The Crystl Vision

Derek Walmsley speaks in depth with DJ Crystl, one of the lost legends - discussing his production techniques and his thwarted career (signed to London, but never made an album) as well as his resurfacing with the sample-pack FUTURIZM and a remixes album. 

Derek - "What makes Crystl’s records stand out is the full-frequency attack and mesmerising detail he and his studio buddies created from that break, a bit of multi-tracking, and some reverb and delay. He could make drums sound like whirlwinds, futuristic machinery, or gamelan orchestras. The wildest fantasies of the 20th century pioneers of electronic sound – of how music could be created from noise, and how the use of everyday sounds could take music out of the concert hall and to hitherto unheard places – were realised in jungle and the music of producers such as Crystl."

Crystl on Amentalism: “It’s all sliced up completely, and then pitch-changed, and then different snares are added, and then there’s transient manipulation, and then there’s different plug ins which go on it, and then there’s parallel compression. It’s almost like making a fucking track, on one drum.....   It would be displayed over the keyboard in every little segment...  I would play physically, manually, all of my drums, all of the edit, record it in, then quantise if it needed it. It’s all hand played. I didn’t ever draw anything.”

Crystl on cartoon physics: "I make the drums animated" 

The Hertfordshire/Hardcore Continuum nexus, ahoy! - "By around 1993, he fell into making tracks for North London dance label Lucky Spin. “They were a couple of Hertfordshire brothers. And I was doing the artworks and stuff. I did the first tracks for them and carried on.”

Crystl on his creative wellspring:  “Organised chaos, in my head. I’ve got one of those very noisy brains. I find it very hard to organise myself, actually.” 

If not the One, then one of the Ones - "Warpdrive" was a track that rearranged my brain, made me see-hear how looping a break wasn't an easier option to programming a drum machine, but a new discipline, an emerging science, a field of competition.

That and the sheer violence of it - that crashing, collapsing break that first comes in at 2.24.

 

Then "Let It Roll" - incredible cut-glass breaksmanship

Here's a playlist I made that has most of Crystl's tunes in it, in more or less chronological order.

Benny L's remix of "Warpdrive" forthcoming on the remixes project

The rest of the Crystl corpus is good but doesn't quite impact to the same degree as "Warpdrive" and "Let It Roll".

This is an exciting effort

"Here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get to the future" - Crystl uses the sample from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension  (never heard of it? me neither) before Nico and Trace do on "Amtrak"

Also nice use of a synth wash from The Black Dog's "Virtual"

Talking of expensive mainstream-movie flops of the 1980s.... now, is that a sample from the Jim Henson movie in there? 

Why yes it is!

(I once got sent to review Labyrinth - godawful it was)

in - out... in... out... Shake'n' Vac it all about

 "i always feel like UK Hard House has been snubbed from being part of the "hardcore continuum"...... like listen to this and tell me it wasnt massively influenced by jamaican soundsystem culture"

- says someone on Twitter, completely misunderstanding how the nuum works (it's not like a party you're invited or not to invited to...  or a club with a strict bouncer - me! - at the door. Hard house is not nuum because they were no hard house pirate radio stations, no MCs or rewinds or dubplates etc etc)

Anyway I love this idea that a random Musical Youth sample is indication, nay proof, of the deep connection between hard house and Jamaican music!

Mind you, it's a pretty exciting track. Reminds me of the Commander Tom "Are Am Eye" killertune - not nuum, but Noom

I heard this the other day for the first in a decade probably and was struck by how Eurorave it was  - that Nordic race memory coming through the Dutch / Afrikaans thing 

I kinda would like to have liked Hard House more, just cos it's so pillhead lumpenprolekult....but it's a bonebrained stomp too far for me. 

Bit like the Liberator squat acid thing - I loved the whole "It's not Intelligent, It's not from Detroit, But it's fucking 'avin it" stance - and probably would have vicariously enjoyed the mad-for-it vibe in a squatrave.  But when it comes to actually listening habitually to that kind of thing...

We Were E

 RIP the legendary Lennie De Ice

Real name Lenworth Green. A first name I've never seen before. The whole name sounds like a place. 

I can't remember what I was watching - an old episode of Snub seen many years after its 1988 broadcast ? - but can remember my surprise on encounteringthe source of that almost distraught-with-XTC "we are e-e-e-e-e"

Rai'd on tyme. 

It was on the indie-alt TV show Snub  because Factory licensed the rai track and put it out late 1987. 

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Lennie made a load of other solid tunes without ever reapproaching the 'lightning captured in a bottle' effect of that debut 

Mixed at the Dark Side Studio - quite early for that concept to be in circ. 

Like the use of the wonderful phased vocal intro bit - "no time for no time for criticizing / music's hypnotizing" - from Raw Silk's "Do It To The Music" (postdisco classic, bought this at the time - heard the first time on Top of the Pops and was floored) 

A reflicker here of the bliss-stricken "we are eeeeeee" sample

Smackman on the right geeking out 

Getting intelligentish in a sort of Bodysnatchish way

Which is funny cos one of his alter egos was called Body Snatcher

I like the use of the word 'terrible' in this next title -  the Ivan / sublime awe-ful majesty vibe of it undercut by the blokey bathos of 'well' 

The best things he did apart from 'I.E' were as part of Dubb Hustlers  

"Jungle Tremble" -  cool, odd title that

One more time for the all-time classic  - the original remastered (and on Hooj Choons for some reason)

the unrevived and the unrevivable

 Shawn Reynaldo's latest newsletter starts by asking what are the defining sounds of the first half of 2020s and then talks about how the current scene is dominated by revivalism, before reaching its reall subject (wait for it):

Yet even as dancefloors have warmed to a wider range of tempos and drum patterns, they’ve also remained stubbornly in thrall to the past. Recycling has always been big in dance music, and the 2020s have put that tendency into overdrive. Aside from the aforementioned revivals, the past few years have also seen large-scale flirtations with electroclash, bloghouse, trip-hop, progressive house, Eurodance and numerous other ghosts of dance music’s past, many of them from the late ’90s and early ’2000s. In purely aesthetic terms, Y2K-era cosplay has dominated the decade to date, and that, in combination with the current affinity for breakbeats, should have theoretically cleared the way for one specific sound to come steaming back into the dance music conversation.

That sound? Nu-skool breaks, which oddly doesn’t seem to be one anyone’s radar...

The readable-by-nonsubscribers bit ends there, which is a good cut off point, because 

a/ it's where I burst out laughing

b/ it's a nice cliffhanger (have to wait until the whole newsletter becomes readable to all to find out what his argument in favor of nu-skool breaks having its moment in the retro sun would be)

It did get me wondering though

1/ What would be Shawn's argument in favor of nu-skool breaks having untapped revival potential? 

2/ Has everything else that could be revived already been revived, in fact? What are the other things that haven't been recycled yet? (Thinking specifically in dance music, but could be a wider span).

3/  What things are unrevivable? That no one will ever touch with a retro bargepole?

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I have to say, I find the idea of the Y2K as a rich seam for revivalists to be a bemusing idea - here's a real-time Year 2000 piece I wrote about the slim pickings (nu-skool breaks glancingly mentioned)  organized around the concepts of The Next Medium-Sized Thing and "plausible deniability"