Dusted Reviews
Artist: V/A Album: The Bip-Hop Generation v.5 Label: Bip-Hop Review date: Oct. 7, 2002 |
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Writhe Against The Machine
Fluorescent lights flicker on and off 60 times per second. A dot races across a screen, taxing your persistence of vision so much it feels like leisure. If it bleeds, it leads. And the electro-Thanatosis buzzes away at your eardrum like a skill-saw that flew into your ear canal. How many beats per minute will you sit still for? How did it come to this? It could've been different, y'know.
Bip-Hop provides an umbrella for a cast of producers working on the assumption that the music of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick could be set to beats that echo the human pulse, as opposed to the queen of spades clipped to a Harley tire. That maybe computers think kind thoughts of us when left on overnight. That sex with a computer has possibilites for warmth.
Technology will soon transfer our lives to ersatz. It's inevitable. The makers of Bip-Hop V.5 may help us preserve the best of what works now.
This softcore digitalia is hardly alone under the sun. To Rococo Rot and other purveyors of similar "blip-hop" are in the same academy. But Bip-Hop is richer - nay, healthier - in depth and scope. Witness Andrew Duke's update on dub: A beat that could pump on for hours and present a new revelation every ten seconds. Pull Rechenzentrum's coat and hear droning, thwacking suspension transformed into what the Master Pimp calls "sweet torture." D'Iberville's "Le Souffle C'est La Vie" sounds like the laminating machine I could hear from down the hall as I rolled around on my plastic mat during naptime in Mrs. Poplin's kindergarten class, before I realized fun-loving machines are so often prostituted to tedium and slow death.
We beat ourselves senseless with noise because we were raised on rock, and expect a certain degree of nihilism of all things. So be it. For now, though, fuck that. Run a goddamn bath and spend a slice of time with music that loves you back.
By Emerson Dameron
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