bass for the weight

In The Wire end-of-year issue, Louis Pattison talks about the "weightless" quality of the nu-grime. And he doesn’t mean that as a pejorative. Not at all: the essay is full of warm words for operatives who "advance grime into structurally abstract, melodically rich realms". No misgivings discernible when it's noted that "weightless tracks do not welcome the presence of an MC, and for the most part, on record at least, that's the way they stay: untethered to personality or postcode, left to explore space,melody and emotion in a state of zero gravity."

All very accurate, that, but I for one do take "weightless" as a pejorative, unintended as it is is.  Grime has gone from purpose-built MC tools to purposeless instrumentalizm: not what I'd call "advance". A form of music that once served as a vehicle for individual and social expression – explosive with individual hunger, freighted and feral with social demand -  has been reborn as art-muzak. Superficially jagged and challengingly ugly;  ultimately placid. *  

Compare the nu-G with deep tech (e.g. the Jack 'n Danny set + MC above), which does feel purposeful, does pack some (bass) weight. (A genre, intriguingly, totally cold-shouldered by your FACTs and Wires - deep tech doesn't figure into either's official account of 2014, the tally of treasurable or notable sonic landmarks). 

[stop press: check Dominic Morris's just-out Guardian piece on Deep Tech)

Deep tech works according to classic sceniotic/ "changing-same" principles. Its form is stringently determined by function: DJ tools for adjusting the pleasure-machinery of the crowdfloor. Eclecticism is refused/refuted in favor of rigorous vibe-consistency.  A sort of pleasure-principled puritanism:  austere-yet-hedonist. Like a person with a very defined set of sexual kinks, returning fixatedly to the same narrow set of erogenous zones and turn-ons. 

It makes me wish I was back in London – something that  funky didn’t manage,  nor dubstep.  

The last thing that made me wish I was back living in London was grime, of course. Old grime, meaning - in its own time - new grime, in so far as it was a new thing, then, a shock of the new thing.... not a long-established template or blueprint to be tinkered with, "expanded" or "advanced" upon. In itself, it was the advance guard.     

* Mr Mitch and Yameneko - perfectly pleasant toy-musik - could almost have been designed to prove my contention that grime, 10 years after the fact, has become yet another province of the Nu-IDM).



Even the DJ patter here sounds nu-IDM...

compare/contrast...







grimehouse

tuff little unit

gabbamentary

not in English and no subtitles but it doesn't matter

can't work out if this gabber doc is old or was really made in 2013 as it seems to say  - if it's about gabba now then the scene really is frozen in time

frozen, perhaps because it was the furthest promontory into the future....  a bridge incapable of extension (at least along that particular axis of extremism - speed / noise / assault / frenzy)

a bridge too far (Nightmare in Arnhem reference, apologies)


stop press: Steeve Cross says the doc is "indeed recent -  however it uses lots of 20 year old footage (early 90s) and you have those mid 30 / mid 40 guys talking about their youth as Gabbaheads. The footage from the parties is very like 1993-95-ish - hints: the video aesthetics/ the fashion/ the total lack of smartphones.  If it were recent, you'd see at least the phone screens flash here and there."

stop stop press: Roy de B points out helpfully that there are in fact subtitles in English you just have to click a button - never seen that function before


(tip off from Toby Reynolds, no relation, who knows a thing or two about extremes - he was  formerly known as DJ Scud, nowadays works with mountains)

Dove Plate Pressure

oddity stumbled across trawling YouTube

never heard of the label or the artist

groanworthy pun on Dubplate and Doves there

samples from LFO and Holy Ghost Inc

label nod to Nasty V and the Don FM Crew

even the chaff of this era is treasurable

oh lookee here, Dove Recordings is the name of the label



how many other labels named themselves after a brand of E?

Well there was E, the Ibiza imprint, but that's generic

A small discography but rated by at least some

dude at Discogs opines:

This label, although relatively unknown, produced some of the ruffest tunes available in 1993, in my opinion. Using dark and atmospheric samples Crazee M managed to capture the spirit of the Darkside era brilliantly and i would recommend this label to anyone who likes Darkside hardcore. Customs + Excise Volume One and Genesis The Sequel / The Message in particular are two fine pieces of plastic, just dont listen to them in a darkened room will you!






like a junior Ibiza, i would say

via Blog to the Old Skool - a "live" PA by Rufige Cru, from November 1991, at a rave in Toronto - the most Anglophile rave scene in North America.

