RIP William Orbit

I was quite taken with the Bass-O-Matic album, cringe though the band name is

In the review, I make that cardinal rockcrit error of looking for the dance artist who can sustain at album level.  Writing still from outside the culture at this point (October 1990, a year before the Conversion). 

A similar sort of conceptual-ideological blunder was made in my review of Bomb the Bass's Unknown Territory, and this time it's only a couple of months away from Seeing the Light - the Damascene experience at Progeny

Bomb The Bass

Unknown Territory 

Melody Maker, August 17 1991

We need a new category – something like "progressive dance", or prog funk – to describe the new post-acieed groups like 808 Slate, Bass-O-Matic and The Shamen, who are as effective at album length as they are in the condensed format of the club-targetted 12-inch. Coming an unaccountably long time after the Into The Dragon debut, Unknown Territory is a great advance in the cause of dance albums that aren't just the singles plus a heap of filler.

Unknown Territory also shows the extent to which the post-house revolution is a reprise or resurrection of the avant-funk of the early Eighties. Ideas first explored by the likes of A Certain Ratio, Byrne and Eno, 23 Skidoo, Cabaret Voltaire, On U Sound, Material et al, have migrated from the margins to the mainstream, in the process swapping their dank and forbidding aura of "subversion" for hedonistic, populist appeal.

'Throughout The Entire World', the opener, is as pan-global as its title suggests, mixing an Afro-centric cauldron of funk ferment with bamboo music trills and pipings. 'Switching Channels' is a murderous miscegenation of rock and hip hop; pyrotechnical guitar licks lash and singe a tapestry of magisterially interwoven and inter-bled samples. 'Love So True' is marred a little by the focal effect of the soul-rich vocals, but its sensurround soundscape opens up your senses like a night-time stroll in a rainforest, every corner of the mix murmuring and quivering with detail.

'Winter In July' you should know and adore by now: the rustling canopies of Gamelan chimes, the heartquake bass, the jewel-encrusted, ambient swathes. Would that the melody was sung in Icelandic or Liz Fraser-ese, for it's only the ungainly homilies and sound advice of the lyrics that hold this back from divinity.

'You See Me In 3D' is marauding, voracious techno-funk, 'Liquid Metal' a furore of drum machine mayhem. 'Run Baby Run' is swaggering rock/house, its soundscape honeycombed with enclaves of uncanny acoustics and pockmarked with perplexing sounds. 'Understand This' toils and bubbles, spraying raucous rockist blare in the style of Public Enemy's '911 Is A Joke' and 'You're Gonna Get Yours'. 'The Air You Breathe' reprises the crater-bass currents and hymnal poignancy of 'Winter In July', but isn't quite as molten and majestic.

On the CD, there's a drastic rewrite of 'Winter' as sweltering jungle-funk, topped with a tangled lattice of humid, jazzy pipes. 'Pressure Point' is the only lapse into the unacceptable side of the "prog" connection, being a jam session between drum machines, defaced by ugly guitar solos. With a clinical metal riff reminiscent of Clail's 'Human Nature', this track will doubtless end up, like so much prog rock, as the theme tune for a sports programme.

Best comes last, with 'Moody', a brilliant version of a forgotten classic by early Eighties avant-funk group ESG, an all-female unit who were likened at the time to a cross between Motown and Public Image Limited. With its costive bass lines and clipped, glowering vocals, the superbly baleful and tensile 'Moody' was a prototype for house music.

On Unknown Territory, Tim Simenon's avant-funk roots are showing, and 'Moody' confirms and acknowledges the connection. Yesterday's "unknown territory" is contemporary chartpop's terra firma.

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

Yikes, "progressive dance". Double-yikes, "prog funk".

Also a neater inversion in the final line would be "yesterday's 'unknown territory' is contemporary chartpop's terra cognita"

But back to Bass-O-Matic

The technorave-chillout yen for Pink Floyd is worth a mini-essay - wasn't there some ambient house (89-90 phase) track that samples "Wish You Were Here"?  Consults faded regions of the back brain - ah yes, Innocence, "Natural Thing"

The Orb obviously.... 

