through rushes and through briars

 

I always heard the sampled lyric in "Sub Dub" as "through rushes and through briars" - thinking the word "rush" with its ravey connotations snagged the ear of DJ Seduction

Actually it's "Bushes and Briars"

Through bushes and through briars

I lately took my way

All for to hear the small birds sing

And the lambs to skip and play

All for to hear the small birds sing

And the lambs to skip and play

I overhead my own true love

His voice did sound so clear

Long time I have been waiting for

The coming of my dear

Long time I have been waiting for

The coming of my dear

Sometimes I am uneasy

And troubled in my mind

Sometimes I think I'll go to my love

And tell to him my mind

But if I should go to my love

My love he will say “nay”

If I show to him my boldness

He'll ne'er love me again

If I show to him my boldness

He'll ne'er love me again

In  Energy Flash I took a wild guess and said it sounds like Maddy Prior

See, I imagined some ardkore ooligan rifling through the parents's albums collection and alighting on some Steeleye Span

Slightly disappointing, then, to learn much, much later that it's from a sort of ambient house record, "West In Motion" 

Made by an Irish group called Bumble - the vocalist on this "Haunted Mix" (like it, like it) is Breda Mayock, which is a folk-rock maiden type of  name

There is an Andy Weatherall mix of this song that is admired by some 

Back to Seduction and "Sub Dub" (why is it called "Sub Dub" then?)

Did not know there was a crazy breaks remix of 'Sub Dub" with an even longer bit of the vocal

Or an DJ SS Rollers remix

The song is a trad.arr and appears in the stiff (if beautifully Nic Roeg filmed) cinematic adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.

Julie Christie "sings"

Actually it's Isla Cameron reprising her rendition from her own album - putting a lovely quiver through the melody. 

Apparently June Tabor did it also - on her very first recordings, which nobody has put out there

As did the witchily fetching Toni Arthur, best known for Play School as opposed to her folk-rock past 

Sandy Denny done it too - except she didn't, the song is completely different but has the same title. 

Which was then covered by Lee Ranaldo of all people. 

In terms of traditional music royalty - dynastic scion Eliza Carthy has notably had a go, with Nancy Kerr

It's said to be the very first traditional song that Vaughan Williams collected: 

"Sung by a 72-year-old labourer, Charles Potiphar.... Vaughan Williams...  experienced a deep sense of recognition as though “it was something he had known all his life”. Being new to folk song collecting, he only transcribed the first verse, and got the rest of the words from a late 19th-century broadside published by W.S. Fortey of Seven Dials (London). John Clare also noted the song in his manuscripts, compiled in the 1820’s"

Here's a cool version by The Swingle Singers, it sounds like a madrigal

future-dance at Beat Connection / a snapshot of UK garridge forming before your ears

I had a fun and wide-ranging chat with The Underground Is Massive author Michaelangelo Matos at his substack Beat Connection, which is dedicated to deejay mixes. The chat touched on Futuromania, rave, jungle, UK garage pirate radio, digital maximalism, and many other topics, using the structure of five deejay mixes and radio sets:  John Peel's legendary Punk Special from December '76, a Don FM Ezy D Xmas '92 show, DB's The History of Our World hardcore + breakbeat ultramix from 94, Tuff Jam's CD-mix  Underground Frequencies Volume One which captures UK garage at a protean formative moment before either the "speed" or  "2step" kicked in, and then Rustie's Essential Mix of April 2012, the frazzling dazzle of digi-maxed nu-progtronica. 

My favorite was probably the Tuff Jam set, which reintroduced me to these old favorites:

Matos noticed that one of Basement Jaxx had some involvement in this gorgeous Mutiny track.

 

It reminded me of a period when I owned about three or four speed garage comps,  as that was all there was to own -  and this was one of them. It was the main way - living in NYC - I was able to hear the music. A handful of 12 inch singles would reach the Manhattan dance specialist stores, and I'd scoop them all up, pretty much - but there was zero demand locally: the local jungle / drum+bass scene was at its strongest then, and they all regarded speed garage as apostasy, a def(l)ection from the True Path, while the New York househeads, as you'd expect, thought it was garbage not garage - too ruff-hewn on the production side, too fast, too bumpy.  Not proper.

As I mentioned to Matos, my evangelism - like with jungle several years earlier - involved making tape introductions to the new style for friends and colleagues. But because most of the best tracks I only had on these DJ-mixed CDs, I had to fade them up and fade them down in order to get them to resemble proper tracks, on these cassette compilations. I'm sure this is one of the reasons - all these three or four minutes portions of a track, sometimes with a bit of another tune lingering at the start, or coming in at the end - why these tapes confused my intended converts. But  mostly they just couldn't hear the subtle radicalism, the contamination of American lush sexy garage with jungly flavor, the exaggeration of the bump+flex in the original music.  I would get responses like "isn't this just house music?". Well, yes, but also no.

On the Tuff Jam ceedee, it's very nascent and early-days-yet indeed - the selection is equal parts American house, emulative British stuff that attempts to sound as smooth 'n' sexy and palatially polished... and then really just a few things that are true speed garridge. There's also stuff by those unorthodox Americans who would help to catalyse the UK thing and then be pulled along by it and pushed further - Todd Edwards, Armand Van Helden.  

Great days - I remember the hunger 

a/ the hunger just to get hold of the bloody music 

and 

b/ the hunger, the itch, just to see where it was going to go next. 

I couldn't have imagined 2step, even though there was a clue on this Tuff Jam CD right near the end of it. 

