"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
It's nearly always the case that the things that are touted for their supposedly superior musicality, are actually - on inspection - rather meagre, musically speaking.
Timbrally and tonally impoverished.
Especially when compared to the alleged hoi polloi of the day.
Far more startling melody-dissonance clashes and harmonic strangeness to be found in the jungle tekno of the time.
(And we won't even mention the rhythmic shortfall).
But I am preaching to the choir here, no doubt!
"Mondrin" - I assume there's an "a" missing here?
I liked the title of their second full-length effort, which was three years a-comin', Time Tourist but not sure I ever listened to it.
Yet like so many IDM-ers they had a perfectly solid pre-career doing hardcore
Like this moderately entertaining bit of novelty bleep-acid
This one even has a breakbeat-y groove and a mentasmic synth-smear
This has a piano vamp and a nice curl of diva vocal
A blippy chugger with a fairground Waltzer-like riff
Moderately bangin'!
But then within a year or so, they opted for restraint and politesse
Another good title
from a less-good titled EP Retreat from Unpleasant Realities
Refreshingly for a music history, the focus is not the far past but recent history that has barely ceased to be the present - dispatches from the frontline of a living subculture.
2017 was my flashpoint. From second wave British industrial techno acts like AnD and Bleaching Agent pushing “Reaktor’s most hard-lined techno concept” Unpolished into the red (in the same venue where Amsterdam gabberhouse hardened into hardcore); to hearing my first OG Rotterdam gabber set in the plush Koninklijke Schouwburg theatre in the Hague, of all places, during TodaysArt; to finally witnessing Dutch hardcore history unfold in a human-hive of Australians (tracksuits) and undercuts at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht for the resurrection of Thunderdome: 2017 felt like a seismic year for hardcore, and I was at the epicentre, living in the Netherlands....
I had moved to the Dutch harbour city in May 2015... after escaping Berlin, where I consumed – and was consumed by – techno (and breakcore) for four strobing years. I experienced diehard club culture beneath the streets of Köpenickerstrasse in Kreuzberg and Gerichtstrasse in Wedding, spending every Friday to Monday – but usually starting on Wednesdays during Boiler Room Berlin stream days (where I interned) – shuffling between repurposed reinforced concrete wombs, feeling truly liberated in the crush of human bodies synched up to sound....
Talking about rave culture is much much easier than writing about it. And I really miss my radio shows with Red Light Radio and PRSPCT, which inspired the chatty informal style of the book. I hope when you read this, it feels like you are backstage at a rave with us, eavesdropping on the stories – or around the kitchen table at the inevitable after. This history of hardcore has taken years to complete, and it’s still not finished. It will never be finished because hardcore cannot be tamed to a page or forced into a single narrative. It’s too rich and rebellious for that...
Hardcore isn’t for everybody, but everybody is welcome in this enduring phuture rave movement. And once you’re in, you’re in all the way, diehard and dancing to the death. Dance or Die!
Funny that she says 2017 is the flashpoint, given its significance in the Acardipane cosmology...
Real name Lenworth Green. A first name I've never seen before. The whole name sounds like a place.
I can't remember what I was watching - an old episode of Snub seen many years after its 1988 broadcast ? - but can remember my surprise on encounteringthe source of that almost distraught-with-XTC "we are e-e-e-e-e"
Rai'd on tyme.
It was on the indie-alt TV show Snub because Factory licensed the rai track and put it out late 1987.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Lennie made a load of other solid tunes without ever reapproaching the 'lightning captured in a bottle' effect of that debut
Mixed at the Dark Side Studio - quite early for that concept to be in circ.
