for us crew, some old school cd labels to look for in the used section of your local shops. there are some sick cd compilations from the 1993-1996 time. much respect to db, soulslinger & ak1200 who never get enough credit for pumping this music in america when nobody knew what it was.
http://www.discogs.com/release/215332
http://www.discogs.com/release/266518
http://www.discogs.com/label/Quango+Records
http://www.discogs.com/label/Jungle+Sky
Latecomers to Jungle
-
jackquinox
- Posts: 572
- Joined: Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:54 pm
I always thought that the mix cd goldie did for the incredible series had some great tracks on:
http://www.discogs.com/release/11728
And i agree platinum breakz vol 1 and Logical Progression Vol 1 are also 2 albums with a great compilation of tracks.
As far as the moving shadow cds go i remember they did an anniversary type one which had everything from 2 bad mice - waremouse through to dom and roland -cant punish me, im not sure which number it was and cant find it on there website but it was only a couple of pound and a really good retrospective of the label.
http://www.discogs.com/release/11728
And i agree platinum breakz vol 1 and Logical Progression Vol 1 are also 2 albums with a great compilation of tracks.
As far as the moving shadow cds go i remember they did an anniversary type one which had everything from 2 bad mice - waremouse through to dom and roland -cant punish me, im not sure which number it was and cant find it on there website but it was only a couple of pound and a really good retrospective of the label.
-
hate recordings
- Posts: 623
- Joined: Wed May 17, 2006 11:12 am
- Location: washington dc area
- Contact:
i've included somethin for main man
to give him an idea of where he should start listening to dnb. if he likes inner city life better, he should start working from 1995 backwards. if he likes amtrak better, he should start working from 1996 point forwards.
i think it makes sense, since inner city life is the pennacle of jungle, where as amtrak is the birth of tech step. of course, this can be debated. we all have our favorates, neither tune is mine. but if i was on jeopardy answering questions about jungle/dnb, those would be my answers.
http://www.haterecordings.com/wow/goldievstrace.mp3
1) goldie - inner city life
2) trace - amtrak
i also found a fascinating article while trying to pinpoint the sample used in amtrak. a must read for anyone interested in the transformation of dnb.
This extract is taken from Simon Reynold's
brilliant history of rave music and dance
culture "Energy Flash"
Apocalypse Noir
In 1996, a new sub-genre of jungle began to coalesce called 'techstep', a dirge-like death-funk characterized by harsh industrial timbres and bludgeoning 'butcher's block' beats. The term was coined by DJ-producers Ed Rush and Trace, who shaped the sound in tandem with engineer Nico of the No U-Turn label. The 'tech' stood not for Detroit techno, dreamy and elegant, but for the brilliant brutalist Belgian hardcore of the early nineties. Paying homage to R&S classics like 'Dominator' and 'Mentasm', to artists like T99 and Frank de Wulf, Trace and Ed Rush deliberately affirmed a crucial white European element that had been written out of jungle's history.
The other important source for techstep was the first era of 'darkside', as pioneered by Reinforced artists like Doc Scott and 4 Hero. This was when the teenage DJs Trace and Ed Rush cut their production teeth with sinister classics like 'Lost Entity' and 'Blodclot Artattack'. The name 'Ed Rush' sounds like a take on the 'head rush', early rave slang for a temporary white-out of consciousness caused by taking too many E's. There's a big difference between darkside 1993 and techstep though. The original dark-core had still oozed a sinister, sickly bliss on the border between loved-up and f**ked-up. In 1996, with Ecstasy long out of favour, techstep was shaped by a different mindf**k-of-choice: hydroponically grown marijuana a.k.a. 'skunk', whose near-hallucinogenic levels of THC induce a sensory intensification without euphoria and a nerve-jangling paranoia perfect for jungle's tension-but-no-release rhythms.
The first stirrings of the return-to-darkness were heard in late 1995 withTrace's seminal remix of T. Power's 'Horny Mutant Jazz'. Working in tandem with Nico and Ed Rush, Trace tore the fusion-flavoured original to shreds, replacing its leisurely glidfe with slipped-gears breakbeats, spectral synths and a brooding, bruising bass sound sampled and mutated from Kevin Saunderson's Reese classic 'Just Want Another Chance'. Meanwhile Ed Rush's No U-Turn tracks 'Gangsta Hardstep' and 'Guncheck' took the explosive energy of hardcore and imploded it, transforming febrile hyperkinesis into molasses-thick malaise. The new sound made you feel like you were caged in a pressure-cooker of paroxysmic breaks and plasmic bass.
