The Crystl Vision

Derek Walmsley speaks in depth with DJ Crystl, one of the lost legends - discussing his production techniques and his thwarted career (signed to London, but never made an album) as well as his resurfacing with the sample-pack FUTURIZM and a remixes album. 

Derek - "What makes Crystl’s records stand out is the full-frequency attack and mesmerising detail he and his studio buddies created from that break, a bit of multi-tracking, and some reverb and delay. He could make drums sound like whirlwinds, futuristic machinery, or gamelan orchestras. The wildest fantasies of the 20th century pioneers of electronic sound – of how music could be created from noise, and how the use of everyday sounds could take music out of the concert hall and to hitherto unheard places – were realised in jungle and the music of producers such as Crystl."

Crystl on Amentalism: “It’s all sliced up completely, and then pitch-changed, and then different snares are added, and then there’s transient manipulation, and then there’s different plug ins which go on it, and then there’s parallel compression. It’s almost like making a fucking track, on one drum.....   It would be displayed over the keyboard in every little segment...  I would play physically, manually, all of my drums, all of the edit, record it in, then quantise if it needed it. It’s all hand played. I didn’t ever draw anything.”

Crystl on cartoon physics: "I make the drums animated" 

The Hertfordshire/Hardcore Continuum nexus, ahoy! - "By around 1993, he fell into making tracks for North London dance label Lucky Spin. “They were a couple of Hertfordshire brothers. And I was doing the artworks and stuff. I did the first tracks for them and carried on.”

Crystl on his creative wellspring:  “Organised chaos, in my head. I’ve got one of those very noisy brains. I find it very hard to organise myself, actually.” 

If not the One, then one of the Ones - "Warpdrive" was a track that rearranged my brain, made me see-hear how looping a break wasn't an easier option to programming a drum machine, but a new discipline, an emerging science, a field of competition.

That and the sheer violence of it - that crashing, collapsing break that first comes in at 2.24.

 

Then "Let It Roll" - incredible cut-glass breaksmanship

Here's a playlist I made that has most of Crystl's tunes in it, in more or less chronological order.

Benny L's remix of "Warpdrive" forthcoming on the remixes project

The rest of the Crystl corpus is good but doesn't quite impact to the same degree as "Warpdrive" and "Let It Roll".

This is an exciting effort

"Here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get to the future" - Crystl uses the sample from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension  (never heard of it? me neither) before Nico and Trace do on "Amtrak"

Also nice use of a synth wash from The Black Dog's "Virtual"

Talking of expensive mainstream-movie flops of the 1980s.... now, is that a sample from the Jim Henson movie in there? 

Why yes it is!

(I once got sent to review Labyrinth - godawful it was)

into thinn air (the Bachelard series 3 of ?)

A poetic conjunction - "thinn air", "pure white" 

The "thinn" suggestive of an archaic spelling, or perhaps even an unusual child's name,

It's a release by Slipmaster J, aka Justin Cohen, the owner of Lucky Spin Recordings, Dee Jay Recordings, Pure White and other labels...  a Don FM regular too

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

 

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

the beauty of Beverley

Six things I have in common with Beverley Craven

1/ Born in the summer of 1963 
(July for her; June for me)

2/ A connection with Ceylon / Sri Lanka 
(Her dad worked there and it's where she was born; my dad spent his childhood there, I grew up hearing many tales about Kandy and Colombo, still have quite a few Sinhalese relatives scattered around the globe) 

3/ We both grew up in Berkhamsted and went to school there
(I was at the local boys-only public school; she would have been 2 years above my younger brother Tim at Ashlyns, the state school; before that she went to Bridgewater middle school, just up the road from our house, at 113 Bridgewater Rd, so I have almost certainly walked past her, or seen her walking past.. ) (She also once worked at luxury health resort Champneys,  right next to door where my friend Dudlyke lived) (She still lives in that Hertfordshire / Buckinghamshire border zone).

4/ Both have a connection with the Yorkshire Dales

5/ Both cancer survivors

6/ Finally  (and this is why this post is on EnergyFlashblog) we both intersect with rave culture. 

In Beverley's case, the connection is not of her choosing - indeed it's possible, if unlikely, that she's unaware of it. 

