Jungle redefined machinism as delirious rhythmic psychedelia rather than rigid techno lines

Evidence

In a fascinating blog post, Tristam Adams identifies exactly what makes footwork new: its compositional innovations. To bring this out, Adams contrasts footwork to jungle. Jungle’s newness was in large part a consequence of the widespread availability of digital sampling technology, which facilitated both new sounds and new ways of treating sound (time-stretched breakbeats and vocals). Beyond this, though, I’m not sure that the way Adams constructs the comparison between jungle and footwork is quite right. Adams hears jungle as more “machinic” than footwork — but what was exciting about jungle to many of us at the time was that it gave a whole new sense of what machinism was. Jungle’s machinism was delirious; it was, in Kodwo Eshun’s immortal phrase, a rhythmic psychedelia, composed from whorls, twists, and vortexes of sound; there were none of the rigid mechanoid lines of techno. Jungle was dark, but also wet, viscous, and enveloping. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1330

Categorization

• XREF: Fisher draws on Kodwo Eshun’s ‘rhythmic psychedelia’ — the More Brilliant Than the Sun thesis that black electronic music refigures the machine, a recurring motif in K-Punk. — connects to: An artist can evoke psychedelia as becoming rather than as backward-looking iteration — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 354