With its synaesthetic textures and three-dimensional, audio-maze spatiality, Gerald’s music anticipates virtual reality. His music actually sounds like a datascape that’s sensorily intoxicating yet teeming with threat. On tracks like ‘Gloc’ and ‘Nazinji-Zaka’, breakbeats writhe like serpents, samples morph and dematerialize like fever-dream hallucinations, itchy ’n’ scratchy blips of texture/rhythm dart and hover like dragonflies. Like the labyrinthine, multi-tiered combat-zones in video-games, jungle offers a drastically intensified aural allegory of the concrete jungle; in Gerald’s case, the gang-infested, post-rave Manchester where he then still lived. ‘The samples of “you’re gonna be a bad motherfucker” are from Robocop,’ Gerald says of ‘Gloc’, which was named after the LA gangsta’s favourite automatic weapon, then retitled ‘Cyberjazz’ for the album. ‘It’s the scene where they’re rebuilding the cop as a cyborg after he got shot up. It fits, ’cos the track’s a remix, and I rebuilt it, put it through effects, armoured it.’
Leaving behind the ghetto for the visionary ether, 4 Hero’s Parallel Universe cleaved more to the mystical, utopian side of the Afro-futurist imagination. Space is the place where the race can escape terrestrial oppression. With its astrophysical imagery (titles like ‘Solar Emissions’, ‘Terraforming’ and ‘Sunspots’) and jazzy cadences, Universe is basically a digitized update of early seventies fusion à la Weather Report and Herbie Hancock. This is drum and bass freed of the surly bonds of gravity: quicksilver breakbeats vaporize and deliquesce, succulent keyboards ripple and striate like globules of liquid adrift in Zero-G. On tracks like ‘Wrinkles in Time’ and ‘Shadow Run’, the breaks seem to fluctuate in tempo and pitch, morphing as uncannily as Salvador Dali’s melting clocks. Throughout, the percussion is so extremely and exquisitely processed it’s tactile as much as rhythmic, caressing your skin and kissing your ears.
The Fusion Con
Parallel Universe also illustrates some of the perils of ‘armchair jungle’, though. On the mellow jazz-funk glide of ‘Universal Love’, the creamy ‘real’ vocal and smarmy saxophone seem like a misguided grab for ‘real music’ legitimacy. Similar problems beset Goldie’s Timeless, finally released in the summer of 1995 to rapturous praise. Despite the hosannas, Timeless was jungle’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band: 50 per cent genre-bending brilliance, 50 per cent ill-advised attempts to prove Goldie’s versatility.
When he was collaborating with his drum and bass peers – engineer-programmers like Playford, Dillinja, Dego from 4 Hero – the results were astonishing: ‘This Is A Bad’, ‘Jah The Seventh Seal’, ‘Still Life’, ‘Timeless’ itself (a sort of nineties ‘A Day In The Life’, with sixties anomie replaced by nineties millenarian paranoia). But whenever Goldie roped in ‘luminary’ players and vocalists from the jazz-world – Steve Williamson, Cleveland Watkiss, Justina Curtis, Lorna Harris – the results were embarrassing: the jazz-rock odyssey of ‘Sea of Tears’, the mushy mystic quiet stormscape of ‘Adrift’ (which David Toop described as ‘Luther Vandross on acid’). Goldie’s motley array of influences – David Sylvian and Japan, Pat Metheny, Byrne and Eno, Visage, the third Stranglers’ album – proved both a strength and liability. On the worst of Timeless, two particularly distressing sources – the slicked-out, early eighties Miles Davis of Decoy and Tutu, the clinical New Age jazz-fusion of The Yellowjackets – came to the fore, and came perilously close to fulfilling Rob Playford’s fantasy of drum and bass as twenty-first-century progressive rock. Goldie’s second album – 1998’s Saturnz Return – went all the way into prog terrain with its sixty minute concept track ‘Mother’ which was recorded with a full string orchestra.
Why did so many artcore junglists avidly embrace the most conventional and middlebrow signifiers of ‘musicality’ – sax solos, over-melismatic singing? The reason was that underneath the bravado and the futurist rhetoric, a secret inferiority complex lurked. Jungle is the most digitalized and sampladelic music on the planet. No acoustic sound is involved, nothing is recorded through a microphone. Jungle is composed from data derived from recordings, video or sound-modules (Pop Tart sized encyclopedias of samples and synth-tones), and it is assembled using programs like Cubase VST (virtual studio technology), which presents loops and motifs in visual form on the computer screen. ‘You feel like a conductor with an orchestra,’ one producer told me. But because jungle relies so heavily on production and effects, many producers secretly believed that ‘musicality’ involved moving away from digital technology.
