When was the last time you experienced Futureshock? I mean really
experienced it — affectively, right down to your core. For my part, I
got a small dose at the start of the year from James Blake’s self-titled
debut. Sure, it had a history; Blake’s indebtedness to dubstep (even
bordering on a kind of purism)
has been well noted. But that doesn’t change the fact that his clever
deployment of both bass and (particularly) space meant that pop sounded different now. This, suddenly, seemed to be the future. And sure enough, it was. So much so, in fact, that the future quickly began to sound dull again: present and, soon enough, altogether past.
Right now, just about everywhere on the planet other than in certain
key enclaves in Chicago, footwork seems like the sound of the future.
Strictly, it’s a kind of dance music. Or at least “that’s what it is in
Chicago’s converted warehouses and rec centers,” as TMT’s Mr P recently put it, “where combatant footworkers form circles and take turns battling, dozens-style, with dazzlingly complex foot patterns.”
Outside of such rarefied circles, however, nothing else sounds so
Fresh, so New, so Vital, or so Different, even to the point of being
Unpalatable — not Unintelligible necessarily, but literally
Indecipherable at the level of the body...
Read the rest here on TMT.
Also, I can't help but note that the piece got props from none other than Simon Reynolds. More or less made my day/week/life.
No comments:
Post a Comment