Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (61 page)

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Authors: Simon Reynolds

BOOK: Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture
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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 reaffirmed 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.
Young producer Dillinja was, like Size and Die, renowned for fusion-tinged masterpieces like ‘Sovereign Melody’ and ‘Deep Love’, with their softly glowing electric piano and flickers of lachrymose wah-wah guitar. But this tended to obscure Dillinja’s real claim to genius: the viciously disorientating properties of his beats and B-lines, which he convoluted and contorted into grooves of ear-boggling, labyrinthine complexity. ‘Warrior’ places the listener in the centre of an unfeasibly expanded drum-kit played by an octopus-limbed cyborg; the bass enters not as a B-line but a one-note detonation, an impacted cluster of different bass-timbres. On these and other Dillinja classics – ‘You Don’t Know’, ‘Deadly Deep Subs’, ‘Lionheart’, ‘Ja Know Ya Big’, ‘Brutal Bass’ – the jolting breaks trigger muscular reflexes and motor-impulses, so that you find yourself shadowboxing instead of dancing, tensing and sparring in a deadly ballet of feint, jab and parry.
If Dillinja and Size and Die were developing drum and bass as martial art, Danny Breaks’ work as Droppin’ Science is more like a virtual adventure playground, where collapsible breakbeats and trampoline bass trigger kinaesthetic responses, gradually hotrodding the human nervous system in readiness for the rapid-fire reaction-time required in the info-dense future. On tracks like ‘Long Time Comin” and ‘Step Off’ bass fibrillates like muscle with electric current coursing through it, hi-hats incandesce like fireworks in slow-mo, beats seem to run backward as uncannily as trick photography of a fallen house of cards tumbling back together. Throughout, melody limits itself to minimal motifs where the eerie fluorescent glow of the synth-goo is the real hook.
1995 – the year of jungle’s mainstream breakthrough in Britain – saw jungle torn every which way in a conflict between two rival models of blackness: elegant urbanity (the opulence and finesse of fusion/garage/ jazz-funk/quiet storm) versus ruffneck tribalism (the raw, percussive minimalism of dub/ragga/hip hop/electro). Lurking beneath this smooth/ruff dialectic was a covert class struggle: upwardly mobile gentrification versus ghettocentricity, crossover versus undergroundism.
On one side were those who equated ‘progression’ with making drum and bass sound more like other genres (house, garage, Detroit techno), and thus more appealing to outsiders; artists like Reece, Photek and Bukem, most of whom had deals with major labels by the end of 1995. And on the other side, there were the purists who wanted jungle to advance by sounding ever more intensely
like itself
, and therefore dedicated themselves to achieving hard-won increments of polyrhythmic intricacy and sub-bass brutalism. This strategy had the beneficial side effect of fending off outsiders, because it involved plunging ever deeper into the anti-populist imperatives of the art’s core (that’s to say, all the stuff that happens beneath/beyond the non-initiate’s perceptual thresholds). Most of these artists stuck with independent labels or put out their own tracks. Meanwhile, caught between intelligent’s serenity and the ruff-stuff’s moody minimalism, the idea of jungle as E’d up frisky funquake seemed to have simply dropped away altogether.
Soldiers of Darkness
 
By 1996, ‘jungle’ and ‘drum and bass’ were
the
words to drop. Everybody from thirtysomething jazz-pop duo Everything But The Girl to freeform improv-guitarist Derek Bailey was dabbling with sped-up breakbeats, as were techno types such as Underworld and Aphex Twin. Alex Reece’s jungle-lite convinced house fans they had nothing to fear, while Bukem launched a campaign to bring breakbeat rhythms to the clubbing mainstream, playing at venues like Cream and The End. Despite having played a big role in the gentrification process with his crusade for ‘jazzstep’, Fabio railed against the reduction of drum and bass to mere ‘wallpaper fodder’ by its use in TV links and commercials. One of the most bizarre examples of this syndrome is Virgin Atlantic’s use of Goldie’s ghetto-blues ballad ‘Inner City Life’ as tranquillizing muzak to steady passengers’ nerves before take-off!

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