"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN -
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
Everyone knows about Moving Shadow coming from Stevenage
But I hadn't realized that Ruff Kut! Records was from there
As in The Good 2Bad & Hugly
Variously spelled - sometimes there's a comma, sometimes it'se "The Good", sometimes it's Hugly and sometimes the Hugly, and sometimes there's an ampersand and sometimes nothing at all
Like The Criminal Minds, the ruff-cut origins are in Britrap
Those are all from Ruff Kut!'s debut release from 1991, which wasn't a single but an album - a sort of scene sampler, mixing MC tracks, street soul, fast breakbeat instrumentals that aren't quite jungle yet, and some bleepy acid-y tunes
On Discogs it says the LP came out of a youth project - "thanks to Prince of Wales Trust"!
Now I think about it - actually I did know Ruff Kut! was from Stevenage. Because that's the label that put out Gappa G and Hyper Hypa's "The Information Centre" - and I discovered not so long ago that GG and HH played on a Hertfordshire pirate, Perception FM, whose existence I couldn't have imagined back in the day (on visits to my hometown to see the family, it would never occurred to me turn on the radio). (There was also Pressure FM in Luton).
But then again Stevenage was an London overflow town, like Hemel and Hatfield - and in that sense a kind of outpost of nuum demographics. In fact it was the U.K.'s very first New Town - albeit having existed in much smaller form for centuries before it.
However I hadn't realized that Good 2 Bad Hugly was the main driving force behind the label
At a certain point Good 2Bad Hugly reactivated and has been churning out nu-jungle releases including New Town Sound Boy, Vol. 1.
Never give in, never give up, indeed - still hurling out EPs, with New Town Sound Boy, Vol 3 out just this January
There's also been a bunch of reissues, including Ruff Kut Reissue, Vol. 3, whose cover shows a famous pair of modernist landmarks in Stevenage - the Joyride statue and Clock Tower in the town centre.
There's some similar but not quite as impressive statues in the New Hemel bit of Hemel Hempstead as it happens
G2BH did a track called "Wuthering Heights', sampling you-guessed-it the twittertastic vocals of Home Counties girl Katy B
Well in recent years G2BH went back to the Bush source for "Running Up The Road"
A different twist on 'hardcore' - laced with porno moans
"You Know How To Love Me" is the stone classic but the rest is a very solid body of ruffige
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Here's a whole interview with Jimmy Ryan of Ruff Kut! and Good 2Bad Hugly at Gone To A Rave
some key snippets:
"I used to work in a youth centre in Stevenage called Bowes Lyon Centre. From the age of 11 up to 16 or 17 I was there literally every day. I’d gone to the director of the place and asked him if there was anything I could do, and he said, ‘yeah we’ve got a music project going’. The project was to produce an album using all the youth that go to the centre. This first album was called Ruff Kut.
"... There was a group of us who were really into hip hop from an early age. We were all DJs and MCs, we were into stuff like Public Enemy, Rob Base and EZ Rock, all the electro albums. Bowes was a youth club – if you imagine a youth club that every Friday had 500 kids from all over Herts and Beds. It was quite a melting pot of people. For example, we’d have crews from Luton, St Albans, Letchworth, Stevenage, North London, they’d all go to this club. If you ever watched Grange Hill, it was like that, but the music was current.
"..... Just to give you an inkling of the heritage of the place, Rob Playford from Moving Shadow, and 2 Bad Mice used to go.
".... with what I gained knowledge wise [from doing the album], I went to Princes Trust to start a recording studio, I’d got a bug for the recording side of things. The youth leader at Bowes said, look I know you’re interested in starting up a studio, I’ll let you do it here until you get yourself going. I couldn’t believe it! I got the grant from Princes Trust, then I got approached by two… I’ll call them partners now. They said they were looking to invest in something, and they knew I had a recording studio, so they suggested we start a label."
