuch). "When I went to see the Vice Chancellor about leaving, he said 'I don't believe it, Germaine Greer pulled this on us as well'", says Plant, flashing her buck-toothed smile.

We're in a cafe in Birmingham, the industrial Midlands metroplis where Plant grew up and where she returned after quitting Warwick.The way Sadie tells it, she never really wanted to be an academic in the first place, but just fell into a university career. After transforming her Manchester University philosophy PhD on Situationism into The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International In A Postmodern Age, Plant accepted a Lecturer's position at Birmingham University's Department of Cultural Studies. Back in the Seventies, when it was called Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies, the department was a vibrant place, home of the "resistance through rituals" school of neo-Gramscian subcultural theory (Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, et al). But the CCCS spirit was long gone by the time Plant arrived. The only redeeming aspect was the undergraduate and graduate students, who shared Plant's enthusiasm for rave culture and digital technology.

Plant was on the verge of quitting academia for good, when the opportunity of a Research Fellowship at Warwick presented itself in 1995. Warwick was already a cyber-theory hotbed, what with its 1994 and '95 Virtual Futures conferences. There were strong alliances between like-minds at Birmingham and Warwick: the VF events had involved some of Plant's Birmingham proteges (who appeared at VF95 in their proto-CCRU incarnation Switch), while Plant and Nick Land had actually been creative-and-sexual partners for a couple of years and remained close. With the promise of her very own research center dangled before her, Plant decided to give academia one last shot, and brought many of her Birmingham students with her to form CCRU.

For the first year of its existence, 1995/1996, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was characterised by "a frantic atmosphere" of interdisciplinary excitement, involving reading groups, lectures series, research-sharing sessions, seminars like 1996's Afro-Futures, and the confrontational journal ****Collapse. There was an exhilirating sense of being at the heart of something new. This first phase of the unit's life climaxed with Virtual Futures 96: Datableed, which was wholly organised by the CCRU (the first two VF's had been put together by postgraduates attached to Professor Benjamin's Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature). Advertised as "an antidisciplinary event" aiming "to explore the smearing of previously discrete cultural spheres", VF96 alternated DJ sessions with sound-and-vision enhanced talks by a diverse range of guests--theorist Manuel De Landa, journalists Steve Beard and Mark Sinker, SF writer Pat Cadigan, and cyberfeminist Linda Dement, to name just a handful.

By the second year of its existence, tensions emerged between the CCRU-virus and its host, the Philosophy Department. Warwick had expected something closer to traditional notions of cyberculture: Internet studies, basically. But what actually took shape reflected Plant and Land's interest in hooking up cybernetics in the original Norbert Wiener sense (information flows, dissolving the difference between living and non-living systems) to compatible elements of Deleuze & Guattari (schizo-analysis, machinic desire, the biomechanical continuum of material reality), plus chaos, complexity and connection theory. "Cyber", as CCRU conceived it, also connoted "cyberpunk": the theory-fiction goal of academic writing that rivalled the hallucinatory rush you got from Neuromancer and Blade Runner.

Warwick clearly got more than it bargained for. Benjamin admits to having "mixed feelings about what Sadie and Nick do", professes to be mystified by "the meaningless term" that is cyber-theory, and keenly stresses the fact that CCRU and the Philosophy Department "are quite separate things". One of Benjamin's administrative colleagues notes drily that "very little" CCRU work "was published in philosophy journals." For her part, Sadie Plant emphasises the practical problems caused by the CCRU students' interdisciplinary approach, like "the need for external examiners.... It would have suited us to be able to just sweep all that away, but it's not so easy."

CCRU are less diplomatic, railing against "disciplinary templates" that obstruct "real research". "You're not allowed to follow these things where they want to go," says Mark Fisher, a cleancut young man who speaks with an evangelical urgency and agitated hand gestures. "You're not allowed to find anything out.... Because who would mark it?!". He cites the example of the PhD work of CCRU's Suzanne Livingston, which was challenged by one Philosophy Department member on the grounds--"what's neurology got to do with capitalism?".

After Plant left, CCRU embarked upon a second phase of trying "to occupy the university" and create a "non-disciplinary" atmosphere by forging links with postgraduates in the Mathematics and Science departments. But this petered out "with no real engagement". The final breaking point came with the Fall '97 Virotechnics conference, which CCRU decided to hold off campus at a media conference center in Wolverhampton, 35 miles from Warwick. According to CCRU, Nick Land effectively had to resign his lecturer's job in order to attend Virotechnics. "Nick had to cancel a simultaneously scheduled seminar at the university, hastily set up as an opportunity for him to explain the increasingly perplexing direction of CCRU's research", explains CCRU's Steve Goodman. Every couple of years, the staff of university departments make an assessment of the publications the department has produced. Since the kind of work Land and his proteges were producing was not considered philosophy, and therefore not counted in any departmental assessment, Land felt obliged to resign, effective the end of the academic year.

Virotechnics was the culmination of the unit's second-phase attempt "to rigorise a kind of diagrammatic study programme in the university," says Land, referring to CCRU's alloy of science and philosphy. "That was really not acceptable, it's fair to say, to the Philosophy Department. So the third phase is take that programme outside the university." While CCRU members continue to finish their PhD's and teach, they regard these activities as " lower-order intensity"; the real action takes place at the Leamington HQ. "There's nothing more unproductive than engaging in this lifelong struggle to get intensity into the academy," says an exasperated Fisher. "It's hopeless and thankless." He maintains that the Philosophy Dept's attitude to CCRU ranges from "outright hostile" to "embarassment", but the general strategy "is to wait for it to die rather than to actively kill it."

Nick Land is the kind of "vortical machine" (to use a fave CCRU trope) around which swirl all manner of outlandish and possibly apocryphal stories. Didya hear about the phase Nick went through only talking in numbers? Or the time he was taken over by three distinct entities? True or not, there's no deying the fact that, as Lecturer in Continental Philosophy, Dr Land has been a "strange attractor" luring students to Warwick purely through his personal reputation. A colleague who sat in on Land classes in the early Nineties remembers both his "impressive pedagogic commitment" and his charisma. "Despite his diffident, tentative way of suggesting things, Nick had a real presence.... It was conspicuous that his gang of groupies did fall apart during his sabbatical term."

The Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Land's sole book-length publication to date, is a remarkable if deranged mix of prose-poem, spiritual autobiography and rigorous explication of the implications of Bataille's thought (if taken seriously, comparable to "syphilis of the mind"). Prefiguring CCRU's struggles with university bureaucracy, the book drips with anti-academic bile, occasionally spilling over into flagellating self-disgust. Philosophy itself is castigated as "the excruciation of libido". Thirst For Annihilation's polymathically perverse range of learning (thermodynamics, cyclone formation, the Menger sponge), and phrases like "vortex of vulvo-cosmic dissolution" that blend scientific language with darkside mysticism, anticipate the CCRU's work.

In the early Nineties, Land was wont to describe himself as a "professor of delirial engineering", recalls the colleague. He also went through a "glorious phase in which he offered millenial prophecies for the next global meltdown in world markets, a deduction based on past such cycles. It rather smacked of an infatuation with the power of numbers."

As much chaos magician as chaos theorist, Land is said to be thoroughly versed in the gamult of occult knowledge and parapsychology: the I Ching, Current 93 (Aleister Crowley's kundalini-like energy force), Kabbalist numerology, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and the eschatological cosmology of Terence McKenna (a neo-hippy evangelist for plant-based hallucinogens like psilocybin and DMT). Much of CCRU's thought seems to emanate from an uncanny interzone between science and superstition. (Both of which appeal to rigorous method, of course.)

After reading Thirst For Annihilation's valedictory salute to "the saints, shamans, werewolves, vampires, and lunatics with whom I have communed,", and his self-description in ***Collapse as "a palsied mantis constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry, stalking the crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all humanism", I expected Land to be an emaciated and eldritch figure. Stick insect thin, he is. But Land's gentle voice and impishly twinkling eyes make him closer to a playgroup leader than a dark magus. He and the CCRU crew ply me with endless cups of tea while explaining the curious diagrams on the walls.

There's a chart that synthesises Kabbalah's Tree of Life with H.P. Lovecraft, and is related to a magickal system called tangential tantra. "Instead of summoning or invoking, you're setting up a magical event that will be cut across from the forces of the Outside, so unanticipated events will happen," explains Land. Another poster--influenced by J.G. Ballard's concept of "deep time" as outlined in his catastrophe novel The Drowned World--depicts a cross section of the human spine, with different vertebrae aligned to different phases of human prehistory. And there's a chart that divides human history into a series of periods--"the primitive socius, the despotic state, capitalism" --culminating in a post-human phase named "Unuttera", which I learn refers to "The Entity or polytendriled abomination" at the End of Time.

The most recent diagram represents the culmination of CCRU's forays into the occult numerological techniques of digital reduction and triangular numbering. A spiral bisected by a number scale that descends from 9 to one, the diagram looks rather ordinary. But as CCRU explain its implications to me at considerable length (something to do with allowing them to understand "concepts as number systems) it becomes clear they sincerely believe it contains something on a par with the secret of the universe. The 9-spiral mandala--the Barker Scale, they call it--is the end-product of CCRU's determination to abandon "the fuzziness of discursive articulation" (philosophy) and move into "a much crisper, more rigorous and productive diagrammatic style", says Land. ("Crisp and rigorous" is one of his favourite phrases, despite the stress it puts on his weak 'R').

The diagram was a gift from "Professor Barker". Inspired by Professor Challenger--the Conan-Doyle anti-hero reinvented by Deleuze & Guattari in "The Geology of Morals" section of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia--Barker appears to be a sort of imaginary mentor who hips the CCRU to various cosmic secrets. "But we'd be a bit reluctant to say 'imaginary' now, wouldn't we?," cautions Land with a mischievous glint in his eye. "We've learned as much--well, vastly more from Professor Barker --than supposedly 'real' pedagogues!". As CCRU's "avatar", Barker has revealed the "Geo-Cosmic Theory of Trauma". Following the materialist lead of Deleuze & Guattari, human culture is analysed as just another set of strata on a geocosmic continuum. From the chemistry of metals to the non-linear dynamics of the ocean, from the cycles of capitalism to the hyper-syncopated breakbeat rhythms of jungle, the cosmos is an "unfolding traumascape" governed by self-similar patterns and fundamental processes that recur on every scale.

Libidinising "flows" and investing them with an intrinsically subversive power,
Deleuze & Guattari have been criticised as incorrigible Romantics. CCRU develop this element of A Thousand Plateaus into a kind of mystic-materialism. Discussing what CCRU call "Gothic Materialism" ("ferro-vampiric" cultural activity which flirts with the inorganic and walks the "flatline" between life and death), Anna Greenspan talks about how "the core of the earth is made of iron, and blood contains iron", about how the goal is to "hook up with the Earth's metal plasma core, which is the Body-Without-Organs". Body-without-Organs (B-w-O) is the Deleuzian utopia, an inchoate flux of deterritorialised energy; Greenspan says they take the B-w-O as "an ethical injunction", a supreme goal.

^^^^^^^^^^^

O[rphan] D[frift>] also talk about "metal in the body" and seeking the B-w-O. Another Land-influenced theory-fiction collective, O[rphan] D[frift>] are CRRU's prime allies: they performed at VF96 and are staging an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London's Beaconsfield Arts Centre, October of this year. Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, the core of OD, originally met as Fine Art students at the prestigious-but-conservative Royal College, where their ideas about creating a form of multimedia-based synaesthetic terrorism oriented around "schizoid thinking", pre-linguistic autistic states and man-machine interfaces proved way too radical. Formed in late 1994, OD was shaped by two mindblowing experiences: "experimentation with drugs and techno", and a 1993 encounter with Nick Land.

"Before CCRU started at Warwick, Nick latched onto us very intensively for a while," says Roberts. "We fed him image experience, tactile readings of the stuff he was buried in theoretically. He wanted his writing to kick in a much more experiential way. For us, there was something wonderful about having a man you could ring up and ask: 'what's radiation?', 'what's a black hole?'".

OD's collective debut was a multimedia installation at London's Cabinet Gallery. What began as a catalogue for the show escalated into an astonishing 437 page book, Cyberpositive. Like Plant's Zeros + Ones, Cyberpositive is a swarm-text of sampled writings that aren't attributed in the text. But where Plant offers footnotes; OD merely list the "asked" and "un-asked" contributors at the end. Published in 1995, Cyberpositive serves as a sort of canon-defining primer for the CCRU intellectual universe, placing SF and cyberpunk writers on the same level as post-structuralist theorists. "We treat Burroughs as clearly as important a thinker as any notional theorist," says Nick Land, "At the same time, every great philosopher is producing an important fiction. Marx is obviously a science fiction writer." For her part, Sadie Plant regards the Eighties cyberpunk novelists like Gibson and Cadigan as "more reliable witnesses", precisely because, unlike theorists, "they don't have an axe to grind".

The most highly-charged passages in Cyberpositive are the hefty chunks of Plant/Land writing and Roberts's and Mukherjee's evocations of the techno-rave-Ecstasy-LSD experience. "I used to write a lot in clubs, which probably looked really pretentious," recalls Roberts. "Tracing what's happening in all the different sound channels and what they're doing spatially and physically to you". The language veers from masochistic mortification of the flesh ("deep hurting techno", "the meat is learning to know loss") to imagery influenced by voodoo and shamanic possession ("white darkness", "the fog of absolute proximity", "psyclone", "beautiful fear"). "It's trying to process the dissassembling of the self," says Roberts. "Maybe what you're calling abject, we'd call melting. The violence of the sounds in techno, it's like you're being turned inside out, smeared, penetrated."

Despite her facial piercing and techno-pagan accoutrements, Roberts has a sort of burned-out, aristocratic air that suggests Marianne Faithfull circa 1969. A half-smile flickering on her lips, as if she's privy to some kosmik joke, Roberts speaks in a faded falter--as though some unutterably alien zone of posthuman consciousness hasn't quite relinquished its hold. Which may be a pretty accurate description of the state of play. If CCRU have something of a cultic air about them, OD go a lot further. Combining Mayan cosmology with ideas about Artificial Intelligence, they sem to believe that humanity will soon abandon the "meat" of incarnate existence and become pure spirit. Throughout Cyberpositive there's the recurrent exhortation "we must change for the machines"; while the book ends with the declaration--"human viewpoint redundant."

Not only do OD reckon Charles Manson had some good ideas, their East London HQ contains several cages of snakes--proof of their determination to get really serious about voodoo rites. The obsession was sparked by Gibson's Count Zero, in which cyberspace has spontaneously generated entities equivalent to the loa (the spirit-gods of voudun cosmology). Throughout the interview, a shaven-headed OD member called Rich sits with baby boa constrictors wrapped around his body. His other contribution to the evening is to make some sandwiches--daintily quartered, but containing peanut butter mixed with sardines. "Too radical for me", I confess after one nibble. Rich's eyes light up triumphantly: Mind-Game Over.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

"Cyberpositive" was originally the title of an essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land. First aired at the 1992 drug culture symposium Pharmakon, "Cyberpositive" was a gauntlet thrown down at the Left-wing orthodoxies that still dominate British academia. The term "cyberpositive" was a twist on Norbert Wierner's ideas of "negative feedback" (homeostasis), and "positive feedback" (runaway tendencies, vicious circles). Where the conservative Wiener valorized "negative feedback", Plant/Land re-positivized positive feedback--specifically,: the tendency of market forces to generate disorder and destabilise control structures.

"It was pretty obvious that a theoretically Left-leaning critique could be maintained quite happily but it wasn't ever going to get anywhere," says Plant. "If there was going to be scope for any kind of....not 'resistance', but any kind of discrepancy in the global consensus, then it was going to have to come from somewhere else." That elsewhere was certain passages in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze & Guattari suggest that, in Plant's words, "you don't try and slow things down, you encourage them to go fast as possible. Which was interestingly connected to Marx's ideas about capitalism sweeping away the past. So we got into this stance of 'oh well, let it sweep away! Maybe it should sweep away faster'." Other crucial influences were neo-Deleuzian theorist Manuel De Landa's idea of "capitalism as the system of antimarkets", and, says Plant, historian-of-everyday-life Fernand Braudel's conception of capitalism as "an amalgam of would-be free market forces and state/ corporate/centralised control functions. So there isn't really any such thing called 'capitalism', it's just a coincidence of those two really extreme and opposed tendencies."

Plant and the CCRU enthuse about bottom-up, grass-roots, self-organising activity: street markets, "the frontier zones of capitalism", what De Landa calls "meshwork", as opposed to corporate, top-down capitalism. It all sounds quite jovial, the way they describe it now--a bustling bazaar culture of trade and "cutting deals". But "Cyberpositive" actually reads like a nihilistic paean to the "cyberpathology of markets", celebrating capitalism as "a viral contagion" and declaring "everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind". In Nick Land solo essays like "Machinic Desire" and "Meltdown", the tone of morbid glee is intensified to an apocalyptic pitch. There seems to be a perverse and literally anti-humanist identification with the "dark will" of capital and technology, as it "rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities". In "Meltdown", Land declares: "Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag".

This gloating delight in capital's deterritorialising virulence is the CCRU's reaction to the stuffy complacency of Left-wing academic thought; a sort of rubbing salt in the wounds (as when Land jibes at the "senile spectre" of Socialism, an allusion to The Communist Manifesto). "There's definitely a strong alliance in the academy between anti-market ideas and completely schleroticised, institutionalised thought," says Mark Fisher. "Marx has been outdated by cybernetic theory. It's obvious that capitalism isn't going to be brought down by its contradictions. Nothing ever died of contradictions!". Exulting in capitalism's permanent "crisis mode", CCRU believe in the strategic application of pressure to accelerate the tendencies towards chaos. The real struggle, says Fisher in fluent Deleuzian, is within capitalism and between "homogenisation processes and nomadic distribution.".

What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but "the future coming together". Where Land gives this idea a millenial spin (he's described capitalism as "an invasion from the future", a virus retrochronically triggered by some kind of artificial intelligence to create the conditions for its own assembling--an idea that reads like it was spawned by watching Terminator on acid), Plant's attitude is more humanely ambivalent. In the mid-Eighties, for instance, she supported the Coal Miner's strike, a revolt against Thatcherite modernising policies and an attempt to preserve a traditional working class culture. Since then, she has come to believe that the privatisation and anti-welfare policies pursued by the Conservative goverment in the 1980s really did constitute "a revolution". She talks approvingly of the end of "the dependency culture", arguing that this helped catalyse the Nineties upsurge of British pop culture, fashion and art.

"Obviously it is painful for any particular community that ends up on the scrapheap of history", Plant says, looking appropriately pained. "But I've got a far more evolutionary view of history these days. Just as particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human cultures". In the face of this "reality", she argues, the British Left is comparable with the Church of England: "Every so often it comes out and makes some moral statement about how terrible things are, but what's it going to do about it? Nothing."

Many Left-wing theorists would retaliate by arguing that the Plant/Land/CCRU pro-market stance is merely an intellectual accomodation to "realities" imposed by top-down corporate forces; that by mapping techniques appropriate for natural phenonema (chaos theory, non-linear dynamics) onto capitalism, they've effectively naturalized the free market, resulting in a kind of post-Deleuzian version of Social Darwinism. Judith Williamson--Professor of Cultural History at Middlesex University, and writer for the left-leaning newspaper The Guardian--accuses the CCRU of "inevitabilism".

