"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!
Via Droid, here's an 1989 pirate radio show on which Randall (RIP) talks about "jungle beats" - at about 3.55 mins into this clip.
The track playing is Renegade Soundwave's "The Phantom" - a beat later sampled by Omni Trio for "Stronger"
One thing I've found consistently is that whenever you think you can pinpoint the moment when a musical term or genre name gets adopted, you will always find an earlier example.... there's sort of new-word seep-backwards-through-time syndrome
It applies to almost everything
- grunge (used all through the 1980s and probably has earlier usages)
- grime (well, "grimy" was used by Onyx almost a decade earlier)
And don't get me started on "techno"....
Hell, I even found I'd coined neurofunk almost a decade earlier than when I affixed the term to a shit direction in drum and bass
Talking of funk... they used that in the 1950s, as a specifically musical term, in the context of jazz, hard bop and that end of the spectrum. (Obviously it had other meanings - including the completely non-congruent quaint-Brit Rudyard Kiplingesque meaning of "loss of nerve", "fearfulness" - as well as the connotatively proximate ones of body odour, sex-smell, etc)
"Indie" is another one.... color me surprised to see it pop up twice in Nik Cohn's Awopbop:
- describing
Apple Records, he says something that started out as the grand
Beatles dream of a free space for artists of all kinds, inventors, people
trying to do experimental happenings, etc, but then it shrank down to
being just an “indie record label”
- he
talks about Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Stones, starting his own
indie label Immediate Records. Admittedly quite a ways from what indie would
mean after punk – although only in his early 20s still, Oldham’s immensely
wealthy, a record business insider, lots of contacts, and through
Immediate signs up acts many of whom have hits. Doubtless it went through major label distribution too. So indie just means there’s
just one boss, the guy who founded it, calling the shots.
That said, I would be surprised to find if anyone used the term "arsequake" prior to the, well, Arsequake League
And I feel like "shoegaze" came out of nowhere, as did "trip hop".
The journalistic coinages seem to be more likely to emerge ex nihilo (not always though - post-rock as we know first used in 1967) whereas the ones that come from scenes and populations in an organic sort of way.... you will find more of a semantic prehistory...
in sideways tribute to Man like Droid's Dissensus thread which argues for 1995 as jungle's imperial phase - when jungle was most like itself and unlike anything else, as he puts it - and strews many, many gems to prove the peak-year thesis... here is a vintage '95 featurette about one of that year's most imperial producers plus an album review of a compilation of the cream from his label Formation.
DJ SS
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
1995
was a banner year for DJ SS. 25 year old Leroy Small dropped a bomb-load
of monster tunes-- "Hearing Is
Believing", "The Lighter", "Smoker's Rhythm",
"The Rollidge", "95 Rampage"-- that tore up the hardstep
dancefloor.
Then
again, there's never really been a slow year for SS. He's been at the frontline
of hardcore since 1991, both as
co-founder of Leicester-based hardcore label Formation and as a prolific
tunesmith operating under myriad aliases (Sounds of The Future, International
Rude Boys, Rhythm For Reasons, MA1 and MA2, etc). As Formation's in-house
producer, he's had a hand in all but 5 out of the 65 releases to date.
SS
started DJ-ing at the age of 13, working his way up through school discos,
soul, hip hop, early house, in a "natural progression" that took him
to hardcore rave. "In the rave scene I saw so many hooligans I knew that
were happy and dancing". This rave-revelation co-incided with SS's
alienation from hip hop: the British rap crews weren't really happening, while
"Public Enemy and NWA were preaching the wrong things, harking on about
past crimes against black people, captivating the audience in the wrong way.
Recently I've got back into the more groovy stuff in rap, like Wu Tang Clan,
and I've always had hip hop flavour in my music, with the breakbeats. But I
don't like the gangsta element, that's too like the ragga gunshot thing".
Ragga-jungle
is something that Formation have consciously distanced themselves from.
"In '94, the ragga thing was big but I wasn'tinto it. I took the basslines and a stab of
ragga vocal but I refused to do a full-on ragga chat over my tracks". SS
doesn't like the vibe ragga creates. "Jungle just got too dark, too
intimidating. There's been a lot of trouble in the Midlands, shootings. People
don't want to worry about treading on someone's toes or giving someone a funny
look. It's the promoters' fault, they should bar them kind of people from
coming to their clubs, but they're just interested in money. DJ's and producers
are to blame too, for putting gunshots in tracks."
