"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
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.
Shout to all the historical #PirateRadio stations who this new track is dedicated to! “Broadcasting From The Top Of The Block…” Great memories having the DTI on the tails of all involved putting up links & aerials… respect! This one’s for you!
So shouteth Source Direct in a recent tweet, referencing their new track "Top of the Block" which you can hear here
I always heard the sampled lyric in "Sub Dub" as "through rushes and through briars" - thinking the word "rush" with its ravey connotations snagged the ear of DJ Seduction
Actually it's "Bushes and Briars"
Through bushes and through briars
I lately took my way
All for to hear the small birds sing
And the lambs to skip and play
All for to hear the small birds sing
And the lambs to skip and play
I overhead my own true love
His voice did sound so clear
Long time I have been waiting for
The coming of my dear
Long time I have been waiting for
The coming of my dear
Sometimes I am uneasy
And troubled in my mind
Sometimes I think I'll go to my love
And tell to him my mind
But if I should go to my love
My love he will say “nay”
If I show to him my boldness
He'll ne'er love me again
If I show to him my boldness
He'll ne'er love me again
In Energy Flash I took a wild guess and said it sounds like Maddy Prior
See, I imagined some ardkore ooligan rifling through the parents's albums collection and alighting on some Steeleye Span
Slightly disappointing, then, to learn much, much later that it's from a sort of ambient house record, "West In Motion"
Made by an Irish group called Bumble - the vocalist on this "Haunted Mix" (like it, like it) is Breda Mayock, which is a folk-rock maiden type of name
There is an Andy Weatherall mix of this song that is admired by some
Back to Seduction and "Sub Dub" (why is it called "Sub Dub" then?)
Did not know there was a crazy breaks remix of 'Sub Dub" with an even longer bit of the vocal
Or an DJ SS Rollers remix
Nor was I aware of this Dutch happy-gabber retake of the DJ Seduction tune, which Thirdform alerted me to in comments
The song is a trad.arr and appears in the stiff (if beautifully Nic Roeg filmed) cinematic adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.
Julie Christie "sings"
Actually it's Isla Cameron reprising her rendition from her own album - putting a lovely quiver through the melody.
Apparently June Tabor did it also - on her very first recordings, which nobody has put out there
As did the witchily fetching Toni Arthur, best known for Play School as opposed to her folk-rock past
Sandy Denny done it too - except she didn't, the song is completely different but has the same title.
Which was then covered by Lee Ranaldo of all people.
In terms of traditional music royalty - dynastic scion Eliza Carthy has notably had a go, with Nancy Kerr
It's said to be the very first traditional song that Vaughan Williams collected:
"Sung by a 72-year-old labourer, Charles Potiphar.... Vaughan Williams... experienced a deep sense of recognition as though “it was something he had known all his life”. Being new to folk song collecting, he only transcribed the first verse, and got the rest of the words from a late 19th-century broadside published by W.S. Fortey of Seven Dials (London). John Clare also noted the song in his manuscripts, compiled in the 1820’s"
Here's a cool version by The Swingle Singers, it sounds like a madrigal
I had a fun and wide-ranging chat with The Underground Is Massiveauthor Michaelangelo Matos at his substack Beat Connection, which is dedicated to deejay mixes. The chat touched on Futuromania, rave, jungle, UK garage pirate radio, digital maximalism, and many other topics, using the structure of five deejay mixes and radio sets: John Peel's legendary Punk Special from December '76, a Don FMEzy D Xmas '92 show, DB's The History of Our World hardcore + breakbeat ultramix from 94, Tuff Jam's CD-mix Underground Frequencies Volume One which captures UK garage at a protean formative moment beforeeither the "speed" or "2step" kicked in, and then Rustie's Essential Mix of April 2012, the frazzling dazzle of digi-maxed nu-progtronica.
My favorite was probably the Tuff Jam set, which reintroduced me to these old favorites:
It reminded me of a period when I owned about three or four speed garage comps, as that was all there was to own - and this was one of them. It was the main way - living in NYC - I was able to hear the music. A handful of 12 inch singles would reach the Manhattan dance specialist stores, and I'd scoop them all up, pretty much - but there was zero demand locally: the local jungle / drum+bass scene was at its strongest then, and they all regarded speed garage as apostasy, a def(l)ection from the True Path, while the New York househeads, as you'd expect, thought it was garbage not garage - too ruff-hewn on the production side, too fast, too bumpy. Not proper.
