future-dance at Beat Connection / a snapshot of UK garridge forming before your ears

I had a fun and wide-ranging chat with The Underground Is Massive author 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 FM Ezy 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 before either 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:

Matos noticed that one of Basement Jaxx had some involvement in this gorgeous Mutiny track.

 

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" 

RIP Jason Jinx

here's his cohort DB with a sweet tribute  to NYC rave hardcore breakbeat stalwart Jason Jinx,  who was involved in both STORMrave and NASA. This was written while he was still alive.

Been playing the hell out of of "Survival" recently, on account of digging out  this compilation

What a line-up! What a track list!

Released March 93, contents late 1992 mostly - dawn of darkcore

Bought it in this one store in Greenwich Village that, while not a dance store per se, through its being Anglophile and therefore imports oriented, was just about the only place you could get rave and hardcore comps on CD in New York at that time *

(Much later in 1993 I found Liquid Sky, this record store / rave-clothes boutique, Soul Slinger's I believe, but in which DB had some involvement, and it stocked actual vinyl -- Reinforced, Moving Shadow, Suburban Base  - 12 inch ardkore junglizm manna for this famished exile).

But yeah, for a period, this store in the West Village was the only way I could get hold of the latest tunes (and by the time they reached comp they weren't the latest, the pirates had moved on), through a whole series of darkside CDs that React and Kickin' did...

 

Now this was during a long period from about mid-Feb 93 until the end of August when I was stuck in NYC (finishing the Sex Revolts) and itching, burning,  to be where the music was, i.e. London. Where the future was happening. Wore out the stockpile of pirate tapes I had and played those CDs to death. 

I reviewed that first The Dark Side comp on React for MM but  the reviews ed. never ran it, bastard!

Not sure what the lines across the text are -- looks like faded yellow or pink highlighter pen, so possibly bits that several years later I thought about recycling (and probably did recycle) into Energy Flash.

Another killer tune (so many) on The Dark Side is "String of Darkness" by Darkman aka DJ SS, which is basically a mash up of Rufige Cru's "Believe" and Derrick May's "Strings of Life". I remember the first interview I did with Goldie he referenced some kind of amiable rivalry thing he had with SS, I wonder if this was part of the back-and-forth

Goldie himself is on the comp properly with "Terminator"

Goldie, incidentally, has much of his early classic Rufige Cru/Metalheads stuff reissued very soon -- well, what do you know, I check, and it's out tomorrow in fact -  in a double-CD career retrospective called The Alchemist.


Tracklist for The Alchemist: The Best Of Goldie 1992-2012
 
CD1
01. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Malice In Wonderland
02. Goldie & Metalheadz - Terminator
03. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Menace
04. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Monkey Boy
05. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Dark Rider
06. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Sometime Sad Day
07. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Shanghai Dub
08. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Rhythm Killa
09. Goldie - Special Request
10. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Babylon 2012
11. Goldie - I'll Be There For You
12. Goldie - Saint Angel
13. Goldie - I Know Who I Am

CD2
01. Goldie - Single Petal Of A Rose
02. Goldie - Angel
03. Goldie feat. Natalie Duncan - Freedom (Radio Edit)
04. Goldie - State Of Mind
05. Goldie feat. Natalie Williams - Latin Skin
06. Goldie feat. Diane Charlemagne - What You Won't Do For Love
07. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Beachdrifta
08. Goldie & J Majik - Runway
09. Goldie & 4 Hero - (Internal Affairs) In My Soul
10. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Is This Real VIP
11. Goldie - VIP Riders Ghost
12. Goldie - Sea Of Tears

CD3
01. Goldie & Metalheadz - Inner City Life (Baby Boy's Edit)
02. Goldie - Kemistry (Doc Scott Remix)
03. Goldie feat. KRS-One - Digital (Armand Van Helden Remix)
04. Garbage - Milk (Goldie's Completely Trashed Remix)
05. Björk - Isobel (Isobel's Lonely Heart) (Goldie Remix)
06. Ed Sheeran - Lego House (Goldie Remix - Sticklebrick Edit)
07. Bush - Swallowed (Toasted Both Sides Please Goldie Remix)
08. Goldie - Temper Temper (Grooverider Remix)
09. Roni Size & DJ Die - The Calling (Goldie Remix)
10. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Chances (Alix Perez & Sabre Remix)
11. Goldie presents Rufige Kru - Something About You (D-Bridge Remix)

I might buy this actually, for sentimentality's sake, and curiosity about how the later post-Saturnz drum 'n ' bass measures up to the earlier classic Reinforced (I know "Beachdrifta" and don't quite understand why Burial rates it so highly).

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

* Much much later I found some CD singles that Reinforced and Shut Up and Dance had put out in 92 at rave's UK crossover height -- CD singles would you believe -- that had slipped into Tower's giant imports branch, the one that used to be on 4th and Lafayette, directly opposite where Other Music is now.  

interview with NYC jungle stalwart and old skool obsessive DJ Dara at Village Voice, done by Michaelangelo Matos

fascinating history on Breakbeat Science, the legendary drum 'n 'bass shop that he started with DB

and an interesting perspective on the gains and losses of the shift from the Analogue System to the Digital System, which had me nodding in agreement:

"I'm not necessarily crazy about this whole digital idea, and the fact that anything can be released. I'm firmly of the belief that just because you can release a tune doesn't mean you should. I do miss [having] A&R men to weed out the mediocre music. Because there's no overhead involved in releasing music anymore, the bar has been lowered substantially. There's a lot of music out there that's OK, but it wouldn't have been good enough to have been pressed on vinyl. 

"When people say, "[This track sold] 200 downloads on Beatport in two days," my question is always, "OK, you got 200 people paying $1.99 for your tune. How many of those people do you think would've paid $12 or $15 for it?" It's easy to get people to pay $2, but would they pay $12? Because that's what it would have been a few years ago—they would've had to if they wanted it. I think that the overhead barrier definitely made sure [there was] a certain standard. There's always been bad music. But I think there's less bad music when it costs money to put it out.

"People say, "This barrier's been broken, there's all this incredible music that can be discovered now that wouldn't be discovered before." But I see it the other way around. I see that the really incredible music is being buried in an avalanche of mediocre music. [laughs] And it gets harder and harder to find it.

"Often, I'll be on Beatport and I'll just give up: "I cannot listen to any more bad music that is right up there next to really quality stuff." What happens is, I just end up going to the same artists that I've known all the time, rather than trying to check out new people, because so much of the new stuff that I check out . . . I'm not saying it's terrible, but there's nothing that makes it stand out. It sounds like a million other people."

Yes, the DIY principle run rife, unchecked by any reality principle (costs, overheads, the materiality of culture-objects that must be physically transported, physically stored), the filtering involved because releasing a record required investment either by label or by the release-it-yourself artist... all that seemingly purely financial calculus actually had incalculable aesthetic side-benefits

now we have a flattened cultural landscape, in which the great is buried by the good which is smothered by the pretty good which is flooded by the not really good which is engulfed by the really not good