"Promise Me", her big hit -  No. 3 in May 1990 - is a pretty-enough, rather old-fashioned ballad.  The sampling wizards of Orca skip the sappy chorus and home in on a pearly wisp of melody and sunburst singing in the verse  (heard first at 1.01 in "4 AM")




"It's four o' clock in the morning and it's starting to get light" - absolutely top detournement of a love ballad lyric to describe a rhapsodic rave moment, there.

As is another line that Orca (forgive me) reporpoise: "you look like you're in another world"

In "Promise Me", the "look like you're in another world" is about the male lover - who's distracted, distant, emotionally unavailable to the yearning girl singing the song 

In "4 AM", "in another world" is the sea of shining eyes and the dancefloor dreamspace, from which we are to be too-soon expelled, into the gray light of the morning... back to  ordinary life and the inevitable comedown... 

On Lucky Spin records, "4 AM" was a huge tune in 1993.... I picked it up some years ago, by which time twas tad pricey.  

(For a while, I thought the the artist was called Pure White. Seems that was name of a Lucky Spin sub-label).

The not-quite-as-good remixes



This one is ruff and junglistic, but I still prefer the original



Nothing else I've heard by Orca comes close to "4 AM", despite promising titles e.g. the two Dances with Dolphins EPs...  "Pure Bliss" ,"Underwater Science", "Sky Hook". It's good, solid stuff, in that happy-dark zone, getting ruffer, then getting wafty (titles like "Intalect", ooer), then getting technical

However one of Orca - Darren Beale - had various other aliases (Koda... also Psykus, with his Orca-mate Kristian Towsend... quite a few others). One of these aliases was Acro, as in the great "Superpod" which continues the cetacean obsession with its name (pod being a tribe of dolphins) and use of dolphin sounds. 



Fab rmx, getting well tech-itchy in a Photekky way but not losing the bliss




slow on the uptake today, just twigged that Acro  = Orca backwards!

i shall have to do a proper trawl through the whole alias-cluster uuuurv at some point.  

Back to Bev...
  
Craven cites among her influences Kate Bush and Judie Tzuke, but I don't hear much Bush, apart from the piano, whereas I do hear a lot of Tzuke - especially "Promise Me", which has a similar scenario and yearny, needy, feminine-fluttery quality to Tzuke's one hit "Stay With Me Til Dawn"







Look at this period-piece promo, which (possibly an artifact of the lighting and/or the aging of the video format) makes her look like a painting that come to life. 



Overbite-tastic! 

"Stay With Me Till Dawn" got repurposed itself, at the dawn of the Nineties, by Ultramarine, on the gorgeous "Honey", which turns around the "need you tonight" bit of the pre-chorus 



Well what do you know, from just last year, Beverlee and Judee (and Julee) team up for a single  



two singles 



actually a whole album / tour

also a joint performance of "Promise Me" on the telly 




Home Counties soul

Another Bev chartsong, albeit only just barely a hit really








There are other AOR lady / Brit female singer-songwriters who have been rave-ransacked of course, notably the lovely "Sleeping Satellite" by Tasmin Archer. 






I guess that style of AOR is an alternative source for yearning, soaring vocals, from the more usual soul / R&B/ house diva stockpile. 

I wonder why there was never a rave version of "Constant Craving"

Well fancy that




addendum 7/18

Pointed out by anonymous commenter, another dance treatment of the "it's four o'clock in the morning and it's starting to get light" Bev-sample - rather nice too




Meant to say also that in my mind I always bracket Orca's "4 AM" alongside this wonderful tune "Blow Out Pt II" aka "You've Had It, You've Had It All, Boy"



Must "do" Bass Selective properly one of these days...

And also alongside this tune by DJ Massive



"4AM", "Blow Out Pt. 11", "Ruff in the Comfort Zone"  - a little cluster of  junglistic but luvdup  diva bliss anthems that walk that underground / pop line and stick together in my memory


addendum 7/19

Ian S in Comments points out that Bay B Kane sampled Ms Tzuke also  - from "Ladies Night", off the same album as "Stay With Me Till Dawn"






Here is an in-depth breakdown of the making of the Bay B Kane track from God Is No Longer A DJ