"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
Well, a dream comes true - I appear on a pirate radio station. Except it's legal now, but still - Rinse FM!
I am talking - alongside Martin Clark aka Blackdown - about Burial's debut album, which came out 20 years ago - on Eclecticist's show on Rinse.
Now I think about it, I have been on a pirate before - twice in fact.
The first time was inadvertent: BBC radio (I think Radio 4) had done a report on jungle, then emerging, in the summer of 1994, and the reporter came around to our flat to get some quotes from me. And immediately after it aired, one of the pirates - Kool FM if I recall right - pirated it. Played the whole program a few times on the radio. So there I was, coming over the airwaves of the station I most frequently tuned into at that time. (In 1994, after 8 years living in South London, I had finally made it North of the River and was living in Belsize Park, slipping out of range of my beloved Don FM but in compensation able to pick up Kool and other pirates that had mostly been out of reach when living in Brixton).
Another time I actually deejayed on a pirate - but this was not a nuum pirate, it was a sort of hipster pirate in Williamsburg. Sometime in the early 2000s. I played gloomcore and stuff like that, but the guy before me played Anthony Braxton and such. So the station was a bit like The Wire on the air. I have no idea if anyone listened. Still, a buzz to do.
A few times I have been inside an actual functioning London pirate station - Flex FM at the height of 2step in 2000, that was in South West London, a big if delapidated house, when reporting on UK garage for Spin. Deekline was spinning.
And then in 2005, again reporting for Spin, this time on grime, I got to go inside Rinse FM's HQ, a basement of a building near Whitechapel. It had once been a travel agents and it was surprisingly smart looking still (compared with Flex FM). They even had a sort of ante-room with a sofa in it, and then the actual room where the deejaying took place - the Ruff Sqwad followed by Roll Deep - was quite tidy. And actually now I recall it was Martin Clark who made the connection for me and came long to the session (thrilling to watch close up - the young Skepta was there). So big up Blackdown.
Here's what I wrote about Burial in 2006 when I reviewed it for The Observer Music Monthly
Burial
Burial
(Hyperdub)
The mystery-shrouded artist known only as Burial is
affiliated to the dubstep scene, a
sister-genre to grime that this year looks set to eclipse its waning
sibling. Running in parallel for the past half-decade, both these London underground sounds
rely on the same pirate radio infrastructure and share a common history in UK
garage and jungle. But dubstep is a largely instrumental style bigger on mood
than personality (no shouty MCs here). It’s also a site-specific music, its
bass-heavy menace achieving full impact only through a massive sound system in
a dark, crammed club. Burial’s self-titled debut is the first record from the
scene to transcend that context. It evocative atmospherics and enfolding ambience make it a perfect lose-yourself
soundtrack for headphones or lights-low living room listening
“Distant Lights” blueprints the basic Burial sound: an
ominously amorphous bass-rumble and a frantic-yet-subdued 2step beat are
countered by the slow-motion mournfulness of the track’s other elements, a
yearning vocal sample and a reverb-blurry trumpet, like Kenny Wheeler wilting
in a Temazepam swoon. Titles like “Night Bus” pinpoint Burial’s subject as the
melancholy and anomie of city life, while “Southern Comfort” localizes the vibe
further to South London. But the feeling this
music creates--imagine The Blue Nile of “Downtown Lights” but with the euphoria
turned to sorrow--is something any metropolis-dweller anywhere on the planet will
understand: sensations of grandeur and
possibility battling with desolation and entrapment. There’s a simmering, suppressed violence
bubbling inside Burial’s music, hinted at in titles like “Wounder,” which
conjures images of a city full of damaged people ready to inflict damage on
others. But there’s also a hovering grace and tenderness that makes me think of
Wings of Desire, a quality that
emerges most clearly on “Forgive,” a beatless ache of sound threaded with the
sounds of cleansing rainfall.
This album actually comes complete with a concept (it’s a
sound-portrait of a near-future South London submerged under water, New Orleans-style)
while the most persuasive readings of the album hear it as a requiem for the
lost dreams of rave culture. But the
non-specific sadness that shimmers inside this music ultimately transcends attempts
to pin it to a place, period, or population. You can imagine Burial’s tremulous
poignancy reaching out to hurt and heal all kinds of listeners--fans of David
Sylvian and Harold Budd, Massive Attack and Boards of Canada, Radiohead and Joy
Division. This music can go far.
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I am reading Moby Dick at the moment - it's incredible, but it's taking me a long time - and one thing that surprised me is that seafaring men of that era did actually address each other en masse as "me hearties" e.g. "pull hard, my hearties" when rowing a small boat in pursuit of a whale
Presented yesterday at the EMP conference, it's titled "We Can Be Free”: The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993) and can beenjoyed in script form at MM's Beat ConnectionSubstack.
I once gave a talk titled "Just 4 U London" at EMP, back when it took place in Seattle every year - I can't remember if I played any pirate radio snippets, though....
Fault-less - very-nearly-convincing as time travel
The artwork by one AROE is very in the wildstyle of DJ Trax early releases on Moving Shadow
release rationale
"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a ’92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP’s and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".
On the label Rave Radio Records - a hub of epigonic action
I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?
The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!
Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point.
People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity....
Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze. When you factor in the international factor.
Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music.
You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point...
Convergence of new-olds - here's a nu-gaze group who have gone so far as to take inspiration from the junglistic portions of MBV's 2013 mbv i.e. the bits that would have been the follow up to Loveless
It almost does supply what never actually existed ie. the bang-on-timely jungle-influenced album MBV could conceivably have put out in 1993 or 94
Somehow missed this - from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set
release irrationale
The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.
Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides...
Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It’s a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.
If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down... dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity
SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture’s, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF’s Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture’s work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.
SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.
Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork - Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:
Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw’s Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica’s back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.
A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I’d drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.
One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D’s Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek’s The Water Margin, and Intense’s The Quickening.
During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.
There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF’s 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There’s enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.
Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.
The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles’ 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.
The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle’s genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle’s Johnny, Subnation’s Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer’s Ricky–a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine ‘Somewhere About Town’.
The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM’s DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It’s well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.
Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a ‘first aid kit’, packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn’t take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he’d remind his groggy listeners that it was “time to draw for the First Aid Kit,” creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn’t get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was “a bridge too far,” but if they made it, Jinx would say, “taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton.” Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More (“What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!”), and end with his signature send-off: “Seeeeeeeeee ya!”
