Various Artists
Routes from the Jungle: Escape Velocity Volume 1
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
Showing posts with label JUNGLE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JUNGLE. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 7, 2023
Wednesday, August 2, 2023
Jungle ! (January 22, 1994)
Not the first thing I did on jungle in Melody Maker - there was this Singles Club column from three months earlier focusing on releases from Moving Shadow and Reinforced.
And much earlier in April '93, I did a Letter from SW2 column about "Junglist" music
But this
was the first proper feature, as in piece that includes interview material with an actual living-breathing junglist (Goldie, my go-to motormouth for much of ,the earlier championing).
But although this was the first proper feature to appear, it was actually the second to be written - for in the last months of '93 I had written for the then-new US rap 'n' B mag Vibe a much larger piece on jungle - including more quotes from Goldie - and making the hip hop connection central to my pitch to the readership as to why they oughta take heed. Owing to longer lead times with a monthly mag, this appeared in spring '94.
Now I think of it there was actually there was another smaller piece on Goldie in among this flurry - from October 1993. Using that same odd, disconcerting photograph - his press shot of the time.
Getting a lot of use out of that first interview with the G-Man! He could cram a lot of words into a 45 minute phone chat. I particularly enjoyed Goldie's swipe at Sven Vath - at that time, the superiority of jungle over trance was self-evident to me, if no one else. Indeed around this time I did yet another piece, this time for The Wire, that was based around this trance v. jungle counter-view.
But back to the January '94 piece. It was part of a big Melody Maker issue dedicated to the electronic dance music explosion - Underworld on the cover, page upon page upon page of coverage of the kind of artists that would be the staple of Muzik magazine (essentially a club culture offshoot of MM). The singles page was put in the hands of Orbital. Even the technical-muso pages were given over to electronica (The Drum Club talking about their gear - pass the smelling salts).
The whole of that issue is below for your delectation. Seldom has such a confraternity of pale, male, bald-bonced individuals been gathered within a single publication!
Jungle was included on the periphery of this feature package, held at arm's length as it were - the (literal) black sheep of the family.
Scanning the contents today, what strikes me about all these names - then automatically given more credence than your 4 Heroes and LTJ Bukems - is how few have them have endured.
Thursday, June 2, 2022
Sorted - DB and Dara bring the old skool vibe back (2002)
Sorted
Village Voice, 2002
by Simon Reynolds
In the UK, rave nostalgia is old enough to warrant nostalgic
pangs itself. For years now there’ve been acid-house flashbacks, Back To ’92
hardcore nights, and recently even Back to ’97 (speed garage’s annus mirabilis)
parties. Hosted by original junglist DB and drum’n’bass selecta Dara, Sorted
was Manhattan’s first proper dose of old skool rave retro. At this dummy
edition of what’s intended as a regular monthly, an astonishingly fervent crowd
(many doubtless veterans of DB’s pioneering NYC rave party NASA) packed out Bar
13, lured by the slogan "come feel that vibe again".
"That vibe" being the starry-eyed and virginal
euphoria of a culture at its glorious dawn, an eon before its degeneration into
the numbingly professionalized leisure industry of today. 1988-92, the period
from which DB & Dara cherrypicked their relentless onslaught of classics,
is rave’s "Sixties". 1992-97 would be its "Seventies"
(fragmentation, darkness, aesthetic bloating versus strategies of
renewal-through-reduction) while ’97-to-02 is clearly the Eighties (irony,
self-reflexiveness, revivals galore). As with the original 1960s, during rave's
youth it seemed like the well of killer tunes would never dry, like the culture
would just keep on hurtling forwards forever.
"Music From London, Manchester, and Chicago" was
the promised menu, but the last two got pretty short shrift. (If you crave that
baggy beat, better hope the Madchester-retro party Hacienda, recently
deactivated, finds a new home). London’s breakbeat house and jungalistic hardcore
ruled the night. Rave’s own internal logic of intensification seemed to pull
the deejays towards 91/92 and keep them there, at that explosive brink where
hip hop met Italo-house met techno met Jamaica in the supercollider of mass
MDMA madness. "E’s Not Required This Time" winked the flyer, but it
was true: this music triggers the serotonin gush all by itself . Of course, it
doesn’t hurt if you have memories of all-night frenz-E burned into your nervous
system, like this crowd evidently did.
Recollected in tranquility, two patterns emerged. One was the absolute centrality, in this supposedly future-fixated music, of a 19th Century instrument, the piano. Tonight we heard track after track based on the plangent elation of major-key piano vamps. From Manix’s "Feel Real Good" to Awesome 3’s "Don’t Go", we were blessed by a cornucopia of keyboard riffs poised between sublimely simple and ridiculously inane.
The other thing that stood out
was a melancholy sense of 1991-92 as a lost/last moment before the rave
diaspora; before the tempos and intentions of the nascent subgenres (jungle,
trance, gabba, purist techno, etc) fatally diverged. Back then, a single set
could comfortably comprehend Felix’s gay nu-NRG thump, SL2’s hyper-skank, the
sneaky slink of Jaydee’s "Plastic Dreams", Human Resource’s infernal
blare, the serene bliss-waves of Jam & Spoon’s "Stella", Eon’s
proto-darkcore, and more. DB and Dara took us back to a time when the center
still held. They’d have to be crazy if they don’t make Sorted a regular thing,
and you’d have to be crazy to miss the next one.
Friday, August 6, 2021
Two Fingas interviewed on the emergence of jungle (in celebration of Repeater Books republication of Junglist)
JUNGLE EMERGES: A Flashback to 1993
director's cut of a piece written six years later, Spin, 1999
by Simon Reynolds
Years before Roni Size and LTJ Bukem became international hipster favorites, jungle was banished from the media limelight. To identify yourself as a "junglist" in 1993 meant you belonged to an outcast tribe, a scene feared by most London clubbers as a sinister underworld populated by speed-freaks and baby-gangstas. Born out of rave's Ecstasy-fuelled fervor, the music had mutated, under the influence of bad drugs and the desperation of the recession-wracked early Nineties, until it was too hard, too dark, and too black for most people to handle.
The emergence of jungle has everything to do with drugs. Its frantic breakbeat rhythms evolved because ravers buzzing on too many E pills and amphetamine wraps craved beats as hectic and hyper as their own overdriven metabolisms. The music's bad-trippy aura and disorientating FX simultaneously reflected and exacerbated the paranoia induced by long-term stimulant abuse. 1993 was the year of "darkside", a crucial transitional phase between hardcore rave's hands-in-the-air euphoria and jungle's guns-in-the-air menace.
"The production played tricks on your mind, " enthuses Two Fingas, co-author of the pulp novel Junglist, talking about twilight-zone jungle classics like Boogie Time Tribe's "Dark Stranger" and Origin Unknown's "Valley of the Shadows". "Darkside freaked out a lot of people, especially those still in the Ecstasy haze--because on E there's no distance between you and the music. Darkside was just evil, evil music--and that was good. Cos it got rid of the lightweights, to be honest".
One of the first all-jungle-DJs raves, Jungle Fever, went out of its way to scare off fans of happy rave and fluffy house, theming the venue with tombstones, coffins, and Gothic statuary. But the classic darkside moment in jungle mythology is an infamous inccident at a rave called Telepathy, where DJ Rap unwittingly played 4 Hero's "Mr. Kirk's Nightmare"---a song in which a father is informed about his son's fatal overdose--just seconds after a boy was knifed on the dancefloor.
Stabbings and muggings, friction and tension.... Many blamed the shift from rave's smiley-face glee to jungle's skrewface scowl on another drug: crack. After all, who else but rock-smoking fiends could possibly enjoy such insanely frenetic beats? Joe Wieczorek, owner of the hardcore rave club Labrynth, claims "the early dark jungle, you might as well call it crack music. There's nothing worse for a raver than being somewhere he doesn't feel safe, and if there's fifty rock-heads in the club, it's going to frighten the life out of you." But although there was a spate of anti-crack tunes like DJ Ron's "Crackman On the Line" in 1993, others reject the linking of jungle and crack as a crypto-racist slur.
If any substance has a claim to be the true junglist's drug, it's marijuana-- especially the hydroponically-grown ultra-strong weed known as skunk. An archetypal tableau in any jungle club is a group of boys stood in a huddle "building and burning." One youth clasps his hands together, fingers interlocked, and upturns the palms to form a flat surface for his friend to build a massive spliff on; in a crowded, jostling club, it's the only way to roll. Another friend leans close to block off the sight-lines of any security guard in the vicinity. "Burning"... well, that's self-explanatory. Marijuana is the reason jungle basslines started to run at reggae tempo, exactly half the speed of the accelerated breakbeats, thereby allowing dancers to skank rather than rave. And marijuana is why the nudge-nudge wink-wink references to E in tracks were gradually replaced by roots reggae samples exalting ganja, sensimilla and herb.
Jungle wouldn't exist without two black musics that also worship sub-bass and the chronic that intensifies the low-end boom: hip hop and reggae. The life arc of DJ Hype, founder of the labels Ganja and True Playaz, is typical. A white working class boy from the desolate East London borough of Hackney, Hype spent the Eighties playing on a reggae sound-system and competing in hip hop cut'n'mix contests. By 1990, he was spinning house on pirate station Fantasy FM and recording brutal Euro-techno anthems as The Scientist. Jungle is the only-in-London amalgam of all these different imported sounds, and crucially it was a collective invention. " I always say, we are the foundation, because there's no one record, no single DJ, no specific club, where jungle started," Hype declares.
