"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
Via Droid, here's an 1989 pirate radio show on which Randall (RIP) talks about "jungle beats" - at about 3.55 mins into this clip.
The track playing is Renegade Soundwave's "The Phantom" - a beat later sampled by Omni Trio for "Stronger"
One thing I've found consistently is that whenever you think you can pinpoint the moment when a musical term or genre name gets adopted, you will always find an earlier example.... there's sort of new-word seep-backwards-through-time syndrome
It applies to almost everything
- grunge (used all through the 1980s and probably has earlier usages)
- grime (well, "grimy" was used by Onyx almost a decade earlier)
And don't get me started on "techno"....
Hell, I even found I'd coined neurofunk almost a decade earlier than when I affixed the term to a shit direction in drum and bass
Talking of funk... they used that in the 1950s, as a specifically musical term, in the context of jazz, hard bop and that end of the spectrum. (Obviously it had other meanings - including the completely non-congruent quaint-Brit Rudyard Kiplingesque meaning of "loss of nerve", "fearfulness" - as well as the connotatively proximate ones of body odour, sex-smell, etc)
"Indie" is another one.... color me surprised to see it pop up twice in Nik Cohn's Awopbop:
- describing
Apple Records, he says something that started out as the grand
Beatles dream of a free space for artists of all kinds, inventors, people
trying to do experimental happenings, etc, but then it shrank down to
being just an “indie record label”
- he
talks about Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Stones, starting his own
indie label Immediate Records. Admittedly quite a ways from what indie would
mean after punk – although only in his early 20s still, Oldham’s immensely
wealthy, a record business insider, lots of contacts, and through
Immediate signs up acts many of whom have hits. Doubtless it went through major label distribution too. So indie just means there’s
just one boss, the guy who founded it, calling the shots.
That said, I would be surprised to find if anyone used the term "arsequake" prior to the, well, Arsequake League
And I feel like "shoegaze" came out of nowhere, as did "trip hop".
The journalistic coinages seem to be more likely to emerge ex nihilo (not always though - post-rock as we know first used in 1967) whereas the ones that come from scenes and populations in an organic sort of way.... you will find more of a semantic prehistory...
St Albans massive - part of the Hertfordshire Annex to the Hardcore Continuum (Omni, Source Direct, Photek, Gappa G and Hypa Hypa, Omni Trio, DJ Trax I think, others too)
Not in the first rank of ardkore + jungle - now if they were Omni level, there'd be more polemical strength to the comparison with you-know-who
But this kind of thing = the real Britpop. I thought that then. Think it now.
And it was pretty popular, with the populace. Chart music for a good stretch there..
This is Oaysis's first-rank moment
"I think we've found / A special place... Just close your eyes / And dream with me"
Better still, the Slipmatt remix
Oaysis started on Formation, up in Leicester, then went to an actual Hertfordshire label - Stevenage's Moving Shadow
One of those groups that tended to go a bit wispy when they shifted from ardkore to intelligent
One of them - Danny Hopkins - became Hopa, as in Hopa & Bones - a name that always tickled me. Although I can see now that it's just a twist on Hopkins. Still, it's an archetypally nuum sort of name, isn't it? Hopa n Bones.
Hopa and Bones featuring Oaysis - a transitional nomenclature. Was this like Hopa saying to the other two in Oaysis - "okay, you can be in the room with us while me and Bones make the tune?" Like letting them down gently, aka not pulling the bandage off. Maybe they helped, contributed, advis.
Or maybe it was trying to drag over the "name-recognition" factor into the new enterprise.
Good stuff. Not wispy at all. Glistening and "musical" and cold-fresh-airy, yet the beats are lively and limber, the bass booms in all the right places.
Danny Hopkins also recorded, earlier, as Higher Octave
SMILEY: The Shacklewell Arms used to be called The Green Man. And basically The Green Man pub was where all the local guys used to go and buy their crack cocaine. That’s where it was sold, in that pub, so you know that pub is responsible for smashing so many lives. I mean, tearing families apart.
Seriously, that was like the devil was there. And I mean, we’ve seen from ages of, like, fourteen year olds to fifty year olds coming out of that pub, and they’ll be stealing from mums and brothers and dads, and robbing old ladies. Doing aggravated burglaries so they could get money to go into that bloody pub, The Green Man.
I mean, that’s a significant piece of history that place is, but a lot of people don’t know this.
But we was here from the beginning. So, we made a song called The Green Man. It was about people going in there buying crack.
