RIP J. Saul Kane

 

Well, it had to be this one I posted, didn't it? 

That macabre sing-song sample - "did you ever think / when the hearse goes by / that some day you are going to die?"

Also on the theme

Younger than me, by a half-decade...  sobering, eh? 

I reviewed Depth Charge  - or is it Depthcharge? - a couple of times in a Melody Maker Singles column, and each time the release brightened that week's rather barren haul

from October 1989

DEPTHCHARGE

"Depthcharge"

(Vinyl Solution)

     Inconsequential but captivatingly labyrinthine "dance" record that reminds me vaguely of Arthur Russell's bathyscopic odyssey "Let's Go Swimming". Over a bubbling cauldron of deep-sea dub bass, drifts a sargasso sea of sonic flotsam, sonar blips, smeared Kung fu samples, anemones and polyps.  If Sun Ra thought he was from Atlantis rather than Saturn, was into Adrian Sherwood, and had an obsession with martial arts, he might make records like this. (That's a lot of "ifs", I s'pose, but there you go...)

Kind of Renegade Soundwave-y, without the grating Guy-Ritchie-movie voices.... 

Sort of anticipating trip hop, but not really... 

 And in some ways also anticipating Big Beat. 

The other Depthcharge single I reviewed, from early 1990

Bit Wu-y in his predilections...  

Vinyl Solution label mate  with the also-departed Eon a/k/a Ian Loveday. He went quite a while back.... 

Anticipating darkcore

This even earlier tune has quite a darkside title, if not the sound or vibe really

I guess it's just the Pulp Continuum - video-nasty bizniz

Also as The Octagon Man, this has neat beats

Here's an obituary for Jonathan Saul Kane by Carl Loben at DJ magazine

He seems to have rubbed shoulders with a lot of people from that "DJ Records" moment in the late '80s - Mark Moore, Tim Simenon - and also the aforementioned Renegade Soundwave. 

Here's a reminiscence / tribute I've borrowed wholesale from Danny Briotet of RSW. 

"One upon a time in West London, in a place called Ladbroke Grove, there was a band of (very) young brothers that went under the name of Krew.

"Krew, multi-racial, comprised of MCs, DJs, breakers and graffiti artists and were one of the 1st hip hop crews anywhere outside of the US (we’re talking early ‘80s). 

"At tangents from Krew there were myself and a kid called Jonathon. Jonathon began DJing mostly at local hip hop jams on the manor, which often descended into mayhem and violence. Jon (sometimes wearing a black cape) was unphased by this – as well as having DJ skills decades before the term ‘turntablist’ was even thought of, he was also well-versed in martial arts (a theme than ran throughout his career) and could look after himself. 

"When I first knew Jon he lived at his mum’s in Powis Sq and had a massive scaffolding construction in his room to house his decks and records...

"By the mid-80s we were both playing at illegal warehouse parties in places like Shoreditch (then a barren wasteland with just a few Bengali families living there) or under the Harrow Road roundabout at Paddington. 

"Jon started releasing records around the time of the 1st RSW releases, on the Vinyl Solution label (the original shop was opposite my flat), first as Grimm Death, with MC Tony Tone from Krew. 

"Then Jon brought out the 1st Depth Charge record at the same time as we released The Phantom, and the 2 records would find themselves together in so many DJs' boxes, although they sped DC up to fit with 120 bpms of the Rave scene, (although Jon was always tea-total and never went anywhere near a pill). 

"We used to talk, at the time, about how we’d both done these tunes, completely independently of each other, but kind of coming from the same place. The Depth Charge records were massive, and it goes without saying how big an influence they were on the Chemicals, Wall of Sound and so many others in that amazing post-acid house period when alternative became mainstream.

"As things progressed, Jon and I would find ourselves on the same bill in all sorts of weird and far-flung places and he was often late – I remember sitting on planes ages after they were meant to take off, only for Jon to stroll on, record box in hand.

"Jonathan’s approach to DJing was same as his approach to life – uncompromising. He didn’t suffer fools lightly and it wasn’t hard to lock horns with him over anything from samples to football, which he loved – when I first knew him, he played in a team of local Arab kids.