The KLF too. 

And there was an ardkore track by the wonderfully named E that interpolated from The Wall - "Nobody's Home", the line "I've got a little black book with my poems in"  became "oi! I've got a little black disk with me tune on it", and I think a bit of David Gilmour soloing also got sampled at the end. It's the first tune here

The technoptimism of  this end of '80s /start of '90s moment is endearing - painfully poignant  too, considering all that has happened since, from world stuff to the "bright promise of digital technology" going rancid. 

All this stuff - Shamen and Deeelite particularly, but also The Grid, Adamski, Bomb the Bass, Coldcut, The Orb, KLF, 808 State , Underworld,  Humanoid / very early Future Sound of London etc, One Dove, Hypnotone,  ie. for the most part house music made by former rock people  -  all of it flashes me back to smart drinks, flotation tanks, Mondo 2000,  Terence McKenna books, Nicholas Saunders, Fraser Clark, "zippies", etc etc

These blogs are Ciccone-free zones but "Ray Of Light" was one of Madonna's more bearable singles. I hope William made a lot of money off it and the album. 

This is an Orbit tune the heads love

I am not sure I ever traced the William Orbit trail back to Torch Song

Joy pipes up: "I loved that song! I didn't know it was William Orbit!"

She thinks she must have heard it at Danceteria. 

"e"

But where oh where is the fourth track on this "e" EP Analyser -  "NGC 891"? Named possibly after either the Edgar Froese track off of Aqua (which it may well sample from, who knows?). Or after the "edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy" that the Froese track is named after....



The great missing mystery tune by "e" - also rendered as 'E' apparently - is at the start of this pirate session...



"sounds of 'e'! - coming atcha!!!!"

After many years of loving that mistreee choon, I stumbled across the origin of the samples in it - Pink Floyd! I had called it a "Little Black Disc With Me Tune On It" after the main vocal lick - that's what I scrawled on the cassette.  But that bit's also taken from Pink Floyd - s a twist on the bit in The Wall that goes "I've got a little black book with me poems in it".



Another "e" tune getting a bit intelligent techno-y



And that's it for "e" as far as YouTube is concerned.


Actually I tell a lie...

"e" did some acid tracks back in 1988 - for a compilation called Blast the Joint.





This early 'E' also did a track entitled "E"


Not to be confused with Mr E

how big was the creative core of hardcore?

The first time I had any real face-to-face contact with hardcore scene leader types was meeting Goldie in the first months of '94.  We'd made contact a few months before, towards the end of '93, when I was still in NYC and doing a big piece on jungle - the first anywhere - for Vibe. Did a big phone interview for that. Then, not long after moving back to London at the start of '94, I went round to the G-man's gaff. He lived in a tower block off of Englands Lane  - he was something like the permanent house-guest of the documentary maker who had gotten him involved as a young man in a doc about graffiti. The flat was full of G's canvases. I was living in Belsize Park - first time north of the river since I was a baby - and so we were almost neighbours. Then Goldie introduced me to Rob Playford - we met up for a curry in a place on Camden High Street.

During the meal, I asked them how big the scene was. Because there was no way to know really - it seemed massive to me, in my own head, based on the energy of the pirates and the sheer number of them.

I remember Rob seeming slightly evasive or even sheepish as he offered, "Fifty thousand?".

And that did seem smaller than I'd imagined.

Many years later, in response to an enquiry from a scholar or student researcher, I had a bash trying to work out the demographic dimensions of the creative core of rave.

All based on estimates.

There was at that time a particular old skool nuttah website that seemed to have audio clips of most every rave tune from 91/92/93.

This is probably ten or more years ago, but there were 2604 tunes up there, which seemed immense. and they were stretched  across a 4 year period, 1991 to 1994.

