RE: [microsound] whoopsy

[Gareth Metford <gmetford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all

> for the record, any house or two-step or speed-garage or even fuck-step
> (whatever that is) that can be reasonably argued to be characteristic of 
a
> loosely articulated "digital aesthetics" (again, see www.microsound.org 
for
> more on this) should be considered on-topic. random calls for compilation
> entries by otherwise non-participating listmembers, while certainly more
> suspect, will at least be tolerated until such practice becomes abusive.

I'm the 'non-participating listmember', and - in light of the incredibly 
varied responses my little post generated - I'd like to attempt to explain 
myself. First of all, my call for expressions of interest was NOT randomly 
posted to this list. As well as being a longtime fan of rave music and its 
various mutations (from 2-step to happy hardcore), I have a history of 
involvement in those musics which tend now to be grouped under the 'glitch' 
rubric stretching back to my teens. Listen to the tracks 'MPEG Nectar' and 
'Protocols 1.0' on my website (address below) if you want to check my 
credentials. The reason I posted to microsound is that I feel the 
connections between 2-step and the sort of music discussed here are not 
only fairly obvious, but quite profound, and hence it seemed to me that 
subscribers to the list might well be interested in contributing to the 
comp.

I suppose that for the benefit of Mr Laviazar (he of the multiply impaired 
capacities), I should try to outline what those connections are. In 
essence, they have to do with the attitude that 2-step producers take to 
the audio content with which they work. Prior to the emergence of rave in 
around 1990-91, dance music discourse tended to be conducted with much 
emphasis on those specious categories 'soul' and 'authenticity' (UK 
producers who built their careers on ripping off Detroit techno being 
especially fond of such verbal smokescreening). Rave music, while by no 
means the first dance music to escape from the shackles of such ideas, was 
revolutionary insofar as the form's popular appeal, its massive 'user base' 
across Europe acted to amplify the tendency towards materialist uses of 
sound embedded in the technology of sampling, to the point where there was 
simply no turning back: a large-scale subculture had developed in which ALL 
sound was considered fair game for re-articulation, and which - furthermore 
- positively relished the potential for jarring juxtaposition and creative 
destruction inherent in such a situation. What these 'cheesy quavers', 
these 'gurning nutters' (as ravers were stereotyped at the time) wanted to 
hear was emphatically NOT the plangent synthesiser melodies and pattering 
drum machines so beloved of techno purists, all delicacy and poise and 
even-tempered 'musicality'. Instead, they wanted multiply-layered 
breakbeats, in which the sound of the funky drummer exploded beyond any 
human musician's capabilities into thick clouds of percussive dust. They 
wanted vocals chopped up into multiple tiny fragments and pitch-shifted 
beyond the reach of gender's gravitational pull, returning as melismatic 
androids, sexless schizophonic angels. They wanted to hear the *breaks*, 
those terrifying/exhilarating moments of discontinuity where samples were 
brutally truncated, where reverb tails were cut horribly short, where 
sickly-sweet piano arpeggios momentarily transformed themselves into 
thickets of grinding, clangorous, hostile, atonal noise. In short, unlike 
the earlier period of 'cut-up' records, when DJ-producers like Coldcut 
achieved momentary chart success with sampled collage tracks, only to find 
that their continued success depended on retreating to the safe ground of 
melodic cover versions, the existence of a mass audience for rave enabled 
the producers to take the oppositional, anti-melodic, anti-'musical' 
tendencies of the sampler and reify them, make them the effective substrate 
of a musical continuum that had never previously existed: a popular avan  
t-garde, completely opposed to transcendentalism, dedicated to the 
transformation of 'music' (voices, instruments, discrete 'works') into 
endlessly manipulable, endlessly transformable noise.

Where does 2-step fit into this? Well, I see 2-step as simply the latest 
incarnation of what I call the 'rave virus': that urge towards 
dismemberment, towards fragmentation, towards the asynchronous jerk, the 
horrible collision, and - yes - the 'glitch' which is the signifier of rave 
music in all its forms. In its treatment of vocals, which are chopped up 
and re-ordered completely arbitrarily, without any attempt to retain or 
even generate fresh syntactic meanings, 2-step is as blatantly 
'post-digital' as any music on the planet. Its rhythms similarly 
dis-articulate the body - in their constant interplay of shuffles, jerks, 
surges and momentary relaxations, they force the dancer to relearn his or 
her body's responses, adjusting their nervous system to the frantic 
micro-syncopations and double-time incrementations of the beat. Then there 
are the twisted, 'bent' pitchings and phrasings used by garage producers of 
every ilk in their effort to complicate and re-present the R&B/gospel roots 
from which garage originally derived. 2-step is therefore not merely 
post-jungle house music (or even 'the hip-house of the '90s' as one 
commentator put it), but a continuation of a major cultural trend in which 
jungle has played a significant, but not a central role, and which should 
be paid attention to by anyone who claims interest in the way technology 
has recreated the category 'music' over the last ten or twenty years.

Sorry to take your time up with such an epic post. I've been stung, and 
quite shocked, by the virulence of some of the reactions my cross-posting 
has received, often from communities where I would least expect it, and I 
feel strongly the need to defend myself. For anyone who's interested, I've 
posted a set of 2-step samples at http://www.geocities.com/qubit_records. I 
also seriously recommend Simon Reynolds' article 'Feminine Pressure' at 
http://members.aol.com/blissout/2step.htm. Oh, and incidentally, there *is* 
such a thing as fuck-step. Doesn't anyone on microsound ever read Datacide 
(http://www.c8.com)?

Gareth

--

Gareth Metford (Nonlinear / Qubit Records)

Email: gmetford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Nonlinear website: http://www.qubit.demon.co.uk/nonlinear