"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
In June I went to Bristol to do a Still In A Dream event at Strange Brew. Wandering around, we saw all these posters for jungle raves and drum and bass club nights. I thought, "wow the scene is more pumping still to this day than I could have imagined"
But then I looked closer and they were all for events in the 1990s and 2000s - turned out it was some kind of exhibition, the vintage posters stuck on fences around a venue called Lakota, that used to be the hub of the Bristol jungle scene
The last previous time I was in Bristol must have been 2013, for a Energy Flash re-release event at a record store
I hadn’t noticed then the extent to which Bristol - along with being the second home of jungle and then the second home of dubstep - was also Banksy City
Not that the below are by Banksy but it vibes that vibe
Portland, it reminds me of a bit, Bristol (the dream of the '90s is still alive)…. but with a maritime port vibe (seagulls) …. Also the black music 'n' culture influence.
After the graphic and some of the titles ("Lost World", "Black Mist", "Dank") the actual music is fearfully uninteresting - fearfully lacking in fearfulness.
... and the countless clips of scanty-clad female deejays jiggling as they performatively tweak the knobs
... driving huge crowds inexplicably wild with the tame-old same-old sounds of an endless, extending-into-perpetuity 90s (and not even the good parts of the '90s!)...
in amongst all that, you do come across some nerdily informative reels of a historical bent on Instagram
Such as the triffic little micro-essays done by DJ Zinc, where he'll break down the technology and techniques used in a classic track, enumerate the samples and the breaks... position the track in the unfolding dialectic of the nuum.... maybe even have a tale about where and when it was made and how long it took (usually a matter of hours) ... and often he'll throw in a few personal memories of first-hearing or first-playing it out himself at the Roller Express or somewhere like that
He did DJ Vibes's "Obsession (Music So Wonderful)" the other day... talking about what it was made of... how it came along at this moment when happy hardcore and jungle had still not yet branched off from each other - such that a tune like "Obsession" could be played alongside "The Dark Stranger", Dougal could do a set in between Randall and Hype.
It reminded me what a teeeeeeeearin' tune it was and is
Seemed to be on the pirates incessantly at one point
I always forget it's called "Obsession", so indelible is the hook "Music So Wonderful" (or is it "Music's So Wonderful" - on the original track by Vivian Lee it's definitely "Music's")
But it's aptly titled, it does have a feverishly obsessed feel - that fixated-feeling 4/4/ that comes in every so often before the breaks take over completely
Along with the Think and the Amen and the Vivian Lee vocal and the T99 noise, Zinc indicates a chunk of Alec Empire's "You Must Confront" in there - the doomy horn-like fanfare-blare.
Zinc also had a bit of an exclusive: some prototype artwork for the Asylum label shared by Vibes - mockups done by an artist called Deano or probably more likely Dino (can't trust the AI captioning)
Listening to this perfect little tune - a favorite from 2step garage days - I noticed how the whole track is propelled along by horn fanfares.
I'm assuming they are synth-horns, if only because used in such a programmed riff sort of way, precisely the same in every iteration.
They actually sound quite realistic in timbre, so it's possible the riff was played by a hornsman and then sequenced.
In "Clean Riddem" the way the synthi-horn functions is very different from ersatz-sax is usually deployed in UKG. Typically it exudes a sensual, sultry smoky vibe and it takes the form of parping micro-vamps.
Here it's more like the "jousting" fanfares that Dexys Midnight Runners went in for. Sort of punchy and pugilistic.
"Clean Riddem" and flipside "No Fighting" - ooh gosh! Transfusions of pure joy... ruff 'n' smooth in perfect balance. Unimprovable in every just-so detail.
