trance versus jungle

TRANCE V. JUNGLE 

The Wire, late 1993

by Simon Reynolds

Tastemakers are unanimous: when it comes to the scattered tribes

of the post-aciiied diaspora, trance is where it's at.  And 'ardkore

is held in universal disdain: junglist breakbeats and squeaky vocal

samples are regarded as risible signs of rave's degeneration into

'nuttercore', 150 b.p.m. kiddy-kartoon nonsense for E'd up hooligans.

For trance purists, programmed beats and all-electronic textures

indicate pure-blooded ancestry, rooted in the 'golden age' of

Detroit, as passed down through illustrious scions like Warp.  But in

music as in genealogy/genetics, purity is over-rated: it engenders

inbred enfeeblement. Miscegenation, mongrelisation and mutation are

the very stuff of evolution. So I'm here to hail rave's wayward,

RUFF-ian son, jungalistic hardcore, and direct some overdue

scepticism towards trance.

By any reckoning 'Trance Europe Express', Volume's double CD of

state-of-art techno, is a superb compilation: 24 tracks including

offerings by most of the prime movers in the field.  Nonetheless, the

comp has something of the air of epitaph about it: this is a genre

that's reached a dead end, etiolated by its own oppressive

tastefulness.  Trance's critical hegemony goes hand in hand with

textural homogeneity: the 'infinite possibilities' fanfared by

technophile critics too often boil down to a rather uniform and

impoverished array of 'cosmic' synth-timbres. While the best

exponents here (Orbital, Aphex, Bandulu) are opening up a new genre

of electronic composition, the lesser units (Psychick Warriors Ov

Gaia, The Source, Cosmic Baby) are little more than Tangerine Dream

or Vangelis with a modern beat: funkless, Aryan mood-muzak.

The alleged superiority of trance over jungle relies on the

questionable desirability of such an entity as 'armchair/intelligent

techno'. Is sedentary and contemplative somehow intrinsically a

higher, truer response than sweaty and mental?  This is simply

prog-rock snobbery.  Like the earnest conceptualists of the

Seventies, trance signifies its 'progressive' intentions by taking

its bleedin' time: at best (say, Orbital), this is an aesthetic of

sensuous ebb-and-flow (rather than ardkore's blipvert blitz).  Too

often, it means longeurs galore.

In fact, listening to trance can be a bit like going to church.

The genre does give itself pseudo-spiritual airs (hence the angelic

choral samples on Scubadevil's "Celestial Symphony", or the fact that

the top London club for trance is called 'The Knowledge').  Whereas

jungle is more pagan and voodoo. Its vulgar, indiscriminate approach

to sampling makes me think of cargo cults - hallucinating the sublime

and otherworldly in all manner of trash and pop-cultural jetsam.

Where trance's sampling is tasteful, discreet, a fusion-puree, jungle

is fissile: you can see the joins and that's so much more postmodern

and exciting. A typical jungle track is an epileptic/eclectic mish-

mash of incongrous textures (spooky ectoplasm rubs up against

gimmicky cartoon gibberish) and incompatible moods (mystic, manic,

macabre).  Jungle's cut'n'mix aesthetic owes as much to hip hop as to

techno; tracks have a machinic/organic, cyborg quality that recalls

the days before rap's slide into plausible, 'realistic' grooviness.

   

If you think 'ardkore means The Prodigy (who's great, anyway, The

Sweet of the 90's), you should really check out 'The Joint'. Label

compilations tend to be patchy, but this one excels because it's a

collaboration between two of ardkore's most innovative labels,

Suburban Base and Moving Shadow.  Most of the tracks have a schizoid

quality, flitting back and forth between jungle's two current modes:

happy'n'hyper and dark'n'demonic. Foul Play's "Open Your Mind"

oscillates between clammy synth-tones and billowing soul-chanteuse

harmonies.  Omni Trio's "Mystic Stepper" also has an unnerving

oxymoronic vibe, a sort of mournful euphoria: the "feel good" chorus

aches with a strange desolation. DJ Hype's "The Chopper" starts as a

pure rush (ricochetting hi-hat and Uzi-rattling snare, faecal-squirts

of bass-flatulence), then forlorn soul-diva ether wafts into the mix,

introducing an incongrous note of poignancy. DJ Krome & Mr Time's

"The Slammer", by comparison, is pure 'happy hardcore', a gorgeous,

fuzzily-reverbed piano figure entwined with a chorus that gushes

'dancing we dancing we losing control'.

