…once desire is specified as sexuality, it enters into forms of particularised power…
Felix Guattari

Libidinal Musics
Electronically composed sound, communally celebrated has the effect of some collective plateau phase. Music becomes a device, a prosthetics that leads to a hypersensitization – an overspill that establishes a field of flow between listeners. This incessant repetition with its controlled highs and lows, its deep grindings is nothing other than the continuation of erotics by other means, an erogenisation without object or delimited locale. The carefully placed touches of digitalised breaks, tips of searing reverb and the conducting of frequencies through skins plays the body to effect a libidinal response… to take us elsewhere. The desire for music is the desire for erotic communication as diffuse sensuality. [Read more →]

MIXED UP IN THE HAGUE (REMIX)

Dough boy probably told you i don’t carry any Saturday Night Specials or crap like that. It’s all outa State, clean, brand new, top-of-the-line stuff…
Andy the Dealer: Taxis Driver

Whilst those of us in the UK were being deluded by the rise of ‘intelligent techno’, a pocket of resistance arose in the Hague through the activities of the Acid Planet parties and the Bunker label: Unit Moebius, Interr-ference, Rude 66, Sulphur Surfer… [Read more →]

When the first french hardcore productions appeared in 1994 (Weapons, GTI, Explore Toi) the tone was set for a sound that differed considerably from what was around at the time, most notably the Gabber scene that had begun to dominate (and some might argue, spoil) the hard-side productions maybe a year earlier. Of course there had been renegades and pioneers mainly in Germany – most importantly C-Tank, but also some stuff on the PCP sublabel SS, Urban Primitivism on Pod, some Praxis and some Monotone stuff – but it was the advent of the french underground that created a whole new field of what became a fairly distinct sound dominated by the fastest succession of repetitive beats around that supplies a steady backbone to freestyle electronic experiments much more noise-based than their east German and Australian speedcore counterparts (who certainly drew some inspiration from Gangstar Toons Industry) who take a lot of elements for their post-Gabber whirlwinds from speedmetal and hip hop. [Read more →]

Found sound is recorded. Interference at the end of the scale. There are no instruments. Nothing is crafted or selected for performance. There is no beginning or end. There is no intervention to shape this electronic material that can be picked up from anywhere. If the sampler seeks to relocate its snatched fragments within a recognisable framework, if it relies on some conscious agency of a composer then this tape violently dissolves the act of composition and the vested interests that surround such an activity. It cannot be attributed to any one source.The author of this music is more than dead, they do not exist. Perhaps its creation is truly multiple. The signals are sent out from an unknown and unknowing source…they are unlocatable, and yet thier creation is reliant upon a thousand and one contingent creations. But this is a creation that cannot be apprehended in words for as sounds they are generated without any sense of being captured, overcoded and territorialised. They are re-contextualised in no-place. Everything is to be disentangled, but nothing deciphered. It is all in the listening. It is all reception. [Read more →]

This is the Way, Step Inside…. Various Artists: Privileged Frames [V/Vm]

Hack Intro…After having spawned the early acid-house LPs of 808 State and the early crossover pop-techno of a Guy Called Gerald, Manchester hasn’t been noted for providing the scene with much to get excited about. The predominance of Warp in the Northern swathe of England has meant that many Northern producers have been ‘signed’ up to the Sheffield label and had their identity swamped not only by corporate design but by becoming easily labelled as ‘Warp acts’. However, over the past years a more ‘minor’ independent label activity that services the electronic dance scene has been becoming more visible. [Read more →]