>>53676832
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA_a7Y1yx6w
>V/Vm - The Death of Rave
The concept is simple: a requiem/celebration of a now bygone age - the rave years. How it's done? Well, take several hours/days worth of late 80s/early 90s rave tunes and mangle away at them, hacking at the beats and distorting until what remains is a pulverised, sludgey residue of noise. Slowly, the beats become atomised leaving, mostly, a sheet of noise. Ugly, ugly noise, whirling, swirling and incoherently swarming. Occasionally the noise is punctuated by some luminous interludes of serene beauty, moments of clarity amid the chaos. But soon enough there's more noise... nightmarish blaring noise cascading down like monsoon rains.
There are parallels between The Death of Rave and Kirby's work as The Caretaker: in both cases, dance music (admittedly quite different forms of dance music) are sonically mutilated until they resemble something almost ghostly. But whereas, say, Persistent Repetition of Phrases invokes sound of music reverberated around the empty floorboards of some haunted dancehall, TDoR brings to mind the flaying limbs of ghostly dancers from distant warehouse raves... their frugging bodies twitching away to beats that have dissipated long, long ago, their spirits stuck forever between the barren, empty concrete floor and the rotten, rusting corrugated iron walls.
At times, The Death of Rave resembles an endurance task... listening to the full 111 tracks on the basic release and the 94 additional tracks on will take 19 and a bit hours. It's not a pleasant listen on the whole, it's not even that enjoyable - it's brutal, it's disorientating and it's unnerving. But somehow it's also kind of entrancing. And maybe that's the point...