The looped breakbeats + recognisable samples method initially

resulted in a deluge of white label mediocrity, provoking

proclamations of rave's death.  But Reinforced's recent sampler-EP

"Enforcers 4" shows that this aesthetic has matured; jungle has

thrived on media neglect.  Like the Moving Shadow & Suburban Base

crews, Reinforced's roster pile on the rollin' breaks to form a

sophisticated mesh of polyrhythms; beats are treated, reverbed,

'timestretched', even run backwards (on Manix' 'The X Factor'),

inducing a eerie feel of in-the-pocket funk and out-of-body delirium.

Over this roiling syncopation, ecstastic vocal plasma is molded and

modulated, an inner-body choir of sighs and whimpers that simulates

E's 'arrested orgasm' sensation.  Meanwhile, instead of basslines,

jungle's low-end has devolved into a radioactive ooze that impacts

you viscerally rather than aurally.

Ultimately, it is all down to a gut-level response, whether you

prefer trance's clockwork-regular Kraftwerk/Moroder pulse-grooves or

jungle's staccato, thrash-funk judder-quake.  It's whatever gets in

your pants, works your booty and your imagination.  But putting on my

critic's cap, I'd say that jungle's uproarious schizo-eclecticism is

paying greater dividends than trance's solemn purism. At its best,

jungle is like a gutternsnipe Can (same James Brownian rotorvation,

similar 'flow motion' ethos). Jungle is the bastard child of the John

Cage/Byrne & Eno/23 Skidoo avant-disco tradition, shunned and scorned

where the supposedly rightful inheritor of that tradition,

trance/ambient, is feted. But illegitimate heirs tend to lead more

interesting lives.

Lady Sovereign

Lady Sovereign

Public Warning

Island

director's cut, Observer Music Monthly, December 10th 2006.

by Simon Reynolds

Public Warning is a paradox: a great album, but a botched debut. It’s everything the fan could have hoped for, yet it’s palpably tarnished by its tardiness. This record, you can’t help feeling, really should have come out 18 months ago, when it would have spearheaded the onslaught of grime-goes-pop bids (Kano, Roll Deep, Lethal B) and when Lady Sovereign was surfing a high tide of media buzz. By now “the multitalented munchkin” ought to be a one-woman Spice Girls phenomenon, with Sov World already in production. Arriving in the early months of 2007 Public Warning unavoidably has a last year’s thing--hell, the year before last’s thing--aura. And why the heinous, mystifying decision to release it in the UK three months after its American release? Were Sov's minders thinking they should wait until grime's profile sank to zero and then re-launch her as a US-anointed star? The press release  for Warning trumpets its #48  Billboard Chart entry and 20 thousand first week sales, but what that really means is that hardcore British fans will have bought the import or, more likely, downloaded it illegally months before the record even comes out in Sov’s homeland. 

But enough about hype and strategy, what about the would-be pop artifact itself? From production to persona, rhymes to flow, Public Warning is almost flawless. Three years since she first stung ours ears with “Ch Ching,” it’s still pure delight to hear Louise Harman mangle language as she shifts back and forth her two modes of tautly-drawled nasal insolence and slack ‘n’ gravelly ragga menace. So deft is her flair for alliteration she can't help signposting it with an interpolation of “Peter Piper picked a pickled pepper"  in one song and “she sells sea-shells by the sea shore” in another. And she subjects vowel sounds to Abu Ghraib-degrees of contortion--just check the stretched “u”'s in the “9 to 5” verse that rhymes “huge”, “rude”, “food”, “Red Bull” and “Channel U”. 

So deliriously pleasurable is the sound of Sov that you often glaze out on the sense of her words, which--when they’re not bigging herself up on tunes like “A Little Bit of Shhh” or the Prodigy-goes-2-Tone title track--are as keenly observed as Mike Skinner’s. “Gatheration” sketches an impromptu house party at Sov’s “yard”, while the hilarious “My England” skewers American Anglophile illusions about this country: “we don’t all have bowler hats and hire servants/More like 24 hour surveillance and dogshit on the pavements”, declares Sov, before spurning croquet for Playstation and scones for “someone’s fresh homegrown.” There’s more local colour in the obligatory US hip hop-style reminiscence “Those Were The Days”, Sov recalling youthful larks--“racing down the hill in Safeway trolleys”--on the Chalk Hill estate in North London. 

