"LISTEN & LEARN"

The not unwarranted superiority complex of the Reinforced cru!

What was it Rob Playford said? That Reinforced were the scene's research lab 

Operating just that little ahead of everybody else.... 

The vanguard

Ever so slightly forbidding and coldblooded as a result

At times, anyway - for sure they had their manic nutty moments and sent-E-mental anthems, later on  lush 'n 'sexy souljazzual

Recently been listening to this beaut a lot...

(Listening to the original Scarface version as I did for the first time recently was weird - just sounded wrong because the 4 Hero reframing is so sensitively done, it feels like he rapped over it in the studio, as opposed to having the rhythm scaffolding built around his lines - so snugly does his flow fit the groove) 

Here's a different 4 Hero remix of "Seen A Man" -  starker and ruffer - not quite as wondrous as the above.

But there's also an overly mellow Talkin Loud-vibed version of the tune by 4 Hero, a warning sign - perhaps where the "LISTEN & LEARN" attitude can ultimately lead ("proper music")

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

[Some earlier thoughts on Reinforced's eminence]

Surely the greatest label of the first half of the Nineties.

Not just in jungle, but on all fronts.

The militant commitment to a vision-quest.... the sheer sustained strike rate combined with the relentless forward drive....

But what about Reinforced during the second half of the '90s?

I carried on loyally buying a lot of their stuff - not loyally, really, just genuinely excited by things heard in the store (by that point usually Breakbeat Science the NYC hub for the city's junglists)

However very little of it has stuck with me - in the sense that I literally can't remember it.

Part of it is that tracks by Arcon 2 or Sonar Circle or whoever, the tracks get so convoluted and dense with editing and processing, they actually defy memory.

Also they weren't things you'd hear played out, like, ever - so no memories got attached to them.

So the last thing from that camp that really stuck with me is actually not technically on Reinforced - it's the Jacob's Optical Stairway album, which came out on Crammed or something like that.

Reinforced proper, would probably be the Cold Mission stuff.

 

WHY DO THEY WANNA SOUND GRYMEY

listening to this talisman touchstone of an EP again, noticed at Discogs that inscribed into the vinyl there is an early sighting of the word / concept "grimy" 

• Matrix / Runout (side A, etched): RIVET 1249 - A ∗ - J.T.S. - ∗ "WHY DO THEY WANNA SOUND GRYMEY"

(Onyx were also using the term around this time on the other side of the pond)

I don't know if I'd call the sound on Enforcers 4 "grimy" though - if anything it's reaching for a kind of psychotic slickness 

the beats and the bass on the flipside tracks blew my mind then, and still now 

sampling spotting saddo 3 (putting a rush on)

4 Hero "Time To Get Ill" 

the easy spottable = beastie boys "Time To Get Ill" 

the less easy spottable = Stephanie Mills "(You're Puttin') A Rush on Me"

spottage courtesy somebloke on the Facebook Old Skool Hardcore group

always heard that as "hu-mi-li-a-tion"!!  (puttin a rush on / oo - mill - ush- awn) (think it's been sampled elsewhere too, more mangled)

Oh wow, unexpected xtra bonus spottable accidentally spotted just now

 the song is also the source of  Tek 9 "you've got to slow down"!!!

also as in this wunnerful wunnerful remix by the Nookster

all-time top50 jungle tune that

"too much speed and we see nothing"--Virilio



"I was born with a sense that my time was running out. Not long ago, I too began blaming the speed of the internet and its corresponding mobile, digital technologies. But then I realized that the problem wasn't being able to do more, faster; it was that, faster and faster, I was spending more of my own precious time doing more of less.... We need to slow the internet down, and should probably hurry up about it"

from "Slow Media, & The Occupation Of Online Time", an essay by Ryan Alexander Diduck, at the Quietus