I ended up getting my own Sunday morning show on Rude FM 88.2 in the early 2000s, and I often thought of Jinx and my love for his Sunday morning show. In some ways, this study influenced how I approached my own show—not so much in the presentation or music selection, but in understanding the audience and their needs at that time of the morning. The Sunday morning pirate radio aesthetic is something I first referenced on the original 0860 album in the track First Aid Kit, and this tin full of goodies for Slow860 strengthens the bonds, further connects the dots and adds to the lineage of the Hardcore Continuum.
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Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie"
That's from over ten years ago)
Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality
This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"
Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat
Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick
Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew.
release rationale:
I’ve been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn’t know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.
Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG’s London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the “we got the vibes, yo” lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I’m grinning from ear to ear.
Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London’s legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.
Fast forward 30 years, and I’m in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I’ve always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I’ve been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.
Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It’s a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour!
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The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit
Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania
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!
People remember the Sixties pirate radio heyday, when the pirates were literally boats at sea.... and they remember the Eighties terrestial tower-block resurgence of reggae and soul and jazz and funk and early rap stations.... and of course they remember the Nineties onwards rave hardcore jungle UK garage grime etc explosion of piracy...
But what about the in-between bits?
Even after the Labour government (Tony Benn specifically) squashed the pop-crazed offshore pirates in '67, and the big buccaneers accepted "pardons" and joined Radio One as its first roster of deejays.... some people carried on broadcasting outside the law. Via pirate radio scholarRob Chapman, here's a roundup from May 1971, from an enthusiast's zine called Newsbeat Newsletter.
Love the fact that a bunch of these are broadcasting from the Home Counties - Hertfordshire, Sussex, Surrey, Berkshire (where the intriguingly named Radio Utopia transmits from, or at least can be picked up in)
(Echo here of my repeated and enormous delight in the fact that Herts was something of a bastion for the Hardcore Continuum. Indeed there was a jungle pirate out of Luton - Perception FM. Gappa G and Hypa Hypa were involved)
Radio Free Rhubarb feels more like a Home Counties type name than Radio Utopia... I'd like to imagine it was some kind of renegade counterpart to Gardeners Question Time, eccentric views on herbaceous borders and composting, the kind of horticultural heresy that Radio 4 wouldn't allow on the airwaves... but I imagine the name is goofy, perhaps a little Goonsy or Pythonesque. Or just the old slang meaning...
Also intriguing - The Voice of Freedom. A rare example of the political pirate in Britain? I believe there was some kind of right-wing pirate, opposed to the unions - I think this comes up in the Andy Beckett book. And then there were a few short-lived pirates from the other side of the struggle, started during strikes... This is all hazy memory, though.
Check out Rob Chapman's pirate radio archive - he has recordings of 1960s pirates but also some prime 90s hardcore rave junglism action via a Manchester radio station (not actually a pirate, I'm repeatedly told by someone - it was somehow legal).
A whole thesis - beautifully illustrated and designed, more like a book - on London Pirate Radio of the Nummy Nuum Nuum era, by Frederik Birket-Smith. Although as this blog post shows, the title should really be Not Just 4 U London....
Crazy to think that's it over a quarter-century since UKG! Well over 25 years, actually, depending on when you date it from (e.g. the pre-speed UK garage tunes)
Below is all my website writing on UKG, 1997-2001, drawn from the annual faves / unfaves surveys. Five of the best years of my listening life.
Actually there's one thing I left out, the theory-slanted, macro-analytic Feminine Pressure Footnotes. Below is the more juicy stuff - rhythmtexture-evoking paeans to particular tunes.
It's a textual accompaniment to this 2step garage playlist and this (much shorter) speed garage playlist (suggestions for expanding that, or indeed the already very long 2step, most welcome)
1997
AMBIVALENCE OF THE YEAR: SPEED GARAGE
Things I like about Speed Garage
1/ It's a composite of potent clichés -- the best, most effective (what some call "cheesy") elements from the last ten years of club and rave culture mashed together: garage's skipping, syncopated snares; house's brassy diva vocals and EQ-ing/filtering/phasing/stereopanning effects that make sounds shiver up your spine; 1992 hardcore's squeaky vocals (hence speed garage covers of Jonny L's "Hurt You So", Urban Shakedown's "Some Justice", that "Sexual Feeling Is Mutual" track); 1994 jungle's ragga-dalek timestretched chants and Dred Bass radioactive-glow B-lines and Omni Trio-style soul-diva plasma-acapella loops.
2/ Such a simple idea--fusing the best of house and jungle--ruffing up house just at the point when it had gotten a little too sedate and glossy, and joy-juicing up jungle just as it lost its rude-bwoy exuberance and (with neurofunk) became utterly desiccated and frigid, what Peter Shapiro called a "cyber-Calvinist pleasure-free zone".
3/ Those lewd, lubricious butt-surging B-lines really erogenize your rump-zone.
4/ The Arthur Russell-like dub-spacious and percussadelic side of the sound (artists like Ramsey & Fen) looks like it might develop into "ambient speed garage", while the ragga-sampling and dirty-bass driven end of the scene (what UK Dance's Bat calls "dangerous garage") has already taken over the role of jump-up jungle. This potential split between "musical"/"experimental" speed-garage and the rougher, darker stuff that appeals to "garage ravers" (once a contradiction in terms) could be highly productive or highly amusing, or even both. Either way it's going to be way more interesting than the song-full stuff that just sounds like a slightly tuffer and faster version of New York garage.
Things I Don't Like About Speed Garage:
1/ Such a simple idea--fusing the best of house and jungle--simple, and once the initial surprise has worn off, kind of obvious.
2/ Precisely because it's a composite of house and jungle, whereas jungle was a mutant of hip hop and techno -- a mutant that warped all its sources (speeding up and chopping to shreds the breakbeats, for instance). I don't hear an equivalent factor of warpage in Speed Garage yet, I don't hear enough future.
3/ Too many tracks with the exact same beat--something you could never say about jungle, at least until 1997 and the tyranny of the two-step trudge. I've heard tracks that interlace and leaven the skipping, wood-chop snares with micro-breaks and percussadelic ticks, but too much speed garage is as rhythmically monotonous as house and trance.
4/ The "politics" of Speed Garage are so much less interesting than those of jungle, which was shadowed by the desperation and darkside gloom caused by the 1992/93/94 recession, whereas Speed Garage is colored by the feel-goodism and living-large of the late Major/early Blair boom. Hence its reversion to the pre-rave clubland exclusivity of the last economic boom, the mid-to-late loadsamoney Eighties; hence its resemblance to the playaz of post-Puffy rap/post-Timbaland R&B, products of the Clinton boom. Same flash clothes (literally--shiny, man-made, near-fluorescent fabrics), designer-label fetishism, champagne-swigging, we-are-the-beautiful-people/we-be-the-baddest-clique ethos. Now, I don't wanna come across like a playa-hater, but as someone who wears trainers, and crap trainers to boot, I resent the return of style codes and the implicit "quality people, quality sounds" ethos.
