Space Bass Mix 1.01

Electro swing is a mix of modern techno beats and swing band sounds from the 30's and 40's. In the same way that techno takes favoured clips of contemporary musical sounds and loops them, so electro swing does with those big band sounds.

The outcome is that you get a mix of horns, clarinets, jazz guitar, etc over a hypnotic drum and bass beat. Very good for dancing. Even white men like me can dance to this stuff.

Rhythm and rhythmic movement has always played a large part in the human experience. No other species on the planet gets mesmerised by rhythm in this way. No other species has ever been seen tapping its foot (or tentacle or whatever) to the sound of music or beating drums. We alone seem affected by it.

Is rhythm something to do with consciousness? Self-awareness? Large social groupings? Was it a fore-runner to more complex forms of communication? Did it precede language?

Imagining the first twinges of self-awareness in our species, one can imagine how thumping the ground with a stick or a rock may have led to two or more sapiens taking it up at the same time. Would they, inevitably, have endeavoured to merge their timings? Would this have led to more and more of the family joining in and beginning to experience collective consciousness? Would the lonely collective thumping have sounded out into the night and given them heart that, despite the unknowableness of everything, they at least had each other?

My guess is that it was the advent of fire control which led to this. Without fire, daily lives would have been much more restricted to dawn and dusk. Early cold beds would have prompted sleep as soon as possible. With fire, social evenings were born, along with the opportunity to relax (knowing other animals were still wary of fire) and to develop skills and techniques for living and communicating for which day time living simply didn't have the time or stasis.