"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
known dj's: 2 Stoned crew (2 bad mice in disguise), dj lucky, dj active, dj duffy
Frequency FM
freq: 101.4fm
area: Hertfordshire
known years running: 1991-1993
basic style genre: Oldskool
known dj's: DJ Legacy (myself), DJ Twist, DJ Nitemare, DJ Donny P, DJ Shiva
Got bust when the aerial got blown down in high winds.
(and this one, shrouded a bit in non-knowledge)
Unknown FM
freq: 108.0 fm
area: Hertfordshire (not 100% though)
known years running : no idea
basic style genre: no idea
known dj's: no idea
And what do you know, just this morning Droid alerts me to this release by Justice and Metro, a mini-LP titled PRESSURE 101.5 FM-Luton Pirate Memories.
It's actually from a few years ago and is woven out of old pirate adverts and jingles - info about long-lost record shops and club nights in the Luton and Dunstable area.
"J and M takes us on a journey back to the 90's and compile Pirate radio adverts from their local station Pressure FM. The flip is a track inspired by the sounds being broadcast around the rave era."
Hark at the well spoken voices in the adverts... big up the bourgeoisie! big shout going out to the middle class massive!
"Right of admission is reserved - and this is a drug-free zone" - yeah pull the other one, luv!
St Albans massive - part of the Hertfordshire Annex to the Hardcore Continuum (Omni, Source Direct, Photek, Gappa G and Hypa Hypa, Omni Trio, DJ Trax I think, others too)
Not in the first rank of ardkore + jungle - now if they were Omni level, there'd be more polemical strength to the comparison with you-know-who
But this kind of thing = the real Britpop. I thought that then. Think it now.
And it was pretty popular, with the populace. Chart music for a good stretch there..
This is Oaysis's first-rank moment
"I think we've found / A special place... Just close your eyes / And dream with me"
Better still, the Slipmatt remix
Oaysis started on Formation, up in Leicester, then went to an actual Hertfordshire label - Stevenage's Moving Shadow
One of those groups that tended to go a bit wispy when they shifted from ardkore to intelligent
One of them - Danny Hopkins - became Hopa, as in Hopa & Bones - a name that always tickled me. Although I can see now that it's just a twist on Hopkins. Still, it's an archetypally nuum sort of name, isn't it? Hopa n Bones.
Hopa and Bones featuring Oaysis - a transitional nomenclature. Was this like Hopa saying to the other two in Oaysis - "okay, you can be in the room with us while me and Bones make the tune?" Like letting them down gently, aka not pulling the bandage off. Maybe they helped, contributed, advis.
Or maybe it was trying to drag over the "name-recognition" factor into the new enterprise.
Good stuff. Not wispy at all. Glistening and "musical" and cold-fresh-airy, yet the beats are lively and limber, the bass booms in all the right places.
Danny Hopkins also recorded, earlier, as Higher Octave
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."
is a kind of revision of this from a year or two earlier
The relation is not audible in the original pre-remixed "Waremouse" though - which is astonishingly minimalistic and stark, just sub-bass boomige and MPC-triggered breaks.
Trak 1 via this Bleeps, Breaks + Bass vol 2 comp that's well worth an ear-gander
Probably if you are reading this blog, you've already heard the news that the entire Moving Shadow back catalogue, or near enough, suddenly materialised on Spotify, Tidal, and other streamers! And as Matthew McKinnon notes in the comments, it's also digitally available in buyable form at Boomkat, Bleep et al.
I have been listening to it almost continuously since late last week and I've still only got to late 1995!
It's not completely complete - some very early stuff is missing, and as you go through on the Spotify playlist, tracks are sometimes listed but there's no audio - withholding of right by some artists? logistical delays?
Still, it's damn close to the entire discography.
I have a feeling my will to continue right to the end (which is some point in the late 2000s) will crumble, as the liquid funk bongos-a-ripplin' direction dominates, while the counter-direction would be all that Dom & Roland type stuff. (Update: 6/14 - got to somewhere near the end of '97 and the will to continue did in fact fade away).
