The Crystl Vision

Great post by CardrossManiac2  on the genius of DJ Crystl, celebrating him as a relatively undersung yet essential part of the ambient-jungle moment - the move toward musicality and finesse (said journey being better than the arrival, of course). 

 (The post is part of an ongoing series on the darkcore into jungle golden age, worth backtracking through - and keeping an eye for coming instalments) 

Here - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYrbm00SnK2aDMQbm52b_WgZUs77mMdu7 -  I've helpfully piled all the '93 Crystl gems the drossman's highlighted, plus a few others and then some earlier tunes and also some later tunes (including, at the end, the disappointing major-label swerve into hip hop / jungle hybrids, then followed by an even more disappointing silence).  It might be the entire corpus in fact. 

Of all of them, the monster that turned my head around at the time is "Warp Drive". So colossal - one of several tunes alongside "Terminator" that really convinced me this is the future. That smashing  crashing break with the final drum hit haloed with reverb....

Apparently with "Warp Drive" Crystl was inspired by hearing Nasty Habits "Here Come the Drums"  - the drone-hum running through the whole thing, the stark minimalism - but verily I think the student surpasseth the teacher in this case, as good and as seminal as Doc Scott's tune is. 

(Headz will recognise the Stevie Nicks quote in the blogpost title - and often I have, when listening to "Dreams", thought of DJ Crystl as opposed to whatever fairy-tale vagary Stevie means to evoke - that's just how my nuum-addled brain is wired)

The other gem of that  Crystl run is "Let It Roll" - those cut-glass snare sounds, the almost tabla-like ripples of hand-percussion - and apparently it will come in a follow-up post on Crystl's post-93 output. 

Now I thought the "let it roll" in "Let In Roll" came from this hip-house classic 

but according to online authorities it's from this