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Ooh! A new /rupture mix! That's worth getting excited over, methinks. Recorded Oct. 17 for the BBC's Breezeblock sessions, it's 20-odd minutes of Wiley, Aphex, DJ C, Public Enemy and a heaping spoonful of other stuff i didn't recognize.

Found via /rupture's blog, which i feel compelled to add is one of the few blogs i read daily. Jace always finds something interesting to say or share. Politics, music and culture, all well-written and with enough of a reader-base for conversations to form in the comments section. I just spent 45 minutes going through the archive looking for specific things to back up such an endorsement (blog's labour lost and all) and i realized it's all pretty fucking good, so just head over there already.

Before you go, though, i'd recommend checking this out. While not music, of course (or is it?), it's fucking scary as Christ and makes a nice compliment to /rupture's mix. Why? Because much like the hidden codes on the printout being invisible to the naked eye, /rupture's genrefucking soundclashs bring to light the hidden codes and similarities of popular and underground music(s). He creates a seemingly effortless whole out of diverse and sometimes conflicting sources, exhibiting the hidden logic (i.e.: DANCE MOTHERFUCKERS) running through disparate musicians sonic experiments. Seriously... how many times have i listened to a mix by him and been unaware of where one song begins and another ends? His mixes are blue-light steganographs, magnifying the dot-dot-dot ciphers of Gwen Stefani and Rotator and the often arbitrary dichotomy that keeps the two houses, alike in dignity, apart.

Except i don't think Jace has links with the Secret Service.

Why would i make such a strained and weak analogy? Because i'm fucking high, that's why.

Why are you still here?

Music bloggers are notorious for their unflagging desire to seek out new music genres and write about them on the Internet. Post-grime rockstep? Sure. Stoner dubhall? Why not? Tripwire? Of course. *snicker*

Now that i've joined this illustrious company, i bring you the newest of the new (to me): skeet-hop, as exemplified by the mighty Gazebow (sic) Unit. Made primarily by and for "white, aggressive, uneducated teenagers", skeet-hop takes the rage and discontent of the skeet'd class and sets it to, uhm, hip-hop. All the touchstones of skeet culture are present here: ATVs, smokes, homophobia, fighting and Timmies. This is the realest shi(zni)t you ever heard, son, pure lyrical science taking apart the daily struggle of living 10 minutes from the airport. Real recognize real.

Realness aside, this is pretty fucking funny. I can't quite make up my mind, though, as to whether this is some spot-on satire or a lazy, post-Trailer Park Boys piss-take on poverty and Newfoundland dialect. The lyrics occasionally drift into tired racism and sexism (which further begs the above question) and that's a bit much. Still, all misgivings aside, i've been called a faggot by folks exactly like this enough to get a chuckle out of it: "SKIDOO, SKIDOO".

MP3's available here. See the most recent entry.

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By the by, in case anyone a.) is familiar with the genus Skeet and b.) actually reads this thing, what exactly do skeets listen to nowadays? The preponderance of G-Unit sweats and Sean John hats leads me to suspect hip-hop, but when i was actually dealing with skeets on a day-to-day basis, metal was still king. It's an interesting inversion: normally music and subcultural identity are pretty intimately inter-mingled, but given the enormous power of the skeets, they've managed to transcend such historical limitations. They truly are a creature unto themselves.

SKEETS RULE OK.

...it's kinda hard being... oh, whatfuckingever.

[anhist] and you alrady got a couple of tracks!
[anhist] cunt
[anhist] didn't you have files queued up????
[anhist] you do have files queue up!
[anhist] what a fuckin idiot you are
[anhist] thanks for the ban
[anhist] cocksucker
[anhist] maybe you should wax philiosophically about the state of breakcore
[deappropriation] OH SNAP

I was all excited to get a bona fide flame and it turns out it's just someone pissed at a soulseek ban.

On the plus side, he did call me a nerdy cocksucker, which made me feel both intellectually superior and a little frisky.

I'm not dead. I just look that way.

