now for the only personality test that matters
Ceephax or Squarepusher?
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jane i think you would be a ceephax person:
And, Squarepusher, i guess? Only due to a complete lack of familiarity with Ceephax.
apparently there are quite a few basic factual errors and he has some unpleasant opinions/biases
There's a really cranky passage in there about Squarepusher and IDM in general that I can't find
I have yet to read it so I can verify little for myself.
im gonna be honest, i am recalling how John Zorn used to (still does?) feel about music reviews
How so?
Mind you, I often disagree with him, but he is at least thoughtful.
Considering I still want to read Slimed! despite the author of that being a twat himself, I think I can get past that for that one book.
...?
That does not sound like his long-form work.
Has this guy ever done anything of consequence? (Apart from the B-lines on "On Land", and Material's "Bustin' Out"). All his Fourth World super-jams read like a great idea, but the results are uniformly less-than-the-sum-of-its-parts. And he's so desperate to get in on every new trend. As soon as jungle broke, media-wise, I just knew it'd only be a matter of months before Laswell would pitch in with his own take--and sure enough, he did (I forget which of the 25 albums that year it was on), and sure enough, it was embarassing. As with the Squarepusher types, it's that perennial margin-walker arrogance of thinking you can improve on any style or genre, "take it further"....
I Am Going To Eat This Man
But then white bohemians (myself included) have never truly grasped why the likes of LTJ Bukem glimpse utopia in the jazz-funk of Lonnie Liston Smith and Roy Ayers, why Goldie flips out for the fuzak of The Yellowjackets and mid-Eighties Miles Davis. New Forms is a timely reminder that elegance can be a form of rebellion for the black working class (rather than a straightforwardly upwardly mobile aspiration to conventional notions of "class"). From Earth Wind and Fire and Chic to today's G-funk, swingbeat and speed garage, the regal panache and sheer slickness of sound communicate a kind of fuck-you defiance, a refusal of your allotted place in the social pyramid. Like "Big Willie"/Notorious BIG/playa rap's commodity fetishism (Hillfiger, Cristal, Rolexes, Hennesy, Lexus et al), the trappings of sonic luxury --stand-up bass, lush strings and jazzed cadences--that infuse New Forms proclaim: "nothing's too good for us".
When electronic musicians attempt a synthesis of sequenced sound with "musicality" ("real" vocals, "live" playing), the result is usually an embarassing mish-mash; witness the worst bits of Timeless. If New Forms mostly escapes that dire fate, it's because Size/Reprazent are minimalists where Goldie is a maximalist. Reprazent understand that the real "jazz thing" going on in drum & bass doesn't involve sampling electric piano licks or hiring a session-musician to noodle out a sax solo. Rather, it resides in the rhythm section--the tangential relationship between the hyper-syncopated breakbeats and the roaming, ruminative but always visceral B-line. Strip away the stereo-panned streaks of abstract tone-color and the Pat Metheny-style guitar glints from "Matter of Fact", for instance, and the track is basically a rimshot-ricochetting, paradiddle-palsied drum solo (albeit one constructed painstakingly over days of red-eyed computer-screen toil rather than played in real-time and real acoustic space).
The first disc of New Forms contains all the "big tunes", as well as the most overt nods towards jazz: the double bass driven "Brown Paper Bag", the title track with its tongue-twistingly sibilant scat-rap from Bahamadia (which was psychedelicized and susurrated even further on the superior Roni Size remix released as a single), the gorgeous singles "Heroes" and "Share The Fall" (both graced by the torch-song croon of Onalee). "Share The Fall" isn't as good a song as "Heroes", but it's better jungle: singing inside your flesh, the beat is the melody, its rolling tumble of rapid-fire triplets making you step fierce like a bebop soldier.
Disc Two of New Forms is more cinematic and soundtrack-to-life oriented, achieving a widescreen feel and Technicolor sheen rivalled only by Spring Heel Jack. "Trust Me", for instance, sounds like it might be woven out of offcuts from Dudley Moore's symphonic jazz score for his Sixties movie Bedazzled. Truer to the anonymous funktionalism of "real" jungle, the tracks on Disc Two strip away song-structures and "proper" vocals to reveal a music of lustrous details. Drum & bass is an engineer's art, oriented around specifications and special effects, timbres and treatments. So what you listen for is the sculpted rustle-and-glisten of hi-hat and cymbal figures, the contoured plasma of the bass, the exquisitely timed placement of horn stabs and string cascades. You thrill to the music's murderous finesse--intricacies and subleties designed to enhance the ganjadelic mind-state but which are so nuanced and three-dimensional they stone you all by themselves.
In Reprazent's music, the clash between the ghettocentric exuberance of the breakbeats and the opulent arrangements generates oxymoronic mood-amalgams: tense serenity, suave unease, fervent ambivalence. Tracks like the eerie, menthol-cool "Hot Stuff" modulate your metabolism like the impossibly refined neurochemical engineering and designer drugs of the next century. New forms, for sure--but Roni Size/Reprazent are also forging new emotions.
...Does anybody remember that horribly embarrassing old Pitchfork review of that Jon Coltrane retrospective?
is his problem that he is deaf?
im actually mad now
I don't think that's...
Nevermind. Just, nevermind.
i read it twice to be sure, because i was struck with profound disbelief