If you wanted to pinpoint the emergence of jungle, though, one contender is the moment at the end of 1992 when tracks like Bodysnatch's "Just 4 U London" and Code 071's "London Sumting" hit the pirate radio airwaves. "That it's-a-London-thing stance, I always took as this-is-a-black-thing, y'know," says Two Fingas. "London has the biggest black population in Britain". It was black fashion that shaped jungle's style spectrum, which ranged from hip hop-influenced "ruffneck soldier" minimalism (puffy MA1 and MA2 flight-jackets, namebrand sneakers, baggy pants) to dancehall-reggae derived ghetto fabulous flashiness. At the ragga-dominated raves like Sunday Roast and Desert Storm, the 80 percent black British crowd "larged it" VIP style--the men flaunting Versace and Moschino, gold sovereign rings and bottles of champagne; the women flexin' their abdomens and winin' their waists in their skin-tight "batty rider" shorts, micro-skirts, bustiers, and thigh-high boots.
As well as changing the way people moved on the dancefloor, the ragga influence was decisive in another area that sealed jungle's break with house and techno: the crucial role of the MC. "Girls sticking their asses in the air and a MC really working the crowd, getting them to hold their lighters up and blow their horns to get the DJ to rewind the track." is how Lee Billingham, aka DJ Bo!ne, recalls his first encounter with jungle at the South London club Lazerdrome.
"I loved the whole 'selector! wheel-and-come-again!' , rewind thing," says Two Fingas, another Lazerdrome regular. The democratic way in which the audience controlled the DJ via the MC, he argues, is part of jungle's renegade blackness--its participatory, call-and-response ethos. "As the jungle MCs like GQ, Det, 5-0 and Moose took on the Jamaican patois thing, they became more than crowd motivators, they were vocalizing what the massive was feeling, connecting you with the music more intensely, and adding a lyrical element to this largely instrumental music. There's an ephemeral, magical quality to the MC chants--especially on the pirate radio stations, they'd just go off on one, creating stuff on the fly."
It's the pirate radio stations that are the real heroes of jungle's story--they kept the vibe alive in the scene's early, pre-breakthrough phase. London has dozens of these illegal radio collectives, gangstas of the airwaves who broadcast from the top of towering apartment blocks and engage in a constant, quasi-military struggle to survive not just governmental suppression but the skullduggery of rival stations who'll gladly steal their pirate brethren's transmitters. Legend has it that one outfit, Rush FM, turned the derelict upper floors of an East London block into a fortress so impregnable that the DJ's had to rappel up the side of the building to reach the studio. They sealed the stairwell entrance with concrete, hollow metal tubes pumped with ammonia gas, and a wire connected to the electrical supply. When local government officials attempted to drill through the barricade, they hit the live wire and an electric spark ignited the gas, exploding the concrete and showering the workmen with shrapnel.
Yet for all its militancy and moodiness, jungle seethed with "a fierce, fierce joy", as convert Bjork put it. The speed of the music was crucial, as if you could somehow ride its future-rush, achieve escape velocity, and smash through to a brighter tomorrow.
"The breakbeats were so fast and chopped up, your body wanted to be pulled in twenty different directions at once," recalls DJ Bo!ne of his baptismal experience at Lazerdome. "Me and my mates just looked at each other, jaws dropped, and were, like, 'This is mental!!!!"."
Says Two Fingas: "Anyone can be a junglist, but for me, it's part of having a black spirit. Jungle is about getting sweaty and having a religious experience on the dancefloor. It can feel like the Holy Spirit is moving through you."
Buy Junglist here (US) and here (UK)
More information here and Another Mag's interview with co-author James T. Kirk here
Saturday, July 24, 2021
lost in Muzik
a couple of old reviews of mine Michelangelo Matos found trawling through the back pages of Muzik, IPC Media's attempt to rival Mixmag and DJ.
Monday, June 10, 2019
the republic of rave (30 years on)
an article for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on 30 years of rave
"Once Upon a Time in the Rave"
Robinson magazine, part of La Repubblica
02 Ottobre 2018
by Simon Reynolds
Thirty years ago, the U.K. was convulsed by the birth of arguably the last real youth movement. Rave was a proper subculture, with rituals and its own clothing style as well as music. Between the winter of 1987 and the summer of 1989, a new template for youth leisure emerged that would ultimately spread across the world: massive parties in which hordes of young people, clad in brightly colored clothes, danced all-night-long to electronic rhythms, united not just in the trance caused by the hypnotic beats but through a blissful communion generated by the drug MDMA. As rave proliferated, DJs were idolized, but the true star remained the dancing crowd itself. Raves were fiestas of anonymous collectivity, where individual self-consciousness dissolved in a tribal vibe.
The story of rave actually begins outside the U.K., when a coterie of London deejays traveled to Ibiza in 1987 and there experienced the synergy between MDMA (also known as Ecstasy, or E) and house music (a post-disco style spawned in Chicago’s gay clubs). Attempting to bring back the summery “Balearic” vibe to wintry London, the deejays Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold launched the clubs Shoom and Spectrum. Their atmosphere of relaxed intimacy broke with the preexisting clubland ethos of cool and posing.
Meanwhile, in the Northern city of Manchester, a similar energy coalesced at the Hacienda, a cavernous and somewhat desolate club started earlier in the Eighties by Factory Records. House’s music brisk rhythms plugged into a regional taste for uptempo black music, reactivating the fevered spirit of Northern Soul (a Seventies subculture based around cult-worshipped deejays, imported black American dance singles, and amphetamines). The “Madchester” scene spawned some of the first UK artists to take the imported sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno and apply a unique British spin to them, such as A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State. There were also Manchester indie-rock groups who assimilated the new feeling, like Happy Mondays, who built a local following not just through their music but by selling pills of E direct to the audience. Their onstage frontline included a character known as Bez whose sole function was to swallow as much E as he could and do a bizarre twitchy dance. A holy fool of Ecstatic excess, Bez modelled a new dance culture archetype: the raver, whose uncool delirium superseded the club scene’s premium on elegance and composure.
“Rave” was actually an old word, dating back to the Sixties, when psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd threw All Night Raves. The term was reactivated in 1988 as the logic of the new culture demanded ever larger events: the more people in attendance, the more that the MDMA-induced feeling of unity was amplified. In the autumn of 1988, promoters began to throw events in warehouses and abandoned factories in run-down inner-city zones like London’s East End, or the industrial areas of Northern cities like Bolton or Sheffield. That logic of escalation then led in the summer of 1989 to even huger raves in the English countryside. Promoters took over farms (sometimes with the owner’s permission, but never notifying the authorities or following appropriate safety regulations) or they illegally occupied abandoned airfields. Long before mobile phones were widely available, rave organisers developed sophisticated methods of directing ravers to the secret locations, using phone messaging systems and “meet points” where cars of revelers drew up to receive further instructions. The strategy was to assemble a large number of people at a location before the police found out, at which point they would be forced to accept the de facto rave for fear of causing a riot if they attempted to shut it down.
The huge convoys of cars that arrived on the M25 motorway that encircled London every weekend, the massive assemblies of bizarrely dressed youngsters shattering the quiet of the English countryside with futuristic electronic noise - these disruptions could hardly fail to draw attention. And rave quickly became the most demonized British subculture since punk. Even without the drugs involved, you can see why both the political establishment and the general public might fear raves. Unruly gatherings of working class youths recalled the mass pickets during the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85. But rave stirred more inchoate fears. From the outside, raves did look like a pagan cult – kids flailing their limbs like voodoo worshippers. The word “rave” has connotations of madness, hysteria, or extreme forms of enthusiasm or fanaticism. In the Sixties, “raver” had been a slang term for a sexually wild girl. Many of the newspaper scare stories about rave in 1988-89 concerned classic scenarios designed to alarm parents: tales of teenage girls having their tender minds blown on LSD, of orgies and creepy strangers preying on helpless young females.
Actually, if anything, MDMA instilled a sexless vibe. Because MDMA’s effect encouraged tactile affection but suppressed sexual lust, the drug created an atmosphere in which women came into their own, free from the predations of the male gaze. Rave clothing was baggy, its looseness ideal for dancing in hot sweaty environments, but also child-like, hiding the curves of sexual differentiation. When the word “love” appeared in house tracks, it wasn’t a reference to erotic coupling but a feeling of open-hearted trust towards the strangers with which you shared the dancefloor– a marvelous sensation of “collective intimacy”. That’s why, in a playful postmodern nod to the hippie Sixties, ravers talked about 1988 as the Second Summer of Love. Later, in the early Nineties came a spate of rave tunes that sampled the melodies of children’s TV programmes. Rave as a culture involved a mass regression into innocence, a flight from adult responsibilities but also adult desires (remember, this was also the era of peak fear about AIDS).
Rarely directly political in its themes, rave’s collectivity offered an implicit rebuke to Margaret Thatcher’s worldview of competitive individualism, crystallized in her infamous statement that “there is no such thing as society” . Rave’s more fervent converts believed that the love drug Ecstasy could change the world. “They could settle wars with this… imagine the world’s leaders on pills” is how The Streets’s Mike Skinner recalled the feeling at the time in his 2002 rave-flashback song “Weak Become Heroes”. Indie-rock converts to rave The Farm, from Liverpool, scored a 1990 hit with “All Together Now”, a song inspired by the 1914 Christmas truce between British and German troops. And certainly in the early days of rave, the divisions between races, classes, and sexualities seemed to be dissolving in the woozy unity of the rave. Even the warring supporters of football teams fraternized in clubs and on the stadium terraces.
