#hardcore continuum

(via The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum: Introduction - The Wire)

6/8/21

car culture - Featherweight

gruff rhys - Distant Snowy Peaks

annie – miracle mile

clock class - Dead A Sleep

ישי קיצ'לס – המצב אינו מזהיר

sons of kemet – pick your burning cross

king gizzard and the lizard wizard - Catching Smoke

סוס מביט - חיסין

thirdface – local

אלי לס – לך דע

עטר מיינר – מדינה של גנבים

חנה וחסיבה – חמור

overmono – pieces of 8

The photographer Brian Stevens and I have worked together for a long time getting to this simplicity. We first made a vague attempt to map out underground culture through interviews and portraits a full decade ago, with my VeryVeryMuch website. “Underground culture” is a helluva catch-all, though, and after putting up a few interviews we found ourselves unfocused and overcomplicated. Also, I forgot to renew the domain name.

If you haven’t heard of music journalist Simon Reynolds’ concept of the Hardcore Continuum please click HERE to read about it first.

If you’ve now read that or you knew about it anyway hopefully you might find a recent online conversation I had with various people about the current state of said Hardcore Continuum interesting:

Them: Everyone’s got a grasp on why the hardcore continuum pegged it

Scuffed Deejays: Do they? What is it?

For me it’s currently: Acid House > Hardcore > Jungle > UK Garage > Grime > Dubstep > Bassline / UK Funky > Jackin’ > Deep Tech

Deep Tech is basically Acid House reimagined so we’ve come full circle if that is what you mean by pegged it?

Them: [Deep Tech is not basically Acid House reimagined], and it isn’t even bleep n bass reimagined either. it’s shite tech house, just4u london version.

Acid has always been around in the techno scene.

Scuffed Deejays: It’s definitely not shite tech house. The following Jack n Danny set from a few months ago proves this:

Jack n Danny 3am-4am @ Audiowhore

I’ve listened to the above about 40 times since discovering it.

My current new favourite is the following from last month:

Lee Edwards 4am-5am @ House of Silk

Edwards very much has his own distinct sound compared to other DJs on the same night.

I don’t know anything about Techno so will take your word for it that Acid House has always been around there. It’s its reemergence in the continuum which is interesting to me though. House music split off from Acid House and Hardcore back in the day and has always run kind of parallel but in opposition to the continuum up till Deep Tech.

Them: My dude, this sounds exactly like hot creations/get physical tech house given a UK twist, and thats only slightly. this stuff is all over rinse. It’s so static.

Didn’t the main players in this scene, like Radford, decamp to soulful house after garage turned to grime? thats where the overly fundamentalist applications of the nuum breaks down anyway.

This is the kinda stuff i am more down with but even then there’s a certain cleanliness of sound. 

Scuffed Deejays: I remember those Strange Static shows. For me they are more like UK Bass or almost Bassline than Deep Tech. Deep Tech for me is less jump up and more turned towards the trad House scene from which Radford was cherry picking the darker stuff to highlight a new direction. Therefore back in 2014 I was sort of in opposition to what they were doing but secretly I was listening to those shows and really enjoying them. In 2018 that Strange Static sound, or a more jump up and hardcorey version of Deep Tech, is more interesting than it was back then when they were perhaps a bit too ahead of their time.

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Following the above exchange somebody started a new conversation about how the Hardcore Continuum ended effectively when the internet came into being.

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Scuffed Deejays: The hardcore continuum didn’t go quiet with the introduction of the internet! After Acid House became Hardcore it didn’t lose any of its what the fuckness. Hardcore exacerbated it. Jungle was a different side but still as free. Maybe as time has progressed some of the shock of the sound of electronic beats has diminished as we’ve become more used to them. You can probably pinpoint this to the point when indie guitar bands completely went off the radar and hip hop and EDM took over the mainstream completely. Grime is like the generation xennial of the hardcore continuum in that it is straddled both not being internet based and vice versa. Post Grime every new music genre has had the internet to support and spread it. Far more effective in terms of numbers than pirate radio. Now every white middle class person knows about Bass House, Drum n Bass etc instead of isolated London boroughs but that hasn’t had a negative effect. The idolising of driving into London and tuning in to the pirates is all well and good and I know this experience but it doesn’t compare to the same buzz now being available to anyone with an internet connection. It’s just taken a different form in terms of signal carrier. The physical scenes still exist in clubs and festivals. Record shops moved online and so did their clientele. The discussions that took place in those places now happen on forums etc. Today’s hardcore continuum is far more expansive. 

Where does the hardcore continuum head next?

So we’ve reached Deep Tech, or we did in about 2013, so what happens or has happened next? I think last time I wrote about this I said that we had gone full circle and were basically back at Acid House again with Deep Tech. Since this statement I’ve done a bit of research and discovered that this may not be entirely the case. Deep Tech seems to be moving slowly towards a harder more hardcore vibe in some areas with DJs like Jack n Danny and Aaron Vybe and Perch MC (who have handily just released a new mix which is well worth a listen):

Aaron Vybe & Perch MC - Devastation Mix

Having said that, I still hear less hardcorey and more stripped down sets from Deep Tech DJs like Majesty and Lee Edwards that are also interesting in the paths they are exploring. More trad house but still with that darker hardcore edge in there. Perhaps where Majesty and Lee Edwards might fail is perhaps an over reliance on darkness. Jack n Danny and Aaron Vybe are not quite as dark and therefore more appealing I think.

