RIP Sly Dunbar

 

just some of the obvious greats...

but Sly (with and without Robbie) did all sorts of odd things 

Dunbar worked on a record by Jackson Browne! 

ardkive fever - the eternal returns

Brand-new anachronism from Z-Neo

Fault-less -  very-nearly-convincing as time travel

The artwork by one AROE is very in the wildstyle of  DJ Trax early releases on Moving Shadow

release rationale

"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a ’92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP’s and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".

On the label  Rave Radio Records -  a hub of epigonic action

I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?

The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific  - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!

Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point. 

People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity.... 

Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze.  When you factor in the international factor. 

Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music. 

You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a  Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point... 

Convergence of new-olds - here's a nu-gaze group who have gone so far as to take inspiration from the junglistic portions of MBV's 2013 mbv i.e. the bits that would have been the follow up to Loveless

It almost does supply what never actually existed ie. the bang-on-timely jungle-influenced album MBV could conceivably have put out in 1993 or 94 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Talking of spectral imaginings... 

Somehow missed this -  from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set 

release irrationale 

The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.

Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides... 

Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It’s a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.

If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down...  dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity

SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture’s, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF’s Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture’s work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.

SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.

Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork -  Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:

Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw’s Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica’s back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.

A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I’d drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.

One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D’s Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek’s The Water Margin, and Intense’s The Quickening.

During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.

There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF’s 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There’s enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.

Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.

The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles’ 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.

The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle’s genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle’s Johnny, Subnation’s Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer’s Ricky–a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine ‘Somewhere About Town’.

The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM’s DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It’s well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.

Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a ‘first aid kit’, packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn’t take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he’d remind his groggy listeners that it was “time to draw for the First Aid Kit,” creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn’t get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was “a bridge too far,” but if they made it, Jinx would say, “taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton.” Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More (“What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!”), and end with his signature send-off: “Seeeeeeeeee ya!”

I ended up getting my own Sunday morning show on Rude FM 88.2 in the early 2000s, and I often thought of Jinx and my love for his Sunday morning show. In some ways, this study influenced how I approached my own show—not so much in the presentation or music selection, but in understanding the audience and their needs at that time of the morning. The Sunday morning pirate radio aesthetic is something I first referenced on the original 0860 album in the track First Aid Kit, and this tin full of goodies for Slow860 strengthens the bonds, further connects the dots and adds to the lineage of the Hardcore Continuum. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie" 

That's from over ten years ago) 

Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality

This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"

Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat

Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick

Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a  a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew. 

release rationale: 

I’ve been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn’t know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.

Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG’s London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the “we got the vibes, yo” lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I’m grinning from ear to ear.

Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London’s legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.

Fast forward 30 years, and I’m in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I’ve always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I’ve been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.

Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It’s a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour! 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit

Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania

RIP Ken Downie of The Black Dog

Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase.

Here is Matt's lovely tribute to the Black Dog from a few years ago

Here's my own writing about the group:

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

emusic, 2007


A legend in techno circles, The Black Dog’s music is like the missing link between Coil’s eldritch electronica and Carl Craig’s exquisitely-textured elegance. Although the British group--originally the trio of Ken Downie, Ed Handley, and Andy Turner--became widely heard as part of Warp Records’ “electronic listening music” initiative of the early 90s, the bedrock of their cult is their hard-to-find first three EPs, 

Did I say hard? Damn near impossible actually, when it comes to The Virtual EP, Age of Slack EP, and The Black Dog EP, vinyl-only 1989-90 releases long out-of-print and each worth a small fortune. Now at long overdue last they are available in their entirety as the first disc of this double-CD retrospective. 

Tracks like “Virtual,” “The Weight” and “Tactile” distil the essence of Detroit techno into an etherealized machine-funk so translucent and refined it feels like you should store it in crystal vials rather than a lowly CD case or hard drive. "Age of Slack” and “Ambience with Teeth” use hip hop breakbeats in ways that parallel early jungle, but there’s a balletic poise and delicacy to the way Black Dog deploy their crisp and rattling drum loops. 

This is rave sublimated into a mind-dance, the shimmying-and-sashaying thought-shapes of some advanced alien species who get together and party via telepathy. 

This set’s second disc, consisting of tracks from three EPS recorded for the GPR label in the early 90s, is also excellent, looking ahead to the Warp-era albums Bytes and Spanners. 

But it’s disc one that captures The Black Dog at their magickal and mysterious best.

