We Can Be Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Enjoy this forensic analysis by Michaelangelo Matos of a classic pirate radio set. 

Presented yesterday at the EMP conference, it's titled "We Can Be Free”: The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993) and can be enjoyed in script form at MM's Beat Connection Substack.

Enjoy also the set itself at Soundcloud 

I once gave a talk titled "Just 4 U London" at EMP, back when it took place in Seattle every year - I can't remember if I played any pirate radio snippets, though.... 

echo? not-lively business!

 

Love the echo-chamber swathing this MC on Rude FM in '94.

Makes it sounds ghostified, more like a lost Suicide track in the vein of "Space Blue" than usual rowdy ragamuffin RUFFian bizniz

Reminded me of this favorite clip of MC OC on Don FM from the year before - starts at around 9.42 seconds in 

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" 

"Normality, believe!"

 

"Jim and Emma, get out of John's bed"

the flip

 

the whole session (or what i got of it)

mystery tune # 13 - Mad Tune Hard Core Exclamation Mark

Don FM - Xmas 92?

"send another pager London come on"

mystery tune # 12 - Wicked Riff

Don FM -  Ed Rush  + Ryme Tyme  - early 93?

"that's from the hardcore brothers - switch yer mobile on"

lost entitites

one of my favorite ever pirate bits














not keen on this remix



flipside = one of those 'genre-of-one' killer tracks that point to a path not taken

Pirate Treasure (just 4 U every-1)

Recently I had some bloodwork done and experienced what's known in the trade as a "vasovagal syncope". When I came to, I was surprised to find a medical team strapping monitors on my chest and putting an IV into my forearm. In retrospect, I think they over-reacted a bit, but I guess they have procedures they have to follow.

While they bustled around saying alarming things like "pulse is down to 38", the nurse who'd been drawing blood in the first place was elevating my legs for better blood-flow to the brain and trying to wake me with questions. Like, "What's your hobby? "Music," I mumbled groggily.  "What's your favourite kind of music?," he asked. "Jungle".

Maybe if I'd been less out of it I'd have hedged and offered some extra contenders (like postpunk or psychedelia or....) to round out the picture of self.  But in that extreme moment, the first word that popped into my head was "jungle".  Which must make it true: this music is my heart's core.

Certainly I've never experienced anything more electric than the 92-94 jungalistic hardcore / jungle techno / junglizm  moment. At no other time have I felt plugged into something so deliriously present-tense and can't-believe-your-ears NEW. Neither before or since have I felt such a strong sensation of significance pulsating from a scene and a sound. 

My favorite format for my favorite music is of course the pirate tape. In the mix: a choppy relentless surge of track into track upon track against track (nameless, then, almost all of them - and in some ways the better for it - on my cassettes I would give them made-up titles like "Spangly Tingler"or "Woogly & Ruff").  In the ride: an MC possessed by the mania of the music.

Other components of a classic pirate tape for me include wicked ad breaks (these later became one of my favorite elements of the tapes I'd made, causing me to curse the number of times I had edited them out), some inelegantly wasted nonsense and randomness from studio personnel, even the odd fuck-up on the decks.

Out of the scores of 92-93 tapes I recorded,  you will find below the creme de la creme. I digitized them a while back but never got around to uploading. I offer them now to the common weal.

Starting with a couple of miscellanies - compilations of best bits from the whole collection. Take care, these are so rush-packed they may well induce vasovagal syncope - a.k.a. a whitey - in their own right.

(the first and bestest installment of that series is further down this post, where I have the ones I uploaded to YTube a while back.)

Then onto the freshly loaded pirate tapes proper

This next one mis-titled - it should read "Impact FM 1992 or early 1993".

There were a couple of others I put up on YouTube that have been already blocked for copyright, annoyingly.

I also uploaded a Slipmatt old skool set - the best one I ever heard -  that I'd taped in 1997 off of One In the Jungle, MC Det on the mic. But that one also got blocked - not because anything of in the mix, but because of a snippet of drum and bass, from when the normal show resumed, that I'd left on at the end, dammit! However you can find the set below or on YouTube. (I must say my own recording sounded brighter and louder).