5/ Its victory has been too easy (coming out of the London underground to conquer the rest of the country and penetrate the Top 30 within less than a year); its appeal too straightforward and accountable. Where's the difficulty, the danger?
Nonetheless, for the curious, here are some killer speed-garage tunes. Shake your ass to:
Gant --"Sound Bwoy Burial (187 Lockdown Dancehall Mix)" (Positiva)
187 Lockdown --"Gunman" (EastWestDance)
Fabulous Baker Boys --"Oh Boy" (Multiply) [sampling Jonny L's "Hurt You So (Alright)"]
D.J. Ride -- "Renegade Bass (Unreleased Mix)" from Power House Recordings
Limited Edition Part 1" EP (Power House) [sampling Renegade's "Terrorist"]
Ramsey & Fen -- "Underground Explosion" from The Off-Key Experience EP" (Very Important Plastic)
The Hornet --"Just 4 U London" from The Hornet Presents "The Rockin' EP" (Sting
City) [remake of Bodysnatch's "Euphony" a/k/a "Just 4 U London"]
The Unofficials Vol. 1 [bootleg of Notorious BIG track]
Underground Distortion --"Everything Is Large" (Satellite)
R.I.P. Productions--"The Chant (We R)" (Satellite) [samples Lennie De Underground's "We Are Ie"]
Ruff Da' Menace -- "Kick The Party Into Full Effect (Ruff & Menacing Mix)" (Obsessive House)
A Baffled Republic--"Bad Boys (Move In Silence)" (One Step/Catch)
Double 99 --"Ripgroove" (Satellite)
1998
2-STEP GARAGE
The book's verdict on speed garage was that it's "a composite (house plus jungle) where drum and bass was a mutant (hiphop times techno)", that where jungle "twisted and morphed its sources; as yet, an equivalent warp factor is barely audible in speed garage". 1998 was when the warp factor really began to make itself heard, with producers reasserting the breakbeat legacy of jungle and creating the strange nu-funk style called 2-step--basically slow-motion jungle, something for the ladies massive.
At the same time as being lover's jungle, 2-step is also like a UK response to American R'n'B. Timbaland's twitchy hypersyncopation has long been widely attributed to a drum and bass influence, something steadfastly denied by Tim 'n' Missy. All through '98 you could hear that imagined (?) compliment being repaid by the children of jungle, in the form of 2-step. Dropping the four-to-the-floor house pulse and replacing it with Timbaland's falter-funk kick drum, producers like Dreem Teem, Dem 2, Chris Mac, Steve Gurley, et al are basically making smoov R'n'B filtered through a post-Ecstasy sensorium: midtempop bump'n' grind; sped-up, succulent cyborg-diva vocals; a playa-pleasing patina of deluxe production. At the same time, 2-step is geared towards the UK polydrug culture (where cocaine has usurped E as the paradigm drug, the vibe-setter), so alongside the sexed-up, VIP opulence there's all these dark-but-sensual elements (warped vocal ectoplasm, convulsive hypersyncopations) that hint at coke psychosis on the scene's horizon.
Dem 2--Dean Boylan and Spencer Edwards--are the outfit whose music makes the most convincing argument that 2-step is a brand nu-funk for the Nine Nine. One listen to "Destiny (Sleepless)" is enough to tell you it's not house music; it barely has any relationship to garage as hitherto known. So deceptively simple is its groove (every element--and they're all simultaneously melodic/rhythmic/textural--dovetails with a Zen perfection) that it's almost impossible to describe. It doesn't sound overtly avant-garde or abstract, but I defy you to name a record before 1998 it resembles or owes much to: the tremulous, heartbroken cyborg vocal faintly recalls Zapp, the darting and stinging synth-lick recalls Gary Numan, there's an electro flavor in there, but that's about it. Crisp and juicy, joyous yet tense, "Destiny" is one of those key records in the hardcore/jungle/speed garage continuum, like 2 Bad Mice's "Waremouse", Renegade's "Terrorist" or Gant's "Sound Bwoy Burial", that announces a paradigm shift, codifies a new style, sets the blueprint.
Dem 2's "Don't Cry Dub" of "Club Lonely"--like the original "Destiny", released way back in late '97--has a similar do-androids-weep-electric-tears? feel. Here you can really hear Dem 2's virtuosity at the diva-manipulation techniques that Bat from ukdance calls "vocal science." Texturally, they scintillate the voice, fluorescize it, make it gleam and refract as though you're hearing it through ears wet with tears; rhythmically, they shred the vocal into micro-syllable and sub-phoneme particles--cyborg-sniffles, sounds as fleetingly iridescent as spit-bubbles in the corner of a sobbing mouth--and make them syncopate against the groove (pure Timbaland twitch-and-bump).
"Grunge Dub" by U.S. Alliance--a Dem 2 alias--shows the duo's darker direction for 1999: a rhythm matrix so assymetrical, angular and stop-start off-kilter it's almost impossible to dance to (this is 2-step's big break with house's E-d up 4-to-the-floor egalitarianism--you have to be really good at dancing to move to these beats), and a twisted, gibbering groan-riff of a male vocal.
CHRIS MAC--Plenty More/Get It [Confetti]
Possibly the most accomplished and inventive producer to arise out of UK garage last year, Chris Mac is doing as much as Dem 2 to prove that 2-step is a new thing. "Plenty More" is silky, svelte sensuality corroded with darkness: a simultaneously brittle and supple rhythm track dominated by squishy, spongy snares (possibly reversed), strings that slash across the stereofield like the orchestral equivalent of a skid, and a mix so shiny you almost have to squint your ears against its harsh gloss glare. The vocal is interesting too, plugging into garage's rapacious appetitiveness (all those divas demanding "give me", "I need it"). The voice is ambiguously pitched, recalling Prince's sped-up alter-ego Camille on "If I Was Your Girlfriend"--the lyrics go "not a little girl anymore/used to be the one I adore/but there's plenty more fish in the sea/for me", but you're never sure if it's a diva putting down a guy and asserting her sexual autonomy, or a playa putting a girl in her place by telling her she's disposable, replaceable. Either way, "Plenty More" evokes the coked-up roving eye feasting its gaze on the sexual bounty of the nightclub's babe-arama. "Get It" is even more rapacious, transmitting an ants-in-your-pants alloy of desperation and desire. Brass stabs and jungalistic sub-bass pressure-drops weave around a dense web of drum some of which (in a typical 2-step sleight of subtle avant-gardism) reveal themselves on close inspection as made of the human voice: hiccups, chokings, winces, gasps and stutters.
