Hello to all, On friday i went to the final frontier 10 year anniversary where Timeline played a 2hr live set. Timeline is Mike Bank's live project with some lesser know UR operatives - Gerald Mitchell (not so obscure tbh) on keyboards, Raphael Merriweathers on some sort of drum machine, Mad Mike on other keyboards and either Danny Caballero or Santiago Salazar on turntables. Well known UR tracks (the jaguar, jupiter jazz, afrogermanic, plus others whose name escapes me atm but are also UR classics) were spun on the decks as the others played live over and around them - spanish guitar synths doodles led into the track played on the decks as Merriweathers bongo-ed and tom-tom-ed away on his machine. The set started off with more of a house style but steadily evolved into harder UR techno for maximum dancing effect, but there was not much of a flow between each track giving it all a very "live" feeling. A live sax appreared at one point making everything seems even more like a jam session. All in all it was a very high quality show, very danceable (especially the second hour) and the notoriously tepid roman crowd responded very well.
The project seemed to want to make an explicit connection between 313's rNb and funk roots and the UR techno/electro tradition. Both the long funky introductions on the synths to well-known UR tracks and the whole raw jam session atmosphere seemd to point in this direction. And this takes me to the "no future (was re:future)" part of my subject line. It seems to me that the major 313 players have totally forgone any research in exploring "the future" as an aesthetic concept. Representing the future through music is not an issue anymore, and conversely, exploring one's musical heritage has become the focal point of many a producers output. Take Carl Craig's Detroit Experiment project for example, or Derrick's, Juan's and Kevins extended forays into house. And I add also the Timeline project and Theo's Rotating Assembly. All these for me are evidence of a desire on behalf of these artists to bridge the gap between themselves and their location in the current time-space and (between) their influences and the ghosts of their musical history. (These are just some examples and I do not intend to analyse nor list ever single 313 release of the third millenium... I am also deliberately ignoring electro - i feel it has become a sort of neo-classical style of music, but that deserves a whole another email) On the other hand, I feel that european producers are much more preoccupied with musically representing the future. They continue a long standing tradition that dates back to New Wave and beyond that at one point became infected with the futuristic outpourings from detroit. At that time, detroit producers had tapped into the stream of music coming from europe and re-intepreted it according their aesthetic sensibility. If feel that now artists in detroit have forgone the futuristic undercurrents of detroit techno to concentrating on re-exploring their "traditional" influences in the light of an expired, digested (and therefore encoded and engrained) futuristic attitude. Sorry if this last sentence is not too clear, but its the only way I found how to express this concept :) many thanks, fabrizio ----------------------------- Citymorb Music http://www.citymorb.net [EMAIL PROTECTED]
