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Rodion Kriwoschein
http://www.descendingangel.com/nou-turn/intrview/int_srey.html
No U-Turn Records: Simon Reynolds' overview of techstep and neurofunk
This extract is taken from Simon Reynold'sbrilliant history of rave music
and danceculture "Energy Flash"(PICADOR ISBM 0-330-35056-0).
(link to Simon Reynold's website -
http://members.aol.com/blissout/index.htm)
Any notes required are added in (bracketedred text).
Apocalypse Noir
In 1996, a new sub-genre of jungle began to coalesce called 'techstep', a
dirge-like death-funk characterized by harsh industrial timbres and
bludgeoning 'butcher's block' beats. The term was coined by DJ-producers Ed
Rush and Trace, who shaped the sound in tandem with engineer Nico of the No
U-Turn label. The 'tech' stood not for Detroit techno, dreamy and elegant,
but for the brilliant brutalist Belgian hardcore of the early nineties.
Paying homage to R&S classics like 'Dominator' and 'Mentasm', to artists
like T99 and Frank de Wulf, Trace and Ed Rush deliberately affirmed a
crucial white European element that had been written out of jungle's
history.
The other important source for techstep was the first era of 'darkside', as
pioneered by Reinforced artists like Doc Scott and 4 Hero. This was when the
teenage DJs Trace and Ed Rush cut their production teeth with sinister
classics like 'Lost Entity' and 'Blodclot Artattack'. The name 'Ed Rush'
sounds like a take on the 'head rush', early rave slang for a temporary
white-out of consciousness caused by taking too many E's. There's a big
difference between darkside 1993 and techstep though. The original dark-core
had still oozed a sinister, sickly bliss on the border between loved-up and
f**ked-up. In 1996, with Ecstasy long out of favour, techstep was shaped by
a different mindf**k-of-choice: hydroponically grown marijuana a.k.a.
'skunk', whose near-hallucinogenic levels of THC induce a sensory
intensification without euphoria and a nerve-jangling paranoia perfect for
jungle's tension-but-no-release rhythms.
The first stirrings of the return-to-darkness were heard in late 1995
withTrace's seminal remix of T. Power's 'Horny Mutant Jazz'. Working in
tandem with Nico and Ed Rush, Trace tore the fusion-flavoured original to
shreds, replacing its leisurely glidfe with slipped-gears breakbeats,
spectral synths and a brooding, bruising bass sound sampled and mutated from
Kevin Saunderson's Reese classic 'Just Want Another Chance'. Meanwhile Ed
Rush's No U-Turn tracks 'Gangsta Hardstep' and 'Guncheck' took the explosive
energy of hardcore and imploded it, transforming febrile hyperkinesis into
molasses-thick malaise. The new sound made you feel like you were caged in a
pressure-cooker of paroxysmic breaks and plasmic bass.
If Belgian brutalism and early breakbeat 'ardkore resembled sixties garage
punk, techstep is like seventies punk rock, in so far as it's not a simple
back-to-basics manoeuvre, but an isolation and intensification of the most
aggresive, non R&B elements in its precursor. Over the six months, as the No
U-Turn squad honed their sound-and-vision, they accentuated the self-same
'noise annoys' elements that punk exaggerated in garage rock: headbanger
riffs and mid-frequency blare. Where intelligent drum and bass suffers from
an obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, techstep production is deliberately
dirty, all dense murk and noxious drones. The defining aspect of the No
U-Turn sound was its bass sound - a dense, humming miasma of low-end
frequencies, as malignant as a cloud of poison gas - acheived by feeding the
bass-riffs through a guitar distortion pedal and a battery of effects.
Another stylistic trait was the way techstep shunned the frisky fluency of
jazzy-jungle's breakbeats in favour of relative simplicity and rigour.
Although the breakbeats are still running at jungle's 160-and-rising b.p.m
norm, the techstep feels slower - fatigued, winded, like it's had the crap
beaten out of it. In tracks like Doc Scott's 'Drumz 95', the emphasis is on
the 80 b.p.m. half-step, making you want to stomp, not sashay.
Techstep is a sado-masochistic sound. Ed Rush declared bluntly 'I want to
hurt people with my beats', and one No U-Turn release had the phrase
'hurter's mission' scratched into the vinyl. This terrorist stance is in
marked contrast to the rhetoric of intelligent drum and bass artists, with
their talk of 'educating' the audience, 'opening minds' and 'easing the
pressure' of urban life. Sonically, techstep's dry, clenched sound couldn't
have been further from the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of genteel
sound oozed by DJs like Bukem and Fabio, all soothing synth-washes and sax
loops semingly on loan from Grover Washington Jnr and Kenny G.