[from the liner notes to Artificial Intelligence]

via Dan Selzer, "dot matrix printed welcome screen to Black Dog Productions’ BBS"

^^^^^^^^^^^^

The Black Dog (and Balil and Plaid)  from Energy Flash

The Black Dog – the trio of Ed Handley, Andy Turner and Ken Downie – were almost as hermetic as Autechre, but more committed to traditional art notions of ‘expression’. They once defined their 

project as the quest for ‘a computer soul’, while Ken Downie told Eternity that The Black Dog started in order to fill ‘a hole in music. Acid house had been “squashed” by the police and rinky-dinky 

Italian house music was getting played everywhere. Emotion had left via the window.’ 

The musical emotions in The Black Dog (and alter egos Plaid and Balil) aren’t the straightforward, run-of-the-mill, everyday sort, but rather more elusive: subtle, indefinable shades of mood, 

ambiguous and evanescent feelings for which even an oxymoron like ‘bittersweet’ seems rather crude. Eschewing live appearances and seldom doing interviews, The Black Dog nonetheless created a 

cult aura around their often hard-to-find discography. One of their chosen mediums was cyberspace: long before the current craze for  techno websites, The Black Dog established a computer bulletin 

board called Black Dog Towers. Visitors could gawp at artwork and learn more about the Dog’s interest in arcane knowledges, such as paganism, out-of-body experiences, UFOs, Kabbalah and ‘aeonics’ 

(mass shifts in consciousness). Ken Downie – the principal esoterrorist in the band – has described himself as a magician. One of The Black Dog’s earliest tracks, ‘Virtual (Gods in Space)’, features 

a sample – ‘make the events occur that you want to occur’ – which gives a magickal spin to the punk DIY ethos. 

Although far from the euphoric fervour of rave, The Black Dog’s early 1990–2 material is remarkably similar to the breakbeat hardcore of the day. Like Hyper-On Experience, DJ Trax, et al., the 

mode of construction is basically the Mantronix collage aesthetic updated for the rave era: incongruous samples + looped breakbeats + oscillator riffs. But the mood of ‘Seers + Sages’, ‘Apt’, ‘Chiba’ and 

‘Age of Slack’ is quirky Dada absurdism rather than Loony Toons zany. The crisp, echoed breakbeat and keyboard vamp on ‘Seers + Sale’ recalls 2 Bad Mice classics like ‘Waremouse’, except that the 

riff sounds like it’s played on a church organ, so the effect is eldritch rather than E-lated. On 1991’s ‘Chiba’, the Morse-code riff has a glancing lightness of inflection that anticipates the Detroit break

beat of Innerzone Orchestra’s ‘Bug in the Bassbin’. 

Carl Craig, the producer behind Innerzone Orchestra, clearly recognized The Black Dog as kindred spirits in sonic watercolours; in  1992, his Planet E label released their classic Balil track ‘Nort Route’. 

Strangely redolent of the early eighties – the Sinophile phunk of Sylvian and Sakomoto’s ‘Bamboo Music’, the phuturistic panache of Thomas Leer – ‘Nort Route’ daubs synth-goo into an exquisite 

calligraphic melody-shape over an off-kilter breakbeat. The track trembles and brims with a peculiar emotion, a euphoric melancholy that David Toop came closest to capturing with the phrase ‘nostalgia for the future’. 

What The Black Dog/Balil/Plaid tracks most resembled was a sort of digital update of fifties exotica. But instead of imitating remote alien cultures, as the original exotica did, it was like The Black Dog were somehow giving us advance glimpses of the hybrid musics of the next millennium: the Hispanic-Polynesian dance crazes of the Pacific Rim, or music for discotheques and wine bars in Chiba City and The Sprawl (the megalopolises in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero). 

While some of the Dog’s later work – on albums like Bytes, Parallel, The Temple of Transparent Balls and Spanners – crosses the thin line between mood-music and muzak, it’s still marked by a rhythmic inventiveness that’s unusual in the electronic listening field. With its percussive density and discombobulated time signatures, The Black Dog’s music often feels like it’s designed for the asymmetrical dancing of creatures with an odd number of limbs – not bipeds, but quintupeds or nonopeds. 

The Black Dog's mix of bleep n bass for FACT

Stuff on The Black Dog in this Redbull story about London Techno 

the 21st Century so far

Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far...

I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the end of time.

Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit?)

So despite the enormity I thought I would give the entire list a listen, in both categories. (There's also a list of mixes). 

