The Hardcore Continuum is a chronology of journalistic essays about the development of rave culture in the UK, penned by Simon Reynolds. Considered classics by most music fans and critics, they cemented a certain attitude of the 90s and early 2000s club culture—Deleuzo-Guattarian metaphors, an ethos of acceleration, and ethnomusicologically styled direct reporting from the warehouse raves. These articles laid down the mythology and history of club music as a whole and centered those styles as products of UK Culture. Like any mythos, there seem to be some cracks in the internal logic of the Hardcore Continuum. 

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/the-wire-300_simon-reynolds-on-the-hardcore-continuum_introduction

Brown’s concerns are informed by his time writing in New York at publications such as XLR8R, Mixmag, and NPR, transcribing interviews and working in the archives. From there, he discovered something akin to a cover-up by popular electronic music magazines. 

“This is partly why my book is so big. There are details about the way that techno and house were archived and distributed that created a market gap,” Brown said. “Techno!: The New Dance Sound of Detroit compilation came out two years after the House Sound of Chicago compiled many of the house artists that released 12” on Trax records locally.”

“So you get these two compilations that export sounds from the American Midwest to the UK that define these two genres that did not yet exist in the UK before. The liner notes were done by one person, Stuart Cosgrove, who also wrote articles for both compilations at NME and The Face magazine.”

https://www.foundationsofhouse.com/blog/the-djs-they-couldnt-hang-chicago-house-1986

https://testpressing.wordpress.com/2010/10/07/the-face-detroit-dance/

This exportation of techno from Detroit spawned a massive wave of a new way of interacting with music, the rave. The messaging surrounding Detroit Techno was singular: the future of music was here. The book The Third Wave was influential to Juan Atkins, prophesizing the next revolution in capitalist production, the information age. He drew much of the imagery and sound design from the book and, to some degree, imagined a future outside of the abandoned Motor City. 

Hyperstition is a niche philosophical term that denotes a phenomenon arriving from the fiction or art of some imaginative creative and brings itself into the world by way of people actualizing that idea. In this instance, the future of music was hyperstitioned by way of Juan Atkins’s reading of The Third Wave and his imagination of what the future of digital sound could be. Almost by historical necessity, the world reacted to this singular vision, but not in the way he could have imagined. 

“When Derrick May got over to London, what he found out– and he had to pay his own way to get there– was that there was no house music, and there was no techno,” Brown said. 

“It was a strange amalgamation,” I said. 

Brown said. “The Techno! comp was a commercial failure, but enough people bought it that a myth would emerge over time through the term “techno”. There weren’t enough records out that you would think of these individual artists as artists in the way you would think about New Order as an individual artist.”

Techno had been shipped off to Europe, and around this time, British DJs began making their tracks. Without understanding the scene as a whole, the alienated producers of the Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit had been cloistered off as an anomaly. However, British hipsters and producers began to fill the market gap that the Techno compilation opened up. Records like Warp’s Artificial Intelligence reflect the ethos at this time, with producers of the compilation taking up alternative monikers that reflected the non-artist status of Detroit Techno producers of the time. By way of a strange disjunct between the originators of Techno and this new breed of IDM, something got lost in translation. 

“Aphex Twin and Autechre were like these DIY engineers, tinkerers who were sitting with a one-track recorder and a piece of gear–quite similar to what Juan Atkins was doing,” said Brown. “These initial processes were the beginning of electronic dance music thinking about and becoming aware of itself as a studio practice as well as being my inspiration for the liner notes for the new Cybotron releases and my own music.”

https://tresorberlin.bandcamp.com/album/parallel-shift

https://speakermusic.bandcamp.com/album/techxodus

The internet played a singular role in the exchange of electronic music from Europe to the US. Message boards and websites like K-Punk, the Hyperdub blog, and the Warp email bulletin titled “Intelligent Dance Music” fueled the disjunct between techno’s originators and this newly interpreted type of electronic home listening music. 

