Hardcore

British music critic Simon Reynolds is as capable of documenting the lives of glam stars as he is of describing the sonic intensity of British jungle, techno and hardcore music. This new collection brings together all his virtuoso chronicles for Wire magazine, which led him to theorize the hardcore continuum (jungle, drum’n’bass, etc.) – according to him the last aesthetic to have represented a major break in electronic music, around an immoderate taste for bass, syncopated rhythms and atmospheres of dirty realism, an exorcism of the generalized anxiety under the effects of a capitalism gone into turbo mode. After the real time analysis of these scenes, comes the time of the theory and a series of ambitious reflections on the meaning of the future in electronic music, the relationship to politics in the dancefloor scenes, but also their consequences in dancehall or Burial music.