Bush in the jungle: five Xsamples

fun FACT mini-piece  about samples of Kate Bush in rave tunes  (presumably triggered by the Goddess's touring announcement?)

They skip the obvious one - Utah Saints' "Something Good" - for five lesser known choons that I confess I had never noticed contain trace elements of KB, despite being quite the sample-spotting saddo


This is the most blatant, actually titled after her career-igniting smash:



Trying and failing to come up with a pun around Bush/Ghosts/samples-as-spectres...

Breaks the unbreakable

nice Breaksdown of  career highlights in the discog of Danny B aka Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era and  Droppin Science, by Laurent Fintoni at FACT

not nearly enough Hcore though

I mean, why not this?



and later - edging into drum & bass - why not this bass-fibrillator?




or this?



or this glistening glider?





Not sure if Vol 4 was actually Danny Breaks or some mate of his he produced or remixed... Gorgeous (yet slamming), rinsed the fuck out of this 12 " back in the day.

Or this dark glow-bass killa?




There really hould be a CD with all the Droppin Science Volumes nicely collated on

And there was more Volumes after those five, wasn't there  -- see this mini-feature I did on Danny for Melody Maker back in 1995, nearly twenty years ago, jeee-Zussssss...  I remember buying "Easy" (slight drop off in inventiveness)  and maybe a couple others before it got a bit too jazzy-smooth and head-noddy spacey for me.

DROPPIN' SCIENCE  

                     

The first and last thing you need to know about Danny Breaks--whose five year

career has taken him from the scratchadelic 'ardkore of Sonz of A Loop Da Loop

Era to the disorientating drum & bass of Droppin' Science--is that this 22 year

old whizzkid from Southend is an original British B-boy.

"For me, music starts with electro and breakdancing.  Right through school,

it was pure on the turntables for me. Cutting up breaks was heaven.  But hip hop wasn't really running in Britain.  Even if the UK crews were rapping about everyday English life, it didn't come across, 'cos so much of the flavour of rap is the American voice."

Danny reckons that UK hip hop never found the political role ("black

folks' CNN") that it did in America.  He attributes this to the fact that "black

and white are more integrated in Britain, at least amongst the young.  There's

outposts of racism like skinheads, but most of the youth don't care about your

colour." And so in Britain, the verbal, protest side of rap was always less

important than the sonic sorcery and breakbeat-manipulation. "With hip hop, what I

liked was the beats and samples, more than the voice and the words."

   

Like other original Brit B-boys--DJ Hype, Goldie, Aphrodite etc--Danny's

desire to "do instrumental stuff with breaks and weird sounds" drew him gradually

into the rave scene. "Being a B-boy I could never admit to being into aciiied.

But I did like the bleep-and-bass sound of Unique 3, and also the early Vinyl

Solution stuff like Depthcharge and Renegade Soundwave."

In 1991-2 the sharpest graduates of UK B-boyism began fusing hip hop with

techno to create a new wildstyle, 'ARDKORE.  In 1990, aged 17, Danny bought a

sampler and was soon making exhiliratingly ruff'n'ready 'ardkore anthems under

the name Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era.  "Far Out", which Suburban Base re-released

in early '92, got to Number 36 in the Hit Parade and sold 30 thousand copies.

This was the golden age of hardcore rave, when the Prodigy and SL2 gatecrashed

the Top 2, and Urban Shakedown could sell 90,000 of "Some Justice".  Even after

its massive media hype, jungle has never recovered that popular appeal: a big

tune, says Danny, today sells about 4000.                              

Next came the Top 50 cracking "Peace & Loveism", whose flower-power title,

Danny claims, was "influenced more by Daisy Age rap like De La Soul than by

rave." At the end of '92, the "Flowers In My Garden" EP featured the uproarious

"Bust That Groove" and the self-explanatory "Skratchadelikism". Then came Danny's

most hip hoppy track yet, "What The...", a slow-mo sub-bass floorquaker that

updated electro for the E generation. Danny cites "What The..." as a turning

point, "when I started to get professional".

Through the rest of '93, Danny found himself out-of-step with DJ's tastes:

he was using rare groove licks that wouldn't come into favour until '94. By then

he'd changed his name to Droppin' Science--"'cos that was the vibe,

experimentation"--and started his series of "Vol." EP's that are among the most

audaciously avant-funky  in jungle.  "Vol.1" combined a hyper-orgasmic vocal "sampled from a dodgy Italian record" with an oriental piano melody to become a huge hit on dubplate. "Electro was a big influence on Vol.2," says Danny, "It's a full-on studio bug-out. Not a big tune, but connoisseurs dig it. Then 'Vol 3: Firing Line' was even more B-boyish, with wildstyle sampling."

On "Firing Line" and its even more astonishing sequels "Vol 4: Long Time

Coming" and "Vol 5: Step Off", Danny uses an eerie tremolo bass effect that makes

your whole body tremble.  "It's a bit like a wah-wah on a guitar, it really

vibrates.  I'm well into shaking sounds. My mission is to find and create new

effects". After the fluorescent synth-riffs, flashing hi-hats and topsy-turvy

breaks of "Long Time" and "Step Off", Danny's latest offering "Vol 6: Easy" is a

relatively mellow, '70s soul-tinged affair. Also around at the moment are a pair

of remixes of "Vol 1" and a brilliant Origin Unknown revamp of "Firing Line". And

any day now, there'll be Splash's "military assault" on "Step Off".

As for the future, Danny's working on a little something for Mo' Wax: "slow,

fucked up turntable shit, lots of stopping and starting". Danny's allies' Safari

Sounds are handling "Vol.  7", then he resumes control with "Vol 8: Beats".

                                                                                               

"That one's a manifesto, 'cos that's what I'm into--beats, all kinds of beats."

Danny talks of how positive it is that jungle and trip hop have met up to form a

single continuum of post-rap breakbeat-science, noting that "drum & bass can be

played alongside trip hop, whereas it can't really be played in a house set--the

beats don't fit."

As one of the precious few who's really pushing the state-of-the-artcore,

what does Danny reckon on the state of jungle in '95?

"I think last year's media explosion came too early, we really needed

another year to develop. There's a big buzz about jungle but it's not like we're

all selling an extra 10 thousand copies. I don't think drum & bass will ever get

really big, it's too complex to be pop.  I personally could go incredibly deep in

the future, really intricate in my production. I see no limits."

"knocky bassline stabs"

part 2 of Tim Cant's interview with Hyper-On Experience's hyper-articulate Alex Banks - tons of techy detail for the ardkore nerds out there. But also some very moving, emotionally precise bits on what it felt like to achieve their first pieces of music.

)


(via Blog to the Old Skool)

The Fun For All the Family EP, Hyper-On's debut for Moving Shadow - Shadow 17.

)

)


)

)

Tim Cant, any relation to Brian Cant?

rocktronica

Heard this at the hairdresser's the other day, instantly grabbed by its combo of minimalist and maximalist, early-90s slamming and EDM overblare.

Turns out to be five years old, and by a indie-dance duo whose other output looks to be a misguided hash of electro-house and rap

Did they stumble on perfection just the once?

Takes skill and taste to make something so batteringly brain-evacauting; to sustain the feeling of fixatedness without it becoming boring and benumbing.