After the failure of police forces to thwart the big outdoor raves of 1989, Thatcher’s Conservative government passed the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990, legislation that threatened rave promoters with huge fines. For a while, the culture retreated back into the clubs. But then in 1991, the large-scale events resurged. Some were fully licensed and increasingly commercial, with spectacular lights and lazers and amusement-park side-shows. But there was also a new surge of illegal raves thrown by renegade outfits like Spiral Tribe, rough-and-ready parties without the amenities (like toilets or food) provided by the legal raves, but infused with a thrilling sense of adventure as you danced under the stars in remote areas of England.
As the music got harder and faster, matching the escalating drug consumption of the ravers, everything seemed to be hurtling towards some kind of catastrophic climax. It came with the May 1992 mega-rave at Castlemorton Common in the rural west of England. Urban ravers joined with hippie travelers, who for decades had traditionally migrated between summer festivals in their gaily painted buses and caravans and buses. Forty thousand revelers attended Castlemorton during the rave’s six days of existence, during which it made the front covers of every newspaper in the country and led to questions in Parliament. Ultimately the Conservative government responded with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which increased police powers to crush raves and harass travelers until their lifestyle became barely viable.
1992 may have been the peak of rave as a countercultural force, but the electronic dance culture only grew bigger as the Nineties unfolded. Musically it fragmented and mutated into a huge range of genres and micro-scenes. But its mainstream of house and trance-techno also became a well-organised and profitable leisure industry, with the rise of superclubs like Cream, Ministry of Sound and Gatecrasher: mini-corporations who raked in the money with merchandising, sponsorship deals, even club tours that took their legendary "vibe" around the county. Paralleling this professionalization was the emergence of a Premier League of super-deejays who travelled up and down the UK (and internationally too), earning thousands of pounds for each two-hour set and often playing several gigs per night at the weekend.
By the turn of the millennium, club culture had become a predictable and even controlling institution. It arguably still largely operates as a kind of social safety-valve, encouraging youth to live for the temporary utopia of the weekend rather than invest their idealism in a long-term collective project of political change. Yet there are other legacies that still retain elements of the dissident potential of the original rave movement. The gay roots of electronic dance music have been reaffirmed by a new breed of queer and trans electronic artists like Arca, Elysia Crampton and Lotic. Then there’s the black British genre of grime, which emerged in the early 2000s from London’s illegal pirate radio culture (which earlier fostered the fiercest and strangest mutants of rave music, like jungle).
Demoting the status of the deejay, grime elevated the MC – hitherto a secondary figure in UK rave – and pushed his lyrics and vocal charisma to the fore. Initially apolitical and socially irresponsible in the gangsta rap style, grime’s political consciousness has matured and at the last UK election in June 2017 the genre threw its weight behind Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. The support of leading grime MCs like Stormzy and Novelist appears to have actually encouraged inner-city youth not just to register to vote but actually to turn up at the polling stations, resulting in Labour electoral gains and an unexpectedly close result that denied Prime Minister Theresa May an outright victory. In that sense, rave could be said to still be resisting Conservatism. At the Labour Party conference this week, Corbyn took to the stage to the tune of The Farm’s “All Together Now” and in his speech laid out a vision of reborn socialism that would effectively cancel the Thatcherite consensus of the last 35 years.
"Once Upon a Time in the Rave"
Robinson magazine, part of La Repubblica
02 Ottobre 2018
by Simon Reynolds
Thirty years ago, the U.K. was convulsed by the birth of arguably the last real youth movement. Rave was a proper subculture, with rituals and its own clothing style as well as music. Between the winter of 1987 and the summer of 1989, a new template for youth leisure emerged that would ultimately spread across the world: massive parties in which hordes of young people, clad in brightly colored clothes, danced all-night-long to electronic rhythms, united not just in the trance caused by the hypnotic beats but through a blissful communion generated by the drug MDMA. As rave proliferated, DJs were idolized, but the true star remained the dancing crowd itself. Raves were fiestas of anonymous collectivity, where individual self-consciousness dissolved in a tribal vibe.
The story of rave actually begins outside the U.K., when a coterie of London deejays traveled to Ibiza in 1987 and there experienced the synergy between MDMA (also known as Ecstasy, or E) and house music (a post-disco style spawned in Chicago’s gay clubs). Attempting to bring back the summery “Balearic” vibe to wintry London, the deejays Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold launched the clubs Shoom and Spectrum. Their atmosphere of relaxed intimacy broke with the preexisting clubland ethos of cool and posing.
Meanwhile, in the Northern city of Manchester, a similar energy coalesced at the Hacienda, a cavernous and somewhat desolate club started earlier in the Eighties by Factory Records. House’s music brisk rhythms plugged into a regional taste for uptempo black music, reactivating the fevered spirit of Northern Soul (a Seventies subculture based around cult-worshipped deejays, imported black American dance singles, and amphetamines). The “Madchester” scene spawned some of the first UK artists to take the imported sounds of Chicago house and Detroit techno and apply a unique British spin to them, such as A Guy Called Gerald and 808 State. There were also Manchester indie-rock groups who assimilated the new feeling, like Happy Mondays, who built a local following not just through their music but by selling pills of E direct to the audience. Their onstage frontline included a character known as Bez whose sole function was to swallow as much E as he could and do a bizarre twitchy dance. A holy fool of Ecstatic excess, Bez modelled a new dance culture archetype: the raver, whose uncool delirium superseded the club scene’s premium on elegance and composure.
“Rave” was actually an old word, dating back to the Sixties, when psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd threw All Night Raves. The term was reactivated in 1988 as the logic of the new culture demanded ever larger events: the more people in attendance, the more that the MDMA-induced feeling of unity was amplified. In the autumn of 1988, promoters began to throw events in warehouses and abandoned factories in run-down inner-city zones like London’s East End, or the industrial areas of Northern cities like Bolton or Sheffield. That logic of escalation then led in the summer of 1989 to even huger raves in the English countryside. Promoters took over farms (sometimes with the owner’s permission, but never notifying the authorities or following appropriate safety regulations) or they illegally occupied abandoned airfields. Long before mobile phones were widely available, rave organisers developed sophisticated methods of directing ravers to the secret locations, using phone messaging systems and “meet points” where cars of revelers drew up to receive further instructions. The strategy was to assemble a large number of people at a location before the police found out, at which point they would be forced to accept the de facto rave for fear of causing a riot if they attempted to shut it down.
The huge convoys of cars that arrived on the M25 motorway that encircled London every weekend, the massive assemblies of bizarrely dressed youngsters shattering the quiet of the English countryside with futuristic electronic noise - these disruptions could hardly fail to draw attention. And rave quickly became the most demonized British subculture since punk. Even without the drugs involved, you can see why both the political establishment and the general public might fear raves. Unruly gatherings of working class youths recalled the mass pickets during the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85. But rave stirred more inchoate fears. From the outside, raves did look like a pagan cult – kids flailing their limbs like voodoo worshippers. The word “rave” has connotations of madness, hysteria, or extreme forms of enthusiasm or fanaticism. In the Sixties, “raver” had been a slang term for a sexually wild girl. Many of the newspaper scare stories about rave in 1988-89 concerned classic scenarios designed to alarm parents: tales of teenage girls having their tender minds blown on LSD, of orgies and creepy strangers preying on helpless young females.
Actually, if anything, MDMA instilled a sexless vibe. Because MDMA’s effect encouraged tactile affection but suppressed sexual lust, the drug created an atmosphere in which women came into their own, free from the predations of the male gaze. Rave clothing was baggy, its looseness ideal for dancing in hot sweaty environments, but also child-like, hiding the curves of sexual differentiation. When the word “love” appeared in house tracks, it wasn’t a reference to erotic coupling but a feeling of open-hearted trust towards the strangers with which you shared the dancefloor– a marvelous sensation of “collective intimacy”. That’s why, in a playful postmodern nod to the hippie Sixties, ravers talked about 1988 as the Second Summer of Love. Later, in the early Nineties came a spate of rave tunes that sampled the melodies of children’s TV programmes. Rave as a culture involved a mass regression into innocence, a flight from adult responsibilities but also adult desires (remember, this was also the era of peak fear about AIDS).
Rarely directly political in its themes, rave’s collectivity offered an implicit rebuke to Margaret Thatcher’s worldview of competitive individualism, crystallized in her infamous statement that “there is no such thing as society” . Rave’s more fervent converts believed that the love drug Ecstasy could change the world. “They could settle wars with this… imagine the world’s leaders on pills” is how The Streets’s Mike Skinner recalled the feeling at the time in his 2002 rave-flashback song “Weak Become Heroes”. Indie-rock converts to rave The Farm, from Liverpool, scored a 1990 hit with “All Together Now”, a song inspired by the 1914 Christmas truce between British and German troops. And certainly in the early days of rave, the divisions between races, classes, and sexualities seemed to be dissolving in the woozy unity of the rave. Even the warring supporters of football teams fraternized in clubs and on the stadium terraces.
After the failure of police forces to thwart the big outdoor raves of 1989, Thatcher’s Conservative government passed the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act of 1990, legislation that threatened rave promoters with huge fines. For a while, the culture retreated back into the clubs. But then in 1991, the large-scale events resurged. Some were fully licensed and increasingly commercial, with spectacular lights and lazers and amusement-park side-shows. But there was also a new surge of illegal raves thrown by renegade outfits like Spiral Tribe, rough-and-ready parties without the amenities (like toilets or food) provided by the legal raves, but infused with a thrilling sense of adventure as you danced under the stars in remote areas of England.