"All these excitingly eroticised ideas about the flows of capital absolve one from morality," she says. "Most of capitalism's flows are deeply pernicious." The trouble with inevitablism is that it removes human agency from the picture, complains Williamson. "But human will is not nothing -- there have been these huge acts of courage and altruism throughout history." As neo-Deleuzians devoutly committed to impersonality, agency is precisely what Plant and the CCRU demote. "Nothing takes the credit--or the blame--for either the runaway tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them," argues Plant in Zeros + Ones. "Political struggles and ideologies have not been incidental to these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo are far too complex to be attributed to attempts to make them happen or hold them back".

Williamson is an old sparring partner with Plant, Land and CCRU, having had
several public fights with them at various academic events. The author of Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture, Williamson belongs to an earlier, Marx-influenced phase of British cultural theory, so the the clash between her and CCRU is partly generational. Recalling a famous spat in the bar of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, she recalls finding it "spooky that Nick Land and all these people spoke as one. You could not get 20 of my postgrad students in a room and have them agree with me. I find that scary--that messianic quality, like they've got the message"...A lot of what they say reminds me of tripping experiences, where you have that feeling that everything coheres and makes sense."

Another Williamson accusation--that CCRU lift ideas from chaos and complexity that describe material process but "apply them in a metaphorical way... as if using a concrete thing for a metaphor makes it not be a metaphor"--would especiallly infuriate CCRU. Metaphor, figurative language, the whole realm of representation and ideology: these are the enemy, as far as CCRU are concerned. "Our analysis is materialist, rather than ideological," says Goodman, "Whether the scale is geological, oceanic, socio-cultural, there are parallels going on at every scale". Despite drawing a lot from post-structuralism's assault upon the sovereign ego, CCRU detest deconstruction, precisely because of its treatment of the text as a cosmology and everything as metaphor. "The only thing that's powerful about books--their ability to plug into other machines outside themselves-- is completely destroyed by treating them as this macro-interiority that spreads over everything," spits Fisher, co-author of the hilarious and coruscating Abstract Culture rant "Pomophobia".

Hungry for intellectual reasons-to-be-cheerful, CCRU simultaneously renounce postmodernism's wan fatalism (the idea that we're at the end of everything) and the guilt-wracked impotence of the Left (Fisher talks, cyborg-style, about the relief of having "the false memory-chip of Socialist authenticity" removed from his brain). In the process, they've jettisoned the concept of "alienation" in both its Marxist and Freudian senses. They speak approvingly of "surplus value", sublimation and commodity-fetishism as creative tendencies. Where "Cyberpositive" noted how how runaway capitalism had accessed "inconceivable alienations", CCRU's collective essay "Swarmachines" goes further and climaxes with the boast: "alienated and loving it".

The idea, says Fisher, comes from a mix-and-blend of Lyotard and Blade Runner--"the proletariat as this synthetic class, of a revolution that's on the side of the synthetic and artificial. The concept of 'alienation' depends on the notion that there's some authentic essence lost through the development of capitalism. But according to Barker's Geo-Cosmic theory of trauma, everything's already synthetic." If reality really is a bio-mechanical continuum, there's no reason to resist capitalism's escalating dynamic of anti-naturalism: addiction to hyper-stimulus, the creation of artificial desires.

Willamson condes that "if there's one thing that's quite endearing about CCRU, it's the search for a kind of optimism.... Today it's very hard to have those sort of Sixties feelings of 'oh God, things are exciting, things can get better, new things can happen'". The mania of CCRU's texts--a mood-blend of euphoric anticipatioin and dystopian dread that Mark Dery called "dysphoria"--is certainly contagious. "A lot of things are exciting, but is it true?," cautions Williamson. "Music is a good parallel--you don't think 'this music explains the universe' just because you finds it charges you up". Again, the CCRU would fervently disagree. "The musical model is really key to us," says Land. "It's absurd to say that music doesn't represent the real and therefore it's an empty metaphor. Every theorist who hasn't a real place for music ends up with one-dimensional melancholia."

Not only do the CCRU derive a lot of their energy from music--specifically, the British rave genre of jungle a/k/a drum & bass--but popular culture is where their ideas seem most persuasive. Right from its late Eighties beginnings, rave culture's motor has been anarcho-capitalist and entrepreneurial: from promoters throwing illegal parties in warehouses and fields, to drug dealing. Even after its co-optation by the record and clubbing industries, rave music's cutting edge comes from the grass-roots: small labels, cottage-industry producers with home studios, specialist record stores, pirate radio.

Sadie Plant attributes these bottom-up economic networks to the end of dependency culture, forcing people "to get real and find some ways of surviving" but also to invent "new forms of collectivity" (the micro-utopian communality of the rave).

As a postgraduate in Manchester, Plant was swept up in that city's legendary 1988-90 rave scene. Currently, she's co-running a jungle club in Birmingham called Kleptomania, for which she creates back-projections involving "video feedback", an "orgasmically beautiful" effect that makes "everything looks like it's come from another world". Plant is also writing about book about the interface between drugs and technology. CCRU has a musical sub-component, Ko-Labs, engaged in making jungle tracks. The unit's latest recruit is Jessica Edwards, a researcher who has no affiliation with Warwick University whatsoever, but who used to be a professional dancer at raves and recently completed an undergraduate thesis entitled "Mapping the Liminal- Pentecostalism, Shamanism and Drum & Bass".

Despite being rave theorists and "sub-bass materialists", CCRU are surprisingly cagey when the topic of drugs is introduced. Acknowledging the cyborgizing, viral usefulness of drugs--as anorganic elements that enter the nervous system and engineer precise changes in consciousness--Land nonetheless resists the "relapse into a biographical narrative". Anna Greenspan talks of the negative "crash-and-burn" syndrome caused by drug abuse, and says the CCRU are more interested in building sustained plateaus of intensity. One outcrop of this is Suzanne Livingston's research into "long term rewiring of perception"--techniques of flash and flicker that restructure the brain, as already used by advertising, MTV, and rave promoters (lights, lazers and strobes).

As well as being galvanised by music, the CCRU are also influenced by the theory-driven leading edge of music journalism. One of their associate members is Kodwo Eshun, contributor to magazines like iD and The Wire and author of the forthcoming More Brilliant Than The Sun, a study of "sonic fiction" in black music from Sun Ra to jungle. He was guest of honour at CCRU's Afro-Futures seminar and gave a talk at VF96. Eshun describes himself and the CCRU as "concept-engineers", as opposed to thinkers. Critique, he argues, is a rhetorical mode that puts the heavy burden of History on your shoulders, whereas the concept-engineer is into speculation. "Most theory contextualises, historicizes and cautions; the concept-engineer uses theory to excite and ignite," Eshun proclaims. Where "thinker" evokes an effete and impotent ivory-tower detachment, "engineer" suggests someone who gets down-and-dirty with the material word (in Deleuzian terms, someone who operates and maintains desiring machines). Like a DJ or jungle producer, the concept-engineer is "a sample-finder": s/he's free to suspend belief in the ultimate truth-value of a theory and simply use the bits that work, in the spirit of Deleuze & Guattari's offering up of A Thousand Plateaus as tool-kit rather than gospel.

^^^^^^^^^^^

"Concept-engineer" is a good tag for the outerzone of "independent researchers" and amateur autodidacts to which CCRU is connected. Renegade theorists like Howard Slater, a Deleuze-freak whose techno-zine Break/Flow brilliantly analyses rave music in terms of "nonconceptual thought" and "impulsional exchanges", and celebrates the techno underground as a rhizomatic, insubordinate, post-media economy. And like Matthew Fuller, a media theorist/activist with a background in anarchist politics and links to the hacker underground. Fuller's CV of cultural dissidence includes flypostering, pirate radio, a non-Internet bulletin board called Fast Breeder, the scabrous freesheet Underground, and a series of anarcho-seminars like "Seizing The Media" dedicated to the theory and praxis of media terrorism. Fuller also put out the anthology Unnatural: Techno-Theory For A Contaminated Culture, which included Plant/Land's "Cyberpositive" and an essay by CCRU member Steve Metcalf.

Discussing his own cyber-theory writings, Fuller talks about dismantling traditional "modes of political address" and developing a sort of post-ideological realpolitik of resistance. A true concept-engineer, he believes in ransacking theory texts for task-specific ideas. "Publishers like Autonomedia and Semiotexte produce material that you don't have to be an academic to get into, so it circulates outside those milieux. When I give presentations at academic events, it's easy to see I'm in a more powerful position than the academics--I can steal all the advantages of their discipline, plus do something else with it that fucks it up totally."

Noting that Deleuze & Guattari are already being institutionalised into "the most dreary, saintly area of discourse", Fuller says he's dedicated to "cracking open those texts again, thinkers who originally opened stuff up to delirium and the irrational. I mix up different linguistic registers and narrative strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the reader, so to speak. In that respect, there's a lot more to be learned from fiction than theory." Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose work-in-progress, Writing On Drugs, includes a fictional component. Plant says she hopes that subsequent books will become "pure fiction".

^^^^^^^^^^^^

"The most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang -- PhD students with attitude!," says Eshun. Loathing the "necrotic side of philosphy, the chewing-over of dead thinkers' entrails", and bored limp by the "delibidinising" atmosphere of seminars, CCRU used to attend academic events, claims Eshun, expressly "in order to disrupt, undermine and ridicule.... They'd get into pitched battles with Derrideans!". Enhancing this picture of intra-academic gang-warfare, two of CCRU's allies from another university once turned up to an event sporting "colors": they'd printed up T-Shirts that mimicked the logo of Dolce & Gabbana, but stood for Deleuze & Guattari!

Weary of such sports, Plant, Land and CCRU have all enthusiastically embraced the idea of escaping "institutional lockdown" by going freelance. In addition to her drugs book, Plant is working on a film screenplay and says she can't imagine ever returning to academia. The CCRU hope to become a kind of independent think-tank, selling "commodities" on the intellectual free market--like their strikingly designed Abstact Culture (each "swarm" consists of five separate monographs bundled together) and, in the future, CD's, CD-ROM's and books. "The whole saga of the first phase of the CCRU was to do with negotiating bureaucratic space," says Fisher. "But we quickly realised that the institution didn't depend on university space itself , but on the collectivity."

It seems unlikely, however, that Plant and her erstwhile cronies will rejoin forces once they're out in the freemarket wilderness. Some kind of ideological rift seems to have occurred. Plant says she couldn't really go along with the trip into numerical mysticism, not least because she didn't like finding herself "in the role of the sensible, conservative one --not a role I'm used to!". CCRU, for their part, seem to have resented her premature departure from Warwick. Perhaps CCRU's fervent emphasis on collectivity stems in part from what Kodwo Eshun characterises as "an adaption to this harsh feeling of abandonment by this person who they really admired and who they decided to devote three, four years of their lives around." Plant, meanwhile, says she felt uncomfortable with being a guru figure.

"Nick's hermetic, he wants acolytes", says Eshun. "Whereas Sadie's this total communicator. Zeros + Ones is the return of the grand narrative with a vengeance. I can't think of any other writer with the same ambition. Sadie wants the world and I think she'll get it. " CCRU, meanwhile, are toying with the idea of relocating wholesale to India.

2009-11-03T12:07:00.000-08:00

SADIE PLANT and "WRITING ON DRUGS"
Feed, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Drug theorist Sadie Plant sucks on the long, bendy tubing of a hookah at Kush, a Moroccan-style bar in downtown Manhattan, and exhales a cloud of tobacco smoke. "This is the real thing, not like the crap you get in these", she says, gesturing at the packet of name-brand cigarettes next to her glass of mint tea. "And it's really quite potent". Half way through the six dollar chunk of apple-scented tobacco, she does indeed look at bit dizzy.

Referenced in Alice In Wonderland and Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", the hookah is one of countless examples of the way drugs have long been identified in our imagination with the mystic Orient. From its flow-oriented spirituality to its ego-dissolving herbal potions, the East beckons those who yearn to defect from the Occidental tyranny of sober reason. And Sadie Plant shares this view: she sees drugs as the anti-Enlightenment in powder or pill form, directly challenging Western humanist confidence in the power of will. "It's a big Western error to think that individual humans, or even groups of them, can control things," she says. "Drugs are a perfect place from which to interrogate that notion."

35 year old cyberfeminist and renegade from British academia Sadie
Plant has always been interested in anything that unsettles and
undermines control structures. Her first book, written as a PhD, was
a study of Situationism, the Dada-influenced anarchist movement
whose ultra-extreme theories influenced the May 1968 riots in Paris
and inspired many key combatants in British punk. Zeros + Ones:
Digital Women + The New Technoculture, written while Plant was a
research fellow and director of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, has been hailed as a Nineties equivalent to The Female Eunuch. "With Zeroes, Sadie was working on the cutting edge of understanding cyberculture from a feminist perspective," says N. Katherine Hayles, a professor at UCLA and author of the acclaimed How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies
in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. "Her really important
contribution is recovering the secret history of women working in
computing, which is still seen as a male dominated field."

Beyond its gender polemic, though, Zeroes is also a poetically written verging
on anarcho-mystical paean to chaos--the promiscuous,
border-dissolving and mutagenic flows of information, desire, trade.
In her new book, Writing On Drugs, the first fruit of her
post-academic career as "freelance thinker," Plant adds drugs to her
litany of chaos-generating agents, messing with consciousness on an
individual level and causing all kinds of turbulence in the body
politic and internationally through the seemingly ineradicable black
markets they've created.

One of Plant's key polemics in Writing On Drugs--which is set for early summer publication by Farrar Strauss Giroux--involves demolishing the
real/unreal, authentic/vicarious distinction that still governs much
thinking about drug experiences. For her, the interesting thing about
drugs is that they are material substances that make relatively
specific, physical interventions in consciousness. Although she has
sympathies with the grand tradition of using drugs as part of a
spiritual quest for higher states of consciousness and as ritualized
encounters with a transcendental beyond, Plant has more in common
with the demystified approach of today's post-rave generation, who
increasingly explore drugs purely for the intrinsic interest of their
precise perceptual distortions and sensory enhancements, without
making the kind of investment in ideas of the visionary or shamanic
that characterized the generation of psychonauts that included Aldous
Huxley, R. Gordon Wasson, and Tim Leary. For Plant,
"the scrambling of perceptions" itself is the revelation -- the
discovery that reality is "just a deeply contingent effect of the
interaction between your environment and one of many possible
neurochemical brain-states", the realisation that the bandwith and
processing-speed of your cranial computer can be drastically
expanded. Plant's materialist approach makes her the Scully to Terence McKenna's Mulder--the cautious, sensible, almost incongruously grounded woman in the boy's club of crackpot speculation and wild-eyed messiah complexes.

^^^^^^^^^

IN HER NATIVE BRITAIN, Plant is one of the country's most famous
"media academics", writing for quality newspapers and pontificating
on the highbrow BBC Radio programme "Start The Week" alongside
fellow guests like Gore Vidal and Martin Amis. None of which is bad
for a woman who comes from "not at all a literary or intellectual
background... my parents left school at 15, and ran their own
engineering business, so I grew up amongst heavy machinery and
engineering blueprints". Born in 1964 and bred in Birmingham, the
dowdy industrial heartland of the UK, Plant spent her childhood
reading and writing, and her late adolescence revelling in and on the
"free festival" scene-- a nationwide circuit of drug-and-music fueled
bacchanals similar to today's raves or Burning Man but far more
disorganized. Going to her first festival in 1981, she remembers being
stunned by the sheer size of "what back then was known as the Peace
Convoy"--a nomadic hippy calvacade of thousands of trucks, van, cars,
and horse-drawn caravans that spent the summer migrating from
festival to festival, despite police roadblocks and persecution from
local residents. These events were Plant's introduction to anarchist
practice, and a key influence on the anti-politics of self-organizing
activity she subscribes to. "I used to love the way a town of sorts
would emerge in a few hours, with temporary landmarks and streets. It
still intrigues me how they did it. There was one festival I went
to that drew 50 thousand people and lasted a couple of weeks--long
enough to have its own urban history, with three deaths and an
outbreak of meningitis!"

It was through the Situationist pamphlets she found at the free
festivals that Plant also encountered anarchist theory. The result
was her first book The Most Radical Gesture, where she used
the Situationists's fervent utopianism as a stick to bash postmodern
defeatism. It was while she was writing the book as
her PhD at Manchester University that she witnessed another chaotic
outbreak of cultural dissidence: the rave movement, born of the
synergy between futuristic electronic dance music and the designer
drug Ecstasy. Her experiences at Manchester's clubs are the
seeds that bloomed eight years later as Writing On Drugs.

"What really got me started was the mystery of Ecstasy", she
recalls. "MDMA has been around for most of the 20th Century, it had
moments of popularity in the 1960s, but it never became a culture
until the late 1980s." Why this strange time-lag, given MDMA's
intense pleasures--euphoria, hyper-tactile sensuality, overwhelming
feelings of trust, intimacy and affection? Plant's answer was that
Ecstasy was "waiting" for the right technology to arrive and
"potentiate" it, to use the pharmacological term for the synergistic
interaction of two drugs. "There's something about the clean
precision of the MDMA experience that seems to fit digital
technology, the same technology that enabled the creation of that
very precise rhythmic dance music."" Beyond this, she sees Ecstasy
and rave music as training the nervous system and human sensorium in
prepartion for the Internet and virtual reality. In Writing On
Drugs, she describes how ravers in the raptures of Ecstasy feel
"overwhelmed by their own connectivity", merging not just with music
and with the crowd but with machines too: the sound-system, the
dazzling lighting effects and lasers, and all the other hi-tech
elements used to "engineer atmospheres". Melting what Reich called
character armor , Ecstasy creates a kind of porous, permeable ego
that's supple and open to connection and contact. It's a process
Plant describes as "positive self-destruction, a self-destruction
without death-wish".

Plant originally planned to write a single book on drugs and
technology that would cover the entire terrain she ended up dividing
between Zeroes & Ones and Writing On Drugs. "The Zeroes and Ones
element was gonna be the exterior technology--computing, the
Internet, VR. Drugs were like the interior technology, the "soft" or
"wet" technology that reconfigures the brain", she explains. Plant
sees drugs as cyborgizing -- anorganic elements "inserted" into the
body and interfacing with the nervous system to enable perceptions
and sensations inaccessible to the undrugged organism.

"Drugs are the perfect example of a subtle prosthesis, working on the
internal wiring of the body in a way that makes the traditional
notion of becoming a cyborg through adding robotic attachments seem
really quaint and archaic. And I'm sure there'll come a point where
drugs themselves will seem very clumsy and dirty--in that sense of
being imprecise--compared with future forms of enhancement."