And also on the flipside of Green Man, where it was more PJ’s idea, we had a song called Autobiography Of A Crackhead, and that was sort of like one of our deepest songs we’ve ever done really.
PJ: Basically it was a rap tune, and it was us both doing a verse each about living the life of a crackhead.
SMILEY: It’s not, like, bigging up crack…
Another Crack-in tune, suggested by YT in comments
I had a great chat with Paul Rose - a/k/a Scuba a/k/a the man behind Hotflush Recordings - for his Not A Diving Podcast. We talked about Futuromania, electronic dance music, back in the day blogging, and much more besides. Immerse.
produced some tracks but primarily a deejay, that's where Randall McNeil's contribution lay
a detailed tribute from Carl Loben + Ben Murphy at DJ magazine
54 - way too early to go
an archive of his deejay sets and other stuff set up posthumously
Revered for his ‘double impact’ style of mixing, aka 'double drop' mixing - playing two tracks and aligning their drops so that they detonate simultaneously
Randall on schooling the young Andy C on how to do it:
“I remember telling him how I’d scope out tunes and how I’d count the bars and the maths of double drops. Basically knowing your tunes inside out. He knew it already and just took it another level. I merely showed him the blueprints.”
A regular at the AWOL night at the Paradise in Islington, the focus for the scene's innercore
cabal (Goldie Grooverider Fabio Reinforced cru Kemistry & Storm et al) during that period between the closing of Rage and the start of Metalheadz at the Blue Note.
I remember Goldie regaling me with a story of a one
particular triumphant mix by Randall at AWOL that got the jungalistic equivalent of a standing ovation. Something about how he went in and out between the two tracks, back and forth, in some incredibly involuted but sustained way... the rapid switchbacks so steal-your-breath astonishing, the duration so improbably extended, the precision so needlepoint, that a clamor of awestruck disbelief erupted.... the track was duly rewound - only for Randall to repeat the feat of mixological acrobatics exactly, same jump points - this was a connoisseur performance 4 the connoisseurs, a tour de force showcase of the emerging artistry of a new kind of music
In the same interview Goldie spoke of how in response to deejays like Randall (and Grooverider at Rage) he made sure his own tracks were always "both music and mixable, with entrances and exits"
Here's some of Randall's own productions
and a remix (in collaboration with Foul Play)
Randall was the go-to mixer for Reinforced compilations, doing the fully mixed version of The Definition of Hardcore in '93 and more recently a 25th Anniversary comp
That's the juiciest mix but this one has its a-peel
Still, pipped to the post by the original mix.
Skin Up had another entertaining cheesy-quaver moment
Is that the voice of Neil the Hippie in there?
Ha, something I only just noticed - Skin Up, aka Jason Laurence Cohen, went on to the Big Beat artist Laidback, who recorded for a label I was fond of for a moment - Bolshi
However I don't remember being that struck by the Laidback tunes - the outfits I liked most were Rasmus and Beachcomas
The latter did this fruit 'n veg themed oddity - possibly Gardeners Question Time sourced samples that go "peaches, shaped like doughnuts... split and juicy", "strawberries", "nuts.... and medleys"
Love it to the marrow. (Boom boom)
A Mekons sample too wouldyabelieve
One of my absolute favorites out of that late '90s harvest, the ripening bounty before all went to shit in the early 2000s
That's my video by the way, illustrated with idyllic images of the Chilterns (watch out for my mum) and Oxfordshire and Maryon Park, South London - the bulk of the pix first aired in this elegiac post
An exploration of personal and collective histories from the UK garage rave scene of the early 2000’s, from Angel Zinovieff.
This Material Archive brings together a collection of works made between 2014 and 2023. Reflecting on sonic, choreographic and social histories of the UK garage rave scene, it maps themes such as joy in collective movement, transcendence, madness, the power of the imagination and the division of time. Weaving both deeply personal and collective experiences, the work encompasses archival materials, video work, music and text.
Two piece chicken and chips for 99p inside the party
[Verse 2 - Shotta Shah]
It's me; Shotta Shah Khan
Hold tight yes with the garlic naan
Smack Princess Pukka with the back of my palm
Sniff ten lines, that shit's haraam
Uncle will flip but I'll tell him keep calm
It's me and my boy Ali
Coming down Leeds Road at ninety
In my Chacha's Ferrari
I'm a taxi driver
Drive you to my yard for a fiver
Get a sucky off a prozzy for a bottle of cider
Up on the mic ah!
