#and its grading is wack so they superbed it

[puppys-rhythm-heaven]

rhythm heaven is perfect for adhd. it produces very much dopamine i think. maybe. what does dopamine feel like-

[teenagepretentiousness]

loki episode 5

so.

im in pain. emotional. its fine. lets review.

the entire loki squad is iconic. i MEAN THE KID STRAIGHT UP KILLED THOR. its great. dont even get me started on the alligator. i love it. i cant stand ravonna, i just hate her. shes a good villain, didn’t expect it. NOW the entire scene with the alligator attacking boastful loki was one of my favourite parts. i love that everyone thought sylvie was terrifying, i love it. also can we talk about how much screen time the alligator got considering hes AN ALLIGATOR. im very thankful, dont get me wrong. i gotta say, president loki was messing with my head, twas scaring me. now SYLVIE AND MOBIUS TOGETHER WAS AMAZING. that was everything i couldve asked for. they have great chemistry. i really need the scenes if mobius interrogating sylvie about loki. i just I NEED IT. back to the lokis, president loki being confused why theres an alligator, then getting attacked by said alligator. thats it, i love it, i would watch it for days. tHEN IT BITES HIS DAMN HAND OFF AND THE ABSOLUTE CHAOS IS JUST SUPERB. just, amazing. “shes the only one i do trust” UM WHOS MOBIUS THEN BITCH? EXCUSE ME. sorry i just adore mobius with every cell of my body. i also love sylvie. i just, i love her, shes me, shes great, shes- i love her. sylvies definetly the superior loki, gotta say. i also love the faith that mobius has in loki. its just, hes very in love. can we just talk about how an ALLIGATOR IS PRAYING. i love this thing. “is he a coward or is he being brave” is the definition of lokis character lets be real. and THE PURE JOY IN LOKIS “Mobius!” HIS LITTLE SMILE I CANT JGHJDGKJ. #sylvie is fed up with lokis stupidity. also, RELEASE B-15. HELLO? THIS IS KINDA RUDE. TF YOU THINK SHES GONNA TELL U. LIKE MAAM. WHAT? B-15 DIDN’T EVEN REALLY KNOW. i also wanna know how MUCH talking b-15 and sylvie did. because like... i really like the ship ok? its fine. everything is fine. WHATS UP WITH MISS MINUTES. SHES BEING WACK AND IM SCARED. #we’re still confused by the alligator and i love it. so mobius finds the chance to gush about loki any time he can get. i respect it. i loved the heart to heart loki and sylvie had. they start talking about mobius, which is fair, i would also start gushing about mobius m mobius in the face of imminent death. LETS TALK ABOUT SYLVIES LITTLE “he cares about you”. SHE KNOWS. AFTER SPENDING TIME WITH BOTH OF THEM, SHE 100% K N O W S. and i love it. her knowing smile when loki doesnt respond is just gsgfkasgfkhs. the entire conversation following that about their ‘relationship’ looks like its out of a grade 5 playground, its great. but thats the thing. i dont think their romantic, given the following line is “i dont have friends” by sylvie. meaning their just friends. and let me tell ya, an mcu project has never focused and has been this self aware of a relationship, especially like this. especially because this relationship hasn’t even started. so, me and my lokius heart will be in the corner, thank you very much. i love how they immediately start banter, they’re a great duo, its fantastic. you know who loki also betrayed? MOBIUS. they keep making it clear, first with the dagger, the “he cares about you”, now this, that mobius loves loki. no but wtf are those birds. whatever, not the point. sylvies so powerful i love her. (im sorry im very gay). the moment loki says “im staying” who turns around BUT MOBIUS. C’MON. kid loki giving loki a dagger is just so. IT CAN ALSO SYMBOLIZE SELF LOVE BECAUSE LOVE IS A DAGGER. lokius’ goodbye. im not ok. first we got hit in the stomach with “burn it to the ground. thanks for the spark” then WE GOT THE GODDAMN HUG. the look on lokis face as he went to hug him. this was a bond. he cares about mobius. a handshake wont do. they were farther than that. and the dagger in the shot WAS NOT A MF COINCIDENCE. I’LL TELL YOU THAT MUCH. THEY LOVE EACH OTHER OF STORY. #sylvie just out her like: imma need that dagger to cut this romantic and sexual tension sweet jesus. now, did i cry during the goodbye? y e s, yes i did. loki being able to enchant it was so powerful. it shows his full potential and just how power he is. LOKIS are just powerful. classic loki built ASGARD FOR GODS SAKE. SYLVIE DID THAT ENCHANTING ON HER OWN FOR A LARGE AMOUNT OF TIME. so iconic, i love them all. “because we’re the same” then why did you fall in love mf? whats that about? the fact this episode ends on a cliff hanger is kinda very rude but whatever. if mobius doesnt come back im gonna- its not gonna be pretty.