I guessed that even though this chap was a total fiend,with a completist streak (there was a fair amount of dross up there, but then again the point of the site was not to be a filter but an archive, a data bank), in all likelihood he must only have had about  50 % of the tunes actually released on his site.

For 1992 -  the most populous, explosive DIY-gone-crazy year (which was also hardcore rave's peak of commercial penetration, the first half of the year anyway) - this bloke had got audio clips for 872 tunes.

I decided the real figure for hardcore releases in that year might be more like 2000 tracks. 

Most 12 inch releases then would just have two tunes, an A-side and flipside. But you did get a fair number of 3-track, 4 track  - even 5 or 6 track -  EPs.

So let's say that there'd have been 750 individual 12 inch releases in this one year period within the genre of UK hardcore rave music, loosely defined. 

So that means roughly 15 new tunes a week. Which does chime with my vague general sense of going into hardcore/jungle stores and that being the number of brand-new new tunes that would be up on the wall behind the counter. A constant flow of white labels.

Given that many producers released several things a year and that producers also operated under pseudonyms, I’m going to guess conservatively that each producer released 3 records that year.

So that would lead you to conclude that this were around 250 actively releasing-stuff producers in the UK within the hardcore zone. Some producing under multiple names to confuse things and create a deceptive sense of plethora and profusion.

There's a probably a lot of amateurs who never finished their tracks, or ones that did but never grubbed together the money to put them out, and quite a few borderlines that were barely released or came out on dubplate only. (And are now being reissued as expensive reissues). 

In the not-quite-released zone, I remember one Ruff crew show in '92 where a producer called E had brought his tracks to played, including a fantastic one that sampled Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, but that never actually came out. It's the first tune on this tape -

Anyway, let's go with the estimate of 250 actively releasing producers.

Now, how big was the scene?

The biggest raves that summer drew 30 thousand, but you have to guess that this was not everyone in the scene in attendance -  people stayed for local clubs or lived too far away across the country. Even the mega-est rave must have only managed 1 in 3 of the rave massive at most.

A really big underground rave tune could sell 25 thousand, except for the rave pop crossover ones  like Prodigy or SL2. But following a similar principle as above,  no tune would be bought by everyone.

So let’s say that the rave massive was somewhere between 75 thousand and 100 thousand

With the first estimate of rave population you get 1 in 300 as the ratio of producer-participants to consumer-participants

With the second figure it diminishes to 1 in 400!

 That’s a lot of smaller than I thought.

I'd imagined that the punk-redolent DIY principle would have been more rife and rampant.

I guess human laziness, a sensible awareness of one’s own lack of musicality, or just not being prepared to cough up the dough for the initial start-up costs, would ensure that the majority were happy to be just punters.

With the collapse of the rave audience and the coming of darkness in 1993, the ratio of producers to consumers would go up dramatically -- the harder the core, the more of a component of active  producers / DJs you would have. In Chris Cutler's terms, the more "engaged" a music scene.

So with Playford's guess of 50 thousand  - made in early 94, when the scene was still under the sway of darkness, the jungle crossover explosion some months away, still contracted to a hard core -  then the  ratio of active music-releasing artists to punters becomes 1 in 200. 

Equally the more commercially successful the music is, the less participatory and "engaged" it is. You have a lot more mere punters happy to sit back and enjoy. 

2step would be another period in which the ratio of producers to consumers goes down again, owing to its massive pop success and across London domination of the pirate airwaves.

Grime, in the early 2000s, would have gone back to having high ratio of creatives (aspiring MCs, producers, deejays). Indeed in its fundamental unpopularity I would compare it to the improv or noise scenes...

Going back to the creative core of H-core question, I suppose one could go to Discogs and attempt to actually count the number of producers (especially as it useful displays all the pseudonyms and alter-egos and aliases each one uses).

But I'm guessing the result won't be too far off the 250-ish sort of figure that I kinda pulled out of my arse there.

It won't be drastically off, I don't think - like 2500 producers.