:two

Everytime I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle

To the extent that most Dubliners could be said to know Limerick it would usually be either as a stopover at the Junction on the way to somewehere else, are as a tabloid-fuelling locus of nasty gang violence. For the Dub it is the most inpenetrable of the other cities; compared with the sterotypical views of fun’n'friendly Galway or comically cocksure Cork, Limerick seems to project an opaque combination of the capital’s often sinister ruffness with a rural pragmatism and almost mystical traditionalism.

It is also home to Ireland’s Other DnB record label, Subtle Audio.

Ireland’s DnB scene always had a certain hauntological quality, for reasons to do with both the difficulty in accessing the UK scene jungle in real-time and due to the tastes of its foremost DJs. Early-nineties tunes would emerge on the Dub scene for the first time a decade later by virtue of reissues and more established connections with Uk distributers. DJs were under less pressure than their UK counterparts to compete on terms of the latest floor-smashing dubplates, and the likes of Naphta, Don Rosco and Code would unfussily blend GE jungle with whatever tunes of the day could compete with those standards, so that for the relative neophytes, temporal lineraity was disrupted, allowing mid-90s Reinforced, Metalheadz, Moving Shadow etc, to occupy the present as objects of the present rather than as nostalgia triggers or as Nostolgia Mode-ifyers.

An unusual development over the past decade has been the fetishistic reverance for the breakbeats (cf esp. Paradox) that the first generation of junglists so irreverantly looted and mutated, alongwith a desire to keep alive (or resurrect) the spirit of the latter, so that the drums in many of the tracks on Subtle Audio 1 have the uncanny sound of being lovingly but grotesquely pieced together and brought to a technologically-modified re-life. The product is not a post-modern pastiche of the inplicit funky-science of the sample sources combined with the concrete breakbeat-science of the GEJunglists, rather this is the sound of a last bastion of a defiant modernism, albeit one which has been chastened, toxified and sobered by recent history. Its tone is one of intellectual pessimism and indefatigable will.

In the world depicted by SA1, the fairground has been abandoned and let decay, and blissing-out is no longer a physical possibility. Feminine pressure doesn’t so much re-present itself, but haunts the air in the atmos-windsweeps on ‘What Do You Like?’ or provides akward elegance against the atonal iceiness of ‘Burning Sun’.

(It’s testament to Codes exceptional skills that a track that appears fairly unremarkable on its own can be made sound positively exuberant when placed in its ideal context; bursting into Burning sun, its bassline sounds almost lyrical, the bubbling synth is playful and weird, the sinister sax(?) sample almost threatens to reach out through the speakers in the middle of the track before the drums tumble back in a la sonic the hedgehog in mid-spin accompanied by a wonderful chant of ‘hhhuuup’ reminiscient of the “heyyyyy-yooo”s in Foul Play’s ‘The Stepper’.)

At the start of the summer, Subtle Audio’s night in Crawdaddy (for non-Dubz, this is Dublin’s locus central of the electronic end of Hipsterism) provided one of the most intriguing recent musical experiences. The cold breakbeat-science blues was wonderfully and bizarre-ly offset by a young and enthusiastically hedonstic 50/50 gender balanced crowd, the people filling-in the absence of playfullness and optimism in the music, to often uncanny effect; whether this was a display of a desire to respond to stimulation in ways outside of the usual prescriptions, or of simply a zombie-like reaction to the remnants of familiar stimulants (breaks, builds, drops) wasn’t in anyway clear.

UPDATE: the precision finish:

…you could come to the conclusion that the futurist, delirious rhetoric of junglist theory worked because the music hadn’t had the chance to become just another style - it was the style, an apparent pinnacle, summation and repudiation of all previous electronic musics to the point where it doesn’t sound rhetorical or exaggerated to ask ‘how can you make a record like that and the world keeps turning?‘ That a culture can reach a peak like this and it has no effect, and everything carries on as before if not worse, with the sound living on only as memory (no matter how poignant, intractable and anti-nostalgic that memory might be) suggests something sobering about the essential uselessness of even the most powerful, radical musics.