If Belgian brutalism and early breakbeat 'ardkore resembled sixties garage punk, techstep is like seventies punk rock, in so far as it's not a simple back-to-basics manoeuvre, but an isolation and intensification of the most aggresive, non R&B elements in its precursor. Over the six months, as the No U-Turn squad honed their sound-and-vision, they accentuated the self-same 'noise annoys' elements that punk exaggerated in garage rock: headbanger riffs and mid-frequency blare. Where intelligent drum and bass suffers from an obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, techstep production is deliberately dirty, all dense murk and noxious drones. The defining aspect of the No U-Turn sound was its bass sound - a dense, humming miasma of low-end frequencies, as malignant as a cloud of poison gas - acheived by feeding the bass-riffs through a guitar distortion pedal and a battery of effects. Another stylistic trait was the way techstep shunned the frisky fluency of jazzy-jungle's breakbeats in favour of relative simplicity and rigour. Although the breakbeats are still running at jungle's 160-and-rising b.p.m norm, the techstep feels slower - fatigued, winded, like it's had the crap beaten out of it. In tracks like Doc Scott's 'Drumz 95', the emphasis is on the 80 b.p.m. half-step, making you want to stomp, not sashay.
Techstep is a sado-masochistic sound. Ed Rush declared bluntly 'I want to hurt people with my beats', and one No U-Turn release had the phrase 'hurter's mission' scratched into the vinyl. This terrorist stance is in marked contrast to the rhetoric of intelligent drum and bass artists, with their talk of 'educating' the audience, 'opening minds' and 'easing the pressure' of urban life. Sonically, techstep's dry, clenched sound couldn't have been further from the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of genteel sound oozed by DJs like Bukem and Fabio, all soothing synth-washes and sax loops semingly on loan from Grover Washington Jnr and Kenny G.
While the intelligent and jazz-step producers prided themselves on their musicality , the techstep producers veered to the opposite extreme: a bracing 'anti-musicality'. With its incorporation of atonal, unpitched timbres, non-musical sounds and horror-movie soundtrack dissonance, the new artcore noir was simply far more avant-garde than the likes of Bukem. In an abiding confusion about what constitutes 'progression' for electronic music, the intelligent drum and bass producers were simply too deferential to traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, 'nice' textures, the importance of proper songs and hands-on, real-time instrumentation.
By the end of 1996, producers like Nasty Habits / Doc Scott, Dom and Roland, Boymerang, E-Sassin, Cyborgz and Optical had joined No U-Turn on their 'hurther's mission'. Techstep got even more industrial and stiff-jointed, at times verging on gabba, or a syncopated, sped-up update of Swans. Above all, the music got colder. The Numanoid synth-riff on Nasty Habits' awesome 'Shadowboxin'' sears the ear with its glacial grandeur, while the trudging two-step beat always makes me imagine a commando jogging under napalm skies with a rocket launcher on his hip. No U-Turn themselves reached something of a pinnacle with the dark exultation of Trace / Nico's 'Squadron', whose Carmina Burana-gone-cyberpunk fanfares slash and scythe like the Grim Reaper.
Where did the apocalyptic glee, the morbid and preverse jouissance, in techstep stem from? Nico described the music-making process - all night, red-eye sessions conducted in a ganja fog - as a horrible experience that poisoned his nervous system with tension. Ed Rush talked of deliberately smokin' weed to get 'dark, evil thoughts', the kind of skunkanoia without which he couldn't acheive the right vibe for his tracks. Like Wu-Tang-style horrorcore rap, techstep seemed based around the active pursuit of phobia and psychosis as entertainment. Which begged the question: what exactly were the social conditions that had created such a big audience for music that f**ks with your head so extensively, that appears to be 'no fun'?
Future-Shock Troops
'It's like this: some people are sharks, and some people are marks. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Play pussy, get f**ked. Come prepared or run away scared...You can't always count on E to shelter you from being vic'd.'
