Undetected
Act from the Gloom Chamber
Planet
Phuture / Boidae
VARIOUS ARTISTS / SICK MUSIC
Sick Music
2018
(Hospital
Records)
The Wire, April 2018
by Simon Reynolds
In 1990, the
German producer Marc Acardipane released “Reflections of 2017” under the name
Mescalinum United – the first of many aliases, among them Pilldriver, Alien
Christ, and most famously The Mover.
“Reflections” was the flipside of “We Have Arrived”, a blaring stampede that
laid down the blueprint for gabba: the crazy-fast, ultra-hard style of techno
that stormed to popularity across Northern Europe and established outposts of
fanatical followers all over the world. “2017” would remain a leitmotif in
Acardipane’s work, appearing in track titles like “Lightbringer (Escape from
2017)” and as the catchphrase “see you in 2017”. Back in the early Nineties, 2017 must have
seemed far off, a mind-swirl of dystopian mise-en-scenery out of Blade Runner, Robocop, and Terminator. Fans could imagine the Mover as a faceless
rave equivalent to Snake Plissken from Escape
from New York: a lone-ranger anti-hero making his way through the chaos of
a collapsed society or a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Flash
forward to the present: we have arrived, indeed we’ve overshot. The future-now
of 2018 is dystopian and apocalyptic, for sure, but in ways we could never have
imagined back in the Nineties. Compared with that decade, when he released
hundreds of tracks through the Frankfurt-based family of labels he co-founded –
PCP, Cold Rush, Dance Ecstasy 2001, etc - Acardipane had a quiet 21st
century. His output oscillated between gestures towards credibility (a 2003 album
for Tresor) and panders to the remaining gabbers in the Netherlands (plentiful
enough to propel him into the pop charts). But there were long silences too.
Then last year The Mover remobilized, with high-profile “living legend” style deejay
appearances at raves and the remastered reissue of his greatest tracks. The
plan was for an all-new album to come out in 2017 – completing the circle – but
it got bumped to this year.
The ungainly
album title Undetected Act from the Gloom
Chamber suggests a certain awkwardness
about returning to the fray. Which would be understandable, in so far as The
Mover’s ästhetisch / weltanschauung is built
around a foreboding futurity that we’ve in some sense gone past. Almost
inevitably, Acardipane picks up exactly where he left off. All the things fans
like me love, hallmarks of the style some of us call gloomcore, are amply present:
the sky-darkening swoops of raven-black synth, the parade-ground snares and thick
thuds of kickdrum; the cold cavernous reverb; the piteous melodies and macabre
jeering sounds. Highlights include
“Stealth,” an electro-tinged track bounced along by giant smacks of clap and a
backwards bass-lurch like a tank’s caterpillar tread churning helplessly in mud,
and “Doom Computer,” which drapes sickly drooping melody-riffs over a trudging
march beat like a renegade legion of orcs on a dastardly mission.
The Mover’s
first album came out in 1993 and bore the title The Final Sickness; earlier there’d been two Frontal Sickness EPs. That’s my segue to Sick Music 2018, a compilation on Hospital
Recordings, for some time now drum and bass’s leading label. Every so often I
ponder, as a long lapsed D&B believer, how the genre has carried on for a full
twenty years after I stopped paying close attention: a timespan four
times as long as the genre’s original heyday of 1993-97. I wasn’t
the only one to switch off. Once D&B commanded the attention of magazines
like this one, as well as ideas-hungry pop stars like Bowie and Bjork. But now
you’re more likely to see a review of a hauntological facsimile of 94-era jungle
or darkcore-circa-93 in these pages, than a current exponent of the genre that
is the extension of those sounds.
Not that the
D&B scene cares particularly. Nor has it suffered from the external
neglect. Arena-scale raves still happen regularly, scene elders like Andy C
persevere and prosper, new DJs and producers replenish the field. A stable fixture in the genrescape, D&B
has also stabilized as a form, “the full circumference” (as they used to call
it) of its stylistic variants long since set out. Andy C’s defiant comment that
D&B “isn’t going anywhere” could be read in a less flattering way. On the
other hand, perhaps it’s time to give the genre a break, forgive and forget its
promises to keep always moving forward. Why judge it any more harshly than all
the other vanguard sounds that have slipped into a steady-state?