:one

Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle

Some thoughts provoked by the excellent Subtle Audio Vol 1

The bus route that used to take us to school was notable mainly for the string of burgeoning high-Celtic-Tiger building sites through which it would stop-startedly make its reluctant-seeming way; an industrial estate, a new shopping centre and a load of new apartment complexes all encircled by auto-optimistic plastic hoarding that unconvincingly extolled the bright future that awaited behind for their soon to be denizens. At various stops we’d unload a crack team of mixed-nationality (but mainly Irish and Polish) workers who seemed about as excited at the prospect of another day on site as us on our ’sites of learning’ (the passing of spliffs between the older school-kids and the younger labourers was an almost touching acknowledgement of the shared experience of structural tedium). Head tilted against etched-plexiglass windows which projected oversized coke advertisements to the outside world, the rolling sounds of fin de secile drum + bass offered a strange kind of escape; everything around was there in sound - the relentless repetition, the coldness, the combo of state-of-the-art technological abundance and an inability to imaging anything (architecturally or sonically) truly exuberant. But just as the sheer scale of development and vague sense (or hope) of something happening delivered a unique thrill, so too did 21st Century DnB’s grimly resilient futurism, its militant exploration of 2-step-techno - at the time that indie-retro was consolidating its pop-underground hegemony - offer a narrow alley of evasion.

The trundle into the double-0’s saw DnB go truly post-modern with the proliferation of an endless number of equally-useless self-subdividing micro-genres; latin DnB, housey-DnB and philtered-disco DnB ‘for-the-laydeeez’, clownstep, tech-step, metal-step, drumfunk/’edits’, and my personally most-hated, dubwise DnB (aside from its thourough soporificness, most-hated largely because it came to utterly dominate the Bassbin label, stifling the promise made by early releases from Naphta, Beta 2 and Zero Tolerance which I had adored). By the time I finished school most of the developments had been built; the industrial estate and shopping centre housed the various service jobs that most of us would be constantly laundered through for the forseeable future (except for our contemporaries who cashed in on the construction boom at the time and are now stuck in an extremely more precarious position) within profoundly uninspiring vaguely corporate-looking buildings, while the apartment complexes are now home to mostly city workers who avail of nearby public transport, again cod-sophisticated plasterboard constructions, different but all the same.

Dissillusionment with both lost horizons was so programmatic and inexorable so as to go almost unoticed for a period, until the loss of that which had taken up so much mental and physical investment, and its colonisation by the extra-musical developments, became unavoidably apparent.

But the junglised organism can never fully return to ‘normal’, even after the junglising agent has been drained of its potency. The slightest aural glimpse of 160+ bpm or shard of Hardcore soundwave triggers a pavlovian adrenaline-acceleration response and concrete-alloy mentality which reverts to its previous uneasily-settled disposition as the tamed rolling mechanisms of PoMo DnB kick in, the brain filing ‘false alarm’.

Untitled

Apologies to anyone who’s being expecting new Mentasms posts, no free college internet access and the poxiness of starting yet another new temporary job making it a bit difficult at the moment. But in the mean time…

The one advantage of work is, of course, that the besuited masters occassionally (12 times a year to be precise) peel a few digits from their big fat virtual wallets, tuck them into your grubby breast pocket and grant you permission to leave the compound for a few hours to unwind and get yourself ready for the next shift.

And so with the first decent paycheck of the summer comes new CD’s!

Whenever a new Nas album is near release, I cant help but have high expectations; despite his choice of beats being gallingly erratic, ranging from the sublimley apt to the incomprehensibly mundane, and the apparent fact that he nor anyone else involved in their production ever seems to listen to his albums all the way through before they’re released, on every album there are solid gold examples of what  hip-hop was at the peaks of its golden ages, and of what it still can be. Hip-Hop is Dead was a post-It Was Written Nas album par excellence; the first four tracks inexplicably dull, an inexcusable overture to an album packed full of great ideas executed with varying degress of success. HHID officially finished with ‘Hope’, an accapella, and the line “If your asking why Hip-Hop is dead, there’s a pretty good chance YOU’re the reason it died”. This being Nasir “God’s Son” Jones, the impression produced is that Nas here thinks of himself as the sinless one casting the first stone; but for the same reason, and because of the convinction demonstrated by devoting an entire album to the theme, there’s a exciting inkling that he’s going to exonerate himself, something will be pulled out of the bag which will surprise everyone (except me!).