The "bionic", superhumanizing aspect of drugs helps explain why the
military have had been so intimately involved with them in this
century, using stimulants like amphetamine to enhance soldiers's
fighting capabilities and R&D-ing the potential applications of LSD
and MDMA as disorientation-inducing weapons and/or "truth serums". In
Writing On Drugs, Plant traces this drug/warfare interface back to
the vegetable kingdom-- the "herbal", Gaia-given substances that some
drug enthusiasts regard as superior to synthesized man- made drugs
originally evolved to discourage animal predators by causing nausea,
delirium or death when ingested. Intoxicants are all, at root,
toxins; drug experiences, says Plant, are little infusions of death
into life. Which is why the shamanic traditions of using plant
hallucinogens tend to imagine the trip as a journey across the border
between life and death.

^^^^^^^^^

WRITING ON DRUGS IS ALL ABOUT the myriad ways in which the
production, trafficking, and use of mind-altering substances has
shaped our economic, political and cultural history. Half the book
is taken up with a survey of drugs's influence on literature, taking
in suspects usual and unusual (Coleridge, Poe, Rimbaud, Baudelaire,
Sherlock Holmes, Wilkie Collins, etc) and arguing that a hefty strand
of high culture has been precisely that--"high" as a kite. Plant
argues that even the most sober, abstemious regions of society have
been contaminated by druggy consciousness, because drug-derived
sensations get encoded in cultural forms--not just books, but movies,
music, TV commercials.

One of her more provocative arguments is that advertising in its
modern sense began as a surrogate for more direct forms of hooking
the customer. "The Coca Cola company was the first big company to
invest in mass advertising, and they did that in an attempt to keep
the market they'd first acquired when they still had a substantial
amount of cocaine in the drink. If you can't hook consumers one way,
you have to find another. Every commodity today tries to be as close
to a drug as it can possibly be without actually being a drug." The
intimacy of drugs and "normal life" goes much further than the way
they've insinuated their influence through all levels of our culture.
As Plant notes in Writing On Drugs, every single one of us is guilty
of "possession", because the human brain runs on neurochemicals that
are similar to or near-identical to illegal substances (endorphins,
for instance, are so named because of their proximity to the opium
derivative morphine). It's obvious, really: drugs wouldn't work if
the brain wasn't full of receptors pre-disposed to being activated by
these electro-chemical triggers. The upshot of human brain chemistry
is that there is no such thing as "sobriety"; consciousness itself is
an ever-shifting tissue of different drug-states. "There are all
sorts of non-drug activities that obviously change that neurochemical
balance--sex, exercise, food," notes Plant, sipping a
cappucino at a Lower East Side cafe where you still have to ask for a
key to the bathroom--a relic of the pre-gentrification era when it
was necessary to discourage junkies from sneaking in them to shoot
up. "Then there are all the more extreme techniques for achieving an
altered state, be it yoga or whatever."

There are points in Writing On Drugs where Plant flirts with the idea
that drugs can access certain "revelations." The twist is that it's
not a transcendent reality "out there", but one deep within the hard
wiring of the brain itself. She subscribes to Henri Michaux's
mescaline-inspired conviction that there's a kind of pre-cultural
commonality underlying all the many forms of psychedelic experience
through history and across the globe. The deranged geometry of
lattices, honeycombs, lacework, and spiderwebbing, the baroquely
infolding spirals and proliferating ornamentation, the mosaic vision
and kaleidscopic turbulence, seen by users of LSD, peyote, DMT,
psilocybin, and other hallucinogens, find a visual echo in such
cultural forms as the "coptic light" patterns of Arabian carpets and
the paisley fabric of the Indian subcontinent. Michaux speculated
that all this drug-induced eye-candy constitutes an amplification of
brain wave activity, especially that of the visual cortex. The fact
that some migraine sufferers see similar patterns--known as the
migraine aura--suggests that in certain extreme states, the MS/DOS
and subroutines of the brain can be apprehended by consciousness.
"Some people can get the aura effects without the pain of migraine,"
says Plant. "It's happened to me about three times in my life, at
times of extreme exhaustion. This almost kaleidoscopic stuff kind of
creeps across your visual field from one side to the other. It's
really quite stunning, and not at all scary. The fact that there are
'natural' equivalents to drug-induced experiences suggests the
possibility you are in some sense observing what's going on in the
brain." Noting the similarity between these psychedelic
hallucinations and the self-similar patterns of Mandelbrot's
fractals, Plant characterizes the drugged or migrained brain as a
cranked-up bio-chemical computer capable of picturing the
self-organizing behavior and non-linear dynamism at play within
normally staid reality.

^^^^^^^^^

THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO PLANT: One is the sane, pragmatic,
down-to-earth daughter of self-employed parents. This is the Plant
who diligently slogs through scientific writings for nuggets of
inspiration, who's prudently cagey about her "field research" for the
new book on the grounds that talking about her drug use might result
in problems with visas to foreign countries. The other side of Plant
is the anarchist free spirit--the 17 year old whose eyes were blown
by the free festivals, the avid reader of books by drug fiends like
Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, the writer who herself plans to abandon
fact for full-blown fiction, the neurophilosophical adventurer who
eventually reveals that she's tried almost all the illegal chemicals
mentioned in Writing On Drugs.

All these tendencies converge in Plant's controversial endorsement of
"market forces", which figure in the new book as an ambivalent
appreciation of the international drug trade- a dark parody of
globalization, the id of the New World Order. Appropriately enough it
was at Pharmakon, a 1992 drug culture symposium in Brighton,
England, that Plant threw down her gauntlet at the Left-wing
orthodoxies that still dominate British academia, in the form of a
paper co-written with Nick Land called "Cyberpositive". The title is
a twist on cyberneticist Norbert Wiener's ideas of "negative feedback" and "positive
feedback." Where the conservative Wiener valued "negative feedback"
(homeostatic equilibrium) Plant and Land re-positivized positive
feedback (vicious circles, runaway tendencies) and specifically
celebrated the propensity of market forces to generate disorder and
destabilize control. There's a gleeful, gloating tone to the way in
which the duo exalt capital as "a viral contagion" that scorns
national boundaries, deletes cultural traditions and over-rides human
priorites: "Everything cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind."

Today, Plant says the essay was written as a provocation. Her real
attitude is more humanely ambivalent. During the Eighties, she
opposed the modernizing policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative
government--the crushing of Britain's once enormously powerful labor
unions, the dismantling of the welfare state, the privatization of
nationally owned industries and utilities. But by the early Nineties,
she was coming to terms with the idea that Thatcherism's assault on
"dependency culture" really had been a revolution, creating the
climate for this decade's upsurge of British fashion, art, and pop
culture (including her beloved rave scene, which for all its
Ecstasy-addled utopianism is anarcho- capitalist to the core, from
its illegal warehouse parties and pirate radio stations to small
independent labels to the drug dealers themselves). Plant stresses
the fact that she's no fan of huge corporations--she sees capitalism
not as a coherent system but as a pluralistic warzone organized
around a perpetual tension between centralizing entities
(wannabe-monopoly corporations, government agencies) and bottom-up,
grass-roots activity (plucky entrepreneurs, street markets). You can
guess which side she's on.

Sympathy for the underdog and small-is-beautiful sentiments
notwithstanding, there are those who reject Plant's ideas as a merely
a postmodern update of 19th Century laissez-faire economics--the
update aspect being the way she uses ideas from chaos theory and
cybernetics to effectively "naturalize" what is really a human
construction, the free market. Natural's not in it, says Judith
Williamson, Professor of Cultural History at Middlesex University,
and writer for the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian. "All
these excitingly eroticised ideas about the flows of capital absolve
one from morality. Most of capitalism's flows are deeply
pernicious." She castigates Plant's attitude for its fatalistic
underestimation of the power of human beings to change things on both
the individual and collective level. "Human will is not nothing. All
through history there have been huge acts of courage and altruism."
Indeed, Plant's understanding of how things change leaves no role for
charismatic, far-sighted inviduals, for a Bill Gates or Fidel Castro.

What Williamson denigrates as "inevitabilism," Plant herself
characterises as a Zen or Taoist view of the world--not so much
devaluing the power of human agency as putting it in perspective.
"Nothing takes the credit--or the blame--for either the runaway
tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them," she wrote in
Zeros + Ones, arguing for a radically depersonalized conception of
how history works. "Political struggles and ideologies have not been
incidental to these shifts, but cultures and the changes they undergo
are far too complex to be attributed to attempts to make them happen
or hold them back". In Writing On Drugs, she sees a kind of
equivalence between drugs and capital: both are the quintessence of
trade and traffic, both make a mockery of national boundaries, both
resist governmental attempts to regulate their flows (the Soviet
Union, for instance, was ultimately unable to stay uninfected by "the
contagion of markets"). In the 20th Century's history of drugs
prohibition, she sees a powerful demonstration of human hubris: the
struggle to suppress the drug trade hasn't just failed, it's created
a monstrous, hydra-headed narco-military-industrial complex that
perfects its wares through refinement (cocaine>crack),
researches-and- develops new products, and aggressively markets its
wares to consumers. If the impersonal laws of supply and demand had
been allowed to play themselves out without interference, the global
drugs problem and its equally cancerous double (the industry of
policing, surveillance, incarceration, and civil rights infringement)
would never have reached anything like its current proportions.

When it comes to the war on drugs, neither cops nor crooks have
anything to gain from an armistice. "In Britain, there's a big
reassessment going on about drugs, and someone who argues the case for
decriminalization told me he'd been accosted at a public meeting by
a drug dealer, who asked 'are you trying to put me out of
business?!?'." Plant chuckles grimly. "There's a lot of very
different interests that are well served by the status quo." A sane,
pragmatic solution to the drugs problem? Plant isn't convinced we'll
see decriminalization in our lifetime. Sitting with the hookah pipe
in her hand in the mock-Moroccan murk of Kush, she doesn't look too
bothered, though--for there'll always be the fascinating trail of
havoc left by drugs for her to follow.

2009-11-03T11:53:00.000-08:00

DFA and LCD SOUNDSYSTEM: label and band profile
Groove, 2005

by Simon Reynolds

For the last three years, DFA has been on a mission to make New York City live up to its own legend--"to be what it should be," as the label's co-founder James Murphy puts it. DFA's spiritual ancestors are early Eighties Manhattan labels like ZE, 99 and Sleeping Bag, pioneers of sounds like "punk-funk" and "mutant disco" that mixed dance culture's groove power with absurdist wit, dark humor and rock'n'roll aggression. The DFA sound flashes back to times and places when NYC's party-hard hedonism seemed to have both an edge and a point--Mudd Club, Hurrah's, Danceteria, Paradise Garage--but it rarely feels like a mere exercise in retro-pastiche.

The label's initial batch of vinyl-only singles in 2002--most famously "House of Jealous Lovers" by The Rapture and "Losing My Edge" by LCD Soundsystem--resurrected the idea of dance music spiked with punk attitude. Before long everybody was clamoring for a dose of DFA cool. Murphy, 34, and his English-born partner Tim Goldsworthy, 32, were touted as Superproducers, indieland's equivalent to the Neptunes. "Yeah I was the punk-funk Pharrell
Williams," laughs Murphy. "Which makes me Chad, I guess" adds Goldsworthy.

Janet Jackson phoned DFA and suggested collaborating, saying she wanted to do something "raw and funky" like "Losing My Edge." Amazingly, DFA sorta kinda forgot to follow up the call. Duran Duran were also interested in
getting DFA's magic touch. Most surreally, Goldsworthy and Murphy spent an afternoon in the studio with Britney Spears. "That was weird," says Goldsworthy. "Won't do that again. No offence to her--she's lovely. Got a foul mouth, though!" The brief session came to nothing, through lack of
common musical ground. "When we work with people, we hang out, listen to records, share stuff," says Murphy. "But with Britney we soon discovered we had absolutely no way of communicating. She didn't know anything that we
knew. I was excited when the idea was first broached, because I thought maybe there's something Britney wants to do, and it's fucking burning a hole in her, and we can find out what it is. And the collaboration could be embarrassing, a failure, but that's fine. But I think she's someone that's
very divorced from what she wants to do, there's been a set of performance requirements on her for such a long time, such that how would she even know what she wanted to do? And we never had time to found out anyway, because it
was like, 'she's available for four hours on Wednesday, write a song'. There's no way you can kid yourself you can make something real in those circumstances."

After these lost encounters with "the big time", DFA consciously backed away from the opportunities being thrust their way. "You stop returning phone calls, people get bored of you real quickly!" laughs Murphy. Instead, they concentrated on building up their own operation. The stance is bearing fruit now, with a freshly-inked global distribution deal between DFA and EMI. The first release under this new arrangement was the recent and highly impressive three-CD collection of DFA works so far, Compilation #2. It’s now followed by the brilliant debut album from LCD Soundsystem, which is James Murphy's own group.

Murphy and Goldsworthy originally met in inauspicious circumstances, as hired help for Irish deejay/producer/soundtrack composer David Holmes, who
was making his Bow Down To The Exit Sign album in Manhattan. Murphy did the engineering, Goldsworthy did the programming. The location was Murphy's West Village of Manhattan recording studio (now DFA's basement sound-lab). It didn't take long for the two technicians to suspect they were making most of the creative decisions. "Tim and I were forced to create a dialogue about how to
make sounds, because there was just this vague cloud of ideas coming from Holmes," says Murphy, gesturing to the back of the studio, where Holmes sat during the recording process. "Tim and I found we could talk about the most
subtle sonic things. Say, with Suicide, we could talk about the space between the two different organ sounds, or the lag between the organ playing and the drum machine beat, the way the two instruments don't lock together. Or we could talk about how earnest Alan Vega's Elvis-like vocal performance is, and how could we get that same quality out of the bass--a feeling that's earnest and embarrassing but saved by being actually totally for real."

Taking breaks from the recording grind, Goldsworthy and Murphy bonded further during Saturday night missions of full-on clubbing. Which is when Murphy, hitherto a typical indie-rock guy, had his dance music E-piphany. "Yeah, it's an unheard of story, isn't it?" he laughs. "A person who only
listens to rock goes off, does a mountain of Ecstasy, and gets converted to dance music".

The same thing had happened to Goldsworthy over a decade earlier, as an indiepop fan who got swept up in the UK's Ecstasy-fueled acid house revolution circa 1988. "I went from wearing an anorak and National Health spectacles into shaving my head and dancing in a field for eight hours!" In
the Nineties, Goldsworthy, like a lot of people, followed a vibe shift towards more chilled-out drugs (heavy weed) and moody, downtempo sounds, picking up especially on the music coming out of the early Nineties Bristol scene (very near where he grew up in the West of England). With his
schoolfriend James Lavelle, Goldsworthy co-founded the trip hop label Mo Wax, whose whole aesthetic owed a huge amount to Massive Attack's epochal 1991 album Blue Lines. Goldsworthy and Lavelle also made atmospheric and
increasingly over-ambitious music as the pivotal core of
UNKLE, a sort of post-trip hop supergroup that called upon diverse array of collaborators (ranging from DJ Shadow to Radiohead's Thom Yorke) on albums like Psyence Fiction. It's this background in "soundtrack for a non-existent
movie" music that led to Goldsworthy becoming the programming foil for David Holmes. Which ultimately led to him coming to Manhattan and meeting Murphy.

Goldsworthy had been through the whole dance culture experience and, like a lot of people, grown sick and tired of it. Murphy, a die-hard indie-rock/punk-rock guy, had always "loathed dance music. I thought it was all disco or C& C Music Factory. I didn't know anything about it and didn't
want to know anything about it. I'd really come up through the Pixies, the Fall, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and all the Chicago noise punk stuff like Big Black." And in truth, when the two of them went out clubbing in New York while working on the Holmes record, there wasn't much going on in dance culture to counter either Goldsworthy's disillusion or Murphy's prejudice. The Manhattan scene was moribund. Goldsworthy had come to New York, a city that loomed large in his imagination because of hip hop and house, with high
expectations and was very disappointed. "I was shocked, it was so bad. You couldn't dance anywhere," he says, referring to Mayor Bloomberg's crackdown
on bars that had DJs spinning but didn't have the expensive "cabaret license" that nightclubs need to get to make it permissible for their patrons to wiggle their butts in time to the music. "It was fucking awful."

Beyond the specific malaise of Manhattan clubland, dance music at the close of the Nineties was going through a not very compelling phase. It was neither pushing fearlessly forward into the future with huge leaps of innovation like it had done for most of the Nineties, nor did it have that
edge-of-anarchy madness that characterized the rave scene in its early days. The superclubs were slick and soul-less. And technique-obsessed and genre-purist DJs had squeezed out an awful lot of vibe. By the start of
the new millennium, the new generation of hipster youth in New York and London had little interest in club culture, which seemed safe, passe and altogether lacking in cutting-edge glamour. These young cool kids were looking to guitar bands again, groups with stage moves and charismatic hair,
from the Strokes to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Murphy and Goldsworthy decided to rescue dance music from "McDepth--that McDonald's version of 'deep', where there's nothing there", Murphy explains. The duo cite everything from glitchy laptop musicians to Tortoise-style
post-rock to post-Blue Lines Massive Attack as examples of bogus profundity, chin-stroking pretentiousness, and terminal boredom. Revealingly, Murphy's MDMA revelation didn't occur listening to whatever passed for an Ecstasy
anthem in those days (Rolando's "Jaguar," say). No, the DJ dropped The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows"--one of his all-time favorite tunes--at exactly the point "when the drug was peaking" in his nervous system. And that gave Murphy the idea of "throwing parties and playing better music--like "Loose" by the Stooges--than what dance culture was offering at that time". Taking the name DFA--short for Death From Above, and originally the tag under which Murphy did infamously loud sound mixing for rock bands--they started throwing irregular parties in New York, based around the notion of bridging the considerable gap between Donna Summer and The Stooges. Soon, tired of endlessly playing their staple fare like Can and Liquid Liquid, the duo decided to make their own "dance-punk" tracks to spin.

"House Of Jealous Lovers" was their first stab. Dance distributors picked up the single purely for the house remix by Morgan Geist from cognoscenti-approved outfit Metro Area. "We'd heard his track 'Atmosphreak' and thought it was amazing," recalls Murphy. "One of the Rapture's friends,
Dan, was room mates with Morgan, and so we asked if he'd do a remix and he very kindly did one really cheap. It was only because of Morgan's remix that anyone took it--the dance distributors would often identify it in their orders as being by Morgan Geist." Ironically, and fatefully, it was DFA's original discopunk version that eventually took off.

"House of Jealous Lovers" arrived with perfect timing to catch the breaking wave of dancefloor taste shift towards edgy angularity--not just the rediscovery of Eighties groups like ESG and A Certain Ratio, but the emergence of neo-postpunk bands like !!!, Liars, Erase Errata, and Radio
Four (whom DFA also produced). But while The Rapture's slashing guitar and slightly-constipated, white-boys-getting-down funk bass flash you back to 1979 and UK agit-funk outfits like Gang of Four and Delta 5, Murphy &
Goldsworthy's production supplied the kind of pumping, monolithic regularity that made the track fully contemporary. "There were indie bands already
coming through doing that kind of rickety, Delta 5-style punk-funk, but we wanted to make records that house DJs would actually play," says Murphy. "We had a big talk with The Rapture about that Mr Oizo track 'Flat Beat', the
bassline in that tune. In 2000, when we were making 'House of Jealous Lovers', 'Flat Beat' was just about the only dance track around that was memorable. It was a tune you could remember, it fucked killed on the dancefloor, and it had incredible low end. So our attitude was, 'Jealous
Lovers' has to compete in that context. So we filtered the bass a lot, did a couple of layers of hi-hats and reversed them, took the drummer's playing and chopped it up." The drummer himself came up with the cowbell, which
eventually became a kind of DFA trademark. "House of Jealous Lovers" became a huge success on all kinds of different dancefloors. Some commentators regard it as the best single of the decade so far. It's certainly one of the most significant.