Along with the sound of the New Thing, what hooks me as a language-fan is also the sense of a new argot creeping in - new buzzterms - "bumpy", Tuff Jam's term "Unda-Vybe" 

Det paid / MC Conrad RIP

 I had no idea this ever came out - the first MC-fronted jungle album. 1996.

MC Det' s Out of Det reviewed here by my old Melody Maker colleague Carl Loben - now the editor of DJ magazine. 

This later EP from 2002 has a title that nods towards - perhaps forms a matching book end with - an era-inaugurating album from 1991.

What Ragga Twins and Det had heralded was at that moment reaching fruition with grime

Wonder how this post-SUAD Ragga Twins effort from '95 sounds? Probably not very ragga-y.

As Carl acknowledges in his review,  jungle MCs rarely worked as "feat." artists on record - their style was built for and around the live set at a rave on a pirate 

What are the great examples of a jungle MC doing it in the studio?  

MC GQ is grrrrrrreat on this but it's really just one lick. Well one hook-lick and a bit of chat.

This is an exciting performance by UK Apachi  - it cuts back and forth between a singjay sing-song mode that's quite plaintive and   jabbered fast-chat that's raggaruff.

This from Stevie Hyper D is very early - 1991 - but it's more like a dancehall vocal rather than jungle MC-ing

Likewise this from the next year

Fun but pales next to this

Stevie Hyper D also did EP called Junglist Hooligan and the track "Junglist Soldier" in '95 and '96

A take on "Rub a Dub Soldier" 

Another very early effort - 1991 - is Killer Man Archer - on "Narra Mine"

But it is more like a dancehall deejay guesting than a junglist MC (okay it's points along a line but feels like there's a distinction )

I went looking and found that MCs featuring in jungle records seemed to happen more towards the end of the '90s (which surprised me) and that earlier quite often if I look for say a famous MC like Navigator, they'll appear in discogs as the producer of a track.  Bit like with MC Duke. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Suggestions in comments

nominated Anonymously

MC Dynamite on Roni Size / Reprazent's "Brown Paper Bag"

DaveK in comments pointing out the Conrad remix of PFM  - which features his uniquely smoov and serene style of chill chat - reminds me that I have been remiss about RIP-ing MC Conrad.

Conrad's style of emceeing was perfect for the Speed vibe

Meditative indeed... adrift on reverie bliss

the most, cough, Bachelardian of jungle MCs

DaveK also mentions this early effort involving MC Fearless on the Boogie Beat label 

That's rather good and I like the melodic interpolation from "Moments in Love" too

Here's the whole Weekend Rush Part 3 EP

He also mentions Bassman's contribution to this classic 

That's more on the lines of GQ on "Roll Da Beats" 

Going back to Fearless, here's a bunch of later 'feat.s" from around '96

Aha - bit later than the period I'm looking at - but in 2003 Fearless teamed up with Shabba D, Skibadee and Det for this release under the group name The Professionals 

There's a great tune featuring Skibadee but it's UKG

uploaded by yourstrools 4 da commonwealth

Another one that doesn't really count - it's not a release, it's an advert - is this pirate ad for Telepathy, the MC whose name I'm blanking on is also the guy who ran the club, indeed he voiced all their ads 

we need flight to feel the light (the Bachelard series 4 of ?)

 

The last truly divine Moving Shadow release? 

Dave Wallace was in Aquasky, which name could not be more Bachelardian. 

Nowhere-near-as-good flipside "Waves" continues these thematics: 

“When the dreamer really experiences the word immense, he sees himself liberated from his cares and thoughts, even from his dreams. He is no longer shut up in his weight, the prisoner of his own being”

- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

"I felt freed from the powers of gravity, and, through memory, succeeded in recapturing the extraordinary voluptuousness that pervades high places. Involuntarily I pictured to myself the delightful state of a man in the grip of a long daydream, in absolute solitude, but a solitude with an immense horizon and widely diffused light; in other words, immensity with no other setting than itself.” - Baudelaire, quoted in The Poetics of Space

“Plunged into infinite space.... little by little the heart of God’s elect is uplifted; it swells and expands, stirred by ineffable aspirations; it yields to increasing bliss, and as it comes nearer the luminous apparition, when at last the Holy Grail itself appears in the midst of the procession, it sinks into ecstastic adoration as though the whole world had suddenly disappeared”  

- Baudelaire, quoting from the passages on the Prelude in a program to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, requoted in The Poetics of Space

“The word vast… is a vocable of breath. It is placed on our breathing, which must be slow and calm…  the word vast evokes calm, peace and serenity..... I begin to think that the vowel a is the vowel of immensity. It is a sound area that starts with a sigh and extends beyond all limits.... like some soft substance, it receives the balsamic powers of infinite calm. With it, we take infinity into our lungs”

- Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Referring to the work of deep sea explorer turned desert wanderer Philippe Diole, Bachelard writes that the latter "gives us a psychological technique which permits us to be elsewhere, in an absolute elsewhere that bars the way to the forces that hold us imprisoned in the ‘here’.”....  Elsewhere and formerly are stronger than the hic et nunc...  Space, vast space, is the friend of being” 

Diole himself writes: "Neither in the desert nor on the bottom of the sea does one’s spirit remain sealed and indivisible....  As I walked along, my mind filled the desert landscape with water! In my imagination I flooded the space around me while walking through it. I lived in a sort of invented immersion in which I moved about in the heart of a fluid, luminous, beneficient, dense matter."