And from the beginning of the first track on Nigga/Untitled (bang-on piece on the title issue here) there’s a real sense that this is gonna be it ; the album that makes not only hip-hop, but music itself, once again something essential, a socially, personally, sonically, lyrically, aesthetically, ontologically force for good, and not just the piped-in soundtrack to your stay at the Capitolist HotELL. And the thing is that, the album kind of is. The opener kicks off with ghost-in-the-broken-piano slightly off-kilter loops - the clash of the would-be archaic and the now - before his voice bursts in; and, it’s so strange, the usual self-assured effortless gracfullness of his flow isn’t fully there; instead there’s an utterly distracting slightl tint of nervousness and akwardness, a tiny little tell-tale that he’s almost starting all over again, the youthful cockiness that sources its exaggerated self-belief from an in-built inferiority complex is inverted; now that he knows the truth (that they‘re not superior to him, far from it), that oversized inpenetrable confidence isn’t automatically necessary and is therefore so much harder to manufacture. The anxiety is subtle palpable; his flow is spitting rather than ’spitting’. It is an almost perfect, dreamt-about, introverture.

Then, things seem to take a turn for the vilely normal; with the crushing sound of  a laidback soulful guitar lick looped over an as-trad-as-trad-Hip-Hop-can-get rythym, comes the feeling that this is going to be the usual well-intentioned but sadly unimaginative effort; except, there’s something more to this track ;- that riff, laidback though it may be, is slyly menacing, almost jeering, in its drawling catchiness. The sample, it turns out, is from The Wahtnaut’s ‘Message From a Blackman“, and the ensuing “You Can’t Stop Us Now” is a reclamation, a restatement, of that track’s calling/warning to society; and it contains Untitled’s mission statement; This is our time, we have to make something happen NOW.

‘Hero’, the lead single, is absolutely brilliant (can you imagine a collaboration between Pollow Da Don, Keri Hilson and Nas being anything but?), and on first hearing, at monumental volume, viscerly spine-tingling like nothing has been for a long time. The video opens with Nas overlooking a Gothic neon skyline, the Dark Night surveying his Hamletian charge, but quickly he turns from comic-book hero to concrete-level commander, leading a mixed-race team of real life X-Men. The production is cartoonish in a Marvel sense, every sound is high-definitely bold and bright; a steamtech break-beat conducts incandescent synthetic-strings of symphonic neon. Nas’ occupation of the Hero role is, as he acknowledges, by default; since no one else is going to it, he Has to.

However the album’s greatest failure (as always) is it’s sequencing and the presence of a handful of utterly unneccessary tracks; after the masterful opening are two tracks which definately should be located elsewhere; “Make The World Go Around”’s affecting optimism would be way better suited to later in the album, after the self- reflection, analyis, criticism, rectification, resolve; the trackfeels premature so early in the album, like a spin in hip-pop’s cruise control mode of unjustified self-aggrandisement rather than the poignantly uplifting demand for recognition that it is.

The effective denoument, ‘Black President’, even manages to redeem the loathsome practice of posthumous-Tupac-sampling and is one of the album’s better productions in terms of pure sonics; half marching drums and high-pressure bass, and the 2P sample is poignant for many reasons; the slow realisation of something that seemed utterly impossible only a decade ago, 2P not being let live on to see it, and because this great almost utopian vision of a black president, a coming to life of a long-held prophecy, in its actual form now looks to be something far from monumental and more like a benevolent quirk in the self-regulating circuit of politics-as-usual.

