#irregularity

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Off the grid

Club music's relationship to its own regularity has always been complicated, but 2012 saw these complications multiplying and the music pushing at its patterns and grids in some radical ways. While for many the story was of a retreat to the safety of familiar forms – mid-nineties house and techno in particular dominated, with a jungle revival nascent – in darker corners things were pulsing and warping, starting to ooze and waft around the steady four-square rhythm patterns that have been foundational at least since the invention of the sequencer. This was not a new genre or style in the conventional sense, rather the convergence of some key trends in 21st century music, the coming to a head of certain pressures, creating an uneasy but thrilling sense of potentiality. These are: slowness, rhythmic slippage, and a more physically expressive interaction with the digital means of production.

The tendency to slowing has been brewing for a long time but was everywhere this year. In 2012 the likes of Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, Raime, Holy Other, Old Apparatus, How To Dress Well, Lukid, Om Unit, Hype Williams and Downliners Sekt all dropped releases with rhythms so stretched that they become textural waves rather than percussion, magnified so that every surface of every sound becomes an environment. The tracks, when played on suitably sizeable speakers, are chambers into which one can enter – sometimes desolate and forbidding as with Raime, sometimes voluptuous and dangerously seductive like Holy Other, sometimes Tron-like and glossy like Om Unit, sometimes fantastical and bejewelled, as in the baroque complexity of this year’s EPs by Old Apparatus. This was “post-dubstep” not in the standard sense of simply applying dubstep's tropes to new rhythms, but in building from first principles entirely new takes on what it could have been.

Dubstep itself had an eye on those first principles, too. This was the year that the “dungeon sound” became prominent: the creepy-crawling update of the earliest half-step rhythms with added production finesse and technologically-enabled sense of detail saw the stock of originators like Distance, Tunnidge and Kryptic Minds, and newer talents like Mancunians Compa and Biome rising. It was a reminder that dubstep's original appeal was about bodily immersion and undulating push-pull physical dynamics rather than about the rave rush and the spectacle of the “drop”. Though we were reminded by the increased profile of Digital Mystikz's Coki – incredibly only now after a decade of dubstep production becoming a full-time musician and launching his own label – that even the harder end of dubstep doesn't have to be predicated on percussive impact: at the heart of even Coki's most violent tunes is always the sluggish undercurrent of his preposterously fractal, semi-liquified “scrambled egg” bass tones.

Even drum'n'bass continued a relationship with slowness. While one end of the scene intensified like commercial dubstep into hyper-pop, reaching vast new audiences, the spaced-out half-tempo “Autonomic” tendency of the last couple of years continued to develop. An album from ASC, various releases on the Space Cadets label, and most fascinatingly a terrifyingly psychedelic EP by Archer & Asanyeh on Romania's DubKraft label all turned d'n'b's velocity in on itself, creating suspenseful, gravity-loosened environments in place of demented drive. House rhythms, too, proved capable of suspending time, particular in the hadns of those re-examining the sparser strains of UK Funky and its potential to draw dubstep and Grime’s sonorities and double-time funk into a more considered space. Wen, Visionist, Beneath, Filter Dread, Shy One, DVA and Cooly G all to some degree created eerie, strangely static rhythms in this way. And throughout the underground, like an underlying pulse that influences all around it, increasingly ran samples of or references to the ‘trap’ sound of US hiphop: layered 808 kicks separated by large space through sheer necessity due to their gigantic size, and looping pitched-down vocal samples running throughout, a 21st century counterpart to the dread signals of reggae vocalists that were cut up into 1990s Jungle.

As Bristol DJ/producer Pinch put it in his Wire Invisible Jukebox interview (The Wire 346), “the way we perceive tempo and the rhythms we're most affiliated with does change, based on situations you're in and the way you tune your head to the world.” What it seems the new techniques of music creation allow is getting closer and closer to real-time manipulation of these changes, to “tune” not just the head but the whole nervous system of the listener in more and more precise ways: where the rhythmic codes of other dance rhythms may aim for the head, hips and feet, the enveloping flows and larger spaces between beats of slower music speak to the entire body as a whole. All of this is about the positioning of bodies in relation to music, allowing new ways of coming close to and entering into the music: about sculpting the affect of the sound in four dimensions. And it's technologically-enabled, the ability to zoom into the finest detail and view all the inhuman complexity of those sonic surfaces and spaces a function of just how much information is being pushed through digital signal processing (DSP) now: we are reminded in no uncertain terms that the dancefloor experience is the interface with that vertiginous information flow. As the hyper-acceleration of jungle illustrated the foaming wave of the digital future cresting as it rushed towards us, so this tendency speaks, perhaps, of it having broken and immersed us.