"before I’d created what I’d call my first rave track, a guy took me down to a rave club called Milwaukee’s. I walked in and was like, wait a minute, this is me! Hahaha… I’d gone, ‘everything I love about music is here, its getting played right now!’ And that was it. I knew that it was my music, what I wanna do. Literally coming home from Milwaukee’s, I went straight into the studio and produced my first rave track. I think that was You Know How to Love Me – although it gets a bit foggy in my memory…
On The Good 2 Bad and Hugly -
"It was supposed to be like Soul II Soul at the time, people would drop in and out – I was the main person, some people would drop in – for example, when we did PA’s there’d be 5 of us working keyboards and samples, scratching and DJing, and MCing, then we had about 15 dancers. It was all people who used to dance at Bowes, it was just a natural thing, we’d say, oh we’re going to do a rave next week, whose coming?"
Fault-less - very-nearly-convincing as time travel
The artwork by one AROE is very in the wildstyle of DJ Trax early releases on Moving Shadow
release rationale
"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a ’92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP’s and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".
On the label Rave Radio Records - a hub of epigonic action
I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?
The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!
Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point.
People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity....
Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze. When you factor in the international factor.
Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music.
You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point...
Convergence of new-olds - here's a nu-gaze group who have gone so far as to take inspiration from the junglistic portions of MBV's 2013 mbv i.e. the bits that would have been the follow up to Loveless
It almost does supply what never actually existed ie. the bang-on-timely jungle-influenced album MBV could conceivably have put out in 1993 or 94
Somehow missed this - from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set
release irrationale
The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.
Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides...
Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It’s a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.
If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down... dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity
SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture’s, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF’s Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture’s work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.
SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.
Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork - Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:
Over the past few years, I’ve been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw’s Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica’s back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.
A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I’d drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.
One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D’s Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek’s The Water Margin, and Intense’s The Quickening.
During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.
There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF’s 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There’s enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.
Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.
The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles’ 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, and Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.
The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle’s genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle’s Johnny, Subnation’s Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer’s Ricky–a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine ‘Somewhere About Town’.
The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM’s DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It’s well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.
Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a ‘first aid kit’, packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn’t take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he’d remind his groggy listeners that it was “time to draw for the First Aid Kit,” creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn’t get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was “a bridge too far,” but if they made it, Jinx would say, “taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton.” Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More (“What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!”), and end with his signature send-off: “Seeeeeeeeee ya!”
I ended up getting my own Sunday morning show on Rude FM 88.2 in the early 2000s, and I often thought of Jinx and my love for his Sunday morning show. In some ways, this study influenced how I approached my own show—not so much in the presentation or music selection, but in understanding the audience and their needs at that time of the morning. The Sunday morning pirate radio aesthetic is something I first referenced on the original 0860 album in the track First Aid Kit, and this tin full of goodies for Slow860 strengthens the bonds, further connects the dots and adds to the lineage of the Hardcore Continuum.
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Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie"
That's from over ten years ago)
Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality
This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"
Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat
Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick
Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew.
release rationale:
I’ve been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn’t know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.
Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG’s London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the “we got the vibes, yo” lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I’m grinning from ear to ear.
Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London’s legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.
Fast forward 30 years, and I’m in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I’ve always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I’ve been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.
Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It’s a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour!
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The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit
Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania
Another series ofLove Island reaches its finale - and finally it's time to unfurl my "Love Island as Mainstream Outpost of the Hardcore Continuum" thesis.
For starters, there is the theme tune.
An instrumental that lies somewhere between UKG and Deep Tech - it sounds a bit like if an Eski-era grime producer decided to make a house track.
Then there's some of the musical guests on the show, who have either been pure Nuum - Craig David - or Nuum-adjacent (Katy B, Tinie Tempah).
The guests chosen often seem to come from around that 2010-2011 moment - which must be when the typical contestant on the show would have been 9 or 10. Perhaps there's a sort of nostalgia appeal for the contestants, a flashback to watching Channel U or listening to your older brother or sister's music. Although quite a few of these artists would have been on the Top of the Pops.
And then there is the fact that Chris & Kem, from the third season of Love Island, revealed an ability to rap in the Talent Show episode of that 2017 season.
This resulted in their recording a not-bad-at-all grime-ish single that incorporates Love Island-slang and which reached #15 in the charts.
"Little Bit Leave It" came out on Relentless, the UK garage label. Nuumtastic!