- Breakbeat Mailing Lists's Correspondent's riposte to other correspondents' complaints about the loveless, intimidating vibe at jungle events
If rave culture was a displaced form of working-class collectivity, with its 'love, peace and unity' running counter to thatcherite social atomization, then jungle is rave music after the death of the rave ethos. Punning on the Labour history of cooperatives and friendly societies, I'd call jungle an 'unfriendly society'. Since 1993 and hardcore's slide into the twilight-zone, debates about 'where did our love go?' have convulsed the UK breakbeat community, with grim tales being related of muggings outside clubs, of fights and 'crack' vibes inside. Disenchanted ravers sloped off to form the happy hardcore scene. Others defended the demise of the euphoric vibe, arguing that jungle's atmosphere wasn't moody, it was 'serious'.
In the absence of Ecstasy, jungle began to embrace an idealogy of real-ness that paralleled the worldview of American hardcore rap. L. Double and Shy FX's 'The S**t', a classic 1996 roller of a jump-up tune, kicked off with a gangsta monologue: 'Yo man, there's a gang of muthaf**kers out there on the d**k...Non-reality seeing, non-reality feeling, non-reality-living-ass muthaf**kas, man. And I don't know, man, reality, it's important to me.' In hip-hop, 'real' has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry. 'Real' also signifies that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. Hence tracks like T. Power's 'Police State' and Photek's neurotic 'The Hidden Camera': lyric-free critiques of a country that conducts the most intense surveillance of its own citizenry in the world (most UK city centres now have spy cameras). 'Real' means the death of the social; it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but downsizing (laying off the permanent work-force in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).
'Real' is a neo-medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocray threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, jungle reflects a medieval paranioascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, secret societies and covert operations. Hence the popularity, as a source of samples and song titles, of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Carlito's Way, whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honour.
Where gangsta hardstep shares the Wu-Tang Clan's neo-medieval vision of late capitalism, techstep is more influenced by dystopian sci-fi movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator et al, which contain a subliminally anti-capitalist message, imagining the future as a return to the Dark Ages, complete with fortress cities and bandit clans. Hence No U-Turn tracks like 'The Droid' and 'Replicants', or Adam F's 'Metropolis'. 'Amtrak', another late 1996 Trace / Nico meisterwerk pivots around the sample 'here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get into the future'. Given the scary millennial soundscape No U-Turn paint, this begs the question: why the hurry to get there? The answer: in a new Dark Age, it's the 'dark' that will come into their own. 'Dark' is where primordial energies meet digital technique, where id gets scientific. Identify with this marauding music, and you define yourself as predator not prey.
What you affiliate yourself to in techstep is the will-to-power of technology itself, the motor behind late capitalism as it rampages over human priorities and tears communities apart. The name No U-Turn captures this sense that there's no turning back. It also has a submerged political resonance: one of Margaret Thatcher's famous boasts was 'This lady's not for turning' - her refusal to bow to pressure from liberal Tories to make a U-Turn on Conservative policies like privatization and the assault on welfare. These same policies led to the catastrophic realization of another infamous Thatcher pronouncement: 'There is no such thing as society.'
The persuasive sense of slippin' into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn't necessarily take the 'logical' form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-facist, anti-corporate nostalgia of America's right-wing militia, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.
In jungle, the response is a 'realism' that accepts a socially constructed reality as 'natural'. To get 'real' is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're neither a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There's a cold rage seething in jungle, but it's expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream. 'Underground' can be understood socialogically as a metaphor for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche: the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat.
Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable to trauma). 'It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for', runs the martial arts movie sample in Source Direct's 'the Cult', a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call 'neurofunk' (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n' blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don't even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's strategy of 'cultural resistance': the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.
The battery of sensations offered by a six-hour stint at AWOL, Millennium or any 'non-intelligent' jungle club, induces a mixture of shell-shock and future-shock. Alvin Toffler defined F-shock as what happens when the human adaptive mechanism seizes up in response to an overload of stimuli, novelty, surprise. Triggering neural reflexes and fight-or-flight responses, jungle's rhythmic assault-course hypes up the listener's adaptive capability in readiness for the worst the twenty-first century has up its sleeve. If jungle is a martial artform, clubs like AWOL are church for the soul-jah and killah priest, inculcating a kind of spiritual fortitude.
