the spark inside (kiddykore kontinuum)

 Chuck Eddy's fave single of 2024 -  "The Spark"  by Kabin Crew & Lisdoonvarna Crew, from Knocknaheeny, Cork.

The entire post-98 quarter-century-long enshittification of drum + bass redeemed at a stroke. It was all worth it.

Kids + Breaks reminded me of this inevitably

The rapping though - as an example of Very White Rapping + high energy dance beat (the breaks are not very breaksy, more bouncy - ultra-linear NRG surge)  makes "The Spark" seem more like an outcrop of  this kind of thing and this kind of thing.

Blimey there's a whole bunch of this stuff featuring children - as performers, and prominently in the videos

"nee-naw nee-naw ... the bobbies coming / let's get running" - surprised this is still current slang for the police (it's as ancient as calling them the Peelers) 

Little crims (is there really a market for knocked-off dustcaps?)

"Mush" is a real throwback piece of slang - I remember that being a term used on Till Death Do Us Part.

Bleak vistas of new built Britain - and shrouded in fog too. 

The parent-in-me is troubled by just how many of these kids on these dirt bikes and quad bikes - doing alarming skids and backwheelies - are not wearing helmets

Many, many of these bassline + rapping tunes seem to be set on this same bike run  

Something a bit unsettling about all these pre-pubes acting gangsta -

"Been a baller since nursery"

"Ten years old and makin' wages"

"I don't wanna work, I'm a full-time G...  I like Nike and Max on my sneakers / truth is, I don't like my teachers" 

"Thirteen, making my own paper"

"I go school but I don't really need ta / Cos I got more money than all my teachers"

Little G's - and ladeez men too

"Let's take it step by step as we're only ten years old"

That's some haircut.

Like the comic strip styling of the video - puts it squarely in the Cartoon Continuum as well as the Toytown Techno lineage

MC Chippy seems to be a sort of Fagin-like figure with all these Artful Dodgers

Back to where we started... and which by default (not really been keeping track of tracks) is now my Single of the Year too

You can practically smell the Chicken McNuggets wafting off this 

The backing adlibs give off an unruly classroom, hapless supply teacher vibe. 

Only thing that mars is that whole "chase your dream" motivational thing....    find it disheartening how early these ideas are ingrained nowadays....  manifest your desire  replacing the manifesto as party program, privatized hope displacing collective advance 

The Crystl Vision

Derek Walmsley speaks in depth with DJ Crystl, one of the lost legends - discussing his production techniques and his thwarted career (signed to London, but never made an album) as well as his resurfacing with the sample-pack FUTURIZM and a remixes album. 

Derek - "What makes Crystl’s records stand out is the full-frequency attack and mesmerising detail he and his studio buddies created from that break, a bit of multi-tracking, and some reverb and delay. He could make drums sound like whirlwinds, futuristic machinery, or gamelan orchestras. The wildest fantasies of the 20th century pioneers of electronic sound – of how music could be created from noise, and how the use of everyday sounds could take music out of the concert hall and to hitherto unheard places – were realised in jungle and the music of producers such as Crystl."

Crystl on Amentalism: “It’s all sliced up completely, and then pitch-changed, and then different snares are added, and then there’s transient manipulation, and then there’s different plug ins which go on it, and then there’s parallel compression. It’s almost like making a fucking track, on one drum.....   It would be displayed over the keyboard in every little segment...  I would play physically, manually, all of my drums, all of the edit, record it in, then quantise if it needed it. It’s all hand played. I didn’t ever draw anything.”

Crystl on cartoon physics: "I make the drums animated" 

The Hertfordshire/Hardcore Continuum nexus, ahoy! - "By around 1993, he fell into making tracks for North London dance label Lucky Spin. “They were a couple of Hertfordshire brothers. And I was doing the artworks and stuff. I did the first tracks for them and carried on.”

