10 Jungle Classics - Mojo - April 1995

 

Note how the copyeditor assumed that the 2 in "2 Bad Mice" was me having started and abandoned a numbering system but having forgotten to remove the 2 in front of the second entry - gah!

Also "gah!" - Mojo got someone else to do the big reported story on jungle and had me do the sidebar. Still I suppose, what with me by this point having already written about jungle for Vibe, The Observer, The Wire, and Melody Maker (twice!), and quite possibly some others I'm blanking on (Spin? Details?), they might quite reasonably have deemed it a good idea to get another voice in. 

Note also the embryonic form of my coinage "rhythmic psychedelia" (yes you heard that right - my coinage) in the reference in the Dead Dred bit to "jungle's psychedelic approach to rhythm". Published in the April 95 issue, which came out March '95, so written February '95.

The first appearance of the fully-evolved term is in a March '95 piece on A Guy Called Gerald

"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."

See, I know what pushed me towards the idea in the first place - the backwards psych-smeary drums on "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)" by Omni Trio. 

Also the way the drums get reversed on this 

Things like "Wrinkles in Time" by 4 Hero also. 

Of course you could say there was rhythmic psychedelia already going in actual psychedelia  - the time / tempo dilation in this (which amazingly they used to do live - it's not a studio artifact, at least not originally, it came out of what they did in concert)

And a lot of the really pronounced phasing is heard on the drums in psychedelic rock - the way they billow at the drum roll in this

looking back at 1994 - Xmas issue commentaries - Melody Maker - December 24-31 1994

 

Freaky cover isn't it? 

The whole issue readable at Nothing Else On

Routes and futures

 

Various Artists

Routes from the Jungle: Escape Velocity Volume 1

Melody Maker, 1995

by Simon Reynolds 

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. 

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 19^th 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.

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."

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  

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 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.

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.