By the end of 1994, some producers in the intelligent sector of drum and bass had started to abandon samplers for old-fashioned analogue synthesizers and sequencers as used by the early Detroit techno and Chicago house pioneers; these instruments were felt to be more hands-on and ‘musical’ than clicking a mouse. And many began to talk wistfully of working with ‘real’ instruments and vocalists. Omni Trio’s Rob Haigh complained to me at the time, ‘There is nothing worse than seeing house artists trying to get into that live muso vibe. The live element of our music occurs on the dancefloor. House and jungle are sequenced musics, created on computers.’ But few heeded the warning.
When a genre starts to think of itself as ‘intelligent’, this is usually a warning sign that it’s on the verge of losing its edge, or at least its sense of fun. Usually, this progressivist discourse masks a class-based or generational struggle to seize control of a music’s direction; look at the schism between prog rock and heavy metal, between the post-punk vanguard and Oi!, between bohemian art-rap and gangsta, between intelligent techno and ’ardkore. Often, the ‘maturity’ and ‘intelligence’ resides less in the music itself than the way it’s used (reverent, sedentary contemplation as opposed to sweaty, boisterous physicality). The majority of ‘intelligent jungle’ tracks were no smarter in their construction than the ruff ragga-jungle anthems. ‘Intelligence’ merely indicated a preference for certain sounds – bongos, complicated hi-hat patterns, floaty synth-washes, neo-Detroit string sounds – over others that were harsher, more obviously artificial and digitally processed.
It had always been somewhat ironic that jungle’s experimental vanguard resorted to the same rhetoric used in 1992, by evangelists for progressive house and intelligent techno, to dismiss breakbeat hardcore as juvenile and anti-musical. By early 1995, my anxieties about jungle’s upwardly mobile drift towards an ill-conceived maturity became horrendous reality. In record shops, I overheard customers (ap)praising tracks in terms of how ‘clean’ their production was. LTJ Bukem’s club Speed – initially founded on the sound premise of playing the tracks that were too experimental for the ‘jump-up’ junglist DJs to play out – quickly became a smug salon for the new smooth-core sound. In 1993, jungle clubs had been banished to the scuzzy margins of London. With its location just off Charing Cross Road, Speed symbolized the artcore junglists’ desire to remake their once despised scene as a metropolitan élite, just another West End clique like rare groove, Balearic or acid jazz. And it worked: everyone from Deelite has-been Lady Miss Kirby Kier to ancient prog-rock bore turned techno bod Steve Hillage to acid jazz maestro Gilles Peterson to Goldie’s future lover Bjork were jostling to be seen there.
Esotericism, elegance and élitism were now the watchwords. Moving Shadow caught the mood when they coined the ghastly slogan ‘audio couture’; the label’s output suddenly got fatally slick, with almost every release featuring their new house sound of scuttling bongos and what sounded suspiciously like a fretless jazz bass as played by some pony-tailed session man. Throughout the intelligent sector, producers studiously shunned anything that smacked of ragga boisterousness or pop catchiness; instead of hefty chunks of melody/lyric, vocal samples were reduced to the merest mood-establishing tint of abstract emotion, while keyboard motifs rarely amounted to anything as memorable as a riff, just timbral washes and jazzy cadences.
The new hegemony of tepid tastefulness coincided neatly with jungle’s rehabilitation by the very people – critics, A & R people, radio programmers,
techno producers – who had derided and marginalized hardcore in 1991 – 3. One example is the case of Pete Tong, Radio One’s leading dance music DJ and A & R for London Record’s dance imprint ffrr. In 1993, Tong had incurred the wrath of the hardcore scene when he remarked during an interview with a rave mag: ‘To be honest the breakbeat house and hardcore just drives me to despair and I’d rather give up than play this. The couple of thousand that still exist for what I call the rave audience, I just don’t want to cater for them. I’ll stand in front of anyone and say it, I think hardcore is boring, uninventive and not musically going anywhere, plus I don’t think it’s selling records anymore . . . When I say dead I mean it’s no longer inventive and it’s gone up its own arse. It’s had a good few years but now it’s time for it to give up.’ In 1994, Tong signed Goldie and DJ Crystl to ffrr; the following year he clinched an exclusive licensing deal with LTJ Bukem’s Good Looking/Looking Good label. At the end of 1995 Tong boasted in Mixmag that his proudest achievement that year was breaking Goldie internationally. Legend has it that jungle’s reintegration into the spectrum of ‘cool’ music was symbolized when Tong and Goldie embraced on the dancefloor at Speed.