DFA's signature sound mixes Goldsworthy's computer wizardry and Murphy's background of engineering and playing in rock bands (DFA's remixes typically
feature his drumming, bass, and sometimes guitar). Two different kinds of knowledge mesh perfectly: Murphy's expertise at getting great drum sounds and capturing live "feel", Goldsworthy's digital editing skills and vast
sample-hound's knowledge of recorded music acquired during his Mo Wax days. Both guys look their respective parts. Slender, softspoken, and diffidently English in a way that often, he says, gets him mistaken for gay, Goldsworthy
seems like someone at home with delicate, intricate work--a century ago, you might have assumed from his intent, bespectacled gaze and fastidious manner that he was an engraver or watch-maker. Wearing a Taos ski resort T-shirt
and brown corduroy pants, the slightly pudgy and much more boisterous Murphy looks like your archetypal American indie-rock studio rat.

After a low-key spell in late 2003/early 2004--a steady flow of fine but not exactly throat-grabbing releases, from The Juan Maclean, Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom, and Black Dice--DFA came back strong in the last few months of 2004 with two of their most exciting singles yet. Pixeltan's "Get Up/Say What" is classic DFA discopunk, simultaneously raw and slick, while "Sunplus" by J.O.Y.--a Japanese outfit helmed by K.U.D.O, Goldsworthy's Tim 's former partner in UNKLE, and featuring guest vocals from Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms--beautifully updates the thorny, fractured postpunk funk of LiLiPUT and The Slits. Like most DFA releases, these tracks came out as vinyl 12 inches. But don't fret if you've got no turntable--you can also find them on Compilation #2. Attractively packaged with the label’s trademark minimal design, the box set pulls together everything that wasn't on their first, not wholly satisfactory compilation, throws in a terrific bonus mix CD executed by Tim Goldsworthy and Tim Sweeney, and altogether
showcases a formidable body of work. Two highlights are Liquid Liquid's "Bellhead," a brand-new DFA recording of an old song by one of their Eighties postpunk heroes, formerly on the legendary 99 Records label, and the 15 minute disco-delic journey-into-sound that is "Casual Friday" by
Black Leotard Front (an alter ego for Gonzalez and Russom).

And now there’s the second release under the global distribution deal with EMI, the debut album from LCD Soundsystem, which people are already talking about as a contender for best album of 2005. In the studio, LCD is basically a James Murphy solo project with occasional help from friends who drop by, and some spiritual guidance from Goldsworthy. Live, though, LCD swells into a proper band, and a surprisingly powerful one, its sheer rock-funk force bringing to mind at various points Happy Mondays, the Lo-Fidelity Allstars, and The Stooges gone disco.

Released not long after “House Of Jealous Lovers”, LCD’s debut single “Losing My Edge” was the first indication that DFA weren’t just a pair of capable remixers, but that there was in fact a whole sensibility, aesthetic, and ethos behind the label, as well as a groovy retro-nuevo sound. Sung by Murphy, the song is the plaint of a cool hunter type--a musician, or DJ, or record store clerk, or possibly all three--who’s agonizingly aware that he’s slipping, as younger kids outdo his esoteric knowledge with even more obscure reference points. “I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978,” the character whines. “To the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties”. The aging hipster’s claims of priority and having been first-on-the-block get more and more absurd: “I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City/I was working on the organ sounds with much patience… I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids/I played it at CBGB's… I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan/I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes/I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.”

As well as being a hilarious auto-critique of hipsterism, “Losing My Edge” obliquely captured something of the pathos of the modern era. All this massive ever-accumulating knowledge about music history, the huge array of arcane influences and sources available thanks to the reissue industry and peer-to-peer filesharing, all the advantages we have today in terms of technology and how to get good sounds, have resulted in a kind of a kind of crisis of “well made” music, where producers are scholars of production, know how to get a great period feel, yet it seems harder and harder to make music that actually matters, in the way that the music that inspired them mattered in its own day. “Record collection rock” is my term for this syndrome, although the malaise is just as prevalent in dance culture (look at the perennial return of the 303 acid bass, each time sounding more exhausted and unsurprising).

“Losing My Edge” was very funny, but also poignant. Murphy agrees. “It’s incredibly sad. It took people a while to pick up on that. At first they were like, ‘ha! You got ‘em’, like it was just a satire on hipsters. What’s truly sad, though, is that the initial inspiration for it was from my deejaying in the early days of DFA, playing postpunk and an eclectic mix of dance and rock. And suddenly everybody started playing that kind of mixture, and I thought ‘fuck, now it’s a genre and I’m fucked, I’m not going to get hired’. My response was, “I was doing this first,” and then I realized that was pathetic, that I was this 31 year old hipster douchebag. So at the end of “Losing My Edge,” that’s why there’s the long list of bands-- Pere Ubu, Todd Terry, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, Heldon, Gentle Giant, the Human League, Roy Harper, Sun Ra, on and on--‘cos in the end that’s what my attitude reduced to, just running around trying to yell the names of cool bands before anybody else!”. He says that a big part of DFA’s attitude is that “we definitely try to shoot holes in our own cool as fast as we can, because being cool is one of the worst things for music.” He cites DFA’s disco-flavored remix of Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” as an example, its softness representing a deliberate swerve from the obvious punk-funk sound that DFA were known for.

“Beat Connection”, the even more impressive flipside to “Losing,” was also a meta-music statement, with Murphy accusing everyone on the dancefloor of colluding in lameness. “Everybody here needs a shove/Everybody here is afraid of fun/It’s the saddest night out in the USA/Nobody’s coming undone.” He explains that this was inspired by his and Goldsworthy’s experience of the “really uptight” New York club scene at the tail-end of the Nineties. When Murphy compares his lyrical approach to The Stooges--“really simple, repetitive, quite stupid”--he hits it on the nail. “Beat Connection” is dance culture’s counterpart to The Stooges 1969 classic “No Fun.” Which was probably the very first punk song--indeed the Sex Pistols did a brilliant cover version of it.

When people talk about LCD Soundsystem and DFA, though, the word that comes up isn’t punk rock so much as postpunk--Public Image Ltd (the band John Lydon formed after the Pistols broke up), Gang of Four, Liquid Liquid, etc. Murphy originally got into this era of music when he was working as sound engineer and live sound mixer for Six Finger Satellite, an abrasive mid-Nineties band who were precocious--indeed premature--in referencing the postpunk period well before it became hip again circa 2001. In a 1995 interview with me, Six Finger Satellite were already namedropping late Seventies outfits like Chrome and This Heat. They also recorded an all-synth and heavily Devo-influenced mini-album, Machine Cuisine, as a sideline from their more guitar-oriented, Big Black-like albums. “Going on tour with Six Finger Satellite was one of those super fertile times in my life in terms of finding out about music,” recalls Murphy. “They were like ‘do you know about Deutsche Amerikanishce Freundschaft? Do you know about Suicide?’, and they dumped all this knowledge on me while we were driving around the country from gig to gig. This was a few years before I met Tim, which was itself another very fertile and immersive period in terms of new music.” The Six Finger Satellite connection endures. DFA act The Juan Maclean is actually Six Finger guitarist John Maclean, making Kraftwerk-like electronica.

“Losing My Edge” b/w “Beat Connection” was followed by two more excellent LCD singles, “Give It Up” b/w “Tired” and “Yeah” (which came in a “Crass version” and a “Pretentious Version” and managed to make the 303 acid-bass sound quite exciting, against all the odds). These six early single tracks are collected on the bonus disc that comes with the debut LCD Soundsystem album. Running through a lot of the CD--particularly songs like “Movement” and “On Repeat”-- is that same meta-musical rage you heard in “Losing” and “Beat”: a poisoned blend of a desire for music to be revolutionary and dangerous, along with a defeatist, crippled-by-irony awareness that the age of musical revolution may be long past. “Movement,” the single, fuses the sentiments of “Losing My Edge” and “Beat Connection”, with Murphy surveying the music scene and pointing the finger--“it’s like a culture, without the effort, of all the culture/it’s like a movement, without the bother, of all of the meaning”--and then confessing to being “tapped”, meaning exhausted, sapped of energy and inspiration. Although the sentiment could apply just as equally to dance culture, Murphy says the song is specifically a reaction to all the talk of guitar rock making a comeback, “all the inanity that gets bandied about as rock journalism. It’s a complete rip of fashion journalism--‘the high waisted pant is BACK’. Like that's supposed to mean something. I mean, I hope you don't go around hearing ‘abstract expressionism is BACK! and HOTTER than EVER!’ in art mags.”

“On Repeat” is yet another LCD song about the ennui that comes when you’re been into music for a long time: the awareness of the cycles repeating, the eternal return of the same personae and poses, archetypes and attitudes, reshuffled with slight variations. “That attitude is where I’m coming from all of the time,” says Murphy. “The lyric referring to ‘the new stylish creep’--that’s me! The song is about hating what you are, and that giving you strength to hate everything else. It's weird. I love music so much that I want to drown it forever. Destroy everything.”

You can hear these conflicted emotions in Murphy’s singing voice. It has a weird tetchy texture that evokes a mixture of exasperation and fatigue, sounds at once spirited and dispirited. Murphy says that’s an accurate reflection of how he feels when he’s recording vocals. “It murders me. I hate hearing my own stupid voice in the headphones, with all the singerly bits and false poses. I sometimes have to sing things over and over until I hate the song, until there's no posy vocal bits in there that make me cringe. That song, ‘On Repeat,’ in particular was hell to do. But in the end I like it. Or at least I feel like I can stand behind it”. In terms of that frayed, worn-out quality to LCD vocals, Murphy says “I usually compress the shit out of the vocal with a VCA
compressor, which is really brutal. And I try to mix them so that the frequencies are like "Mother of Pearl" by Roxy Music or "Poptones" by PiL”.

Yet for all the lyrical and vocal notes of disillusionment and frustration running through LCD Soundsystem, the music itself is full of exuberance and playfulness, a delight in the sheer pleasures and possibilities of sound. “Too Much Love,” which seems to be a song about drug burn-out and excessive nocturnal socializing, features an awesome grating synth-whine that makes me think of a serotonin-depleted brain whimpering on the Tuesday after a wild weekend. Another standout track, “Disco Infiltrator” nods to Kraftwerk with its imitation of the eerie synth-riff from 1980’s “Home Computer.” It’s not a sample but a recreation, says Murphy. “It just an ascending chromatic scale, really. It's not rocket science!” The track also features some sweet semi-falsetto singing from Murphy that sounds like David Byrne circa Talking Heads’ Remain In Light. “It's just my shitty soul voice,” laughs Murphy. “Al Green has a beautiful soul, so that's what you hear coming through in his voice. My soul is absolute rubbish, so that's what comes out!”

The closing “Great Release” seems like a homage to Brian Eno’s song-based albums like Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy and Another Green World. “Actually, it’s Here Comes the Warm Jets-era Eno,” laughs Murphy. “It’s not a homage, though--I hate that word. No, I just like the type of energy that some Eno/Bowie stuff got, and some of the space of Lou Reed stuff, like ’Satellite of Love’. Some journalist got kind of stroppy with me about that song, and all I could think was, ‘is there seriously some problem with there being too many songs that use sonic spaces similar to early Eno solo work? I mean, is this really something we
need to talk about before it gets out of control?!?’”. I WISH I had that problem. Or is the problem just me--that I'm not being original enough? Because if it is, then let's just dump rock in the fucking ocean and call it a day, because I'm doing the best I can for the moment!”

Best of all is “Thrills,” in which Murphy comes off like Iggy Pop singing over a track that fuses The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” with Suicide’s “Dance,” over a fat bassline not a million miles from Timo Maas. Actually, Murphy says, the inspiration for the bass-and-percussion groove is Missy Elliott's “Get Yr Freak On”. “I made the original version of ‘Thrills’ right when that came out. I loved that era of mainstream hip hop, it was a free-for-all. And just the bass of it.”

Of course, all these comparisons and reference points only underscore the point I earlier made in reference to “Losing My Edge”: the poignancy of living in a “late” era of culture, the insurmountable-seeming challenge of competing with the accumulated brilliance of the past and creating any kind of sensation of new-ness. “Yeah, that is kind of tattooed on my stomach,” says Murphy, referring to this pained awareness of belatedness. He acknowledges that “great influences do not a great record make”. And yet despite all the odds, the LCD album is a great record.

When I mention the American literary critic Harold Bloom’s concept of “anxiety of influence”--which argues that “strong” artists suffer from an acute sense of anguish that everything has been done before, and that makes them struggle against their predecessors in a desperate Oedipal attempt to achieve originality--Murphy flips out. “It's hilarious that you say this--I mention Bloom's anxiety theory pretty regularly in interviews! This is the shit I've been screaming about for years. Learning and progress has always been based on learning from the past. Real originality never comes from trying to defeat the past right out of the gate. It's a spark of an individual idea caused by the love/hate relationship between a "listener" and the "sound". I love music, and it inspired me at first to copy it, then to be ashamed of copying it, then to make music in "modes" (genres) while trying to pretend they were original, then finally making music with a purpose--which for me was dance music. It made people dance. It was no longer just music to make you look cool and feel like you were part of something you admire.

“I don't feel like I'm in any danger of making ‘retro’ music, but at the same time, there are things about the ways various people who've come before me did things
that I prefer greatly to the way ‘modern’ things are done. I use a computer. I edit and do all sorts of modern shit, but there are things I consciously do that were done in songs I love from before me.”

As much as love, though, it’s hate that inspires LCD Soundsystem in equal measure. “I hate the way bands stand on stage, the gear they use, the crew they hire to tune their tedious guitars, the love they have for their special ‘guitar amp, the belief in their fragile, phoney little singer who's a fucking sham. They are not and will never be Iggy Pop. Neither will I, or my band, but we know it, and we're trying our fucking best to be the LCD Soundsystem. Complete with its laundry list of influences, failures and idiocies. At least you go onstage knowing that, good or bad, no one is like you.”

* * * * *

Many labels never survive the initial hype storm of being hip. Murphy recalls a peculiar, uncomfortable phase when "we kept seeing magazines with profiles of DFA, but we weren't really releasing anything at the time." Now,
though, he's thankful that "we're not ascendant anymore. At this point we're kind of cruising along. And it's nice. It doesn't feel like it's out of our control anymore."

And what about New York, the city whose mythos is so central to DFA? Is it living up to its own reputation at the moment? "It's a great city, but people get lazy here," says Murphy. "So we and a few other people we think
of as allies, we go into phases of trying to punch the city into being interesting, Then we go home for a couple of months and hang out with our wives and cook. And then it's like, 'okay, time to go out punching again'. And it's getting to be about that time again. For a while, we were like 'oh
fuck them, let them live in their filth of terrible parties, shitty DJs, just doing the same thing'. See I can't go to these parties where people play records that are sent to them by promoters 'cos they're genre djs, part of a genre. I've always loathed that. And then I found myself in that
situation again," Murphy sighs, referring to the way DFA gets lumped together with Black Strobe and Trevor Jackson of Playgroup/Output, the way genre-crossing becomes its own kind of genre. "That's not what I signed up
for, you know? I didn't leave indie rock to end up back in indie rock!"

2009-11-02T09:15:00.001-08:00

TRICKY's MAXINQUAYE in SPIN'S BEST ALBUMS OF THE NINETIES
Spin, 1999
by Simon Reynolds

TRICKY, Maxinquaye (Island, 1995)

Although all but one of its tracks were recorded in London, Maxinquaye has everything to do with Tricky's home town Bristol, the west of England port whose
bohemian milieu of Brit B-boys and post-punk radicals spawned Massive Attack,
Portishead, and the Reprazent clan. "In Bristol, all the different ghettos were mixing in the early Eighties," says Mark Stewart, ex-frontman of legendary avant-funk outfit The Pop Group. "We'd go to reggae 'blues' parties, industrial punk events, and hip hop jams at this crucial club called The Dugout."

Through his friendship with The Wild Bunch (the DJ collective that evolved into
Massive Attack) Stewart became a mentor to Tricky. It was Stewart who first pushed
Tricky onstage and who encouraged him to start a career outside Massive. "He's my
chaos," says Tricky. "When people say I'm weird, I say 'you've got to hang around Mark'. He lives out of a suitcase which contains, like, a jar of mayonnaise, cassettes, and articles clipped out of magazines. He lived with me for two months and got me chucked out of my flat!" It was while they were rooming together that Stewart persuaded Tricky to "blag" money off Massive Attack's management for solo recording. "His idea was to spend half of it on drink!", laughs Tricky. The remaining 300 pounds paid for studio time for "Aftermath", a downtempo drift of "hip hop blues" that eventually became Tricky's debut single.

With Stewart operating as "executive producer" (as Tricky puts it), "Aftermath" came together haphazardly. Stewart remembers the session as "just me and Tricks
messing about on an 8 track," looping beats and weaving in samples that Tricky plucked from "some guy's pile of records". Outside his house, Tricky met Martina Topley-Bird--a schoolgirl in uniform, waiting for a bus--and on impulse invited her to sing. "I laid down a guide vocal for her, but we decided to keep my voice in, 'cos it sounded haunting." This slightly out-of-synch pairing of Martina's dulcet croon and Tricky's bleary rapping became the model for much of Maxinquaye. There was a fourth collaborator on "Aftermath",claims Tricky--he believes the post-apocalyptic scenario lyrics were channeled from his mother, who died when he was four. "I found out later that she used to write words, poetry, but never showed them to anybody."

Tricky offered "Aftermath" to Massive, who were still pulling together their 1991
debut Blue Lines. But, chuckles Tricky, the band's 3D "told me 'it's shit, you're never going to make it as a producer". "Aftermath" stayed on cassette for three years,unreleased; Tricky fell out of touch with Topley-Bird. After Blue Lines's release, Tricky was in limbo, idling on a retainer wage from Massive. "All I did was smoke weed, drink in bars, and go to clubs from Wednesday to Sunday." He sank into a slough of despond, complete with marijuana-induced paranoid hallucinations of demons in his living room.

This dark period inspired Tricky's next recording, "Ponderosa" and its lyrics about
an alcohol-and-spliff induced descent through "different levels of the Devil's company". Underpinned by a clanking, lurching percussion influenced by Indian bhangra,"Ponderosa" was one of several tracks demoed in London with engineering wizard Howard Bernstein (a/k/a Howie B), courtesy of Island Records. "Tricky was living with me and my girlfriend Harriet for a while," remembers Bernstein. "Kippers for breakfast, and Tricky kipping on a couch in the front room." Hospitable Howie believed he was all set to be a partner in the album project, should Island decide to sign Tricky. But management conflicts resulted in a "a legal nightmare" and left almost an album's worth of tunes stranded on the shelf. Although "Ponderosa" did clinch the Island deal, Bernstein was not included and "walked away with a sour taste in my mouth."