Stormzy also made a non-musical appearance in the 2017 season, with a video clip apologizing for a tweet about one of the prominent female contestants. He also gave tips to Kem & Chris about their MC-ing technique: "I can give you advice about the raps - you can't use the phones".
Certain contestants over the years have actually been performers in "urban" bands as singers or backing dancers (e.g. Cach, from the winning couple this year).
Well, Marcel - who's been in it twice, through being in an All Stars season - was in Blazin' Squad, a British rap group who scored a bunch of hits. They started out as a garage rap group: their debut release "Standard Flow" came with remixes from DND and Ras Kwarme and Horsepower, on the label Weighty Plates. You can't get much more Nuum Nuum Nuummy than that.
And how about this with rrrrrrrginal junglists Origin Unknown?
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How about that season finale then?
They should really have bent the rules and allowed two girls to count as a couple, given that Toni and Shakira were clearly the stars of the season and theirs is the true love story here.
Toni has the best tone and cadence since Liza Minelli.
In another era, some impresario would have spotted Shakira's incandescenceand whisked her off to Elstree - or more likely, given her gumption, she'd have made her own way to Hollywood, like Cary Grant and other Brits did did. There she'd have been screen-tested and put through the studio system finishing school (what a shame though for elocution to override that delicious accent) and emerged as a star.
If she can half-way act, it could still happen.
More likely, in this day and age, she'll be famous for being herself, a public personality.
With any luck, she'll drift from entertainment into politics and sort out all our problems.
Barbara Tucker diva loop - brilliantly stuttered and ghostified - is taken from what might well be my favorite house track that isn't by Todds Terry or Edwards
known dj's: 2 Stoned crew (2 bad mice in disguise), dj lucky, dj active, dj duffy
Frequency FM
freq: 101.4fm
area: Hertfordshire
known years running: 1991-1993
basic style genre: Oldskool
known dj's: DJ Legacy (myself), DJ Twist, DJ Nitemare, DJ Donny P, DJ Shiva
Got bust when the aerial got blown down in high winds.
(and this one, shrouded a bit in non-knowledge)
Unknown FM
freq: 108.0 fm
area: Hertfordshire (not 100% though)
known years running : no idea
basic style genre: no idea
known dj's: no idea
And what do you know, just this morning Droid alerts me to this release by Justice and Metro, a mini-LP titled PRESSURE 101.5 FM-Luton Pirate Memories.
It's actually from a few years ago and is woven out of old pirate adverts and jingles - info about long-lost record shops and club nights in the Luton and Dunstable area.
"J and M takes us on a journey back to the 90's and compile Pirate radio adverts from their local station Pressure FM. The flip is a track inspired by the sounds being broadcast around the rave era."
Hark at the well spoken voices in the adverts... big up the bourgeoisie! big shout going out to the middle class massive!
"Right of admission is reserved - and this is a drug-free zone" - yeah pull the other one, luv!
People remember the Sixties pirate radio heyday, when the pirates were literally boats at sea.... and they remember the Eighties terrestial tower-block resurgence of reggae and soul and jazz and funk and early rap stations.... and of course they remember the Nineties onwards rave hardcore jungle UK garage grime etc explosion of piracy...
But what about the in-between bits?
Even after the Labour government (Tony Benn specifically) squashed the pop-crazed offshore pirates in '67, and the big buccaneers accepted "pardons" and joined Radio One as its first roster of deejays.... some people carried on broadcasting outside the law. Via pirate radio scholarRob Chapman, here's a roundup from May 1971, from an enthusiast's zine called Newsbeat Newsletter.
Love the fact that a bunch of these are broadcasting from the Home Counties - Hertfordshire, Sussex, Surrey, Berkshire (where the intriguingly named Radio Utopia transmits from, or at least can be picked up in)
(Echo here of my repeated and enormous delight in the fact that Herts was something of a bastion for the Hardcore Continuum. Indeed there was a jungle pirate out of Luton - Perception FM. Gappa G and Hypa Hypa were involved)
Radio Free Rhubarb feels more like a Home Counties type name than Radio Utopia... I'd like to imagine it was some kind of renegade counterpart to Gardeners Question Time, eccentric views on herbaceous borders and composting, the kind of horticultural heresy that Radio 4 wouldn't allow on the airwaves... but I imagine the name is goofy, perhaps a little Goonsy or Pythonesque. Or just the old slang meaning...
