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Is the term remix redundant? Music has been begging, borrowing and stealing since day one. But does a remix denote more about the working process than the actual nature of the track? When so much is on long term loan, where’s the dividing line between say, a prodigiously used sample and a remix? Is ‘remix’ just a label that’s used top-down, from label to listener, to make sure you’re accessing an audience efficiently?…

…Of course it’s not always like that, but it can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. The good ones often catch you off guard by changing everything about a track, a drastic restoration or rebuild that changes how you thought and felt about something, a sweet vocal line looped into a frightening verbal tic, a tiny synth line scrubbed clean and brought to the fore, massive and shining…

…The term remix isn’t really doing its job. In the same way that genre tags are in many ways redundant, maybe the term remix is limp and ineffective too. Genre tags act as vague signposts, but they can’t draw a map. A remix can tell you who’s been on the buttons, but won’t give up the story of what really happened behind the desk.

Jennifer Lucy Allan - The Wire

Todos juntos brincamos às editoras,
brincamos sim senhora, gasto tudo nesta porra.
Das maquetes do rap, as noites dormidas na estação
a gritar em pleno metro, insultava o kiko como um irmão

pros meus jinxies* 

The west is the best

Right now at 88 

“There’s an important argument being made here: Stop naming and start listening. Describe, compare, and by all means critique, but don’t get hung up on classification. Naming new subgenres while they’re still emerging only stunts their development, calcifying nebulous flux into mere collections of tropes. So slow down and smell the breakbeats: We can name it later.”

“In recent years, with subgenres mutating and spreading with the swiftness of memes, the names that have tended to stick — witch house, chillwave, cloud rap — have felt more like slightly disparaging jokes.”

“…What all three tracks share in common is a profound, almost militant, resistance to the immediate, booming gratification that the vast majority of contemporary club music promises. Turning bass-music formulae inside out, they represent the anti-drop. But here’s the other thing: these tunes are so extreme, in their own ways, that they don’t exactly invite imitation. They’re difficult and hermetic; they don’t play well with others.”

Philip Sherburne - The Genre That Shall Not Be Named

( “of course what he’s talking about does have a name,  an unsatisfactory placeholder name: postdubstep. nu-IDM is what I used to call it for a while” - Simon Reynolds ) 

The thing is, while all this is true, the know-nothing fans are increasingly either UK students packing UKF raves or US ex-Emo kids dancing to DJs like Skrillex and one of the main things they have little or no knowledge of, or indeed grass roots connections with, is the ‘nuum. It’s Pendulum all over again, metal-as-trojan-horse-for-dance. “Something new” may well “come out of it,” but the reality is it’ll have next nothing to do with the next iteration of the UK-centric hardcore continuum. In fact, reflecting on Pendulum or drum & bass in general, when it disconnected itself from the main continuum and changed its audience in the late ’90s at least the top DJs remained original ‘nuum pioneers: Fabio, Grooverider, Andy C, Hype, Shy FX, etc. But with dubstep, in many cases (Skrillex, Borgore, Mount Eden, Datsik, Excision, Bassnector, Doctor P, Modestep, Flux Pavillion, Nero, etc) you’ve got neither audience nor DJs who’ve had deep connections with the growth or genesis of the scene (Skream, Benga and Coki being the increasingly isolated exceptions here). If they know nothing, then the music won’t have anything to do with the ‘nuum and its values.

Where does all this leave us with the ‘nuum? Pirate radio is being replaced with a primary medium that is indistinguishable from media used by all other musical continuums, road rap is absorbing grime’s road energy into hip-hop’s traditions, house continues to satisfy ravers’ need to dance without a strong sense of local identity, breakbeat/bass science rudeness or flava. Grime and UK funky continue to iterate in interesting ways, ways that show real promise but can’t claim the seismic bursts of intense energy they once saw. Dubstep fans who reject brostep have dispersed into either purist halfstep traditionalist stasis (“the dungeon sound”), floating islands of the post-dubstep archipelago, trad European house and techno, homogenizing crate-digging revivalism and eclecticism, US trap rap and juke. So what’s next?

Martin Clark