Remember that episode of Doctor Who – the good one with the statues where you couldn’t blink or they nabbed you? And there’s a bit where a girl goes into an old, spooky abandoned house and peels back a bit of flaking wallpaper to find that, decades earlier, the Doctor has nipped in and written ‘duck!’ in big letters on the wall cos he knows that all those years later at precisely that place, at precisely that time, the girl would be standing there reading the message and someone would lob a rock in through the window?……
Well, beneath my mouldy old 70’s wallpaper Nick Gutterbreakz has written’ YOU WILL GET INTO TECHNO’……… and here we are…… so that either makes me a slavishly predictable conformist, or him a smug bastard…. or probably a bit of both……
I can’t do this beat-matching lark: skillfully coaxing all the of disparate parts into a seamless whole, all fecund and newborn and shiny. Instead, I look for the unassuming, quietly quivering bits, that will juxtapose without undue complaint. A quick snip and I offer the bloodied stump of one part up to the gaping wound of another in the hope that the host body won’t reject it and my creation may walk blinking into the sunlight. All done with audacity…. audacity indeed… and thus I thought let it be so for the blogpost…. a dozen separate parts….
Thematically then, I thought Cybermen….. hardly original for me of course….. but a cold, lost, machine-like groove…. a humanity traded for piston-power and repetitive precision…
There’s an interesting psychology to mixes…. I’ve only ever done mixtapes for girls I’ve fancied at school and I promise you I don’t fancy any of you lot (If I did, I wouldn’t have mentioned Doctor Who so early on in the conversation). The idea of doing a post to accompany it is even more interesting. Normally you have to get this kind of thing across in just a few casual sentences: ‘yeah, just thought you might be interested – only took me half hour, no big deal – some of it’s a bit old – like really last summer, but there’s a coupla bits in there you can only get on white-label or import 12’s…’
Here’s the tracklist…. I put it in minutes, I like it when they do that…. otherwise you have to listen twice and count the tracks and what if you’ve got one of those MP3 players that never returns to the part of the track where you switched off? I don’t want any left-brain counting in this mix ok?
Tracklist
- Breakage - The Shroud
- Moving Ninja – Kemancheh
- Duke Spook – Crosswaves
- Pulshar - Nospheratu (Echospace Reduction)
- Add Noise - Handwerk1A
- Pole - Steingarten (Shackleton mix)
- Laurent Garnier – Panoramix
- Djunya – Uprise
- Patchwerk Man – Cokernut
- Claro Intelecto - Gone To The Dogs
- Gatekeeper - Tense Past
- You Will Become Like Us……
I’m not gonna tell you about these tracks… it’s not my intention to inform you about them or anything. Derrida seems to say that the act of teaching – master to disciple or master to slave, might always be about power imbalance – ‘an irreversible and asymmetrical address’ – an act of power – an act of violence. I lack the conceptual and linguistic weaponry to do you much harm. My arsenal is depleted. So, if you want the theory, the conceptual groundwork of the dubstep / techno interface, I respectfully refer you here to the grandmaster K-Punk for a right good kicking..
I started off with such grand aspirations:…. an architectonic mix… a psychometric reckoning… a map… a narrative of the psyche. The return of the repressed in the form of the ‘Theme from Joe 90′. A hint of the Lacanian Real in ‘Power Rangers – Mystic Force” (surprisingly good). ‘Voodoo Ray’ exhumed from the collective unconscious. A fragrant Kruder and Dorfmeister – smelling more of cred than sweat… representatives from the psychotopographical corners of the inner globe… a cathartic purge of my musical unconscious….
But there’s a reason for repression: assembled together in the exercise yard – lined up like a Colditz count with a couple of dummy prisoners thrown into the line-up, those boys looked ugly….
So I went for one note: Not a neurotic exhumation of the past, but a single psychotic present. A Deleuzian walk in the sunshine….. a dark yodel…..
With Derrida of course it’s all about that which has been excluded, rather than included . Bugger the tracklist, who’s been left out?:
Burial didn’t fit the theme, far too human in his urban melancholia, he’d never cut the mustard as a Cyberman – ‘cept maybe as one of the early ones – the ones with human hands….
Bass Clef was out for similar reasons: too eccentrically individual, too playfully creative. There is no room for a trombone in the world of the Cybermen….. (That one where lonely robot Yeti stalk the underground, that’s the one for Bass Clef…)
I’ve seen a fair few of these folk around – that’s what you get when you are ‘that bloke who hangs round with Gutta’….. It’s like Tanelorn round here …. Moving Ninja, Gatekeeper in his little baseball cap, the inscrutable Punch Drunk Peverelist- a nexus for these fine folk. I’ve got sorcerous Appleblim summoning powers….
stick the Skull Disco comp on yer headphones and there he is, like Mr Benn’s shopkeeper, appearing in the door of Somerfield… Doubt it’ll work when I move to Colchester…. a shame….
I have to say thank you to Droid…. what a sound chap…. heh… look at me out here with my blogariddims mix…. how nice to be asked…
like the music. dont understand the blog, am i stupid?