Jakbeat Is Now

hypnotic tunneling eternity

Of the musical continua emerging to pre-prominence in our dystopic present, Jakbeat is the lone creative seam explicitly championed by contemporary artists. What is Jakbeat? Though not its only progenitor its most visible is Traxx aka duKe aka Melvin Oliphant III aka Jak aka (skipping over several other pseudonyms). Traxx’s late-career prolificacy has developed its own ineluctable momentum. His tangled catalog, remixes, dj mixes, presence, energy, statements (he presents his work with great discursive intention) have snowballed over the past three decades, emerging as a center of gravity with enough mass to warp the cultural fabric, a powerfully electric vision which has rapidly earned global recognition among Those Who Know without scaling…

There is an element of his creative success and relentless work ethic which suggests the results flow from hiding in plain sight—your favorite DJ’s favorite DJ, he’s been a known quantity for years, with only a cult of fanatics who recognize immersion is the sole method for truly understanding the work’s arcane hypnotic charms. Obscured from the the social media tech-hell eye of Sauron, releases exclusively on 12”, live performances, an artistic practice which resists easy commodification and fills whichever space it finds, which rejects the dictates of youth-ordered subculture, driven by the passion of an artist inspired by an immense breadth of tones and colors, but whose resolute principled devotion to the vision over the decades has protected its growth and evolution…I think often of Liz Armstrong’s 2002 description of Traxx’s DJ sets—consistent as ever: “Traxx patches together a schizophrenic jumble of house, punk, new wave, bad industrial goth, and whatever else he feels like.”

As I’ve discussed in previous mentions of Traxx’s cyberfunk-inflected collaborative project Panoramic Coloursound, the notion of “industrial goth” as being self-evidently “bad” has aged terribly, but as primary sourcing reflecting both Traxx’s consistent vision (a reflection of his 1980s-90s Chicagoland upbringing and his own iconoclastic insistence), it is a tell: what preserved Traxx, for years, as a kind of marginal figure who now seems prophetic if not revolutionary, was a will-to-coherence impervious to trends. Likewise, what feels perpetually cool about industrial music is its ability to hide in plain sight, much as Traxx has himself, protected from reassessment and NPR-ification by its own misshapen idiosyncrasy.

As discussed in previous posts, Traxx’s Nation label website summarized Jakbeat thusly:

In detail what defines jakbeat tracks has a lot to do with the jacking feeling and little to do with labels, aesthetics, or any list of synthesizers.

The Jack sound exists in an endless assortment of musics.

For a while it was generally known that you do not need a Roland TB303 to make ‘acid’. But as other fashions took control of our house that fundamental understanding was lost…and the aesthetic took over.

A contrived image was left with the masses.

Jakbeat as it has come to be known is a not just a hash back to a golden age of house, it’s not just a mess of drum beats and synths and it’s not just something that is created at random.

“Jakbeat” is a state of mind and different level of musical consciousness.

This sound was influenced from the early inception of dance music.

As a collective we want to produce an impressive slew of no-holds-barred full on electronic/synth rhythm tracks resisting the current trend for an over-calculated digital sound which has retained the musicality in keeping it very real.

I repost for emphasis, the particular rejection of certain limiting axes of interpretation: jakbeat is not an “aesthetic.” It’s not about the orthodoxies of equipment-used or the marketing determinations of labels. It’s not slavish devotion to tradition—which has been a critique leveled in the past but also remains in many of the more ‘neutral’ descriptions of jakbeat as a sound and Traxx as an artist. And “it’s not just something that is created at random”—this is not an embrace of the arbitrary, there is a unifying lineage and tradition and vision which informs the practice, a thread of some kind connecting these works. But what is it?

My own experience of this sound is that it’s primarily rhythmic. It pre-empts boredom anathema to my listening. It fidgets, it scratches an itch, it engages in patterns and the prismatically alters them in unpredictable and unproven ways, or sometimes it is more-than-predictable, it shortcuts, or relies on ugly suddenness of sound. It spirals and bends through repetition, with subtle alterations rather than noodling. It prioritizes rhythm and creates a hypnotic, tunneling pre-consciousness, compulsive and physical. The result is a sound which is at once easy to feel without training or effort, intuitive, as the body betrays unselfconscious movement. Yet it remains uncontrolled, unpredictable, an electric current which travels along lines determined by laws deeper and more abstruse than the artist, laws of nature, chain reactions at an atomic level, and so forth.

“I always stated the following: ‘Jakbeat is a state of mind and different level of musical consciousness. This sound was influenced from the early inception of dance music.’” —Traxx

What I particularly appreciate about this articulation (Traxx’s) is it sees the genre’s origins not in terms of a tradition one must adhere to, but a particular coherence obfuscated and forgotten, and which reflects a basic understanding I have in my own experiences with dance music: a lot of it fucking sucks, a lot of it is simply bad, and yet being in the room with a DJ who knows how to forge a path, who cultivates a sense of personality through their work will create a sense of Belief, an undeniable, compulsive hold, a shamanic certainty. At times, as one ages, they question—maybe it was just youth? Certainly I was somewhat less critically-minded when I was 22, and there’s nothing as electrifying as our earliest exposures to this world, but before a true artist one is easily reminded that that no, many people are simply not driven by the urge to actually create something good.

To dive into Traxx’s work is rewarding because you cannot replicate the feeling with any other DJ or in any other setting—not that there aren’t other Jakbeat DJs, or people playing the styles he gravitates to, but because his vision is so total that he dictates even the medium of consumption in so many ways, and those mediums shape, to a radical degree, your buy-in. There will be more discussion of Traxx’s output in the future—the Nation label 12”s, his recent release alongside William Strangeland as “Duke Strange,” the Dirty Blends 12”s (his own releases and those he’s curated), his band Nu Vision (I recommend “R U Serious?” from recent release The Seed), for example—but today I’m going to recommend the ten-hour mix he released recently as an entree you can work through over the next week or so. (Then dig into his 6-hour “ArtFunk” mix live in Baltimore.) See you on the other side.