I got sort of lost at dubstep, or maybe 2step, or ponycore, or chiptune, or skelefunk, or, um, footwork… I never properly learned to differentiate jungle from drum’n’bass, or to understand the point in which that became drill or drizzle or whatever the Hell it became. The continuum became the ‘nuum and everyone blamed each other for continuing, for not innovating, for not finding the right glitches in the Matrix.
As in the Industrial scene in the decade before, in “dance music” (a truism that became a lie), it was important to be seen to be not scene, even if you knew your marketing depends on it, even if you knew you wouldn’t be creeping onto the right compilation albums without those associations. Planet Mµ emerged in this fogfucked world sometime in the mid-’90s, just after Warp’s final Artificial Intelligence releases ground to a halt. Warp had done their bit and to some extent, Planet Mµ kept that ball rolling, releasing music that was extraordinarily composed and yet giving off the vibe that it was somehow just thrown together.
In the beginning, there was a lot of welcome silliness, as electronica bristled at being taken seriously (and at that savage who coined the phrase intelligent dance music – no one much seems to have noticed that those early albums were called “Artificial” Intelligence) and artists like Venetian Snares and Speedranch tried to keep people guessing. Old modes were explored as much as new ones, and people kept having to look up what a B-Boy listened to whenever Autechre (from Warp, but you get the idea) mentioned it in interviews.Things got tangled. Rephlex started playing it more for laughs while Planet Mµ gradually positioned itself as the label for music that straddled the experimental / dancefloor divide, attempting, often successfully, to please all of the people all of the time. There was still a lot of fun in the mix – Shitmat cooked the books, or pickled them – but there was a slowish crawl to seriousness (or to fun taken seriously), even if they never quite plumbed the Deleuze and Guattarian depths of Mille Plateaux et al.
So here we are, twenty-five years later and I’m sad to say I haven’t really kept up with where they’ve been headed as a label. The only records I know from the label over the past decade or so have been by variations of Ekoplekz and he’s not even on this. This is a compilation that stands as a position statement rather than a retrospective; this is where the label is now, and it works very effectively as a buyer’s guide to their current crop of artists. If there’s a theme (there isn’t) then I guess that theme is footwork, the Chicago side-scene which Planet Mµ has been instrumental in taking from relative obscurity (more or less operationalised here as “do white British people know about it yet?”) into whatever passes for ubiquity these days in the crowded electronic market. For instance, DJ Nate, Ripatti and RP BOO’s tracks sound represent here as (I’m speaking from almost pure ignorance) footwork exemplars in that they sound a lot like the old tape experiments me and my mates used to do mid-’80s, mostly cutting up old Monty Python records and New Order instrumental b-sides to make tracks that more or less sounded like a funkier, twitchier Position Normal.If that sounds facetious, it isn’t meant to be; I mean it very much as a compliment… this is a kind of music that bares its bones, that uses technology in such a clever way that it appears to hardly use it at all. If this is really put together in Ableton Live or some future-facing cracked beta copy of Fruityloops then it sounds like it’s a fifteen year old boy (or girl) sticking masking tape over the erasing head of their dad’s tape to tape deck (they would use their own but it’s made by Bush and the wheels are crap) and layering sounds like they were slices of Battenberg. There’s slicker tracks here, of course, but overall there’s a thrown together feel to all of this, like punk without the pub rock connotations.
In truth, while you can see that this is intended to display the admirable diversity of the roster as it is now, all of these tracks seem like they belong together. There’s a curatorial tone present in which nothing ever seems like a rupture. The gentle breakbeat jazz tingles of Jada Rush are called “Mynd Fuc” but, even if they are seemingly made up of a bag of angles, they nevertheless slide sweetly alongside the Dead Can’t Dance ambience of Meemo Comma, whose Kabbalistic track “Tif’eret” is a highlight here, if only because I first heard it while finishing reading the last chapters of the His Dark Materials triology to my son and it sounded like music the angels might make when they decided to get a bit wasted on dust. Ital Tek play all their the techno-dubstep cards in one sitting, with that melodica-not-melodica breakdown sound we’ve all waved our arms in the air to back when that kind of thing was still a possibility and, to these tired ears, this would have made a more perfect end track to this compilation than Eomac, which feels like it ought to be somewhere in the middle, keeping things going like Gini Winaldum does for Liverpool football club; unspectacular, uncomplicated, necessary.Konx Om Pax are one of the few artists I was aware of here and they manage a minor symphony of sound during a relatively short duration, reminding me in parts of where Rustie was headed in “Glass Swords”; whereas FARWARMTH (something about that name that I love) rustle up a longer track out of sighs and stutters and Windows 98 vapourwave chimes that is immediately a little forgettable, but then grows on you and has made me seek out more of their stuff. Even the hiphop / grime / whatever tracks, like the short but very sweet East Man & Streema, track sit easily alongside their bedfellows and you can imagine everything on this album played out in the same DJ set whenever we can all get together to bootyshake uninterrupted on a dancefloor that’s not just your living room filmed by Zoom.
Here’s to another twenty-five years, Mr and Mrs Mµ.-Loki-
