dissensus jungle poll - forgot / never knew, part 3

Continuing my comb-through for junglistic jems I never heard or didn't recognise on sight....  now it's the turn of Woebot's Top 40 picks

Well, I know nearly all of these 

In fact I think there are just five that didn't immediately ring a bell


Dillinja - "Untitled" from the Tough Toonz EP

Or is Tough Toonz actually the label? The mighty D's debut at any rate. 

I am going to assume Matt means the A1 tune



Never heard that. Rough, murky... good stuff. 

Tantalised though by the possibility he meant one of the other Untitleds on this EP, Like this - 



 - which is actually even more jungalistic, a skittering roil laced with droney smears of degraded sample-texture, then punctured by a stammering vocal riff like a Rasta spectre with a speech impediment  

Dillinja's formative years are dense

Postscript #1: Matt says the D'ja trak he has in mind is at 2:37:51 in this mix he did a while back


 
Yes that's good innit - has the edge on the previous tune - the way the breaks seem to whiplash out of dense whirl of murk - ditto those sharp stings of mentasmoid sound
Baby D, "Daydreaming"



This 1990 track is great - more bleep than jungle, though surely? Or did Matt mean a later rmx?



I guess there is something tribally coming through in this sound, a premonition of tangled rhythmic undergrowth

I recognise the vocal melody / performance but don't know either of the versions here

Now does Acen with his Acenhallucination rmx of '91 push it further toward junglizm?



It's getting there! Big and bashy. I would still file this under 'hardcore' though


DJ Hype, "Come Again"



Ah, never heard that, It's ace. Better than "The Trooper", its A-side - a somewhat underpar effort from Hype.  "Come Again" has great little dubwize bleeps and an unusual groove with a military-drill feel, impossibly crisp and precise.

This is the first so far I would add to my own 200 (although I think I've actually spilled well over that number at this point)

Actually, listening to "The Trooper" again, it's really pretty exciting. 




I think at the time for me it didn't match "A Shot In the Dark", "Weird Energy (Hells Bells Mix)", "I Can't Understand It (Scratch the Fuck Out of the Beginning Mix)" "The Chopper"... 



The Johnny Jungle rmx on The Joint is even better

Back to Matt's

DJ Solo and DJ Rossie - "Sure Shot"

Well they don't have that one on YouTube as far as I can tell - the title definitely rings a loud clangy bell but nothing in the way of sound-pictures fill the mindscreen

They got the flipside though, "Inna Strength" - which is really good. Classic bit of rusty bedsprings a-clanking 'n' a-creakin' away with those sproinnnngy processed breaks and a bassline that is fast but reggae-feel, pummelling away below like a fist swinging up beneath your ribcage.




Postscript #2: Matt says that "Sure Shot" is at 41:02 in this other mix of his


Ah, yes, that is really good -  Think + thunderbass choppage that gets all clattery and pots-and-pans-y
Adding to this one to the ever-growing canon!


Despite worshipping "Darkage" I have never really got a fix on Solo's other work

This one is good and definitely sets a few memory-tingles going



This is a minor classic 



And the last one from Matt's list I didn't recognise


Trinity, "Chapter 19"



Another good one - not as atmospheric OR as deadly honed in its beats 'n bass as Mighty D would get in a year's time (this tune apparently circulating from late '93 on dubplate) but nice churning pummel with some slashing smears of tekno-blare still hanging in there, a linger from hardcore days. Then it goes into terrific middle bit with a sort of I-lost-my-mind broken-doll-person feel about it. Yup a gem - and something I never heard before.    

I tend to think of D's aliases like Trinity as being equivalent to Tom & Jerry vis-a-vis 4 Hero - i.e the main name is the auteur name, the artcore name, while the alias(es) are the cater-to-the-massive, bread 'n' butter brand.  But "Chapter 19" makes me think I should check through the Trinity trackage thoroughly.


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

I was thinking I would do Sadmanbarty's lot right away but I glanced at them and "lot" is the right word - list is ENORMOUS, and full of things I don't recognise. I'll have to gird my loins for that sort-through session. 

the other hardcore

cool Top Ten list + commentary on the other hardcore - the Euro 4-to-floor kind - done for LA Weekly by  JOEL “DJ DEADLY BUDA” BEVACQUA

No false modesty here - includes one of his own tracks!



And bigs up the Southern California scene whence he hails



Intriguing references to hardcore subgenres morph beats and rawstyle...

No surprises who gets the #1 spot - who else could it be? -  but plenty of surprises along the way

This dude Angerfist is apparently the hot name in hardcore techno right now



Bevacqua's magazine The Hard Data

Deadly Buda's soundcloud

"useless junglism"

"weird useless junglism" is how Jon Dale described this track

whole Joan Skyler album here

on the same label Reckno, Jon also recommends Teresa Winter

And finally directs me to the work of  K.Barley whose aliases are Bambooman and GroupHums

"we are in the throes of a hardcore rave renaissance"

says Ian McQuaid at Bandcamp, citing a bunch of labels reissuing the stuff including Stay On Target,  Underground Music, Force Mass Motion, and Jedi Recordings

"For most ravers, the hardcore scene was documented via tape packs; live recordings of an event from start to finish, divided over anything from four to 12 cassettes, and sold by the thousand in boxes covered with the garish rave scene packaging ... Particularly strong DJ sets were copied and passed from person to person. There were never any tracklists (and this is way before the days of seeking out IDs online); the best a fan could hope for was the names of the DJ, the MC, and the rave itself. The tape pack system meant that a 12” could be a self-released white label with a print run of 500, sold from a tiny specialist record shop, yet still go on to underground immortality if it was played by the right DJ on the right tape—as is the case with Alex Reece and Jack Smooth’s 20 Hertz EP, a militant darkside classic with a tiny press run. It will currently set you back nearly $200 for a copy."

200 quid for that? Praps the other two tunes on the EP are better.

Back to McQuaid's story

"Over a quarter-century later, there’s a huge thirst from both old school ravers and new fans to find those obscure recordings. A host of reissue labels have sprung up, searching out original DATs (the digital studio format tracks were recorded onto before being pressed to vinyl), and producing high quality vinyl and digital represses, making available ultra-rare records that would otherwise fetch ridiculous prices."

a renaissance, strictly speaking though, would be new people doing stuff informed by the old principles and parameters

who are out there of course - just not the subject of this piece


This looks to be a very useful collection of DJ Seduction's works - 39 tracks + 2 remixes for a tenner