As the music got harder and faster, matching the escalating drug consumption of the ravers, everything seemed to be hurtling towards some kind of catastrophic climax. It came with the May 1992 mega-rave at Castlemorton Common in the rural west of England. Urban ravers joined with hippie travelers, who for decades had traditionally migrated between summer festivals in their gaily painted buses and caravans and buses. Forty thousand revelers attended Castlemorton during the rave’s six days of existence, during which it made the front covers of every newspaper in the country and led to questions in Parliament. Ultimately the Conservative government responded with the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which increased police powers to crush raves and harass travelers until their lifestyle became barely viable.
1992 may have been the peak of rave as a countercultural force, but the electronic dance culture only grew bigger as the Nineties unfolded. Musically it fragmented and mutated into a huge range of genres and micro-scenes. But its mainstream of house and trance-techno also became a well-organised and profitable leisure industry, with the rise of superclubs like Cream, Ministry of Sound and Gatecrasher: mini-corporations who raked in the money with merchandising, sponsorship deals, even club tours that took their legendary "vibe" around the county. Paralleling this professionalization was the emergence of a Premier League of super-deejays who travelled up and down the UK (and internationally too), earning thousands of pounds for each two-hour set and often playing several gigs per night at the weekend.
By the turn of the millennium, club culture had become a predictable and even controlling institution. It arguably still largely operates as a kind of social safety-valve, encouraging youth to live for the temporary utopia of the weekend rather than invest their idealism in a long-term collective project of political change. Yet there are other legacies that still retain elements of the dissident potential of the original rave movement. The gay roots of electronic dance music have been reaffirmed by a new breed of queer and trans electronic artists like Arca, Elysia Crampton and Lotic. Then there’s the black British genre of grime, which emerged in the early 2000s from London’s illegal pirate radio culture (which earlier fostered the fiercest and strangest mutants of rave music, like jungle).
Demoting the status of the deejay, grime elevated the MC – hitherto a secondary figure in UK rave – and pushed his lyrics and vocal charisma to the fore. Initially apolitical and socially irresponsible in the gangsta rap style, grime’s political consciousness has matured and at the last UK election in June 2017 the genre threw its weight behind Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. The support of leading grime MCs like Stormzy and Novelist appears to have actually encouraged inner-city youth not just to register to vote but actually to turn up at the polling stations, resulting in Labour electoral gains and an unexpectedly close result that denied Prime Minister Theresa May an outright victory. In that sense, rave could be said to still be resisting Conservatism. At the Labour Party conference this week, Corbyn took to the stage to the tune of The Farm’s “All Together Now” and in his speech laid out a vision of reborn socialism that would effectively cancel the Thatcherite consensus of the last 35 years.
Monday, May 14, 2018
The Mover + Sick Music / gabba + drum & bass in the 21st Century
THE MOVER
In 1990, the German producer Marc Acardipane released “Reflections of 2017” under the name Mescalinum United – the first of many aliases, among them Pilldriver, Alien Christ, and most famously The Mover. “Reflections” was the flipside of “We Have Arrived”, a blaring stampede that laid down the blueprint for gabba: the crazy-fast, ultra-hard style of techno that stormed to popularity across Northern Europe and established outposts of fanatical followers all over the world. “2017” would remain a leitmotif in Acardipane’s work, appearing in track titles like “Lightbringer (Escape from 2017)” and as the catchphrase “see you in 2017”. Back in the early Nineties, 2017 must have seemed far off, a mind-swirl of dystopian mise-en-scenery out of Blade Runner, Robocop, and Terminator. Fans could imagine the Mover as a faceless rave equivalent to Snake Plissken from Escape from New York: a lone-ranger anti-hero making his way through the chaos of a collapsed society or a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Flash forward to the present: we have arrived, indeed we’ve overshot. The future-now of 2018 is dystopian and apocalyptic, for sure, but in ways we could never have imagined back in the Nineties. Compared with that decade, when he released hundreds of tracks through the Frankfurt-based family of labels he co-founded – PCP, Cold Rush, Dance Ecstasy 2001, etc - Acardipane had a quiet 21st century. His output oscillated between gestures towards credibility (a 2003 album for Tresor) and panders to the remaining gabbers in the Netherlands (plentiful enough to propel him into the pop charts). But there were long silences too. Then last year The Mover remobilized, with high-profile “living legend” style deejay appearances at raves and the remastered reissue of his greatest tracks. The plan was for an all-new album to come out in 2017 – completing the circle – but it got bumped to this year.
The ungainly album title Undetected Act from the Gloom Chamber suggests a certain awkwardness about returning to the fray. Which would be understandable, in so far as The Mover’s ästhetisch / weltanschauung is built around a foreboding futurity that we’ve in some sense gone past. Almost inevitably, Acardipane picks up exactly where he left off. All the things fans like me love, hallmarks of the style some of us call gloomcore, are amply present: the sky-darkening swoops of raven-black synth, the parade-ground snares and thick thuds of kickdrum; the cold cavernous reverb; the piteous melodies and macabre jeering sounds. Highlights include “Stealth,” an electro-tinged track bounced along by giant smacks of clap and a backwards bass-lurch like a tank’s caterpillar tread churning helplessly in mud, and “Doom Computer,” which drapes sickly drooping melody-riffs over a trudging march beat like a renegade legion of orcs on a dastardly mission.
The Mover’s first album came out in 1993 and bore the title The Final Sickness; earlier there’d been two Frontal Sickness EPs. That’s my segue to Sick Music 2018, a compilation on Hospital Recordings, for some time now drum and bass’s leading label. Every so often I ponder, as a long lapsed D&B believer, how the genre has carried on for a full twenty years after I stopped paying close attention: a timespan four times as long as the genre’s original heyday of 1993-97.
I wasn’t the only one to switch off. Once D&B commanded the attention of magazines like this one, as well as ideas-hungry pop stars like Bowie and Bjork. But now you’re more likely to see a review of a hauntological facsimile of 94-era jungle or darkcore-circa-93 in these pages, than a current exponent of the genre that is the extension of those sounds.
Not that the D&B scene cares particularly. Nor has it suffered from the external neglect. Arena-scale raves still happen regularly, scene elders like Andy C persevere and prosper, new DJs and producers replenish the field. A stable fixture in the genrescape, D&B has also stabilized as a form, “the full circumference” (as they used to call it) of its stylistic variants long since set out. Andy C’s defiant comment that D&B “isn’t going anywhere” could be read in a less flattering way. On the other hand, perhaps it’s time to give the genre a break, forgive and forget its promises to keep always moving forward. Why judge it any more harshly than all the other vanguard sounds that have slipped into a steady-state?
Sick Music contains a fair amount of the head-banger style that drove me out of the scene in ‘98, although after a long period of abstinence a track like Unglued’s “Bootstrap Bill”, a clattery battery of growling bass and bad-boy beats, sounds rather invigorating. But the freshest stuff by far here expands upon the “musicality” moves of the mid-Nineties: the easy-rollin’ heights (or Haigh-ts) and cruise-control bliss of prime Moving Shadow. The core of Hugh Hardie’s gorgeous “Nightingale” is a reverb-smudgy piano lick whose effect is like a cinematic dissolve, a twinkle in time. Modulating this curl of liquid smoke as if rolling a sip of wine across the palate, Hardie braids the keyboard chords with vocal murmurs, fast-flicker hand-percussion, and soft spasms of double-bass. Who’s to say a stone classic can’t happen during a genre’s middle age, rather than its youth?
Several of the best tunes here could be designated “lover’s jungle”. London Elektricity’s tingling and tremulous “Just One Second (Mitekiss Remix)” features a lyric about freeze-framing a moment of rapture - “if this second was my life / I would happily die” – delivered with that characteristically Scandinavian singer’s quality of cold-water clarity by Elsa Hedberg. Kubaiko’s “Playing Tricks” wordlessly transmits a similar butterflies-in-the-stomach sensation, twining a sprite-like vocal sigh with silvery whooshes of texture. Meshing an Amen-break like a bounding antelope with trance-style pulse-work, Seba x Physics’s “Innocence” is repeatedly split apart by the awe and gratitude of a diva’s “you show me how to love.” And Urbandawn’s “Spare Life” laces dewy synths and unexpected groans of shoegaze guitar over a midtempo groove.
Listening to Sick Music, it struck me that “drum and bass” seems almost a misnomer these days, directing attention as it does to what are now the least interesting aspects of the genre. The drums and the bass do their job efficiently enough: the former skittering briskly, the latter either supplying pulsing warmth or slicing crossways across the beat as blaring stabs. What holds and caresses the ear now is everything else going on in the arrangement and production: keyboards, orchestrations, the wisps and whispers of unidentifiable instrumentation, the overall shimmerglow of the sound design. Really, a better, more telling name would be “melody & mood.”
If both these releases show that an elder artist and a no-longer-young genre can still generate strong, exciting, and in many ways absolutely valid music, there still remains a lingering sense that both reached their apotheosis around 1996-7. The Pilldriver anthem “Apocalypse Never” would be both Acardipane’s and gloomcore’s abyssal apex; Adam F’s “Circles” and “Metropolis” arguably stand as twin peaks of D&B’s musical and monstrous directions.
The point of “see you in 2017” - or jungle’s tropes of “living for the future,” “we bring you the future” etc - wasn’t really about how tomorrow would actually be, sonically or otherwise. The year-date or the amorphous image of “phuture” created a quickening in the present, as if you and the music WERE being pulled taut by a line attached to that distant destination. Propulsive linearity was the feeling that ran through all the dancefloor electronica of the Nineties - trance and techno as much as jungle and gabba. A hurtling teleology, a ballistic sense of purpose, felt as a physical sensation: beats got ever more brutal and fractured, tempos accelerated, textures escalated in abstraction and noxiousness. Hearing them through a sound system was an onslaught and an ordeal: a test for dancers, forging new flesh. And each individual track was a microcosm of the entire culture’s fast-forward drive. Rave was a movement, in the martial sense of a modernist vanguard, but with a hint of political mobilization too. Another reason why The Mover was such a perfect name.
