RIP Randall

ardkore junglist legend

produced some tracks but primarily a deejay, that's where Randall McNeil's contribution lay

a detailed tribute from Carl Loben + Ben Murphy at DJ magazine

54 - way too early to go

an archive of his deejay sets and other stuff set up posthumously 

Revered for his ‘double impact’ style of mixing, aka 'double drop' mixing -  playing two tracks and aligning their drops so that they detonate simultaneously

Randall on schooling the young Andy C on how to do it:

“I remember telling him how I’d scope out tunes and how I’d count the bars and the maths of double drops. Basically knowing your tunes inside out. He knew it already and just took it another level. I merely showed him the blueprints.”

A regular at the AWOL night at the Paradise in Islington, the focus for the scene's innercore cabal (Goldie Grooverider Fabio Reinforced cru Kemistry & Storm et al) during that period between the closing of Rage and the start of Metalheadz at the Blue Note.  

I remember Goldie regaling me with a story of a one particular triumphant mix by Randall at AWOL that got the jungalistic equivalent of a standing ovation. Something about how he went in and out between the two tracks, back and forth, in some incredibly involuted but sustained way...  the rapid switchbacks so steal-your-breath astonishing, the duration so improbably extended, the precision so needlepoint, that a clamor of awestruck disbelief erupted.... the track was duly rewound - only for Randall to repeat the feat of mixological acrobatics exactly, same jump points -  this was a connoisseur performance 4 the connoisseurs, a tour de force showcase of the emerging artistry of a new kind of music

In the same interview Goldie spoke of how in response to deejays like Randall (and Grooverider at Rage) he made sure his own tracks were always "both music and mixable, with entrances and exits"

Randall appears in the "Inner City Life" video at around 1.10

Here's some of Randall's own productions

 

and a remix (in collaboration with Foul Play)

Randall was the go-to mixer for Reinforced compilations, doing the fully mixed version of The Definition of Hardcore in '93 and more recently a 25th Anniversary comp

now that's why they call it...

 you can complete the sentence I'm sure.... 

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreat 2step-tribute relick remake redream of one of the grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreatest of ardkore tracks ever 

Ever!

Vocal ghosted from 

Ah, never noticed before, or perhaps forgot - but there's a snippet of the Urban Soul  vocal once again - garbled and ultrawoogly - in "Jim Skreech", the track that immediately follows "Menace" on the Darkrider EP. 

At 0.56

Making it all even more nuum numm nuumy, there's a lovely bleep-tinkle-echo-echo swipe from Sweet Exorcist's awesome "Clonk's Coming" in "Menace"

Oh never knew this - sweet tremolo'd-2-fuck vocal rip from "Menace" appears in this tune "Sensi Addict" by The Candyman - at 2.26 

Nice tune

Back to "Jim Skreech", always wondered if there was an inspiration taken from this Big Youth track 

Must be surely (Goldie had a Rastafari-phase in his past) 

In the Rufige Cru tune "Jim Skreech", there's an ultra-jittered vocal lick - "fee-eee-eee-eel it" -  sourced in the postdisco song "Life Is Something Special" by the Peech Boys, an era of music where dubby FX enters the mix and especially the remix, the flipside versions on 12 inches

But I wonder if Goldie + kru got the "fee-eee-eeel it" second-hand, via late-bleep classic "Feel It" by Coco Steel & Lovebomb? 

Well, I never heard this mix... 

It's dubbier, yet tepid compared to the fevered original. Worthy of Guerrilla Records or Hard Hands.

There's a Justin Robertson remix that's even duller yet presumptuously calls itself "Dub Excursion".

This "5 am" mix by Kid Batchelor is a bit better but still too muted

Oh god, somehow I've strayed far far from all that was glorious and world-historical in 92-93!

It's funny how almost the exact same sources and constituents - dub, house, disco + postdisco- could produce such drastically different results at more or less the exact same time. 

"Dub", in the early '90s-  as a track title parenthetical / remix title or just vague invoked ancestry -  could be the promise of "Babylon shall fall" tectonic wreckage or milquetoast numbing nothingness 

But let's end on a high

Back to the era of D.E.A. and its "Menace" remake "Sacrifice"

Goldie knew what the score was, where the spirit had gone (saw him once, at one of the UKG clubs, gladhanding Spoony from Dreem Teem up in the deejay booth) 

But I wish these guys - M.J. Cole, Groove Chronicles, Grant Nelson aka Bump n' Flex - had been remixing this earlier Goldie + kru tune with the exact same title

That would have been a true "now that's why they call it..." moment... 

 

 

ghosts isn't about disco

 

rufige

sometimes think this is the greatest hardcore track of all time - dark, blissy, dubby, delirious



knew one of its sources was this excellent Sweet Exorcist album track



did not know another was this





also seems unlikely there is an EP that's better than that Rufige 4-tracker










mind you the Metalheads EP with "Terminator", "Knowledge", "Sinister" and "Kemistry" is pretty fucking stunning

the best three in a row in all of H-core? Darkrider EP, Terminator EP, Angel

the only ones close are Foul Play (Vol. 2, Finest Illusion, Vol.3) and Omni (Mystic Stepper, Renegade Snares, Vol. 4)

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. 

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.  

via Bits, Nibbles & Bytes blog, a post by a dude  (Stephen Stamper) on his Unit 3: Sound Arts Project

"The roots of this project go back two years to my time on the London College of Communication’s ABC Diploma in Sound Design and Music Technology. One of my many ideas for the ABC Diploma’s final project was that of a paper instrument. During research into this idea I discovered that it was possible to use the sharp corner of a piece of paper as a crude form of combined stylus and loudspeaker: amplifying the sounds pressed into the grooves of a vinyl record.... ",,,  This led me to thinking about my formative electronic music influences, the power of the written word in the weekly music press back in the early 1990s.... I remembered a small review dating from August 1993 in the Melody Maker’s Singles column by the writer Simon Reynolds that 20 years down the line still resonates with me. His description of the Metalheads 12-inch vinyl single Angel – an ‘ardkore jungle record not easy to obtain in St. Albans: the city in Hertfordshire where I was living at the time – so fired my young imagination that I felt compelled to try and recreate this unheard record on my lowly Commodore Amiga home computer. Needless to say I failed, but if it was not for the fire that Reynolds’ small spark of a review lit within me, I very much doubt that I would be where I am today. I decided there and then in that lecture that I would take these thoughts and ideas and combine them with the concept of the paper stylus and loudspeaker.

"With this piece I wanted to expand on [David] Toop’s idea and somehow convey the power of this ‘imaginative dimension disclosed by words’ (Toop to Cascella, 2010). By holding the review in one’s hands and plunging the sharp corner into the record’s grooves, I wanted to give some impression of how I heard and, through the vibrations of the paper loudspeaker, felt the ghost of the music within Reynolds’ words."

wow, that's cool

here' s the seed-review in question