But who knows? So far, I've turned up a fair few gems that I'd missed at the time. More on those below.
Update 6/14 - a nice trajectory through the discography steered by Rob Haigh himself. (Hat tip Matos)
Here's a few work-in-progress playlists of my own....
A YouTube list for the things not on Spotify / Tidal - as of yet mostly the earliest releases
Bliss-I- Missed-List(again this is being added to steadily as gems turn up even during the bongo-rippling days)
Moving Shadow Single Artist Albums(a massive bloc of listening, dominated by the prolific Omni Trio and E-Z Rollers - I honestly doubt I'll wade through this all the way to the end, but I do want to do right by Rob Haigh and the Rollers)
Now to gems uncovered
In '94 I would have been paying very close attention to the output of Moving Shadow - checking the releases in the shops every week (most of that year I was back living in London). Plus they had me on the mailing list and a steady stream of promos were arriving to my door. So imagine my surprise to come across a pair of releases that I never heard or heard of.... nor ever come across later in all my years of scouring record shops to scoop up old skool hardcore and jungle... those M&VE years of trading in CDs (brought over on the plane on my visits back to the homeland) for their exchange paper currency and then immediately converting that to old vinyl.
One of these Lost Gem releases involves an all-time fave producer too - DJ Trax
The common denominator in both releases is the excellent Dev Pandya (half of Mixrace with DJ Trax), but here going as Brown.
Then there's someone called Rhymeside.
The Brown & Rhymeside stuff is astonishing - like a demented drum solo.
I can't imagine either of these track getting much play from deejays, it's way too haywire for dancers. But I never even heard these once on a pirate, where the deejays were freed up to be more adventurous selectors.
The 12-inch by Trax & Brown is also clattery and battery but not quite as manic. Apparently this never got a release, there were only a handful of test pressings.
Ah, look, a version of it did come out the following year, on a label called Mob Handed
Actually, only the title has been kept - it's a different track!
Thatside track
Call me sick in the head but I would like to hear Track 3, "Acknowledgements" - even if it's just them reciting a list of allies and enablers through an echo chamber.
DJ Trax sometimes went as Dangerman - and here is a track by Brown & Dangerman on Stronghold
"Ideas for the Ear to Fear" - great title!
Now I could swear I reviewed something by Brown & Dangerman in my sporadic jungle 12 inch roundup column for Melody Maker's Stone Free section...
Ah, I did, in February 1995 - this very record!
BROWN & DANGERMAN-- "Dreams of Another World" (Stronghold) Superfast breaks surge through a whooshing wind-tunnel of aciiiiied frequency-modulations.
Don't know think there's any kids TV sampling in the tunes but the name of the group and the imagery comes from characters on the Eighties kids TV show You and Me.
Cosmo & Dibs = Rob Playford and a fellow called Steve Thrower
Back when things were still a bit rectilinear and sequencer-clunky, the vocal samples loop-da-looping - but a breakbeat phatness is beginning to make itself felt
Wondrous epic mix project here from Selectabwoy. Four mixes + a bonus mix makes five, corralling almost everything Moving Shadow compatriots / allies Omni Trio and Foul Play touched during their extended '90s peak. Original tracks (A-sides, B-sides, tucked-away EP gems). Remixes they did of each other's tracks. Remixes they did of other artists's tracks. Remixes others artists did of their tracks. Pearls expertly strung together, brimming shimmering raptures intensified with artful transitions and overlays.
Simply put - the Finest Music of the '90s, all there for the downloading and delectation.
