Slow it down
In my review of Andy Stott’s quite incredible new album in The Wire last month, aside from shamefully getting the title wrong, I said this:
“Slowing down is one of the defining aesthetic responses of the past decade’s club music. The drop to half tempo in dubstep; the Berghain imperative of Marcel Dettmann and co to pull Techno back to a writhing, muscular House tempo; the jump from Grime’s jumpy aggression to the psychopathic crawl of Road Rap; applying the audio narcosis of chopped ’n’ screwed hiphop to just about any source material; the recent creation of Moombahton by pulling Dutch House records down to the chugging tempo of reggaetón. Slowing down – often technologically enabled via ever more powerful timestretching algorithms – plays with your sense of scale, creating new ways for dancers to inhabit the structures of the music and apprehend sonic detail.”
And it’s true. Think also of the “Autonomic” sound which dBridge and Instra:Mental have been creating – which centres around haunting, analogue half-tempo drum & bass. This one is particularly stark given that dBridge came from being part of the supergroup Bad Company – one of the most manic, frantic, rockist D&B acts of them all. Then you have the “post-dubstep” thing where people turned off by the mainstream of dubstep’s increasing reliance on aggression are pulling from 140bpm down to 130 and less – and even, as I mentioned in another post, with people like Kromestar (especially in his new collaboration with Om Unit) and Quest, right down to a 85-100bpm pulse. It’s the impulse that inspired the Slugrave website and mix series too…
Over and over again people are slowing things down – but it’s vital to understand this remains club music, and it remains dance music. There’s been a lot of talk about “witch house” and “drag” music that puts it in very maudlin terms (the same terms, incidentally, that get chucked around every time there’s a new Burial record), saying it’s about failure, decay, stasis, nostalgia – and it would be very easy to read slowing as a reversal of the hyper-movement of pre-millenial forms like jungle, garage and fidgetty electronica. But it’s not, it’s about so much more, it’s about whole new ways of experiencing moving rhythms, it’s about sounds which are architectural in the sense that original Jamaican dub was – completely surrounding you, so you are brought right up close to details that seem insignificant from “outside”, and it’s about the body too, returning to a little bit of bump-and-grind.
Dubstep has particularly suffered from people comparing it to the dance music of the 90s. You’ll often hear that it’s solipsistic, inward-looking, “po-faced”, that it’s lacking a particular fire or energy, and it’s easy to see why that is: after all, key dubsteppers themselves will often talk about “eyes down” tracks, or even people dancing with their eyes closed, about complete absorption in the music, and you could hardly have a bigger contrast than between that kind of moment and the mania of hunting horns, flailing dreadlocks, jets of flame fired from WD40 cans at jungle raves fifteen years ago. DJ Pinch said something very interesting to me last year: that dubstep was “hardcore turned inside-out: it’s all the same elements of reggae, hip hop and techno but turned in on themselves instead of firing outwards in all directions”.
But (aside from the fact that “eyes down” is only one type of reaction to dubstep, and even at the deepest dubstep nights you’ll still see people flashing lighters in the air when basslines come in…) that seemingly meditational response to music is still communal, the crowd is still there, together, and reacting as one. It’s not disengagement. Or rather, it’s no less disengaged than previous rave crowds: after all, how much eye contact or conversation with strangers would you have had at a jungle rave, hmm? The display taking place on the dancefloor may not be as spectacular, but nonetheless there is still a gut-level, instinctual connection going on between people there, and that goes for all kinds of other slow electronic music, whether it’s Dettman playing techno, or the absolutely beautiful sounds of acts like Downliners Sekt, How To Dress Well, Holy Other and Hype Williams who I saw a whole variety of responses to at Sónar last weekend. The connection is bodily and even sexual in many ways – take a moombahton track like the bootleg of Benga and Coki’s “Night”, something like Jamie xx’s Space Bass Remix of his own band’s “Basic Space” or Quest’s “Smooth Skin”, these are frankly saucy tracks, bringing to experimental music the grind of dancehall and R&B, fluid yet frictional, aimed straight between the hips, and quite narcotic too… Anyway, that’s enough sleaze – but yeah, slow music. Taking it reeeeeal easy. It’s the new thing, you know.