so yeah, that was my review, this is by far my favourite episode, i adore it. aNyWaYs. 

[landlordrecords]

Bassline (& 2020 in general): Re-e-wind

 What a strange year, as everyone, everywhere has said a million times… Writing-wise, I’d been doing Record Collector magazine since 2014, and uDiscover (the Universal Records online mag) for not much less, & that all just seemed to (understandably) stop dead with the onset of the pandemic. Since then, I’ve polished off my chapter on the work of Simon Morris and the Ceramic Hobs for Palgrave, & that’s about it, so you’re more likely to find me over on Twitter at Sniffy (@philblackpool) / Twitter these days, blurting out the odd sentence. I hence thought it might be time to revisit a very old piece…

Like many, I’ve been working from home for much of the year, and although I’ve occasionally wanted to pull out my own eyeballs, it has generally been very pleasant for a voracious music-lover. I started by catching up on the vast majority of my insane, years-deep second-hand vinyl buy piles, and then chomped through a load of ‘long listen’ stuff I’d had on the backburner forever (including, astonishingly, eventually getting through something like 40 hours of Pan Sonic live sets someone had dumped online). I graded hundreds of releases for sale on Discogs, and revisited umpteen musical thangs extensively, including 90s gabba, Sun Ra, music hall, Schoenberg, dancehall reggae, the acknowledged worst albums ever, happy hardcore, Italian house, bounce and makina (I’ve lost track of how much time I’ve spent checking out youtubes to try to identify a couple of most-wanted bounce and makina tunes), Britpop (!), cosmic disco, and Belgian popcorn. It’s been an extraordinary year, packed with cultural discovery and rediscovery. In amongst this, in no way ashamed of my abject love of Discogs, and already having used and edited it for many years, I read the entire guidelines and decided to go hard on sorting out stuff I care about on there. Seeing they’d finally added various more recent ‘styles’, I’ve spent the last month and a half doing a ridiculous amount of edits on a dozen or so niche genres of importance in recent times (footwork, Jersey Club, yadda yadda). My tweakings around Bassline and UK Funky eventually drew me to the attention of UK Garage legend Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown, a fellow Discogs obsessive not so keen on the editing side of the site, who wondered if I might give him a hand sorting out the mess of his own and his label’s (2Tuf 4U) discographies. His entertaining phonecalls were enough to convince me.

I dug out all my stuff related to Karl’s label to listen to along the way, and found myself noticing how much UKG has been back in the spotlight of late (key, and brilliant, article here: RA: Like A Battle: The Push For UK Garage's Future (residentadvisor.net) ). While by no means unaware of this (I’ve had some lovely promos from Kiwi and the like of late, plus some moodier bits from various El-B worshippers), my status as a confirmed middle-aged semi-retired raver had hidden much of this from me. This leads me onto one of my big philosophical points of recent years: I listened to dance music avidly before I ever went out dancing, and listen to it now in lockdown, and in semi-retirement. There is far too much an emphasis among ever-rejuvenating dance music correspondents on ‘the club’ as the only way to enjoy dance music, but we know that OG disco fans are 60+ and unlikely to be out every weekend these days – is their experience now worthless? Online fans talk up their love of dance music for exercise soundtracks, bedtime calming soundtracks, etc: this is reality. Dance music is as valid to all these people as rock is to people who haven’t been to a gig in 40 years.