From a musical point of view, the album quite spectacularly poses the great question of the moment; how important, now, are pure sonics (or how can they be important now), after sound has been co-opted and devalued, desublimated and mudanified. Explicity political music is usually quite a fraught project - the best music is that which is the most stimulating and activating without being glib and/or Po-faced - but when this has been made an almost impossibilty as at present, and when the option of explicit adress has been foreclosed by and for all but the worst ‘artists’, breaking that space back open is an imperative and has produced the most exciting sound at a time when, technically and practically, the possibilities of sound are at their most expansive.

I picked up Wiley’s and JME’s new albums at the same time, both sound great on the first few listens, but have so far failed to get me as riled up as Untitled, sonically they are what music in 2008 should rightly sound like anyway.

(Tidy) Tracks Of The Day

The first in a once-off series

When it comes to all things 4X4, my allegiance will always lie on the Hard House/Trance/Happy Hardcore side of things rather than trad Techno/House, for reasons of age, geography and historical circumstance (though nothing beats Detroit Techno for reading about). 1999-2003 (those crucial adolescent years when I was starting to really get into Dance music) seems now to have been the golden era for this kind of stuff, before it was subsumed into the post-9/11 heading-for-apocalypse Goa-Trance-meets-Noisia-style-DnB monster-genre of Hard Dance.

 

Bass Keep Pumping - Rachel Auburn

Looking Good - Lisa Lashes

Are You Serious - Stimulant DJs

 One interesting thing, to which I didn’t really attach much significance at the time, was that loads of my favourite trax were by female producers. Hard House in particular seems to have benefited from a  greater number of big-name women DJs/producers relative to other genres; Lisa Lashes, Lisa Pin-Up, Rachel Auburn, Anne Savage were all pretty massive at the time (thats only four, but still double what I can think of off-hand for either techno or jungle). You can hear the gender mixology in the sounds; the pitched-up hip-hop vocals, playfully agressive hoovers, and that ever-present on the off-beat spaceball sound, all elude characterisation by standard gender-specific descriptives.

 

The Stimulant DJs (aka Happy Hardcore legends Brisk & Ham) track is an almost perfect techno-fairground dance tune. The polymorphous mentasms(yay!), the jumpin-jumpin-bass-keeps-pumpin mid-line, the hoover-MC “ooah ooah” bit in the middle, the bonkers tempo-shifting breakdown, and then the “Are You Serious” refrain getting shredded  in the jet-speed drop; wicked!

Severely Memed

Tagged by the chronically inspirational Sit Down Man You’re A Bloody Tragedy:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

 

 

1) Foul Play - Finest Illusion (Illegal Mix)

Since coming to college, the fleeting feelings of totally-consuming giddy excitement that used to accompany the arrival of summer/end of the schoolyear have been replaced by a conflicing mixture of relapse to nostalgia and boring dread. The annual June appearance of the tractor-mower plowing through the knee-high grass of the green accross the way used to signal towards the theoretically limitless potential for 2 months of exploration and joyful experience - i.e. about as far from the suffocating dismal hell of school as one could possibly be. Now it heralds the return to counter-productive regimentation and discipline via one or more crap ‘full-time’ service jobs, where notification of toilet-breaks is required, telling-offs are doled out for not having the correct uniform, and everything must be done the inefficient, protracted and wasteful, but official standardised and therefore ‘proper’, way. In spite of the lonely brain-kill this arrangment engenders (not to mention the stifling horror of the thought that this is quite likely the future), that same giddy excitment still occassionaly manages to sneak through the cracks of the lonely labour market walls, engulfing every billimeter of nerve-ending in quietly rapturous pleasure; hopping from the bus on the eve of a day-off, watching the landscape mutate into dense mythological rural glory on a sly trip down the country, or chilling with Paddy Kavanagh by the canal as a certain comrade recites fantastic stream-of-consciousness remixes of the PK canon. When the vocals, NRGised piano and pushedtothelimit Amen finally coalesce after three minutes, nothing else can capture that feeling so totally.