While the intelligent and jazz-step producers prided themselves on their
musicality , the techstep producers veered to the opposite extreme: a
bracing 'anti-musicality'. With its incorporation of atonal, unpitched
timbres, non-musical sounds and horror-movie soundtrack dissonance, the new
artcore noir was simply far more avant-garde than the likes of Bukem. In an
abiding confusion about what constitutes 'progression' for electronic music,
the intelligent drum and bass producers were simply too deferential to
traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, 'nice' textures, the importance
of proper songs and hands-on, real-time instrumentation.
By the end of 1996, producers like Nasty Habits / Doc Scott, Dom and Roland,
Boymerang, E-Sassin, Cyborgz and Optical had joined No U-Turn on their
'hurther's mission'. Techstep got even more industrial and stiff-jointed, at
times verging on gabba, or a syncopated, sped-up update of Swans. Above all,
the music got colder. The Numanoid synth-riff on Nasty Habits' awesome
'Shadowboxin'' sears the ear with its glacial grandeur, while the trudging
two-step beat always makes me imagine a commando jogging under napalm skies
with a rocket launcher on his hip. No U-Turn themselves reached something of
a pinnacle with the dark exultation of Trace / Nico's 'Squadron', whose
Carmina Burana-gone-cyberpunk fanfares slash and scythe like the Grim
Reaper.
Where did the apocalyptic glee, the morbid and preverse jouissance, in
techstep stem from? Nico described the music-making process - all night,
red-eye sessions conducted in a ganja fog - as a horrible experience that
poisoned his nervous system with tension. Ed Rush talked of deliberately
smokin' weed to get 'dark, evil thoughts', the kind of skunkanoia without
which he couldn't acheive the right vibe for his tracks. Like Wu-Tang-style
horrorcore rap, techstep seemed based around the active pursuit of phobia
and psychosis as entertainment. Which begged the question: what exactly were
the social conditions that had created such a big audience for music that
f**ks with your head so extensively, that appears to be 'no fun'?
Future-Shock Troops
'It's like this: some people are sharks, and some people are marks. If you
can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Play pussy, get f**ked. Come
prepared or run away scared...You can't always count on E to shelter you
from being vic'd.'
- Breakbeat Mailing Lists's Correspondent's riposte to other correspondents'
complaints about the loveless, intimidating vibe at jungle events
If rave culture was a displaced form of working-class collectivity, with its
'love, peace and unity' running counter to thatcherite social atomization,
then jungle is rave music after the death of the rave ethos. Punning on the
Labour history of cooperatives and friendly societies, I'd call jungle an
'unfriendly society'. Since 1993 and hardcore's slide into the
twilight-zone, debates about 'where did our love go?' have convulsed the UK
breakbeat community, with grim tales being related of muggings outside
clubs, of fights and 'crack' vibes inside. Disenchanted ravers sloped off to
form the happy hardcore scene. Others defended the demise of the euphoric
vibe, arguing that jungle's atmosphere wasn't moody, it was 'serious'.
In the absence of Ecstasy, jungle began to embrace an idealogy of real-ness
that paralleled the worldview of American hardcore rap. L. Double and Shy
FX's 'The S**t', a classic 1996 roller of a jump-up tune, kicked off with a
gangsta monologue: 'Yo man, there's a gang of muthaf**kers out there on the
d**k...Non-reality seeing, non-reality feeling, non-reality-living-ass
muthaf**kas, man. And I don't know, man, reality, it's important to me.' In
hip-hop, 'real' has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised
music that refuses to sell out to the music industry. 'Real' also signifies
that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late capitalist economic
instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and
harassment of youth by the police. Hence tracks like T. Power's 'Police
State' and Photek's neurotic 'The Hidden Camera': lyric-free critiques of a
country that conducts the most intense surveillance of its own citizenry in
the world (most UK city centres now have spy cameras). 'Real' means the
death of the social; it means corporations who respond to increased profits
not by raising pay or improving benefits but downsizing (laying off the
permanent work-force in order to create a floating employment pool of
part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).
'Real' is a neo-medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to
enclosure, where the aristocray threw the peasants off the land and reduced
them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, jungle reflects a medieval
paranioascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, secret societies and
covert operations. Hence the popularity, as a source of samples and song
titles, of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather,
Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Carlito's Way, whose universe revolves around
concepts of righteous violence and blood-honour.
Where gangsta hardstep shares the Wu-Tang Clan's neo-medieval vision of late
capitalism, techstep is more influenced by dystopian sci-fi movies like
Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator et al, which contain a subliminally
anti-capitalist message, imagining the future as a return to the Dark Ages,
complete with fortress cities and bandit clans. Hence No U-Turn tracks like
'The Droid' and 'Replicants', or Adam F's 'Metropolis'. 'Amtrak', another
late 1996 Trace / Nico meisterwerk pivots around the sample 'here is a group
trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get into the future'. Given the
scary millennial soundscape No U-Turn paint, this begs the question: why the
hurry to get there? The answer: in a new Dark Age, it's the 'dark' that will
come into their own. 'Dark' is where primordial energies meet digital
technique, where id gets scientific. Identify with this marauding music, and
you define yourself as predator not prey.