Also intriguing - The Voice of Freedom. A rare example of the political pirate in Britain? I believe there was some kind of right-wing pirate, opposed to the unions - I think this comes up in the Andy Beckett book. And then there were a few short-lived pirates from the other side of the struggle, started during strikes... This is all hazy memory, though.
Check out Rob Chapman's pirate radio archive - he has recordings of 1960s pirates but also some prime 90s hardcore rave junglism action via a Manchester radio station (not actually a pirate, I'm repeatedly told by someone - it was somehow legal).
A whole thesis - beautifully illustrated and designed, more like a book - on London Pirate Radio of the Nummy Nuum Nuum era, by Frederik Birket-Smith. Although as this blog post shows, the title should really be Not Just 4 U London....
I am honestly not particularly invested in whether the hardcore continuum, er, continues *
But it is funny - and delightful - that things like this still happen: an amapiano remake by DJ Eastwood of "Cape Fear", the dark garage classic by KMA.
A tune that came out in 1996 - almost 30 years ago!
Blimey, here's an earlier prototype, I think done as a pirate radio show ident. From 1995 - fully 30 years ago!
The mighty original, meaning the record that was actually released
Such a thick, humid, balmy, sticky, swimmy, brimming, subaquatic sound.
Flipside
The mighty follow-up - breakbeat garage but much more enticing than what that term later came to signify
Another dubplate prototype - again a pirate station ident for Six's brother DJ Maddness - his partner in KMA. Track titled "Kaotic Maddness" with the extra 'd' at this point.
Here's a handy playlist I made of the almost complete works and various refixes
And here's one DJ Maddness made that has various oddments in its, some decent remixes they did for various units.
On the basis of "Cape Fear", "Kaotic Madness" and the Re-Con Mission EP, I thought of Six as potentially a Goldie-type auteur. (KMA even did a dubplate track titled "Kemistry").
He certainly talked a good game. (But then it all fizzled out...)
"This is a line to the future"
This stuff does have that soul-smeared edge-of-atonal quality of prime Reinforced, when they were "jazzed" but not yet actually jazzy or jazzual
Here's DJ Maddness operating as a YouTube UKG historian with the series Pirate Chronicles
KMA - just one of those outfits who come along, have their moment, make their contribution.... and then that's it. Operators at that cusp between genius and scenius.
The Nuum is littered with them.
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* on the continuum's continuance and not being that bothered whether it does
It had a really good run there.... 20 years plus... covered a huge amount of ground.... laid down a legacy, comparable in richness and duration to reggae's prime or hip hop's heyday.... to expect another convulsion or major-phase would be almost greedy...
And in truth nothing really seismically major has come along since funky - i.e. fifteen years plus ago.
For sure, there are diasporic tendrils still wriggling out there..... DNA flickers in otherwise completely other genres.
And yes the people who came up during its different phases and are still active, they do "continue" - refining and extending their thing
But for the most part Nuum is now a site of memorialization and archiving (as with the Pirate Chronicles series)
And then there's the much younger artists who extract juice of varying pungency and nutritional content out of fundamentally settled styles that originally emerged out of unfolding dialectical becoming... in much the same ahistorical way that a current band can describe what it does as "postpunk" when it is a/ blatantly not - simply because of chronology, how much has happened in between b/ contra the originating spirit of postpunk.
Some young-people-of-today juice extraction that is fairly blatantly squeezing "Cape Fear"
Saddened to learn that Terror Danjah - grime's greatest producer and co-founder of the Aftershock label - has died.
Here is the liner note tribute I did for Gremlinz - the Terror Danjah compilation thatPlanet Muput out in 2009. There's also a longer length version of the Q + A with Terror that appeared in Gremlinz . There's also some Danjah-related entries from the Grime Primer I did for the Wire in 2005.