And then this one  - not actually recorded by me but by a hardcore-loving DJ from Philadelphia who'd taped it on a visit to the U.K and a few years later kindly dubbed it for me. I'm struggling to dredge his name from my memory (which gets worse every day) but I believe it was DJ Geoff E. In his opinion this was the greatest hardcore set he ever heard.

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

And here are the ones I put up on YouTube previously, starting with that first installment in the Pirate Faves Series:








This next one overlaps slightly with the Don FM August 7 1993 one above, but is just the most electrifying 20 minutes or so of the full session (which is really good, well worth hearing in its entirety).






Again, this is the most electric portion of the FMB Crew Feb 12 1993 set above. It comes from the second video, "the climax" - but is shorter than that second video.

And finally two great ads for Telepathy that I have pulled out and isolated from these tapes, one from '93 and the other from '96. Who is that MC?






Oh and finally finally - a favorite bit out of a tape somebody else made - shout outs to the entire scene from Shakedown FM's Infinity

the archival shortfall

I noted the other day that there were so many pirate tapes online that they start to blur into each other

And there are a lot

But in some ways, you can't help thinking, there ought to be a lot more

Take for instance Don FM

My favorite station. The source of many of my all-time fave tapes.

Its signal was loud and strong on account of coming from Wandsworth - and I was living in Brixton at that time (I didn't know it was based in Wandsworth then, I didn't know anything about the station at all.).

But mostly it was the deejaying (especially the Lucky Spin crew) and the MCs (especially MC OC and Ryme Time).

Just recently I went on a little jag of hunting down Don FM tapes from 92 / 93 and adding that trawl to the ones I'd already scavenged off the internet in previous years - it came to about 30 hours of recordings up there and out there.

Let's say I've missed a few -  round that up to 40 hours

I also put up there about three hours worth from my own tape archive

So that's about, let's say, 45 hours of Don FM from 92/93 captured on tape and shared on YouTube, mixcloud, and various blogs like Hardscore

45 hours seems like rather a small amount, don't you think. That's less than a hour per weekend over the course of a year and a bit.

The period I'm talking about is from when Don FM launched November 92 until the end of 1993.
(The station carried on into the early months of 1994, before going off the air March 28th voluntarily while pursuing a license, which it got, and then... well you can find out the story online).

Like most pirates, Don FM was on all through the weekend. My possibly unreliable memory is that stations would start up about 7pm on Friday (get everyone warmed up for going out), sometimes earlier...  and then would go all night on Friday and Saturday (and all day in between - often a bit mellower - sometimes even a bit of garage). Then they would wind down probably 10 PM or midnight on Sunday.

I seem to recall Don being on some weekdays here and there (producing some of my fave tapes on these days actually). But let's just stick with those weekends of continuous broadcast. 

Nov 92 to end of 93 - that must amount to some 3000 hours of Don FM transmissions.

So if there's 45 hours of it online - that means just 1 out of every 66 of its hours of broadcast in that period is archived publicly.

I'm sure people must have taped LOADS more than that. The deejays and MCs themselves must have taped a lot of their shows. But punters at home too - it was the main way to get hold of the music and have to play during the week, because so much of it was dubplate or prelease.

That suggests the ageing ravers either

-  are holding / hoarding

- played the tapes at the time until the tape wore out

- put them in a box and forgot about them, or threw them out during some big clear-out, or they got damaged through poor storage conditions

- can't be arsed to digitize them and share

- or, or, they like the idea of keeping it just to themselves, a snatch of time that they alone have access to. That's always a possibility.

Of course, not all of the 65/66ths worth of undigitized / unshared /unarchived will ever have been worth being digitized / shared / archived

I have quite a few undigitized tapes of  Don FM of my own and they are not all gold by any means. A lot of pirate shows never quite ignited, just chugged along. Probably I have around 20 tapes that fall into this category. There is a certain redundancy with the same tunes getting played in different sequences.

Still there's got to be some great sessions out there that people are sitting on and either have forgotten about or just can't be bothered.

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

Here's a Don FM sesh from ninety-free that I have freshly digitized and offered to the common wealth  - with some Eruption FM bits at the start and then into a full-on session with MC OC

be Don.. or be gone!!

never not a good time to re-air this classic from me own archive




or indeed this




or this