Accompanying this nauseating rehabilitation process was a subtle rewriting of history, with some intelligent junglists – Bukem, Photek, Alex Reece, Wax Doctor – citing the Detroit-aligned likes of Carl Craig and The Black Dog as formative influences, while other key ancestors, perhaps too redolent of ’ardkore’s ‘one dimensional’ juvenilia were conveniently forgotten: Joey Beltram, Mantronix, Shut Up And Dance, the Prodigy. All this only served to reassure the recent hipster converts to drum and bass that they’d been right all along to dismiss hardcore as trashy drug-noise.
Desperate to distance themselves from ragga and to disown the ravey-ness of ’ardkore, the intelligent drum and bass contingent seized upon ‘fusion’ as a model of progression and maturity. Drum and bass was always a hybrid style. In the early ’ardkore days, this took the form of a collage-based, cut-up aesthetic, but ‘intelligent’ replaced that fissile mess-thetic with a seamless emulsion of influences. There was an explicit reinvocation of seventies jazz-fusion (samples of Lonnie Liston Smith and Roy Ayers licks, Rhodes piano trills, frilly bass parts, flute solos) and of subsequent musics influenced by that era, like jazz-funk, Detroit techno and garage. Too often, the result was a sort of twenty-first century cocktail music.
For intelligent junglists, ‘jazz’ signified flava, not process; there was no improv-combustion involved, just the use of a certain kind of chords. ‘Jazz’ also related to a specific British Black tradition, where said chord-sequences and a polished fluency connote relaxation, finesse, sophistication, upward mobility. And so on KISS FM’s newly commissioned weekly jungle show, DJ Fabio would hail tracks by artists like Essence of Aura, Aquasky and Dead Calm for their ‘rich, lavish production – real class!’ then exhort breakbeat-fans to ‘open their minds’. All this passionate advocacy on behalf of what was basically fuzak draped over unneccessarily fussy breaks!
‘Intelligent’ producers genuflected at the shrine of Detroit techno, seemingly oblivious to the irony that back in 1992 Derrick May, a recent and horrified visitor to Rage, had railed against breakbeat-based hardcore as ‘a diabolical mutation, a Frankenstein’s monster that’s out of control’. Take rising producer Rupert Parkes, who – as Photek, Studio Pressure et al – built up a reputation by making jungle sound more like ‘proper’ techno and less like its own superbad self. At every opportunity, he would stress his Detroit ‘roots’, telling iD that he and his allies (Wax Doctor, Alex Reece, Sounds of Life) had ‘more in common with Carl Craig’s music than we do with the majority of jungle’. And this was true: although tracks like ‘The Water Margin’ had a compelling neurotic frenzy, generally Parkes’s work infected drum and bass with the funkless frigidity and pseudo-conceptual portentousness of techno – just dig track titles like ‘Resolution’, ‘Book of Changes’, ‘Form and Function’!
Alex Reece, another jazzy-jungle pioneer, was basically a house bod; in interviews, he never namechecked anyone from jungle, or God forbid, the hardcore era (which he’d detested), but would instead declare of his beloved collection of classic house tracks, ‘I’d fucking cry if I lost ’em.’ Like his buddies Wax Doctor and DJ Pulse, Reece’s ambition was to seduce house fans into dancing to breakbeat rhythms. And so his tunes, like the Latin-tinged ‘Basic Principles’ and ‘Feel The Sunshine’, downplayed the cut-up, jagged breakbeat-science in favour of a slinky, easy-rolling flow. This disco-fication of jungle paid off massively just once, in the form of the monumental Speed anthem ‘Pulp Fiction’.
Perhaps the most influential icon of jungle’s gentrification was LTJ Bukem. In his music and his rhetoric, he more than anyone helped to define ‘intelligence’ as the repudiation of hardcore’s drug-fuelled energy. In retrospect, the title of his non-anthemic anthem ‘Music’ seems like a poignant plea to ‘take me seriously, please’. And while ‘Music’ and ‘Atlantis’ certainly warranted Bukem’s status as ‘the Derrick May of hardcore’ (as Rob Haigh put it), the comparison began to seem less complimentary when you recall May’s disdain for the’ooligans of ’ardkore.