TERROR DANJAH: THE ALPHA PRODUCER
By Simon Reynolds
Ninety-five percent of grime beats are strictly functional: they're designed as launching pads for an MC's skills rather than as showcases for the producer's virtuosity.These tracks don't tend to go through a lot of shifts and changes but instead loop a drum pattern and a refrain (typically evoking an atmosphere that mingles menace and majesty, with melody and "orchestration" pitched somewhere between a straight-to-video movie score and a ring-tone). And that's fine, you know: it's a perfectly valid and valuable craft making this kind of basic MC tool. It's okay if the tune doesn't go anywhere, because the pirate deejay's only likely to drop a minute-and-a-half before cutting to the next track.It's alright if it'sthinly textured, a bit 2-D and cheapo-sounding, because it's going to be largely drowned out by MCs jostling for their turn to spit sixteen bars.But it stands to reason that few of these tracks are going to be things you'd want to buy and listen to at home.They're just not built for that purpose.
Out of the handful of grime producers who've made some beats that work as stand-alone aesthetic objects--Wiley, Target, Wonder, Rapid from Ruff Sqwad--the undoubted ruler is Terror Danjah.But this 29-year-old from East London is not just grime's most accomplished and inventive producer.He's one of the great electronic musicians to emerge in the first decade of the 21st Century, a figure as crucial and influential as Ricardo Villalobos or Digital Mystikz. Someone who's kept on flying the flag for futurism at a time when recombinant pastiche and retro-eclecticism have taken over post-rave music just like what happened with alternative rock a couple of decades before.
Like earlier artcore heroes such as 4 Hero and Foul Play (in jungle) or Dem 2 and Groove Chronicles (in 2step garage), Terror Danjah knows how to walk that perfect diagonal between function and form, how to maintain a tightrope balance between rocking the crowd and pushing the envelope.He has made plenty of MC tools, tracks like his "Creepy Crawler" remix of "Frontline" or "Cock Back" that have become standard beats of the season on the grime scene, enabling MCs he's never met, on pirate shows he's never heard, to show off and sharpen their skills. Terror has also crafted beats tailor-made to a specific MC's talents, like "Haunted" (the instrumental for Trim's classic "Boogeyman") or "Reloadz", whose speeding-up and slowing-down-again rhythm is a perfect vehicle for Durrty Goodz's quick-time style.(That track is also a kind of living history lesson, cutting back forth between grime's stomping swagger and jungle's breakneck breakbeat sprint, between 2008 and 1994.)
But on this all-instrumental anthology, with the pungent charisma of MCs like Bruza or D Double E removed from the picture, you can really hear all the work that Terror Danjah puts into his tunes.On tracks like "Code Morse" and "Radar," the intricate syncopations and hyper-spatialised production, the feel for textural contrast and attention to detail, are comparable to German minimal techno producers like Isolee.But all this sound-sculpting finesse is marshaled in service of a gloweringly intense mood--foreboding and feral-- that is pure grime.This is artcore: a stunning blend of intellect and intimidation, subtlety and savagery.Street modernism, in full effect.
Gremlinz is named after Terror Danjah's trademark:the grotesquely distorted, gloating laughter that makes an appearance in all his tracks, a poisonousgiggle that makes you think of a golem, some horrid little homunculus thatTerror's hatched to do his bidding.The gremlin audio-logo crystallizes the essence of Terror Danjah's work and of the London hardcore continuum of which he's such an illustrious scion. It's at once technical (the product of skilful sonic processing) and visceral,funny and creepy.Like the catchphrases and vocal-noise gimmicks that MCs drop into their sets or tracks (think D Double E's famous "it's mwee mwee" signal), the cackling gremlin announces that this here is a TERROR DANJAHproduction you're listening to.When a pirate deejay drops one of his tunes, when a crowd in a club hollers for a reload, that slimy little goblin is Terror marking his sonic territory like the top dog, the alpha producer, he is.
Q/A with Terror Danjah
You started out in the late Nineties with Reckless Crew, an East London jungle/drum'n'bass collective of deejays and MCs. How did that come about?
I formed Reckless in 1998. The other members were D Double E, Bruza, Hyper, Funsta, Triple Threat, DJ Interlude and Mayhem. We came to fame from being on Rinse Fm and playing at local clubs and raves including One Nation, Telepathy, World Dance, Garage Nation, and Slammin' Vinyl.
