Back when The Duke was in the high-school, what occurred was that every damn fella other than the few impossibly hip cats who served as the folks The Duke would hang around with, smoke with, swear inventively with, wanted to be listening to the "hardcore". What The Duke knew to be "hardcore", either with regards pornography or cannibal films or maybe the musical genre explored by the likes of Black Flag or those straight edge folks, had little to do with what these school-chums wanted to be obsessing over.
Check this shit, they would holler, and next thing I know I'm graced with a cassette featuring a load of bleeps and blobs and crappy dittering that sounded dated even then, even when the thing was first minted.
Looking back now, I can see how there may have been something worthwhile amidst all that cack. I mean come the hell on, The Prodigy made dance music a snarling, threatening attack in the shape of Music For The Jilted Generation, and then there were Atari Teenage Riot, who were busy increasing the BPM to such undanceable levels that a man's knees would smoulder at the very thought of it.
Still, in The Northern Ireland at the time, you had to go to extreme lengths to find anyone closing their eyes and making swirly shapes with their arms to music a man might conceivably adore.
Dance music sucks, was The Duke's train of thought.
What happened next was that a bunch of metal types from Nottingham were busy getting signed to a major label, Geffen, no less, and were about to release a record that fused dance with punk in a manner that blew the fucking cack on those "DJ tapes" out of the damn water.
This was dance music The Duke could believe in.
True, it owed more to Slayer than to, say, 2 Unlimited, but still, it had enough beats, bleeps, blobs to win over one or two folks in the vicinity.
That record, www.pitchshifter.com, was a revelation. It still sounds amazing now. How many of those damn "techno sets" got an airing after, ooh, October 1994?
The new live DVD, PSI-entology, is a testament to how brilliant these folks are. The bulk of the footage concerns a show at Nottingham's Rock City, a ferocious performance, even though The Duke preferred it when frontman J.S Clayden had black hair, instead of the bleached-blonde look sported nowadays.
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