Routes and futures

 

Various Artists

Routes from the Jungle: Escape Velocity Volume 1

Melody Maker, 1995

by Simon Reynolds 

A Guy Called Gerald

 

A GUY CALLED GERALD 

Melody Maker, March 25 1995

by Simon Reynolds

     In many ways, Gerald Simpson has the absolutely stereotypical profile of  your average art-core junglist.  Steeped in early '70s jazz-rock (Herbie Hancock,  Chick Corea, etc), Gerald flipped for electro (Afrika Bambatta, Mantronix), then tripped out to acid house and Detroit techno. 

  His first creative efforts were in the Hit Squad, a Manchester hip hop collective from whose cadres 808 State coalesced. Gerald was briefly a member of 808 (who, non-coincidentally, were also fusion freaks), and actually co-wrote their biggest hit "Pacific State".  By then, Gerald had his own thing going, having scored a Top 20 smash with "Voodoo Ray".  This slinky aciiied-samba reappears in drastically remodelled form as "Voodoo Rage", on Gerald's brand new, unspeakably brilliant album "Black Secret Technology". It turns out that the song was always meant to be called "Voodoo Rage", but Gerald didn't have enough memory in his sampler and had to chop the "g" off!

 After "Voodoo", the logical thing for Gerald would have been to follow all the other Detroit buffs up the funkless cul de sac of 'electronic listening music'. Instead, after a frustrating period signed to major label Sony, Gerald discovered the glory of the breakbeat.  Originated by James Brown and the Meters,  sampled by hip hop producers, breakbeats are what enabled a generation of post-rave producers to move beyond the 4/4 monotony of house, into the multi-tiered, hyper-syncopated rhythmic psychedelia of drum & bass.

     "Originally I was into drum machines, I used to hate breaks. But then I discovered that with a sampler you don't just have to take a break and loop it, you can chop it up into segments, recombine it, enchance and stretch the sounds.  Basically you can turn a couple of hits into a whole drum solo!"

     Metalheads' Goldie had contacted Gerald, dragged him down from Manchester to Rage, London's legendary 1991/92 ardkore club. Gerald realised that hardcore was an emergent subculture that was totally British, and he wanted in.

    "The whole vibe was totally different to what was going on in Chicago.  I realised there was no point in me trying to sound like American house.  Jungle was also like touching ground with my own personal roots, 'cos my parents are from the West Indies.  For me it was like 'I'm still a real person, I've not been castrated by Sony'. Cos they'd wanted me to make Hi-NRG style music."

     Gerald's first efforts were ragga-influenced tracks like "28 Gun Bad Boy", but gradually he evolved towards the art-core end of things. In early '95, the term 'jungle' has already been outmoded by the music's onward and outward diffusion. That familiar matrix of influences, fusion/electro/Detroit, is pushing 'jungle' in all manner of astonishing directions--the cyber-jazz strangeness of Photek and Alec Reese, the hyper-soul 'hardstep' of Hidden Agenda, the lambent aqua-funk serenity of LTJ Bukem and his cronies.  On "Black Secret Technology" Gerald dabbles and daubs in all these different shades of the state-of-artcore spectrum. But his stuff is still too weird to get played at Speed, Bukem's Thursday Night salon for the drum & bass scene's inner circle of cognoscenti.

               *                   *                   *

The critic Andrew Ross recently asked where (given US rap's current reliance on '70s funk, its old skool nostalgia) had hip hop's "rage for the future" gone? The answer is: Blighty, where phuturism is alive 'n' KICKIN'.  From Tricky to Goldie, from Earthling to Droppin' Science, Britain's first generation of B-boys have come of age. And the striking difference about trip hop and art-core jungle vis-a-vis US rap, is that race is not the crucial determinant of belonging. Instead, what unites da massive is a shared attitude towards technology, an impatience to reach the future (hence Omni Trio's "Living For The Future", Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse "We Are The Future", Red One's "The Futurist", ad infinitum).

     From the orgasmatronic rapture of "Energy" to the cyborg paranoia of "Gloktrak", Gerald's new LP is virtually an essay (non-verbal, bar the odd sample) about the bliss and the danger of techno-fetishism. The title, "Black Secret Technology", expresses this ambivalence perfectly.  Gerald heard the phrase on a TV talk-show about government mind-control via the media, where some kind of witch-woman used the word 'black' to denote  malign sorcery.  But Gerald detourned the word to evoke the science-fiction fantasies of black pop's maverick tradition--Sun Ra as Saturn-born ambassador for the Omniverse, Hendrix landing his kinky machine, George Clinton's Mothership taking the Afronauts to a lost homeland on the other side of the galaxy, Afrika Bambatta's fetish for Kraftwerk and Nubian science, Juan Atkins and Derrick May's cybertronic mindscapes.