The style I felt myself most drawn back to was bassline (largely via Karl’s low-key issue of some DJ Q material). My love of UK Garage and all its offshoots largely stems from how physically removed I have been from it from virtually its entire history. Only my 2000-03 stint in Essex perfectly matched the garage waveform, and that was the 2-step era, quite the opposite of bassline. Despite being largely a northern phenomenon, Blackpool is largely untouched by bassline, being all about punk and bounce to my mind. An instant love for me circa 2007, bassline feels like one of those genres with unfinished business, but remains one I’ve rarely danced to. Cut off in its prime, it is now back, enormously popular, and rightly so, but, due to the vagaries of the digital music world, some of its key material remains tough to access in any decent form.

I originally wrote the piece I have butchered for this one in March 2008, on Myspace (remember that), in reaction to the exciting waves of bassline and UK funky then reinvigorating the world of UKG. It looks a bit embarrassing now, with more writing experience, although I continue to applaud my own willingness to be open about my innocent appreciation of things I love but am not truly part of.

 The most notable misstep in my original piece was the presumption that bassline would become the latest enormous chart sensation. Like happy hardcore before it, the ball was, in reality, fumbled. Instead of hoped-for freaky innovation, the producers also opted, as many in years gone by, for smoothed-out commerciality (in unholy alliance with low-grade grime crossovers), although the main adversarial issues seem to have been police crackdowns and the London-centric ‘cool police’. Although I was long aware of such problems with Niche in Sheffield (the genre’s spiritual home), it appears that the police interference had a devastating effect across the board ( Banned From Sheffield: How Jamie Duggan fought for bassline… And won (ukf.com) ). This largely explains why many of the bassline producers gravitated towards the largely wack bass house/house & bass style so beloved of teenyboppers in recent years. Thank heavens that era is now largely over.

Niche reputedly specialised in an arguably unholy mixture of dated late 90s speed garage and ‘bassline house’ (think ‘Let Me Show You’ by Camisra, and MK’s ‘organ house’), way past their sell-by date (I still only really like a handful of Shaun Banger Scott bits in this style, one single 2009 Brummie CD EP, and one Virgo remix). Ultimately, though, this experiment unexpectedly created something magical. The crucial element here is the 4/4 beat. While undoubtedly skippy, the vast majority of the material favoured had a firm 4/4 beat, always favoured across all key scenes in the north of England from northern soul onwards. When they ran out of tunes to rinse, in time-honoured fashion, they made their own. Long, rumbling walls of bass, organs, and hoppy-skippy beats, with raggafied samples and gunshots over the top. Popular in Birmingham as well (pretty much the centre of a vinyl glut at the time, and now notable in the popularity of DJs such as Chris Lorenzo and Hannah Wants), B-side titles hinted of coke overload. Disenfranchised by London’s movement away from the holy 4/4 (despite a slight revival in the early noughties), and via messenger services and the like, northern producers began to exchange a new hybrid in the mid-00s which took these speed garage and bassline house influences and updated them with current R’n’B bootlegs, with influences from grime (regional grime producers were key here) and, most notably, with rococo basslines. Its most obvious comparison point was Sticky’s garage productions, concurrent with the early grime era. Southern producers such as Agent X, Delinquent (who featured Gemma Fox on their magical 2006 ‘Boxers’), and Dexplicit (Fox again, 2005’s ‘Might Be’) ran with that, and the north lapped it up. Key early pointers also included DJ Narrows’ superb 2001 4/4 tune ‘Saved Soul’, and early 00s DND work (Artwork, later part of dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man). A notable increase in output came in 2006, and 2007-9 were the genre’s original glory years. And the bulk of producers and up-&-comings delivering serious anthems to the scene came not from London and the south-east, but from Leeds (T2, Wittyboy, Nastee Boi), Bradford (TS7), Manchester (Murkz, Burgaboy, Subzero), Nottingham (Virgo, IllMana), Leicester (JTJ, H20, FB & Zibba), and Wolverhampton (EJ, TRC, Brett Maverick). EJ’s Ejucation mix series (all up on Soundcloud) is a good place to start, beginning as the bassline house began to be overtaken by the pure bassline numbers.