OPERATOR and BAFFLED--"Things Are Never (STEVE GURLEY Remix) [Locked On]
LENNY FONTANA--"Spirit of the Sun" (STEVE GURLEY Remix) [public
Demand]
"Things Are Never" is moody. (It actually reminds me of E.S.G.'s "Moody"). Crisper-than-crisp beats, a baleful bass-drop (making your stomach plummet like you're on a rollercoaster), a one-note synth-bleep wincing like a hypertense vein pulsing in your temple. In the new sonic context crafted by Steve Gurley (ex-Foul Play, a/k/a Rogue Unit), the originally romantic-heartbreak themed diva vocal ("things are never/what they seem") becomes a more general statement of existensial instability. The lush-but-dark vibe reminds me of Nightmares On Wax's "Aftermath", the plinkily metallic, melodic-percussive xylophone riff recalls Unique 3's "7-AM". There's a bunch of tunes around in early 99--like "Slamdown" off New Horizons' Scrap Iron Dubs No. 1 EP--that have a clonking industrial feel that harks back to the bleep-and-bass era of 1990: the first time the British merged house, reggae and electro to make a new sound system stylee.
"Spirit of the Sun" has the archetypal 2-step mood-blend of euphoria and tension, retaining garage's overwraught diva histronics but resituating them amid dynamics and drops that are totally un-house. The bit where the beat pauses and the "shine on, shine on, shine on" chorus explodes never fails to send goosebumps prickling up my neck. The lyric is kind of interesting too, the diva talking about how she's going to be infused by "the spirit of the sun"--it takes garage's traditional obsession with summer to the verge of Bataille-style helioatry: his worship of solar extravagance and his exaltation of a "will for glory" in the human soul "which would that we live like suns, squandering our goods and our life." Bataille-style will-to-expenditure, aristocratic potlatch, largesse, and garage 'n' R'n'B's luxury, commodity-fetishism and larging it --same thing innit?
RICHIE BOY AND DJ KLASSE--"Madness On The Street (2 Step Mix)" [Stamp]
Another stunning torsion-and-treatment job on a female R'n'B vocal of unknown (to me) provenance. "I can't stand/All this madness on the street"--this short phrase, pretty funky to start with, is subjected to all kinds of vivisection and resequencing over a sublime cyberfunk groove. Combining the anti-naturalism of R'n'B vocal production with the filtering/panning techniques of late 90s house, producers like Richie Boy and DJ Klasse fracture the vocie into tiny percussive shards, create new accents and stresses, make the vocal haemorrhage or pulse, fold in on itself, buckle, crinkle, or glow uncannily. It's serious posthuman business, you're not listening to a person anymore but a passion that's being enhanced and mutated through interaction with technology. A cyborg, in other words.
SOME TREAT -- Lost In Vegas (JBR)
A tribute to/remake of Shut Up And Dance's 1990 (or was it even 1989?) track "Ten Pounds To Get In," this samples the Suzanne Vega vocal-riff from "Tom's Diner" that SUAD must have got from DNA's unoffical-then-subsequently-sanctioned dance version of the S. Vega track. We're talking multiple levels of citation here, serious intertextuality. On a broader level it's a tribute to the hardcore continuum--getting on for ten years of London's multiracial rave scene, a culture of mixing it up, of hybridising hybrids and mutating mutations; the continual reinvention of flava and vibe. A tradition of futurism. Roots N' Future = the endlessly fresh now.
DOOLALLY--"Straight From The Heart" (Chocolate Boy/Locked On)
A lot of people have said there's a ska element to this tune. There's definitely a skanking vibe-- the trace of a reggae afterbeat, a strange bubbling bassline that winds and weaves around the crisp, push-me pull-you 2-step. So irresistibly poppy and chuneful it made the UK Top 20, "Straight From the Heart"--and its sequel, "Sweet Like Chocolate", released as Shanks and Bigfoot--make the strongest case for 2-step as a millenial update of lover's rock: the UK-spawned hybrid of US soul and reggae that emerged at the end of the 1970s as second-generation Caribbean-British women demanded songs that addressed their concerns (love, relationships) rather than a Rastafarian agenda. As Dick Hebdiges says in Cut 'n' Mix, rather than the fantasy of utopia through repatriation to Ethiopia/Zion, these women's (only slightly less unrealistic?) dream was of a caring man. A song hymning devotion, commitment and holding out for the long-term emotional dividend, "Straight From The Heart" is also a sign that the hardcore nation's grown up and settled down. Borderline cheesy, it reminds me of the way hardcore could alchemize the most cheddary pop hits and make them sublime (c.f. Goldseal Tribe's '92 push-me-pull-you pirate monster "Only The Lonely"). Love it.
JODECI VS CLUB ASYLUM--Freak Me Up (Steppers Vocal Mix) [white label]
US R'n'B gods/goddesses (and some Brit-wannabes) given the now almost obligatory 2-step remix for the London market--sometimes official, sometimes strickly bootleg. "My Desire"--glossy gamelan clatter'n'tinkle of percussion, B-line that hops and skips and flutters like lovestruck butterflies in the stomach, a perpetual forward tumbling flow (pivoting around a micro-second hesitation in the groove that makes all the difference), a trembling-with-joy vocal re-patterned to dovetail with the groove in such snugly funky ways you'll want to leap out your own skin. "Telefunkin'"--slow-burning, svelte menace, hilarious love-junkie phone-sex lyrics ("I've got the fever for your flava", "I'm addicted to you baby/tied to the telephone line"). "Freak Me Up"--simply very, very horny.