Here's the tracklist (including a few things I'd somehow never heard)
SIDE A
Foul Play - Open Your Mind (Foul Play Remix)
Omni Trio - Feel Good (Original In Demand Mix)
Foul Play - Dubbing You
Omni Trio - Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)
Foul Play - Survival
Omni Trio - Original Soundtrack
Foul Play - Murder Most Foul
Haute Control - Future Stylin'
Foul Play - Screwface
Omni Trio - Stronger
4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse - We Are The Future
Omni Trio - Mainline
Foul Play - Feel The Vibe (Again)
Splice - Falling (In Dub)
Foul Play - Finest Illusion (Illegal Mix)
Omni Trio - Step Off (Gold Blend Mix)
SIDE B
Omni Trio - Nu Grooves '94
Foul Play - Strung Out
Omni Trio - Rollin' Heights
4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse - Drowning In Her (Phantasy & Aphrodite Remix)
Foul Play - Total Control (Origin Unknown Remix)
Omni Trio - Renegade Snares (Foul Play VIP Remix)
Omni Trio - Thru The Vibe (Bongo Mix)
Foul Play - Ignorance
Foul Play - Chrysalis
Omni Trio - Living For The Future (FBD Project Remix)
Omni Trio - Soul Promenade
Omni Trio - Feel Good '95
Foul Play - Being With You (E-Z Rollers Remix)
Foul Play - Cuttin' Loose
SIDE C
Haute Control - Dream Series (Volume 1)
Splice - Hold Me
Foul Play - The Alchemist
4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse - We Are The Future (Darren Jay Mix)
Omni Trio - Feel Better (Foul Play Remix)
Splice - Bus In (Strawberries)
Foul Play - Dub In U (Remix)
Foul Play - Ragatere
Foul Play - Open Your Mind (Nookie Remix)
Foul Play - Survival (Remix)
Foul Play - Ricochet (No Stopping The Remix)
Omni Trio - Future Frontier
Bug Kann & The Plastic Jam - Made In Two Minutes (Foul Play Remix)
Haute Control - Drum & Bass Collision
Omni Trio - Renegade Snares (Original Mix)
SIDE D
Nookie - The Sound Of Music (Foul Play Remix)
Omni Trio - Be There
The Terrorist - Sing Time (Foul Play Remix)
Omni Trio - Nu Grooves '94 (Deep Blue Remix)
Foul Play - Karma Pt. 2
Foul Play - Being With You (Foul Play Remix)
Foul Play - Being With You (Van Kleef Remix)
Omni Trio - Soul Freestyle
Omni Trio - Ghost Rider
E-Z Rollers - Believe (Foul Play Remix)
Omni Trio - Renegade Snares (Rob's Reconstruction Mix)
Omni Trio - Soul Of Darkness (Promenade '96 Rollout)
DJ Pulse - So Fine (Omni Trio Remix)
Foul Play - The Stepper (Remix)
Omni Trio - Torn
BONUS MIX
Foul Play - Artificial Intelligence
London Steppers - Nu Grooves
Omni Trio - London Step
Foul Play - Beats Track
DJ Pulse - Stay Calm (Foul Play Remix)
Hyper On Experience - Lord Of The Null Lines (Foul Play & Randall Remix)
Omni Trio - Shadowplay
Omni Trio - Rollin' Heights (More Strings Attached Mix)
Omni Trio - Soul Promenade (Nookie Remix)
Omni Trio - Living For The Future (FBD Project VIP Remix)
Foul Play - Being With You
Foul Play - Cuttin' Loose (Remix)
Foul Play - Re-Open Your Mind '95
4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse - We Are The Future (Two Dreads In A Dub Mix)
4 Horsemen Of The Apocalypse - Drowning In Her (4 Horsemen Mix)
Pearsall, aka Randall Helms, launches a new mix series in celebration of Moving Shadow - there'll be a mix dedicated to each of their golden years, starting with this one for 1993
Begging the question for some (including me) of why not start with '92? Pearsall explains why and discusses the ongoing series here at his Sonic Rampage blog
Could I pick a favorite Shadow tune from 1993? It would be very hard, but it would be this mix of "Open Your Mind" (rather than the Tango which P-Man plumps for). Hearing it on the pirates and initially not knowing what it was - I couldn't believe music like this could exist.
And then '94 - I wouldn't really know where to begin, so ample are that year's riches - but Blame's "Anthemia" would have to be on (omitted from the Pearsall mix - possibly impossible to mix into a mix?) and Omni Vol.4's "Original Soundtrack" just for the intro.... But also EZ Rollers "Believe (Foul Play Remix"... and.... but... also
As for the title of the post - that's infinitely arguable, I'm sure, but if there was one that might just pip Shadow to the title, it would do that through sheer grandeur of vision-quest and it would be Reinforced.