     At this fraught fin de millenium moment, technology appears both as instrument of domination and of resistance; machines can both castrate and superhumanize you.  Gerald belongs to a subculture based around abusing technology (jungle's all about doing things with machines unintended by the manufacturer) rather than being abused by it.  And it all goes back to his childhood.

    "I got a tank for Christmas and it played a tune, and I just had to know how it worked. I took a knife but I couldn't get these mad screws to open. So I heated the knife on the oven and sliced through the plastic, and ripped the tape recorder out. I just had to know!"

     Gerald still has that small boy's confidence about technology. As with a lot of post-rave producers, there's something vaguely auto-erotic verging on autistic to his techno-fetishism. When I ask him if he ever feels like a cyborg, in so far as his machines are extensions of his body that give him superhuman powers, he frankly admits that working in his studio, "it's like your own world and you become like the god."

     Like a lot of art-core producers, Gerald's eager to extend his dominion from the aural to the visual; he's hungry for the new frontier of virtual reality.  He dreams of a machine that "could convert sound into visuals.  You'd feed a sound in and the computer would turn it into an image on a screen.  Then you'd manipulate that vision and turn it back into sound. There's still scope for new things using sound. But hooking into the visual would make it even more interesting.  Epecially for kids nowadays, who're into computer games."

     On the album, "Cybergen" is all about an "imaginary drug that's basically virtual reality. The vocal goes 'it takes you up, down, anywhere you want to go.'. It's a drug where you're in total control of the experience: if you wanted a steel globe floating about, then going purple, you'd have it. Then the vocal says 'it's too late to turn back now', and that's making the point that it's no use saying we can't cope with this technology, that it's going to ruin society. Cos the technology's already here.  You either cope with it or you're lost. Kids today are already totally hooked into it. Kids today are frightening! I grew up with records, and now I know how to manipulate records.  When today's kids grow up, they'll know how to manipulate the visual side of it."

     So do you think people will lose interest in music?

    "Yeah, sound will just become a small part of it.  I can't imagine a kid today just sitting down and listening to an album. It's progression, innit?"

     Feeling like a fogey, I quibble: isn't part of music's magic the way it makes you come up with your own mind's eye imagery?  Gerald's chirpy response is that with CD-ROM you'll soon have the power to create your own graphics.  But, I counter feebly, who actually has the energy for all this inter-active self-expression?

       "Not people who grew up in our era. But kids today, given ten years, they'll be on it."

     People from 'our era', even those who are getting on-line, feel a deep anxiety about the digital revolution. The sense of being outstripped by technology's exponential development has even penetrated the subconscious: once, schizophrenics imagined loss-of-control in terms of demons and incubi, now they rant about microchips implanted behind their eyes or satellites irradiating them with a brainwashing beam.  But Gerald is gung-ho about technology's empowering potential. He takes a boyish delight in the sheer "deviousness" of the ever-escalating, techno-mediated struggle between Control and Anarchy.

   "There always ways around it. Say if someone was scanning into this room with a directional microphone and listening to us, we could scan them back and find out their exact location.  Your phone can be bugged, but you can get devices that scramble the signal.  When we were at school, we used to fiddle fruit machines.  They always came back with some new trick to stop us, but we always got round it. We'd find ways to get credits on space invaders' machines. It was like, ghetto technology!"

    

A GUY CALLED GERALD

BLACK SECRET TECHNOLOGY  

Juice Box JB2 

by Simon Reynolds

    Technology promises "total control".  But there's a deadly ambiguity here: who's the controller, who's controlled?  Technology serves the secret agendas of corporations and government agencies as easily as it empowers individuals and facilitates resistance. When it comes to state-of-art gadgetry, we're all potentially in the position of Gene Hackman's surveillance expert in 'The Conversation', who ends up f***ed over by the very machinery at which he's a virtuoso.

    Jungle--the most relentlessly digitalized music on the planet--grasps the double-edged sword of technology with both hands.  Jungle oscillates between auto-erotic fantasies of man-machine omnipotence and paranoid anxiety about the invasive, manipulating capacity of technology.   In the junglist imagination, technology figures as both orgasmatron (a pleasuredome of artifically-induced sensations) and Panopticon (the  terrordome in which every individual is constantly under Authority's punitive gaze).

