riot beats

VARIOUS ARTISTS

ROUGH AND FAST

(Riot Beats) 
The Wire, 1995?

by Simon Reynolds

All my anxieties about jungle's upwardly-mobile drift

towards dubious concepts like 'musicality' and 'maturity'

seem to be on the verge of becoming horrendous reality.

You've got artists utilising 'real' musicians, punters who

(ap)praise tracks in terms of how 'clean' their production

is, and a burgeoning mutual admiration pact between the Mo'

Wax posse and the drum & bass intelligentsia. All the new

styles in what must now be termed post-jungle are ultra-

smooth and mellifluously mellow--from hardstep, with its

fussy hi-hat shuffle-beats and tastefully restrained soul-diva

passion, to the fusion-tinged serenity and long sustained

synth-tones of the LTJ Bukem school.  Don't get me wrong,

these developments are still generating astonishing music.

But sometimes you've got to wonder: whither jungle's mania,

madness, ruffness?

For that, you might look to the UK's 'happy hardcore'

scene, which has back-lashed to '92 in order to follow a

different path than that taken by drum & bass, i.e. fixating

on staccato synth-stabs, rush-activating piano riffs, helium-

shrill vocals and stomping 4/4 beats. Or you might check out

Germany's small but fervent breakbeat scene, as represented

on Rough and Fast.  Based around a handful of labels,

Germanic jungle has more of an explicitly political edge than

its British cousin.  Key figure Alec Empire of agit-tekno

combo Atari Teenage Riot released a jungle track called "Hunt

Down the Nazis" (appropriate given that jungle is all about

musical miscegenation and post-colonial cultural hybridity).

Doubtless by necessity, German jungle is less polished

and fluent than current UK fare, but in a way that only adds

to its raw appeal--there's a fierce inflexibility, an un-

swinging rigour, to the drum programming that's curiously

invigorating at a time when so much UK drum & bass verges on

fuzak-with-breakbeats.  Much of this comp harks back to

jungle's under-rated 'dark' phase of early 1993, when

hardcore producers were first messin' with fucked up rhythms

but the music still retained some relation to techno (Joey Beltram/Belgian brutalism style as opposed to trance).

And so DJ Moonraker's "Lion King" and Space Cube's "Dark

Dive" both let rip bass-blast synth-riffs, redolent of the

Frankfurt-based PCP label's brand of stormtrooper tekno,

amidst the jittery, shimmery breaks, while Roland 303

aciiied-squiggles are woven into the hyper-syncopated bustle

of Sonic Subjunkies' "Djungelstadt" and Dr Echo & DJ

Reverend's "Fine Style".  And on Doc Tom's "Moskito" there's

a terrific ear-searing synth-noise that, yup, sounds like a

squadron of mosquitos dive-bombing upon your flesh.

As with most non-Anglophone appropriations of Brit-pop

there's something slightly wrong-sounding about the results:

just check those names--Doc Tom, Sonic Subjunkies, Mental

Bombin, DJ Reverend. But the best tracks here--the

itchy'n'scratchy insectoid scrabble of Biobreaks' "May The

Funk Be With You", the prehensile rhythmic intricacies and

gamelan-textured percussion-rolls of Da Captains of Phuture's

"Legendary Flight"--suggest not just that the Krauts may soon

catch but with their UK forebears, but that jungle's next and

most interesting phase will involve regional hybrids across

the globe: G-funk junglism, Miami Bass'n'drum, Latin-

breakbeat, Scandinavian new complexity 'ardkore....