All of this is why going to AWOL is serious bizness, as opposed to 'fun'. Jungle is the living death of rave, the sound of living with and living through the dream's demise. Every synapse-shredding snare and cranium-cracking bass-bomb is an alarm-call saying 'Wake-up, that dream is over. Time to get real.'
i guess everyone has thier own thing. depends on what background you come from. parents raised me on dc hardcore/oldschool punk - predominately minor threat, bad brains, black flag, dead kennedys, crass, ect. teens were spent listening to nyc hiphop circa 87-96 - mostly hardcore hiphop ala MOP, early nas, kool g rap, rakim, public enemy, early wu tang, ect.
guess that's why it appealed to me the most. not sure what kinda musical background inner city life would appeal to, but i couldnt stand it. too pretty and plur'ish "i love you, ill never let you go, insert cliche love song crap here". mabey people who grew up listening to the beach boys or top 40 music or some shit.
i'm all about the dark, hardcore shit.
to give him an idea of where he should start listening to dnb. if he likes inner city life better, he should start working from 1995 backwards. if he likes amtrak better, he should start working from 1996 point forwards.
i think it makes sense, since inner city life is the pennacle of jungle, where as amtrak is the birth of tech step. of course, this can be debated. we all have our favorates, neither tune is mine. but if i was on jeopardy answering questions about jungle/dnb, those would be my answers.
http://www.haterecordings.com/wow/goldievstrace.mp3
1) goldie - inner city life
2) trace - amtrak
i also found a fascinating article while trying to pinpoint the sample used in amtrak. a must read for anyone interested in the transformation of dnb.
This extract is taken from Simon Reynold's
brilliant history of rave music and dance
culture "Energy Flash"
Apocalypse Noir
In 1996, a new sub-genre of jungle began to coalesce called 'techstep', a dirge-like death-funk characterized by harsh industrial timbres and bludgeoning 'butcher's block' beats. The term was coined by DJ-producers Ed Rush and Trace, who shaped the sound in tandem with engineer Nico of the No U-Turn label. The 'tech' stood not for Detroit techno, dreamy and elegant, but for the brilliant brutalist Belgian hardcore of the early nineties. Paying homage to R&S classics like 'Dominator' and 'Mentasm', to artists like T99 and Frank de Wulf, Trace and Ed Rush deliberately affirmed a crucial white European element that had been written out of jungle's history.
The other important source for techstep was the first era of 'darkside', as pioneered by Reinforced artists like Doc Scott and 4 Hero. This was when the teenage DJs Trace and Ed Rush cut their production teeth with sinister classics like 'Lost Entity' and 'Blodclot Artattack'. The name 'Ed Rush' sounds like a take on the 'head rush', early rave slang for a temporary white-out of consciousness caused by taking too many E's. There's a big difference between darkside 1993 and techstep though. The original dark-core had still oozed a sinister, sickly bliss on the border between loved-up and f**ked-up. In 1996, with Ecstasy long out of favour, techstep was shaped by a different mindf**k-of-choice: hydroponically grown marijuana a.k.a. 'skunk', whose near-hallucinogenic levels of THC induce a sensory intensification without euphoria and a nerve-jangling paranoia perfect for jungle's tension-but-no-release rhythms.
The first stirrings of the return-to-darkness were heard in late 1995 withTrace's seminal remix of T. Power's 'Horny Mutant Jazz'. Working in tandem with Nico and Ed Rush, Trace tore the fusion-flavoured original to shreds, replacing its leisurely glidfe with slipped-gears breakbeats, spectral synths and a brooding, bruising bass sound sampled and mutated from Kevin Saunderson's Reese classic 'Just Want Another Chance'. Meanwhile Ed Rush's No U-Turn tracks 'Gangsta Hardstep' and 'Guncheck' took the explosive energy of hardcore and imploded it, transforming febrile hyperkinesis into molasses-thick malaise. The new sound made you feel like you were caged in a pressure-cooker of paroxysmic breaks and plasmic bass.
