The Armpit Foghorn

 

Don't ask me why, but for some reason whenever I hear the blare-blast stab in this tune (first kicks in at 2.09), I always picture stink lines radiating from an armpit, like in a comic strip! Or maybe in a 1970s advert for strap-hangers on the Tube who forgot to use their Mum roll-on that morning and are ripely assaulting the nostrils of fellow commuters....  

This remix is marginally more exciting but just as stinkazoid 

Whereas this Doc Scott remix is deodorized 

Sometimes the imagined source of this infernally exciting sound is more like a hybrid of an armpit and a foghorn!  

This Pulse / Foul Play collision takes the armpit-foghorn stab and makes it even more pungently full-frontal and nasally invasive  - check 2.30 for the full blast

original also stanky

Mum roll-ette at work in clubbing context

Love Energy

 More Manchester jungalistic pirate action from June '94 via Rob Chapman - DJ Direct and the Revolution Crew on Love Energy FM. First  side o' original tape includes "a Spin Inn Jungle Top 10" - the other side mixes ambient-j and ragga-y vibes. 

What's the first couple of tunes played in this? 

Check out the rest of his fab gear at Mixcloud

stop press Friday May 27: Rob just added another great tape with a bunch of different sets from July and August 1994, mostly DJ Direct but some other Revolution Crew deejays too

smoovgroov

here's a playlist I made of smoovgrooving '70s music (starts funk and souljazz, veers off into a rockier but still boogiefunkin' direction - what I call nifty groovers).

the list is almost infinitely expandable and I'll be adding to it on and off

The impulse came to me after hearing this tune played by a band on a little hill park near Santa Monica beach, catching the name "Grover Washington" and later managing to work out what the tune the group was covering was. 

This one, also included, is more than smooov, it is an argument for, nay proof of,  a Divine Plan for Creation

I feel there should be a book or at least an article written about Ramp's "Daylight" (maybe there is)

I remember hearing the original sample-source for the first time, having only known the Size version. It was in the middle of the '90s, while wandering around Camden Market - suddenly there's the vocal and the lick that I recognise and love, wafting across from a record stall. So surprised and delighted was I that I strode up the chap behind the counter and burbled "there's a jungle track that samples this!". The look of disgust on the jazzbo's face!

I can sort of see his point actually comparing the two - much as I love the Roni take, it leaves so many gorgeous glistening components behind in its ransacking raid on the rare groove archive (not that the jazz snob would have known that, having never gone within a million miles of jungle I'm sure)

But I'd be hard pressed to choose between the two

Jungle as a gateway drug to '70s souljazz (the tracks between tunes traceable here)

Energy Flash the compilation

The Hi-Fi Junglist has put the Energy Flash CD - free with the original Picador 1998 edition, attached to the front in fact - on YouTube as a playlist. Below are all the track clips, separately.

Lots of treasure uploaded and some nifty playlists too at Hi-Fi Junglist - including this tune  whose absence on YouTube I'd noticed and had planned to do myself but not got around to, and now H-F-J has relieved me of the need and duty.

heaven

 

One of the greatest - most unusual and unorthodox - and sheerly beautiful - tracks of the peak moment of ambient jungle (late '93 / first half '94). Musicality unexpectedly emerging in a context considered widely, by supposed cognoscenti, to be sub-music ("jungle - it's just not music" as a colleague apparently said, and a dance-specialist to boot, a fan of Laurent Garnier). 

 

Romford Ghosts

 

Love the title, the track not so enamored although I really liked some of Phineas II's other tunes

stay calm!

 

One of the greatest of the Foul Play remixes  - with an almost Mover-like sculpted-swoop of a stab bringing in a nice'n'doomy gloomcore-ish feel. Gorgeous psychedelic-smeared drums. 

The original's triffic too but the Foul Play boys really take it to another level 

I think Foul Play "played" this remix live at their Voodoo Magic PA in 1994. I know they played the rmx of "Lord of the Null Lines".

What's the flipside like?

Well the internet doesn't have "Warning" , the original's flipside, but it does have the flipside to the FPrmx of "Stay Calm"

And it's widescreen, glistening, Omni Trio-ish stuff. Nice. Warning signs perhaps of too much smoovness to come. 

Funnily there's an Omni rmx

Another back in the day remix of "Stay Calm" with a bit too much of that reverb-clangy metallicized / scuttling percussion sound that came in during the prissy-ification later days of D&B. Fine but that had a real challenge trying to out-match Foul Play's definitive retake. 

Later re-touch of "Stay Calm"