Definitely
no gunshots, then, but boombastic B-lines, eerily warped vocals, portentous
hunting-horns and shlocky intros of classical music all figure as hallmarks of
SS's style. "Hearing Is Believing Remix" and "Rollers'
Convention", in particular, brilliantly reconciled avant-garde edge with
crowdpleasing groove-power. As such, SS is a prime exponent of 'hardstep',
Grooverider's term for the purist drum & bass style that cuts a middle path
between rudeboy ragga and 'intelligent'. "Hardstep's got no ragga in it,
but people step hard to it," says SS. "See, my only qualms about
intelligent is that musically it's wicked but often it's sounds weak on the
dancefloor. Formation tracks have got to be rolling." As his hardstep
peers, SS gives the nod to Roni Size & Krust,Dillinja, Hype, Andy C, Pascal, and Ray Keith
("his stuff is so simple, but it works!").
That
said, SS is looking for Formation to get more "musical" next year,
with real vocals and songs, as with the forthcoming cover version of
"Free"."People buying
our stuff know what they're getting, we've got a little predictable and it's
time for a change". Okay, but don't get too 'musical', SS, please! Because
right now Formation have hit their stride with a perfect blend of complexity
and minimalism, which can be heard onHighly Recommended, a compilation that revisits and
drastically remixes highlights from the label's brilliant '95.
"Highly Recommended" is out now on Formation, new
SS tunes "Free" and "Sense of Direction" are set for early
1996 release. SS's remix of DJ Krust's "Set Speed" is out now on V
Recordings.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Formation
Melody Maker, 1995
by Simon Reynolds
DJ SS, in-house
producer of Leicester's Formation label, is
one of jungle's
most undersung figures. 1995 was a banner year for both SS
and Formation. They
dominated the drum & bass dancefloor with a series of
killa trax--MA2's "Hearing
Is Believing", Sounds of The Future's "The
Lighter", SS's "Rollidge" and In
Between The Lines' "95 Rampage"--all SS-produced,
and all revisited/revamped on
Highly Recommended.
"Lighter" starts daftly with the rinky-dinky melancholia of
top classical
piano tune "Fur Elise" (better known as
"Theme From 'Love Story'"), then drops
into a ragga-tastic swagger and pummel; the VIP remix
injects a feverish stutter
and stammer into the rude-boy "lighter!!" chant.
The LP mix of "Hearing Is
Believing" adds a squelchy bass-drone that mimics or
maybe even samples "Public
Enemy Number One" from PE's debut album. The original's
portentous
hunting-horn fanfares are timestretched so they wilt and
waver like Salvador
Dali's melting clocks, while the irresistibly surging
bass-flow has been
displaced by a metallic, sproinggg-ing B-line, like a
bouncing, giant-sized ball-
bearing.
The revamp of
"Rollidge" is astonishing; the breakbeats ripple and undulate
like they've been liquidified, and the original's
reversed-diva is slowed and
processed 'til it's like a baritone drowning in the bath.
Even more startling are the voice treatments on "95 Rampage", where the
diva-vocal is extruded into a long thin streak of laser-intense light, then a single
syllable is isolated and
oscillated into a spasming percussive tattoo.
Less familiar tunes are also given a vicious going-over.Black's awesome VIP Mix of "Black" features some ear-confounding dub-FX--a snatch of MC chatter is shattered
into syllables, each
of which is scattered through a sonic hall-of-mirrors.
While
'intelligent' drum & bass (Goldie, Photek et al) seduced the ears of
non-junglists and music press readers, Highly Recommended is an essential(ist)
document of where the real action was in jungle '95, i.e.
the purist
strain of drum & bass known as 'hardstep'.This compilation's title says it all.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Scattering of gems from the Formation / SS back pages
Formation tunes feature heavily on this great DB selected-and-mixed compilation of 1994 as one of the UK's Big Five hardcore/jungle labels alongside Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, Reinforced, and Production House
a treasury of old skool -- Uncle Dugs shows for Rinse FM archived - including guest sets and chats with hardcore luminaries like 2 Bad Mice, Frost, and Guy Called Gerald.
"Proper oral history" says the Man like Droid.
Particularly enjoyed this one, featuring "lovely bloke" Nicky Blackmarket and themed around 1991 (responding to a request for LFO, Dugs says "Not in the bag mate, that's 1990. Bit of a shtickler I am"), that being the year when Dugs went to his first rave