What you affiliate yourself to in techstep is the will-to-power of
technology itself, the motor behind late capitalism as it rampages over
human priorities and tears communities apart. The name No U-Turn captures
this sense that there's no turning back. It also has a submerged political
resonance: one of Margaret Thatcher's famous boasts was 'This lady's not for
turning' - her refusal to bow to pressure from liberal Tories to make a
U-Turn on Conservative policies like privatization and the assault on
welfare. These same policies led to the catastrophic realization of another
infamous Thatcher pronouncement: 'There is no such thing as society.'
The persuasive sense of slippin' into a new Dark Age, of an insidious
breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but
resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn't necessarily take
the 'logical' form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it
can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of
capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-facist,
anti-corporate nostalgia of America's right-wing militia, or as a sort of
hyper-individualistic survivalism.
In jungle, the response is a 'realism' that accepts a socially constructed
reality as 'natural'. To get 'real' is to confront a state-of-nature where
dog eats dog, where you're neither a winner or a loser, and where most will
be losers. There's a cold rage seething in jungle, but it's expressed within
the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed
defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by
the mainstream. 'Underground' can be understood socialogically as a metaphor
for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche:
the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat.
Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I
listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the
bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms
offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud,
is an essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable to
trauma). 'It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for', runs the martial
arts movie sample in Source Direct's 'the Cult', a track that pioneered the
post-techstep style I call 'neurofunk' (clinical and obsessively nuanced
production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n' blurts of electronic noise,
and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don't even sound like
breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's
strategy of 'cultural resistance': the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse
yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.
The battery of sensations offered by a six-hour stint at AWOL, Millennium or
any 'non-intelligent' jungle club, induces a mixture of shell-shock and
future-shock. Alvin Toffler defined F-shock as what happens when the human
adaptive mechanism seizes up in response to an overload of stimuli, novelty,
surprise. Triggering neural reflexes and fight-or-flight responses, jungle's
rhythmic assault-course hypes up the listener's adaptive capability in
readiness for the worst the twenty-first century has up its sleeve. If
jungle is a martial artform, clubs like AWOL are church for the soul-jah and
killah priest, inculcating a kind of spiritual fortitude.
All of this is why going to AWOL is serious bizness, as opposed to 'fun'.
Jungle is the living death of rave, the sound of living with and living
through the dream's demise. Every synapse-shredding snare and
cranium-cracking bass-bomb is an alarm-call saying 'Wake-up, that dream is
over. Time to get real.'
--
np: Tenechtica - Spinning the System mix
Nikita Melnikov
24 май 05 17:46, you wrote to All:
RK> http://www.descendingangel.com/nou-turn/intrview/int_srey.html
RK> No U-Turn Records: Simon Reynolds' overview of techstep and neurofunk
RK> This extract is taken from Simon Reynold'sbrilliant history of rave
RK> music and danceculture "Energy Flash"(PICADOR ISBM
RK> 0-330-35056-0). (link to Simon Reynold's website -
RK> http://members.aol.com/blissout/index.htm)
Странно, что такие товарищи, как Бес и Диссидент, называют своё творчество тоже
нейрофанком (я лично его называю нейропуком), ибо с "настоящим" нейрофанком, о
котором идёт речь в данной статье, а также тем, что было потом, оно не имеет
ничего общего.
А статья правильная и интересная :) Я на No U-Turn подсел давным-давно, на моём
втором mp3-шном диске был их LP Torque. Рекомендую всем, кто не слышал :)
Да не упадет ядро твое в корку, Rodion!
Nikita Melnikov aka Koroedd[Ku3]
... xmms: Baron - Squelch (Sub Focus Remix)
dmitry boycko
>──[*/─ты─пахнешь─фиолетовой─pадиацией─/*]────────────────[_/*─Nikita!*/_]
NM> "настоящим" нейрофанком, о котором идёт речь в данной статье, а также
NM> тем, что было потом, оно не имеет ничего общего.
NM> А статья правильная и интересная :) Я на No U-Turn подсел
NM> давным-давно, на моём втором mp3-шном диске был их LP Torque.
NM> Рекомендую всем, кто не слышал :)
что ещё можешь посоветовать из no u-turn? а то из всего что оттyда слышал
зацепил тока нпшный тpек, но он охyенный. довольно необычный звyк. может, там
есть ещё шедевpы типа этого? (%
з.ы. казалось бы, пpи чём здесь цой? [_par0wo3zz dey ya hso man_]
... 196.Одноногий шушпанчик бегает вдвое быстpее.
