Well that Bristol takeover at Corsica Studios on Friday was neither very Purple nor very Wow, was it? In fact it looked a lot like favours–for-mates, Joker carrying his significantly less talented chums Jemmy and Guido, the set only really coming alive when he stepped up to the decks. Actually, the entire set seemed to be hung around Joker’s handful of big tunes. Last time I saw him he played for about forty five minutes and provided enough colour and contrast to the lumpen Dubstep that came before and after to shine: a short, sharp, shiny injection of sass and swagger, over two hours it kind of flags. Maybe my hardwiring is just too rusty after literally DECADES of existence but rhythmically, however vanguardist it might be on some arcane musicological* level, it sounded turgid and muddily clubfooted, meaning it’s still all about the bass and…

… heavy bass is a bit tedious, innit? I mean reliance on bass as the kinetic/galvanic element. Haven’t we had enough of dub? Is it not basically in K-Punk’s** avant-conservatism category? If you hear the term dub attached to anything these days how likely is it that it’s going to be doing anything interesting or pulse quickening? Apparently it’s not going to go away though as not only is the place pretty rammed, generally young and unusually for a dubstep night, about 60-40 male to female, but outside a young women, being held aloft by no less than Joker himself, hands me a fat wad of fliers called DubPack. Yet the most exhilarating of the post-Dubsteppers, if he really ever had much of an affiliation to it at all, Zomby, seems to have largely abandoned bass, with ravishing results.


*There’s an excellent example of what I can only call blog paranoia creep in the footnotes to Rouge's Foam’s review of Zomby. Blog Paranoia Creep is characterized by the marked suspicion that someone may have been talking specifically about YOU when they slagged off X trend/perspective/scene, tempered by the desire not to a) be seen to be arrogant enough to assume that anyone is paying the slightest bit of attention to little you b) make any enemies on the basis of an easily dismissed objection ( oh.. no.. I wasn’t thinking about you at all, actually….) and come off as a deluded, self-important hysteric. This is achieved by opening, as here, with a mini-testamonial to the writer’s standing/ importance followed by a comprehensive rebuke of everything they apparently stand for. I assume that it was occasioned by this from Matt which kind of calls into question RF’s project/area of expertise as of any use at all, as it does more or less everybody else’s too, actually, leading to a pretty Old Skool nihilation of Matt’s symptomatic defects, though frankly the tenuous claims on Matt’s check-list of sins seems instead to suggest he is in fact tilting at phantoms, some weird composite figure (Matt and the end of history/everything’s been shit since 93? He’s never been of that persuasion at all, has he?) who chimerically represents a looming, monstrous Old Guard haunting the imagination of those keen to be the New Custodians of Wonkville. Yes, you're praising it to the skies, but in the wrong way! It surely deserves better than your almost total endorsement! All of which suggest he may have been doing some magnified listening but he hasn’t been paying much attention while reading. Time for a new criticism perhaps? Ok… what will that be like, how will it…. AHHHH! You mean the stuff that precedes the footnote! Lots of description plus some pictures! A certain thoughtful professorial modesty having naturally prevented one from emblazoning the post with the title “ LOOKETH THEE UPON THE NEW CRITICISM!!!!!!" And then, hang on.. isn’t he disingenuously boasting about his emerging rep with the Lacanians down the bottom of the previous post…. surely hoary old Lacan has no place in the New Criticism?! To the scaffold with the old, if admittedly prestigious and very intellectually fashionable …although…it IS sort of gratifying in a way....

Disavowel is the new resentment, I see!

In which case, “Rouge’s Foam's work is not always worth reading, however his parapraxis-riddled footnotes……


** I love K-Punk, he's brilliant, I wish he was my Dad. I'm thinking of having costly and painful tounge extension surgery just so I can get it even further up his batty. Actually if I had it bifurcated... better still trifurcated ! I could do Reynolds and Hatherly at the same time and really extract maximum value from the depths of their erudition...