Despite having played at big raves like Dreamscape and Raindance, Bukem was at pains to make out he’d never really been involved in rave and had only done E a handful of times. More than most computer-in-the-bedroom producers, Bukem had the resources to enable him to break with jungle’s radical sampladelia; as a child, he’d studied piano, steeped himself in fusioneers like Chick Corea, and played in a jazz-rock band. And so in his tracks, he deliberately muted the wildstyle FX of jungle’s breakbeat-aesthetic in favour of more naturalistic, less chopped up rhythms. ‘My sound is more realistic if you like . . . you could imagine [a drummer] drumming it,’ he told Mixmag in 1995. Why such a retreat – from digital anti-naturalism towards time-honoured muso values – should be regarded as an advance for jungle was never made clear.
By this point, the aqua-funk serenity of ‘Atlantis’ – once so startling – had become an aesthetic cul de sac. Bukem’s acolytes on Good Looking/Looking Good – PFM, Aquarius, Tayla, Ils and Solo – followed their guru by expunging all of jungle’s most adrenalizing and disruptive elements, in favour of a pleasant, placid formula of heart-beat basslines, smooth-rollin’ breaks and watercolour synths. Bukem’s own 1995 offering ‘Horizons’ was closer to jacuzzi than gulf-stream; its arpeggiated synths and healing chimes verged on New Age, as did the snatch of Maya Angelou wittering about how ‘each new hour holds new chances for new beginnings / the horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change’.
Fusion-jungle wasn’t an unmitigated calamity; tracks like E-Z Rollers’ ‘Rolled Into One’, Hidden Agenda’s ‘Is It Love’, PFM’s ‘one and only’, Adam F’s ‘Circles’ and Da Intalex’s ‘What Ya Gonna Do’ showed it was possible to incorporate smoother textures from seventies soul and jazz-funk without forsaking jungle’s polyrhythmic exuberance. But too many second division drum and bass units followed a formula. Start with an unnecessarily elongated, teasing intro; roll in the heavy-on-the-cymbals breaks; layer some wordless female vocal samples (measured, tasteful passion only, no helium-histrionics please); drag out the track, through percussive breakdowns and wafting synth-interludes, for eight minutes or longer; rinse the mix to get that airy, ‘just brushed freshness’ that sounds good on a really crisp hi-fi. Pursuing ‘depth’, but lacking the vision it took to get there, too many intelligent junglists washed up in the middlebrow shallows.
Rough Stuff
While the doyens of intelligence seemed to have forgotten what had originally made jungle more invigorating than trance or armchair techno, other producers – DJ SS, Asend/Dead Dred, Deep Blue, Aphrodite, DJ Hype, Ray Keith/Renegade – honed in on the genre’s essence: breakbeat-science, bass-mutation, sampladelia. Their work proved that the true intellect in jungle resided in the percussive rather than the melodic. Whether they were white or black, these artists r
eaffirmed drum and bass’s place in an African musical continuum (dub, hip hop, James Brown etc.) whose premises constitute a radical break with Western music, classical and pop.
Roni Size and sidekick DJ Die were exemplars. This duo is often regarded as pioneers of jazz-jungle, on account of their early 1994 classic ‘Music Box’ and its sequel ‘It’s A Jazz Thing’. Listen again to ‘Music Box’, though, and you realize that the sublime cascades of fusion-era chimes are only a brief interlude in what’s basically a stripped-down percussion workout. Size’s late 1994 monster ‘Time-stretch’ was even more austere, just escalating drums and a chiming bassline that together resemble a clockwork contraption gone mad. And the Size and Die early 1995 collaboration ‘11.55’ was positively murderous in its minimal-is-maximal starkness. What initially registers as merciless monotony reveals itself, on repeated plays, to be an inexhaustibly listenable forest of densely tangled breaks and multiple basslines (the latter acting both as subliminal, ever-modulating melody and as sustained sub-aural pressure), relieved only by the sparest shadings of sampled jazz coloration. Forcing you to focus entirely on what, in normal pop, is not consciously listened to – the rhythm section – ‘11.55’ clenches your brain until it feel like a knotted mass of hypertense tendons. Size and Die’s fiercely compressed, implosive aesthetic recalled bebop, in so far as it’s a strategy of alienation designed to discover who’s really down with the programme, by venturing deeper into the heart of ‘blackness’. Articulating this ‘it’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand’ subtext, and giving a gansta twist to the music’s glowering malevolence, was the soundbite at the beginning of ‘11.55’ – ‘you could feel all the tension building up at the convention / as the hustlers began to to arrive’ – sampled from Hustlers’ Convention, a solo album by a member of The Last Poets.
Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture Page 46