If Belgian brutalism and early breakbeat 'ardkore resembled sixties garage punk, techstep is like seventies punk rock, in so far as it's not a simple back-to-basics manoeuvre, but an isolation and intensification of the most aggresive, non R&B elements in its precursor. Over the six months, as the No U-Turn squad honed their sound-and-vision, they accentuated the self-same 'noise annoys' elements that punk exaggerated in garage rock: headbanger riffs and mid-frequency blare. Where intelligent drum and bass suffers from an obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, techstep production is deliberately dirty, all dense murk and noxious drones. The defining aspect of the No U-Turn sound was its bass sound - a dense, humming miasma of low-end frequencies, as malignant as a cloud of poison gas - acheived by feeding the bass-riffs through a guitar distortion pedal and a battery of effects. Another stylistic trait was the way techstep shunned the frisky fluency of jazzy-jungle's breakbeats in favour of relative simplicity and rigour. Although the breakbeats are still running at jungle's 160-and-rising b.p.m norm, the techstep feels slower - fatigued, winded, like it's had the crap beaten out of it. In tracks like Doc Scott's 'Drumz 95', the emphasis is on the 80 b.p.m. half-step, making you want to stomp, not sashay.
Techstep is a sado-masochistic sound. Ed Rush declared bluntly 'I want to hurt people with my beats', and one No U-Turn release had the phrase 'hurter's mission' scratched into the vinyl. This terrorist stance is in marked contrast to the rhetoric of intelligent drum and bass artists, with their talk of 'educating' the audience, 'opening minds' and 'easing the pressure' of urban life. Sonically, techstep's dry, clenched sound couldn't have been further from the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of genteel sound oozed by DJs like Bukem and Fabio, all soothing synth-washes and sax loops semingly on loan from Grover Washington Jnr and Kenny G.
While the intelligent and jazz-step producers prided themselves on their musicality , the techstep producers veered to the opposite extreme: a bracing 'anti-musicality'. With its incorporation of atonal, unpitched timbres, non-musical sounds and horror-movie soundtrack dissonance, the new artcore noir was simply far more avant-garde than the likes of Bukem. In an abiding confusion about what constitutes 'progression' for electronic music, the intelligent drum and bass producers were simply too deferential to traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, 'nice' textures, the importance of proper songs and hands-on, real-time instrumentation.
By the end of 1996, producers like Nasty Habits / Doc Scott, Dom and Roland, Boymerang, E-Sassin, Cyborgz and Optical had joined No U-Turn on their 'hurther's mission'. Techstep got even more industrial and stiff-jointed, at times verging on gabba, or a syncopated, sped-up update of Swans. Above all, the music got colder. The Numanoid synth-riff on Nasty Habits' awesome 'Shadowboxin'' sears the ear with its glacial grandeur, while the trudging two-step beat always makes me imagine a commando jogging under napalm skies with a rocket launcher on his hip. No U-Turn themselves reached something of a pinnacle with the dark exultation of Trace / Nico's 'Squadron', whose Carmina Burana-gone-cyberpunk fanfares slash and scythe like the Grim Reaper.
Where did the apocalyptic glee, the morbid and preverse jouissance, in techstep stem from? Nico described the music-making process - all night, red-eye sessions conducted in a ganja fog - as a horrible experience that poisoned his nervous system with tension. Ed Rush talked of deliberately smokin' weed to get 'dark, evil thoughts', the kind of skunkanoia without which he couldn't acheive the right vibe for his tracks. Like Wu-Tang-style horrorcore rap, techstep seemed based around the active pursuit of phobia and psychosis as entertainment. Which begged the question: what exactly were the social conditions that had created such a big audience for music that f**ks with your head so extensively, that appears to be 'no fun'?
Future-Shock Troops
'It's like this: some people are sharks, and some people are marks. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Play pussy, get f**ked. Come prepared or run away scared...You can't always count on E to shelter you from being vic'd.'
- Breakbeat Mailing Lists's Correspondent's riposte to other correspondents' complaints about the loveless, intimidating vibe at jungle events
If rave culture was a displaced form of working-class collectivity, with its 'love, peace and unity' running counter to thatcherite social atomization, then jungle is rave music after the death of the rave ethos. Punning on the Labour history of cooperatives and friendly societies, I'd call jungle an 'unfriendly society'. Since 1993 and hardcore's slide into the twilight-zone, debates about 'where did our love go?' have convulsed the UK breakbeat community, with grim tales being related of muggings outside clubs, of fights and 'crack' vibes inside. Disenchanted ravers sloped off to form the happy hardcore scene. Others defended the demise of the euphoric vibe, arguing that jungle's atmosphere wasn't moody, it was 'serious'.
