the full circumference

 

Some kind of peak for jungle music

the ruff and the smooth, frenzy and elegance 

"big up all ghetto youth" versus silky wafting sounds like the EZ-listening that makes Harry Flowers say "turn it up, I like that tune"

jazzual menace, dubby flickers, "Think" palsy, soundtrackism 

future + retro 

somewhere between Size + Die "11.55" and Kruder & Dorfmeister

I don't know much at all about Hidden Agenda, but I recently saw this Melody Maker mini-feature go up at Nothingelseon

From Newcastle, of course. Gateshead, to be precise. 

The "cutting up grooves" rather than "cutting up breaks' bit is interesting.

"Is It Love?" came out in mid-1995

There was another year or so of great things - "Metropolis", the first run of No U Turn, the Full Cycle camp - and then something broke decisively

Seemed like everything became

ruff and nothing but (jump-up)

or

smooth and nothing but (liquid funk)

or 

anxious and itchy with sci-fi technicality (neuro) 

tracks that had "the full circumference" within them - the ruff, the smooth, the futuroid, the technical, the dark -  all within that one track - became vanishingly rare 

As for Hidden Agenda... never quite taken by anything else they did, to the same extent anyway. 

Always felt like they were one of the outfits who should have done a proper album.

Actually, checking, it appears they did. In 2000. With the wry title Whatever Happened To... that seems to acknowledge having missed their moment, taken too bleedin' long

Unless it's a Tynesiders nod to this beloved Britcom

"the only thing to look forward to / the past"

Ah well, certainly they liked to play up the Tyneside thing - naming a track after Get Carter, after all

Sadly one of the Goodings brothers passed in 2016 (Mark) - but it appears the other (Jason) has reactivated the name Hidden Agenda in the last few years and put out some more tunes. 

vintage 96 rollige

except it was recorded in 2017!



no, but it's great stereo-panning rhythmic psychedelia

like a lost batch of barely recognisable remixes of Goldie tunes done by Source Direct and Hidden Agenda

lead track of OneMind's debut album OneMind presents OneMind



(via Tim Finney)

sweird

it still sounds

like

the future

to me

very odd, that - cos i know it's not, that it's a now classic sound-style...

that it's history... legend...

a mythic and mythologized era

(hell, I done mythologized it myself - not single-handedly but certainly made an outsize contribution there!)

i know that we've gone past this and are looking back at it in the rear-view mirror

except that listening, it feels open and wide and forward-leaning - a full-speed ahead windshield view

perhaps it's just a trick of memory, how I felt then flooding back involuntarily

or that it's all so imprinted in my neurology and brain pathways that those sounds can't be heard any other way

it's not like I don't feel that feeling about some things happening today

(more so than 2009-2010)

but yeah, it feels like  my ears are staring out at a vista, a frontier, when I listen to it

if i played it to my beats and bleeps mad son, I wonder if he's be able to tell it was from the past ?

(not literally from the past obviously, in actual fact made virtually yesterday)