Rhythmic slippage is directly related to the way that slowing music makes it come in waves as much as beats or pulses. Dubstep, as mentioned, continued to prove it was about tones that undulate around and over the beat as much as the beat itself. Chicago's footworking sounds established that their determinedly tricksy rhythms were here to stay as part of the international dance language. The psychedelic hip hop of Flying Lotus and co has been elaborating on the lurch of J Dilla and the astral analogue funk of Sa-Ra for some years now, but in 2012 we saw plenty of proof in tracks like Fly-Lo's “Pretty Boy Strut”, Mark Pritchard's beats for Wiley, and the gloriously juddering melting pots of Geiom's and dÉbruit's albums, that this too is now established globally as dancefloor-rocking music, not just some over-elaborated gentrification or neo-triphop. It's no coincidence that the London club night where Kutmah, Om Unit, Kidkanevil, Blue Daisy & Offshore play these decentred beats is called “Tempo Clash”: this is, again, about grooves slithering out of expected tempo constraints, and more generally out of expected patterns.

Once again, this was about the body in relation to data: about the physicality of musical (re)production, the sampling of complex jazz playing, the hands dancing across MPC pads, the passed-down skills of the scratch DJ being applied to CDJs, touchscreens and other Ableton controllers. Whether in footworking beats or Fly-Lo's Brainfeeder imperative, it was the return of the repressed b-boy drive, a deranged scrawling of digital wildstyle lines across the weird, wired world. And again this was a tendency that had been building for some while, but in 2012 it became apparent that a convergence was taking place between tempo meltdown, rhythmic looseness and this new sense of placing of the body in relationship to the music. We begun to see – in dramatic contrast to the overtly cerebral abstractions of 1990s “IDM” – how the input-output between fleshy bodies and digital transmission systems could be made bigger, sloppier, stranger and more involving.

In this there were close parallels with The New Aesthetic – the (mainly) visual movement that coalesced in the spring of 2012 around a panel organised by British theorist James Bridle and popularised by Bruce Sterling. The New Aesthetic zooms in on the cracks in our day-to-day datasphere, glitches in normality, the sudden Turing Test fails, the moments when the comforting shields of digital culture wobble and you see the bots' myriad eyes peering out at you and assessing you. It's about revelling in ruptures between what we have naively cast as two separate worlds: the physical and the digital. The New Aesthetic – and the lurching, pulsating weirdings of electronic club music that warp and crack the regularity of sequencer patterns – are about the horror and thrill of realising that what is inside the computer and what is outside are all the same system, that we are submerged in floods of data.

It may even be that Burroughs's adage that “when you cut open the present, the future bleeds out” has some traction here: by defamiliarising the rhythms of common genres, by warping and cracking them, we may be discovering ways through the illusory impasse of the everything-available-all-at-once overwhelming by the past and present. Certainly these techniques are a way of breaking the comfort and ease that readily available sound manipulation technology – in particular the omnipresent Ableton Live – engender. Whether it's the excessively sensual surges of sound in Holy Other, the flailing iPad abuse of Gaslamp Killer or the rusted and irregular-edged grime of Filter Dread and Sd Laika, everything here can be seen as a reaction to the predictably mixed and mixable flows of the Ableton DJ generation. When precision and perfection become easier than making errors, magnifying and repeating errors suddenly seems hugely compelling.

Whether it can go further, or whether these remain just pockets of resistance, is questionable. Dance by its very nature is predicated on some degree of regularity and coherence, and the global forces of “EDM” – the all-encompassing term used since house and dubstep bizarrely gatecrashed the US mainstream at the turn of the decade – seem to increase the pressure to conformity and easily-packaged units of DJ culture. Again in The Wire, Pinch talked of wanting to emulate the freedom of tempo and metre in the Qawwali music that he has often taken inspiration from but bemoaned his lack of the “musical intelligence” of the Qawwali musicians – hinting towards an entirely new understanding of the production of rhythm that needs to be collectively built to cope with the possibilities of more flexible and expressive technology.