Story by Dan Hekate

Kate Macmillan had been following Specimen July 13th all week. He fascinated and beguiled her in equal measure. It had been months since she had been this intrigued.

Kate liked to follow people, to capture them unbeknownst. She hoped one day to put on a solo show somewhere in Shoreditch, ‘Waking Life’ it would be called. She had decided long ago there would be no interaction with the subject, that only through a lack of information could she portray an unbiased portrait. As a rule she would only follow her subject, her specimen for a day, for no more than two hours and always in a public space.

This week she had broken almost all of her rules. It was now the 19th; she was crouched behind a wrecked Ford Astra with her zoom lens pointed a hundred metres across an industrial marshland as Specimen July 13th rummaged through a skip.

July 13th’s hair was a bush of grey curls that defied gravity as it arched back from his receding hairline. He wore a mish mash of clothes or what first appeared as such, an old waistcoat, a new rain mac, a long wooly scarf. Although incongruous, the items somehow matched, blending together in a murky array of browns, blacks and dark greens. From afar he could easily be taken for a homeless man but up close it was apparent how cared for the clothes were, not that she had got up close. She had used the zoom. She had been careful, Kate was always careful. [Read more →]

Alexander Reid Ross
Against the Fascist Creep
AK Press, Chico, Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore, 2017
ISBN 978-1-84935-244-4

In the introduction, Alexander Reid Ross, who is a lecturer in geography at Portland State, explains what he means by ‘fascist creep’: it ‘refers to the porous borders between fascism and the radical right, through which fascism is able to “creep” into mainstream discourse. However, the “fascist creep” is also a double-edged term, because it refers more specifically to the crossover space between right and left that engenders fascism in the first place’.

Summing up different theories about fascism, he concludes: ‘fascism is a syncretic form of ultranationalist ideology developed through patriarchal mythopoesis, which seeks the destruction of the modern world and the spiritual alingenesis (“rebirth”) of an organic community led by natural elites through the fusion of technological advancement and cultural tradition’.

In the 390-page book he sets out to document this ‘creep’ from its beginnings to its current manifestations, from classical fascism to third positionism, national bolshevism, and autonomous nationalism. He also makes meaningful distinctions between the ‘radical right’, fringe ‘conservatives’, and neo-fascists or neo-Nazis without obscuring their many overlaps.

One of the difficult things to grasp about fascism is its fundamentally contradictory nature if one is looking at it in terms of a coherent program, philosophy, or ideology. This is something that has not been denied but rather celebrated by different fascist spokesmen, from Benito Mussolini to Armin Mohler, who emphasised that fascism rather than being bothered about its discrepancies in theory was more concerned with ‘style’. [Read more →]

Bong-Ra
Palestina EP
[PRSPCT RVLT Digi 005]
In his previous works Bong-Ra withheld from political statements. Now he makes an explicit statement with his 2-Track EP “Palestina”.

On the cover there is a protester with a keffiyeh scarf holding a Palestinian flag. The revenues of the release are donated to the Al Awda hospital in Gaza. There is a link on the bandcamp page to a campaign of culturesofresistance.org. More information, what this is about, is not given. The listener only gets the cover, two track titles, the tracks, and the link. It was released according to discogs as PRSPCT RVLT Digi 005, according to bandcamp as self-release without a label.

It would be important to know why this hospital and why now. In an interview with the dutch version of VICE magazine and in one Facebook post Bong-Ra delivers more information. He has always been a friend of the Palestinian cause. And he refers to a campaign of Norman Finkelstein, who in 2015 had initiated a donation campaign for the Al Awda hospital via the platform byline. The voice sample on the track “Gaza” is also Norman Finkelstein.

Bong-Ra says in his interview with VICE: [Read more →]

HFK
[Rouge de Colere 11]
The Toolbox sublabel reserved for the fast and hard sounds is back with one of its best releases yet. The four-tracker starts with some mental hypnotic hardcore which would also fit in a more out-there tek set, then starts evolving into more speedcore inspired experiments. It’s not that extreme and comes of as quite rounded, but evolves with multiple listens to a great addition to the catalogue.

Molecule SCAM vs. HFK
[AcidNight 20]
The first side credited to Molecule SCAM is an epic digital acid excursion with nice progressions, but definitely nothing outside of the genre. This is what happens on the flipside where HFK is giving the old Jones & Stephenson track The First Rebirth (released in 1993 on Bonzai) a manic flashcore workover. Of course it’s tongue in cheek, but since I have no nostalgic feelings towards early 90s hard trance I find it hard to get into, although I can imagine there to be the right moment at a party for mixing in and out of this track. Pretty good is the final track where hardcore, speedcore and broken elements in the beat structure are combined with nervous bleeping loops and descending hisses. Overall a welcome addition to the Acid Night catalogue, especially with its genre-bending tendencies.

Cyclic Backwash
[Neurotrope NRT039]
Very prolific in the last couple of years, Cyclic Backwash appears on Neurotrope with a varied 3-tracker. Most interesting is the a-side with its combination of acid lines, resonating stabs and psychedelic progression with a slightly broken beat. [Read more →]

Various: Osiris Music 50 [Osiris Music UK]
Simon Shreeve (one half of Kryptic Minds) has been in the bass music game since the early ‘00s and stacked up and impressive, heads-down, grafting, back catalogue to boot, turning out drum and bass, dubstep and lately, finding his true voice over the last few years, in more crossover techno excursions under his Monic guise on labels like Tresor and his own Osiris Music UK.

There are definitely some parallels to be made with Pinch and his Tectonic/Cold imprints in their shift towards merging dubstep with techno and deep house into new broken forms and in building solid stables of rotating, like-minded artists. The labels rarely disappoint in scope, vision or production values; they’re always highly crafted, tech, never overtly “experimental” but always pushing the envelope with a moody restraint. Sometimes this tendency can end up sounding a bit muted, a bit formalist for sure, but then there’s a sense of an embedded long game involved, not for radical short, sharp, shock treatments. It’s horses for courses innit.

This compilation marking the fiftieth release is a well-picked sampler of the last few years’ output, with plenty to pique an interest in further exploration of the back catalogue for the uninitiated. Definite highlights are the two Monic tracks, and Killawatt’s cyclical, gritty, bass wobbler “Pressgang” from 2015, still sounding out there as a front runner (although nothing’s yet to surpass the belting, syncopated broken beat Monic version of Manni Dee’s “Sister Nobody” from 2014 in my opinion).

Ian Martin: Sleepwalker [Panzerkreuz]
Viewlexx continue their run of low-key re-presses/re-releases, this one originally from 2013. Never heard of him before? But I’m impressed enough to go digging after this. Quite an achievement; to make a record that seems to synthesise an entire hallucinogenic trip, or the soundtrack to some unfinished, budget-pulled Italian zombie flick. The tone stays within an eery, almost John Carpenteresque, lo-fi Bladerunner Vangelis vibe throughout. Simple, direct, lush, detuned – you’re transported to bleached out, dystopian film rush clips off the cutting room floor; empty suburban shopping malls, streets before dawn, radioactive sunsets, and lonely drug abuse. [Read more →]