Jungle

## Jungle as music

Jungle music was very actively evolving during the first/'‘classic’ wave of CCRU, starting in 1994. It plays an important role in that wave through a number of qualities:

### Remix culture, or remixology

> *Synthetic culture sheds no Benjaminite tears for the lost aura of objects in the age of mechanical reproduction, celebrating instead the way in which the subject-object dichotomy and its attendant pathos are reconfigured as machinic circuits in the age of cybernetic replication. "The transaesthetics of banality" plays upon the poignant, if bathetic, aura of found objects, but for abstract culture everything that's ready made, or mass-marketed, is there to be dismantled and relocated into the unfamiliar architectures of the synthetic composition, the "uncanny adjacencies" of the hip hop or jungle track, where they have a machinic, rather than merely a citational, role to play: decomposable elements on a plane of consistency, not cut up fragments.*
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> *One of the big strands is breakbeat science, and breakbeat science, as I see it, is when Grandmaster Flash and DJ Kool Herc and all those guys isolate the breakbeat, when they literally go to the moment of a record where the melody and the harmony drops away and where the beats and the drum and the bass moves forward. By isolating this, they did something comparable to switching on a kind of electricity, by making the beat portable, by extracting the beat. I call it motion capturing, which is like, in things like Jurassic Park and all the big animatronic films, motion capure is the device by which they synthesize, they virtualize, the human body. They have a guy that's dancing slowly, and each of his joints are fixed to lights and they map that onto an interface, and then you've got it. You've literally captured the motion of a human; now you can proceed to virtualize it. And I think that's kind of what they did with the beat. They more or less grabbed a kind of potential beat which was always there, by severing it from the funk engine, by materializing it as actually a portion of vinyl that could be repeated. They basically let loose, they basically switched on, the material potential of the break which had been lying dormant for a long time. So I follow that, that isolation of the breakbeat through different spheres. Through Grandmaster Flash and the invention of scratchadelia.*
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### Rhythmicity and polyrhythmicity

> *3. "Drying up, death, intrusion have rhythm. It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence; there is nothing less rhythmic than the military march."³⁰ There is nothing more rhythmic than a breakbeat swarm.*
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> *Demons make themselves real through rhythmic signatures.*
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### Loops

> *Looping is not cyclicity.*
> *A cycle curves back to the origin, whereas loops dissolve beginning and end into an endless middle: a sequence taken out of time.*
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### Abduction

Abduction, or losing control to music, and of evolution/devolution of body moving to the music, mobilising the body through bass and polyrhythm:

> *That's why drum 'n' bass talks a lot about the stepper, because sound is literally articulating you as a kind of exo-skeleton It's almost like your feet are gaining an intelligence at the expense of your head, or your arse, or your back, or your shoulders are gaining intelligence at the expense of your head. Anywhere you have a sense of tension, that's the beginning, that's the signs of a bodily intelligence switching itself on. And that's what rhythm is doing. You can foresee a point where the body is mutated by rhythm to the point where the head becomes completely superfluous, becomes this flabby muscle bouncing around, aimlessly lolling around, while your muscles go twenty to the dozen. In fact, of course, this already exists; its jungle. That's the whole point of it.*
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### Virtualization, diagonalization, destratification

> *One sense in which that is the case is when you’re exploring the territory between percussive units and waveforms. So, if you have a snare and you repeat it and bring it closer and closer and closer together, until you produce a kind of buzz, you know, that becomes a tone. And you can pitch the sample up and down and create these elastic runs of percussive samples that become tonal glissandi. This is something that regularly happens in jungle, a slippage where encapsulated units of sound freighted with a semantic status are ‘melted down’ and used as sonic particles to forge some other fluid sonic phenomenon. So essentially in this music there are produced spontaneously certain methods of problematising the objectivity of the sound object.*
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> *Most importantly there is the use of timestretching endemic to jungle, and the idea that timestretching is a fundamental diagonalization of the double articulation of acoustic time itself as expressed in the waveform, whereby, given a recording on a physical medium, you usually can’t speed up its playback without making the pitch higher. In violating this principle by using digital sampling, it’s almost as if timestretching breaks time itself. That’s the affect of timestretching, that’s how it feels when you listen to it, but also there’s a deeper kind of truth to it.*
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> […] *The crucial thing here is, just as, in a sense, ‘below’ all geological stratifications, all different rock formations, there is the same virtual material (what D&G call ‘the body of the earth’), beneath all organised sound we can similarly postulate a sonic virtuality. The ‘line of flight’ out of sonic articulation is achieved precisely to the extent that one is able to access that virtuality, which is the ultimate material basis of all sonic organization.*
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> […] *In that sense then, jungle also became a kind of model for diagonalizing. How do we escape from double articulation? How do we escape from the strata, at all scales? We looked in these new sonic operations as kind of exemplary models for how one can operate this destratification, this return to the potential of virtual matter, called for by Deleuze and Guattari.*
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### Blackness and hybridity

> *Jungle is where these different Black Atlantic genres converge.*
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[TODO: importance of soundsystems as swarm tactics, a cultural inheritance of the diaspora by way of Jamaica; Energy Flash, https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/the-wire-300\_simon-reynolds-on-the-hardcore-continuum\_introduction , https://readthis.wtf/writing/capitalism-and-schizophrenia-wildstyle-in-full-effect/ ]

## Jungle as alive space

Similarly, jungle as a way of alive space, or as a more generic word encompassing both this and previous musical meaning is a foil for Oecumenic stasis:

> *K-jungle spreads across delocalizing periphery, teaching itself to escape.* […] *Jungle as a space dislocator, destratifying cities snarled in an arcane surveillance apparatus […] the urban city is a jungle. becoming snake, becoming clandestine in nights of microcultural mutation. becoming zero as machinic assemblages mashup and crossfade. becoming diagonal as markets lock into guerrilla commerce, ever-decamping nomad cultures, melting in the heat of the chase. Alienated and loving it. Current.*
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1. ↑ Mark Fisher & Robin Mackay- Pomophobia
2. ↑ Kodwo Eshun- Motion Capture
3. ↑ Steve Goodman- Darkcore
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Rhythmic Practices
5. ↑ Kodwo Eshun- Abducted by Audio
6. ↑ Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Jungle (Interview) (Part 1)
7. ↑ Reynolds, Simon (1998). Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. Picador. ISBN 0330350560.
8. ↑ Ccru- Swarmachines