future-dance at Beat Connection / a snapshot of UK garridge forming before your ears

I had a fun and wide-ranging chat with The Underground Is Massive author Michaelangelo Matos at his substack Beat Connection, which is dedicated to deejay mixes. The chat touched on Futuromania, rave, jungle, UK garage pirate radio, digital maximalism, and many other topics, using the structure of five deejay mixes and radio sets:  John Peel's legendary Punk Special from December '76, a Don FM Ezy D Xmas '92 show, DB's The History of Our World hardcore + breakbeat ultramix from 94, Tuff Jam's CD-mix  Underground Frequencies Volume One which captures UK garage at a protean formative moment before either the "speed" or  "2step" kicked in, and then Rustie's Essential Mix of April 2012, the frazzling dazzle of digi-maxed nu-progtronica. 

My favorite was probably the Tuff Jam set, which reintroduced me to these old favorites:

Matos noticed that one of Basement Jaxx had some involvement in this gorgeous Mutiny track.

 

It reminded me of a period when I owned about three or four speed garage comps,  as that was all there was to own -  and this was one of them. It was the main way - living in NYC - I was able to hear the music. A handful of 12 inch singles would reach the Manhattan dance specialist stores, and I'd scoop them all up, pretty much - but there was zero demand locally: the local jungle / drum+bass scene was at its strongest then, and they all regarded speed garage as apostasy, a def(l)ection from the True Path, while the New York househeads, as you'd expect, thought it was garbage not garage - too ruff-hewn on the production side, too fast, too bumpy.  Not proper.

As I mentioned to Matos, my evangelism - like with jungle several years earlier - involved making tape introductions to the new style for friends and colleagues. But because most of the best tracks I only had on these DJ-mixed CDs, I had to fade them up and fade them down in order to get them to resemble proper tracks, on these cassette compilations. I'm sure this is one of the reasons - all these three or four minutes portions of a track, sometimes with a bit of another tune lingering at the start, or coming in at the end - why these tapes confused my intended converts. But  mostly they just couldn't hear the subtle radicalism, the contamination of American lush sexy garage with jungly flavor, the exaggeration of the bump+flex in the original music.  I would get responses like "isn't this just house music?". Well, yes, but also no.

On the Tuff Jam ceedee, it's very nascent and early-days-yet indeed - the selection is equal parts American house, emulative British stuff that attempts to sound as smooth 'n' sexy and palatially polished... and then really just a few things that are true speed garridge. There's also stuff by those unorthodox Americans who would help to catalyse the UK thing and then be pulled along by it and pushed further - Todd Edwards, Armand Van Helden.  

Great days - I remember the hunger 

a/ the hunger just to get hold of the bloody music 

and 

b/ the hunger, the itch, just to see where it was going to go next. 

I couldn't have imagined 2step, even though there was a clue on this Tuff Jam CD right near the end of it. 

Along with the sound of the New Thing, what hooks me as a language-fan is also the sense of a new argot creeping in - new buzzterms - "bumpy", Tuff Jam's term "Unda-Vybe" 

where's it gone, where's it gone

 

On a mad jag of listening to peak 2step and UKG - here's a playlist of the stuff - and this one, Stephen Emmanuel presents Colours, "Hold On (SE22 Mix)" -  leaps out at me for its feverish sultry hard-swung insanity.

 

Here's what I wrote about it at the time: 

"The vocal – a paroxysm of hair-trigger blurts and stuttered spasms of passion – doesn’t resemble a human being so much as an out-of-control desiring machine."

Of course, Todd Edwards is overwhelmingly present here as an influence, but I think the student has surpassed the master.  As always, the UK pushes the US template just that little bit further, into the deranged. 

Many questions remain unanswered

- who was Stephen Emmanuel?

- why is it an "SE22 Mix"?

- was the "Cute Mix" any cop? 

SE22 - which includes bits of Herne Hill and East Dulwich - is quite near where I used to live (Effra Road, close to Brockwell Park). Although that was back in the early '90s - by 98-99 I was in New York. 

I must have the vinyl with the 'Cute Mix' on it somewhere.

Ah, SE22 is a Stephen Emmanuel alias - S E, geddit?

Andy Lysandrou is somewhere in the background of the project - A.L. as in Boogie Beat Records and then Ice Cream Records (and also Truesteppers)

But apart from a couple of other tunes, SE leaves scarcely any spoor for the nuumologist to track 

Nice tune - nice 'n ' ripe

10 degrees Below - a name I remember, fairly vaguely

Alongside SE's slim discography, those Basement Jaxx boys had the good taste to invite this mysterious personage to remix one of their tunes 

The SE22 mix of "Hold On" is so preferred by the massive that - even when it isn't credited as such, but just as "Hold On" - that is it what you will find on YouTube. 

Aha, hold on a minute - found a version of "Hold On" that isn't "SE22"

But it is a remix, by Y-Tribe,  that uses the "SE22" as its launchpad

As does this by Duncan Powell, an auteur of "late 2step"

These remixes seem to be from four years or so after the original release 

Neither manages to make "SE22" any more jittery or eroto-delirious than the original 

If anything, it goes into the Zone of Fruitless Intensification

Becomes an irritant

Bit like drill & bass or breakcore's relationship to jungle 

Yet these re-renderings are by tru believers, not outsiders

Blimey, even more remixes!