 

2) Rihanna - Take a Bow

Didn’t like this at first, put off before even the first chorus by how standard it all sounded; standard post-Irreplacacble  808 ballad-beat, standard tinkly-tender piano, standard semi-soulful melifluosness. Foolishly, had only half-paid attention to the lyrics. How could someone make an entire song’s worth of derision and sarcasm* sound so utterly beguiling? The grace with which the invective is dolled out multiplies by a million the gutted self-loathing of the regretful manbot at the receiving end.

*While we’re on it, sarcasm isn’t really half as bad as the old adage makes it out to be is it? Sexual innuendo is surely the absolute nadir of humour.

3) Asian Dub foundation - New Way, New Life

Community Music touched so many bases at the time; popular experimentation, overt politicism and defiant optimism. At times the various pieces of outsider-rap, neo-punk, Asian trad and after-the-moment-jungle didnt fit very neatly togther, the rough joints tellingly visible and some of the lyrics could have done with a bit of fine-sanding, but taken as a whole, as a collective (Mode), it was genuinly inspirational. Dusting it out recently, it sounds so out of tune with current trends but utterly necessary because of it. Chosen here is ‘New Way, New Life’, a paen to parental struggle and the wonders of immigration.

 

4) Nas feat. Kelis - American Way

In anticipation of his new abum, have been listening to his last Great one, Street’s Disciple. Nas is the only mass-appeal rapper who can still excite some genuine fanboyism. No matter how succesful he becomes, he seems incapable of being fully ingratiated into, and rendered utterly irrelevant by, the establishment a la Jay-Z, Snoop, Ice Cube et al. Always cutting a lone figure, the unsatisfiable autodictat without a true home, always caught between conflicting desires and aspirations, he is one of few rappers with the nous and the will to talk intelligently about something actually worth taking about. While Public Enemy have sadly allowed themselves to be carved out of pop/mainstream hip-hop and into a corner for the already converted, Nas has successfuly evaded typcasting and so still commands the attention of a more diverse (political and sonic) audience. Here, in the space of less than 5 minutes he achieves what most ‘political’ artists of any genre might struggle to achieve over an entire album - if ever -, expertly calling out capitalism, neoliberal ideology, class segragation and Patriarchy, with Kelis giving sardonic voice to their common root;
I don’t care about the runaways/ I don’t care about who’s gay/ I don’t care about dying of AIDS/But I care if I got paid
Who even cares about the president?/ I think they’re making a mistake/I don’t care about the hurricane/ As long as my family’s safe

 

5) Burial - Endorphin

Blissblog declares he no longer believes in beats, Villalobos cuts out the sacred kick drum for one of his greatest tracks yet, and a sizeable proportion of the best tracks on Untrue are completely beatless; bring on the trend.

 

6) Stephan Bodzin - Bedford

The flipside to ‘Daytona Beach’ and a personal favourite out of all of his tunes so far (though haven’t managed to keep up with much of his recent stuff). Begins with what sounds like an old Trance melody that’s been locked in a dark basement for the past decade grown wretched and psychotic, hate swelling and spewing out sporadically over the two minute intro. Then, everything quietens down to an unnerving, unbearable calm; a seemingly innocuos bassline lurches into the sounscape, drops of plinky, slightly atonal melody dripping down upon it. >>>> Fuel begins pumping into the bass-engine, growling louder and louder, liquid hi-hat quickly pouring in before combusting into pure white noise; powering one gigantic black-chrome machine, the component parts are still distinct enough to convey the rythmic angles. This track has everything that the Border Community/Get Physical pseudo-trancers and the Ed Banger entrist rockers have been trying at for what seems like ages now. Like Villalobos, Bodzin refuses to take the mechanics of the Track for granted; but where RV is refining and redefining them spatialy, Bodzin is down in the engine room, loosening the valves, letting off the saftey latches and bypassing the limiters, to see what it can really do.

 

7) Crystal Castles - Courtship Dating

(Waits for someone to point out that Crystal Castles aren’t original as their patently retro sound might make you believe)

 

To be anTagonised: Please Keep Dancing, The Colour of Memory, anyone at Weareie, Pop Feminist and HIMAN!