What a great find....

Although

1 / that's about as live as a group on Top of the Pops, they're just standing there jigging about in front of the keyboards while the tracks play!

 2/ Goldie's not that hot as an MC let's be honest.

Still, v. nice little historical document....

Now, I seem to recall there was a DJ set + interview floating about that Goldie and cru did on a Toronto radio station around that visit, as ambassadors for Reinforced...

Ah, here it is (cheers to Daze of Reality in comments for better hook-up than the broken into eight bits on Youtube i had before)






and the other seven instalments here

community radio at its best (you nutter)

Being a tape I made in the mid-Nineties of my favorite pirate-tape bits from the early-90s

Now the excerpt from Index FM (starts at 5.05 minutes in) is engraved in my heart and memory for all time on account of these two tunes:



The first time I ever did hear Foul Play - the start of a lifelong love affair




And very fond of this one too, which kicks the sequence off



Got all three on vinyl. But none of them has ever sounded as electrifying on their own as in this sequence,  even with the fucked-up mix between "It's Not Over" and "Living Lonely" - a classic case of "not in spite of, because of"

RETROlogic (frankly my dear I do give a Damm)

Martin Damm, who made breakbeat, gabba and Krautkore tracks under the name Biochip C and about 27 other aliases has been rereleasing his classic 90s tunes in a EP series he's named Lost Memories, through an imprint called RETROlogic

This second EP was originally released by Force Inc in 1993.



(via Strictly NuSkool blog)

Don't think I ever interviewed Damm, which is a pity because he put out some blinding stuff, and so much of it.

The Biochip C stuff was great but I particularly liked his emissions under the alter-ego The Speedfreak


I think this LP on Shockwave was the first one I scooped up by him, when I was most taken with the whole idea of gabba / speedcore / terrorcore.









I mean, a double album of gabba - the guy had music pouring out of him!

He could turn his hand to any style, Martin  - for instance he did experimental / IDM / abstract techno stuff for Mille Plateaux as Steel  - although I don't recall being as taken by that identity as much as his more ludic romping hKore and hhhhhgabbah identities

As Biobreaks he did some wicked speedjungle tracks for Riot Beats



I wonder if he is considered, as he should be, part of the ancestry of breakcore?

His name (as Biobreaks) pops up in this review I did in 1995 of the Rough and Fast compilation (which follows on nicely from the discussion of the Two On One series in the previous post)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

ROUGH AND FAST

(Riot Beats) 
The Wire, 1995?

by Simon Reynolds

All my anxieties about jungle's upwardly-mobile drift

towards dubious concepts like 'musicality' and 'maturity'

seem to be on the verge of becoming horrendous reality.

You've got artists utilising 'real' musicians, punters who

(ap)praise tracks in terms of how 'clean' their production

is, and a burgeoning mutual admiration pact between the Mo'

Wax posse and the drum & bass intelligentsia. All the new

styles in what must now be termed post-jungle are ultra-

smooth and mellifluously mellow--from hardstep, with its

fussy hi-hat shuffle-beats and tastefully restrained soul-diva

passion, to the fusion-tinged serenity and long sustained

synth-tones of the LTJ Bukem school.  Don't get me wrong,

these developments are still generating astonishing music.

But sometimes you've got to wonder: whither jungle's mania,

madness, ruffness?

For that, you might look to the UK's 'happy hardcore'

scene, which has back-lashed to '92 in order to follow a

different path than that taken by drum & bass, i.e. fixating

on staccato synth-stabs, rush-activating piano riffs, helium-

shrill vocals and stomping 4/4 beats. Or you might check out

Germany's small but fervent breakbeat scene, as represented

on Rough and Fast.  Based around a handful of labels,

Germanic jungle has more of an explicitly political edge than

its British cousin.  Key figure Alec Empire of agit-tekno

combo Atari Teenage Riot released a jungle track called "Hunt

Down the Nazis" (appropriate given that jungle is all about

musical miscegenation and post-colonial cultural hybridity).

Doubtless by necessity, German jungle is less polished

and fluent than current UK fare, but in a way that only adds

to its raw appeal--there's a fierce inflexibility, an un-

swinging rigour, to the drum programming that's curiously

invigorating at a time when so much UK drum & bass verges on

fuzak-with-breakbeats.  Much of this comp harks back to

jungle's under-rated 'dark' phase of early 1993, when

hardcore producers were first messin' with fucked up rhythms

but the music still retained some relation to techno (Joey Beltram/Belgian brutalism style as opposed to trance).