“I’m interested in examining the structural logic of the Hardcore Continuum––especially as it relates to Reynolds’ coinage of the term ‘post-rock’ to describe groups like Bark Psychosis and Seefeel” said Brown. “Because it's not a continuum. It’s an attempt at making sense of generic models of music morphing across time.. It’s a time-stretched amnesia between the time of 1988 with the introduction of techno and ecstasy to 1997 with the introduction of some of the most difficult Autechre albums.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/postrock/comments/17iz58o/the_1994_article_that_popularized_the_term/

Brown would be quick to designate the difference between rave culture and techno. During his talk in Atlanta, I asked him this exact question. Using a more materialist response in comparison to most people’s understanding, he explained that rave was born when ecstasy blended with this newly formed brand of European electronic music. The lack of an ethos of futurism, specifically afro-futurist techno-optimism, is the ideological break between techno and the raves of the 90s. Techno was focused on Fourth-Wave futurism, asking and answering the question that is: What does the music of an information economy sound like? Rave culture centered itself in hedonistic corporeal pleasures and a politics of speed. 

This politics of speed can be understood through the cultural products surrounding jungle and dubstep. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, based allegedly in the University of Warwick, offered a political philosophy informed by first jungle, but a direct line can be drawn to early dubstep albums like Burial’s S/T project, and Kode9’s work with the Spaceape and Lawrence Lek is understood as an extrapolation of the politics of speed and automation.

Accelerationism was the main philosophical theory exegeted by many from their analysis of cyberculture and the hardcore continuum. 

For those not privy to obscure 90s techno-philosophy, Accelerationism is first a Marxist description of the Money-Commodity-Money circuit in a technological industrial economy. A business involved in capitalist production uses money to create commodities to sell for more money. This commodity is built from the labor of workers who alienate their labor to earn a wage to survive. Accelerationism’s key insight into capitalism’s development is that technology amplifies the money earned from the commodity sold on the market by reducing the necessary labor time for the commodity to be produced. Marx initially noticed this in his “Fragment on Machines” and explained how this dead labor, or machines built by workers to enhance work, results in the amplification effect. (pp. 54, #Accelerate, The Accelerationist Reader)

https://files.libcom.org/files/Accelerate%20-%20Robin%20Mackay.pdf 

Back down in the world of music, DeForrest and I speculated on how electronic music was the locus of this insight and what specific quality of electronic music had that elicited these insights. We discussed the idea of Digital Realism, which is a description of the metaphysics of data in the information economy. Digital Realism claims that the next privatization of the commons is the closure of the internet by way of digital advertisers and platforms. Communications online, personal preferences, and branding get tokenized into computable data points. Time is flattened by this mechanism since tokenized cultural artifacts from the past are presented not in sequence but as data available for algorithms to train on. The algorithms themselves operate at levels of speed not able to be understood by humans. Therefore, as Maya B. Kronic puts it, “Time has nothing to say.” 

“Music plugs in so nicely with techno-capital because it’s vaporous,” I said. “It’s sound waves in the air. You can sell an infinite number of songs, or streams, because of the tokenized nature of songs online. This devalues music to the point at which it becomes worthless content. You don’t have to worry about supply. It’s just selling numbers on the computer.”

“You’re on the right track looking at this and Max/MSP,” said Brown. “These accelerations, I would not consider them left or right wing. It’s just the real view of how capitalist desire plugs into a post-Deleuzo-Guitarrian world. Everything that requires skill or expertise has been redesigned towards the consumer user experience. You don’t even need to buy sample packs because electronic music can be automated. Everything is vaporware.”

“It’s the datafictation and the fact that you’re not limited by the human body,” I said. “Electronic music is dealing with the sonification of data through speakers. And that lack of materiality and corporeality of electronic music makes it the prime subject for Digital Realism.”

Follow DeForrest Brown Jr: https://www.instagram.com/clinicalpoetics/?hl=en

Written By Rei Low: x.com/_rocktimist