     With "Black Secret Technology", Gerald Simpson puts an Afro-futurist spin to this technophile/technophobe ambivalence.  The title aligns Gerald with the black science fiction tradition that runs from Sun Ra, P.Funk and Lee Perry, through Afrika Bambatta and Derrick May, to Goldie and Jeff Mills. Gerald's music actually sounds like a virtual jungle, a datascape environment that's sensorily intoxicating yet teeming with threat. Breakbeats coil and writhe like serpents, samples morph and dematerialise like fever-dream hallucinations, itchy'n'scratchy blips of texture/rhythm dart and hover like dragonflies.  This could be heaven, this could be hell... Either way, this jungle is a terrain where the natives, the tech-savvy, have the advantage.

     "Black Secret Technology" divides up into fairly distinct utopian/dystopian sides. First comes sheer bliss: the mellow jazz-goo of "Darker Than I Should Be", the lover's rock idyll of "Finley's Rainbow (Slow Motion Mix)", the mystic vapors of "The Nile" .  "Energy" hymns neurological overload, oozing druggy textures and ooohing angel-voices over a bassline as stealthy and spring-heeled as a panther.  "Silent Cry" is even better: its music-box chimes, bittersweet vocal pangs and sombre synths instil a mood of piercing poignancy, like Aphex gone jungalistic.

     Then darkness falls. On "Cybergen", the vocal samples are hideously twisted and extruded, like the human soul bent out of shape by the technology-driven pressures of the late 20th Century.   Kicking off with "you're gonna be a bad muthafucker" (sampled from the cyborg-building scene in 'Robocop') and named after a sub-machine gun, "Gloktrak" is Gerald's most brutally disorientating track to date: eerie, almost MBV-like drone-swathes waver and contort over squelchy blocs of Cubist rhythm and a pressure-drop bass-lunge so stomach-jolting it'll have your lunch leaping up to greet the daylight. 

     Finally "Voodoo Rage" jungalizes the aciiied-tribal anthem that first made Gerald famous.  The original's "oooh-ooh- hoo" chant is relocated to a dense thicket of slimy polyrhythms. Juxtaposed with torturously timestretched (literally like a Medieval rack) vocals, the chant's serene 1989 rapture contrasts with the absolutely 1995 tension-and-dread of its new context; it figures as a tantalising echo of the communal release and utopian dreams that rave culture once offered, but that are now long-lost.

     "Black Secret Technology" is all about the danger of bliss and the bliss of danger. Emotionally (narcosis vs. vigilance) and sonically (melting ambience vs. jagged drum & bass), Gerald's music embodies the contradictions of the present. It's absolutely NOW, absolutely ESSENTIAL.           

                                                                     

a separate, earlier MM interview with Gerald, from October '94

A Guy Called Gerald

Melody Maker, October 8th, 1994

by Simon Reynolds

You could be forgiven for thinking that A Guy Called Gerald, the genius behind 'Voodoo Ray', had disappeared off the face of the earth. In fact, since his deal with CBS went sour, Gerald Simpson has being working deep underground. He started up his own label, Juice Box, and developed the digital-tribe vibe of 'Voodoo Ray' in an unexpected direction: hardcore junglism.

Gerald has this year issued a series of astonishing cuts such as 'Nazinji-Zaka' and 'Darker Than I Should Be'. 'Nazinji' starts with the declaration, "The first rhythms came from Africa", which is a big clue to Gerald's thang. The leap from 'Voodoo Ray' makes sense because jungle is Afro-futurist. Like dub, hip hop and ragga, it has the hallmark of African music. The complexity is rhythmic rather than melodic. Or, rather, the rhythm IS the melody. Gerald's tracks take the jungle mesh of polyrhythms, cross-rhythms and counter-rhythms to new levels of insane detail.

"I use five or six loops, add electronic percussion, pan 'em across the speakers and feed 'em through effects," he explains. "If people are gonna pay five quid, I'll give 'em their money's worth! I try to create as many dynamics within the music as possible and I have a personal rule that the samples must be masked beyond recognition."

Another key word for Gerald's aesthetic is cyber-black. Check out 'Gloc', the sinister, fucked-up flip of the jazzy, ultra-smooth 'Darker Than I Should Be'.