Tricky, meanwhile, bought a home studio and started work on the album in a grim
area of London called Harlesden, where he and Topley-Bird were ensconced as house
mates, although they barely knew each other. Aggravating his desolate surroundings and the alienation caused by moving from his hometown Bristol to a city where he had no friends, Tricky was listening to a relentlessly glum soundtrack-- The Geto Boys, Billie Holliday, and The Specials. The "concrete bleak sound" of Specials classics such as "Ghost Town" is just one thread in the Maxinquaye tapestry. Alongside the obvious hip hop ancestry (Eric B & Rakim's cinematic rap noir; Public Enemy--Tricky hailed Chuck D as "my Shakespeare"), the album is steeped in the influence of English art-rock weirdness ---Bowie, Numan, Japan, Peter Gabriel, and Kate Bush ("I think she's in the same league as John Lennon," Tricky gushes). Even more unlikely, Tricky claims that the gorgeous aural malaise of "Abbaon Fat Tracks" got its curious title because "it reminded me of Abba--but fucked up, and with phat beats."

An enigmatic tribute to his mother Maxine Quaye, the album's title was originally
intended as Tricky and Martina's collective bandname until the rapper capitulated to
Island's pressure and agreed to record under his nom de mic'. Released in 1995 to massive acclaim, Maxinquaye works simultaneously as an autobiographical account of one man's struggles and as a wider allegory. Evoking the orphanned drift, sociocultural deadlock, and pre-millenial tension of the Nineties just as Sly Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On had expressed the caged rage and curdled idealism of the early Seventies, Maxinquaye seemed to be partly about the inability of Tricky's generation to imagine utopia, let alone build it.

"We're all fucking lost!", Tricky declared. "I can't see how things are gonna get better. I think we have to destroy everything and start again. But I can't pretend I've got the answers. Bob Marley, he could write songs about freedom and love. I'm just telling the truth that I'm confused, I'm paranoid, I'm scared, I'm vicious."
Yet for all its despondency and dread, Maxinquaye is ultimately a redemptive experience.

2009-10-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

AFX
Analord 01--11
(Rephlex)
Village Voice, August 30th 2005

By Simon Reynolds

Since the debacle that was 2001’s over-programmed Drukqs, there’s been zero transmissions from Planet Aphex. So when Richard D. James reemerged at the start of the year with the launch of an extended series of EPs, the response from his still sizeable cult mingled joy, skepticism, and a heap of curiosity. Could James--once techno’s greatest melodist-- possibly have anything more to give?

The analog-only concept underpinning Analord seemed like a tacit admission that, like so many of his peers, during the late Nineties James had gotten lost in the mire of options offered by state-of-art technology. Riddled with detail and addled by effects, Drukqs’ delirium tremens of twitchy-glitchy beats and fruitless FruityLoops-ery suggested it was time for a drastic rethink. In the Dogme-like spirit of Holger Czukay’s maxim “restriction is the mother of invention,” on Analord James shuns digital signal processing, plug-ins and “virtual studio technology” programs in favor of synths, sequencers, and house music’s favorite tools, the Roland 909 drum machine and the Roland 303 bassline generator (source of the wibbly-bibbly acid-sound). The series stages a strategic retreat to the sort of set-up James used at the very start of his career some fifteen years ago.

Consistent with the analog concept, these EPs are vinyl-only releases, high quality pressings from whose deep grooves emanate sounds as thick and glossy as the platters themselves. Vinyl fiends always bang on about “warmth”, but that’s not exactly what you hear on Analord, given that the music is electronic and therefore innately glacial. But even before you appraise the tracks as compositions, your ears are struck by the rich presence of the sound. Vinyl-fetishism is also a crucial aspect of the EPs visual appeal: transparent sleeves invite your eyes to feast on the inky blackness.

Analord 11 is where the series has paused (for breath, or permanently, it’s not clear), which makes now a good moment to survey the length and breadth of what by any standard constitutes a formidable amount of sound (three 74 minute CD-R’s worth) to have issued in just six months. Alongside reverting to the restricted means available to him as a youth, it seems like James has also tried to recover the creative mindset. Circa ‘95, jungle threw the entire “electronic listening music” community off-balance, making producers focus their creativity on rhythmic complexity rather than haunting melody (the genre’s true forte). Analord reverses that priority. The beats, while deftly programmed, assume a largely subservient role; mood and melodiousness return to the fore. These tracks invoke a time when the concept of “machine soul” was fresh and inspirational: the era of classic releases by Derrick May, Fingers Inc, LFO, Carl Craig, The Black Dog, et al, long before chopped-up breakbeats impinged on the “purity” of electronic music.

The crucial question, though, is whether any Analord tracks approach the heights of James’ own classic phase (1991’s “Analogue Bubblebath” to 1995’s “Alberto Balsalm”, approximately). The answer: not quite, but close enough. If the weaker material recalls the output of James’ early Nineties second-division pseudonyms, the better pieces--the lustrous chitter of “Boxingday” (A3), the cyborg-toad jabber of “Analoggins” (A6), the writhy glisten of “”Backdoor. Netshadow” (A9)--display his unique flair for clustered dissonances, ghostly harmonic wisps, and eerie in-between emotions. (Consumer Guidance: your best buys are 2, 3, 10, and 11). The pieces that linger in your memory possess a somber, sorrowful quality: the pensive, frowning chords of “Pissed Up In Sel” (A2), the weepy-eyed melody-foam of
“Pwsteal.ldpinch.D” (A8), the dank mazes of glum that take up side two of Analord 11.

Instrumentally, the most Valued Player here isn’t the near-omnipresent 303 but whatever reverb unit James uses to drape his sounds in his signature shroud of muzzy melancholy. You start to wonder: could it be that The Aphex Twin is, like, depressed? Has he been dumped (one mournful ditty is titled “Where’s Your Girlfriend?”)? Or is this simply the blues of the innovator who ran out of future, and who’s gone back in the hope of finding a better way forward?

2009-10-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

jungle 12 inch reviews/ "Stone Free" column
Melody Maker, late 1994

by Simon Reynolds

METALHEADS--"Inner City Life"/"Timeless" (fffr/London)
Released as a taster 12 inch, "Inner City Life" could become jungle's "Back To Life" or "Unfinished Sympathy", thanks to the crossover appeal of Diane Charlemagne's gorgeous jazzy vocals and Goldie's angelic/demonic strings. But it's "Timeless", the 22 minute epic from which "Inner" is excerpted, that will really blow your mind, with its cobra-coiling swarm of breakbeats and maze-like/mirage-like production. A concept track about "inner city pressure", "Timeless" passes through different 'movements' (the most breathtaking being "Jah"'--cyber-juju, King Sunny Ade meets Derrick May). But "Timeless" really works as a whole, taking you on a hair-raising terror-ride through the city's heart of darkness. Not just a great 'dance record' but one of this decade's most astonishing pieces of popular art.

DA INTALEX---"What Ya Gonna Do" (Flex)
"What Ya Gonna Do" takes ambient jungle's paradoxes--savage sentimentality, punishing poignancy--to the extreme. It starts as a haze of synth-ripples and rapturous moans, then SUPERNOVAS with devastating bass-blasts and a skin-scalding soul-diva ultimatum: "whatcha gonna do?!". Da Intalex (a.k.a. L. Double) is a rising star.

DILLINJA---"Deep Love (Remix)" (Logic Productions), "Stomper's Delight/Southside" (Logic Productions)
With its softly glowing electric piano and flickers of lachrymose wah-wah guitar, 'Deep Love' exudes an exquisitely serene melancholy. Blue and beguiling, this is orchestral jungle at its finest. "Stompers" and "Southside" offer more Dillinja magic, unfurling cyber-jazz electronics over cranked-to-the-max clockwork drum & bass.

D'CRUZE--"Lonely/Chronic Breaks" (Suburban Base)
A brilliantly tentative intro--stabs of plangent strings, lump-in-throat lamentations--then "Lonely" rolls out an irresistible sashay of intricate snares and hi-hats. "Chronic Breaks" is gorgeously desolate, with eerie vocal samples like The Clangers yodelling the Appalachian blues.

E-Z ROLLERS--"Remixes" (Moving Shadow)
Droppin' Science's revamp of the sublime "Rolled Into One" is cool, but you can't really improve on perfection. So it's Foul Play's dramatic reconstruction of "Believe" that's killer, cutting between minimal (ultra-crisp drum tattoo and chiming bass) and maximal (rhapsodic wafts of strings 'n' synths) to superb effect.

RONI SIZE & KRUST/JMJ & RICHIE---"2 on 1, Issue 7" (Moving Shadow)
JMJ & Richie's "Deep Bass 9" is a pleasant enough confection of vocoderized ragga, blissed diva and two-step shuffle. But it's Size & Krust's "Witchcraft"--a dreamswirl of s(h)immering percussion, spangly wah-wah and hall-of-mirrors vocals-- that really substantiates the experimental intentions of the '2 On 1' series.

DJ PESHAY--"Psychosis/Represent" (Metalheads)
Both tracks have elegant arrangements featuring piano-tinkles and wah-wah tingles, but jungle's new smooth-side/soft-core direction worries me--this is a tad too tasteful for my taste. Enough soul-diva ululations already!

2009-10-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

jungle 12 inch reviews/ "Stone Free" column
Melody Maker, 1994

by Simon Reynolds

A GUY CALLED GERALD--- "Darker Than I Should/Gloc" (Juice Box),"Nazinji-Zaka/Hot Foot" (Juice Box)

Mr 'Voodoo Ray' is now at the forefront of 'intelligent hardcore'---hence these two 12 inches of densely textured ambient jungle. "Darker" and "Nazinji" offer ethno-pagan cyber-jazz that picks up where 808 State's 'State Ritual' left off; "Gloc" is so sensuously disorientating it could be from My Bloody Valentine's forthcoming jungle-influenced LP.

F.B.D. PROJECT---"Classified Listening" (Bangra Tunes)
F.B.D is intelligent hardcore whizzkid Neil Trix; "Classified' is a lush and limpid rainforest of polyrhythms, tremulous with detail.

DJ TANGO/HYPER ON EXPERIENCE---"Two On One, Issue 4" (Moving Shadow)
Tango's "Think Twice" is a dancefloor desolator, all demonic bass-surges and hideously clammy samples. Isolationist jungle? Sounds like a good idea to me.

BOOGIE TIMES TRIBE---"My Soul" (Suburban Base)
Go straight for the Roni Size & Krust remix, which laces the dark drum-&-bass groove with mysterious sound-vapours, heady strings and wafts of psychedelic eeriness.

NOODLES & WONDER---"Drum Soup" EP (Kickin')
Serene wind-chimes and gamelan-tinkling bells float over a turbo-charged battery of beats. Magical, despite a strange interlude of swingbeat mid-track.

RENEGADE featuring RAY KEITH---"Terrorist" (Moving Shadow)
Shlocky sentimental piano fades into a warrior-charge of radioactive bass and crisp drums. Then another B-line and another tier of drums.... Propulsive and compulsive.

DJ CRYSTL---"Meditation (Remix)/Warpdrive (Remix)" (Dee Jay)
Crystl's revamp of the monstrously foreboding "Warpdrive" plays up the poison-gas synth-drones but tampers with the avalanche effect of the breakbeat. The untouchable original can still be found on Breakdown's 'Drum & Bass' compilation.

THE K.G.B.--- "I Feel The Magic" (Juice Box)
More lush and languid enchantment from 'Executive Producer' A Guy Called Gerald's Juice Box label. Jazz-funk for the 21st Century.

LICK BACK ORGANISATION---"Ruff'n'Rugged/Manic Musik" (Suburban Base)
"Manic" starts with a sample of Grace Slick's "morning maniac music" drivel from Woodstock, then oscillates between jagged drum-&-bass and aromatic atmospherics.

SPLASH---"Hypnotizing" (Splash)
Ruff-rider breaks, gusts of ethereal girl-vox---a solid slice of ambient ardkore

2009-10-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

jungle 12 inch reviews/ "Stone Free" column
Melody Maker, 1994

by Simon Reynolds

RUFIGE CRU--"Fury", from 'Two On One, Issue One' (Moving Shadow)

Metalheads' Goldie does it again, this time in his Rufige Cru incarnation,
as part of Moving Shadow's new 'Two on One' series of experimental EPs. You
could call it 'ambient hardcore', you could call it 'cyber-jazz'--either way,
"Fury"'s demonic timewarped bass, soul-diva-in-agony samples, orchestral synths
and jazzy tangents all add up to one hell of a phuture shocker.

DJ NUT NUT & PURE SCIENCE--"The Rumble" (Production House)

Eno-esque drones, melted moans, stabbing B-line worthy of Wobble-era
PiL--ambient 'ardkore at its best. B-side "Virtual Reality" is a creepy
catacomb of sub-bass murk.

VARIOUS ARTISTS--"Subplates Vol 3" (Suburban Base)

Latest in Sub Base's 'showcase' series, two 10 inches of darkest
drum-&-bass. Best is Mikey James & Q Bass' "The Prophecy", with its spookadelic
backwards bass and beats.

OMNI TRIO--"Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)" (Moving Shadow)

Foul Play turbo-charge new thunder'n'joy into Omni's anthem, with its
ricocheting breakbeats, soul-blasting diva uproar and poignant piano motif.

ENGINEERS WITHOUT FEARS--"Spiritual Aura" (DeeJay Recordings)

Uplifting 'appy 'ardkore, ambient-tinged with rapturously rippling synths
and quiet storm murmurs.

RETURN OF Q PROJECT/ALLIANCE REMIXES--"Champion Sound" (Legend)

Almighty stomper with an elephantine bass-blast of a riff.

FULL MOON SCIENTIST--"Old Man River's Crying" (Hard Hands)

Dubbed-up, elegaic, and with a long, gorgeous coda of pure ambience, this
is the missing link between A.R. Kane's "I" and Underworld's "River Of Bass".

JUMPING JACK FROST--"Underworld E.P." (Formation)

Desolate girl-vox, ghostly garage-y keyboard riff, fevered breakbeats--a
fine slice of jungle noir.

DEEP BLUE--"The Helicopter Tune (Remixes)" (Moving Shadow)

Two 10 inches of revamps of this drum-&-bass monster with the sizzling
Latin percussion.

2009-10-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

jungle 12 inch reviews / "Stone Free" column
Melody Maker, February 1995

by Simon Reynolds

BLAME & JUSTICE--"Chapter II Remixes" (Moving Shadow)
"Nightvision"--remixed here by D'Cruze--is a drum & bass groove so eerily elasticated and dub-reverbed that it's hard to imagine what kind of physical response could do it justice. Art-core rhythm-magick designed for pythons or contortionists, music to turn your body inside out.

HIDDEN AGENDA -- "Is It Love?" (Black/White Records)
Starts as dub-wize weirdness over the most stealthy, stalking bassline, then
abruptly sashays into '70s soul grooviness, all halcyon harmonies, frothing Moogs
and honeyed guitar-twinkles. Jungle meets G-funk--could this be the sound of '95?

RHYTHM FOR REASONS -- "A Statement of Rhythms EP" (Formation)
'The Love Statement' takes the euphoric synth-blip intro to Jonny L's happy hardcore
classic "Alright" and folds it like origami over fucked-up breakbeats. "The
Smoker's Rhythm', a frenzied drum-kit work-out, is one for the Risla massive.

T. POWER --"Horny Mutant Jazz" (SOUR)
Chilled-out jazz-jungle pivoting around a stately, sonorous horn motif. Calms
your metabolic rate as effectively as an intravenous squirt of liquid nitrogen.

TOM & JERRY-- EP (Reinforced)
Four tracks of inventive drum-rolls and multiple basslines that plunge deep into
red-zone distortion. Highlights: the swingbeat-flavoured "'Til The Morning" and
the percussion-labyrinth of "Follow Da Massive".

NICKY BLACKMARKET-- "Wild Geese" (Blackmarket)
Kinda like Ultramarine gone jungalistic, this turns honking waterfowl into
bebop horns, and rippling fusion-era piano into the melancholy ambience of a lake
shore at dusk.

HIGHER SENSE--"Cold Fresh Air (Remix)/People of the Universe" (Moving Shadow)
Ignore the overrated A-side in favour of "People", with its intricate beats,
eccentric bass and lambent jazz-chords.

SKANNA--"Greatest Thing (Remix)/All You Wanted" (Skanna)
Deeply dubby, with a yearning roots reggae vocal, rubbery bass and glassy percussion.

BROWN & DANGERMAN-- "Dreams of Another World" (Stronghold)
Superfast breaks surge through a whooshing wind-tunnel of aciiiiied frequency-modulations.

2009-09-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

for more Hawtin-related entertainment, go here

2009-09-19T13:18:00.000-07:00

2009-09-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

TRIBAL GATHERING, JULY 1996
Melody Maker, July 13th 1996

by Simon Reynolds

Scan courtesy of Archived Music Press

2009-09-09T14:16:00.001-07:00

2009-08-06T06:31:00.001-07:00

2009-07-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

MOVING SHADOW present "VOODOO MAGIC"
Equinox, London
Melody Maker, spring 1994

by Simon Reynolds

The host: Moving Shadow, the UK's leading "intelligent
hardcore" label. The line-up: jungle's top DJs, including
the ubiquitous Randall, Grooverider, Ray Keith, Brockie and
LTJ Bukem, plus PA's from Moving Shadow's three most popular artists,
Foul Play, Omni Trio and Deep Blue. The venue: Equinox, a
slightly cheesy disco on Leicester Square usually full of tourists, whose
balconies and upholstered alcoves provide welcome rest and
respite for the combat-fatigued and shellshocked.

For hardcore is warzone music; its jagged breakbeats are
treacherous, a simulation of the minefield that is modern
life. Hardcore strafes the listener's body with percussion,
so that dancing is like striding into a stream of machine-gun
snares and ricocheting paradiddles, while bass-bombs send
shockwaves through your intestines. But, with Moving Shadow's
brand of hardcore, the danger-beats are incongruously swathed
with soothing, silken tenderness: strings, harps, jazz-fusion
chords, soul-diva sighs and gasps, plus the kind of woogly
textures you'd usually hear from The Irresistible Force.

This "ambient hardcore" sound was traiblazed on tracks
like "Music" by LTJ Bukem (who plays a brilliant set, finding
an extra five notches of volume to really detonate the night)
and "Open Your Mind" by FOUL PLAY. Sadly, FP don't include this sublime song in their PA, but they do debut their fab
new single ["Being With You"], all phuture-jazz synth-clusters and diva
beseechings, while lazers scythe and slash the crowd. Foul
Play also 'play' their remix of Hyper-On-Experience's "Lords
Of the Null Lines", demonstrating how fluid the notion of
'authorship' is in this scene, where an anthem's life is
prolonged by endless, drastically altered versions.