Crystl on his creative wellspring:  “Organised chaos, in my head. I’ve got one of those very noisy brains. I find it very hard to organise myself, actually.” 

If not the One, then one of the Ones - "Warpdrive" was a track that rearranged my brain, made me see-hear how looping a break wasn't an easier option to programming a drum machine, but a new discipline, an emerging science, a field of competition.

That and the sheer violence of it - that crashing, collapsing break that first comes in at 2.24.

 

Then "Let It Roll" - incredible cut-glass breaksmanship

Here's a playlist I made that has most of Crystl's tunes in it, in more or less chronological order.

Benny L's remix of "Warpdrive" forthcoming on the remixes project

The rest of the Crystl corpus is good but doesn't quite impact to the same degree as "Warpdrive" and "Let It Roll".

This is an exciting effort

"Here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get to the future" - Crystl uses the sample from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension  (never heard of it? me neither) before Nico and Trace do on "Amtrak"

Also nice use of a synth wash from The Black Dog's "Virtual"

Talking of expensive mainstream-movie flops of the 1980s.... now, is that a sample from the Jim Henson movie in there? 

Why yes it is!

(I once got sent to review Labyrinth - godawful it was)

in - out... in... out... Shake'n' Vac it all about

 "i always feel like UK Hard House has been snubbed from being part of the "hardcore continuum"...... like listen to this and tell me it wasnt massively influenced by jamaican soundsystem culture"

- says someone on Twitter, completely misunderstanding how the nuum works (it's not like a party you're invited or not to invited to...  or a club with a strict bouncer - me! - at the door. Hard house is not nuum because they were no hard house pirate radio stations, no MCs or rewinds or dubplates etc etc)

Anyway I love this idea that a random Musical Youth sample is indication, nay proof, of the deep connection between hard house and Jamaican music!

Mind you, it's a pretty exciting track. Reminds me of the Commander Tom "Are Am Eye" killertune - not nuum, but Noom

I heard this the other day for the first in a decade probably and was struck by how Eurorave it was  - that Nordic race memory coming through the Dutch / Afrikaans thing 

I kinda would like to have liked Hard House more, just cos it's so pillhead lumpenprolekult....but it's a bonebrained stomp too far for me. 

Bit like the Liberator squat acid thing - I loved the whole "It's not Intelligent, It's not from Detroit, But it's fucking 'avin it" stance - and probably would have vicariously enjoyed the mad-for-it vibe in a squatrave.  But when it comes to actually listening habitually to that kind of thing...

We Were E

 RIP the legendary Lennie De Ice

Real name Lenworth Green. A first name I've never seen before. The whole name sounds like a place. 

I can't remember what I was watching - an old episode of Snub seen many years after its 1988 broadcast ? - but can remember my surprise on encounteringthe source of that almost distraught-with-XTC "we are e-e-e-e-e"

Rai'd on tyme. 

It was on the indie-alt TV show Snub  because Factory licensed the rai track and put it out late 1987. 

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

Lennie made a load of other solid tunes without ever reapproaching the 'lightning captured in a bottle' effect of that debut 

Mixed at the Dark Side Studio - quite early for that concept to be in circ. 

Like the use of the wonderful phased vocal intro bit - "no time for no time for criticizing / music's hypnotizing" - from Raw Silk's "Do It To The Music" (postdisco classic, bought this at the time - heard the first time on Top of the Pops and was floored) 

A reflicker here of the bliss-stricken "we are eeeeeee" sample

Smackman on the right geeking out 

Getting intelligentish in a sort of Bodysnatchish way

Which is funny cos one of his alter egos was called Body Snatcher

I like the use of the word 'terrible' in this next title -  the Ivan / sublime awe-ful majesty vibe of it undercut by the blokey bathos of 'well' 

The best things he did apart from 'I.E' were as part of Dubb Hustlers  

"Jungle Tremble" -  cool, odd title that

One more time for the all-time classic  - the original remastered (and on Hooj Choons for some reason)