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"Pop-goes-clubbing," "the sound of uninhibited, unironic hands-in-the-air joy," "the sound of someone changing dance music by utterly disregarding dance music," "rave-inspired dance maximalism". Yeah, yeah, I know it is music writers' favourite pastime to make up genre genealogies (just two months ago the aforementioned Reynaldo suggested that it was Basement Jaxx's album Rooty (2001) that presciently announced the shape of pop to come), but I would really like for people to revisit this gem with new ears, and experience it through the lens of all the cultural baggage accumulated around it since its release. Looking back on the past decade in electronic music, to me, Glass Swords actually symbolises the dawn of hyperpop. What took me by surprise on first listen in 2021 was how prophetic it actually was. At a loss for words, writers would simply classify it as electronic music, but there were some specific aesthetic qualities to it, both sound and structure-wise, which would later fully form and finally blossom through the music of other young artists. It also made it to the AOTY lists of The Wire, Mixmag and The Guardian, which is unsurprising considering how unanimously perplexed and excited most music critics were by it (go check its Wikipedia entry to get an idea). Produced between 20, Rustie's debut LP baffled music critics with its uniquely artificial patina and elusive transgenreness in the realm of post-dubstep electronica.
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Working on a presentation on the topic of futurist dance music earlier this year, in the fantastic book The Music Of The Future (Repeater Books, 2017) by fellow tQ writer Robert Barry, I discovered the record Glass Swords by Scottish producer Rustie, released on October 10, 2011, by Warp Records to great acclaim. There is also another, at least from my point of view, important anniversary to be celebrated this month, one perhaps even more relevant to the contemporary state of affairs in forward-looking dance music. Since you are going to read about it elsewhere for sure, I decided to grab your attention with a different jubilee. With the release of the gargantuan intergenerational compilation Tresor 30, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of the legendary German club and label with an exquisite selection of 52 tracks from legends and rising artists of all generations, for the major part of October, it was techno – its past and future – that occupied dance music stans and writers. But it is also a transglobal cultural phenomenon larger than life, which is slowly succumbing to the self-mythologisation process that we have witnessed in popular culture so many times before, most notably in rock. As Shawn Reynaldo discussed in his recent First Floor newsletter, in 2021 we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of techno music, a genre torn between futurism and nostalgia.