Energy Flash: Of Instagrammatology
Thursday, June 4, 2026
Of Instagrammatology
Had Instagram for ages and ages but never got into looking at it regularly until quite recently.... the algorithm quickly learned to serve me up dance music, as that's what I'd linger on. So what I get is an endless succession of reels of deejays playing tunes, either in their living room, or it's clips of them performing at a rave.<br>Occasionally there'll be one where a DJ or producer talks about a classic track, either their own or someone else's - breaking down its sample constituents, naming its breaks, or talking about the gear used to make it. I also get a fair number of haggard record collectors type sitting in their 'record room' pulling out obscure library or soundtrack LPs, or Old Wave cult items, and mumbling about them.<br>But what follows here are some thoughts on dance music today informed entirely by the Instagram perspective.
TimeisNOTnow<br>I say ‘dance music today', but the first thing that comes across on Instagram is not-todayness: how dance music exists in a state of complete atemporality. Tunes from decades ago sit alongside current tracks that are either incrementally different contributions to a long established and overcrowded tradition (techno, house, D&B, trance) or they are outright retro (with just a glisten of contemporary production polish sprucing up the time travel). Deejays draw from across these huge reserves of material, where the long-ago and the this-minute are equally valid.<br>There's a tremendous awareness of history - a lot of clips are like ultra-brief history lessons, on a genre or a sound (like say Reese bass) or an auteur (DJ Zinc just today did a great little potted history of three key tracks by A Guy Called Gerald ). Yet offsetting that historical awareness, the overall effect of the platform interface for users is that chronology gets completely jumbled. There's little sense of a tune's original context (let alone adversarial context) or its place in historical sequence: the platform makes everything current.<br>What has completely vaporized is the idea that anything is obsolete or passé. Everything exists in a permanent plateau of equal relevance - which has the side effect of making it impossible for any one sound (should an actually fully new sound ever emerge) to assert itself as supremely relevant and demanding of your undivided attention. Indeed, you could say that our attention is pre-divided, splayed across both an enormously expanded and accessible present and a teeming archival vastness that feels vertiginously limitless. Anything that is new and different, like say amapiano, has to fight against, fights its way through, all this quality music arrayed before our ears.<br>An example of how these syndromes play out.
The gentleman who calls himself Fish56Octagon - and who deejays in his front room wearing a dressing gown (I'm always expecting it to come open as he jigs about, genitals bouncing forth) and often is nibbling on his breakfast, which appears to be Weetabix bits in what looks like a dog's bowl - played a nu-UKG tune on this label:<br>Timeisnow<br>Sub-label of Shall Not Fade, specialising in UK bass-driven dance music styles.<br>Established 2019. Bristol, UK.<br>The record has a period-perfect title, Bubblers EP, and the sound is spot-on
According to Mr Fish, this labels and others like it have pushed nu-UKG to the point where deejays playing it are getting major sets at festivals all around the world.<br>And this makes me queasy.... for all the reasons you can imagine. Like what happened to supercession? The dialectic of dance? Fanatical focus?<br>(Mr Fish picks from a huge range of genres and as a working deejay either jumbles it all up in a set OR plays a set dedicated to a single genre but just as one arrow from his quiver)<br>Atemporality and historical hyper-awareness has some strange kinks.<br>Here's a nu-UKG label called Move Silent , and Keymag asks the man behind it why the name: "This is really giving up the secret. Years ago, I had this t-shirt that sold really well, and had the phrase "Move Silent". It embodies how I operate in life. I’m a big believer in the phrase, "empty vessels make the loudest noises". "<br>Which is funny to me because I would have 100 percent assumed otherwise it was a nod to "Bad Boys Move In Silence" - could this dude really not know the foundational UKG track by A Baffled Republic ?
(Mind you, I only just realised the line "bad boys move in silence" comes originally from Notorious B.I.G.)<br>Another label Shadow System , the guy behind first heard UKG from his dad playing it!<br>(Reminds me of another reel I saw recently, a young kid playing "hardcore jungle" - and the text reads: "When ur dad’s in the crowd so you gotta blend in his favorite tune from back in the day")<br>Some of these nu-UKG labels are as far flung as Finland and Houston, Texas.<br>So it's not just atemporalized, dance music, it's really postgeographicalized too - unrooted from any location socially and...