Distribution for serious UK garage music has often been woeful, with only high street compilations & the chart singles (‘Heartbroken’ by T2, ‘What’s It Gonna Be’ by H20, etc) making it all over the country, and this helped stymie the true development of bassline, although vinyl prices, dreadful video promos, and the leap to digital in some ways didn’t help. Years on, as an incorrigible vinyl fanatic, I still only have handful of bassline 12”s. Yes, you can now access this stuff the world over via Youtube etc, but decent, high-quality copies of full-length tunes (they are often hacked about to great effect, but in a way which obscures the original intentions, in the mix) are not always the easiest to come by, although the classic producers are increasingly putting out digital compilations of their original work. Material that would, for previous genres, be fiended after, is lost to being just more online links. At the time, I looked high and low for 12”s, succeeding only rarely, largely on the flip of UK Funky releases. The (mixtape) audience, going by comments online, were often extremely young, are probably now still only in their mid-twenties, and are seemingly happy enough with this chaotic model. Bassline originally, as all rave genres, largely ran off mixtape boxsets, and a 2007 ‘Pure Bass – Fantasy’ box from Stoke remains my key document of that era: seven bassline CDs, with many tracks repeated, but packed to the gills, with most tracks only lasting a minute or two in the mix. As with all rave mixes, it has taken me years to suss the majority of the track IDs. In the Resident Advisor piece linked above, DJ Q (from Huddersfield) talks about thousands of lost bassline tunes, the bad side of the digital revolution. My recent Discogs ferreting suggests more bassline tunes than one might imagine did make some sort of decent release, but too many only made white labels, promo CDs for commercial releases (before being snipped from the main release), mix CDRs, or Youtube’s grainy depths. Classics such as TS7 featuring Bianca’s ‘Seems Like’ appear to never have had any decent release whatsoever, despite TS7 going on to be a big name in bass-oriented house, and Bianca Gerald having kept at the vocal turns ever since.

T2 hit biggest, with ‘Heartbroken’, a gorgeous, smashed-vocal garage dub so popular that it even inspired a Jersey Club refix. His catalogue was immediately deep, although I get the impression he has stopped adding to it. One complaint about bassline, including some of the T2 work, regards the untutored vocals, which can sometimes be rather flat, and certainly lacking in dynamics compared to the dazzling US vocalists featured on some earlier UK garage pieces (I refer here, as always, to TJ Cases’ remarkable ‘Do It Again’). I kinda like that - it shows amateur enthusiasm not far removed from punk, and most obviously links to lover’s rock, as does the production at times: it gives a feeling of melancholy entirely suited to the vocals. Other bassline heroes include TS7, who briefly brought to the fore sassy female garage MC T Dot. His productions also include ‘Smile’, one of my very favourite bassline tracks, full of that Simon Reynolds-quoted 'weird energy’ possessed by DJ Hype & co in the early nineties. Male bassline vocalists such as Ideal also remain unfairly forgotten, although some of the female vocalists have gone on to work in related genres since bassline’s peak.

Paleface, an ex-member of London garage rap crew Stonecold GX, runs Northern Line Records (FB, TRC, Wittyboy, Nastee Boi), something of a quality mark for bassline productions, while also making highly successful UK Funky tunes as part of Crazy Cousinz, and later progressing into commercial house territory. He chronicled much of bassline’s high-water mark (including being married to Kyla, since sampled by Drake). Wolverhampton-based Northern Line signing TRC proved particularly adaptable, spewing out a legion of original tunes and remixes before retreating for a while to grime. Leeds’ Nastee Boi was a favourite of mine at the time, with his pitch-black gangsta bassline tunes, but pushed on towards a mixture of underwhelming R’n’B vocal cuts and nursery grime toons. Wittyboy started similarly punishingly but also went smoother, unbalancing the classic bassline rough and smooth combination.

Now that the dubiously poisonous rep of Niche has been dispatched, the key bassline acts have returned to their key battleground, and the genre seems in full throttle again. Much of the new material seems a little one-dimensional to me: producers invariably big up Bristol’s My Nu Leng as, I suppose, a bridge from bro-step to 4/4. Everything, as acknowledged by the DJs, is huge drops and nothing much else. It still sounds pretty hot though – not the updated lover’s rock of a decade ago, but worth supporting. Bassline is NOT finished!