And so DJ Moonraker's "Lion King" and Space Cube's "Dark

Dive" both let rip bass-blast synth-riffs, redolent of the

Frankfurt-based PCP label's brand of stormtrooper tekno,

amidst the jittery, shimmery breaks, while Roland 303

aciiied-squiggles are woven into the hyper-syncopated bustle

of Sonic Subjunkies' "Djungelstadt" and Dr Echo & DJ

Reverend's "Fine Style".  And on Doc Tom's "Moskito" there's

a terrific ear-searing synth-noise that, yup, sounds like a

squadron of mosquitos dive-bombing upon your flesh.

As with most non-Anglophone appropriations of Brit-pop

there's something slightly wrong-sounding about the results:

just check those names--Doc Tom, Sonic Subjunkies, Mental

Bombin, DJ Reverend. But the best tracks here--the

itchy'n'scratchy insectoid scrabble of Biobreaks' "May The

Funk Be With You", the prehensile rhythmic intricacies and

gamelan-textured percussion-rolls of Da Captains of Phuture's

"Legendary Flight"--suggest not just that the Krauts may soon

catch but with their UK forebears, but that jungle's next and

most interesting phase will involve regional hybrids across

the globe: G-funk junglism, Miami Bass'n'drum, Latin-

breakbeat, Scandinavian new complexity 'ardkore....

A comments-box commenter reminded me of the Two On One series that Moving Shadow did, starting in early 1994 -  an artist - either from the Shadow roster or an admired ally / peer -  given  one side of a 12 inch on which to explore their more "experimental" tendencies....

Very excited by this idea I was, but the results were generally underwhelming .... less intense than each artist's usual offerings, and in truth often less mindbendingly strange than the more slamming crowd-pleasing things Moving Shadow were doing at that time, such as Dead Dred's "Dred Bass"

The Goldie tune (Two On One Issue 1) was good, but no "Angel"



This is how I reviewed it at the time in Melody Maker:

"You could call it 'ambient hardcore', you could call it 'cyber-jazz'--either way,

"Fury"'s demonic timewarped bass, soul-diva-in-agony samples, orchestral synths

and jazzy tangents all add up to one hell of a phuture shocker."

This 2 Bad Mice effort was probably the best of the lot.... metallic stepper with sinister-slinky glow-bass



The MM review:  "a complex mesh of shifting snares and treated percussion"

The Foul Play was a middling sort of effort - although a Herbie Hancock "Watermelon" rip is always nice



The Omni Trio is lovely but it's just an alternate mix or a preview (can't remember which) of a track on the Vol. 4 EP, so hardly much of a stretching-himself step into the avant-zone for Mr Haigh. Bit of a fob-off, really.



The Deep Blue is decent, but more like a messy pageant of tasty drum sounds -- an unnecessary complication of what works so sublimely on "The Helicopter Tune"




The rest, though - mostly an early indication that the drift towards musicality and smoothed-out ambient textures was going to be a mixed blessing

(In MM I was still trying to maintain my enthusiasm for the series: the mini-review for that one goes "Tango's "Think Twice" is a dancefloor desolator, all demonic bass-surges and hideously clammy samples. Isolationist jungle? Sounds like a good idea to me."

Really beginning to lose interest by this point: "JMJ & Richie's "Deep Bass 9" is a pleasant enough confection of vocoderized ragga, blissed diva and two-step shuffle. But it's Size & Krust's "Witchcraft"--a dreamswirl of s(h)immering percussion, spangly wah-wah and hall-of-mirrors vocals-- that really substantiates the experimental intentions of the '2 On 1' series."

Now I guarantee you I never played that one ever again - but listening today, it's okay: "Music Box" + creepy sound-wraithes.

sadly not sampling the Renaissance tune... nice enough little groover though



ah the tell-tale pitter of the hand-percussion, and then the sickly synth-washes



it's the synths that spoil most of these tunes - uninteresting chords, pallid textures

See this one is quite exciting rhythmically - like frenzy inside a fog, with that susurrated spray of beat-particles...