I've been quiet for the last little while, so here's a treat that requires little effort on both of our parts (we have such a dysfunctional relationship, you and i). Here're a couple of live sets from what is quite possibly the best live music night in, uhm, all of Bristol: Toxic Dancehall. Don't believe me? Oct. 8 will feature The Bug, Parasite, D'Kat, DJ Wrongspeed and a brimming fuckload of likewise unsane selectors. Wicked innit.

(Confession time: i'm not actually posting this because i think you'll all love Exile and Rotator, but mainly because a.) i haven't posted any MP3s yet; b.) i want to divert attention [both mine and yours] from how much fucking Sean Paul i've been listening to; c.) i wanted to say 'innit' at least once. Kinda sad innit.

Okay, twice.)

Exile - Live at Toxic Dancehall - Exile spins a set of twisted breakneck murder-scene drum n' bass. Brrr. You know that brief goosebumpy tingle you get when you write something straight out of a press kit? Here in Nfld., we say "that's a music critic walking on your grave, sure".

Anyway. You know those impossibly deep trenches and crevasses on the ocean floor, the ones that extend thousands of feet into the earth and are populated by ungodly bioluminescent things covered in spines and teeth? In the future, human beings will devise artificially intelligent robots to plumb these forsaken depths. Eventually (as with all A.I.) these robots will develop rudimentary sentience and become disillusioned with the commercial rave scene (note: it sucks just as bad in the future). They will gather to imbibe snatches of code that might be considered a rough analogue of taking ketamine, chloral hydrate and MDMA. Exile would be the music they dance to (well, 'dance', insomuch as the placement of 'limbs' on these devices could, with some charity, be considered approximately anthropomorphic).

Also, if "BIG UP THE WINDOWS MASSIVE!" doesn't become your new catch-phrase after listening to this, you are a soulless automaton and i'll send my E'd out robot buddies to strip you for parts with their drills, spindles and penetrating infrared optical scanners.

Rotator - Fuck Shit Up X-Toxic!: Live at Toxic Dancehall* - Okay, so there are these robots, right, and they're used for, uhm, mining and they don't see much light and, uhm, drugs... breakcore... etc. Er. Demented mashed-up breakcore fucking punishment for all people, artificial or otherwise. My love for this shit transcends strained metaphors and questionable analogies. Just fucked up, down and all-around noize, bass and breaks spun oh-so-delicately (love is the secret ingredient, BTW),like some vaguely scary bearish leatherdaddy type who wants to flay the skin off your ass and then have you cuddle and nuzzle up against his furry barrel chest and rough moustache, except his moustache is made of steel wool and even his tender post-stropping squeezes cut the fuck out of your face and leave you bleeding all over his tasetful silk sheets. It's like that, only it, uhm, transcends it. What with that inadequacy of metaphors and all.

Keep your ears peeled (?) for the awesome /rupture remix in track 3. Between that track, Wiley's Slew Dem and Sixteenarmedjack's Gwan Infiltrate, that was basically my summer. That, and Sean Paul. And marijuana. And sadistic deep-sea robots. With moustaches. And proclivities.

We write what we know.

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* - Did you ever notice how just about everything i write nowadays has footnotes?** Maybe it could become my angle, my selling point. Anyway, this one's kinda necessary. I thought the Rotator stuff was just a bootleg but it turns out Discogs.com has an entry for it. Huh. Well, i'll leave it up for now (c'mon, like 25 downloads at the absolute most is really that big a deal for an apparently out-of-print CDr). Still, with that said, if you're an artist (ha) or a friend of an artist (double ha) whose stuff i've posted and you don't want it up, just let me know and i'll take it down. I just like to share music.

** - I think it's because the quality of writing here has maybe (maybe) reached the high standard set by, say, the most inane moments of somethingawful.com. Anything to distract you guys from the endless death-march of cliches, conjecture and cock-jokes. Like i'm doing right now. Distracted? It keeps me amused and out of trouble and keeps you from focusing on whatever waaaacky shit i happen to be forcing myself to write. Burroughs wrote sex scenes to keep himself amused, i've got my footnotes. And mp3's.***

*** - Would this make a good place for another footnote? Or has this admittedly tired "device" turned utterly necrotic? Discuss.

http://www.c8.com/c8/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4822

It's not a question of aesthetics. It can't be. We have none.