I got about a third of the way into the albums, skipping the ones I already knew. But then - as always seems to happen with such undertakings (e.g. the enormous playlists of an artist's entire discography that you might pull together yourself, or of a genre)...  inevitably the will to carry on crumbles away. It's just too daunting. It comes to feel like work. As a way of discovering things, it's not the way that the music you end up loving generally tumbles into your life. Especially not with dance music, which is most meaningfully encountered in a club and in the thick of a crowd. 

But I did hear some things I'd never heard that I really liked, along with quite a lot of things that were excellent but ultimately sounded like superior-sound-design updates of  sono-rhythmic ideas that existed in rawer form in the 1990s.  

As always happens with these canon-making pushes by publications, I was surprised by how few of the artists or works that I love figure in these lists. (And quite often when an artist I like did get mentioned, the track honored wasn't what I would have selected). 

But you know what - people are different!  

So much music - electronic, dance, everything else - came out in the 21st Century that entirely different cartographies and canons can be constructed that barely overlap with your own trajectory as a listener or personal pantheon. 

One new-to-me tune in the RA list that I really liked

Now if you know anything about where I'm coming from, in terms of what I like in dance music, it makes perfect sense that this is a tune that would appeal.   It's fresh and exciting but audibly in the tradition of "Party People". 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I'm not sure how much this RA list is ultimately based on the votes of the contributors and how much determined by decree from above, but they did ask me for a list of nominations, albeit only in the overlapping categories of hauntology / ambient / conceptronica. This is what I suggested, which is unranked: 

ALBUMS

Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

The Focus Group – Hey Let Loose Your Love

Oneohtrix Point Never – Rifts

Belbury Poly – The Willows

The Advisory Circle – Other Channels

Mordant Music – Dead Air

Moon Wiring Club – An Audience of Art Deco Eyes

Rashad Becker – Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

The Caretaker – Everywhere at the end of time

Debit – The Long Count

Runners up (unasked for, I couldn't resist supplying)

Lo Five – Geography of the Abyss

Dolphins into the Future – On Seafaring Isolation

Lee Gamble – Diversions -  1994-96

eMMplekz – Rook to TN34

Roj – The Transactional Dharma of Roj

Hybrid Palms – Pacific Image

ML Buch – Suntub

Second Woman - S/W

Huerco S – For Those of You Who Have Never

Burial – debut album

patten – Mirage FM

TRACKS

Mark Van Hoen – Holy Me

eMMplekz – Gloomy Leper Techno

The Focus Group – Modern Harp

Oneohtrix Point Never – Physical Memory

The Advisory Circle – Sundial

Holly Herndon – Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

James Blake – If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Burial – South London Boroughs

Belbury Poly – Caermaen

People Like Us – World of Wonder (Why We’re Here)

Moon Wiring Club – Mademoiselle Marionette

 

MIX

bit stumped here, I don't tend to remembrance mixes like other folks do, but then I thought, "oh yes, there's - 

The Arkiteket - The Deep Ark

And then when I saw their list, I slapped my forehead with a 'gah' and realized I really should have - and really would have - included this mix: 

Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo (Japan, 1980-86) - by Spencer Doran

And the follow up Vol 2 was great too. 

It's especially amnesiac of me given that in this big piece on Ambient / New Age as a phenom of the 2010s written for Resident Advisor, these mixes feature prominently (along with the Japanese interior music / 4th world compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980–1990 plus quotes from Doran in his Visible Cloaks guise). 

Talking of those who remembrance mixes, here's mixologist (and RA 2000-2025 contributor) Michaelangelos Matos's faves 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Maybe, maybe,  I'll go back and finish that 2000-2025 albums list... do it in stages... then do the tracks... and maybe even the mixes. 

I already tried and enjoyed this mix which sounded intriguing from the write-up and mixologist Nono Gigsta's side reflections

https://soundcloud.com/gigstab/freerotation-2024-the-house-of-crocodiles-part-2-live-recording

Amid the near-infinity of sources out of which it is woven, this new-to-me tune jumped out particularly

Which itself contains a sample of - or perhaps more accurately, is a re-edit of? - something I dimly recognise (from being sampled elsewhere - some track on Reinforced?) but the source song "Misdemeanor" is new-to-me and quite delicious, sort of avant-ized Jackson 5

Less delicious is learning about the actual misdemeanor the artist would much later commit.... Wiki Fear strikes again, or at least, it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have read the offending entry 

Ah, Anon comes through in the comments with the ardkore jungle tune that samples Foster Sylvers - not 4 Hero and crew but M-Beat 

Here's another use (out of loads and loads in hip hop etc)

Here's a Misdemeanor sample-chain playlist