... but then the World's Least Compelling Keyboard Chords keep interrupting the proceedings

bleepology

Matt Anniss goes deep with bleep in a probing piece for Resident Advisor on the bass-intensive Northern sound of early 90s England.  Nice images / graphics / colour-palette (blue and lime-green) too -  evocative of the period.

Anniss also did a thing on Unique 3's "It's Only The Beginning / The Theme" as Original Bleep + Bass Trak  for Juno Plus

And check out this bleepmix of his from a few years ago

Bass-ment Jacks [Bleep history mix for Hivemind.fm] by Sell By Dave on Mixcloud

trad rave

"An All-Night Rave at the Alexandra Palace" - 

An all-night 'trad' ball held in the echoing and chilly infinity of the great hall of the Alexandra Palace. Band followed band from 9-30 PM until 7-30 AM the next morning. The audience were dressed almost without exception in 'rave gear'. As the essence of 'rave gear'  is a stylized shabbiness, the general effect was of a crowd scene from a biblical epic.  To describe an individual couple, the boy was wearing a top hat with 'Acker' painted on it, a shift made out of a sugar shack with a C.N.D. symbol painted on the back, jeans, and no shoes.  The girl, a bowler hat with a C.N.D. symbol on it, a man's shirt worn outside her black woolen tights. 'Trad' dancing in the contemporary sense is deliberately anti-dancing.  When I first went to jazz clubs, there were usually one or two  very graceful and clever couples.  But today the accepted method of dancing to trad music is to jump heavily from foot to foot like a performing bear, preferably out of time to the beat.  I have no explanation to offer for this unattractive fad, unless it is to underline that they have no connection with the lovers of pop music, all of whom dance rather well in a somewhat mechanical way. Trad musicians have christened these self-made elephants 'Leapniks'.

- George Melly, Revolt Into Style

And then in an old Newsweek article from 1961:

"Among their fans is a teen-ager who. holding a container full of cider, whisky and gin. said the last word on the trad boom recently on BBC TV: "If it really comes to it.'' said the traddist, "I prefer jazz to sex."

Redolent of the classic pill-popping  born-again techno head who says they prefer raving to sex...

deep (tech) thoughts

or thought singular

"this stuff is narrowed by design, the appeal in deliberately focusing on a specific claustrophobic minatory tension, using it as tautly-wired rotational axis" - bob zemko, aka r/t/c, at ILM

changing same innit

how about some nookie?

Met Gavin Cheung once, round Goldie's gaff on Englands Lane

This next is one of the greatest things ever.



To the bone

And this one.... ooh gosh



Not sure I ever even heard the original!




He done a lot, Nookie

Appy ardkore, as opposed to happy hardcore, if you get me.

But although most famous for uplifting bright-toned piano tunes, he could do dark rolling choppage







Why Return of the Donut?





Never heard this, Foul Play on the remix -  wait for the drumz!





odds n sods












and the Anthem

Xen-ophobia

Missed this mordant review of Arca's Xen by Britt Brown in a recent issue of  The Wire , which chimes with some of the feelings (or not-really-feelings) in this post of mine.

Brown writes:

"The music of Arca... often feels indistinguishable from a high tech software demonstration.... every texture a labored mirage of plug-ins and processing. Pondering the click count necessary to construct one of his labyrinthine designs is enough to induce carpal tunnel syndrome...."

He further asserts that Xen is "as much a scrapbook of frequency oscillation experiments as a set of tracks meant to evoke some sort of human response....   Shorn of vocals, Xen suffers the same fate as much beloved contemporary beat music, which is a kind of dazzling monotony. Rhythms are fractured and abstracted to the point of nonexistence; glassy soft synths swoop and wander, indifferent to songcraft or notions of structural momentum. This refusal to pursue ideas to fruition is the record's shallowest quality - though it may also explain something of Arca's generational appeal. Nations of curious culture hounds skimming videos and audio waveforms in search of content worthy of their time has birthed an aesthetic of impatience, click bait, listicles, streaming previews."

Brown also offers some acerbic analysis of the aesthetic economy of out-sourced beat-making. He notes that it makes sense that Arca's "convoluted, maximalist music caught the attention of Kanye West's subcommittee of Yeezus production delegates" because "the cold blooded wisdom of Yeezus is that brilliance can be bought. A star like Kanye can approach a new album with nothing more than a vague desire to sound fresh, and simply delegate the rest.....  Electronic music is an arms race like any other... [and] Arca is as much a mercenary as a musician, padding his portfolio with exotically blasted snare drum sounds and melted circuit reverb patches in an effort to tempt new clients. Xen should keep his workflow steady."  