In the absence of Ecstasy, jungle began to embrace an idealogy of real-ness that paralleled the worldview of American hardcore rap. L. Double and Shy FX's 'The S**t', a classic 1996 roller of a jump-up tune, kicked off with a gangsta monologue: 'Yo man, there's a gang of muthaf**kers out there on the d**k...Non-reality seeing, non-reality feeling, non-reality-living-ass muthaf**kas, man. And I don't know, man, reality, it's important to me.' In hip-hop, 'real' has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry. 'Real' also signifies that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. Hence tracks like T. Power's 'Police State' and Photek's neurotic 'The Hidden Camera': lyric-free critiques of a country that conducts the most intense surveillance of its own citizenry in the world (most UK city centres now have spy cameras). 'Real' means the death of the social; it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but downsizing (laying off the permanent work-force in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).
'Real' is a neo-medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocray threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, jungle reflects a medieval paranioascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, secret societies and covert operations. Hence the popularity, as a source of samples and song titles, of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Carlito's Way, whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honour.
Where gangsta hardstep shares the Wu-Tang Clan's neo-medieval vision of late capitalism, techstep is more influenced by dystopian sci-fi movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator et al, which contain a subliminally anti-capitalist message, imagining the future as a return to the Dark Ages, complete with fortress cities and bandit clans. Hence No U-Turn tracks like 'The Droid' and 'Replicants', or Adam F's 'Metropolis'. 'Amtrak', another late 1996 Trace / Nico meisterwerk pivots around the sample 'here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get into the future'. Given the scary millennial soundscape No U-Turn paint, this begs the question: why the hurry to get there? The answer: in a new Dark Age, it's the 'dark' that will come into their own. 'Dark' is where primordial energies meet digital technique, where id gets scientific. Identify with this marauding music, and you define yourself as predator not prey.
What you affiliate yourself to in techstep is the will-to-power of technology itself, the motor behind late capitalism as it rampages over human priorities and tears communities apart. The name No U-Turn captures this sense that there's no turning back. It also has a submerged political resonance: one of Margaret Thatcher's famous boasts was 'This lady's not for turning' - her refusal to bow to pressure from liberal Tories to make a U-Turn on Conservative policies like privatization and the assault on welfare. These same policies led to the catastrophic realization of another infamous Thatcher pronouncement: 'There is no such thing as society.'
The persuasive sense of slippin' into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn't necessarily take the 'logical' form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-facist, anti-corporate nostalgia of America's right-wing militia, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.
In jungle, the response is a 'realism' that accepts a socially constructed reality as 'natural'. To get 'real' is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're neither a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There's a cold rage seething in jungle, but it's expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream. 'Underground' can be understood socialogically as a metaphor for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche: the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat.
Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable to trauma). 'It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for', runs the martial arts movie sample in Source Direct's 'the Cult', a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call 'neurofunk' (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n' blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don't even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's strategy of 'cultural resistance': the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.
The battery of sensations offered by a six-hour stint at AWOL, Millennium or any 'non-intelligent' jungle club, induces a mixture of shell-shock and future-shock. Alvin Toffler defined F-shock as what happens when the human adaptive mechanism seizes up in response to an overload of stimuli, novelty, surprise. Triggering neural reflexes and fight-or-flight responses, jungle's rhythmic assault-course hypes up the listener's adaptive capability in readiness for the worst the twenty-first century has up its sleeve. If jungle is a martial artform, clubs like AWOL are church for the soul-jah and killah priest, inculcating a kind of spiritual fortitude.