I said I took this bird to the Shimla Spice
Curry and rice on a Friday night
I got a vindaloo and it made me poo
Now I'm at Frame 2 with the Leeds road crew
See rap shows near Hollywood
Get tickets as low as $112
[Verse 3 - Halal Ham]
Stepped in the party, pass me the shisha
Drove to Bradford in my two-litre
Saw a peng ting, I'll go chat to her
Not going to Begum though like Shamima
I moved to this Auntie, Aunti went hanji
Then she went to go make me some handi
It's Shotta Shah and Kutta Khan and we go hard in Bradistan
A couple of apnas, a couple of goras
A couple of tings for a couple of pakoras
Uss bar kidda sohniye
And she's gonna take me home with her
Kasmeh bro it was mental
Spend my Eid monies on a rental
I was like "Boss who wants a Lambo?"
Popping bottles; Rubicon Mango
Shotta Shah is from Bad Boy Chiller Crew and here's another BBCC track that references Chicken Dhansak
What led me back to these was a more recent "Bradford Sound" track by MC Chippy
A real "Danelaw" look to most of the people in this video - red hair, pale skin, narrow eyes
A Scandi-ness that recalls Die Antwoord, the whitest people who ever rapped - until BBCC + crews
(although donkists the Blackout Crew were pretty pasty)
This Chippy fella looks like a mash-up of Catweazle and Jimmy Savile
Looking at these vids (and there's so many of them) I sometimes can't help picturing a post-apocalyptic tribe out of some Russell Hoban scenario.... mutant survivors who've reconstructed "civilization" using a handful of cultural fragments - in this case, a So Solid Crew DVD, a No Limit CD, singles by T2 and DJ Q... a Niche mix-tape pack ... over the centuries the repeated gestures and references devolved into rote ritual, emptied of meaning, original referents long lost....
Hey look - an Irish branch of this bassline/rap fusion
i.e the electronic future emerging first not out of pop's vanguards (art-pop or street) but from the middle-aged and the middle-of-the-road - radio and TV themes, musik for advertisements, , novelty pop, background music, easy-listening, etc
Raymond Scott, Jean-Jacques Perrey, this chap...
In part because who else could afford to use the gear at the start?
Built by The Arkiteket - an enigmatic figure, known to some on this circuit, but for this project self-shrouded in mystery.
Years in the making, The Deep Ark consists of three elements.
The core is a mix - an extended (8 hour plus) odyssey through 1990s Electronic Listening Music (to use the term originally deployed by Warp Records).
It's more like a remixtape than a selection of tracks segueing seamlessly one after the other. More often than not, the components have been partially disassembled - moving parts rejiggered, tempos tinkered, keys tweaked--before being jigsawed back into perfectly annealed alignment.
Listening to the entire length and breadth of The Deep Ark, you get a powerful sense of the music of this era as a single gigantic living organism. Each track is individually distinct while also webbed within an ecosystem of reciprocal influence and mutual inspiration. The balance between genius and scenius, the auteur and the collective, is ever-shifting.
Download the whole mix here here (where you'll also find the tracklist) or listen to it at YouTube.
As the word "Ark" suggests, this ultramix is a vessel in both senses: something that takes you on a voyage, and a container. A sacred repository, a canister for the future, an archive, a memorial.
Not so much separate levels or extensions of the mix, but plateaux in parallel, the two other components of The Deep Ark are visual and textual: a website and a book.
The site contains images, commentary about each track that features in the mix, and an in-depth meditation on the whys-and-wherefores of the project, cast as a dialogue between The Arkiteket and an unknown interlocutor.
Here's a snippet, discussing how The Deep Ark has been informed by the ideas and impulses of Romanticism:
"... I’m really thinking in the painterly sense here... an emotive, individualist representation of landscape and memory that touches on the darker aspects of the sublime... . We see this contradiction at work within this genre as a whole; Aphex Twin, an oneiric visionary in the mould of Blake, instantiating his dream music through sleep deprivation and the induction of hypnopompic and hypnagogic states, and Autechre, with their obsessive relish for intricately detailed sound design and their construction of these deeply evocative, hymnal, hyper-textural sonic sculptures, like scribes solemnly illuminating a testament to human emotion.... I think romantic is the best description of this intensely individualistic and emotional music, full of yearning, sadness and beauty.
The photographs are doctored documents of a landscape-turned-dreamscape - a real place that has served for many years as a site for ritual adventures, journeys to the end of the night. Images have been remixed in ways that parallel the techniques applied to the musical components of The Deep Ark. Photographs were altered, overlaid, colorized, mutated or outright generated via AI.
The result is a form of hallucinatory hauntology - a monument to an Area of Outstanding (Super)Natural Beauty.