After Bukem's set, Andy C keeps the music rollin'.
Junglists and junglettes do a palsied version of 'steppers',
originally a roots reggae dance that involves skipping on the
spot like a manic jig'n'reel. But with jungle, it's like
they're Morris-dancing on bullets. The crowd tonight mixes
chic, style-conscious sophisticates (usually black or Asian)
and dressed-down white kids who mostly look like they're well
under the 18 age limit emblazoned on the flyer. There's all
sorts here tonight, friendly luv'd up types who probably
secretly mourn the days of "happy 'ardcore", and the moody,
self-contained junglists into dark tunes, who despise the
rave ethos with its Vicks, white gloves and gushing euphoria.

OMNI TRIO hit the stage, or rather a proxy does, since the true creator behind this country's sublimest dance-pop is
a 38 year old Can fan who prefers to remain an enigma. The
stand-in pretends to knob-twiddle as Omni's classic "Renegade
Snares" tears up the floor, with its soul-shocking cannonades
of polyrhythm, hypergasmic chorus "c'mon, take me UP!" and
sentimental verging on twee piano motif. Then the MC
announces "the one 'n' only, the livin' legend", DEEP BLUE.
The latter is a unassuming bloke whose "The Helicopter Tune"
is still massive after 6 months floor-life. Recently reissued
with 4 remixes, it sold 22 thousand and became the first
hardcore track to go Top 70 in years. Based around a
geometric Latin beat cranked up like some crazed clockwork
mechanism, "Helicopter" gets the crowd seething like a
cauldron.

A few hours later, we stumble bleary and squinting into
a viciously crisp dawn, battered and bruised but still
glowing with the beauty-terrorism of "Voodoo Magic."

2009-07-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

NOSTALGIA OF THE YEAR: AMBIENT JUNGLE

by Simon Reynolds

(originally appeared at the Blissout website, Faves and Unfaves of 2000, now located here)

Another Pop Mystery I've been contemplating recently relates to the life cycles of genres, their arc and fall. You can be basking in the blooming fullness of a genre's annus mirabilus, and somehow it never occurs that this is obviously the golden age, the peak, the best it's ever gonna get, and that the only way forward now is downhill. When you're in the thick of it, you think it can just carry on forever at this perpetual crest... Records that at the time seem like portents or glimpses of so-much-more-to-come turn out, years later, to have been swan-songs, the last of the summer wine. Who'd have thought, for instance, that Adam F's 'Metropolis' and Nasty Habit's 'Shadowboxing" were destined to be the historical pinnacle of techstep (and therefore drum'n'bass), that they were form-defining and form-exhausting ultra-tunes?

These thoughts emerged during a spate of compulsive re-listening to what they used to call (alright, what I used to call) "ambient jungle", which inspired musings on the lines of why couldn't this music just stay forever at this sustained peak of awesomeness? Why do musics have to deteriorate or die? Tracks like Dillinja's "Deep Love" and "Sovereign Melody," Bukem's "Atlantis", EZ Roller's 'Believe" and "Rolled Into One" (Moving Shadow's last masterpiece?), the Steve Gurley's remix (more like re-production) of Princess's Eighties Britsoul classic of yearning "Say I'm Your Number One," still sound so fantastic--why couldn't they have carried on like this until the end of time, or at least lasted out the decade. A peculiar twist of hind-hearing is that even tracks I didn't rate particularly at the time sound fabulous now, like PFM's "One and Only"--the way the bass moves and drops, the ripple-trails and
glistening vapors of ambience, the explosive entrance of the diva vocal. Then there's Peshay, a producer I've never rated--his track on the first Logical Progression, "Vocal", is amazing, and I never even noticed it at the time; that kind of Speed-oriented mellow jazzual track was the enemy, back then. Now, long after the battle's subsided, whatever was at stake a faint memory, I can hear it as a tour de force of exquisitely mashed-up beats and diva deployment, using a vocal sample (Anita Baker? Barbara Tucker? it's the vocal lick that goes "I'm singing to you") that's got more in common with a beautifully designed commodity, a sports car or leather sofa, than say Aretha Franklin; it's all burnished technique and poise, not raw soul. After 2step I can appreciate what is basically a kind of capitalist utopianism behind such fetishising of elegance and surface slickness.

Another example: in my disappointment that Omni Trio had abandoned the euphoria fireworks of the "Renegade Snares" formula, I missed how good bits of Haunted Science are--"Who Are You?" and especially "The Elemental", an early neurofunk-style two-stepper beat with keyboard lines as delicate as dew settling and bass-drops like tender thunder--how cleverly Rob Haigh had developed a new, calmer but still compelling style of drum'n'bass for the home environment.

The truth is that there always was an integral side to drum'n'bass that wasn't about rudeness (nasty B-lines, mash-up breakbeats) but about supreme dainty-ness and neat-freak finesse. It's a different kind of rush--the tingle you can get from the groomed delicacy of a hi-hat pattern, the nimble, glancing panache of a synth-chord flourish. Jacob's Optical Stairway, the oft-maligned alter-ego album by 4 Hero, is some kind of pinnacle in this respect: the detail in the music induces its own kind of high, the aural equivalent of putting on your first pair of glasses and suddenly everything's ultra-sharp.

The chill-ness of "ambient jungle" and the jazzy stuff that followed is also more appealing, partly because of the feeling that I've listened to enough extreme music for a lifetime so why not go with sheer beauty and pleasantness for a bit, and partly because there's nothing like parenthood to make you appreciate the aesthetic of stress-reduction. (Actually, a few years ago I had something of an epiphany: a plane trip, creating the typical intense stress situation right up til you go with all the getting work done before departure and packing in a rush. Coiled as tight as bedsprings, we got in the cab to JFK; the driver had the radio tuned to one of those lite-jazz stations, the kind that plays what Jackson Griffiths dubbed "biz jazz", the post-ECM, post-fusion travesty of jazz favored by many corporate executives (and Yellowjackets fan Goldie). Any other day my response would have been nausea, but the music hit like a IV drip pumping liquid valium straight into the spine. Instant tranquilizing bliss. That day, I could dig it.).

Of course, people still make this kind of drum'n'bass (or carry on doing something pretty similar in spirit e.g. broken beats/West London Sound) and it's not as good as the 94/95 stuff. LTJ Bukem's long-awaited debut album came out this year--encased in a striking period-looking jazz-fusion style cover, and with a montage of snapshots of his jazzbo heroes on the inside--but it got almost no attention. Bit sad, for a guy who once commanded dance magazine cover stories.

But going back to the golden period that late 93/94/95 phase when darkside started to flirt with musicality, blossomed into artcore/ambient-jungle, and then went too far into the fuzak-zone.... quite a few tracks from that era fit the syndrome of "lost future" music, or genres-that-never-were (but could/should have been). Sometimes A-sides, more often B-side tunes or track four on an EP
jobs, these tunes--Blame's "Anthemia", Trace's "Jazz Primitives", Myerson's "Find Yourself" (with its painted bird of a Flora Purim sample flitting through a labyrinth of future-jazz foliage), lots more--feel like they could have been blueprints for entire worlds of sound , but of course they weren't. The DJs
weeded them out; the massive rejected them. Still, I'm fascinated by these tracks that represent a path not taken.

2009-06-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

FYI all cru:

an announcement and general appeal for donations of flyers, zines, rave memorabilia, music, books, etc:

Glowsticks, Acid and the Post-Modern Matrix. An Archive of Rave and Club Culture.

A project by the Berlin Archive of Youth Cultures (Archiv der Jugendkulturen e.V.) and the chair for general sociology at the Technical University Dortmund.

On the occasion the 20-year anniversary of the Love Parade, Sean Nye from the Berlin Archive Youth Cultures together with Professor Ronald Hitzler from the techno archive at the Technical University Dortmund are pleased to announce an initiative during 2009, to expand and centralize their collection in Berlin.

Rave and club culture has existed for more than two decades. It has long since moved out of the subcultural shadows of the basement and warehouse raves and has since become a global phenomenon. Although its exciting history constantly grows in complexity, there still exists no central archive, where the development and history of the scene is documented and preserved. The goal of the archive is to establish a central collection for scholarly research on the history of the scene, which will be made public and accessible as a meeting point for researchers, journalists, musicians, fans and other interested parties. In this regard, the focus of the archive is not only techno, as the most popular and general genre for electronic dance music. Rather, we seek to document the entire history and variety of electronic dance music with its various subscenes and genres: House, Trance, Drum & Bass, Electro, Gabber, IDM, Industrial, EBM, Goa and much more.

The collection already consists of more than 3,000 rave and club fanzines, primarily major German fanzines (for example, Frontpage, Partysan, De:bug, Groove, Raveline, etc.). It also includes a press archive with thousands of articles from newspapers, magazines, and other print media, academic research (bachelor, master and doctoral projects), books, as well as thousands of flyers, posters and other objects. The archive has set a goal to expand this collection considerably with the help of labels, scene activists, and fans. We ask for you help through material and financial support in order to personally contribute to the construction of this archive.

For the coming year the Archive has set the following goals:

1. The expansion of the book and fanzine collections: The collection of significant German-language and international fanzines, books, academic papers, and media articles should be completed. A list of the current book and fanzines collections can be sent upon request.

2. The expansion of the media collections: A comprehensive collection of films and documentaries, music videos, TV-reports and concert films that deal with rave and club culture needs to be gathered. This includes recordings of radio interviews, DJ-sets and concerts, among others. Our collections of posters and flyers also needs to be expanded. A list of our current collection of video materials can be sent upon request.

3. The development of a representative musical archive: This is the most challenging goal of the archive, and it demands the greatest support from volunteers. We call upon labels as well as collectors and private persons to participate in the construction of such a collection. Above all, donations of musical recordings are needed. We ask music labels to send copies of their future releases to the archive; available copies of major releases from back catalogues would also be much appreciated. All material forms of musical releases are included in this request: cassettes, records, CDs and other formats. Due to the enormous number of musical releases, our focus at this stage remains on a representative
archive: that means, on releases with either a significant musical or commercial impact on the scene.

4. To promote the archive: The archive’s work and research should be made better known through the cooperation of well-known scene personalities (artists and DJs) and institutions (media, labels and promoters). Events should not only promote the archive, but also help raise money for the development of the archive.

ENDOWMENT

On account of the Archive of Youth Cultures’ lack of regular financial backing (rent, job salaries, etc), we are currently planning the founding of a general endowment, in order to secure the archive’s work for the long term. The Archive of Rave and Club Culture currently under development would be an important component of this endowment. To establish this foundation, 50.000 Euros are still in need of collection.

Always available for questions and further information:

Sean Nye
Curator of the Archive of Rave and Club Culture
Archiv der Jugendkulturen e.V.
Fidicinstraße 3, 10965 Berlin
Tel: 030/6942934
sean.nye@jugendkulturen.de
www.jugendkulturen.de

Tours of the archive are also possible.
More information can be found under www.jugendkulturen.de

Membership:

For an annual sum of only 48 Euros, you could support the social work and documentation that the Archive of Youth Cultures offers. You will be part of a creative and scholarly network that at the same time continues to develop a comprehensive library on the topic of youth and subcultures. As a member, you will receive an issue of the Journal of Youth Cultures as well as two books of your choice from our annual publications.

Further information: www.jugendkulturen.de

About the Archive of Youth Cultures:

The Berlin Archive of Youth Cultures (in Germany, an officially registered association) was founded in 1998. It collects – as the only institution of its kind in Europe – above all authentic documents from youth cultures themselves (fanzines, flyers, music, etc.), but also scholarly and academic papers, news reports, etc. The archive offers these free of cost for research and for public use in its 300 square-meter-large library and archive spaces. In addition, the Archive of Youth Cultures carries out its own research on youth scenes, and works with institutions, communes and associations. It offers 120 school project events and adult education services annually and publishes its own journal – Journal der Jugendkulturen (The Journal of Youth Cultures) – as well as a book series, publishing six new books annually. The Archive of Youth Cultures is in this respect always interested in obtaining appropriate documents and materials in all forms. The majority of the archive’s employees work on a volunteer basis.

About Professor Ronald Hitzler:
Professorship of General Sociology at the Technical University Dortmund. Longtime Rresearcher of youth scenes with personal specialization in the techno scene. Founder and ofi Co-editor of the volume Techno-Soziologie: Erkundungen einer Jugendkultur (Techno-Sociology: Investigations in a Youth Culture) (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2001). Also the founder of jugendszenen.com and co-Editor of the volume Leben in Szenen: Formern jugendlicher Vergemeinschaftung heute (Life in Scenes: Forms of Youth Socialization Today) (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005). More information at www.hitzler-soziologie.de

About Sean Nye:
PhD-Student in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society (Minors in Music and German Studies) at the University of Minnesota since 2004. DAAD-research fellow in the Popular Music Research-Centre at Humboldt University Berlin (2008-09). Research scholar in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Free University Berlin (2009-10). Since 2008 curator of the techno and gothic scene collections at the Archive of Youth Cultures.

Our partners include the following institutions/artists:

Ad Noiseam Records (Electronic Music Label, Berlin)
Adam X (Producer/DJ, NYC-Berlin)
Atom TM (Uwe Schmidt, Producer, Frankfurt/Santiago)
Club Transmediale, Fesitval For Adventurous Music and Related Visual Arts (Berlin)
Dense Records (Record Store, Berlin)
DJ T (House/Techno DJ, Journalist and Founder of Groove Magazine, Frankfurt/Berlin)
Groove (Fanzine, Berlin)
Hecq (IDM Producer, Berlin)
Oliver Lieb (Producer/DJ, Frankfurt)
PARTYSAN (German and International Fanzine)
Pearls Booking (DJ booking agent, Berlin)
rock‘n’popmuseum (museum for pop music history, Gronau)
Simon Reynolds (English Journalist, Author of Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture)

We appreciate any form of assistance and look forward to more official partnerships!

2009-06-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

RIP Ian Loveday a/k/a Eon

spice

inner mind

fear: the mindkiller

basket case

2009-06-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, # 5

MASCULINE PRESSURE

or,

(REAP)PRAISING THE "HARD" IN HARDCORE

Quite often during hardcore continuum discourse there'll be an invocation of "the feminine"--as a depleted or suppressed quality in the music, and sometimes in the discourse about the music too. This deplorable deficit will prompt calls for an irrigation of fluidity to counteract the encroaching inflexibility, whether it's a stiffness and riffness afflicting a particular nuum genre, or the "ossification " [fnote1] syndrome caused by excessively rigorous theorizing.

Now the person invoking "the feminine" in these debates (if they're well-read they might even mention Helene Cixous's ecriture feminine) is always male, and not the least bit hesitant about recruiting "the feminine" to support their argument (generally aimed against some other male, an old fashioned iron fist wrapped in the velvet glove of quasi-feminism). Compare that with the way that few people nowadays would be sufficiently unaware to do a similar rhetorical move using "blackness": over time it has sunk in that few things are more undignified than two white guys squabbling over whose has the better understanding of/ relationship with musical "blackness." (I speak, wincing, as someone who has in the past been one of those two white guys). Despite this it's still permissible to do the inverse racism move and complain about an excess of "whiteness" in the music. Indeed nuum-discourse participants do this quite regularly, railing about particular subgenres that have gotten too "whiteboy" , which usually means too rocky/riffy, which in turn means too masculine/phallic. Taking us right back to all those invocations of "the feminine".

Now I did actually feel slightly self-conscious about invoking the Mighty Yin during my Liverpool talk--the passage on hypersoul/diva vocal science/"feminine pressure". As the paragraphs approached it suddenly felt awkward to be talking about this stuff in a room that contained a fair number of women: what would they think? But I ploughed ahead--had no choice, since those points were central to my argument, and furthermore were (as far as these things can be gauged) "true". There is a diva-fabulous, "feminine presha" undercurrent running through the nuum that every so often totally swamps the music (2step being the supreme example).

But in terms of my becoming intrigued by gender-coded discourse games [fnote2], the seeds of this essay go back a couple of months, when my interest in Caspa was sparked, having been startled by the vilification of the man and his music. All that incredibly vivid revulsion for wobble's mid-frequency blare as the sound of "someone jizzing in my face" and "bukkakestep"! All that anxiety about dance music degenerating into rock: "rigor mortis mid range shite… punching the ceiling and moshing rather than dancing… shouty soulless gack… big chunks of riff meat".

Here's a recent deployment of this kind of rhetoric, albeit calmer in tone: Louis Pattison spotlights as Guardian single of the week "Narst"/"Love Dub" by Cooly G (an actual woman! on Hyperdub!!).

"As dubstep begins to resemble, quite literally, a boy's club -- one that pongs of a pungent mix of spliff and locker rooms -- Hyperdub, the label behind the murky, underwater two-step of Burial, ups the ante once more… 'Love Dub' and its remix are a reminder of UK bass music's capacity to sooth and seduce, all gently massaging sub-bass, breathy vocals and woozy synth that collects like warm pools of sunlight."

Stop press: and here's another one, same newspaper, different writer, same rhetoric from scribe and artists alike (Bristol's new "purple" sound purveyors Joker, Guido, Gemmy--all men as it happens):

"There's a gender issue here, too: since the sexy vocals and pop sensibilities of garage disappeared, British club music has become dominated by bland masculinity. Guido says that is reflected on dancefloors: 'The low-end sounds carry the power, bass, and aggression, and the mids and highs carry the sexy melodies. Without the melodies, dubstep and grime clubs have lost the girls. But the girls get up and dance to our stuff'.... For too long, British dance music has been po-faced, masculine, drab...."

Stop Stop Press: in the big dubstepforum July 2009 discussion about wobble versus post-dubstep, one commenter referred to the low-frequency-oscillation riffs of wobble as "LFO rape":

"its not even the fact that the wobble is hated. Its just the LFO Rape I dont agree with.. My Defininition of LFO Rape... the process in which subject uses an LFO preset to create soul-less, machine music."

Yes, the potent whiff of man-stench has been giving the custodians of dubstep the jitters recently. Is it going the way of drum 'n' bass post-1997, they worry? Actually what I hear, at least in potential, is something closer to slowed-down gabba. Complete with gabber-like cartoon bad-boy samples and puerile abjection/pulp horror yuk-yuks (track titles like "Diahorrea," "Putrid Creature," "Puking Over", "The Mong Song"). The handwringing dismay of the cognoscenti has a curiously déjà vu quality. Dubstep, six years into its existence, has become a hardcore, headstrong, having-it scene, with a following of punters and munters, not just pundits. Its original fans, scholars of the history of hardcore to a man, are repeating the exact same kind of attack lines the Balearics and house heads spat in 1991: ardkore as "the new heavy metal" for shirtless sweaty hoolies, "all the curve and swing has been squeezed out… all it seems to be about is boys, bass and bother".

At the time there was a counter-view: another Caspar (Pound, young boss of Rising High Records, RIP), proclaimed: "Hard as fuck! It's the rock of the future… The best thing about hardcore is that all the soul's been taken out. We’ve had 200 years of human element in music and it's about time for a change…. It's not about happiness, it's more aggressive, more intense."

Those words were uttered in early '92, the nuum's dawn (bliss twas to be alive and rushing your nut off). What Pound identified as an emergent force in the music--aggression, apocalyptic darkness, a soul-less mechanistic coldness--would prove to be a massive current within the hardcore continuum all the way through its existence. It's hardly ever gone away completely, and often it's flared up to completely take over the music.