All of this is why going to AWOL is serious bizness, as opposed to 'fun'. Jungle is the living death of rave, the sound of living with and living through the dream's demise. Every synapse-shredding snare and cranium-cracking bass-bomb is an alarm-call saying 'Wake-up, that dream is over. Time to get real.'
i guess everyone has thier own thing. depends on what background you come from. parents raised me on dc hardcore/oldschool punk - predominately minor threat, bad brains, black flag, dead kennedys, crass, ect. teens were spent listening to nyc hiphop circa 87-96 - mostly hardcore hiphop ala MOP, early nas, kool g rap, rakim, public enemy, early wu tang, ect.
guess that's why it appealed to me the most. not sure what kinda musical background inner city life would appeal to, but i couldnt stand it. too pretty and plur'ish "i love you, ill never let you go, insert cliche love song crap here". mabey people who grew up listening to the beach boys or top 40 music or some shit.
i'm all about the dark, hardcore shit.
-
jackquinox
- Posts: 572
- Joined: Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:54 pm
http://goldenerajungle.com/php-files/news.php
Lots of jungle mixes here for download... I know these arent cds, but maybe he/she can just go off on these for a while.
Lots of jungle mixes here for download... I know these arent cds, but maybe he/she can just go off on these for a while.
Hate Recordings wrote
"i guess everyone has thier own thing. depends on what background you come from. parents raised me on dc hardcore/oldschool punk - predominately minor threat, bad brains, black flag, dead kennedys, crass, ect. teens were spent listening to nyc hiphop circa 87-96 - mostly hardcore hiphop ala MOP, early nas, kool g rap, rakim, public enemy, early wu tang, ect.
guess that's why it appealed to me the most. not sure what kinda musical background inner city life would appeal to, but i couldnt stand it. too pretty and plur'ish "i love you, ill never let you go, insert cliche love song crap here". mabey people who grew up listening to the beach boys or top 40 music or some shit.
i'm all about the dark, hardcore shit."
Fair enough, massive DK's fan myself, metal and punk background in the 80's, into PE and hip hop, prodigy into hardcore and jungle, but I think that all music needs light and shade/black and white, and too much of either gets a bit tedious after a while.
If you had a friend that thought everything was great all the time, I'm sure he/she'd become as annoying as someone that thought everything was shit constantly. I think the best music incorporates the best of both.
And cheers for that Simon Reynolds article - he a damn fine writer
"i guess everyone has thier own thing. depends on what background you come from. parents raised me on dc hardcore/oldschool punk - predominately minor threat, bad brains, black flag, dead kennedys, crass, ect. teens were spent listening to nyc hiphop circa 87-96 - mostly hardcore hiphop ala MOP, early nas, kool g rap, rakim, public enemy, early wu tang, ect.
guess that's why it appealed to me the most. not sure what kinda musical background inner city life would appeal to, but i couldnt stand it. too pretty and plur'ish "i love you, ill never let you go, insert cliche love song crap here". mabey people who grew up listening to the beach boys or top 40 music or some shit.
i'm all about the dark, hardcore shit."
Fair enough, massive DK's fan myself, metal and punk background in the 80's, into PE and hip hop, prodigy into hardcore and jungle, but I think that all music needs light and shade/black and white, and too much of either gets a bit tedious after a while.
If you had a friend that thought everything was great all the time, I'm sure he/she'd become as annoying as someone that thought everything was shit constantly. I think the best music incorporates the best of both.
And cheers for that Simon Reynolds article - he a damn fine writer
Hmm....
http://redekonstrukcje.org
hardest and toughest sound system of freezing east
hardest and toughest sound system of freezing east
yeah, i gotta say, mixes (studio, shows, radio) is where its at back then (still even lol)
if you are looking for a lbum thats gonna sound like that remarc, head straight to the Sub Base comps tbh... Drum & Bass Selection vol 1- whatever.. i think #3 is alot of peoples favorite...
a bit more obscure vibe would be some of the Strictly Underground compilations like "Jungle Soundclash"... or maybe try the Street Tuff "Jungle Hits" compilations (although they dont always have the full tunes on them..)
best bet for the real Jungle vibe, explore some classic live sets & old pirate radio....
check these i got up for DL:
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... _Frost.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... _Frost.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... y_Finn.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... y_Finn.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... _Trace.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
wordup...
one
human?
if you are looking for a lbum thats gonna sound like that remarc, head straight to the Sub Base comps tbh... Drum & Bass Selection vol 1- whatever.. i think #3 is alot of peoples favorite...
a bit more obscure vibe would be some of the Strictly Underground compilations like "Jungle Soundclash"... or maybe try the Street Tuff "Jungle Hits" compilations (although they dont always have the full tunes on them..)
best bet for the real Jungle vibe, explore some classic live sets & old pirate radio....
check these i got up for DL:
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... _Frost.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... _Frost.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... y_Finn.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... y_Finn.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... _Trace.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
http://www.survivalnyc.org/audio/mixes/ ... DJ_Ron.mp3
wordup...
one
human?