Aesthetics doesn't interest us beyond being a possible tactic against recuperation. But even this conception seems to us naive: recuperation doesn't operate on some subjective principle of shared taste, of "what'll play well". This refers only to the most obvious manifestations of the phenomenon, of sleazy A&R men and air-brushed artwork. Content doesn't dictate whether you can be made a commodity, as myriad "ugly", counter-cultural musical genres have shown: hippy rock, punk, heavy metal... all found their niche in the record store. Indeed, appearing to fight your own commodification might be seen to be a wise marketing move: we do love our rebels.

Thus, when people decide to split hairs, dividing and subdividing breakcore (which Fringeli calls an admittedly "hybrid strategy" and not a genre) into camps, factions and tendencies, we tend to tune it out, even if there are valid criticisms to be made. Fringeli is completely correct to point out how important an oppositional and anti-authoritarian attitude are to breakcore and his remarks on the cultural re-appropriation of jungle are also spot-on. Furthermore, he accurately encapsulates the regressive tendency within the breakcore world to idolize or deify certain artists, something that we probably inherited from the absurd Cult of the Prolific IDM Producer.

Our only real problem with the article as posted is Fringeli's attack on the aesthetic split in contemporary breakcore. As outlined above, we don't think the form or structure of the music itself is what leads to 'mainstream acceptance'. Aesthetics, at the very least, are concurrent with or, given a stronger reading, subordinate to larger questions of structure, form , distribution and audience. Trying to change a person's conception of 'good' or 'beautiful' strikes us as a waste of time. Trying to convince someone of the practical utility and clandestine fun of breaking into an abandoned warehouse to have a party is easier. At least the latter is concrete.

The larger problem, the predominant concern, ought to be how we can create culture outside capital and how, in turn, we can distribute this D.I.Y. material in order to avoid it becoming a trend, a commodity, fuel for the system we're trying to destroy. Breakcore is just a subset of this larger struggle. It's history and origins certainly seem to bear this out, as Fringeli notes in relation to early breakcore enthusiast's dissatisfaction with both the commercial rave and the free party scene. It originated in response to a general vacuum of D.I.Y. electronic music at a certain place in a certain time. It was a tactical response to a situation. I think this manifests in choices and decisions made around how the music is made and distributed, not in the aesthetics of the "genre" itself: the fact that you're having a party on squatted private land is what makes it oppositional, not the gabber beats or chopped amens. It's a shame and a pity that certain musical genres or styles seem to have a monopoly on these kind of strategies. I don't want to see breakcore stay "pure", but i do want to see some of the ideas that have coalesced around the breakcore scene spread out to other D.I.Y. contexts so as to encourage culture outside capital.

So when Fringeli singles out people like Jason Forrest as being part of some IDMpop takeover of breakcore, i am a little sceptical. The recuperation of breakcore won't be based around aesthetics, but around presentation and distribution of the music. And it does seem like there is a possibility of recuperation happening around these targets. Early breakcore seemed cognizant of this possibility and took pains to avoid it by distributing itself through non-traditional channels. It seems that the people around at that time shared a similar aesthetic. Sure: part of the reason my friends are my friends is that we share certain tastes. But Fringeli, to my mind, is conflating the two: OUR aesthetics + OUR strategies of dispersal = breakcore. In point of fact, the aesthetics are, by and large, an incidental component of a larger question of cultural dispersal and its relation to capitalism. Maybe not incidental in the sense of being irrelevant, but incidental in the sense that, right now, they have next to no bearing on whether breakcore can retain its political and cultural character, compared to larger questions around exactly what means are used to promulgate the material.