Yet strangely it's become almost impermissible in recent years to say that what attracted you to this whole area of music was--in large part--its qualities of hardness and darkness, its ability to overpower and dominate the listener. In a peculiar twist, "macho" has replaced "poppy" (code for "girly") as the way cognoscenti diss(miss) things that aren't tasteful or "progressive" enough. As I noted in the Caspa column, people refer to the macho, noisy dubstep as "commercial".

Now all these gender-codings and "feminine pressure" moves [fnote3] would be irrelevant if they didn't have some correlation with what's going on within the scene itself. Handily corroborating what I'm addressing here is currently hot tune "Too Many Man", a grime/funky hybrid by Boy Better Know:

"We need some more girls in here/We need some more girls in here/There's too many man/Too many many man"

So at last we arrive at the crux: the lugubrious concept of the "sausage party", a social gathering where hardly any women are present. Jeremy Gilbert described the UEL seminar as the most male-dominated academic event he'd ever organized. I wasn't surprised to learn this, not in the least. In my second reflection I noted that "the majority of us appear to be boys, regrettably" and suggested "the reasons deserve further investigation". What follows is my attempt to probe that mystery.

First thing to note is that no one ever voluntarily and with foreknowledge goes to a sausage party. It's something you end up at inadvertently and discover with slowly mounting dismay. In the case of nuum-discourse, I don't believe women are excluded so much as they simply don't turn up. Some do, obviously, but the sexual imbalance is marked. Begging the question: if this music is so crucial, and the discussion about it so compelling, why don't we have something much closer to gender parity?

I'm not sure this is a nuum problem exclusively. It's probably even worse in some other areas of discussion about dance music--deep house snobs, Detroit techno purists. It's possibly a fairly uniform syndrome across the music nerdosphere. Even in the poptimist milieu--where the whole premise is "letting in and privileging the music of the teenage girl"--there's a rather high density of sausage. This doubtless relates to a common mode of engagement with music that cuts across genre divisions: competitive expertise, the drive to mastery and knowledge, curation, collecting/classifying, canon guardianship, taste and taxonomy battles, etc.

I can get weary of all that, like anyone. But I get equally weary when blokes go into auto-flagellation mode about their blokeishness (especially when the self-reproaches quickly subside and it's back to blokey business as usual). I don't believe that obsessiveness and hyper-seriousness are somehow discredited by this gender imbalance, that it reflects badly either on Obsession in a general sense or on the specific musical area being obsessed about, over-interpreted, etc. I think these activities have an intrinsic value. Nerdishness has some things going for it: knowledge, enthusiasm, the capacity to get carried away by ideas. I'm just curious why relatively few women are drawn to engage with this particular form of music in this particular mode.

One possibility, of course, is there is something about this music that has a particularly strong attraction to males, or to a particular subset of males.

Right up front it ought to be acknowledged that lots of the key moments of the nuum have been, if anything, hyper-masculine: ragga-jungle, techstep, grime, and certain strains of dubstep (early on, the colder, techno-y side of the music; more recently the rowdy wobble yobbery). (I'm trusting here that people will allow me to use the conventional codings of masculine and feminine in this essay for the purpose of argument--obviously I'm aware of their culturally constructed nature). There have been peak phases within the trajectory of the nuum that have only really been celebrate-able in terms of their hardness and aggression, through recourse to notions of music that tests the listener, to an ideology of the underground as anti-pop. Terms that are conventionally negative, that are unappealing in life and in entertainment--cold, severe, militaristic, machinic, emotionally armored, tense, dread-full--are valorized within this music culture. More than that: they're glamorized. You only have to look at the slanguage of praise generated within the scene itself: tracks or DJ sets that are slammin', kickin', tearin'…. deejays or MCs who smashed it, tore it up, killed, slew… music that is rude or ruff, sick or disgusting…

And then consider the sonic currents percolating all the way through the music's history. The gruff swagger of hip hop and dancehall reggae doesn't require elaboration, and in nuum history these flavours generally overpower or at least balance out the influence of house (diva vocals, groove, the disco tradition). But pushing things further to the yang, you have the fourth cornerstone of the nuum: hard techno [fnote4]. The "Dominator"/"Mentasm" sound of Belgium and Beltram… the clanking, mechanistic industrialism of Meng Syndicate and 80 Aum plus the harsher bleep exponents like XON and Forgemasters… the riffy-ness of Frank DeWulf and CJ Bolland… even the darker side of Detroit (early UR, Suburban Knight, Kevin Saunderson's Tronikhouse alter-ego) creeps in a bit… This strain of cold, punitive bombast, rooted partly in Electronic Body Music and Euro industrial, is something that resurfaces periodically: in the techstep brutalism of No U Turn and Dom & Roland and Renegade Hardware, in early grime and sub-lo, at various points in dubstep. Hell, there's some Human Resource-style sicknoize on "Mind Is A Gun" on the recent Newham Generals album!

So running parallel with the current of feminine pressure within the nuum there's an equally strong current of masculine pressure [fnote 5]. Crudely diagrammed, you can track a dialectic here, a pendulum-like oscillation, or (more frequent, actually) the fissile coexistence of opposites:

Yin / Yang
Pop / Anti-pop
Song / Track
Maximalist / Minimalist
Swing / Stiff
Cheesy / Dark
Sentimental / Cold
Groovy / Machinic
Human / Inhuman
Pulse / Riff

A point worth making at this juncture is that the yin terms are very much forces within the music. It's feminine pressure. What could be more formidable than the diva? I make this point because many who call for the nuum to get back in touch with its "feminine side" confuse that with a sort of aquatic androgyny, a metrosexual mildness. Hence the recurring error of the Dolphin Move, where the "logical progression" for this music is to make it sound more like Carl Craig or a Nu Groove B-side (something you can see with a lot of the wishy-washy, watery dubstep of recent years that converges with Basic Channel/Chain Reaction…. Don't get me wrong, that Martyn album is splendid home listening, but mash up a dancehall?). Or you'll get people bigging up deejays for mixing with slow blends and gradual builds rather than the wham-bang pander-to-the-massive style, with its orientation towards "the drop". But "true" nuum music is about the dynamic co-existence of equal but opposed forces (dark/light, minimal/ maximal, etc), rather than a Derek Smalls-like "fire + ice = lukewarm water" half-measure.

Looking back across the history of this music, it seems to me that even during those periods when you might say that fem-presha was ascendant (speed garage and 2step), the darker, harder undercurrent still lurked balefully within the slinky sexiness. Early UK Garage had tunes like "Gunman" and "Sound Bwoy Burial" (the raucous dancehall MC christens the track's genre-of-one as "ruffhouse"!), like "Cape Fear" and "Bad Boys Move In Silence". Even 2step--nuum at its slickest, most mature and melodic and sugarsweet--had its fair share of rudeboy MCs and dutty bass-2-dark. On one of 2step's most poptastic crossover hit ever--Truestepper's "Out of Your Mind"--Victoria Becks taunts: "this tune's gonna punish you".

So what I'm talking about is how the nuum (and dance music in general) has this secret side that's raucous and ruckus-oriented and, face it, rockist. And this is disavowed, even when it might have been the very thing that drew some of us into the music in the first place. Certainly in my case it was Beltram and Bolland and the Belgian bombast-blare that pulled me into rave, before I turned on to the breakbeat direction…. the mid-range riffage of what was then just called "techno" was the first time that I heard something coming out of the house music area that had the full-on bliss-attack and engulfing (over)power of MBV and other neo-psych bands I worshipped…. or rather it was the first thing since the original
acid house (another hard, cold, mechanistic music that had certain parallels with rock).

I don't think I am alone here. Some of us are pulled in by this rockist/testosterone-y element in the music and then later on veer away from it; our tastes evolve or we learn to think of it as less sophisticated or advanced or something.

Now I hasten to add that I'm not suggesting this kind of aggy, hard-as-hell stuff has no appeal to women. I was always surprised by how many girls were into the post-97 drum'n'bass, after the supposed defection of Womankind to speed garage; indeed one female friend of mine only got into D&B in a real heavy-duty fanatical way after I'd switched over to UK garage (but then she was from a kind of rocky, indie background). When you get female deejays in these seemingly macho-land genres like jungle or gabba, often they play it as hard or harder than the men. (I'm flashing on DJ Rap one time at the Paradise, scourging the audience with a set of ruthlessly stripped-down, hard-as-nails jungle, out-blasting the likes of Hype and Randall on the same bill). Or think of someone like Mary Ann Hobbs, who was into heavy metal and motorbikes before she became the first lady of dubstep.

Nonetheless, one has to say that a lot of this music--resorting to gender designation as conventionally understood, seen--it's quite… manly, isn't it? And it's not just about the sound of the music, it's about the imagery that surrounds it: the track titles… the artist names picked by producers, DJs, MCs… the samples used… There's a steady stream of masculine archetypes, of heroics and anti-heroics. The rude boy, the gangsta, the thug, the soldier… It's all very Clash, to be honest! Grime was the culmination of this funk-to-punk tendency within nuum music, and how right that the genre virtually begins with a song titled "'Oi!".

I'm going to seize the opportunity to talk at some length about grime here because it got somewhat neglected at Liverpool and in the subsequent discussions. In my case this was partly because it seemed so recent it almost didn't need to be accounted for, unlike the Nineties stuff. But grime is a totally crucial phase-shift within the nuum narrative: in some ways the most drastic transformation (from a dance/deejay oriented sound to a verbal/MC dominated culture) but undeniably continuum-ous from what came before (the flowering of rave/pirate MCing as a latent artform, the fact that the grime artists were all inspired by jungle MCs). Grime represented the remasculinisation of the music after 2step's girls-like-this shift. All the supple slinkiness of 2step rhythm was reversed, with cold, stiff beats that merged aspects of electro, ragga, even gabba. The sound-palette became vastly less "musical" in the conventionally understood sense (a marked diminishment in "played" feel; tonalities that are glacial, dry, thin, redolent of video games or ringtones). All this makes grime ideally suited for a discussion of the play of genderised terms within nuum music.

It's also overdue for me to grapple with grime again because the fact is I was as excited by that "moment"--from the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2005--as I was by jungle or 2step; as much of a believer. It's only the bruising failure of its push to crash-over (rather than cross-over) into chartpop that led to the emotional exhaustion with grime candidly recorded in the 2006 blogpost that Dan Hancox wheeled out at UEL and which he seems to almost take personally. I also eagerly grab the opportunity to discuss grime because I think it's one of the most potent arguments against the nuum-is-over case. The fact that grime has endured through the entire Noughties, that in crossover terms it's bigger than ever while the underground is healthy, as triumphantly noted in this piece by Man Like Dan
(which I could almost imagine as belated riposte to my 2006 blogpost!)… all that would seem to prove that the nuum remains relevant both as an actually living body of sonix/scenius and as a model that retains some purchase on current musical reality. So I'm delighted to direct the spotlight of my mind on grime once again.

And the first thing to say about grime is to acknowledge how much of its compelling aesthetic qualities and its sheer pleasure is related to the flexing of power and violence.

Let's look closely at two tracks that have claims to be absolute zeniths of grime both formally and in terms of a cultural moment rising to its peak:

"Pow (Forward)", by Lethal B featuring Fumin, D Double E, Nappa, Jamakabi, Neeko, Flow Dan, Ozzi B, Forcer, Demon and Hot Shot
which you can watch as a video here

and

"Destruction (VIP)" by Jammer featuring Wiley, D Double E, Kano and Durty Doogz
which you can listen to here

The title of "Pow" comes from comic book superhero violence--"Biff! Bang! Pow!" --but there's nothing very cartoon-like about the lyrics, which are at pains to convey the gritty specifics of their various threats:

Nappa promises:
"I'lllll....crack your skull
Leave you fucked up in a wheelchair
If you try to clash this evil brer"

Jamakabi describes how he's going to
"draw fi da metal
Not da gun, me draw for da belt buckle
I make a bigger boy feel so likkle
Just swing my belt round like a nun chuckle
Bus you head and make your blood start trickle"

Neeko and Flow Dan both vow to cock back their steel and bun fire, with Flow Dan adding the grace note of
"Man I go step in a him face with my new Nikeys"

Then there's Demon's immortal verse:
"You don't wanna bring armshouse
I'll bring armshouse to your mums house
You don't wanna bring no beef
Bring some beef and lose some teeth"

"Destruction VIP", while more direct in its title, is less bloody in its verses, but does feature the bravura Wiley sequence where he dresses down a wannabe bad-boy, a fake-gangsta:
"I know Trouble
Trouble said he don't know you
I know Beef
Beef said he don't know you
I had War
And War said he don't know you"

...and so on, through a long list of Personified Essences of Grime Reality… Crime, Street, Empty Belly, Robbery, .38, Hustler, Ghetto Life, Bad Boys… all of which Wiley's intimately familiar with. (Which leaves your typical middle class bloggerati grime-lover in a strange place, since he's unlikely to have made the acquaintance of any of these fine fellows).

Lyrics like this--boasts and threats; the verbal articulation of relationships of dominance and humiliation; invidious contrasts between the MC's street knowledge with the fronting of rival MCs, the MC as man of experience exposing the empty talk of mere boys--all this is standard business in grime. You could pluck a record at random almost and you'd likely as not find some variant. So here's "Bruzin" by Bruza featuring Footsie. Triple Threat and Shizzle:
"come on bruv let's ave it, let's war….
"bare left hooks to your jaw…
"to your bredrens you look poor/ there the reason you don't wanna war"
"bring bodily harm, leave you in a mess"
"we're bruising/against us, you're losing/we're the microphone ooligans/ with higher powers/we spit fire showers."

Even if grime words are taken as metaphorical, about verbal maiming, the use of rhyme skills to slay rival MCs… you'd have to say that grime was a gladiatorial art, each sixteen a flurry of verbal blows, cracking egos like skulls.

To quote Bruza's classic track about boy-men pretending to be tougher than they are, I'm "not convinced" by an argument that would propose grime could be reformed, that all it would take would be to get grime artists to drop the gun talk, the murking and feuding, etc, and spit about… other stuff. It's not just about the content. The form of the music is violence, or at least combat.

Take D Double E's performance on "Destruction". His words are usually riddled with descriptions of ultra-vivid violence, but here the lyrics are virtually inaudible. The violence is the delivery itself, the mangling and shredding of language. Here's how I described the first six bars in the Grime Primer for The Wire --"a gargoyle-like gibber closer to hieroglyphics than language… seemingly emanating from the same infrahuman zone Iggy plumbed on “Loose” and “TV Eye”.

I actually met D Double E in 2005, doing a feature on grime for Spin, and was as thrilled as if I'd met Iggy Pop. I was struck by the fact that he was this soft-spoken, dreamy guy with an astonishingly skinny frame, seemingly unlikely to hurt a fly, and yet his rapping is almost non-stop carnage. Here's some of his most famous and frequently recycled lines, which appear on the Terror Danjah tunes "Cock back" and "Frontline" [fnote6] and probably other places too:

"Think you're a big boy cos you got a beard/Bullets will make your face look weird"
"For what I just done/I could get years/Heart is cold and I got no fears/Shed no tears"
"Think you're a big boy cos you go gym/Bullets will cave your whole face in"
"Tip of the gun straight up your nostril and pull"
"Head get mangled and then dangled just like I wear my kangol"
"Who do you resemble?/Face looks fucked up like Michael"
"Never going to go away/Permanent scar"

But listening again to some of his other performances--"Signal", "Birds in the Sky"--what strikes me is the odd fusion of wimpiness and thuggishness. With its lack of definition and edges, his voice is actually weak ("seemingly battling multiple speech impediments" is how I described it in the Wire primer), but there's this sense of tremendous inner turbulence bubbling up through the delivery. (See also the feral gnashings, growls and roars that serve as "backing vocals" in tunes like "Not Convinced" and Flirta D's "Warpspeed"). This gives D Double's utterance an almost involuntary quality, a quality of possession or trance. Seeing Double live onstage in New York and later at the Rinse FM studio, both times I was reminded of Ian Curtis; Double stares sightlessly into the middle distances, makes these strange dainty carving and slicing gestures with his hand, which hovers by his chestbone like a hummingbird.

Some time ago, listening to A Guy Called Gerald's "28 Gun Bad Boy", I suddenly heard the breakbeats as a ballet of violence [fnote7]. Listening now to the jagged syncopations of D Double on "Destruction," to the "Pow" MCs spitting across and against the "Forward" riddim, to the growling distortions and mouth-manglings that transform all these MC's voices into slashes of pure texture ("sixteen bars, sixteen scars"), I started to hear grime rhyming as breakbeat science given voice. In another sense, grime is literally the verbalization of jungle's submerged "content" : society-as-warzone. In jungle that content was audio-allegorised as rhythm and bass and atmosphere, with occasional articulation in the form of samples about darkness or street knowledge. With grime, this became a lot more stark and in-your-face: the lyrical content, the delivery, the performative stance, are all about
mayhem style-ized.

Jungle and grime: martial art forms.

You're not feeling this music if you don't understand it viscerally as the violent assertion of self. Everybody knows this but it doesn't get talked about much because the implications don't bear thinking about too closely. You might start to become aware of uncomfortable stuff, like the way that the knowledge prized in our little subculture is so often related to being down with the minutiae of social destructiveness. E.g. youngers took the piss out of me a few years ago for taking my eye off the ball and missing the rise of the praise term "showa." What they were proud of was being au fait with slanguage derived from the shower of bullets rained down on their enemies by an infamously ruthless Jamaican gang! Another e.g.: a mini-debate triggered by my Caspa piece, where I'd talked about a double standard of black grime MCs acting thuggish on record being deemed cool whereas Caspa was considered both a lout and a poseur. Martin Blackdown effectively argued in defence of the double standard, saying that Caspa's Cockney shtick was all front whereas your grime youth were walking it like they talked it, and going on to cite various acts of real violence perpetrated by certain grime figures. What a fucked-up world where fake thuggery is worse than the genuine article! But not to be the kettle calling the pot black, I've verged on similar logic myself, e.g. semi-dissing dubstep by saying the reason it would always be somewhat lacking for me was related to the reasons why you would never hear anyone utter the words "police are locking off dubstep raves." Yet on some level that is simply true, and sometimes you have to say stuff like this however close to the bone it is. There has been a certain tension and menace at nuum-related raves that's inseparable from the vibe and from the very qualities of the music that make it so powerful.

Yet (no surprise here) I've never voluntarily been involved in violence in my life. The few times it's come calling, it's only been the pure adrenalin-rush of fear, plus dormant capacity left over from my schoolboy cross-country running, that's saved my skin. So why the attraction to music that is actually the opposite of how I live my life and to a large extent opposed to my values?

Of course, the kind of ruff-housing, second-person-directed hostility, megalomaniac energies present in grime are far from unique to it. Think of rap [fnote8] , metal, hardcore punk (and also, within dance music, gabba). Now, once again I don't want to underestimate here the female capacity for aggression, albeit more often of a non-physical sort. You only have to look at the behaviour of teenage girls towards each to see the fairer sex's flair for competitiveness, status games, verbal cruelty, and so on. Nonetheless it seems reasonable to generalize that there isn't quite the same intense attraction towards theatricalised violence in art and entertainment. I'm guessing that by and large women watch movies like The Godfather or Goodfellas (movies which I am incapable of not watching for the umpteenth time if they happen to be on TV) despite the violence, not because of it [fnote9].