AS ABOVE SO BELOW!
-
clone.a.k.
- Posts: 751
- Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2005 6:30 pm
- Location: Humboldt County, California
- Contact:
btw, 4 Hero version of Inner City Life may very well be the best Jungle song ever imho...
on a level.
theres no song that ive had more MOMENTS in the dance with... i play that one when its moment time.. people fall in love @ 3:45 AM to that one.. its get rid of the pain time when that one drops...
i dunno, lol, that ones special...
one
human?
on a level.
theres no song that ive had more MOMENTS in the dance with... i play that one when its moment time.. people fall in love @ 3:45 AM to that one.. its get rid of the pain time when that one drops...
i dunno, lol, that ones special...
one
human?
AS ABOVE SO BELOW!
human? wrote:btw, 4 Hero version of Inner City Life may very well be the best Jungle song ever imho...
on a level.
theres no song that ive had more MOMENTS in the dance with... i play that one when its moment time.. people fall in love @ 3:45 AM to that one.. its get rid of the pain time when that one drops...
i dunno, lol, that ones special...
one
human?
Yeah, agreed. Just thought I'd dig the 12" out and it turned out it was engineered by Photek, and so far as Goldie goes, I think he's more an "executive producer" than techy guy, so is this actually a Photek toon technically speaking?
Hmm....
-
channelzero
- Posts: 4
- Joined: Fri May 26, 2006 2:25 am
- Location: brooklyn u.s.a.
- Contact:
goldie "timeless"
roni size "reprazent"
panacea "low profile darkness"
this way you get three classics with three totally different flavors. that intelligent shit is cool and all but sometimes you gotta throw in some of that dirty, grizzly-ass, fire-breathin, baby-eatin panacea type-shit too.
roni size "reprazent"
panacea "low profile darkness"
this way you get three classics with three totally different flavors. that intelligent shit is cool and all but sometimes you gotta throw in some of that dirty, grizzly-ass, fire-breathin, baby-eatin panacea type-shit too.
"[ChannelZero] had only one idea... and it was wrong."
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)
www.myspace.com/findingzero
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)
www.myspace.com/findingzero
just checked it & the 4 Hero version is engineered by Rob Playford even...Shonky wrote: Yeah, agreed. Just thought I'd dig the 12" out and it turned out it was engineered by Photek, and so far as Goldie goes, I think he's more an "executive producer" than techy guy, so is this actually a Photek toon technically speaking?
yeah, goldie didnt really make that one... but i must say, when i heard him play it in NYC early 95 it blew my mind. havent been the same since.
AS ABOVE SO BELOW!
Timeless is actually a pretty good album, didn't listen to it for years for some reason, but now I've dug it out again it's really good. Fair play to Goldie though, he got good work out of them. Noticed Dillinja on additional production credits - Sky (b-side of Muthafukka I think) is mad production - pity there isn't an album by him from that period, as he was turning out some fine toons.human? wrote:just checked it & the 4 Hero version is engineered by Rob Playford even...Shonky wrote: Yeah, agreed. Just thought I'd dig the 12" out and it turned out it was engineered by Photek, and so far as Goldie goes, I think he's more an "executive producer" than techy guy, so is this actually a Photek toon technically speaking?
yeah, goldie didnt really make that one... but i must say, when i heard him play it in NYC early 95 it blew my mind. havent been the same since.
Hmm....
i got a 2 piece vinyl comp from 96 called "Species Drum & Bass - Something of Intelligent Existence" cat# SPLP7.... bunch of dillinja tunes onit & some Lemon D & some other stuff... its pretty good now that im listening back to it...
but i dunno how available it is/was... cant find it on rolldabeats or discogs...
but i dunno how available it is/was... cant find it on rolldabeats or discogs...
AS ABOVE SO BELOW!
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