But in the 21st Century, for the most part it feels like development in electronic dance became lateral not linear: sideways journeys across the genrescape, combined with a deepening of sound design and a textural thickness afforded by recurrent upgrades in digital technology. Although you hear this laterality most in nu-millennium styles like micro-house and post-dubstep, you can hear it in Acardipane’s new work and in Sick Music’s nu-skool D&B producers. Structurally, in terms of what the beats and riffs are doing, the music has not really advanced. But the sound has a high-definition gloss and dimension to it that’s 21st Century. The architecture is Nineties, but the interior décor and exterior paint-job are totally now.
Undetected
Act from the Gloom Chamber
Planet
Phuture / Boidae
VARIOUS ARTISTS / SICK MUSIC
Sick Music
2018
(Hospital
Records)
The Wire, April 2018
by Simon Reynolds
In 1990, the German producer Marc Acardipane released “Reflections of 2017” under the name Mescalinum United – the first of many aliases, among them Pilldriver, Alien Christ, and most famously The Mover. “Reflections” was the flipside of “We Have Arrived”, a blaring stampede that laid down the blueprint for gabba: the crazy-fast, ultra-hard style of techno that stormed to popularity across Northern Europe and established outposts of fanatical followers all over the world. “2017” would remain a leitmotif in Acardipane’s work, appearing in track titles like “Lightbringer (Escape from 2017)” and as the catchphrase “see you in 2017”. Back in the early Nineties, 2017 must have seemed far off, a mind-swirl of dystopian mise-en-scenery out of Blade Runner, Robocop, and Terminator. Fans could imagine the Mover as a faceless rave equivalent to Snake Plissken from Escape from New York: a lone-ranger anti-hero making his way through the chaos of a collapsed society or a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Flash forward to the present: we have arrived, indeed we’ve overshot. The future-now of 2018 is dystopian and apocalyptic, for sure, but in ways we could never have imagined back in the Nineties. Compared with that decade, when he released hundreds of tracks through the Frankfurt-based family of labels he co-founded – PCP, Cold Rush, Dance Ecstasy 2001, etc - Acardipane had a quiet 21st century. His output oscillated between gestures towards credibility (a 2003 album for Tresor) and panders to the remaining gabbers in the Netherlands (plentiful enough to propel him into the pop charts). But there were long silences too. Then last year The Mover remobilized, with high-profile “living legend” style deejay appearances at raves and the remastered reissue of his greatest tracks. The plan was for an all-new album to come out in 2017 – completing the circle – but it got bumped to this year.
The ungainly album title Undetected Act from the Gloom Chamber suggests a certain awkwardness about returning to the fray. Which would be understandable, in so far as The Mover’s ästhetisch / weltanschauung is built around a foreboding futurity that we’ve in some sense gone past. Almost inevitably, Acardipane picks up exactly where he left off. All the things fans like me love, hallmarks of the style some of us call gloomcore, are amply present: the sky-darkening swoops of raven-black synth, the parade-ground snares and thick thuds of kickdrum; the cold cavernous reverb; the piteous melodies and macabre jeering sounds. Highlights include “Stealth,” an electro-tinged track bounced along by giant smacks of clap and a backwards bass-lurch like a tank’s caterpillar tread churning helplessly in mud, and “Doom Computer,” which drapes sickly drooping melody-riffs over a trudging march beat like a renegade legion of orcs on a dastardly mission.
The Mover’s first album came out in 1993 and bore the title The Final Sickness; earlier there’d been two Frontal Sickness EPs. That’s my segue to Sick Music 2018, a compilation on Hospital Recordings, for some time now drum and bass’s leading label. Every so often I ponder, as a long lapsed D&B believer, how the genre has carried on for a full twenty years after I stopped paying close attention: a timespan four times as long as the genre’s original heyday of 1993-97.
I wasn’t the only one to switch off. Once D&B commanded the attention of magazines like this one, as well as ideas-hungry pop stars like Bowie and Bjork. But now you’re more likely to see a review of a hauntological facsimile of 94-era jungle or darkcore-circa-93 in these pages, than a current exponent of the genre that is the extension of those sounds.
Not that the D&B scene cares particularly. Nor has it suffered from the external neglect. Arena-scale raves still happen regularly, scene elders like Andy C persevere and prosper, new DJs and producers replenish the field. A stable fixture in the genrescape, D&B has also stabilized as a form, “the full circumference” (as they used to call it) of its stylistic variants long since set out. Andy C’s defiant comment that D&B “isn’t going anywhere” could be read in a less flattering way. On the other hand, perhaps it’s time to give the genre a break, forgive and forget its promises to keep always moving forward. Why judge it any more harshly than all the other vanguard sounds that have slipped into a steady-state?
Sick Music contains a fair amount of the head-banger style that drove me out of the scene in ‘98, although after a long period of abstinence a track like Unglued’s “Bootstrap Bill”, a clattery battery of growling bass and bad-boy beats, sounds rather invigorating. But the freshest stuff by far here expands upon the “musicality” moves of the mid-Nineties: the easy-rollin’ heights (or Haigh-ts) and cruise-control bliss of prime Moving Shadow. The core of Hugh Hardie’s gorgeous “Nightingale” is a reverb-smudgy piano lick whose effect is like a cinematic dissolve, a twinkle in time. Modulating this curl of liquid smoke as if rolling a sip of wine across the palate, Hardie braids the keyboard chords with vocal murmurs, fast-flicker hand-percussion, and soft spasms of double-bass. Who’s to say a stone classic can’t happen during a genre’s middle age, rather than its youth?
Several of the best tunes here could be designated “lover’s jungle”. London Elektricity’s tingling and tremulous “Just One Second (Mitekiss Remix)” features a lyric about freeze-framing a moment of rapture - “if this second was my life / I would happily die” – delivered with that characteristically Scandinavian singer’s quality of cold-water clarity by Elsa Hedberg. Kubaiko’s “Playing Tricks” wordlessly transmits a similar butterflies-in-the-stomach sensation, twining a sprite-like vocal sigh with silvery whooshes of texture. Meshing an Amen-break like a bounding antelope with trance-style pulse-work, Seba x Physics’s “Innocence” is repeatedly split apart by the awe and gratitude of a diva’s “you show me how to love.” And Urbandawn’s “Spare Life” laces dewy synths and unexpected groans of shoegaze guitar over a midtempo groove.
Listening to Sick Music, it struck me that “drum and bass” seems almost a misnomer these days, directing attention as it does to what are now the least interesting aspects of the genre. The drums and the bass do their job efficiently enough: the former skittering briskly, the latter either supplying pulsing warmth or slicing crossways across the beat as blaring stabs. What holds and caresses the ear now is everything else going on in the arrangement and production: keyboards, orchestrations, the wisps and whispers of unidentifiable instrumentation, the overall shimmerglow of the sound design. Really, a better, more telling name would be “melody & mood.”
If both these releases show that an elder artist and a no-longer-young genre can still generate strong, exciting, and in many ways absolutely valid music, there still remains a lingering sense that both reached their apotheosis around 1996-7. The Pilldriver anthem “Apocalypse Never” would be both Acardipane’s and gloomcore’s abyssal apex; Adam F’s “Circles” and “Metropolis” arguably stand as twin peaks of D&B’s musical and monstrous directions.
The point of “see you in 2017” - or jungle’s tropes of “living for the future,” “we bring you the future” etc - wasn’t really about how tomorrow would actually be, sonically or otherwise. The year-date or the amorphous image of “phuture” created a quickening in the present, as if you and the music WERE being pulled taut by a line attached to that distant destination. Propulsive linearity was the feeling that ran through all the dancefloor electronica of the Nineties - trance and techno as much as jungle and gabba. A hurtling teleology, a ballistic sense of purpose, felt as a physical sensation: beats got ever more brutal and fractured, tempos accelerated, textures escalated in abstraction and noxiousness. Hearing them through a sound system was an onslaught and an ordeal: a test for dancers, forging new flesh. And each individual track was a microcosm of the entire culture’s fast-forward drive. Rave was a movement, in the martial sense of a modernist vanguard, but with a hint of political mobilization too. Another reason why The Mover was such a perfect name.
But in the 21st Century, for the most part it feels like development in electronic dance became lateral not linear: sideways journeys across the genrescape, combined with a deepening of sound design and a textural thickness afforded by recurrent upgrades in digital technology. Although you hear this laterality most in nu-millennium styles like micro-house and post-dubstep, you can hear it in Acardipane’s new work and in Sick Music’s nu-skool D&B producers. Structurally, in terms of what the beats and riffs are doing, the music has not really advanced. But the sound has a high-definition gloss and dimension to it that’s 21st Century. The architecture is Nineties, but the interior décor and exterior paint-job are totally now.
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
The Prodigy - interview, 1994
THE PRODIGY
Melody Maker, 1994
by Simon Reynolds
“So I’ve decided to take my work back underground … to stop it falling into the wrong hands.”
So begins Music for the Jilted Generation, the Prodigy’s fab second LP. See, seven consecutive hits and a gold debut album aren’t enough for 23-year-old whiz-kid Liam Howlett. He’s sick and tired of his public image: peerless purveyor of hyper-hyper bubblegum nuttercore for E’d up popkids. Liam wants to be taken seriously; more to the point, he wants to be taken seriously by you, the alternative rock fan. So that’s why he’s used rock guitar in a couple of tracks on the album, and that’s why Jilted is a sort of semi-concept album, with a “heavy” political statement.