But Moving Shadow would vault ahead of the Rivet boys if the honorific was shifted slightly and became "the most beloved label of the Nineties". No more miraculously overflowing source of euphoria exists for me in that decade than this label's output.
One of the greatest - most unusual and unorthodox - and sheerly beautiful - tracks of the peak moment of ambient jungle (late '93 / first half '94). Musicality unexpectedly emerging in a context considered widely, by supposed cognoscenti, to be sub-music ("jungle - it's just not music" as a colleague apparently said, and a dance-specialist to boot, a fan of Laurent Garnier).
One of the greatest of the Foul Play remixes - with an almost Mover-like sculpted-swoop of a stab bringing in a nice'n'doomy gloomcore-ish feel. Gorgeous psychedelic-smeared drums.
The original's triffic too but the Foul Play boys really take it to another level
I think Foul Play "played" this remix live at their Voodoo Magic PA in 1994. I know they played the rmx of "Lord of the Null Lines".
What's the flipside like?
Well the internet doesn't have "Warning" , the original's flipside, but it does have the flipside to the FPrmx of "Stay Calm"
And it's widescreen, glistening, Omni Trio-ish stuff. Nice. Warning signs perhaps of too much smoovness to come.
Funnily there's an Omni rmx
Another back in the day remix of "Stay Calm" with a bit too much of that reverb-clangy metallicized / scuttling percussion sound that came in during the prissy-ification later days of D&B. Fine but that had a real challenge trying to out-match Foul Play's definitive retake.
Mixrace + Pro-Ton-Isospace via Cardrossmaniac2's post on the trackige of the Hyper-On/JMJ&Richie/EZ-Rollers diaspora - but wisely steering clear of the Flytronix morass
But where does the original "people of chemistry ... people of rhythm" come from? A Nation of Islam speech?
It also pops up in this hardhouse track from 2000
Krome and Time's fab remix of "Illegal Subs"
This whole EP - or pair of EPs, with the remixes, is so great
I mean this next one, c'mon - world-historical
Gtting a feel of deja vu as I move inevitably to identify its constituents, like I might have posted them before (the pathways of desire we trace and retrace, eh? like lines scored into the cerebellum)
has the same gorgeous mellow house-infused vibe as this even lovelier tune - one of my all-time absolute faves of the era - so slinky
And as if recognising the vibe-ual affinity, YouTube segued straight into it before I even made the selection myself
Met Gavin Cheung aka Nookie early in '94 - round at Goldie's England's Lane tower block flat
Immortal for this tune above all - another all-time fave
"you know House is a feeling"
Keeping the house ancestry alive within the hardcore and the junglizm - that was his thing, Nookie / Cloud 9
But he also did tunes like this - whence the "hardcoouooor" whimper-vocal as used in Mark Leckey's Fiorrucci Made Me Hardcore - although he might have got from another track that used it, I think there were several....
And this goofy one
Never noticed before that the daft vocal lick is human beatboxing
Man like Gavin could do that bliss-2-dark distraught-diva ecstasy-edging-dysphoria hectic-histrionic fever rather well
But lover's jungle (perhaps that's why he chose the alter-ego Nookie) was his forte
Did a lot of very nice piano-based tunes that are just a little bit too uplifting maybe
That one is faultless though.
Remodelled for 94
These are a bit too bright 'n bouncy
Ooh but this next one is a classic - and gets the balance just right
And he weren't just about the pianos - the breaks on this are awesome
I suppose he's only a notch or two behind Omni Trio when it comes to the piano-uplift style of jungle.
Rob Haigh's vamps are just a little more bittersweet, more fleeting and spare. Nookie's a little too florid at times.