Crystal Castles

Crystal Castles, at its best, struggles to convey the effects of music over-exposure, the numbness to sonic-stimulation that ipod dependency induces.

On Untrust Us and Crimewave, all of the components of language are present, but the vowel-sounds, consonants and phrasings fail to add up to anything comprehensible; they sound like words, bear all their superficial life-signs, but never register in the brain and communicate as words should. Just as so much of the vast swathes of new music flowing through white wires and out of computer speakers frequently sounds like it should be great, but ultimately fails to resonate or impact in the way great music should, the effect is disillusioning; everything is being done ‘right’ but the desired end never comes about.

The other vocal tracks like Alice Practice, Courtship Dating and Love and Caring give some expression to the feelings this condition stimulates. Despite all the anguished screams of stressed-out isolation, nothing cuts through and impacts fully; in fact the angrier and more affected the cries become, the more they disintegrate and are subsumed into the totalitising white-noise morass of digital distortion, emasculated and reduced to a waveform which alienates sound from any intent that once lay behind it. This is the sound of subjective desire for emotional expression accumulating into one overbearing mass, pouring ever further into meaninglessness as every extra attempt overloads the listener’s response system, causing it to block everything out.

Crystal Castles really only works in this context of overexposure leading to desensitisation. Free your ears for a few days, let them regain their sensitivity, and the album is almost unlistenable - both because of the over-compressed production, and the abundance of familiar stylistic signifiers that slip too easily into line with those of the rest of the rock-dressed-in-dance’s-clothing crew (especially prevalent on CC’s instrumental tracks). But this context-specifity is what makes the album so compelling, its attempt to articulate (as a symptom rather than a cure) those sensations of system-jam which nothing outside of this context appears able to do.

The album’s conclusion, Tell Me What To Swallow, seems to imply that the way out is a return to introspective ethereal acousticness, but does this not lead only to a complete solipsistic self-immersement; a solution just as horrific and isolating as the alternative of a desensitized, but fully aware, inability to communicate?

________________________________________________________

Separate but related, Blissblog and Please Keep Dancing take up the problem of contemporary beats and bass, and a possible solution in the form of wonkiness, in particular Rustie’s recent output. What is most striking about this stuff is how familiar it all sounds, the Keyshia Cole remix in particular not feeling wholly different to a lot of Polow Da Don’s or Timbaland’s productions, except for being slightly more cluttered and a little less danceable; for the latter reason, BlissBlog makes the comparison to 90’s drill n bass/IDM. This speaks volumes for how far underground music has fallen; its the Pollow/Timbo’s who occupy that territory which lives off both experimentation and popularity (and have done for a good while now), while the underground becomes increasingly conservative, formulaic and contented.

Bring on the ‘cranks’

Many ‘echt’ authentic Irish people have themselves encountered the feeling that to be different in any way is to be a nuisance. This is not even a question of being Black, or a Traveller, or an asylum seeker. It may be a question of being Irish-speaking, or a cyclist, or a lesbian, or a poor or a blind person, or a person with a disability, or an anti-globalist. Difference is exceptionally poorly tolerated in Ireland. This Irish intolerance of so-called ‘cranks’ of any description contrasts markedly with British or Dutch traditions of internal dissent and the acceptance of eccentricity.

Ireland likes to think of itself nowadays as a go-ahead entrepreneurial society, and is regularly presented as such by its governing politicians. But its attitudes do not encourage, still less reward, innovation and risk-taking in the social domain.

Piarais MacEinrí ‘Our Shelter and Ark?’ p 99

One thing really striking for the Hibern-o-bserver is Róisín Murphy’s lack of any discernable Irishness, even though from watching the video there are no obvious signs of her being “Irish-speaking, or a cyclist, or a lesbian, or an anti-globalist” which might exclude her from being a Standard Issue Irish Person. What does mark her out though, is her Glamour. k-punk has brilliantly elaborated on Róisín’s Glamorousness before and on Glam’s foundation on aspiration for and relation to an Aristocratic sensuousness; it is precisely this that makes her appear so un-Irish.