I don't know if I'd go as far as saying men, myself included, enjoy watching violence. But there is a compulsion there that feels gender-specific. With this sort of movie it is probably similar to what goes on when you listen to gangsta rap: a dizzy-making double identification [fnote10] with the perpetrator and the victim simultaneously. Plus a pornographic aspect, seeing what should not be seen, what in fact (in our relatively orderly society) most of us don't ever get to see (thank God). But, to take another example, when I read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs, it was fairly obvious that I was not reading about the activities of these soccer hooligans entirely to inform myself about a peculiar subculture or to disapprove, but because there was a certain appalling thrill. Buford places his own voyeuristic/vicarious fascination for these brutal boors right up front, he becomes a particant-observer in fact and the narrative of the book shows him getting swept up in the mob rampages, leaving behind his civilised, literate self in a kind of tribal group-mind, and then taking the brunt of an almighty comeuppance (he's taught a lesson at the hands and truncheons and boots of riot police in Italy, if I recall right). That's the moral at the end of the story that retroactively washes clean the body of the book as a whole, justifying the prurient pleasure in ultraviolence the reader has taken. (I wonder how many female fans that book has?)

Sports itself, as opposed to sports fan hooliganism, offers another analogy, since a lot of sports are forms of aestheticized warfare. The more gladiatorial and war-like--boxing or team-based contact sports like American football and ice hockey--the greater the proportion of the audience are male, I think it would be fair to say.

So what is going on here? In the case of this discourse around grime and other nuum genres, as opposed to the composition of the subcultures themselves, it's a rather nerdy fraternity we're dealing with, by and large. I'm guessing, owing to the level of literacy and the general left-leaning bias, we are talking about a constituency that is pretty aware of feminist issues and therefore has some ambivalence about conventional notions of masculinity and gender, a degree of confusion about what it means to be a man in the 21st Century (a common predicament anyway in this era of the "kidult"). Through this music, though, we have access to dramas of strength and power, survivalist sharp-wittedness and prowess, that temporarily resolve--or rather, work through--or maybe just put in play--these doubts and confusions.

Now this is nothing new, actually. It's one of the oldest stories in popular culture: white, mostly middle class men working their identity issues out through an intensely felt, deeply confused, slightly problematic identification with black masculinity as manifested through music. It goes back at least as far as The Rolling Stones and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. Probably a lot further back. This kind of projection towards black music may well be more than slightly problematic, but there's no doubt it's hugely significant as a historical phenomenon. As a syndrome it's something impossible to feel comfortable about, let alone affirm unreservedly, but equally it seems to have certain things going for it and be broadly preferable to the alternatives (the de fact apartheid/monoculturalism of indie-rock, for instance).

Nor is it, when looked at in the grander historical scheme, just about black masculinity in the "street soldier" sense as laid out in the Wiley verses on "Destruction". Not at all: there's a whole range of things that your white male has sought and found in black male musical expression, things that have filled in holes in their own culture or upbringing, that have provided a "way out" (especially in Britain, where the projection towards Black American music is especially intense). These things include:

-- an emotionalism that isn't "wet" or "weak" but powerful, a form of strength (soul)

-- worldly wisdom, life-tested toughness (blues, etc)

-- grace, elegance, gentleness, urbanity (softer soul, cooler jazz)

-- gnostic cool, cosmic suss (certain jazz, the boho styles of hip hop)

-- protest, spiritual-political critique, militant pride, purity, prophecy, preacher (conscious rap, roots reggae, etc)

-- exuberance, joie de vivre, sass, earthiness, vitality, energy, style (funk, etc)

And doubtless a bunch of other things too.

Running through all this stuff, the Bad Boy side of it and the Good Man side of it, is the fact that these forms of musical expression offer heroic images of masculinity (even when anti-heroic, as in the gangsta/Staggerlee/rudeboy mode). They are also quite often models of authority. That applies whether it's a Jay-Z or DMX or Clipse talking in worldly-wise, world-weary tones about the game, the paper chase, the things a man does to make it in this world, or whether it's James Brown in soul statesman mode, or Bob Marley as prophet, or the great reggae producers as sound-wizards, or Miles as dark magus… (See also the I Am the King thread running through black music pinpointed by me and Joy in The Sex Revolts.) If you're a left-leaning type then the idea of authority may well be discredited by its association with authoritarianism, etc. But in black music you can find images of authority and stature that aren't about being a cop or colonel, a priest or politician. Perhaps they are images of authority untarnished by actual real-world power, in a similar way that the violence in gangsta rap and grime is inoculated by the justification of its being true-to-life, it's given an alibi and a pass on account of oppression, inequality, racism, etc.

I'm thinking now of Chuck D, the way his commanding cadences and gravitas called on the traditions of black oratory, all those preachers who blurred religion and politics. In a 1991 interview with me, Chuck D described Public Enemy as being rap's "positive hardcore," as opposed to--and in conscious opposition to--the "negative hardcore" of gangsta. In some ways my last essay on the partly political nature of the nuum was about the failure of nuum musics to make the transition from negative hardcore to positive hardcore.

So what I'm playing with here is the idea of a history of white men looking to all these heroic/anti-heroic images of masculinity that run through black music… attracted to those images, inspired by them, confused by them… all at a time when nobody knows what being a man is [fnote11] , and where there aren't actually that many images of positive manhood in the mainstream culture. Well, you can find heroism in action movies and CGI thrill-porn pablum of every sort, but I don't think that provides the same function that earlier forms of mainstream culture did (hardboiled fiction, say, or the war film). [fnote12]

The MCs in jungle and garage often seemed to have an aura of authority, they were the hosts of the dance, the vibe controllers, with deep baritone voices, sonorous and commanding. With grime, you get that surrogate father aspect here and there, but mostly the vibe is boy-men, shriller and less poised than the UK garage MCs. Power here flexes itself primarily as verbal assault and intimidation. And unfortunately what goes on in the music doesn't always stay within the bounds of sound but spills out into real life. Feuds have turned fatal, damage done to self-respect and public status have led to deadly reprisals. Grime seems particularly obsessed with the battle rhyme [fnote13], even more so than American rap with its young pretenders like Canibus taking pot shots at legendary elders, or Jay-Z versus Nas / Prodigy.

It makes perfect sense that you find some of the same dynamics paralleled in the (mostly male) discourse around nuum music: the murkage, the alpha male clashing, the territorial pissings. There's the same odd combination of collectivity and competition, fraternalism and fratricide. And occasionally a bit of patricide. Even this essay, as much as it’s a sincere quest for truth, has a war-like component [fnote 14].

So we're right back to where we started: the boys-own atmosphere enveloping this music and this discussion.

I promised last time to explore the reasons why music with such intense "power" seething within it proved to be a narrowcast phenomenon. I'm not sure I've got answers but here are some thoughts.

The sheer assaultive intensity of the music (thinking specifically of jungle and grime) limits the appeal. If you're not totally of the demographic that makes this music, it's going to take a special combination of factors to enable you to hear past the menace and moodiness of the music, and--specifically with grime--hear the harshness as a kind of sensitivity, the hostility and rage as the expression of legitimate social demand.

Raw uncut grime is more than most people are prepared to deal with in an entertainment context. Grime was only able to really prosper when it could present itself as genial and good times oriented ("Wearing My Rolex") or just innocuous. It amazes me, looking at the video for "Pow," that the track even managed to get to the edge of the Top 10. It's not just the fact that the MCs are physically attacking the camera much of the time, raining down blows on the viewer, nor that the lyrics are so graphic and gory. It's the sheer ferocity of each MC's hunger and ambition as he tries to squeeze through the miniscule aperture of opportunity presented by his guest verse in this sure-to-be-big scene anthem/potential crossover hit. Sixteen bars to be grabbed and smashed as a display window for their talent. "Spotlight's on me" Fumin gloats, before asking "how you gonna bust if there's no room?": a striking image of an ego expanding to crowd out the entire space-for-stars-to-shine that is grime. If you're not already a grime convert, the series of intense eruptions of egomania that constitutes "Pow" must be as alarming as witnessing a volcano go off at close quarters. Disturbing, for many people, at least on a subconscious level, because it's the expression of social energies they don't want to deal with: each sixteen bar burst, a miniature riot. So they flinch, turn away.

Another aspect that limits nuum music's appeal concerns its "militant modernism", the interface between masculinism and the avant-garde. Fredric Jameson discusses how modernism is characterized by negatives: fragmentation, disorientation, stridency, and (quoting Hugo Friedrich) "bolts of annihilation", "brutal abruptness", "depoeticized poetry." Yet another crucial aspect of modernism's negativity, says Jameson, channeling Adorno, is its penchant for interdiction, its creation of new aesthetic taboos, its "ever keener distaste for the conventional and outmoded". This dynamic (out with the old, in with the new) leads to the >>FWD>> propulsiveness of modernism and nuum alike. Warp speed.

Then think of the soldierly subtext of modernism: the fact that "vanguard" is a military term, the idea of the shock troops of the avant-garde repeatedly blasting the new in the public's face. Art as bombardment, assault course, confrontation, challenge, test.

Factor in all these hallmarks and character traits of the nuum: its modernism (as both an inherent sonic narrative within the music and as a third-hand, filtered-down-from-on-high rhetoric of innovation and futurism), its "playing soldiers" aspect, its relationship to the streets as both UK socio-cultural reality and US hip hop cartoon fantasy, the scene's internal hyper-competitiveness, the influence from pulp fictions of all kinds (with their superheroics and dystopian darkness), the cult of technology… It all goes a good way towards accounting for
both the man-stench surrounding this culture and the narrowcast appeal of its musical output. Strictly hardcore.

for the footnotes, go here

2009-06-07T19:10:00.000-07:00

FOOTNOTES to THE NUUM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, PART 5: MASCULINE PRESSURE

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Footnote 1

… "ossification" effect of excessively rigorous theorizing…

Prior to its acquired derogatory meaning of overly rigid thought patterns, "ossification" meant the natural process of bone formation, or the hardening of soft tissue into a bone-like material. So there is a parallel here between nuum-theory's orientation towards "bones" (the structuration principles that make up the music's rhythmic exoskeleton, and that determine the contours of genre) and anti-theory being sensuously attuned to the subtleties of "flesh" (the prettifying flava-surface that makes each auteur, each track even, unique, a genre-of-one.). "Bones" might as well be "boner" as far as some folk are concerned: rigour is equated with rigidity, the theorem seen as a kind of mental erection.

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Footnote 2

…gender-coded discourse games…

Another thing that got me interested in the gender-ised discussion surrounding the nuum was this straw man wielded against the theory-mongers (me and K-punk), the nuum generalisers with their wood-not-trees bias: a bizarrely off-base accusation of being unwholesomely fixated on some East London ghetto hardman mythos. But Mark doesn't like grime much at all, as far as I can tell! The real irony here, though, is that the whole death-to-Nuum kvetch-fest started approximately eighteen months ago when me and K-punk did the classic invocation of "feminine pressure" move. We were blogging, very enthusiastically, about bassline, celebrating its diva-fabulous euphoria, giddy fairground thrills, fizzy poptasmic cheese-power. K-punk argued that this was a dialectical reaction to dubstep's masculine ploddiness and solemnity; I demurred, as it seemed unlikely bassline was even much aware of dubstep, let alone reacting against it, and besides dubstep and bassline had evolved in parallel, as diverging strands from UK garage, starting in the early Noughties. Some flak was thrown, an uncharitable response you might think to highly positive commentary (but you know, these dubsteppers have thin skin!). This was the start of the anti-nuum campaign, so it's amusing to be later painted as exclusively obsessed with all things ruff tuff and street-creddy.

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Footnote 3

… "feminine pressure" moves…

Course it was me who invented the "feminine pressure" critic-move in the first place, with 1999's 2step epic Adult Hardcore, which was originally titled… Feminine Pressure. Taking the name of a pretty obscure female DJ team I'd stumbled upon, I used it to symbolise the spirit of UK garage/2step. It was perfect for encapsulating into a slogan the creation-myth of the scene as the result of women departing the drum'n'bass dancefloor to dance in the garage side-room. A myth based on participant-observed data (all the scene rhetoric about "this one's for the ladies", "the girls love this tune" etc) as well as changes in the music, so a "true myth". And a narrative with legs: it's most recently been wheeled out for funky house, celebrated by one and all for its percussive sinuousness and female appeal.

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Footnote 4

..fourth cornerstone of the nuum: hard techno…

All praise to the Mighty Yang for "Dominator" and "Fairy Dust", "Here Come the Drumz" and "Terminator", "Sonic Destroyer" and "Death Star," "Terrorist" and "Super Sharp Shooter" , "Shadowboxing" and "Squadron," "We Have Arrived" and "Apocalypse Never", "Pulse X" and "Anger Management"'…..

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Footnote 5

… masculine pressure…

I recall a conversation with Tim Finney in the early days of grime in which he said there was a need for a "Feminine Pressure"-style thinkpiece on grime. I considered doing one but couldn't come up with a good-enough antonym ("Masculine Armour" was the closest I got). But some of this gender-stuff is dealt with in the very earliest bloggage I did on grime, a time when lyrics could get very misogynistic (remember "Swallow"?).

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Footnote 6

… D Double E's freestyle over "Frontline"….

I'm playing this and the wife says "what's this?" and then adds, before I can open my mouth, "Not liking". I'm, like,"it's only one of the greatest grime MCs of all time!!" Her face--a frown of skepticism -- says it all. I consider trying to explain the artistry of D Double E… but then, thinking of the lyrics, think better of it.

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Footnote 7

… ballet of violence…

See also "Gloc": a song written, Gerald Simpson told me, as a kind of symbolic retaliation, against this Gunchester bad boy who'd taxed Gerald's studio of some valuable equipment. There's a sample from Robocop and he conceived the track as a kind of serve-and-protect warrior-droid of his own design and construction, a sonic act of displaced and sublimated vengeance.

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Footnote 8

… combative, second-person-directed hostility, megalomaniac energies … rap…

One of my long running problems with much hip hop criticism (going back to the almost very first things I wrote about rap in the mid-Eighties) is that it is so keen to establish the socially redeeming value and artistic worth of the genre that it glides past the nastiness. For as much as it is the music of black male youths, this is also music of male youths, and your adolescent male can be fairly nasty under the best of circumstances. A good example of this is how hip hop criticism in the academy looks at graffiti--it will talk about it as an artistic expression (the aesthetics of wildstyle), or in terms of urban politics, reclaiming hegemonic space, the assertion of a subaltern identity, "bombing" etc. But an important component of graffiti as a practice is that it is vandalism. And that it involves risk-taking activity (trespassing, sometimes involving risk of physical harm; running the gauntlet of police and security guards; in some cases shoplifting the aerosol cans). It finds and creates adventure in the urban environment in ways that are similar to the things that all teenage boys do when they are bored and frustrated, full of hormonal energy they can't find an outlet for. (Tagging also parallels MCing in the same of it being about having a Name, rising out of the anonymous urban multitude).

Boys do irresponsible stuff, dangerous stuff; they take delight in pure mischief and destruction; they have a remarkable ability to not see the consequences of actions, and to temporarily suppress of empathy in favour of the pure kick of the moment. I'm a bookish sort but I did some mildly wicked things as a teenager. Some of them would be glossed up with a bit of Dada or reading about the Situationist's political graffiti and pranks. But really these minor feats of delinquency were just anti-social, un-neighbourly, a nuisance. There is just something in men that enjoys destruction for its own sake. Boys (actually young men in the scenario I'm now thinking of, Oxford graduates no less) will look at a TV that's finally broken down after a long struggle to stay alive and their gaze will wander to the open third storey window and the next thought is "let's chuck it out the window, watch it explode". Somehow I can't imagine that many women I know reacting the same way.

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Footnote 9

… despite the violence, not because of it…

I asked the missus if she enjoyed the violence in movies such as these, and she said "no". Which surprised me because it was she who wanted to watch Kill Bill, but then again the violence there is so fantastical and choreographed, it's more like watching a musical's dance routine. Of course there is a mass public appetite, probably reasonably mixed gender, for the carnage and destruction of Hollywood action films, which is violence without real-seeming costs, without reality. But when it comes to movies that feature genuine brutality depicted with some attempt at realism… I do suspect that the missus is not alone among her gender here, in watching the film or TVs despite this aspect.

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Footnote 10

… dizzy-making double identification with the perpetrator and the victim
simultaneously….

One thought I came up with a long time ago in connection with metal, rap, industrial, etc is the idea that it offers a "'deconstruction of masculinity" akin to movies like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Wild Bunch, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc, which take you inside the hollow-souled paranoia of hyper-masculinine psychology but also rub your face in the results of its depredations. But the truth is as much as there's a critique--rich in historical reverberations in many of these films (the pimp played by Harvey Keitel in Taxi Driver is "symbolically" a Red Indian), there's a intense, disturbing jouissance in these images of violence. The final carnage of Taxi Driver is the "orgasm" the film structurally requires after so much tension. The way the camera lingers over the bloody aftermath is appallingly ambiguous: rubbing our faces in the gore, but also allowing us to delectate over it. "You wanted this", the camera says, "so here it is"--more vivid and prolonged than any film before it, even Peckinpah's.

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Footnote 11

…at a time when nobody knows what to be a man is….

For many of us becoming a father is the first time when the idea of manhood starts to make some kind of liveable sense, to lose its negative connotations… authority and self-sacrifice and sticking-with-it take on not so much lustre as functionality, a can't-get-by-without quality.

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Footnote 12

…. the war film…

It was a shock recently to realise that my son, now nearly ten, has never watched a World War Two movie and has very little idea of what that conflict was about. When I were a lad, there was a constant stream of World War Two movies on the telly, beaming into my impressionable mind all kinds of notions to do with sacrifice, teamwork, loyalty, determination, stoicism, etc. But heroism in a believable, non-cartoon sense--heroism outside a pure fantasy context--is rather a cornered commodity in today's culture market. At the quality TV end, with series like The Wire, it is presented in its rare instances as impotent, thwarted by bureaucracy and power games by malign authority figures. Either that, or the vocational compulsion to be a hero is presented as a form of pathology, as with the New York firefighter series Rescue Me, where the firemen are all damaged and dysfunctional boy-men, incapable of having relationships, addictive personalities, and so forth. The title is ambiguous: these professional rescuers all needed to be rescued from themselves.

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Footnote 13

… grime seems particularly obsessed with the battle rhyme….

Here' s an old Martin Clark piece
that looks at the murking lyrics and the hyper-competitivity of the scene: the importance of having a name, how the biggest way to build a name is to diss an established Name. Anonymity is what the MC is really battling against. I'm reminded (as so often in connection with hip hop) of Robert Warshow's famous essay on The Gangster As Tragic Hero, which explored how the movie viewer takes vicarious pleasure in the ruthlessness of the mobster's quest for prestige--to be top dog, to be Somebody as opposed to a no-mark-- and then how we are relieved (of complicity and guilt) by the inevitable reprisal taken by Society against him.

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Footnote 14

…A war-like component to it…

It's also something of a preemptive strike, but in a very precisely targeted way.

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