The tension between IRL context and URL existence continues to animate us as we find ourselves two decades deep into the 21st century. A brief talk with a stranger at this year’s MUTEK festival in Montreal presented us with an image to explore this tension. They spoke of the “real underground breakbeat” and how today, one seldom hears it implemented properly by North American DJ’s and producers alike. Questions were asked of the real, true use and dissemination of breakbeat samples. We know of this longing for context and the real thing; at its best a call to recognize the political realities surrounding a music’s origin and, at its worst, a perverse form of consumerism.
Enter Emergence, the second release from the Global URL Nation (GUN) x Club Late Music. As we have explored here, members of the GUN are mobilized by the possibilities of the open-souce model for the sharing and dissemination of samples and other content. Beyond IRL context, the GUN community embraces the chaos and emergent order of cross-contextual collaboration. In EMERGENCE, we find shards of URL existence (ASMR, hybridized rhythms, cross-border collaboration) that speak to an unapologetically anti-dystopian trajectory.
Beyond and above the tension between IRL and URL, the commonality between the “real thing” and decentralized web-based community building is a radical use of the tools at hand against the forces of oppression.
by Sam Mulholland.
Stream EMERGENCE above and download it here.