Any identification with aristocracy in Ireland is obviously taboo; when Irish identity across all classes is so confused and clings only to one aspect of its history, to desire the extravagance of royalty is to identify with the Enemy, a betrayal of all that is Irish, since all that constitutes ‘Irishness’ is to a greater or lesser degree anti-Englishness (in its most full blown xenophobic incarnation or the ‘I’ve nothing against English people, just the English establishment’ sense).

In the 90’s then, as house, techno, jungle, garage and hip-hop galvanised British youth, encapsulating the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-ideological makeup of its followers, Trance took hold in Ireland. Trance, the most melodramatically extravagant, baroque and sonically formal of all of rave’s sub-genres, as well as one of its most mono-cultural (as Ireland was until recently).The willfully epic refrains and speed-tunnel rhythm satisfying the adolescent needs for acceleration and self-mythologisation. The repetition of the experiences of speeding cars, trespassed fields and overblown raves encoded in the music itself. Not Glam then, but a pseudo-classicism, and a sense of sublimation that never lasted longer than the experience itself. The need for aggrandisement squeezed out of daily life and into night-life, accompanied by the inevitable day-after comedown into tow-the-line dont-betray-the-cause Irishness. Trance offered a brief catharsis, one that left all of the repressive social norms unchallenged, its flirtations with grandeur ultimately reigned in by the exceptionally strong desublimating force of Ireland’s unique form of late-capitalism.

The bypassing in Ireland of a full-on industrial phase of capitalism gave the working-classes no opportunity to form a reflexive collective identity on the scale of the labour movements in Britain or the Continent. This lack of collective memory has allowed neo-lieralism to take swift root with no real opposition worth speaking of.

This is all our generation knows, the totalising present of neo-liberal late-capitalism, with no memories or experience of anything else.

Ireland’s pop output has faithfully reflected this situation, churning out a seemingly endless line of identitiless Tesco own-brand cheap substitutes for (already dull and conformist) pop and loathsome indie. The likes of The Coronas, The Thrills, U2, Damien Rice and countless others (including their ‘underground’ correlates) are the perfect musical complement to our cheap-labour service economy, the fake American accents of Irish singers echoing the creepy US business-speak, sales scripts and PR-buzzwords spoken by Irish workers. Dissatisfaction with both new music and new work is usually dealt with by the same responses of ‘it could be worse’, ‘think about how bad it was in the 80s’ etc. Why should we settle for that now?

Lets get Cranky.

Les Enfants/Les Artistes

Mentasms has been intensified by Ricardo Villalobos’ Les Enfants for some time now. Villalobos’ strength lies in his unfailing allegiance to a particular aesthetic, his enthusiastic rejection of the mediocritising forces of eclecticism.

Blissblog and K-punk have previously articulated the link between dance music’s structural repetition and Deleuze & Guattari’s conception of the ‘plateau’ as the ideal mode of extracting jouissance. Villalobos takes this method to the extreme; the effect of his use of repetition - no matter how mesmerising - is never to induce a trance (“a half-conscious state characterised by an absence of response to external stimulation”), rather it requires and manipulates a state of hyper-consciousness where even the tiniest introduction of/variation in stimulation induces intense effect.

Over the course of his tracks and live sets, the endless 4X4 beat is internalised, becoming part of the body, allowing all that occurs elsewhere in the soundscape to be experienced more intensely. Les Enfants goes even further in RV’s reconstruction of the track, doing away with the kick drum altogether - subtracting the unnecessary but taken-for-granted formailities and expanding outwards, beyond the artificially imposed limits on (track) time and space. As Enfants’ piano riff is filtered outwards and upwards the brain feels as though it is being sucked through an airlock leading to another gravitational field. All the while the children’s refrain oscillates between schoolyard playfulness and militaristic battle chant, never settling over all of the track’s indivisible seventeen minutes.