NEW HORIZON--"Find The Path" [500 Rekords]
--"It's My House (Bashment Mix)" [500 Rekords]
--Scrap Iron Dubs No. 1 EP" [500 Rekords]
Not 2-step, but a reggaematic and rootical reinvention of house music so marvellous and peculiar I had include it here. '97's "Find The Path" whisks a Gregory Isaacs-style nightingale croon into a falsetto froth of melisma-plasma that quivers and ripples like the fronds of a jellyfish; organ vamps create an almost Gothic-dub atmosphere. "It's My House (Bashment Mix)"--"bashment" is a dancehall patois term for the ultimate, the works--has this amazing dissonant-verging-on-microtonal blare of drones that's somewhere between the Master Musicians of Jajouka and the old hardcore rave blow-your-own-horn classic "One Time For the Foghorn". Scrap Iron Dubs No.1"--killer tune is "Slamdown"-- is part of what Bat from ukdance identifies as the "latest micro-trend in 2-step... weird techno bleepy clanging noises peppered all over the trax", further pointing out that "This is a pretty radical departure for garage, which has stuck to the same portfolio of 'organic' sounds (real instruments, proper singing etc) for yonks. Now we get those organic noises mixed up with all manner of strange vleeps and metallic klungs - something I haven't heard since the heyday of hardcore and jungle around 1994."
KMA--Recon Mission EP (Locked On)
The title declares this EP a probe into the unknown (as does the sample "this is a line to the future/leave a message). From the outfit responsible for the dark garage classics "Cape Fear" and "Kaotic Madness," this is one of the most emotionally and rhythmically confused records I've heard in years. My favorite is the third track, "Blue Kards," a hybrid of the first two: disjointed beats that seem to stampede out of the mix, gaseous swirls of phased vocals (sung by producer Six), stricken guitar licks, and an overwraught doubt-wracked bluesiness of mood. Alarmingly the new KMA jam "Kemistry" is a supersmooth four-to-the-floor tune with a full-on vocal; Six's thinking seems to be that the only unpredictable thing left for KMA to do was make a totally conventional garage track. Shame, but the debut album The Unanswered Question, set for Jan 1st 2000 release, might well rival be 2-step's Timeless .
ANTONIO-- "Hyper Funk" (Locked On)
Crisp-and-spry 2-stepper whose simple drum machine beat, Scritti prickle of glossy funk guitar, and block party MC exhortation ("hype hype hype hype the funk") hark back to early Eighties simplicity. 2-step's very own "Rockerfella Skank"?
Crafted by rising producer Noodles, this languid-yet-foreboding track samples just a few vocal phrases from Aaliyah's sublime "One In A Million" (a Timbaland production which I always though was like a jungle ballad) and totally reinvents them; Aaliyah's hushed devotional tenderness becomes the ghost-of-my-former-self whispers of a love addict going through emotional cold turkey. The key phrase is "desire" (phrased "deee-siyah", putting a sigh in it): in the original, it's Aaliyah promising to do anything her beloved wants, his heart's desire; here, it becomes a floating signifier, pure intransitive craving, and yet another sign of garage's relentless imagery of appetite and neediness ("what you want, what you need', "giving you what you wanted," etc). Killer moment: when the beat and the jazzy sax solo drops out, leaving just Aaliyah's pleas and reproaches ("you don't know, what you do to me"), then in comes the moodiest wah-wah dread bassline ever. Goosepimples a-go-go.
RAMSEY and FEN--"Love Bug" [BUG]
--"Desire" [BUG]
--"Love Bug Remixes" [BUG]
What blows me away about "Desire" is the amazing density of rhythmic information RAF are able to cram in without the groove feeling cluttered. The intricate high-end percussion--shakers, hi-hats (closed and open), tambas, the trademark RAF ultra-crisp fills and rolls --is so dazzling and glitterball spangly that the first time I heard it the phrase "cocaine music" sprung into my mind (and it's not a drug I know much about). Turns out that (according to Kodwo Eshun, who heard it from Portishead's engineer) the "cocaine ear" prefers bright, toppy sounds. "Love Bug" is similarly dense-but-groovy with weird detuned drum fills. There's also an amazing "Love Bug" remix out any day with an electro feel--if it's the track I heard Fen playing out, it's got a Roland 808 bass-drop driven groove that throbs and whirs like a monstrous clockwork mechanism.
CLOUD 9--"Do You Want Me (DEM 2 Steps To Heaven Mix) [Locked On]
CRAZY BANK--"Your Love" [Locked On]
These go together in my head for some reason; "Do You Want Me" is sheer amorous euphoria with great percussive vocal stabs, which are contorted, twisted and clipped short to make for an exquisitely tender frenzy. Crazy Bank does much the same but with a more desperate tinge, making the diva sound like she's about to leap out of her own skin. There's no narrative coherence to 2-step's love songs: sentences are left hanging, the object noun or qualifier snipped to make the phrase fit the funktionalist requirements of the track. Here it's like the lover's discourse in random shuffle mode.
M-DUBS--"Over Here (Sugar Shack Break Beat Funk)" [Babyshack Recordings]
A minimal 2-step roller very much in the "Destiny" mold--crisp snare-kick groove, simple synth-vamp, great organ licks and dub-wise flickers in back of the mix. What really makes it though is the fantastic drawling and nasal ragga vocal from the Emperor Richie Dan, playing a ladeez-man tendering his services ("if you wanna take a chance/I'm right over 'ere") while a female backing vocals seem to be singing "Iron Mike" for some reason.
SKYCAP--titles unknown [white label]
Two tracks in the vein of their awesome dark garage tune from '97, "Endorphin". So wired they're dsyfunktional, they make me think the next step after charley-spliffs might be freebasing. The best side has a gibbering and mewling male vocal (which eventually goes into single-phoneme scatting --imagine Bobby McFerrin reduced to a crackhead) strung around an ultra-brittle 2-step anti-groove. The flip, also good, features a seriously overwraught and accusatory diva and some blues-wracked guitar licks. 2-step's journey beyond the pleasure principle should be as interesting as '93 darkcore's.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Locked On, Vol 3: Mixed by Ramsey and Fen [Virgin]
DREEM TEEM Dreem Teem In Session Volume 2 [Deconstruction/4 Liberty]
Locked On is the best UK garage compilation yet (the full circumference, 2-step to 4-to-the-floor), and also, I'm afraid, the American reader's best chance of hearing this stuff: a few 2-step tunes are slipping through in the speed garage/UK garage bins, but this is a London thing, inevitably if rather sadly.
You can find this comp in American specialist dance stores and also in Virgin megastore. Mixed by RAF, it's the bomb: alongside above-mentioned lovelies "Destiny", "Love Bug," Amira, Crazy Bank, it includes such killers as Dreem Teem's bubblicious proto-2stepper "The Theme," the astounding Dem 2 cyberfunk mix of Aftershock's "Slave To the Vibe," M.J. Cole's slick, Bukem-of-2step "Sincere" and RandF's gorgeous Latin garidge mix of The Heartists's "Belo Horizonti." The Dreem Teem comp has many of the same 2-step classics,, plus New Horizon's "It's My House (Bashment Mix)" and a great woozily vocalized Chris Mac cyberballad, "Set It Off".