“The Jilted Generation, it’s all the kids who’ve grown up on this supposedly corrupt dance music,” says Liam, in between hacking his lungs out (he’s run down by endless remixing and a recent tour of Australia). “The government are trying to make out the whole scene is bad, and they want to stop everyone going out and having a good time.”
On the album’s inner sleeve, a painting depicts an allegory of this confrontation, as a police force and a ragged army of ravers glare at each other across a ravine, with the rave-tribe’s chieftain about to slash the ropes of the bridge. The chorus of "Their Law" – a surprisingly effective metal-riff propelled collaboration with Pop Will Shite Itself – articulates this defiance: “Fuck ’em and their law.” What’s riled Liam isn’t just the Criminal Justice bill, but the unofficial clampdown on legal raves.
“The police can control the sound levels at raves. Basically, there aren’t going to be big outdoors raves any more. They’re not giving them licences in the first place now ’cos of the alleged disturbance and noise pollution, and all the drugs. And ’cos of that, the punters have lost faith a bit. A year ago, you’d get 20,000 at a big event, no worries. Now you’d be lucky to get 10,000. Events happen up until the last minute and then they get cancelled, and so people stop bothering. The Obsession rave, a big three-dayer on the beach, was cancelled, and that was going to be the only major event this year. The Prodigy haven’t suffered from it at all, we’re still packing out shows and selling records. But it does annoy me, the government telling young kids what they can do.”
Because of the clampdown, rave culture’s gone into the clubs and it’s fragmented into factions: scenes like techno, jungle, progressive house, garage, et al. Liam admits to being nostalgic for the golden days of rave’s bygone unity.
“I think a lot of people are. That’s why the housey progressive scene is so popular, ’cos even though it’s not as mental and sweaty, it’s still got the love vibe. On the hardcore scene, the DJs won’t mix up different styles of music, they just wanna play the brand new dubplates that no one can get hold of, cos they only printed 10 copies.”
The Prodigy emerged from the early hardcore scene (what’s now evolved into jungle). Along with Altern-8, they were the principal ambassadors for ’ardkore in the top 10. The Prodigy’s top three hits :Charly" and "Everybody in the Place" were classic breakbeat tracks, and the debut LP Experience was ruff jungle bizness, albeit with a commerical sheen and Liam’s poptastic choonfulness well to the fore. But ever since a dance mag accused the Prodigy’s "Charly" of instigating “the death of rave” (because it inspired a rash of lame bubblecore tracks with kids’ TV samples, like Sesame’s Treet), an embarrassed Liam has struggled to distance himself from hardcore.
“It’s the 180bpm breakbeats I’ve moved away from. The new album is as hardcore as anything I’ve written, but hard in a different way, a German techno way. But I still use breakbeats, ’cos I’ve always been into hip-hop and that side of me will always be there.”
It’s all a bit ironic, given jungle’s creative renaissance in 93 and its long overdue return to hipness in 94. (The dance mag in question just leapt on the bandwagon along with every other rag in town.)
Admits Liam, “There’s loads of quality jungle tracks around. The problem was that a lot of people thought it was so easy to make hardcore that they just knocked out white labels and flooded the market with crap. But this year there’s been a lot of intelligent jungle. Moving Shadow are the leading label.”
But Liam still doesn’t like the attitude and moody atmosphere that so often surrounds jungle ’94, and which is so different from the nutty, luv’d up vibe of ’ardkore ’92.
“The reason I got into rave was that hip-hop had gotten too much into attitude. To me, the jungle scene now is really confused. One minute they’ll play something really uplifting and the next it’s dark and gloomy. Also, that music’s lost a bit of energy. Because it’s so fast, people don’t dance to the 160bpm drums, they lock into the reggae baseline, which is half speed. So you dance really slow. With techno, you dance to the full-on beat. The stuff I really rate is European, like CJ Bolland and a lot of the German artists.”
When I suggest that the Prodigy are the last representatives in the charts for the old rave spirit, Liam frowns. What he really wants is to get back his underground credibility – something as difficult and arguably futile as attempting to recover your virginity.
“We actually do everything we can to stay off the telly and out of Smash Hits and the pop media,” he stresses. “We only do interviews that I feel are credible. It is a battle, a constant battle to get the correct press.”
Hence his flirtation with alternative music and deployment of rock guitar on Jilted. He’s been listening to Led Zep and Pearl Jam, and he might be producing Skinny Puppy’s debut for Rick Rubin’s American label. He tells me how much he likes Senser’s “energy” (they were actually first choice before Pop Will Eat Itself, but were too busy). As well as on"Their Law", grunge guitar features on the killer next single, "Voodoo People".
But Howlett doesn’t need to latch misguidedly onto that dodo “alternative rock” for cred; his own roots – in electro and early hip-hop – are solid enough. I always thought his thang was like a hyperkinetic version of Mantronix’s breakbeats-and-samples collage aesthetic, and sho’nuff, it turns out he was a big fan. His old-school hip-hop background comes through in the funky, fusiony "3 Kilos", which is part of the LP’s "Narcotic Suite" – songs meant to evoke different drug atmospheres.
Back to the present, to Generation J, the kids who live for dance and drugs … Are they going to fight back against repression, or are they just going to languish at home, get despondent, get wasted?
“At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do. But as long as people can still go to clubs, it’ll survive. They’ll never kill the whole thing off completely. Why are the government so threatened? I don’t know. We live in Essex and there’s a massive farmers’ festival every year at the showground. They block up the whole fucking road and it’s totally disruptive. But they won’t have a rave there. It’s the same with football matches – there’s loads of drugs at football now, people taking Es. So it’s one rule for us, one rule for them.”
Melody Maker, 1994
by Simon Reynolds
“So I’ve decided to take my work back underground … to stop it falling into the wrong hands.”
So begins Music for the Jilted Generation, the Prodigy’s fab second LP. See, seven consecutive hits and a gold debut album aren’t enough for 23-year-old whiz-kid Liam Howlett. He’s sick and tired of his public image: peerless purveyor of hyper-hyper bubblegum nuttercore for E’d up popkids. Liam wants to be taken seriously; more to the point, he wants to be taken seriously by you, the alternative rock fan. So that’s why he’s used rock guitar in a couple of tracks on the album, and that’s why Jilted is a sort of semi-concept album, with a “heavy” political statement.
“The Jilted Generation, it’s all the kids who’ve grown up on this supposedly corrupt dance music,” says Liam, in between hacking his lungs out (he’s run down by endless remixing and a recent tour of Australia). “The government are trying to make out the whole scene is bad, and they want to stop everyone going out and having a good time.”
On the album’s inner sleeve, a painting depicts an allegory of this confrontation, as a police force and a ragged army of ravers glare at each other across a ravine, with the rave-tribe’s chieftain about to slash the ropes of the bridge. The chorus of "Their Law" – a surprisingly effective metal-riff propelled collaboration with Pop Will Shite Itself – articulates this defiance: “Fuck ’em and their law.” What’s riled Liam isn’t just the Criminal Justice bill, but the unofficial clampdown on legal raves.
“The police can control the sound levels at raves. Basically, there aren’t going to be big outdoors raves any more. They’re not giving them licences in the first place now ’cos of the alleged disturbance and noise pollution, and all the drugs. And ’cos of that, the punters have lost faith a bit. A year ago, you’d get 20,000 at a big event, no worries. Now you’d be lucky to get 10,000. Events happen up until the last minute and then they get cancelled, and so people stop bothering. The Obsession rave, a big three-dayer on the beach, was cancelled, and that was going to be the only major event this year. The Prodigy haven’t suffered from it at all, we’re still packing out shows and selling records. But it does annoy me, the government telling young kids what they can do.”
Because of the clampdown, rave culture’s gone into the clubs and it’s fragmented into factions: scenes like techno, jungle, progressive house, garage, et al. Liam admits to being nostalgic for the golden days of rave’s bygone unity.
“I think a lot of people are. That’s why the housey progressive scene is so popular, ’cos even though it’s not as mental and sweaty, it’s still got the love vibe. On the hardcore scene, the DJs won’t mix up different styles of music, they just wanna play the brand new dubplates that no one can get hold of, cos they only printed 10 copies.”
The Prodigy emerged from the early hardcore scene (what’s now evolved into jungle). Along with Altern-8, they were the principal ambassadors for ’ardkore in the top 10. The Prodigy’s top three hits :Charly" and "Everybody in the Place" were classic breakbeat tracks, and the debut LP Experience was ruff jungle bizness, albeit with a commerical sheen and Liam’s poptastic choonfulness well to the fore. But ever since a dance mag accused the Prodigy’s "Charly" of instigating “the death of rave” (because it inspired a rash of lame bubblecore tracks with kids’ TV samples, like Sesame’s Treet), an embarrassed Liam has struggled to distance himself from hardcore.
“It’s the 180bpm breakbeats I’ve moved away from. The new album is as hardcore as anything I’ve written, but hard in a different way, a German techno way. But I still use breakbeats, ’cos I’ve always been into hip-hop and that side of me will always be there.”
It’s all a bit ironic, given jungle’s creative renaissance in 93 and its long overdue return to hipness in 94. (The dance mag in question just leapt on the bandwagon along with every other rag in town.)
Admits Liam, “There’s loads of quality jungle tracks around. The problem was that a lot of people thought it was so easy to make hardcore that they just knocked out white labels and flooded the market with crap. But this year there’s been a lot of intelligent jungle. Moving Shadow are the leading label.”