Rodion Kriwoschein
NM> Странно, что такие товарищи, как Бес и Диссидент, называют своё
NM> творчество тоже нейрофанком (я лично его называю нейропуком), ибо с
NM> "настоящим" нейрофанком, о котором идёт речь в данной статье, а также
NM> тем, что было потом, оно не имеет ничего общего.
ну, это как школы кун-фу, гыгы
название одно, а стили исполнения - разные (:
лично мне звучание беса и диссидента нравиццо. особенно диссидента -
последние его вещи, которые он играл в ПС весной (и, которые, скорее всего,
будут на его альбоме, выходящем в июне на TAM Records) ну просто...
просто... обалденные! (:
NM> А статья правильная и интересная :)
вот я иё закинул, а тока потом почитал... оказалось про нейрофанк-то вообще
один абзац... так, мельком зацепили (:
NM> Я на No U-Turn подсел давным-давно, на моём втором mp3-шном диске был их
NM> LP Torque. Рекомендую всем, кто не слышал :)
это который 1997 года?
--
np: pirate station 2005-05-25
f0ckah
NM> А статья правильная и интересная :) Я на No U-Turn подсел давным-давно, на
NM> моём
NM> втором mp3-шном диске был их LP Torque. Рекомендую всем, кто не слышал :)
Ed Rush, Trace, Fierce & Nico Torque (CD#1)
Ed Rush, Trace, Fierce & Nico Torque (CD#2, Live Ed Rush Mix)
это штоле?
Nikita Melnikov
27 май 05 13:23, you wrote to me:
NM>> "настоящим" нейрофанком, о котором идёт речь в данной статье, а
NM>> также тем, что было потом, оно не имеет ничего общего.
NM>> А статья правильная и интересная :) Я на No U-Turn подсел
NM>> давным-давно, на моём втором mp3-шном диске был их LP Torque.
NM>> Рекомендую всем, кто не слышал :)
db> что ещё можешь посоветовать из no u-turn? а то из всего что оттyда
db> слышал зацепил тока нпшный тpек, но он охyенный. довольно необычный
db> звyк. может, там есть ещё шедевpы типа этого? (%
Да сейчас ничего не могу посоветовать... Лейбл помер (ну или почти помер), а уж
его создатели там не выпускаются с 97-го года. Так что только классику...
Трейс потом вообще забросил творчество, Nico выпустил 1 релиз (правда, трек
Defender оттуда -- офигенный), Ed Rush занялся Virus Records, Fierce тоже как
бы с ним.
А, вспомнил, была ещё парочка реальных релизов от Ryme Tyme, но не факт что они
понравятся сейчас тем, кто их слышит в первый раз. Звук тогда был совершенно
другой.
Да не упадет ядро твое в корку, dmitry!
Nikita Melnikov aka Koroedd[Ku3]
... download the latest kernel from kernel.org!
Nikita Melnikov
27 май 05 17:24, Rodion Kriwoschein wrote to me:
NM>> Странно, что такие товарищи, как Бес и Диссидент, называют своё
NM>> творчество тоже нейрофанком (я лично его называю нейропуком), ибо
NM>> с "настоящим" нейрофанком, о котором идёт речь в данной статье, а
NM>> также тем, что было потом, оно не имеет ничего общего.
RK> ну, это как школы кун-фу, гыгы
RK> название одно, а стили исполнения - разные (:
RK> лично мне звучание беса и диссидента нравиццо. особенно диссидента -
RK> последние его вещи, которые он играл в ПС весной (и, которые, скорее
RK> всего, будут на его альбоме, выходящем в июне на TAM Records) ну
RK> просто... просто... обалденные! (:
Эээээ... Я промолчу ;)
NM>> А статья правильная и интересная :)
RK> вот я иё закинул, а тока потом почитал... оказалось про нейрофанк-то
RK> вообще один абзац... так, мельком зацепили (:
Hо всё же ;)
NM>> Я на No U-Turn подсел давным-давно, на моём втором mp3-шном диске
NM>> был их LP Torque. Рекомендую всем, кто не слышал :)
RK> это который 1997 года?
Он.
Да не упадет ядро твое в корку, Rodion!
Nikita Melnikov
27 май 05 11:58, you wrote to me:
NM>> А статья правильная и интересная :) Я на No U-Turn подсел
NM>> давным-давно, на моём втором mp3-шном диске был их LP Torque.
NM>> Рекомендую всем, кто не слышал :)
fc> Ed Rush, Trace, Fierce & Nico Torque (CD#1)
fc> Ed Rush, Trace, Fierce & Nico Torque (CD#2, Live Ed Rush Mix)
fc> это штоле?
Угу. Это цд, но альбом тот же.
Да не упадет ядро твое в корку, f0ckah!