1999
2-STEP and U.K. UNDERGROUND GARAGE
The Artful Doger--"Rewind" (Public Demand)
DJ Double G -- "Poison" (DJs For Life)
Shanks & Bigfoot--"Sweet Like Chocolate" (Pepper)
Master Stepz. feat Splash--"Melody" (Outlaw)
Deetah--"Relax (Bump N' Flex Remix)"
U.S. Alliance--"All I Know (Dem 2's Grunge Dub Mix)" (Locked On)
DEA--"Sacrifice" [remake of Rufige Cru's "Menace"] (DEA)
Various Artists--Locked On... The Best Of
Various Artists--Pure Silk: The Album
(to name but a few.....)
Even after the "Feminine Pressure" UK garage epic, I find there's always more to say about 2-step, new twists and folds, contours and crinkles. It's endlessly seductive and thought-provocative. For now, just a couple of thoughts:
A/ I'm always struck by the way the ads for clubs and raves on the pirates go on about the main room playing "house and UK garage". At these events you can be sure you will never hear a house record in any of the commonly accepted senses. You'll be lucky to hear any four-to-the-floor pump, it'll be 95 percent two-step twitch all the way. The latest wave of tunes--by M-Dubs, Groove Chronicles, E.S. Dubs--are moody midtempo breakbeat with evil basslines and dub-spatialized mixes, topped with menacing ragga vocals or pure darkside-revisisted samples. In other words, fuck-all to do with house music or garage. So why this strident prioritisation, "house and UK garage", with the word "house" upfront? Why the reluctance to announce, proclaim, shout from the rooftops, the fabulous novelty of this music? Why the semantic restraint? (M-Dubs actually call what they do "breakbeat funk" but this is really unusual). The insistence on "house" is a re-pledging of allegiance--as if the swerve into jungle, as a named, differentiated genre, distinct from house, was a terrible mistake; the first split that beget all the subdivisions to follow. Yet the re-dedication to "house" is not at all the same as, say, the UK purist house scene's emulation of American deep house maestros, its fidelity to Chicago or New York. It's more about a reinvocation of the spirit (rather than substance) of a specifically British moment, an all-too-brief phase before the subgeneric dis-intergration of the rave diaspora began. This phase, circa 1990, was when house started to get inflected in all kinds of specifically British ways, yet it was still house: the bleep house of Unique 3 and Nightmares On Wax, the hip-house/breakbeat house of Blapps Posse and Shut Up and Dance, the dancehall/dub house of Ragga Twins and Moody Boys, the hardcore house of Congress and Psychotropic. What's being re-proposed is an idea--again British-of a house music that's so elastic, hybrid, and protean, it almost has no stylistic contours, no delimited range of emotion--it can comprehend any influence, any feeling. House as a literally catholic church -- so inclusive and adaptable there's no need for schisms or breakaway heretic sects--because it can be almost anything. And that's what 2-step is--what house sounds like when almost every defining characteristic of house music has been eliminated or tweaked until near-unrecognisable.
In the tradition of hardcore and jungle before it, London's garage scene works as a gigantic laboratory, a permutation space where new hyphenated hybrids and creole micro-genres flicker into life for a few months or even just weeks, then disappear: speed garage, slow jungle, ska-house, acid swingbeat, hyper-funk, breakbeat garage, disco-ragga, grunge dub, riddim & blues, electro-gamelan, divas-in-the-echo-chamber, crack house, tech-2-step, quiet stormcore, sugarshack breakbeat funk, scrap iron dub, bleep garage, wildstyle soul, lover's jump-up. In this music you hear spectral traces of 20 plus years of London "street sounds" culture---the ghosts of Loose Ends, Janet Kay, Ratpack, Buju Banton, Gappa G & Hypa Hypa, Soul II Soul, Public Enemy, Ali G., Anita "It's the Way" Baker, Cherelle & Anthony O' Neal, Smiley Culture, Tina Moore, Mantronix, Leviticus, JVC Force, Deep Dish, Nina Simone, Kaotic Chemistry---not just in the form of assimilated influences, but often as blatant samples, cheekily plagiarized interpolations, even total remakes like the ones of "Mr Kirk's Nightmare" and "Lord of the Null Lines" going around at the moment.
B/ my favorite bit in Artful Dodger's fabtastic "Re-Wind" isn't the "when the crowd say 'bo' selector/re-e-wind"" chorus or the windscreen-smashing beats, but the bit where Craig David croons "got our groove on, dancing yeah, real hardcore." The fact that he can convincingly claim to be "real hardcore" in that silky-soft swingbeat Nutrasweet voice highlights the transvaluation that's taken place; when drum'n'bass started to fall into the grim orbit of techno, the London massive conversely started to feel the gravitational attraction of American R&B--almost as a kind of counter-force. At any rate, what used to be "jungle" got pulled in twain by these opposed gravitational tugs, so that a huge gulf now exists between, say, Optical and Groove Chronicles. The "real hardcore" line, so smoothly crooned amidst the lethal slickness of Artful Dodger's production, emphasizes just how elastic this London subculture is--how it can assimilate pop melodics and R&B smoov-ness and still be ruff, still be hardcore.
2-step is where the musical advances made during 10 years of collectively living at the cutting edge of rave's drug-technology interface (acidhardcorejungledrum'n'bass) are now being folded back into song-oriented house and American R&B (ie. the humanist, hypersexual pop sounds that ravers originally broke with to pursue manic sexless drug-noise).