What did you learn, as a producer, from those drum and bass days? Who did you rate at that time and would consider an influence?
I wasn't much of a producer back in them days. I was absorbing the musical sounds from Roni Size, Dillinja, Shy FX, Krust, DJ Die, Bad Company, Andy C and DJ SS. I learned a lot from listening to their music. Jungle was the first British music we could say was ours. I'd grown upon on reggae, R&B, soul. And also house music, on account of having an older brother. I was deejaying on the pirates and I got into producing drum and bass, because I wasn't getting a lot of tunes from producers. They'd be giving me one or two dubplates, but they had the big DJs like Brockie to service first. So I started making my own "specials" and did loads of tracks. But I didn't put them out, just played them on the radio. My own personal sound. But DJ Zinc and a few others cut my tunes as dubplates.
When did you make the transition to UK garage and that MC-fronted 2step sound that was the prototype for grime?
I did two garage tunes and they blew up so I decided to stick with that. In 2002 I did "Firecracker" b/w "Highly Inflammable" on Solid City, Teebone's label. For a while I was part of N.A.S.T.Y. Crew, because I'd been at St. Bonaventures [a Roman Catholic comprehensive school in Forest Gate, London E7] with a couple of members of N.A.S.T.Y. But all the time I was doing my own thing and eventually just branched off.
Then in 2003 I formed Aftershock with this guy called Flash, who I'd met at Music House where everyone goes to cut dubplates. The first two Aftershock releases were Crazy Titch's "I Can C U, U Can C Me" and N.A.S.T.Y.'s "Cock Back". That got the label off to a flying start--everyone was buzzing after those two releases. Then it was Big E.D.'s "Frontline" and then in 2004 I put out the Industry Standard EP. That’s the one where people thought "this label is serious".
Industry Standard is where you can really hear your three-dimensional "headphone grime" sound coming through, on tunes like "Juggling" and "Sneak Attack". With those tracks and all through your music, the placement of the beats, the way sounds move around each other in the mix--it's very spatial.
Some of that comes from listening to a lot of Roni Size and Andy C and producers like that. Lots of abstracty sounds rushing about, coming out of nowhere. There's a sense of more life in the music. That’s what I do in my tunes. Drum and bass gave me ideas about layering sounds and placing sounds. But it also comes from studying music engineering at college, doing a sound recording course. I learned about mic'ing a drum kit and panning. You've got the pan positions in the middle of your mixing desk, and the crash should be left or right, the snares should be slightly panned off centre, the kick should be in the center. So you've got a panoramic view of your drum structure.
Obviously I went beyond that, started experimenting more. The bass stays central but the sounds always drift. So each time you listen you’re not just bobbing your head, you’re thinking "I heard something new in Terror Danjah’s tune". So it always lasts longer.
Industry Standard was the breakthrough release, in terms of people realizing that here was a producer to reckon with. What came next?
Payback was the biggest. That EP of remixes was one of Aftershock's top sellers. It was getting caned the most, especially my "Creepy Crawler" remix of "Frontline". That cemented it for us.
Basically you took Big E.D.'s "Frontline" and merged it with your own "Creep Crawler" from Industry Standard. It's got a really unusual synth sound, harmonically rich, with this sour, edge-of-dissonance tonality. It makes you feel like you're on the verge of a stress-induced migraine. A sound like veins in your temple throbbing.
It's a normal synth, but where many people would just use it straight out of the module without any processing or texture, I’ve learned some techniques to give it more. I add that to it. I can’t tell you how, though. Certain producers might go "ah!"
Those sort of wincing tonalities are a Terror Danjah hallmark. Another are the bombastic mid-frequency riffs you use that sound a bit like horn fanfares, and that sort of pummel the listener in the gut. They've got this distorted, smeared quality that makes them sound muffled and suppressed, like their full force is held back. But that just makes them more menacing, a shadowy presence lurking in the mix. Like a pitbull on a leash, growling and snarling.