But Liam still doesn’t like the attitude and moody atmosphere that so often surrounds jungle ’94, and which is so different from the nutty, luv’d up vibe of ’ardkore ’92.
“The reason I got into rave was that hip-hop had gotten too much into attitude. To me, the jungle scene now is really confused. One minute they’ll play something really uplifting and the next it’s dark and gloomy. Also, that music’s lost a bit of energy. Because it’s so fast, people don’t dance to the 160bpm drums, they lock into the reggae baseline, which is half speed. So you dance really slow. With techno, you dance to the full-on beat. The stuff I really rate is European, like CJ Bolland and a lot of the German artists.”
When I suggest that the Prodigy are the last representatives in the charts for the old rave spirit, Liam frowns. What he really wants is to get back his underground credibility – something as difficult and arguably futile as attempting to recover your virginity.
“We actually do everything we can to stay off the telly and out of Smash Hits and the pop media,” he stresses. “We only do interviews that I feel are credible. It is a battle, a constant battle to get the correct press.”
Hence his flirtation with alternative music and deployment of rock guitar on Jilted. He’s been listening to Led Zep and Pearl Jam, and he might be producing Skinny Puppy’s debut for Rick Rubin’s American label. He tells me how much he likes Senser’s “energy” (they were actually first choice before Pop Will Eat Itself, but were too busy). As well as on"Their Law", grunge guitar features on the killer next single, "Voodoo People".
But Howlett doesn’t need to latch misguidedly onto that dodo “alternative rock” for cred; his own roots – in electro and early hip-hop – are solid enough. I always thought his thang was like a hyperkinetic version of Mantronix’s breakbeats-and-samples collage aesthetic, and sho’nuff, it turns out he was a big fan. His old-school hip-hop background comes through in the funky, fusiony "3 Kilos", which is part of the LP’s "Narcotic Suite" – songs meant to evoke different drug atmospheres.
Back to the present, to Generation J, the kids who live for dance and drugs … Are they going to fight back against repression, or are they just going to languish at home, get despondent, get wasted?
“At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do. But as long as people can still go to clubs, it’ll survive. They’ll never kill the whole thing off completely. Why are the government so threatened? I don’t know. We live in Essex and there’s a massive farmers’ festival every year at the showground. They block up the whole fucking road and it’s totally disruptive. But they won’t have a rave there. It’s the same with football matches – there’s loads of drugs at football now, people taking Es. So it’s one rule for us, one rule for them.”
Friday, January 5, 2018
Voodoo Magic
MOVING SHADOW present "VOODOO MAGIC"
Equinox, London
Melody Maker, May 1994
by Simon Reynolds
The host: Moving Shadow, the UK's leading "intelligent hardcore" label. The line-up: jungle's top DJs, including the ubiquitous Randall, Grooverider, Ray Keith, Brockie and LTJ Bukem, plus PA's from Moving Shadow's three most popular artists, Foul Play, Omni Trio and Deep Blue. The venue: Equinox, a slightly cheesy disco on Leicester Square usually full of tourists, whose balconies and upholstered alcoves provide welcome rest and respite for the combat-fatigued and shellshocked.
For hardcore is warzone music; its jagged breakbeats are treacherous, a simulation of the minefield that is modern life. Hardcore strafes the listener's body with percussion, so that dancing is like striding into a stream of machine-gun snares and ricocheting paradiddles, while bass-bombs send shockwaves through your intestines. But, with Moving Shadow's brand of hardcore, the danger-beats are incongruously swathed with soothing, silken tenderness: strings, harps, jazz-fusion chords, soul-diva sighs and gasps, plus the kind of woogly textures you'd usually hear from The Irresistible Force.
This "ambient hardcore" sound was traiblazed on tracks like "Music" by LTJ Bukem (who plays a brilliant set, finding an extra five notches of volume to really detonate the night) and "Open Your Mind" by FOUL PLAY. Sadly, FP don't include this sublime song in their PA, but they do debut their fab new single ["Being With You"], all phuture-jazz synth-clusters and diva beseechings, while lazers scythe and slash the crowd. Foul Play also 'play' their remix of Hyper-On-Experience's "Lords Of the Null Lines", demonstrating how fluid the notion of 'authorship' is in this scene, where an anthem's life is prolonged by endless, drastically altered versions.
After Bukem's set, Andy C keeps the music rollin'. Junglists and junglettes do a palsied version of 'steppers', originally a roots reggae dance that involves skipping on the spot like a manic jig'n'reel. But with jungle, it's like they're Morris-dancing on bullets. The crowd tonight mixes chic, style-conscious sophisticates (usually black or Asian) and dressed-down white kids who mostly look like they're well under the 18 age limit emblazoned on the flyer. There's all sorts here tonight, friendly luv'd up types who probably secretly mourn the days of "happy 'ardcore", and the moody, self-contained junglists into dark tunes, who despise the rave ethos with its Vicks, white gloves and gushing euphoria.
OMNI TRIO hit the stage, or rather a proxy does, since the true creator behind this country's sublimest dance-pop is a 38 year old Can fan who prefers to remain an enigma. The stand-in pretends to knob-twiddle as Omni's classic "Renegade Snares" tears up the floor, with its soul-shocking cannonades of polyrhythm, hypergasmic chorus "c'mon, take me UP!" and sentimental verging on twee piano motif. Then the MC announces "the one 'n' only, the livin' legend", DEEP BLUE. The latter is a unassuming bloke whose "The Helicopter Tune" is still massive after 6 months floor-life. Recently reissued with 4 remixes, it sold 22 thousand and became the first hardcore track to go Top 70 in years. Based around a geometric Latin beat cranked up like some crazed clockwork mechanism, "Helicopter" gets the crowd seething like a cauldron.
A few hours later, we stumble bleary and squinting into a viciously crisp dawn, battered and bruised but still glowing with the beauty-terrorism of "Voodoo Magic."
bonus beats
FOUL PLAY
Suspected
(Moving Shadow)
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
With next to no media profile, Foul Play's John Morrow and Steve Bradshaw have quietly built up one of the finest back catalogues in drum & bass. As is the norm with jungle albums, the back-cat is basically what you get on "Suspected": this is Foul Play's greatest hits, reworked by the band plus a r-r-r-rollcall of famous remixers, and bulked up with a handful of new tracks. While this makes "Suspected" a superb introduction for the uninitiated, for fans who've been following the duo's career for a while, it's a tad disappointing (ditto the ratio of new to old material on Omni Trio's "Deepest Cut" and Goldie's "Timeless").
Still, fans will crave those remixes, which all add new dimensions to the beloved prototypes. "Re-Open Your Mind" remodels Foul Play's 1993 classic (possibly my fave drum & bass track of all time), retaining the goosepimply synth-ripple (still the ultimate aural analogue of a skin-tingling E-rush) but convoluting the beats and bass in accordance with 1995 specifications, and making the twilight-zone bridge passage even more ethereal. "Total Control" is rinsed and blow-dried by Desired State (one of several alter-egos used by top production team Andy C & Ant Miles), who toughen the beats and sub-bass and curb the original's misguided sax solo (for which, many thanks).
Then come all four new tracks in a row. "Ignorance" sustains "Total"'s military-jazz vibe, with stabbing bass and almost be-bop hi-hats and cymbals, which are programmed with such glistening intricacy they tie your ears in knots. Less impressive is "Artifical Intelligence": E-Z listening jungle, its Mantovani strings and twinkling tinkles of cocktail piano conjuring up a rather obvious aura of 'heaven'. As does "Night Moves", a stab at downtempo hip hop graced by a keyboard motif uncomfortably close to Omni Trio's "Together". "Strung Out" is far better, living up to its paranoiac title with fidgety, feverish snares, a stalking B-line and an edgy, persecuted guitar-figure that sounds like it might be sampled from Santana or somesuch jazzbo fret-wanker.
The remainder of "Suspected" reverts back to Foul Play's 'Club Classics, Vol 1'. "Cuttin' Loose" is a drastic revamp of the duo's contribution to Moving Shadow's experimental EP series "Two On One". Kickstarted with an unnerving Afro-futurist kazoo motif sampled from Herbie Hancock, the track unleashes a swarm of scuttling breaks, glassy percussion and furtive, sidling bass. "The Stepperemix" is even more militantly minimal, an endless tidal wave of rustling snares and metallic rim-shots, sheer digital gamelan. Hopa & Bones' evisceration of "Being With You" is the most brutal of the four remixes this late '94 beauty has undergone, with a brand new drum & bass undercarriage and a spray-job to boot. Wiping the floor with the fusion-lite that dominated 'intelligent' jungle in '95, "Being With You" is real phuture-jazz, its densely-clustered synth-chords verging on harmolodic dissonance. The CD version of "Suspected" adds Omni Trio's widescreen film-muzik reinterpretation of "Music Is The Key" (beautiful, but the 'real' diva vocal is a tad Whitney) and the original version of "Total Control".
Hardcore Foul Play devotees, like myself, might be impatient for more new hints as to where the duo is headed next.. But as a summation of the story so far, "Suspected" is fabulous and undeniable.
OMNI TRIO
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
If anyone from the 'ambient jungle' scene deserves a wider audience, it's Omni Trio's Rob Haigh. Draping lush, movie-theme orchestration and explosively rapturous soul-diva vocals over strafing breakbeats, Haigh is a sampladelic sorcerer. Anybody who loved The Art Of Noise's "Moments In Love" or Saint Etienne's "London Belongs To Me" will swoon to the sheer pop genius of "Renegade Snares" or "Thru The Vibe". Now here's Omni's debut LP "Vol 1: The Deepest Cut", sweeping up the best of Haigh's work to date and providing an unbeatable introduction for the uninitiated.
