Jungle Technology

Tasty exercise in time travel here from Gremino 

Particularly like this one, "Trouble" 

https://open.spotify.com/track/2ZpJzF5gqLclLlhq9adXb9?si=f2b5d926520b4ffd

This one and all - "Boomshank Crazy"

https://open.spotify.com/track/2AIA5mniatHmXEVfUANmYZ?si=2c917154d1f44546

release rationale: 

A journey through tropical beaches and palm trees, aqua currents, technology, cyber networks, danger, vigilance and concrete, and all of this operated with smoothness. Jungle Technology is an album which has alongside breakbeats and bass, rooted oldskool hardcore and Detroit techno melodies. The album has tropical paradise sound, but later in the album, we also visit hardened concrete jungle.

Effort has been seen for album's entity, so this is not just a compilation of good tracks. There's story (with interlude tracks) and own theme/aesthetic. The sound has original "rave-melodiousness", so this is not your typical oldskool jungle.

Alongside digital downloads, I put out good old CD-Rs - 30 copies limited edition. Disks are duplicated in factory, so they have beautiful label art printed. Overall I have seen much effort for cover art and booklet.

darkside geezaesthetics

 

Brandon Ivers with some tasty new old skool / flashback-junglizm,  a 3-track EP released under the name DJ Scam as debut release for Psycho Bummers the label he's co-founded. Particularly like the second tune "Sodium Pentothal." 

https://scamdnb.bandcamp.com/album/psycho-bummer-001

release rationale: 

"The EP’s opener, ‘Darkside Geezer’, is a tribute to the transition point right before hardcore morphed into jungle in 1993. Although producers worked with a small palette of sounds back then, the emotion and freshness they were able to pull out of their limitations remains unrivaled. ‘Darkside Geezer’ imagines an alternate reality of that period, drawing parallels between it and seeds of transition that 2020 brought us.

‘Sodium Pentothal’ is the roughest tune on this release, adopting the sonics of modern drum’n’bass production, but channeled through the tropes of the music in its early stages. DJs like Sherelle, Tim Reaper, and Coco Bryce played a tremendous role in inspiring us (and keeping us sane) over the last year, so we wanted to stick to the tempo they helped rekindle.

"The closer, ‘Black Swan’, focuses on the simplicity of early hardcore and jungle, but breaks away with glassy chimes and a folding, geometric structure. Made with old samplers and tracker software, ‘Black Swan’ was the first track Scam did for this release and it helped set the tone for what followed."

Here's an earlier tune by Scam from last autumn

full 12 inch at Bandcamp with the flipside "Metalknight"

https://scamdnb.bandcamp.com/album/smnl034

phin 'n' games (don't fear the reaper)

Got into a nice discussion about the philosophical issues pertaining to "new old skool" with major exponent-proponent Tim Reaper  and Pete Devnull over at the Retromania blog, in the comments after this post....  (Third Form from Dissensus also chipping in with some unusual angles)

Tim and Pete were kind enough to point me in the direction of superior examples of the form

And I must say this chap Phineus II does blast away my hackles

It's like a perfect combo of the period-precise replication so uncanny it's like time-travel, but with a degree of intricacy that befits this obsessive-compulsive age. 

As Pete says: 

"it's jungle, classic sounding jungle, made on Amigas and Akais with 90s synths and nothing that would tip you off to it being made 25 years later. But the level of detail to the tracks is just so intense, you'd be hard pressed to find many (any?) actual 93-95s release with that amount of work. People simply didn't have time to do all that back then, since the scene was changing so fast. They didn't have 10,12,15, however many years Mikey [Phineus II] has been doing this to really dig into a particular style, figure out all the rules, and then cheekily start messing with them. At the same time, it still has that 100% rugged bedroom studio feel to it, not some overpolished aseptic "mastery" of a genre." 

"bowel-evacuating bangers" / uncanny-valley retro-rave

via FACT, Special Request aka Paul Woolford promises "bowel-evacuating bangers" only on his new LP  Vortex (the first of four albums in quick succession apparently) which is out the end of May.

"Fuck all that conceptual guff m888..." Woolford says, a rallying cry I can co-sign. "I had a right fucking doss making this."

That said, it don't sound that bowel-evacuating to me... a bit clean, a bit digi-crisped.

Despite being produced in his underpants apparently! 

I've liked the Special Request stuff before - he's captured that thick gritty churning "rollidge" / "ruffige" breaks sound, almost a time travel effect





Talking about doing-it-clean and the time-travel perplex:  here's another mix of new-old darkcore from Pearsall - "93" but made NOW



at his blog Pearsall continues the discussion he and I have been having about the pleasures and pitfalls of retro-rave

to my point as about H-core being "an unrepeatable moment – a whole confluence of factors (state of technology, state of the outside world, the surrounding music-scape esp hip hop and dancehall and R&B but top 40 pop, the drugs, the relative youth of the movement and its lack of history and self-consciousness, but also lack of sense of itself as an industry and a career structure / profession) produced this sound suffused with Zeitgeist and impelled with chaotic energy … seemingly out of control, set on an evolutionary course whose destination nobody knew…. a thrill-ride on a big dipper that was still under construction,,, a plunge into the unknown" 

which I contrast with retro-rave's "meticulous reconstruction of the known, done with love and desperate longing" 

Pearsall muses whether "these reconstructions are a bit too perfect" resulting in an effect analogous to uncanny valley effect in robotics - an excess of symmetry and proportion.

"Modern producers working in this genre are working with 25 years’ worth of information – they have seen which elements work on the dancefloor, they have vastly superior tools available for composing, editing and mixing down tracks, and they also have a better understanding for how to structure tracks to be both easily mixable and dynamic for crowds. This is a collectively build knowledge that they can draw on" 

cf. .the freestyle making-it-up as they went along of darkcore93 producers and the far crapper technology at their disposal: 

"Amateurish productions, wobbly levels, bizarre (and frankly stupid) samples, keys clashing, different elements not properly in time with each other … if you are a crate digger who is interested in this period, as I am, over time you hear some really bizarre and terrible stuff, the kind of stuff that gets ignored in modern throwback mixes or lists of ‘the best early rave tracks’.But this stuff wasn’t ignored at the time! It would get played at raves and on the radio, so when you listen to some of these old recordings you get these moments where just you furrow your brow and go, ‘what the hell is that?’"

with nu-dark you never get that "what the fuck?!?",  totally floored (in the good + bad senses)  because it's flaw-less

"These recreations are lots of fun," Pearsall further muses, "How could they not be when the original concept is so great? – but taken as a whole they are almost too perfect, too precise, and they are missing the messy, experimental edge to the original early 90’s tracks."