I'm back at my parent's house to study for my law exams but instead of studying I'm listening to that awesome Roll Deep
Sidewinder Mix from last year or whenever it was. I'm fully prepared to concede that this stuff might by now be, like, totally outmoded, but fuckin' hell it's thrilling. It's quite depressing though because in many ways I feel so emotionally attached to the process of following garage's twists and turns
as they happen, but that's a task that's been difficult for nigh on a year now, and almost impossible since I moved out of home... while I just
know that garage's vitality and isotopic instability has certainly not decreased over the same period.
This obsession with as-it-happens musical journalism might seem a bit myopic (these sounds will still be around in a month, a year, a decade) - acknowledged, but nonetheless since late '99 I've always considered garage to be my punk, my 'ardkore/jungle - a rollercoaster journey that I could immerse myself in if not culturally then at least sonically, theoretically... not just retrospectively
imagining the scene's boundless imagination but experiencing it milestone at a time. I fell in love with garage hot on the heels of falling in love with thinking about music, and it's fairly obvious that this genre informed pretty much all of my ideas about music, chiefly my zealous focus on
groove, and my cluster of obsessions within the borders of groove science: the dialectical relationship between familiarity and alienness, loose vs tight, base/superstructure models for musical arrangements, femininity embodied as the "incomplete" within grooves... the list goes on. To take the argument to its logical end, you could say that my love of microhouse is essentially and entirely a reflection of how easily so many of the conceptual stimulants which garage provides me can be transplanted over. So when I hear new garage, this music that plays so wonderfully with all of my obsessions, it's a bittersweet feeling - delight mixed with the knowledge that I'm barely scratching the surface.
PS. obviously all of this also applies for that amazing
Nasty Crew mix.