An enigmatic figure, Haigh's musical route to jungle was strange and winding. He grew up on left-field rock (Can, Faust, Pere Ubu, PiL), jazz (Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew") and dub ( Lee Perry, King Tubby). In the early Eighties, he formed an "avant-funk band", The Truth Club, and supported the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. Like many avant-funk veterans, Haigh was seduced into rave culture by the music of Derrick May and early Warp. But unusually, Haigh gravitated towards the hardcore scene rather than 'electronic listening music'.
"In '91, people started adding breakbeats to house, and it was a very exciting time," Haigh remembers. "When the backlash against hardcore occurred in late '92, I couldn't abandon breaks and return to the 909 kick-and-hat rhythm, so I stuck with it."
From early '93 onwards, Haigh released a series of brilliant EP's on Moving Shadow, which spawned monster tunes like "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)" and "Renegade Snares". The latter is still going strong a full year after it's release, thanks first to Foul Play's turbo-boosted remix, and now to their electrifyingly intense 'VIP Re-Remix' on "The Deepest Cut".
Film soundtrack music is a major reference point for Omni tracks like "Living For The Future" (originally from the recent "Vol 5" EP, now revamped by FBD Project for the album). "John Barry is a big influence," says Haigh. "I love the powerful, melodic, soaring strings!" But for all his brilliant arrangements, with their sentimental piano motifs, mellotronic strings and hypergasmic acappella vocals, Haigh's real forte is as a virtuoso orchestrator of rhythm. Where most jungle producers sample and loop whole breakbeats, Haigh builds his breaks from scratch using "single shot" samples (kicks, hi-hats, shakers, toms etc).
"The beat becomes mine," he says, "and is no more a sample than programming a drum machine."
Throughout his recent work, Haigh's beats are so nuanced, so full of varied accents, that it's like listening to a real-time, hands-on drummer who's improvising around the groove. Just check out the fierce-yet-gliding elegance of the snares on "Soul Freestyle" (from "Vol: 5")--it's like listening to a goddamn jazz drum solo! Haigh is the maestro of a rhythmic innovation in jungle he's dubbed "the soul step".
"The first and third beats are emphasised, giving the illusion that the track is running at 80 b.p.m. and 160 b.p.m. at the same time," he explains. "This gives the music room to breathe, and makes it easier to dance to."
Although Omni Trio firmly belongs in jungle's 'ambient/intelligent' camp, Haigh is wary about jungle's new smooth direction, and in particular the trend towards incorporating so-called 'real' instrumentation.
"House and jungle is a sequenced music, created on computers and workstations. There is nothing worse than seeing house artists trying to get into that live muso vibe. The potential in fusing atmospheric ideas with drum & bass is unlimited. But although the music is getting more sophisticated, it must retain the ruffness of tearing drum & bass. This is the core of our music: to lose it would be like, say, rock music without guitar riffs!"
Suspected
(Moving Shadow)
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
With next to no media profile, Foul Play's John Morrow and Steve Bradshaw have quietly built up one of the finest back catalogues in drum & bass. As is the norm with jungle albums, the back-cat is basically what you get on "Suspected": this is Foul Play's greatest hits, reworked by the band plus a r-r-r-rollcall of famous remixers, and bulked up with a handful of new tracks. While this makes "Suspected" a superb introduction for the uninitiated, for fans who've been following the duo's career for a while, it's a tad disappointing (ditto the ratio of new to old material on Omni Trio's "Deepest Cut" and Goldie's "Timeless").
Still, fans will crave those remixes, which all add new dimensions to the beloved prototypes. "Re-Open Your Mind" remodels Foul Play's 1993 classic (possibly my fave drum & bass track of all time), retaining the goosepimply synth-ripple (still the ultimate aural analogue of a skin-tingling E-rush) but convoluting the beats and bass in accordance with 1995 specifications, and making the twilight-zone bridge passage even more ethereal. "Total Control" is rinsed and blow-dried by Desired State (one of several alter-egos used by top production team Andy C & Ant Miles), who toughen the beats and sub-bass and curb the original's misguided sax solo (for which, many thanks).
Then come all four new tracks in a row. "Ignorance" sustains "Total"'s military-jazz vibe, with stabbing bass and almost be-bop hi-hats and cymbals, which are programmed with such glistening intricacy they tie your ears in knots. Less impressive is "Artifical Intelligence": E-Z listening jungle, its Mantovani strings and twinkling tinkles of cocktail piano conjuring up a rather obvious aura of 'heaven'. As does "Night Moves", a stab at downtempo hip hop graced by a keyboard motif uncomfortably close to Omni Trio's "Together". "Strung Out" is far better, living up to its paranoiac title with fidgety, feverish snares, a stalking B-line and an edgy, persecuted guitar-figure that sounds like it might be sampled from Santana or somesuch jazzbo fret-wanker.
The remainder of "Suspected" reverts back to Foul Play's 'Club Classics, Vol 1'. "Cuttin' Loose" is a drastic revamp of the duo's contribution to Moving Shadow's experimental EP series "Two On One". Kickstarted with an unnerving Afro-futurist kazoo motif sampled from Herbie Hancock, the track unleashes a swarm of scuttling breaks, glassy percussion and furtive, sidling bass. "The Stepperemix" is even more militantly minimal, an endless tidal wave of rustling snares and metallic rim-shots, sheer digital gamelan. Hopa & Bones' evisceration of "Being With You" is the most brutal of the four remixes this late '94 beauty has undergone, with a brand new drum & bass undercarriage and a spray-job to boot. Wiping the floor with the fusion-lite that dominated 'intelligent' jungle in '95, "Being With You" is real phuture-jazz, its densely-clustered synth-chords verging on harmolodic dissonance. The CD version of "Suspected" adds Omni Trio's widescreen film-muzik reinterpretation of "Music Is The Key" (beautiful, but the 'real' diva vocal is a tad Whitney) and the original version of "Total Control".
Hardcore Foul Play devotees, like myself, might be impatient for more new hints as to where the duo is headed next.. But as a summation of the story so far, "Suspected" is fabulous and undeniable.
OMNI TRIO
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
If anyone from the 'ambient jungle' scene deserves a wider audience, it's Omni Trio's Rob Haigh. Draping lush, movie-theme orchestration and explosively rapturous soul-diva vocals over strafing breakbeats, Haigh is a sampladelic sorcerer. Anybody who loved The Art Of Noise's "Moments In Love" or Saint Etienne's "London Belongs To Me" will swoon to the sheer pop genius of "Renegade Snares" or "Thru The Vibe". Now here's Omni's debut LP "Vol 1: The Deepest Cut", sweeping up the best of Haigh's work to date and providing an unbeatable introduction for the uninitiated.
An enigmatic figure, Haigh's musical route to jungle was strange and winding. He grew up on left-field rock (Can, Faust, Pere Ubu, PiL), jazz (Miles Davis' "Bitches Brew") and dub ( Lee Perry, King Tubby). In the early Eighties, he formed an "avant-funk band", The Truth Club, and supported the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA. Like many avant-funk veterans, Haigh was seduced into rave culture by the music of Derrick May and early Warp. But unusually, Haigh gravitated towards the hardcore scene rather than 'electronic listening music'.
"In '91, people started adding breakbeats to house, and it was a very exciting time," Haigh remembers. "When the backlash against hardcore occurred in late '92, I couldn't abandon breaks and return to the 909 kick-and-hat rhythm, so I stuck with it."
From early '93 onwards, Haigh released a series of brilliant EP's on Moving Shadow, which spawned monster tunes like "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)" and "Renegade Snares". The latter is still going strong a full year after it's release, thanks first to Foul Play's turbo-boosted remix, and now to their electrifyingly intense 'VIP Re-Remix' on "The Deepest Cut".
Film soundtrack music is a major reference point for Omni tracks like "Living For The Future" (originally from the recent "Vol 5" EP, now revamped by FBD Project for the album). "John Barry is a big influence," says Haigh. "I love the powerful, melodic, soaring strings!" But for all his brilliant arrangements, with their sentimental piano motifs, mellotronic strings and hypergasmic acappella vocals, Haigh's real forte is as a virtuoso orchestrator of rhythm. Where most jungle producers sample and loop whole breakbeats, Haigh builds his breaks from scratch using "single shot" samples (kicks, hi-hats, shakers, toms etc).
"The beat becomes mine," he says, "and is no more a sample than programming a drum machine."
Throughout his recent work, Haigh's beats are so nuanced, so full of varied accents, that it's like listening to a real-time, hands-on drummer who's improvising around the groove. Just check out the fierce-yet-gliding elegance of the snares on "Soul Freestyle" (from "Vol: 5")--it's like listening to a goddamn jazz drum solo! Haigh is the maestro of a rhythmic innovation in jungle he's dubbed "the soul step".
"The first and third beats are emphasised, giving the illusion that the track is running at 80 b.p.m. and 160 b.p.m. at the same time," he explains. "This gives the music room to breathe, and makes it easier to dance to."
Although Omni Trio firmly belongs in jungle's 'ambient/intelligent' camp, Haigh is wary about jungle's new smooth direction, and in particular the trend towards incorporating so-called 'real' instrumentation.
"House and jungle is a sequenced music, created on computers and workstations. There is nothing worse than seeing house artists trying to get into that live muso vibe. The potential in fusing atmospheric ideas with drum & bass is unlimited. But although the music is getting more sophisticated, it must retain the ruffness of tearing drum & bass. This is the core of our music: to lose it would be like, say, rock music without guitar riffs!"
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