Some kind of peak for jungle music
the ruff and the smooth, frenzy and elegance
"big up all ghetto youth" versus silky wafting sounds like the EZ-listening that makes Harry Flowers say "turn it up, I like that tune"
jazzual menace, dubby flickers, "Think" palsy, soundtrackism
future + retro
somewhere between Size + Die "11.55" and Kruder & Dorfmeister
I don't know much at all about Hidden Agenda, but I recently saw this Melody Maker mini-feature go up at Nothingelseon
From Newcastle, of course. Gateshead, to be precise.
The "cutting up grooves" rather than "cutting up breaks' bit is interesting.
"Is It Love?" came out in mid-1995
There was another year or so of great things - "Metropolis", the first run of No U Turn, the Full Cycle camp - and then something broke decisively
Seemed like everything became
ruff and nothing but (jump-up)
or
smooth and nothing but (liquid funk)
or
anxious and itchy with sci-fi technicality (neuro)
tracks that had "the full circumference" within them - the ruff, the smooth, the futuroid, the technical, the dark - all within that one track - became vanishingly rare
As for Hidden Agenda... never quite taken by anything else they did, to the same extent anyway.
Always felt like they were one of the outfits who should have done a proper album.
Actually, checking, it appears they did. In 2000. With the wry title Whatever Happened To... that seems to acknowledge having missed their moment, taken too bleedin' long
Unless it's a Tynesiders nod to this beloved Britcom
"the only thing to look forward to / the past"
Ah well, certainly they liked to play up the Tyneside thing - naming a track after Get Carter, after all
5 comments:
"That seems to acknowledge having missed their moment, taken too bleedin' long"
A running theme in jungle - same can be said for Source Direct and Photek (by the time Rupert Parkes released "Modus operandi", he was in the process of losing interest in the genre)
The other main theme was splashy, acclaimed debuts with underwhelming follow ups - "Timeless" and "New Forms" obviously spring to mind.
The major exception seems to be your bete noire Squarepusher - Jenkison has been merrily pushing out albums for nigh on three decades now, with another coming out this year...
And I think DJ Crystl never finished his album
Still Omni churned them out... 4 Hero were punctual repeat deliverers (side projects too - Jacob's Optical Illusion, Tek 9)... and Foul Play, Hyper On, Nookie, EZ Rollers, Guy Called Gerald, didn't dawdle too long. Then we get to the neurofunk times and Boymerang, Johnny L (twice!), Ed Rush & Optical, Grooverider, and others, doing full-lengths, for better and for worse...
I feel like the subject of "who should have but never did" in terms of jungle/D&B album-ige has come up before here... Rogue Unit, the missing third of Foul Play?
Think this is what neurofunk producers should should have used a template to strive for. Proper minimal hard funk...
https://youtu.be/NAj5gi-pUAE
96 wasn’t all that late for the Photek LP, was it?
And he kept up a regular flow of d&b releases for a couple of years afterwards, until he threw in the towel with ‘Solaris’
think there was quite a bit of good neuro-adjacent things on reinforced. And some good smooth stuff on Cert 18 etc, however we've discussed all of this in drumb bass 98-99. But you're right in that it follows the minimalistic template of traditional dance music, whereas classic jungle was still untutored to a degree and a mad mishmash of contrasting and incompatible moods.
But then again the idea of the zone of fruitless intensification in dance music forecloses the aesthetic sublime, doesn't it? Minimal techno, where the experience in time and space rather than the individual tracks becomes the focal point. Actually music criticism is always in pursuit of beauty, and thus phantosmatic in the sense that one has to fortify against jouissance, her desires as it were. And desires are always surplus to needs, including that of pleasure. Otherwise judgments of taste would be difficult as it were to expound upon.
Or maybe the argument is that one should not seek the sublime in dance music. That seems hard to square with the idea of the communism of the emotions that people talk about re: rave culture. But then again, maybe that's where the contradiction is located...
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