Sov’s signature blend of vivacious and vicious sometimes brings to mind that old Monty Python sketch inspired by the Kray Twins, in which the most fearsome sibling isn’t the brother who wields ultraviolence but the ones who uses sarcasm. She may be tiny and intensely charming, but I wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her. “Tango Man” reminds you of teenage girls’ capacity for verbal cruelty, taunting an ex-friend who overdid the fake tan (she gets compares to baked beans in an English breakfast at one point) while the growly thunder of Sov’s vocal on “A Little Bit of Shhh” gives teeth to the aside “don’t joke with us small folk.” The bass-booming “Fiddle With the Volume” is an incitement to ASBO--“abuse your speakers, lose your manners/disturb the neighbours, this one’s a banger”--and makes you briefly envisage this rude girl as an icon for our contemporary culture of incivility and public disorder. But then there’s “Hoodie”--not, as you’d expect from the title, a defiant anthem for UK’s new folk devil, the hood-wearing, mall-stalking chav, but actually a celebration of Sov’s own brand of grrl power, in which the unisex hip hop clothes of trainers and hooded sweatshirt is simply more practical for active pursuits like dancing than the sexed-up club babe look. Riding a lithe beat so swinging and innocently exuberant it’s almost Sixties in feel, the gorgeous chorus  “fling on an Adidas hoodie and just boogie-woogie with me” reminds you that young people haven’t really changed. They still want to “get loose,” as Sov sings it, dance their way out of their constrictions.

                                                                  

dance 98

Dance acts at CMJ  1998 alternative music seminar  

Village Voice November 17th, 1998 

by Simon Reynolds


It's been a year of musical agnosticism, with no single zone of sonic activity compelling enough to warrant monomania. Indie-rock hipsters are now as likely to check out dance music, while club-music mags, responding to the ennui engendered by a decade of dance-and-drug culture, are broadening their coverage to include rock: usually instrumentalists such as Tortoise and Fridge, but sometimes proper bands, like The Verve or Spiritualized, who have some kind of narco-spiritual kinship with rave. Given this backdrop of confusion, perhaps it's not surprising that this year's CMJ featured almost as much top DJ talent as the Miami Winter Dance conference.

At Bowery Ballroom Wednesday, Lo-Fidelity Allstars made a brave but clumsy stab at incorporating the science of dance music into the attack of rock'n'roll. The band's debut, How To Operate With a Blown Mind, is an oxymoronic masterpiece of "darkside big beat," documenting the normalized malaise of British polydrug culture, where clubbers boast about getting "messy" on a cocktail of diverse chemicals. Onstage, unfortunately, the band's rave'n'roll hybrid offers neither the machinelike precision of a DJ nor the charismatic spectacle of a band. Still, the vandalized disco of "Blisters on My Brain" dazzled the ears like the Gallic glitterball house of Stardust and Daft Punk.

That same night, Speeed's four-floor, 24-DJ extravaganza promised big fun, but actually delivered (thanks to oddly sparse attendance) a disappointingly vibeless experience. In the cavernous, almost deserted basement, U.S. house gods Deep Dish wove an alternately honeydewed and harsh web of textured rhythm; later, "surprise guests" Sasha & Digweed, accustomed to audiences of several thousand, attempted to please a crowd that was simply absent. 

Elsewhere, old-skool nostalgia seemed to be the ruling flavor: Monkey Mafia's Jon Carter played a very peculiar remix of Prince's "When Doves Cry," Les Rhythmes Digitales's Jacques Lu Cont offered a pitched-up, helium-squeaky version of A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray," and Glasgow's DJ Q dropped a crisp and spangly selection of disco cut-ups and filtered house. Just about the only breath of techno futurism came from Moby, who climaxed his set with a searingly celestial trance track, origin unknown.

Some of the week's best action was at parties not listed in the official program, but loosely affiliated to the schmooze fest and free to badge holders. On Thursday, New York hardcore techno label Industrial Strength brought gabba to the Sapphire Lounge. Lenny Dee resurrected the bombastic Belgian techno vibe of Brooklyn warehouse parties circa 1991; Parisian DJ Manu Le Malin stressed gabba's claims on the phuture with punishing yet atmospheric gloomcore. Later that night, Paul Oakenfold and sidekick Dave Ralph pleasured a packed Irving Plaza with sets of epic house and melodic trance that alternately tugged at the heartstrings (twinkly, plangent riffs) and insulted the intelligence (schlocky grand piano chords, Enya-esque Celt-diva vocals).

Like the Lo-fi's mishmash on Wednesday, the lineup at Irving Plaza on Saturday exposed the fallibility of live techno. Instead of transcendently tweaked-out turntablizm, Josh Wink opted for fitful, real-time performance of his own music. Then industrial dance veterans Meat Beat Manifesto churned out one torpid-tempo'd, quasi-funky track after another, making you wonder why main man Jack Dangers bothers hiring a live drummer if he just sounds like a state-of-the-art-circa-1990 breakbeat loop. With the post-MBM set from Wink never materializing, the night ultimately confirmed a stubborn truth about dance music: with scant few exceptions, it's a DJ thing.