That's like an orchestral riff. Again, it's all about the effects I put on it. If you heard it dry you’d think "Is that it?" It’s the same techniques I use for the giggle.
Ah, your famous hallmark: the jeering death-goblin laughter. How did you come up with the Gremlin?
I had a lot of drum and bass sample CDs back in the day and I had that sound from time. I used it a couple of time in tracks, just to see how it sounds. Then I stopped using it and everyone was like, "Where is it?!?". I was like, "I don’t want to use it no more". But everyone was going like "That’s nang! Use it!". So I switched it up, pitched it down, did all sorts of madness with it.
But Terror Danjah music is not all dread and darkness. You do exquisite, heart-tugging things like "So Sure," your R&G (rhythm-and-grime) classic. Or "Crowbar 2," a really poignant, yearning production draped in what sound like dulcimer chimes, a lattice of teardrops. That one reminds me of ambient jungle artists like Omni Trio and LTJ Bukem.
I used to listen to Omni Trio and all that, when I was 14 or 15. That R&G style is more me. Everything you hear is different sides to me, but that sound, I can do that in my sleep. One day I can be pissed off and make a tune for deejays to do reloads with. And another day I'll do one where you can sit down and listen and relax, or listen with your girl and smooch her.
Do you see anyone else in grime operating at the same level of sophistication, in terms of producers?
I don’t think none of them really. [Aftershock producer] D.O.K. is the closest in terms of subtle changes, and DaVinChe. You've also got P-Jam. But I don't really look at anyone and think they’re amazing. Wiley at one point was the guy whose level was what I wanted to get to. But I don’t think there’s anyone now who’s doing anything different. They’re being sheep.
After the very active 2003/2004/2005 phase, Aftershock went pretty quiet. There were just a few more vinyl releases and then a couple of full-length things. What happened? And what have you been up to in recent years?
The label went quiet due to the change of the climate--the introduction of CDs in the underground market place. Because we were so successful with the vinyl format, but it was time to move with the times. So I released a CD called Hardrive Vol 1, which had ten vocals and ten instrumentals and featured artists like Chipmunk, Griminal, Wiley, Mz Bratt, Wretch 32, D Double E, Scorcher, Shola Ama. I also put out an instrumental CD called Zip Files Vol. 1. And I've been working on Mz Bratt's album.
I'm told this compilation was selected out of some 80 instrumentals. Which means 62 weren't used! Does this mean you are sitting on a vast personal archive of unreleased Terror Danjah material?
Definitely. I got billions of tunes stacked on a few Terra Bytes hard drive.
You have Industry Standard Vol 4 on Planet Mu soon, and you recently returned to deejaying with the Night Slugs appearance -- does this mean you are back in the game full force? Do you feel like grime is still an area you want to work within or are you being drawn to other areas, like funky, or the more experimental end of dubstep?
I've always made music what I like, and most of the tracks on 'Gremlinz' were made before there was a genre called 'Grime' or 'Dubstep'. I started off in Jungle, so I'm not afraid of change!
Talking of the wacked-out end of dubstep, I can see a lot of your influence with the nu skool producers like Joker, Rustie, Guido, and so forth. Can you hear it yourself and what do you think of this sound people are calling things like "purple" and "wonky"?
It doesn't bother me, but I personally think a producer/artist should just make the music and let the record/marketing company name it whatever!
Judging by Industry Standard, you could justly
describe Terror Danjah as one of the most accomplished electronic musicians
currently active. On tracks like “Juggling” and “Sneak Attack,” the intricate
syncopation, texturized beats, spatialized production, and “abstracty sounds”
(Danjah’s own phrase) makes this “headphone grime”--not something that could be
claimed for too many operators on the scene. Yet all this finesse is marshaled
in service of a fanatically doomy and monolithic mood, Gothic in the original
barbarian invader meaning. The atmosphere of domineering darkness is distilled
in Danjah’s audio-logo, a demonic cackle that resembles some jeering, leering cyborg
death-dwarf, which appears in all of his productions and remixes. “Creep
Crawler,” the first tune on Industry
Standard, and its sister track “Frontline (Creepy Crawler Mix),” which
kicks off Pay Back, are Danjah’s
sound at its most pungently oppressive. “Creep Crawler” begins with the
producer smirking aloud (“‘heh-heh, they’re gonna hate me now”), then a bonecrusher beat stomps everything in its path, while
ominous horn-blasts pummel in the lower mid-range and synths wince like the
onset of migraine. From its opening something-wicked-this-way-comes
note-sequence onwards, Big E.D.’s original “Frontline” was hair-raising already.