Brown's critique does get a rather forceful and thought-provoking rejoinder from Mike Sugarman at Ad Hoc, though....

Stop Press: Aaron Grossman from Airport Through The Trees steps "meekly into the Arca fray" with some very interesting thoughts on Xen (including taking issue with Sugarman)  plus adjacent topics such as postmodernity, architecture, and the difference between Music As Cause versus Music as Style.  

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

Thinking about Brown's argument, the thought did occur: when it comes down to it, isn't a lot of dance music, a lot of  electronic music, actually - on some level, to some degree -- a tech-demonstration? A run-through and showcase for what the latest gear can do?

For sure, it must also have that functional aspect of working on the dancefloor. There has to be a groove there - a sensual and kinaesthetic matrix in which the effects and new noises are embedded. But usually there is a fairly sizeable element of ostentatious deployment of  the latest tricknology and special FX.

With IDM, given that the obligation to service the deejay and the massive is diminished severely or eliminated altogether, there's much greater danger of falling into the ear-candy-for-ear-candy's sake zone...  audio fireworks....  digital pyrotechnique... 

In that respect, IDM in its purest and most uncompromised forms is simply a junior cousin to academic electronic composition. (Autechre and Curtis Roads: the only difference is that one works within the music marketplace and the other through institutions of higher learning). For the 
history of electronic composition and computer music is likewise all about making use of the latest machinery. Literally building the state of the art;  being the first to use it because you made it yourself, tinkered with the hardware and the software....  The results can get close to being barely more than audio-engineering, as opposed to Artistic Expression. (Which may explain why some electronic composers over-compensate with Lofty Themes, reconnecting what they do to the grand history of Western Civilisation, poetry and literature and philosophy... and occasionally taking it all the way back to Ancient Greece).

For examples, check out all this early computer music as curated and annotated by Alex de Nunzio on YouTube, which I've been devouring lately. If you fancy a go yourself,  I would start at the start, and work your way forward historically. Go back to de Nunzio's first uploads from 3 years ago, figures like  David Lewin, Max Mathews, Newman Guttman, John Pierce. These guys, operating in the late Fifties and early Sixties, are much more technicians than composers.





This Max Mathews piece was actually "produced as a demonstration of some of the effects which could be achieved with the computer in the early 60's"



But even later on with your James Dashows and James Tenneys, there is an element of what Brown is accusing Arca of doing...


















Some incredible stuff de Nunzio has put up there for our delectation / edification, all of it interesting, but the best of it finding a wondrous balance between tech-demonstration and musical-world-building.







Emmanuel Ghent was a Bell Labs colleague of Laurie Spiegel, who also fits into this zone - what I once, long ago, dubbed "the engineer-poet."

Electronic Dance Music

and Alwin Nikolais's Pond which is embedding-disabled











Maurice Bejart / Pierre Henry Messe pour le temps present video-doc embedding disabled

and it sound ruff

dark shark bass

Jeff Wayne / Richard Burton remix!

keeping track of dance in the decade of atemporality

quite a few retro-jungle and ardkore-replica tracks in FACT's Top 100 Tracks of the Half-Decade (2010 to 2014)












good tunes, all, but...

well, let's just say I smiled wryly at the comment on Kallisti's "Arc of Fire" -- "Blissed-out hardcore is the name of the day – certainly not succour for those who spent the decade subscribing to the Retromania thesis, but as throwbacks go, impeccable."

also a lot of classicist house and techno...  a bit of nu-disco...  and tons of nu-grime (on Logos's "Kowloon": "the elegant balance here between respectfully referencing vintage grime – in this case Wiley’s Devil Mixes – and moving it forwards with extreme production finesse is really something to behold")

I was unaware my daughter has been secretly recording and release neo-acid trax



Anyway loads of things to check out in FACT's 100 Best Tracks of the Decade So Far - and some do sound future-y or at least NOW!ist.

PS Always disconcerting, with magazines that one feels sympatico with, to find so little personal overlap - of the list I would warmly co-sign only "2 On" and "Rack City" and perhaps "Wut". Others would get a "'spose so" or a blank look.