Here's a great mindmeld of the two piano-core gods - fabulous Nookie remix of Omni's "Soul Promenade", with a great push-me, pull-you swaying rhythm
Of course he actually done a tune called "A Drum A Bass A Piano" - shades of the Red Crayola tracklisting for Coconut Hotel, demystifying their means of production or something
I like the fact that an early Nookie alter-ego was Windy Milla
Also like the way the bpm actually written after the track titles on this one - DJ friendly!
"We Rock the Most" - I put that on the Energy Flash CD that was stuck on the first Picador edition book cover .... what an ideas-packed, action-crammed, eventful tune!
What do you know, I never even noticed this EP is called Time Will Tell!
So love loveLOVE the "Infinite Hype"/"We Rock the Most" side I always forget the other two tracks on the flipside.
Adore the cover - it might actually be my favorite ardkore cover (although there is a ton of competition)
Well actually I guess that is the back cover - and this below is the actual front cover - a bit of a mess, yet cool in its UK attempted wildstyle.
This below is a similar kind of cover (to the first image, ie. the back cover) from Moving Shadow squad - a cut up (or torn up) montage of Shadow crew messing about / getting messy. There were just kids!
But back to DJ Trax, he also had a hand in these slices of madness (alongside Dev Pandya, aka Paradox)
This a cappella bonus track (only on the promo?) leaves the terribly English rapping rather exposed!
Paradox + Trax also went by the name Brown & Dangerman
I'm sure I reviewed something by them but it wasn't that one, I don't think.
Trax's own stuff seems to have bypassed dark and gone straight from manic euphoria to intelligent and tasteful
There were titles like "Talking Drums", "Scattered Memories", "Distracted Thoughts", "Define Funk?", "Spirits", The Drummer Is The Heartbeat", and even - as we push into the 21st Century - "Frantically Calm", which could be a phrase from one of my own reviews
Well you can't stay a teenager for ever...
I hadn't quite the heart to follow through the trajectory all the way through into intelligence and clean production and downtempo chillage (similar trajectory to another freshfaced fave of that era, Danny Breaks)
Still I rather like that tune up at the top, from 2013, with the video, and Trax looking a bit battleworn
Here it is again -
The number of times I have walked down Berwick Street! Or up it for that matter. The journeys would invariably take in the two nuum-oriented shops on D'Arblay Street, Reckless (mostly for their rack of old skool tunes) and - in the middle of the fruit ' n' veg market - that poky branch of Music and Video Exchange (likewise heading straight for the 'hardcore' section but also exploring a bunch of other areas of interest as time went by).
But is that store in the video Blackmarket (if so it's moved to a different building as far as I can tell) or just somewhere equivalent?
Nice to have a snapshot of a shop interior with all the whites in marker-penned sleeves on the wall behind the counter.
The first time I had any real face-to-face contact with hardcore scene leader types was meeting Goldie in the first months of '94. We'd made contact a few months before, towards the end of '93, when I was still in NYC and doing a big piece on jungle - the first anywhere - for Vibe. Did a big phone interview for that. Then, not long after moving back to London at the start of '94, I went round to the G-man's gaff. He lived in a tower block off of Englands Lane - he was something like the permanent house-guest of the documentary maker who had gotten him involved as a young man in a doc about graffiti. The flat was full of G's canvases. I was living in Belsize Park - first time north of the river since I was a baby - and so we were almost neighbours. Then Goldie introduced me to Rob Playford - we met up for a curry in a place on Camden High Street.
During the meal, I asked them how big the scene was. Because there was no way to know really - it seemed massive to me, in my own head, based on the energy of the pirates and the sheer number of them.
I remember Rob seeming slightly evasive or even sheepish as he offered, "Fifty thousand?".
And that did seem smaller than I'd imagined.
Many years later, in response to an enquiry from a scholar or student researcher, I had a bash trying to work out the demographic dimensions of the creative core of rave.
This is probably ten or more years ago, but there were 2604 tunes up there, which seemed immense. and they were stretched across a 4 year period, 1991 to 1994.
I guessed that even though this chap was a total fiend,with a completist streak (there was a fair amount of dross up there, but then again the point of the site was not to be a filter but an archive, a data bank), in all likelihood he must only have had about 50 % of the tunes actually released on his site.