Like the use of the wonderful phased vocal intro bit - "no time for no time for criticizing / music's hypnotizing" - from Raw Silk's "Do It To The Music" (postdisco classic, bought this at the time - heard the first time on Top of the Pops and was floored)
A reflicker here of the bliss-stricken "we are eeeeeee" sample
Smackman on the right geeking out
Getting intelligentish in a sort of Bodysnatchish way
Which is funny cos one of his alter egos was called Body Snatcher
I like the use of the word 'terrible' in this next title - the Ivan / sublime awe-ful majesty vibe of it undercut by the blokey bathos of 'well'
The best things he did apart from 'I.E' were as part of Dubb Hustlers
"Jungle Tremble" - cool, odd title that
One more time for the all-time classic - the original remastered (and on Hooj Choons for some reason)
For further poeticism, one track is called "Heaven"
And the other is "Vision"
Here's a nice tune under his alias Code Blue - with more "poetics of air" imagery: "Angels In Rhythm", "Angels in Dub"
The latter, the A-side, is unusually literal in its dubbiness
"Angels" - like heaven - connotative of elevation, ascension, altitude.... purity... serenity... radiance... light and lightness... the ether and the ethereal... the immaterial
"If we want really to know how delicate emotions develop, the
first thing to do... is to determine the extent to which they make
us lighter or heavier. Their positive or negative vertical differential is what
best designates their effectiveness, their psychic destiny. This, then, will be
my formulation of the first principle of ascensional imagination.... all
metaphors, metaphors of height, elevation, depth, sinking, and the fall are the
axiomatic metaphors par excellence. Nothing explains them, and they explain
everything.... These images have amazing power: they govern the dialectic
of enthusiasm and anguish…. It is
impossible to express moral values without reference to the vertical axis.
".... Every valorization is a verticalization"
- Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement
(The French title L'Air et les Songes translates as Air and Reverie, or Air and Reflections - which would be closer to Bachelard's meaning, as he is not talking about the dreams of sleep but of daydreams and poetic contemplation
More aeriality from Justin Cohen, in collaboration with Darren Beale, as Atlas
A "second heaven" !
Not Slipmaster J / Cohen, actually an early alias of Grooverider, but on the Dee Jay Recordings label and with similar ascensional imagery:
From The Vision EP, probably the most known tune in Slipmaster's J slender uuurv is "Symphonic"
Earliest effort, with DJ Crystl
Crystl on the remix tip, with "Angels In Dub"
Justin Cohen - a low-key figure, but clearly - especially with running those labels - a hardcore hero
Another of those figures who moved through the UK rap scene and into hardcore rave and jungle.
"Can't beat the system, go with the flow" - source of the famous sample as used by (fellow former Britrap cru) The Criminal Minds, on "Baptised By Dub"
"Educated Snares" - you gotta love that title!
Associated with Suburban Base / Boogie Times - recording, with a partner, under the name e.kude
Sample from Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men there (or perhaps impersonation)
But before Suburban Base, MC Duke put out a couple of aliased records with Shut Up and Dance ("fast rap' turned breakbeat h-core)
Discogs bio:
Born Anthony Mark Hilaire / Kashif Adham
Died 21 April 2024, aged 58
MC Duke got his big break when the emcee who had won the DMC MC Battle got on stage at the DMC World Championships after party and announced that he would battle anybody in the house, MC Duke got up and beat him. Derek B saw what happened and as he had just signed to Music Of Life asked Duke to meet him at the label the next day. While waiting for Derek B, Duke met the owner Simon Harris, and rapped live as he didn't have a demo, needless to say the rest is history.
Later he joined the Shut Up And Dance label and released two 12 inches with DJ Leader 1 under the name I.C.3..
He then went on to produce for Boogie Times/Suburban Base label and set up the Harddisk and Bluntly Speaking Vinyl label
Messy playlist of MC Duke under various guises and in various eras
Interesting that despite being MC Duke, he graduated from rapping in the Britcore scene to producing in the Ardkore scene and running labels, as opposed to being a rave MC.
Check out the nifty little sample from Specials "Gangsters" - another example of the 2-Tone / Nuum connection
"Common Sensi", teehee
This E.KUD.CM stuff is good ruffstuff - clattery and jittery - and some classic vocal licks (“spread out and skiatter", "sekkle" etc)
It has taken me a ridiculous amount of time (well, a full half hour) to notice that the name E.KUD.C.M. is MC Duke backwards.
Fits the hardcore as hip hop turned inside out idea - hip hop but the MC is the occasional ancillary phrase bobbing about amid the beats, and the drums are doing all the real talking.