And yet another by Duncan Powell, which  admittedly is quite eroto-delirious

4/4, so basically turns it back into Todd Edwards, but more flailing and disjointed than he'd ever dare.

And then this one which is just vandalism, and I assume unsanctioned 

Back to the immaculately maculate original

But wait a minute! With the YouTube clip above, in the artist and track title, suddenly someone called June Hamm appears!

The vocalist, one must assume. But there's no trace of anything else by someone of that name.

Crikey, another fold in the fabric - Craig David did a kind of cover / rewrite of the tune 

Most of what's good about it is the original - and Craig, mostly, squirts a load of vocal whipped cream over it. The Niche-y Bassline element is nice, but Tinchy's contribution is fairly feeble.

But I like it -  it could hardly fail to tickle my nuumerogenous zones.  

Now with nuum, there's always pre-echoes as well as after-echoes

And I always connect "Hold On (SE22 Mix)" with earlier febrilities such as this 

The Resurrection of Todd

A piece by UK Garage-ologist Gabriel Szatan on Todd Edwards's career rebirth 

"If there’s one moment of telepathic audience communication almost every Todd devotee can picture with their eyes closed, it’s this: simply utter the words ‘Jesus Loves UK Garage’, and a rippling harp ushers in the dream sequence.

"It’s New Year’s Day 2003. On the fringes of East London, history is being made. A full decade into his career, Todd Edwards is stepping up for his first club DJ set. The venue is Romford’s  Time & Envy, the night is DJ EZ’s 4by4, and the jet-lagged Jersey boy is sweating with anticipation in a homemade black T-shirt proclaiming Christ’s affection for UKG... 

"EZ slots his records away as Matt ‘Jam’ Lamont and Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown beam from the booth’s back wall. Todd is summoned and cues up a custom dubplate cut for the night. Around 1,200 tightly-packed fans surge forward to the sound of — wait, is that The Carpenters? Todd stands, eager but flummoxed, as people begin to cheer and shuffle to the muted intro for 45 seconds or so. Then the tune kicks in, and the venue goes absolutely doolally.

" [Todd recalls]'... They cheered every song, including that preposterous intro, which was intended to show the crowd how my samples worked. I learned so much that night: the interaction between the DJ and the crowd was like nothing I’d experienced in New York. The MC was saying things and the crowd chanting back — as an American, it just sounded like a pep rally.'”

"During his set, this innocence resulted in one amusing misunderstanding. As the crowd demands a rewind, Todd flashes a confused glance back to the MC. Unsure what was being requested, he whiffs at the chance of a thunderous reload, instead merely hitting the stop button and watching the turntable power down. He grimaces at the mention. "Tuff Jam always joke about that.”

Watch the magic and the mishap here https://youtu.be/1UxY5LonBIc  - or below 

Less cheerfully, there's a lot about Todd losing his way, bad management, financial struggles - and failure to capitalize on a later resurgence off the back of Random Access Memories

There's talk about his "lost" album Odyssey (actually released but not to much impact)

"A 2006 love letter to God that slipped through the cracks, ‘Odyssey’ has gathered something amounting to cult classic status amongst in-the-know heads. The album shows a different side to Todd — multiple different sides, in fact, as each track features a different vocal impression. Todd huffed helium to sound like Björk and crooned like Michael McDonald for maximum yacht-pleasing effect. The production is crystalline and the lyrics have an unresolved melancholy to them, seeking salvation in song. As an artistic statement, there’s no real point of comparison anywhere in Todd’s oeuvre." 

Hear it here or below 

"Todd has been chipping away at an improved version of ‘Odyssey’ for close to a decade, and come 2022, there will be an accompanying (re)making-of documentary by filmmaker Billie JD Porter. The new version is, Porter says, “basically a different album by this point. It’s a fresh, loud take on the original. Old school Todd fans are going to be overjoyed when this record hits.”

And here is Todd talking about spirituality, UKG etc at a Red Bull Music Academy event:

toddermost

try playing them all simultaneously !

christ, there's even more of them









oh and there's official ones too



And there's still more out there

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

Had a major Todd jag at the start of the year, made a mix of all my faves -  that was all I wanted to play for a couple of weeks. This, after a long, long period of never feeling the urge and almost forgetting his existence.

Two of my faves





One of the miracles of modern-era music, that sound he invented - but like all miracles it had its prime season (mid-to-late 90s) and then started to wear itself out with repetition and over-use.   The same tricks that worked so well, reapplied, but the glow not there somehow - perhaps a side effect of him being able to afford better gear? (I saw a video from deep into the 2000s of him showing how he did the Sound - his studio looked like Jodrell Bank. So much equipment, so many blinking lights. I suspect the earlier stuff was done on much more basic and limited equipment, which gave a certain raw edge to the tesselated samples, saving it from the sickly wispiness of Enya's multi-tracked choir-of-self (One of Todd's inspirations of course, Enya).

In my music folder, TE is filed under Nuum. Honorary citizenship, bestowed on no other American, I don't think.

More of my fave Todd blisscapes