For 1992 - the most populous, explosive DIY-gone-crazy year (which was also hardcore rave's peak of commercial penetration, the first half of the year anyway) - this bloke had got audio clips for 872 tunes.
I decided the real figure for hardcore releases in that year might be more like 2000 tracks.
Most 12 inch releases then would just have two tunes, an A-side and flipside. But you did get a fair number
of 3-track, 4 track - even 5 or 6 track - EPs.
So let's say that there'd have been 750 individual 12 inch releases in this one
year period within the genre of UK hardcore rave music, loosely defined.
So that means roughly 15 new tunes a week. Which does chime with my vague general sense of going into hardcore/jungle stores and that being the number of brand-new new tunes that would be up on the wall behind the counter. A constant flow of white labels.
Given that many producers released several things a year and
that producers also operated under pseudonyms, I’m going to guess
conservatively that each producer released 3 records that year.
So that would lead you to conclude that this were around 250 actively releasing-stuff producers in the UK within the hardcore zone. Some producing under multiple names to confuse things and create a deceptive sense of plethora and profusion.
There's a probably a lot of amateurs who never finished their tracks, or
ones that did but never grubbed together the money to put them out, and quite a few borderlines that were barely released or came out on dubplate only. (And are now being reissued as expensive reissues).
In the not-quite-released zone, I remember
one Ruff crew show in '92 where a producer called E had brought his tracks to played, including a fantastic one that sampled Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, but that never actually came out. It's the first tune on this tape -
Anyway, let's go with the estimate of 250 actively releasing producers.
Now, how big was the scene?
The biggest raves that summer drew 30 thousand, but you have
to guess that this was not everyone in the scene in attendance - people stayed for local clubs
or lived too far away across the country. Even the mega-est rave must have only
managed 1 in 3 of the rave massive at most.
A really big underground rave tune could sell 25 thousand,
except for the rave pop crossover ones like Prodigy or SL2. But following a similar
principle as above, no tune would be bought by everyone.
So let’s say that the rave massive was somewhere between 75
thousand and 100 thousand
With the first estimate of rave population you get 1 in 300 as the ratio of producer-participants to
consumer-participants
With the second figure it diminishes to 1 in 400!
That’s a lot of smaller than I thought.
I'd imagined that the punk-redolent DIY principle would have been more rife and rampant.
I guess human laziness, a sensible awareness of one’s own
lack of musicality, or just not being prepared to cough up the
dough for the initial start-up costs, would ensure that the majority were happy
to be just punters.
With the collapse of the rave audience and the
coming of darkness in 1993, the ratio of producers to consumers would go up
dramatically -- the harder the core, the more of a component of active producers / DJs you would have. In Chris Cutler's terms, the more "engaged" a music scene.
So with Playford's guess of 50 thousand - made in early 94, when the scene was still under the sway of darkness, the jungle crossover explosion some months away, still contracted to a hard core - then the ratio of active music-releasing artists to punters becomes 1 in 200.
Equally the more commercially successful the music is, the less participatory and "engaged" it is. You have a lot more mere punters happy to sit back and enjoy.
2step would be another period in which the ratio of producers to
consumers goes down again, owing to its massive pop success and across London domination
of the pirate airwaves.
Grime, in the early 2000s, would have gone back to having high ratio of creatives (aspiring MCs, producers, deejays). Indeed in its fundamental unpopularity I would compare it to the improv or noise
scenes...
Going back to the creative core of H-core question, I suppose one could go to Discogs and attempt to actually count the number of producers (especially as it useful displays all the pseudonyms and alter-egos and aliases each one uses).
But I'm guessing the result won't be too far off the 250-ish sort of figure that I kinda pulled out of my arse there.
It won't be drastically off, I don't think - like 2500 producers.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Hyper-On Experience have a Facebook page! With stories of their formation, how certain tracks were made! And a photo of the studio circa 1994!
One of my fave H-O E tunes - mad beats, skid-tastic, like a breakdancer on a butter coated dancefloor
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