2000
2STEP AND UK UNDERGROUND GARAGE
CHRIS MAC-- "Dubplate Style" (2step dub mix of 'Baby Gonna Rock Dis')
ZED BIAS -- "Neighbourhood" (Locked On)
ARCHITECHS -- "Body Groove" (Go Beat)
NAPA TAC -- "Dibby Dibby Sound" (white)
TRUESTEPPERS FEAT. VICTORIA BECKHAM-- "Out of Your Mind" (Arista)
SHOLA AMA--- "Imagine"
B15 PROJECT --"Girls Like This"
SWEET FEMALE ATTITUDE --"Flowers"
OXIDE & NEUTRINO--"Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty)" (EastWest)
CRAIG DAVID--"Fill Me In (Artful Dodger Remix)" (Wildstar)
CHRIS MAC PRESENTS UK APACHI & DAVID BOOMAH--"Beep Beep!" (Metrix)
LEEE JOHN--"Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul" (Locked On)
DJ ZINC -- "138 Trek" (label unknown)
TEEBONE FEAT. MC SPARKS AND MC KIE (a/k/a TKS) -- "Fly Bi' (ditto)
WOOKIE -- "Battle" (Soul 2 Soul)
VARIOUS MCs-- "Millenium Twist" and "K.O" on the Warm Up EP (Middle Row)
ARTIST UNKNOWN-- "Warship" (Pulse)
STEALTH MEN--"Chapter 1: Behind the Wall" (Phatt Budd)
2 WISEMEN-- "Hardcore Garage" (Ibiza)
SO SOLID CREW -- "Dilemma"
N&G feat. MC CREED AND ROSE WINDROSS--"Liferide"
BASEMENT JAXX--"You Can't Stop Me (Steven Emmanuel Remix)" (XL)
TEEBONE & SKIBA DEE -- "Super S" (Solid City Records)
SECOND PROTOCOL -- "Basslick" (EastWest)
SOVEREIGN -- "There You Go (Pink bootleg)" (All Good)
MONSTA BOY feat. DENZIE Denzie-- "Sorry" (Locked On)
BRANDY VS X-MEN-- "Angel" (white)
MJ COLE---"Sincere Remix" (Talkin' Loud
El-B feat. JUICEMAN -- "Digital" (Locked On)
Y-TRIBE-- "Computer Love" (label unknown)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- Blackmarket Presents 2Step Vol II (Black Market)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- Pure Garage: Mixed Live by E-Z and Pure Garage III
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- The Sound of the Pirates (Locked On)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--Masterstepz freebie mix-CD on cover of Mixmag
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- 2Step Pressure mixed by Merlin (www.wiggle.cx)
UK garage/2step enjoyed its fourth fabulous summer in a row, defying both the Law of Subcultural Exhaustion that decrees genres get three years tops before going pear-shaped (e.g. jungle) and the usual problems of over-exposure leading to boredom that accompany mainstream crossover. But I've got to admit I started to lose much of my interest before the summer was out -- assisted by close encounters with the sheer unpleasantness of 2step as club culture (see over-rated of 2000, forthcoming), the mounting drabness of the "breakbeat garage" tendency (see over-rated of 2000, forthcoming), and just personal exhaustion with that sound. If you're really into something, by a certain point, you've accumulated so much of it (and I probably have more UK garage 12's than jungle at this point) that an inverse-ratio syndrome sets in: it becomes harder to be surprised, it feels like the genre isn't moving as fast as it was, fast enough for you. (The same thing happened with drum'n'bass for me around early 97--although I'd argue that was real stagnation setting in, not a perspectival trick). Plus it's tough getting the records in New York, and the excitement doesn't get continually recharged every weekend by being plugged into the electrical grid that is London pirate radio. At any rate, here's an inventory of 2step delights from this year.
Chris Mack's "Dubplate Style", Leee John's "Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul": love the way the drums on these tracks are so digitally texturized and glossy, it's like the whole track's made from lustrous fabric that crackles, crinkles and kinks with each percussive impact. The way the latter morphs into the former on that Masterstepz/Mixmag freebie is my fave 2step sleight-of-mix this year. Fabulous also to hear Imagination's Leee John again nearly 20 years after "Bodytalk". "Dubplate" has sticky-the-most snares and this fantastic pinging and chiming xylo-bass that's sort of pizzicato and rib-rattling all at once. Chris Mack generally is a supreme exponent of 2-step's art of decentering and spatializing the drums across the stereo-field---so it's like you're moving through a mesh-space of pointillist percussion, your body buffeted and flexed every-which-way by cross-rhythms and hyper-syncopations. Shame he doesn't often have good-enough songs to work this magic through and around, though ("Beep Beep" and "Baby Gonna Rock Dis" don't quite cut it as Tunes).
"Vocal science" seems to have faded a bit from the scene--the cyber-melisma effects, the percussive voice-riffs, the way producers make the diva twinkle, tremble, buckle, pulsate, fold in on herself. Nowadays these deployments tend to be more subtle: like the ecstatic shiver-stutter woven electronically into the word "re-e-e-mix" by Artful Dodger on their version of Craig David's already ultra-warbly "Fill Me In." It's unnerving because the line between what's human and what's artificial isn't so clearly defined.
Oxide & Neutrino's much-detested "Bound 4 Da Reload" --possibly the most tuneless UK Number One ever, but bleakly compelling all the same: those icy staccato strings, that sinisterly bubbling bass. Cool, too, that it infiltrated dancehall's metaphor of the killer track as ordnance in the war of sound versus sound right into the heart of popland. Also on the nu-dark tip, "Warship" which is either by or on Pulse, I'm not sure: the best techstep record since"Metropolis" essentially, albeit substantially slower of course. What's weird is that you'd hear it in the mix with soppy garridge tunes like SFA's "Flowers" orlush musical ones like "Sincere", but this is a track that contains no garage elements whatsoever. Weird also that the scene's getting into the kind of caustic acid-y sounds that originally drove people out of drum'n'bass and into speed garage in the first place. Stealth Men's "Behind The Wall" is in that strung-out coke psychosis mode a la Skycap, and is notable for its creepily effective Tracy Chapman samples --from some song about hearing either wife abuse or child abuse going on in your next door neighbour's flat, but here taking on something of the audio-hallucinatory agony of Coppola's The Conversation. Also plugs into that hardcore continuum of using anything that comes to hand, not being afraid to be cheesy (see also: garage remake of "Tainted Love", the UB40 "One In Ten" chorus borrowed in Suburban Lick's "Here Comes the Lick Again", etc).
B15's "Girls Like This", Shola Ama's "Imagine".... high-pitched melisma anthems that showcase a crucial aspect of 2step: the way that extreme treble can be as intense as extreme bass, triggering a fizzy-dizzy sensation like champagne running through your veins instead of blood. Leading the counter-reaction to chart-step's trebletastic effervescence, Second Protocol's "Basslick", El-B's "Digital", and So Solid's "Dilemma" bring the new bass-2-dark minimalism... Amazing to see how when the high frequencies are stripped away, the ladeez just disappear from the floor ("gir-rls, don't like this, n--n-n-no no"). "Basslick" is just jump-up jungle slowed to 130 b.p.m., right down to the shlocky classical music intro, but the one-note bassdrone of "Dilemma" is bracingly innovative, echoing electro without replicating it. Shame about the cliched martial arts movie samples, though.