From a recent comp of very early Suburban Base / Boogies Times Record stuff
Loved their tunes so long - but I've never once thought to look see who Phuture Assassins were - the name alone sufficed.
"Long running act made famous for their ragga tinged hardcore releases on seminal UK breakbeat label Suburban Base. Originally started off as a collaboration between Dave Jay (as Dave B) and Reesh for the very first release on Boogie Times [i.e. "I Like Techno"] , the name was then passed on to Austin Reynolds who collaborated with Krome & Time for the remaining Suburban Base releases." - Discogs
That's Austin Reynolds in the middle there, with Krome & Time.
Phuture Assassins stuck with the "future" thematic through much of the output
All excellent stuff, but true immortality for this one - the title alone and the resonances it's set off, but the madcap rub-a-dub meets Hava Nagila frolic of it.
Vocal lick sourced in this
Flipside starts with a Pam Ayres sample about a deejay rocking the house!
Dis, dis is my CULCHA!
Lots of good tunes that don't have "future" in the title, of course
Plus stuff he did as Austin - blogged earlier here -
Plus engineering many - most? - all? - of the Suburban Base golden age tuneage.
After "Roots n' Future", Austin Reynolds folded that identity - went into other ones (including the Big Beat-aligned-I-think band Soul Hooligan) but then reactivated the name just a few years ago
"The long awaited Ancient & Modern from Phuture Assassins is finally in hand and due for release on the 3rd of August. If you have heard Luna-C play live at an event this past year or so, or SupaSets 21 & 22, then you would of heard a couple of these tracks already but Austin really shows what the early days of Rave was all about with this insane double vinyl release. All inclusive and not afraid to try things. This is rave meets jungle meets industrial meets sitar music, an instrument that Austin actually plays himself."
Sitar!
For Kniteforce, Austin also ruffed up this Jonny L classic
From a few years ago, Austin Reynolds interviewed by Vinyl Junkie
"I was
brought up in a house with a piano. I don’t remember where I learnt it from but
I started playing simple boogie woogie 12 bar stuff aged 7 or 8. I Picked
up the guitar as a teenager and did bands and gigs while at school. You
can blame Alan Suger for my recording career... one day an ad for the Amstrad
Studio 100 appeared on the telly, it was a four track studio and record player
combined that came with headphones, a tape of drum beats and four microphones.
Myself and friends started recording as a ska band, badly named The Janitors.
It happened to include Kevin Beber (D-Zone/Toxic) on drum machine. Surprisingly
I was offered a record deal off the back of the tapes, but couldn’t commit to a
touring schedule while I was busy failing my A levels. These were my
first dabbling’s"....
[More evidence for the 2-Tone / nuum nexus - as is his comment below from elsewhere in the VJ interview]
".... the complete set of 2-tone singles I call ‘my precious’"
Who do you see as your major influences in music and why?
"Jerry
Dammers - King Tubby - Motown - Studio 1 - Nick Drake - Ginger Baker.
From the rave scene.. ‘The Scientist’ (The original keyboard wiz in the studio
at Kicking Records, he also engineered SB001) The Rebel MC. Longsy D. Shut up
and Dance. Rob Playford and The Meat Beat Manifesto."
"Early releases Shot
Like Dis, Please Don’t Stand In My Way and I Get High were recorded in my
bedroom at my family home. One session was attended by SB founder Dan Donnelly,
myself, both of M&M and my mum on the hoover. My equipment was then moved
into Dan’s Mum’s garage where I began recording with DJs and other musicians
for the label at what is known as Sub Base Studio’s."
"... One PA that stands out was my first one, an appearance as Phuture Assassins at the Eclipse in Coventry. I remember the unforgettable and overpowering smell of Vicks Vapour Rub, topless dudes on platforms covered in the stuff, smoke and lasers."
Some people say you are the unsung hero of hardcore and
that you are one of the innovators of this sound...
To be honest there were so many talented people in the rave scene in those days
and so much we copied off them or owe to them. It’s easy to say ‘Yeh I
did the first this or that, but it’s a bit narcissistic. No one really
invented anything. It was all the people, clubs, records labels and technology,
it was collaborative.