Another development seems to be the Bassline / Bass House area which from a few bits I’ve read and listened to say it started getting interesting again around 2015 (please correct me if I’m wrong on the date). Bassline appears to have gotten slower bpm wise while still sounding roughly the same albeit with a bit more Skrillex / maximalism thrown in. It sounds a bit more professional now and not quite so underground and this seems to be reflected in the videos of raves where this is being played and that I’ve been to. Girls are into it for one thing and not just working class girls (which seems to be more true of girls at Deep Tech events - again correct me if I’m wrong - but also middle class white girls. Importantly the music is really good if you ignore some of the more soulless EDM bits. It’s like Bassline has looked at EDM and its success and gone ‘we can do that but actually make the music good at the same time’. What you are also seeing in the Bassline scene is a merging of Bass House and other similarly named sub genres circling around the same sweet spot. Jamie Duggan mentions it in THIS recent interview:

In your capacity as a DJ, you are one of the originators of bassline as it is known. How has the sound grown up over the years?

It’s definitely changed a lot but the vibe of it still remains. People still love to hear a big dirty wobbler dropped no matter what!

I think the difference today is that there’s a lot of bass and bassline sub-genres this time around, and a lot of different and new producers / sounds from up and down the UK, which are all merging together in each other’s sets. Which in turn is gathering huge fan bases from everywhere and spreading like wildfire!

The genre is branching out to Lost & Found, Reading & Leeds and Parklife Festivals, as well as traditionally house based clubs like Fabric. Where do you see it heading next?

Honestly, you never know. It’s huge at the minute and forever growing with no signs of slowing or hitting a brick wall anytime soon, so the sky’s the limit!

Similarly Holy Goof touches on the subject in THIS interview:

In a nutshell then, how would you best describe your sound?

A sound people can party to! There’s so many elements within my music: garage, bassline, grime, house and more! I don’t really think there’s a label as of yet that people call this sound. I guess it gets branded under the ‘UK bass’ umbrella which is so wide at the moment.

The Holy Goof interview is from 2016 so maybe this has changed but he seems to infer that the sound they are developing is or was in its what do you call it moment.

Como ele diz:

I call it a ‘continuum’ because that’s what it is: a musical tradition/subcultural tribe that’s managed to hold it together for nearly 20 years now, negotiating drastic stylistic shifts and significant changes in technology, drugs, and the social/racial composition of its own population. It’s been a bumpy but exhilarating ride, but let no one doubt that it’s the same rollercoaster at every stage of the journey (a ride which most likely has yet to reach its end). And I call it ‘Hardcore’ because the tradition started to take shape circa 1990 with what people called Hardcore Techno or Hardcore Rave, or sometimes simply Ardkore. These early sounds – bleep tunes from the North East, breakbeat house and ragga techno from London – were the first time that the UK came up with its own unique mutant versions of House and Techno (ironically by adding elements from dub reggae, dancehall, and hiphop that weren’t British in origin, but equally would never have been let into the mix back in Chicago and Detroit). From Jungle and 2-step to today’s Grime and Bassline, the basic parameters of the music have stayed the same as they were in the early Hardcore, although the relative balance of various sources (reggae, rap, R&B, Eurotechno, etc) has shifted, and the beats-per-minute rate has fluctuated wildly. Those core elements are: beat-science seeking the intersection between ‘fucked up’ and ‘groovy’; dark bass pressure; MCs chatting fast over live-mixed DJ sets; samples and arrangement ideas inspired by pulp soundtracks and orchestrated pop. In a profound sense, underneath two decades of relentless sonic mutation, this is the same music, the same culture. What’s also endured has been the scene’s economic infrastructure: pirate radio stations, independent record shops (often in out-of-the-way urban areas), white labels and dubplates, specific rave promoters and clubs (again often in the less glitzy, non-central areas of cities).

Around the time of 2-step and “Adult Hardcore”, I also noticed a continuity in my approach: I realised that I’d been operating a little like an ethnomusicologist, someone who gets involved in the tribe and joins in the rituals, and in the process has their objectivity compromised more than a little. I’ve been what anthropologists call a ‘participant-observer’. A critic-fanatic. Hands down, this Hardcore Continuum thing is the most remarkable popcult phenomenon I’ve witnessed with my own eyes and ears. For me it’s been the most exciting music of our time; the most thrilling but also the most thought-provoking.

English below　↓↓↓

Frankie $です！ずっとFrankly$ickとしてGrimeのDJとして音楽活動してきたので、急にDeep TechというHouse音楽にはまってしまったことに違和感を覚える人もいるかもしれないので、今日は、GrimeとDeep Techとの接点について説明したいと思います。結論から言うと、GrimeとDeep Techは同じ「Hardcore Continuum」に当てはまるジャンルであることは何より注目すべきだろう。「Hardcore Continuum」というのは、イギリスのクラブカルチャーが89年から一貫して継続している理論のことです。これはSimon Reynolds氏が提唱した理論であり、現在広く認識されています。音性の類似性はともかくとして、デモグラ（聞いている人たち・活動している人たち）が同じという極めて肝心な特徴があるということはぜひ知っておいてほしいです。