Xxxchange’s remix of Santogold’s Les Artistes transplants the original’s fantastic melody and lyrics from their dull indietronica casing and onto reinforced crunkoid beats and a black-noise bassline reminiscent of the spectacularally grimey sonic proton-charge in Ashanti’s Only U. This mutation makes the desire for a transition into an unknown mindscape all the more stirring; the feelings of determination, doubt, optimism and loneliness fighting and feeding of each other in the inevitable emotional conflict that preludes the creation of a reconstructed self

Change, change, change, change
I want to get up out of my skin
tell you what
if I can shake it
I’m ‘a make this
something worth dreaming of

I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up

 

 

 

 

 

Like Brutalist architecture demonstrated the beauty that could be forged from the grey functionality of concrete, Jungle did the same with the structural backbone of popular music, the drums. Jungle liberates the drums from the purely functional role they are assigned in rock, and freed from this percussive labour they assume a whole new existence where their true potential is spectacularly unleashed. Snares, kicks and cymbals resonate with tunefulness, explode into spasmic chaos, or just rrroll into an infinite turbo-peacefulness. The drums become the melody, harmony, the rhythm and the atmosphere, their former aesthetic austerity supplanted by emotional charge and hightened sense-stimulation. This radical approach to the use of percussion throws everything up in the air, the unexpected permeates every second.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jungle and Brutalism are instantly polarising to the newcomer and the dilettante. Unlike techno or house, where the subject succumbs and ‘gets lost’ in the music, letting its inner rhythm descend to the tribal repetition of its ancestors, jungle requires an active engagement, a wilful acceleration of the body’s rhythm, beyond the ‘natural’. To enter the Junglistic state requires both a commitment and a risk; once you adjust to jungle’s accelerated state, you may not experience anything the same way again. Jungle and brutalism demand and require belief; belief that culture and community can be better, that they will be better, provided a collective commitment to progress is made and honoured.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

However, in jungle, the stark contours of the drums are always tempered by the bass. Even the most alien and weird basslines will enwrap the subject in an arousing tickle of low frequency soundwaves, a libidinal compromise to the Junglist biology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like brutalism, jungle was inherently at odds with the cultural and economic imperatives which were rapidly consolidating their influence.  Their modernist drives towards collective progress and innovation were in direct opposition to the regressive culture of individualised consumerism..

As the Junglistic ideals receded into fond memory for some, and were written of as a historic fad by others, the de-radicalisation of DnB progressed with characteristically pointless speed. Rhythmic innovation was rooted out and replaced by hasty monotony, nuance supplanted with one-dimensional expressions of set-defined emotions. The overwhelming desire to ‘please the dancefloor’ with simple drum patterns, blunt basslines and flawless production technique, highlighted a collective amnesia, the memory erasure of a period (only a few years before) where pleasing the dancefloor did not involve a drive towards ever lower common denominators. 

As the vacuity of the DnB project became ever clearer to its followers (taking up to 10 years for some), many began to dissent. A sense of boredom prevailed (some tried to reinvigorate the sound by re-introducing rhythmic experimentation, but did so in the most po-faced and joyless way imaginable, repelling most prospective followers). The hollowness of what underground dance music had come to be was laid bare for all to see. The perfect time for change…

 

 

 

And then dubstep emerged.

 

 

 

 

  

 

Dubstep is about bass, drums relegated to formality, their purpose no longer evident other than as a stabiliser anchoring the flows of low frequency soundwaves in a metronomic channel. For former DnBers dubstep projects an endless sequence of reassuring signifiers, it feels different, but familiar. It lures with its opulent infinite sub-bassic pleasure, and comforts with well-worn Drum and Bass tropes; growling techstep basslines and bleeps, head-nodding dubwise grooves and the obligatory sampled rasta-vox; the symbolic order of DnB re-arranged into novel familiarity. The insurrectionary edge of DnB-bordome is now dulled, the army of discontented junglist soldiers mollified, their revolutionary burning doused by vats of thick immobilising bass. Bass is now reactionary; it feeds the underground libido just enough to suppress the mind-body-souls’ desire, its need, for more, and for better. By tweaking the formula just barely enough to feel kind-of-new, dubstep has pacified the latent sonic-proletariat.