A powerful and deep world of sound
filled with the vibrations of nature.
Music to match the wave patterns,
selected and transmitted to harmonise
with each cycle of this guiding line.
An unusual mental space where you can experience
the sweet beginnings of life itself.
To truly grasp the spirit of the dream tide
More about The Deep Ark from the Broken Sleep Bookswebsite.
A psychedelic odyssey that plunges the reader into a mythic exurban world of wonder, ritual, folly & friendship, The Deep Ark blurs the lines between the imagined, the real and the invoked. Moments of tenderness, humor, grief, joy and revelatory intensity combine to form a fragmented narrative of quiet lyrical beauty, suffused with an abiding reverence for the music, memories, community and landscape that inspired it. Check the forecast one last time, put your headphones on, open The Deep Ark and get lost.
Praise for The Deep Ark:
Gnarled, airy, and vibrantly psychedelicized, The Deep Ark is the kind of organic artifact that not only satisfies aesthetically, but draws you into the magical traces of its own production… a visionary and desperate bid to rediscover the animist potential still humming, even as you read in this, in the actual landscapes around us.
— Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
The Deep Ark is an extended meditation on the periphery of the state, represented in the social unit of the collective… the actual geography of heathland, golf courses, hills, and quarries… and in the UK’s melancholic electronica of the nineties
— Matthew Ingram, author of Retreat and The "S" Word
A rave review at International Times by Rupert Loydell:
"This book is a technicolour atlas, a shamanistic guidebook, an augmented mixtape, a multimedia experience, a natural high. It is primary experience mediated through photography and lyrical songs, evocative poems and secular hymns, emotional outbursts, cosmic wonder and everyday dirt. Techno-pixelations and long-exposure night photos enhance our reading of the words, just as the text changes what we see. Everyone of us is lost but together we can not only find each other but also ourselves"
And (effectively) a preview printed in The Wire about 18 months ago, by Michaelangelo Matos.
And more raves from those who know:
- Philip Sherburne, from his Futurism Restatedsubstack
An (almost) completely unconnected track - hypnagogic pop rather than electronic-listening-music - but that seems to come from a similar oneiric-psychogeographic wellspring.
Another project without much surface resemblance but with a kinship at core
An interesting review of One Dove's Morning Dove White by Matthew Schnipper, as part of Pitchfork's Sunday Review series of belated reviews (in this case because the site didn't exist when the album came out in 1993). The score of 8.7 is higher than anything it would have received at the time.
At the time, the album was felt to itself be belated - one of those anticipated albums that takes too long to be made.... (The delay came from a struggle with the record company, who pressurized them to put out more poppified version of the tracks, with radio-friendly mixes).
Reviewers in the UK as I recall felt the album, when it did arrive long after the initial buzz wave, to be underwhelming....
Certainly there didn't seem to be anything else on it as amazing as the single “White Love", which appears twice, in the Guitar Paradise Mix and as a reprise.
“White Love” stalled just outside the Top 40.
(They did have a small hit with “Breakdown” after the album’s release).
Listening again, I heard some really lovely tunes that sit somewhere between Saint
Etienne and Seefeel – "My Friend”, "There Goes The Cure", “Transient Truth”.
A certain too-pure dream of perfect pop, a distillate of essences too rarified to survive the commercial rough-and-tumble of actual real-world pop…. meets
dubby-clubby sounds… wisped through with ultra-breathy ethereal-girliness that places the group near shoegaze. (One reviewer described them as "Cocteau Twins just back from Ibiza").
Part of that Weatherall moment in UK pop (wasn’t there an initiative
called the 98 bpm Movement slowing the music down from house tempo to a
reggae-ish sway?... which would also make it a fellow-traveler with the Bristol sound. *
And then there’s Dot Allison’s voice…. Airy …. almost Medieval at times… a devotional sigh drifting through the cloisters of an abbey.... a sound that joins the dots between Lisa Gerrard and
Kirsty Hawkshaw
“Whiteness” is the word.
Despite the dub and house elements, One Dove always seemed a supremely blanched sort of sound
Maybe that’s partly auto-suggestion, from titles like “White Love” and Morning Dove
White
But it’s also Dot's pure-as-snow tones.
And it’s also the whiteness of Dot herself...
She looks like she’s made of snow...
A reminder that Scotland is nearer Scandinavia than the South of England.