Scenius ahoy!
But modesty aside, Austin Reynolds certainly warrants the term "hardcore hero".
Fave tunes of AR's according to the Vinyl Junkie interview
Sometimes - when I have a real binge of listening to old dance music, meaning mostly the '90s - I am overcome with affection for the culture.
Not just the obviously beloved Nuumy strands of it, but almost the whole worldwide width of it.
Particularly the first half of the '90s, nearly all of it tickles me, in nearly all aspects - the graphic language, the clothes, the dancing....
But above all the names.
The artist aliases, the track titles, the monikers of labels, promoters, raves, clubs...
Even if the track is shit, or lost to time, just a faint after-image of a function long since exhausted... the names endure.
Quite often, more mischief and creativity and spirit seems to have gone into the goofy throwaway title given to a remix than to the rather rote remix itself.
Belgian hardcore and gabber are particularly thick seams of nomenclative delight.
But most of the genres during this era come up with the goods - wordplay, puns, jokes, unlikely references, mockalyptic bombast....
I started scribbling them down on the back of a notepad, further data in support of A Theory of Names*.
It seems like the names and the titles - just like the record artwork and typography... the flyers.... the promo videos with their corny and dated FX.... all of this para-sonic stuff is equally as important as the music in constituting a massive surge of urge-to-newness.... that took off from the end of the '80s and carried on deep into the '90s...
An across-the-board push by the mostly-really-young to make an adventure out of their time. To jettison as much of the old and the still-lingering as they could, on all fronts - sound, dance, fashion, graphics, slang...
* A Theory of Names, aka Nameology.
I've mooted this before, based on ample empirical evidence that the shitness / non-shitness of a genre is in direct relation to the shitness / non-shitness of its artist names and track titles. (Same applies to the decline of a once-great genre - the canary in the coalmine is the enshittification of names, titles, graphics).
To me it makes sense - the names and titles would be a textual efflorescence of the music, reflecting and revealing its inner essence.
The milquetoast mildness of most postdubstep is given away at the pre-auditory stage from the aroma wafting off the artist aliases and the opaque titles they come up for their tunes.... Ditto broken beat, ditto downtempo, ditto all the other tasteful, "good music society", cosmopolitan / cosmigroovy sounds.
The you-won't-like-this-steer-clear of most contemporary music (not just dance, across the genrescape) alerts my antennae through the advance warning system of names (the album artwork is also a fairly reliable giveaway - has it ever been shitter than the present era?).
But that corny-yet-awesome spirit of the '90s survived in pockets into the 21st Century... flickering in bassline, in donk, in brostep, a little bit in deeptech.... UK drill too... and I daresay it is out there to be found even now.
** Rivals to rave?
The original "neophiliac" era, the 1960s - that would be the real rival. But it had older sonic forms embedded within it - blues, soul, folk, country.... Although FX, electrification, amplification, and studio tricknology increasingly come into play, the instrumental line-up is largely shared with earlier forms of popular music like jazz: drums, guitars, horns, bass. So not quite as a big a break as the digital 90s.
New Wave is another rival (especially with all the inorganic fabrics and hair-dyes... the angular graphic language and dance-moves... the quirky vocal styles and herky-jerky rhythms and melodies). But New Wave was largely based in rock's well-established instrumental template (gtr-bs-drms) and it had echoes and deliberate reach-backs to the Sixties in much of it. Rather than synths, New Wavers tended to use keyboards - 60s-style organs, Farfisa etc. So overall it doesn't match the tekno-rave era for full-bore futurism . The first half of the '90s had all these newness-enabling tools to work with (samplers, digital audio workstations).
Eighties synthpop, yes - but it is still tied to the Song, and to the impassioned human voice - to the idea of "soul" and to actual influences from soul music (think of all those fire-and-ice singer + synthesist duos).
Electro... yes, especially with the clothes and the dancing. But it was over a bit too quick. Perhaps it is like a preliminary stage, a dry run, for the '90s eruption (so many ravers had electro childhoods). Mantronix and Nitro Deluxe in particular seem like bridges between electro and the house-techno-rave moment.
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