Why can't 2step's balance of yin and yang, tweeter and woofer, lite and dark, stay where it's at? Especially when the result is chart smashes as jarring and weird as Truesteppers's "Out of Your Mind". I saw them on this crappy CD: UK pop show on TV the night I arrived in England to do a garage story for Spin: Posh Spice wearing one of those R&B singer-style headset microphones and moving amidst this huge phalanx of militaristic-looking backing dancers shrouded in a sinister cloud of dry ice, Jonny L and the other guy lurking at the back with their keyboards. "Out of Your Mind" is so shrill and jagged-sounding it's almost atonal, R&B-meets-Schoenberg. I love the vocal duel between Posh and the indignant vocoderized male singer. And the way she warns "this tune's gonna punish you."
Wookie's definitely over-rated and liked by the wrong sort (acid-jazzy, Rhodes-fetishising tossers) but the first one-note section of "Battle" is undeniably great, building this fabulous tension. Then it opens up into ghastly Giscomby Brit-Soul. Thank Heaven for the dark mix that's just the tense, terse first part of the song---remixing at its most effective and improving!
Napa Tac's "Dibby Dibby Sound": one of those great tunes that come out, probably get played a few weeks on the pirates, you'd have to be in the shops that week to get a copy (I just happened to be in London), and then it's gone: a glorious composite of tried-and-true elements from across the hardcore continuum 1990-2000 (lovely housey shimmer-riffs, bit of ragga chat, rolling bass, ravey stabs, bleep'n'bass echoes) that for some reason makes me think of Foul Play at their finest. If you ever see it, buy on sight.
Teebone feat. Sparks & Kie's "Fly Bi": my favorite of this year's many MC tunes, boisterous, exuberant, insanely catchy.
What else? The fractured funk of Stephen Emanuel's remix of the Jaxx's "You Can't Stop Me "..... Zed's "Neighbourhood": the plangent roots vocal and twin bass-riffs (a midfrequency blare of drone-swarm distortion and an electro-style battery of sub-low thuds and booms)..... Sovereign's boot of Pink's "There You Go": a tuff little unit, with Star Trek/Lieutenant Uhuru type radio-sonar blips running all the way through.... Monsta Boy "Sorry" with its absurdly weepy and prostate-with-regret sounding Denzie vocal..... Architechs's sultry "Body Groove".... N&G feat. MC Creed and Rose Windross's "Liferide": not sure if this even came out this year, but a melodic/percussive plinky xylo-bass classic, and a good spur to pondering why exactly that garage MC style of prissy, prim, clipped delivery sounds so cool...
There's probably dozens more I've forgotten. Perhaps strangest of all, and the kind of record that will always keep me fixated on "the sound of the pirates", was Middle Row's The Warm Up EP, with the Dickensian dancehall of "Millenium Twist" complete with comical Fagin impersonation and the bizarre boxing-ring MC narrative that holds together "K.O."
A good year, then, but we're overdue another paradigm shift from the London hardcore continuum. Within a year, I expect another "all change" on the part of the pirates. Can't wait, and can't imagine what it could be---always a good sign.
2000
BREAKBEAT GARAGE versus "GARAGE RAP"
When this flavour of "garage" first started to come through--must have been late 1999, with Deekline-- I remember being excited by the way the sultry, swinging R&B-2step flow would be disrupted by this much more raw, stripped down and rhythmically unsupple sound that was disconcertingly similar to Big Beat: 130 bpm breaks, bulbous bass, wacky samples. But what was refreshing about these tunes--"I Don't Smoke", later the more electro-flavored "Dilemma" by So Solid--when they were a brief tang of different flavour, becomes tediously homogenous as a scene/sound on its own. Stanton Warriors's "Da Virus" especially seems to be the drab template for a lot of this stuff, and "138 Trek" wore out its welcome fairly quick. There's some cool-enough stuff, I suppose--like Blowfelt's bippety bassline tune "Lickle Rolla"---but generally it sounds too much like jungle minus the extra b.p.m speed-rush, hardcore without the E-fired euphoria. Or worse like nu-skool breaks (alarming to see Rennie 'Stupid Fucking Name' Pilgrem reviewing 2step tunes in Muzik's breakbeat column).
That said, the last batch of pirate tapes I got, showed signs of a new twist in this breakstep (or whatever they're calling it) direction: not so much jungle-slowed-down, and more like a post-rave, drum'n'bass influenced form of English rap. On these spring 2001 pirate tapes, there's hardly any R&B diva tunes, and every other track features very Lunndunn-sounding MCs or ragga-flavored vocals, over caustic acid-riffs and techsteppy sounds, like some latterday Dillinja production. Unlike with techstep or recent d&b, there's very little distorto-blare in the production, there's this typically 2step clipped, costive feel, an almost prim and dainty quality to the aggression-- a weird combo of nasty and neat-freak. Lyrically, the vibe seems to be similarly pinched in spirit, a harsh, bleak worldview shaped subconsciously by the crumbling infrastructural reality beneath New Labour's fake grin; UKG seems to be already transforming itself from boom-time music to recession blues. The Englishness of the vocals reminds me of 3 Wizemen Men and that perpetual false-dawn for UK rap.
Lots of killer tunes I can't identify, but one in particular stood out that I could: "Know We" by Pay As U Go Kartel. As I say, quite mean-minded and loveless music but sonically very exciting-- a new twist if not quite paradigm shift from the hardcore continuum.
2001
TASTY TRENDS OF 2001: MC GARAGE
Dynamite, "Boo"/Genius Kru -- "Boom Selection"/Pay As U Go Kartel, "Know We"/Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood" (Ed Case Remix)/Shut Up And Dance, "Moving Up"/So Solid Crew, -- They Don't Know/Oxide & Neutrino, "Up Middle Finger", Execute/The Streets, "Has It Come To This"/More Fire Crew, "Oi!"/etc etc
The new and often genuinely nasty face of UK youth culture. Proof yet again of the endless productivity of "the streets" as both social reality and pop myth. This MC cru thing in 2step seems to confirm the final utter victory of hip hop values over rave ones in the U.K. (although arguably that hip hop/rave border never really existed in Britain, was always porous; maybe the most exciting subzones of UK dance were always permeated with hip hop values, like hardcore/jungle; maybe it's always been just a "street beats" culture, at least in London). At any rate, ain't no love in the heart of that city no more; to be a raver just means you're someone who steps out and parties at the weekend, there's no cluster of values or attitudes attached to it (unless "bad attitude" counts).
(the analysis / recent-history-retracing carried on at Blissblog with this Footnotes to "Garage Rap" I did around a piece I did for Village Voice on what was soon to be called grime)