PPS For instance - one thing I noticed -  not a single deeptech / Audio Rehab-HouseEntertainment-Mokujin-et-al release...

Sound of E(den)

can you feel the gush (ooh that diva)






On ZTT...   presumably an X-tension of the interest in that area evidenced by signing 808 State

there's a ghost in this house

love the name Ghost House Banton



any relation to Hard House Banton?



and if not then

what is the nuumological resonance of the word "banton"?

This fellow?





mad beats - all kinds of things going on in the bassline(s) on "Bogle" I'd not noticed before - bubblin!

by comparison this stuff is a bit linear

consciously continuumnous

not just an echo or a borrowing but a valedictory wave to Mark Bell / LFO from deeptech producer RS4, who comes from bleep city Sheffield and writes: "Heres a tribute to the original track that got me in to electronic music. Download, share and remember your history. RIP Mark Bell."

some of his other tunes



listen to the bass science on that one - black rippling darkness

oh dread

can remember hearing this on the radio, in early 1994,  mesmerized, entranced, bass-blessed....

more rumblizm, from about a year later



similar kind of thud-boom bass

but the beat is different -- love that clip-clop feel

these tunes ruled my life for months

but I only heard them on the pirates or at home, when I got the 12 inch, or in "Take Your Mind"'s case, it was on a compilation

never heard either played out

the bassweight of memory

Celebrating ten years of blogging, Blackdown shares a live recording of the greatest dubstep set he ever witnessed: Mala b2b Loefah ft SGT Pokes live at FWD>> 01.06.06 . Writing about that night and the (bass)weight of memory, Martin also analyses the dialectic between scenius and genius: a tension between innovation as a collective process versus the impetus to self-differentiate.

"This sense of understanding extended to most of the key producers of this era and how they interacted with each other. This music was made to be played together, they all knew they were contributing to the sound that was being built. But yet equally there was a repulsion as well as attraction interaction happening: people were very protective of their sounds and their spaces; it was massively frowned on to clone one another (even if copying/mutating/being inspired by – implicitly or explicitly – is a massive driver of scene-based musical progress). I remember Loefah saying he couldn’t use an arpeggio or an arpegiator after Skream wrote “Request Line” and “Tapped”, despite the fact that Olly had hardly invented 1-3-5-8. 
  .... D1 had his trance-y sound, Loefah the dark deadly halfstep, Mala caused upward percussive euphoria, Coki that jump up insanity, Skream could turn his hand to so many styles (jazzy, warm, breaky, jump up, grimey and the aforementioned arpeggios), Kode went on his own abstract plane. People had an understanding of each other, but only some understanding. There was commonality but differentiation, dialog but distance, attraction but repulsion. Some understanding."


Had to nod at this bit:

"The funny thing is, as a non smoker (of any kind), I actually miss smokey clubs a bit. It sorta (literally) added to the atmosphere, if not over the top. Maybe I might feel differently about this when I die in my ‘50s of lung cancer, but as an occasional vibe to be part of, it worked. Medically irrational I know I know…"

Annoyingly my computer's protection software won't let me download the bloody set in question. 

just one carnao, give it to me....

Carnao Beats interview by Jack Law aka Corpsey aka Dirtnap 2 , now also blogging about deep tech at Peak Time

another continuum-ous fellow, Mr Carnao -  started out in UK garage, later involved in funky, and now one of the most creative producers in deeptech

special mix he done for Pack London

that's why they call it a continuum folks part 393283753027465648939203949 (the deeptech remix)

reminds me at times of sub-lo or narrows-y darkgarridge  - viscous bass undertow writhing like snakes in diesel  -- slinky slick 'n' sinister

bonus nuum echoes -- the longest historical span between source track and revamp i know of - 24 years 





with a bunch of remakes in between including this junglistic one



and this speed garrigdey one

That Laugh

That girl's laughter = one of the  most recycled samples in the history of dance music

Where did it come from?

Well, I reckon this right here is the source for 99 percent of usages...



Except it's not the original source

It's Alf's laff from this big club tune of the early 80s (especially in American clubs)





Feel like I've heard That Laugh - that liquid trickle of girlish delight - in hundreds of  tracks.

Its only rivals as a Stock Sample Cliche would be Malcolm McLaren's echo-chamber hillbilly whoop at the start of "Buffalo Gals" and "this is a journey into sound" as used by Coldcut, Marc Acardipane, and 15 thousand other producers.