"The samples of 'You're gonna be a bad motherfucker' are from Robocop. It's the scene where they're rebuilding the guy as a cyborg after he was shot up. It fits, because the track is a remix. It's like I rebuilt it and armoured it with effects."

The sci-fi theme is continued on Gerald's forthcoming LP, Black Secret Technology, a title inspired by a programme on government mind-control via blipverts and other subliminal techniques. It also communicates a "Say it loud, I'm cyber-black and proud" message. But before the album, there's a new single, 'Finley's Rainbow', which is totally different to anything he has done before. It's jungle, but instead of drawing on ragga, the sources lie in the skankin' rhythms of roots reggae and the ethereality of lover's rock, all whisked by an irresistibly effervescent happy hardcore tempo.

As part of the intelligent/ambient vanguard, Gerald is making music which doesn't get played out that often, as pandering, play-safe DJs spin only proven crowd-pleasers, all obvious soul choruses, ragga chants and bouncy B-lines. Nevertheless, Gerald, who is about to collaborate with MC Navigator from Kool FM and has invited Goldie from Metalheads to remix 'Voodoo Ray', remains optimistic about the scene.

"So long as no one gets sucked in by the majors, it will keep progressing. People will realise they can't carry on sampling direct lifts from other records and become more creative."

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. 

The Mover + Sick Music / gabba + drum & bass in the 21st Century

THE MOVER

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.

drum and bass circa 1999

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Planet V

Ultra

LTJ BUKEM featuring  MC CONRAD and DRS

Progression Sessons

Good Looking

Spin, 1999?

by Simon Reynolds

        For  half-a-decade there, jungle was the fastest moving music on the planet--and I'm not just talking about the ever-accelerating breakbeats. Sucking in a dizzying succession of influences (hip hop, dancehall,  jazz,  industrial), the scene ran through a half-dozen distinct stylistic phases. But two years ago, jungle's mutational onrush  stalled.  Producers progressively banished the elements that had given the music "vibe" (hip hop, reggae) leaving behind a techno-influenced, dark-but-clinical sound motored by the trudging two-step beat.

    

     Planet V is probably the best compilation the scene could muster right about now; it's a superb survey of  a sonic stasis quo. Adam F's "Brand New Funk" and Ed Rush and Optical's "Funktion (Remix)" indicate two  facets of drum and bass's current, desperate

reinvocation of "funk". The On The Corner-ish "Funktion" trailblazed the more frantic polyrhythms that are now thankfully superceding two-step [2013 note: not meaning the UK garage 2step but the jacknife-at-the-waist plodfunk that took over D'n'B from 1997 onwards, aka neurofunk], while Adam F's tune should really be titled "Kitschy Retro Funk"--its blacksploitation  brass stabs  make me think of  Jackie Brown in silhouette brandishing a gun. Long associated with V Recordings, the Reprazent posse are well, er, reprazented, with solid efforts from DJ Die, Scorpio, DJ Suv and Krust,  plus album highlights from Roni Size like "Strictly Social"--a peculiar mesh of Cantonese gongs,  brittle Sonic Youth guitarchords and  Glitterbeat stomp. Such incongruous combinations are one of the few avenues of  aesthetic rejuvenation still open for drum abd bass.

    

        Stuck in his pleasant rut of  wispy  synth-washes and simulated sax'n' strings sounds,  LTJ Bukem ought to be a sad figure. Instead, he's achieved a strange dignity, simply by sticking to his aesthetic guns instead of going "dark" when it was fashionable. Bukem's latest mix-CD, featuring tracks by his Looking Good roster of acolytes/clones and languid MC-ing from Conrad, will keep his fans  happy until the arrival of the  maestro's long-awaited solo debut. One of the ironies of  ambient drum and bass--supposedly meant for home listening-- is that it  sounds much better over a huge club sound system, where the extra volume realizes the music's oceanic aspirations. These days  I'd rather hear this softcore jazzy jungle played out than the hard stuff:  Looking Good's clip-clopping breaks have more of   jungle's bygone frisky exuberance than two-step's dirgefunk, and its heart-murmur basslines impact your ribcage without harshing your ear.  Influenced more by house's smooth, seamless mixing than jungle's chop 'n' slash, Bukem's forte is weaving a sensurround wall of soothing goo. Which is why all Looking Good artists sound samey--they're designed as compatible components for the Bukem mix-scape. Not radical music by any means, then, but  Bukem-style aquafunk remains a valid segment of what junglists  call the "full circumference".

Further reading: my December 1997 piece on Neurofunk for the Wire