Mokum

A throwaway comment on Twitter ended up throwing me back to some old Mokum tracks... didn't even know these guys still existed... thought the scene/label had been annihilated /sublimated by the I Wanna Be A Hippy crossover/dance-smash...



...the pisstaking sub Blue Sunshine look on the video seemed to cause a rift between the appearance (from outside The Netherlands) and the reality but it seems I missed the point a bit about what it was about... i.e. from here, gabber seemed inexplicable / impossible in a broader cross-cultural mileu... only worked whilst vaguely tainted w/ actual insanity, facism, inarticulate rage...

That seemed to be the marketing scam in the UK: 'Look at these crazy motherfuckers - it's like Rapido gone stabmental!'

while... in reality I think gabber was more complex than that - there were undoubtedly lots of nerve-shredding headbanged skins but there were also sub sub sub happy hardcore fans, shaking their booties with big smiles on their faces....

Anyway... digging a little deeper and you'll find that the Mokum artists were never counter-cultural in the sense I thought; Technohead had already had a hit under the Tricky Disco name, itself an exemplary pop bleep from Warp...



And Tricky Disco were, of course, Greater Than One/GTO who had more than a few industrialish connections way back to the mid 80s...

The links between Technohead/ techno heads and Industrial are not spurious: Mokum, for a moment, in the UK, stood apart from the bleep artists... the early releases were out there, talked about (pre I Wanna) in similar breaths as Power Electronics; the racks weren't far apart... your Whitehouse fan would consider a Mokum track as a first wedding dance.

I bought a few of the Mokum compilations and used them to shed people at parties that had gotten out of hand - people didn't go mental, they went... it seemed like outsider music and, in the absence of the internet, it was impossible to find the sources that would prove it otherwise... then I Wanna Be A Hippy rolled out and things started to change...

(compare and contrast with how people felt about Whitehouse etc before and after you could access info about them - in fact, I talked about that here...)

So, I drifted off... gabber became another genre that died in me... it never fitted my drugs (made the error of taking the wrong drugs in a gabber field, didn't make the same error twice), didn't fit where I was heading musically, seemed simultaneously inaccessible and over-accessed; snobbery ensued and I assumed that everyone else lost interest too...

But they didn't. It's still out there, Mokum's still going strong, gabber's morphed into even more ridiculous highspeed angles: speedcore, cybergrind, splittercore...



and then extratone...



which comes fullcycle with the Nazi imagery and kinda outCakes Chris Morris... Shatner's Bassoon will quake...

Taken By Trees - Taken Too Young

Loving this girl's voice... and this song, especially in it's remixed version, is like hearing Billy Bragg's A New England sung by children as you're coming out of a anaesthetic fog; I wonder if that was intentional?

Either way, it's subtle, trippy and very beautiful... Taken By Trees are (is?) one to watch.

Specta - K-Hole

I dunno... there's stuff just like this everywhere, stuff like this crawling from under rocks, into storm drains, out of badly brushed mouths but... there's something a little off about this and I like it when something grabs you by the throat & makes you pay attention to it specifically, rather than simply echo off it's ancestors, friends, family members... even in a crowded, saturated, chain-smoked field the bass here is gutting... the name, the not Skepta... and the simplicity itself is like a-

Actually, the thing I like about this is that it sort of resists theory and interpretation so I think I'll just shut the fuck up

Am I Real?

As a partially relevant add-end-um... to Kek's piece on the Britney/Salem collaboration (it's not a remix, even if both parties say it is) this seems to encapsulate the fluffier side of the chillwaves, with the assumption that a slightly slowed Britney is less witch-like, more glacial/glazed and should therefore sit snugly with the likes of Nite Jewel...

...but it's the title that really adds something here. The song is Nite Jewel, whatever that means to you (to me, it means a fantastic Summer last year in New York) but the song isn't really where we're at here - it's the plaintive cry of Am I Real? Am I Real? that shoves this to the front of the queue and will no doubt see it on the Chillwave 3CD sets sold for £6 circa 2013...

It's an important question in this genre (cf. witch house, hauntology, whatever) and becoming increasingly difficult to answer... in fact, the 3CD set should only contain versions of this song, or versions of other songs that incorporate this phrase...

Am I Real? she's asking... the TV turning to static... the debt to Twin Peaks extended character assassinations exemplified... Am I Real?

And maybe someone ought to sample this guy, a Borges stemfish, grappling with Who Am I? in mixed metaphor and shifting language....



Time for a shift in the shift... Kek is right, there's something scurrilously upended about the way music's going... the You in Youtube becoming less and less key... the Tube taking all with it... sucking it down... sluicing history like it means nothing because it means nothing...

Lots sounds like lots but I'm beginning not to care. Let it fly. There's still a lot of stuff to coalesce out there, we shouldn't be afraid... we're only at the beginning of the revolution...

Another year where music bites itself and finds new flesh...

Add.

End?

Um...

Hacker Farm - Poundland

Perhaps not fully available yet but here's a place to start snuffling.... There's also this little slice of the olde worlde, which has other stuff... maybe more on this later, the floppiness will need another headbubble to get around.

Poundland wreaks tiny little havocs. Electronic ape gulps, scales and scrapes; all shrouded in deep echo... Lots of tracks start like they're dying.

West country voices occasionally drift up - voices you don't hear often, ghosts of Holloway (Ian and the prison)... there's hidden tinkles and micro melodies that never quite reveal themselves... the hi-hats sound like aerosol sprays... this sounds like music from a country that's just discovered electricity, is still in it's thrall, is wondering if nature could ever tame such a beast...

I know their equipment: the close-miked toys, appendages, shower caps, broken machines... and it does sound like all of those... Steve keeping the beats just in check, Kek flinging himself softly at piles of pure matter... but this is more, er, musical than you might expect... these guys aren't altogether sane or altogether willing to compromise or altogether but... you get the feeling this is a great group, that they've found a way to stitch their two approaches together...

You want superficials? TG is an influence, of course and a lot of this - the violins, the shudders, the leftover electronics and drums; but this is X-TG, none of the Gen(eric) egoings... there's a hint in one section of a West Country version of Peter Christopherson's solo contribution to DOA, for instance... The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death...



Some of it sounds like being inside a giant Zardoz skull; with weapons replaced by cornstalks, sweet wrappers, puffballs...

It's music for a Riddley Walker boar hunt (we're going on a boar hunt, we're going to catch a big one, what a beautiful day; we're not scared....)



Except....we're too fucked to spear, we're rooting for vegetables, snuffling for hallucinogenic fungi alongside the bird squawks (these birds feed on badger carcass)... we're fogfucked, we're wandering...deep in the wud... and there's a glimmer, somewhere up ahead, it's a man with, God, he.... those mirrors, they are blinding... He... shit, he seems to be kicking what looks like a... No... Christ...

Did I say I liked it a lot?