Can you think of any other notable appearances of the Laugh?


Stop press - dude in the comments box points out this rather glaringly obvious example:







Stop Stop press -  another couple of examples from Ricardo Rainho!



Scroll to 4.04 in "Theme From S'Express" and there she is again -  Alison Moyet having a good throaty chuckle in the echo chamber!

And again in the Simon Harris song at 1.02 





Thing that makes it work, I think, is that it doesn't feigned or forced -- sounds like she was genuinely having a giggle in the studio. Perhaps Vince caught it on the sly.... 

Stop Stop Stop Press - Here's another lovely use of it right at the start of "What Is Love" by Deee-Lite - easily my favorite of their songs - although there's some other girl mirth sampled in the track as well later on.

halloween beats -- nu-darkcore and horror garage

8205 Recordings and Back To the Old Skool blog present Darkside Compilation 2014  -  selection of tru-nu productions inna 93 stylee



+


Jack Law aka Corpsey aka Dirtnap's piece on spooky and scary UK garage tracks (fueled partly by suggestions from a Dissensus thread)

I would have nominated this one, not strictly horror movie based, but well creepy -






That's Tracy Chapman, sampled - singing about hearing spouse-battery through the apartment walls - and failing to do anything about it, until too late.

nu tru bonanza - neojunglizm + retrojunglizm from Kloke to Rumbleton

Project Squared / Sub Squared label founder Paul Cooper drops a tasty mix of "new old" jungle tracks from the last few years. One of them is off Kloke's forthcoming "First Light" EP on Sub Squared. 

Tracklist 
01 Lee Gamble - Pandemonium Institute (Pan, 2013)

02 Hate - Darkcore (Hate, 2008)

03 Pearson Sound - Crimson (Beat Ritual Mix) (Hessle Audio, 2013)

04 Ramadanman - Don't Change For Me (Hessle Audio, 2010)

05 Pearson Sound - Blanked (Hessle Audio, 2010)

06 Shed - Fluid 67 (50Weapons, 2013)

07 Tessela - Nancy's Pantry (R&S, 2013)

08 Pev - Aztec Chant (Livity Sound, 2013)

09 Perc - Take Your Body Off (Tessela Remix) (Perc Trax, 2014)

10 Hate - Cunning Love (Hate, 2008)

11 Etch - Lost Methods (Keysound, 2013)

12 Andrea – You Still Got Me (Daphne, 2010)

13 Millie & Andrea – Ever Since You Came Down (Daphne, 2009)

14 SW. - Reminder (Burriddim Mix By DJ Sotofett) (SUED, 2013)

15 Anodyne - At The Gates Of Hell (Yellow Machines, 2014)

16 Hate - Submariner (Hate, 2009)

17 Sully - Blue (Logos Vapour Dub)(Keysound, 2014)

18 Kloke - Space & Time (Sub Squared, forthcoming late 2014)

Cooper's mix reminded me that Droid had pointed me towards a bunch of superior examples of the "tru nu" / rinse-retro-replica style, commenting that in his view "there is still a huge amount of potential in the jungle sound which hasn't been explored, potential that's there because of the massive amount of rhythmic and stylistic diversity of 93-95, which was shut down quite early - I see both amen and two-step as forms of consolidation."

Many of the producers deliberately revert to using old fashioned hardware - Akai, Amiga etc - to get the right vibe. 

What follows is a mega selection of wicked timewarp tunes, with Droid's comments in quotes.

"There's Ricky of course, who despite his amen addiction is still putting out great tunes in a metalheadz 96/97 kinda vibe"

"Dwarde is one of the Akai guys. Pretty young, but been around the scene for years. Hes got a great sensibility and ear. Reminds me a bit of the early Lucky Spin sound"

"Squatski/Phineus 2. Really high hopes for him. Another Akai/hardware dude."

"Some interesting stuff from the Amiga Akai YT crew"






"Dwarde put me onto this guy. [Earl Grey] Very diverse sound to his stuff"

"Reactiv - again, its more jungly d+B, but the quality shines through. Nebula along similar lines, both from the Sci-Wax stable."

"This guy [Anthony D] is all hardware and does some nice jungle and electronica crossover stuff. Really nice feel to his stuff"

And a couple more suggestions from Droid

Tim Reaper

And the splendidly named Rumbleton