Today breakcore is essentially a meaningless buzz word, something it's always bordered on being anyway. What are it's essential features? What do Shitmat, Hecate and Hrvatski have in common? Splitting hairs over aesthetics is pointless, especially since such pursuits often tend to create insular scenes and cliques and this Balkanization serves to further fragment the communities in question. Those familiar with the hardcore scene will know what i'm referring to: put an emo kid, a crusty and skinhead in a room together and observe. Purging pop elements from the music won't create a "pure" scene. Breakcore ought to be as diverse and mutated as possible. It should remain as multi-faceted and million-aspected as it is and it should grow still more heads. What needs to be taken as a given is not an aesthetic or musical posture but an attitude that embraces autonomy and a D.I.Y ethic as tactics against recuperation. Breakcore needs to become, again, a laboratory for tactical cultural intervention, a place where D.I.Y. strategies can be experimented and tampered with. Beyond its role in formenting these kind of situations, breakcore is just another music genre, with the usual scattershot distribution of talent, trends and tastes that comprise any contemporary subculture. Focusing on these superstructural aesthetic details as emblematic of some kind of necessary shift in the base seems ill-founded. Yes, the recuperators are all amongst you, but you can't tell them by the samples they use.

Breakcore emerged as a strategy and it must become one again. They don't care what you play, so long as you play it at home or in the club.

Breakcore is dead, long live 'breakcore'. Or something like it.

Review01:

Aaron Spectre - Evil Most Foul (Death$ucker Records) - On paper, this should kinda suck. We all know how popular and cool it is to bash the recent ragga jungle revivial as an instance of white, middle-class computer nerds reappropriating Black proletarian culture (Mssr. Fringeli, we are looking at you). And being popular and cool is where it's at, especially when, well, the criticism is entirely accurate. Sure, Amen Andrews and co. make fucking wicked music but divorced from the original context the music was made in, it just becomes an exercise in empty formalism, a pastiche of amens and patois to get the kids moving, cut off from any kind of oppositional or political force.

That's not to say that the old skool junglist massif were hurling paving stones at cops or igniting shopping malls, but simply to observe that, like so many other forms of Black musical culture, ragga jungle was initially a genre of music made predominantly by poor people of colour. It was partially a response to the exclusivity of the white rave scene (as i understand it, at least). Later, it too became hip as the culture industry clamoured for another Black-made musical commodity to sell off to its jaded consumers: "Hip! Authentic! New!" Jungle follows in the footsteps of blues, jazz, rock, reggae, hip-hop, garage and others i'm sure i'm forgetting: moments of musical and cultural experimentation ripped from their context and sold as commodity (something all the more necessary within electronic music, given the often accelerated pace of production and distribution: "grime", take note).

So some people made some cash at it and, like any other commodity sold as a fad, it was subsequently consigned to the dustbin of rave history. 10+ years later and IDM'mers who grew up on 90's rave start a nostalgia kick and suddenly it's big again. A revival of an appropriation, but this time with even less context or content. Ostensibly political breakcore artists can toss in acapellas with the most insane homophobic or sexist shit over their (admittedly awesome) ear-splitting post-jungle. Why? Because that vocal is fucking WICKED, man.

Really then, this shouldn't work. Spectre's a white dreadlocked dude who (apparently) has an abiding love of punk rock and hardcore. This ought to be the poster-child for the millennium's tired (re)discovery of old ragga jungle. More than that, you've got song titles like "Look Out Fi Liar" and (wait for it) "Mordor", which made me envision inspirational Gandalf quotes over spoooooky synth stabs and tweaked breaks. Open and shut, right? Stupid movie samples, affected patois spelling and a dreadlocked sexy-punky whiteboy selecta? Case closed, file next to whatever disposable ragga shit is making the rounds on slsk this week.

But, shit, this record is awesome.

"Look Out Fi Liar" is this total burner with really awesome drum programming and a nice twinkly piano sound hiding just below the mix. And, yeah, the vocal is pretty happening too. I don't know what to say about this song aside from saying it's a particularly adept and danceable instance of the scenario i laid out above. That doesn't really do it justice though, as i've been listening to this track on repeat for most of the summer. But y'know i'm pretty fucking fat and i contain multitudes. Do i contradict myself? Very well then, i contradict myself. Wheel up! Oh, and the George Bush incestuous queer blowjob mashup at the end of the song is more than a little endearing too. Go figure.

