who else is relieved to see a bit of rain?
we gotta thank my friend dexter for today’s main rec, which is bbc radio 1’s 1995-97 series one in the jungle. i haven’t been energised or enthralled by something like this in a long time, to be honest. one in the jungle was radio 1’s jungle show when it was the big thing back in the 90s, broadcast in the primetime friday night slot. it must have been thrilling to listen to this live - i was listening to this very loud and bassy in the kitchen last night while making dinner and having a blast.
what really makes one in the jungle special are the MCs, constantly interjecting by hyping up the DJ, rapping over the top, or doing call-outs to people all over the country. there’s a constant sense that they’re racing to keep up with the music which is constantly speeding out of view, always on the edge of perception, quite literally something beamed in from the future which we haven’t yet reached: the jungle horizon. but rather than slow down the speeding train, MCs are constantly caught up in the excitement, adding coal to the engine.
indeed, the MC interjections are not detached from the music playing; their function is not to describe it from afar (“that was song X by Y”) but to intervene in it directly, to enhance its intensity. the MC effectively instantiates a positive feedback loop that is primed by the music: we have this shared experience between us and the music, which is then reflected and validated by the MC, which then gets added to that experience between us and the music, which is then reflected and validated by the MC, …, and so on. the effect of this is the thrilling flattening of hype — everything gets contagiously subsumed by it, everything flattened into one layer. everything is connected, bound together, vibrating, here, about to explode. you can’t miss it.
funnily enough, listening to one in the jungle made me reflect a lot about this newsletter. what’s been an interesting challenge in writing these has been the need to transform our ordinarily passive appreciation of objects into an active act of recommending them — to convincingly hype things up. much like the jungle MC, i haven’t just been presenting a list of recs, but trying - not hugely successfully - to let those recs take over me and speak through me, to be a kind of runaway train that i have to catch up with and add coal to, creating a positive feedback loop. i’ve tried in a sense, much like the jungle MC, to be immanent to the rec at hand, “in” it, a multiplier of desire. again, it’s a lot harder to do this when the object is some article on john berger or whatever rather high-intensity jungle, but hey, it’s been a fun and insightful challenge nonetheless.
one in the jungle episodes are available on youtube here or mixcloud if that takes your fancy. listen to it!
and if any of the discussion takes your interest here, i wrote a blog post with similar vibes last month on the “intensifying” function of criticism which can be read here.
reading rec of the day is xenogothic’s recent essay on what it means to be a goth. like all of his recent stuff, this was a great read. xenogoth basically notes how resolute goth has been historically, never a fad, always persisting (he notes gazelle twin, pic’d, as a contemporary example of goth, which i think is accurate). this is because, as xeno notes:
The Gothic is not an aesthetic genre but a prosthetic sensibility. It is a mode of addition, extension and attachment, and one that has taken on many different forms.
[…]
The xenogothic is a term we might use to define a future Gothic form always already contained within the Gothic itself. It is a name not for a Gothic telos but for a “witch’s flight”. It is a term for the Gothic’s escape from itself and the limits placed upon it from outside. It is a form of movement, according to Gilles Deleuze, “that never ceases to change direction, that is broken, split, diverted, turned in on itself, coiled up, or even extended beyond its natural limits.”
is that it? only two recs? i’m afraid i think so, gotta make dinner soon as i have a quiz this evening, but here’s some other fragments of things that may be of interest:
i really enjoyed this self-titled EP from PC WORLD (another good rec from the BOOKS newsletter) - industrial post-punky electro pop (kinda?). there’s something of the fall in this i think
reader + comrade laura shared this short film on posties in 80s chicago on twitter. as she says: “a portrait of workers crucial to their communities in complex ways, and of the struggles & race/gender dynamics of the job.” i watched a couple of minutes and then my internet went shit, but i think a lot could be gained by watching this.
there is an interesting online screening of a documentary on the Lucas Plan (a modernist/futurist/socialist plan for technology drawn up by trade union stewards at Lucas Aerospace Corporation) at 8pm tonight - details here
// next delivery = friday morn //
ALSO if anyone knows anything about making websites in jekyll, help me out, because i’m trying to build a new blog to enhance my coding knowledge, with questionable success.
until friday morn! stay safe, send recs, engage the hype-function!
jake x