EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 29 - Bubbling
Genre of the Day - Bubbling
Album of the Day - Bubbling Forever by De Schuurman (2024)
Today’s genre, floating up through the seafoam frothing from the Caribbean Sea all the way to the North Sea, may take the cake for the most fun name (though not without the competition of chutney and honky-tonk). It also happens to reflect the music’s sonic bursts blasting like jacuzzi jet streams like you’re at an underwater rave. Today’s genre also reminds us that while musc’s creation is generally a delicate push-and-pull of experimentation and intention, happy accidents in the music technological journey generate just as much sonic joy and energy.
Dutch colonial exploits are typically more well-known for fulfilling Europe’s lucrative, insatiable taste for spices that led to control over the Indonesian archipelago, purchasing Manhattan and flinging a bunch of not-so-PETA-approved place names like Fishkill into the Hudson Valley, and South Africa’s heinous Apartheid practices rooted in Dutch settler times. Though the Dutch West India Company only lasted for fifty years in the 17th century, its southerly Caribbean ABC holdings (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao—pretty convenient acronym for tourist boards) remain as remnants of the Netherlands’ colonial legacy to this day. While we’ve covered the connections between the music of former French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies across the world and through centuries, today we dive into what flows across the Atlantic from the Dutch Antilles to the Netherlands.
First-time purchasers of record players are faced with another unfamiliar acronym and esoteric numbers: RPM, at 33,45, and perhaps 78 if you score a particularly vintage model. Standing for revolutions per minute, each RPM represents a different technological phase in the story of vinyl. Early shellac records were played at 78, but with improvements in sound quality, 33 RPM records allowed for longer 12-inch LPs and 45 RPMs brought crisp sound quality to 7-inch singles. Many a clueless vinyl enthusiast might make the mistake of hitting the wrong button for the wrong record.
When your finger slips and causes the same mistake as a DJ, you wouldn’t expect people to be pleased with the comically fast, pitched-up result. On a chance night in the career of Curaçao-born DJ Moortje, that mistake became his creative drive. When he accidentally sent a dancehall record flying in 45 RPM at a 1988 rave in The Hague, the audience, who evidently must’ve been forebearers of nightcore enthusiasts, loved it. The Dutch do have a propensity for crazy, sped-up dance flavors, such as the development of gabber around the same time as bubbling. Bubbling bubbled up into the world due to sheer accident, but DJ Moortje recognized its potential and set to work injecting techno synths into sped-up dancehall beats and Afro-Antillean tambú percussion and accompanying gyrating dances to craft an idiosyncratic sound that represented a rare, potent cultural inroad of the tiny-but-mighty Antilles within the Netherlands. As with many electrifying new forms of rave music before it became more corporatized in the late ‘90s, bubbling faced various authoritative challenges owing to violent breakouts at certain performances and some MCs’ anti-government lyrics. It slowly petered out into the late ‘90s as gabber’s grip on Dutch EDM intensified.
Bubbling buffs have continued to keep the bubbles flowing, and De Schuurman has been integral in maintaining its lifeline as he fused bubbling with updated house strands in the late 2000s. His devotion to bubbling persists, and this album is hot off the streaming press—it’s the first in this column to be released this year. With its drawn-out risers and tactful explosions of whoops, lasers, and tambú rumbles, his efforts suggest we could consider transitioning from brat summer into bubbling during the season’s tail-end. The squealing, strange harmonics of “Raw[‘s]” synths and cracking rumble strike a peculiar, gleaming contrast to typical house chord vamping. He envisions 2020s bubbling with a roundhouse of touches from across the club scene and Caribbean palettes, from the characteristic whip sounds of Jersey club adding to the party of the high-velocity intensity of “Bienniale Dakar” and touches of Suriname’s signature jaunty kaseko on the addictively dense “Bubbling Meets Kaseko.” The neoperreo-parallel “Stylez two” throws samples into a bubbling whirlpool—juiced-up steel drum, accordion, and the ever-relevant hook of “Sound of da Police” swirl at dizzying speeds. In listening to these records, the energy to move bubbles up naturally, and if revivers continue to pursue its energy, it’s a bubble I can’t see bursting any time soon.