Danjah’s remix of his acolyte’s monstertune essentially merges it with “Creep
Crawler,” deploying the same astringent synth-dissonance and trademark
bass-blare fanfares (filtered to create a weird sensation of suppressed
bombast) but to even more intimidating and shudder-inducing effect.
JAMMER featuring KANO
BOYS LOVE
GIRLS
HOT
SOUND 2003
WONDER featuring KANO
WHAT HAVE YOU
DONE
NEW
ERA 2004
TERROR DANJAH featuring KANO and SADIE
SO SURE
AFTERSHOCK
2004
The backing
tracks are fabulous--Jammer’s frenetic snare-roll clatter, Wonder’s tonally harrowed
synths, Danjah’s aching ripples of idyllic electronics--but it’s the MC who
really shines. With some grime rhymesters, the flow resembles an involuntary
discharge (D Double E being the ultimate exponent of MCing as automatic poetry).
But even at his most hectic, as on “Boys Love Girls,” Kano always sounds in complete control. All
poise and deliberation, Kano
invariably sounds like he’s weighing up the angles, calculating his moves,
calibrating which outcomes serve his interests.
That’s blatant on “Boys” and “What Have You Done”, both cold-hearted
takes on modern romance that depict sex in transactional terms, a ledger of
positives and minuses, credits and debits; a war of the genders in which
keeping your feelings checked and maintaining distance is strategically crucial. But it comes through even in the gorgeous
ballad “So Sure,” on which Kano blurs the border between loverman and soldier
drawing up plans for conquest: “ain’t got time to be one of them guys just
watching you and wasting time/next time I’m clocking you I’m stopping you to
make you mine.” As much as the acutely observed lyrical details, it’s the
timbre of Kano’s voice that’s enthralling: slick yet grainy, like varnished
wood, and knotty with halting cadences that convince you he’s thinking these
thoughts aloud for the very first time.
TRIM
BOOGIEMAN
AFTERSHOCK
2004
BRUZA
NOT CONVINCED
AFTERSHOCK
2005
Like most
producers in most dance genres, grime beat-makers typically invent a striking
sound, then wear it out with endless market-milking iterations. Terror Danjah
has often approached that dangerzone, but on “Boogieman,” he shows how much
scope for inventive arrangement remains in the “Creep Crawler” template. You
can hear the cartoon-comical wooh-wooh ghostly touches best on the instrumental
version, “Haunted” (on Aftershock’s Roadsweeper
EP). “Boogieman” itself is a showcase for rising star Trim, here honing his
persona of scoffing imperturbality: “I’m
not scared of the boogieman/I scare
the boogieman.”
On “Not
Convinced,” Danjah draughts a whole new template that reveals the producer’s
roots in drum’n’bass (the track’s futuristic tingles vaguely recall’s Foul Play
“Being With You” remix). Again, though, the MC makes it hard to focus on the riddim.
More than anyone apart from not-grime-really Mike Skinner, Bruza incorporates British
intonation and idiom into a totally effective style of rapping, in which the
not-flow of stilted English cadences becomes a new flow. It sounds “brutal and British,” as Bruza puts it. As his
name suggests, the MC has also perfected a hardman persona that feels
authentically English rather than a gangsta fantasy based on Compton or Kingston. He exudes a laconic, steely menace redolent
of bouncers. “Not Convinced” extrapolates from this not-easily-impressed
persona to create a typology of character in which the world is divided into
the serious and the silly, the latter lacking the substance and conviction to
give their words authority. Bruza
addresses, and dresses down, a wannabe MC: “I’m not convinced/Since you’ve been
spitting/I haven’t believed one word/Not one inch/Not even a millimeter/To me
you sound like a silly speaker/Silly features in your style/You spit silly.”