As I mentioned to Matos, my evangelism - like with jungle several years earlier - involved making tape introductions to the new style for friends and colleagues. But because most of the best tracks I only had on these DJ-mixed CDs, I had to fade them up and fade them down in order to get them to resemble proper tracks, on these cassette compilations. I'm sure this is one of the reasons - all these three or four minutes portions of a track, sometimes with a bit of another tune lingering at the start, or coming in at the end - why these tapes confused my intended converts. But mostly they just couldn't hear the subtle radicalism, the contamination of American lush sexy garage with jungly flavor, the exaggeration of the bump+flex in the original music. I would get responses like "isn't this just house music?". Well, yes, but also no.
On the Tuff Jam ceedee, it's very nascent and early-days-yet indeed - the selection is equal parts American house, emulative British stuff that attempts to sound as smooth 'n' sexy and palatially polished... and then really just a few things that are true speed garridge. There's also stuff by those unorthodox Americans who would help to catalyse the UK thing and then be pulled along by it and pushed further - Todd Edwards, Armand Van Helden.
Great days - I remember the hunger
a/ the hunger just to get hold of the bloody music
and
b/ the hunger, the itch, just to see where it was going to go next.
I couldn't have imagined 2step, even though there was a clue on this Tuff Jam CD right near the end of it.
Along with the sound of the New Thing, what hooks me as a language-fan is also the sense of a new argot creeping in - new buzzterms - "bumpy", Tuff Jam's term "Unda-Vybe"
I had no idea this ever came out - the first MC-fronted jungle album. 1996.
MC Det' s Out of Det reviewed here by my old Melody Maker colleague Carl Loben - now the editor of DJ magazine.
This later EP from 2002 has a title that nods towards - perhaps forms a matching book end with - an era-inaugurating album from 1991.
What Ragga Twins and Det had heralded was at that moment reaching fruition with grime
Wonder how this post-SUAD Ragga Twins effort from '95 sounds? Probably not very ragga-y.
As Carl acknowledges in his review, jungle MCs rarely worked as "feat." artists on record - their style was built for and around the live set at a rave on a pirate
What are the great examples of a jungle MC doing it in the studio?
MC GQ is grrrrrrreat on this but it's really just one lick. Well one hook-lick and a bit of chat.
This is an exciting performance by UK Apachi - it cuts back and forth between a singjay sing-song mode that's quite plaintive and jabbered fast-chat that's raggaruff.
This from Stevie Hyper D is very early - 1991 - but it's more like a dancehall vocal rather than jungle MC-ing
Likewise this from the next year
Fun but pales next to this
Stevie Hyper D also did EP called Junglist Hooligan and the track "Junglist Soldier" in '95 and '96
A take on "Rub a Dub Soldier"
Another very early effort - 1991 - is Killer Man Archer - on "Narra Mine"
But it is more like a dancehall deejay guesting than a junglist MC (okay it's points along a line but feels like there's a distinction )
I went looking and found that MCs featuring in jungle records seemed to happen more towards the end of the '90s (which surprised me) and that earlier quite often if I look for say a famous MC like Navigator, they'll appear in discogs as the producer of a track. Bit like with MC Duke.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Suggestions in comments
nominated Anonymously
MC Dynamite on Roni Size / Reprazent's "Brown Paper Bag"
DaveK in comments pointing out the Conrad remix of PFM - which features his uniquely smoov and serene style of chill chat - reminds me that I have been remiss about RIP-ing MC Conrad.
Conrad's style of emceeing was perfect for the Speed vibe
Meditative indeed... adrift on reverie bliss
the most, cough, Bachelardian of jungle MCs
DaveK also mentions this early effort involving MC Fearless on the Boogie Beat label
That's rather good and I like the melodic interpolation from "Moments in Love" too
Here's the whole Weekend Rush Part 3 EP
He also mentions Bassman's contribution to this classic
That's more on the lines of GQ on "Roll Da Beats"
Going back to Fearless, here's a bunch of later 'feat.s" from around '96
Aha - bit later than the period I'm looking at - but in 2003 Fearless teamed up with Shabba D, Skibadee and Det for this release under the group name The Professionals
There's a great tune featuring Skibadee but it's UKG
uploaded by yourstrools 4 da commonwealth
Another one that doesn't really count - it's not a release, it's an advert - is this pirate ad for Telepathy, the MC whose name I'm blanking on is also the guy who ran the club, indeed he voiced all their ads
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