Talking of the colour white
I can find no confirmation of this out there, but I continue to believe – I wish
to believe – that the group are named One Dove as a sly nod to White
Doves: an Ecstasy pill of ultra-blissy repute... the kind of pill that makes veterans
of a certain era go all “ooh gosh” wistful, pursing their lips and exhaling with the memory rush
As well as "White Doves", there were also Pink Doves and Speckled Doves. According to this drug awareness postcard, though, the Dove wasn't among the highest of MDMA content pills around then. Perhaps it was just uncut with other things like speed, so it was a purer, cleaner sort of 'classic Ecstasy' lovey-dovey feeling.
White Dove / "White Love"
Morning Dove White / White Dove Morning….
This was music for the afterglow… that 6AM dawn-after-the-rave feeling…. no one
around… the city deserted and silent… and you tingling still... feeling
translucent… unbodied... hollowed out by ecstasy
And then the other druggy connotation of “white” would be the “whitey” – a
white-out... swooning, fainting, falling on the floor …. a pill too strong… or one pill too many
The chorus in “White Love” - if you can even call that wordless gaseous shiver-shudder a chorus - sounds like a whitey.... an internal avalanche of bliss... a deathgasm.
A voice coming, and coming – apart at the seams. Saint Teresa in the throes.**
Sampled as opposed to sung, this kind of erotic-cosmic oozy-woozy feeling was all over rave tunes of the era - wordless diva cries and moans, looped into bliss-spasms - like Shades
of Rhythm’s “Sound of Eden”.
The bliss-spasm isolated / intensified even more on this tune by Pseudo 3
That's where the track titles, the sound, and the look (not just Dot's complexion and hair, but on the album cover she's dressed in white too), all these things converge - a meld, or braid, of spiritual and erotic.
Songs like sexy psalms
The idea of "purity" seems to nestle somewhere beneath all this - pure love, pure devotion, a pure dose, the perfect prescription.
Edinburgh's techno temple Pure.
The cover could be a morning-after-the-night-before tableau - Dot the sleeping beauty... unable to keep her eyes open, her head from drooping... the Other Chaps wasted and drowsy.
Talking of music for the afterglow....
One Dove's "Fallen" featured on this compilation from a few years ago put together by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs: Fell From the Sun: Downtempo & After Hours 1990-91.
A whole bunch of 98-bpm-or-thereabouts tunes described by the label by the label as "comedown downbeat, sunrise indie-dance and woozy morning moods".
Tracks like The Grid's "Floatation", BBG's Satie-laced "Snappiness", The Aloof's ‘Never Get Out Of The Boat’, Sheer Taft's "Cascades (Hypnotone Mix)", Moodswings's "Spiritual High".
The comp's timespan – 1990-91 – shows how past-their-moment One Dove were when they finally dropped Morning Dove White in 1993.
Fell From the Sun fits the Icarian theme of having flown too high, starting to crash... a still glowing ember. ("Higher Than The Sun" by the Primals is on there).
The compilation's title though appears to come from the Opal song, as also recorded by Pale Saints. (The latter's name fits the blanched-by-bliss theme).
Not on the Fell from the Sun comp but partaking of the vibe of that time
That Creation / indie-dance / post-Madchester / UK house nexus
Afterglow is the name of the first of Dot Allison's - six? seven? - solo albums.
I did a little interview with her around it for Spin.
"I Wanna Feel the Chill" was one tune that stood out on a record that otherwise felt a bit subdued by its own good taste. The eerie guitar lick is sampled from Tim Buckley's "Dream Letter."
"Chill" - in either of its meanings - again shows an understanding of her thematic matrix.
Exaltation of Larks, from 2007, is another evocative title.
Her latest album Consciousology is on the shoegaze label Sonic Cathedral.
* Well, I could swear someone telling about a 98 Bpm Movement started by Paul Oakenfold.... but it must have got mangled in the memory: Movement 98 was in fact a Paul Oakenfold project, centered around Carroll Thompson's vocals, and which scored a small UK hit in 1990 with the mid-tempo soul of "Joy and Heartbreak", with melodic elements borrowed from Satie's "Les Trois Gymnopedies".
Odd fact: Rob Davis, formerly the guitarist who wore women's clothing in Mud - was involved as a writer. Later he would make millions as the co-writer of Kylie-smash "Can't Get You Out of My Head".
**
Teresa of Ávila, 16th Century mystic - a nun of noble birth, she became famous for her visions and raptures (sometimes involving levitations). Jacques Lacan, French Freudian theorist, wrote about Bernini’s sculpture of Teresa. Malcolm Bowie, paraphrasing Lacan, writes about “an unlocalisable and ineffable pleasure-spasm” that inspires Teresa’s enraptured contortions.
.jpg)