"I woke up this morning to see Zaf’s post about his passing, and I was deeply shocked and upset – it’s a strange sign of the times when you learn on social media of the death of someone you’ve been friends with for over 4 decades, and whose life ran parallel with yours in so many extraordinary ways. I knew he was ill, and only bumped into him very rarely – he became reclusive. I got a message from a mutual friend just now, that said they saw his house getting cleared out a while ago but didn’t put 2 and 2 together. I also heard he’s been gone for months, and no-one knew – well, tragic though that may be, I can’t help the feeling that Jon might get a chuckle out of that, as the enigma continues to grow. Respect, brother, really."

proto props 1 of ?

 

Bass-thudboom sampled in "Mainline" by Omni Trio

Flipside of this which is also sampled in "Mainline" for its beats

A revisitation 

Otherwise the RW corpus is almost unlistenable for me on account of the stilted, hokey faux-hardman vocals - like if Guy Ritchie was a dance genre. 

proto-jungle? kinda but not really

 

i have a phantom memory that "The Phantom" is sampled in this 

am I wrong? 

it's a great tune in its stiff way

now this tune ("The Ozone")

reminds me a little bit of this Dem 2 alter-ego tune "Grunge Dub"

and one of Dem 2 actually had a postpunk / industrial background din'e?

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

otherwise thoughm never quite love-loved the Renegade Soundwave stuff, there was something a bit naff about them (the name, the trying-too-hard-hard-man thing)

explored in this 1989 review 

RENEGADE SOUNDWAVE

IN DUB

(Mute)

    A smart move, this. The voices were always an obstacle to enjoying Renegade Soundwave, carrying as they did all kinds of unwelcome connotations: "street credibility"; a clenched, unsmiling masculinity redolent of The Godfathers; a blunt, thuggish menace that colluded with the confrontation-by-numbers subject matter (gangsters, drugs'n'sex, petty crime, nailbiting). Eliminating the human factor has the salutary effect of bringing to the fore Renegade Soundwave's forte: the science of b.p.m., the architectonics of dub-space, dance music as girders and gradients. More groups should leave themselves out of the picture.

    This depersonalised dancescape is mirrored in ciphered titles like "Phantom Sex" and "Pocket Porn Dub". In the RSW universe, contact and involvement have been supplanted by voyeurism and the masturbatory pleasure of 'remote control'; "hot" desire (passion, narrative, motivation) has been superceded by "cool" fascination (surface sensationalism, the instantaneous, chance). The debut album dealt with these preoccupations explicitly; "In Dub" transmits the information non-verbally but just as effectively. Welcome to hyper-reality.

    Apparently, CD players fill in the miniscule errors on CD's by making a considered estimate of what the missing fragment would have sounded like. And it's said that if you deliberately damage a CD you can trick the  computer to compose it's own spectral cyber-music that strays further and further from the organic original. "Phantom Sex" sounds like such a computer impersonation of rare groove, the chuntering, clavinet-squelching bump'n'grind turned to geometry. After this, however, Side One doesn't quite zap the nerve nodes. "Bacteria" is stripped down too far, until all that's left is a skeletal grid-beat drained of funk, plus some Andean flutes and mandolins. "Transition" suggests a desolate, uninhabited dancefloor, but is just too remote. "Pocket Porn" is creepy and clammy, but ends before it gets going, sounds like an off-cut of a grander garment.

    "In Dub" comes into its own on the second side. "Women Respond To Bass" is still low-key, but spiritual with it: an almost ECM guitar twinkles in the far corner of the horizon, intangible whorls and eddies of ambient sound flicker at the thresholds of audibility. "Holgertron", by contrast, is upfront, predatory electro, a stalking cyborg-tarantula. "Recognise & Respond" elaborates a fantastical dub-labyrinth of archways and corridors. "Air Hostess" makes the album's solitary concession to "heart and soul" with an interlude of lachyrmose chords, but is mostly disembodied and decentred: at times, it really does sound like the body of the song has been eviscerated, but the hacked-off limbs continue to keep strict time.    The closing "Black Eye Boy" is the album's only outright dub reggae, with a mesmering cymbal pattern and horns that plummet lugubriously into the abyss between the beats.

    "In Dub" is neither feet-motivating nor heart-pumping, but rather a cerebral pleasure. At best, it provokes a detached, cold admiration; at worst, a blank feeling of disconnection. It's asocial, an event that happens only to solitary individuals: no dancefloors will be fired up by this 'dance music'. In the same way that modern  cyber-technology turns the human mind into a screen, "In Dub" organises your headspace like a mixing desk. Prepare to have your consciousness remixed.