The much maligned "Mordor" (a friend saw the title on a playlist and began to despair that i'd started listening to some kind of LotR filk shit. Even irony has its poisonous boundaries) is the fucking gem that makes this record a favourite. Okay, it does have the puzzling and ridiculous Gollum quote and the ambient interludes are, at times, a tad (where 'tad' = 'an amount approximately proportional to all the water currently in Naw'lins') cheesy, but, Jeezum Crow, the fucking drums here are just too much. I know exactly shit all about music production, but those drums just kick. Concrete examples: greyodyssey, a person of impeccable taste and good breeding, copied a Spectre mix from me for the purpose of having a copy of this song; at a show i saw before leaving T.O., someone spun this and the whole room went nuts, pumping fists and scuttling/shuffling to the insane percussion. It's fucking wicked and it's shit like this (along with Spectre's new sideproject, Drumcorps, which mixes digitally distorted metallic hardcore and drum n' bass to frenzied effect¹) that elevate Aaron Spectre above a lot of the more derivative ragga revival shit.

Nutshell: i'm more than a little conflicted about this release, but whatever. Broader questions of cultural and linguistic imperialism don't seem to step inna the dancehall and, at least in this instance, i'm prepared to accept a truce, especially given that Spectre doesn't seem to rely on ragga as some kind of Orientalist exoticism to spice up otherwise uninteresting music. It's solid, well-made, innovative leftfield jungle and, call me complacent, but i totally dig it. At the very least, it'll keep you going until 2011's planned neo-dubstep revival (now with more diva vocals!)

(You can download Aaron Spectre's 70+ min. mix, Life We Promote, from his website, which includes both songs discussed above. Additionally, the Evil Most Foul 12''and Drumcorps Remix or Die 12'' are available from most online electronic music retailers (or, uhm, slsk. Shhh!) If you want another free taste though, head to http://www.mashit.com for free MP3's of his awesome split with DJ C)

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^{1 - Do not even front like that's not neat. I know you have at least a bruised adolescent appreciation for DHR. Imagine if Alec Empire learned to use some software, had good taste in hardcore and stopped his uber-broken English caterwauling, in favour of digitally sputtered vocals and insane drum editing. Ergo, Drumcorps.}

Greetings to sundry all and everyone. Welcome to Medium Info, a new blog devoted to showcasing the best¹ in new (to me) music from all across the sonic spectrum, from punk rock to stoner metal to breakcore to dancehall.

I was going to write this blog as some kind of elaborate fiction, featuring made-up reviewers, fake albums and a general "fuck-you" to the whole genre-obsessed hipster music blog scene, where white boys with B.A.'s blather about the sociology of grime or the lyrical content of the latest Sizzla single, where pretentious goofs try to one up each other as to who's digested more Simon Reynolds or Greil Marcus and who can refresh Pitchfork the fastest. Aside from occasionally snagging their audio files, i have less than no interest in wading into that particular mire and becoming fodder for the spectacular wankers who float aimlessly about the, ahem, blogosphere.

Satire's a lot of work and i hate work. So fuck that.

So here you are. I'll post about the music i currently like and how it makes me feel². There may be MP3's. Maybe. And some pretense. Oh, and i was probably gonna post some stuff on the ongoing debate around breakcore's (possible) reification. And there will be Sizzla.

Fuck. Colour me recuperated. That was fast.

...

So, how about that Wiley fellow? East London sure is, uhm, something. Sociologically speaking, that is. Lots of cultures and what-not, you know.

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<sup>1 - "Best" here means whatever i happened to have grabbed from slsk and listened to more than twice.

2 - All music makes us FEEL, right? I plan to be completely earnest and serious about the effects this music has on me. Cause, like, there's this band, right, like GodEmperor Black (i think they burned down a church in Norway) and, like, y'know, The New Sincerity and irony's dead, right. For sheezy.</sup>