Sick Music contains a fair amount of the head-banger
style that drove me out of the scene in ‘98, although after a long period of
abstinence a track like Unglued’s “Bootstrap Bill”, a clattery battery of
growling bass and bad-boy beats, sounds rather invigorating. But the freshest
stuff by far here expands upon the “musicality” moves of the mid-Nineties: the
easy-rollin’ heights (or Haigh-ts) and cruise-control bliss of prime Moving
Shadow. The core of Hugh Hardie’s gorgeous “Nightingale” is a reverb-smudgy piano
lick whose effect is like a cinematic dissolve, a twinkle in time. Modulating
this curl of liquid smoke as if rolling a sip of wine across the palate, Hardie
braids the keyboard chords with vocal murmurs, fast-flicker hand-percussion, and
soft spasms of double-bass. Who’s to say a stone classic can’t happen during a
genre’s middle age, rather than its youth?
Several of
the best tunes here could be designated “lover’s jungle”. London Elektricity’s tingling and tremulous
“Just One Second (Mitekiss Remix)” features a lyric about freeze-framing a moment
of rapture - “if this second was my life / I would happily die” – delivered
with that characteristically Scandinavian singer’s quality of cold-water
clarity by Elsa Hedberg. Kubaiko’s “Playing Tricks” wordlessly transmits a
similar butterflies-in-the-stomach sensation, twining a sprite-like vocal sigh with
silvery whooshes of texture. Meshing an Amen-break like a bounding antelope
with trance-style pulse-work, Seba x Physics’s “Innocence” is repeatedly split
apart by the awe and gratitude of a diva’s “you show me how to love.” And Urbandawn’s “Spare Life” laces dewy
synths and unexpected groans of shoegaze guitar over a midtempo groove.
Listening to
Sick Music, it struck me that “drum
and bass” seems almost a misnomer these days, directing attention as it does to
what are now the least interesting aspects of the genre. The drums and the bass do their job
efficiently enough: the former skittering briskly, the latter either supplying pulsing
warmth or slicing crossways across the beat as blaring stabs. What holds and caresses the ear now is everything
else going on in the arrangement and production: keyboards, orchestrations, the wisps and
whispers of unidentifiable instrumentation, the overall shimmerglow of the
sound design. Really, a better, more
telling name would be “melody & mood.”
If both these releases show that an elder artist and a
no-longer-young genre can still generate strong, exciting, and in many ways
absolutely valid music, there still remains a lingering sense that both reached
their apotheosis around 1996-7. The Pilldriver anthem “Apocalypse Never” would
be both Acardipane’s and gloomcore’s abyssal apex; Adam F’s “Circles” and “Metropolis”
arguably stand as twin peaks of D&B’s musical and monstrous directions.
The point of
“see you in 2017” - or jungle’s tropes of “living for the future,” “we bring you the future” etc - wasn’t really
about how tomorrow would actually be,
sonically or otherwise. The year-date or the amorphous image of “phuture” created a quickening in the present,
as if you and the music being pulled taut by a line attached to that distant
destination. Propulsive linearity was
the feeling that ran through all the dancefloor electronica of the Nineties - trance
and techno as much as jungle and gabba. A hurtling
teleology, a ballistic sense of purpose, felt as a physical sensation: beats got
ever more brutal and fractured, tempos accelerated, textures escalated in
abstraction and noxiousness. Hearing them through a sound system was an onslaught
and an ordeal: a test for dancers, forging new flesh. And each individual track was a microcosm of
the entire culture’s fast-forward drive. Rave was a movement, in the martial
sense of a modernist vanguard, but with a hint of political mobilization too.
Another reason why The Mover was such a perfect name.
But in the 21st Century, for the most part
it feels like development in electronic dance became lateral not linear: sideways
journeys across the genrescape, combined with a deepening of sound design and a
textural thickness afforded by recurrent upgrades in digital technology. Although you hear this laterality most in
nu-millennium styles like micro-house and post-dubstep, you can hear it in
Acardipane’s new work and in Sick Music’s nu-skool D&B producers. Structurally, in terms of what the beats and
riffs are doing, the music has not really advanced. But the sound has a
high-definition gloss and dimension to it that’s 21st Century. The the
architecture is Nineties, but the interior décor and exterior paint-job are
totally now.
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