Sovereign Rhythms Vol. 2 - A 1993 - 1995 Hardcore and Jungle Selection

Ok, back with the second half of this mix. We’ve had lots of great feedback about the first part, so hopefully this one should be at least as well received… although the concept of preferring one of these mixes mix over the other feels a little odd to me, cos I’ve always kinda thought of them as just one… thing. If there’s any difference in content here, I’d say that this part leans a little more towards the Junglistic than the first… with the overall sound getting a bit ‘blacker’ here, revealing more of the emergent reggae and hiphop influences in Jungle, and less of the nutty hardcore styles; also that this part is a little less likely to convert newcomers to old skool – it is perhaps a bit more specialist, reflecting the splintering into even-further sub-genres that was already taking place back in ’94.

Nonetheless, as ever, my intent was to play across those styles without regard for the fact that many of these producers would have considered what they were doing as very removed from one another (for example, Naughty Naughty and Hyper-on-E still flirted with the manic ‘Happy’ vibes that became Happy Hardcore – a sound that used to represent the absolute nadir of the music for ‘serious’ producers like Photek)… if anything I tried to play off these differences – indeed I sought them out, as I have ever done when mixing drum n bass music.

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(00:00) 1.Hyper-on-E - Monarch Of The Glen (Moving Shadow)
(05:49) 2.Naughty Naughty - Free (Rugged Vinyl)
(09:20) 3.Unknown - LSR 028 (Lucky Spin)
(13:48) 4.Foul Play - Beats Track (Moving Shadow)
(16:06) 5.The Sentinel - Heavy Vibes (Basement)
(19:25) 6.Code Blue - Angels In Dub (Dee Jay)
(22:19) 7.Goldie - Jah The Seventh Seal (ffrr)
(26:00) 8.Intense - Time Space Continuem (Rugged Vinyl)
(30:37) 9.DJ Hype - Mash Up Da Place [Origin Unknown Remix] (Ganja)
(34:18) 10.Dillinja - Heavenly Bass (Logic Productions)
(37:47) 11.Studio Pressure - The Lightning (Photek)
(42:47) 12.DJ Crystl - Warpdrive (Dee Jay)
(47:01) 13.The Renegade - Terrorist (Moving Shadow)
(52:02) 14.DJ Nut Nut feat. Frankie Paul & Top Cat - Special Dedication (Hardstep)
(56:04) 15.Higher Sense - Bizarre [Desired State Remix] (Moving Shadow)
(59:43) 16.Omni Trio - Be There (Moving Shadow)
(63:29) 17.Tek 9 - A London Sumting (Reinforced)
(67:28) 18.Q Bass feat. Skeng Gee - Gun Connection (Suburban Base)
(70:12) 19.Inna Rhythm - Carrie (Tone Def)
(74:36) 20.Studio Pressure - Fusion (Photek)

(00:00) 1.Hyper-on-E - Monarch Of The Glen (Moving Shadow)

So, picking up from where the last one left off - Hyper-On-E justify their name once again, taking an abrupt left-turn after their gorgeous dolphin-rave intro to ‘Monarch Of The Glen’ (apparently named after a long running British TV soap/drama set in Scotland if I’m not mistaken? - no, I have no idea either!), and coming with a stunning butcher’s-block chopping of crazy-ass samplage. This one provides yet another example of just how Hyper-on-E absolutely excelled at this kind of smooth/schizo style, before they decided to get all ‘sophisticated’ with E-Z Rollers…

(05:49) 2.Naughty Naughty - Free (Rugged Vinyl)

Next up, Naughty Naughty pursue the darkly sweet sound of late ’93 on ‘Free’… little creatures emerge from the darkness… it’s OK they’re nice! hang on, they’re not! no they are, no wait, they’re not! etc. This blend of the nice with the nasty – the blurring of intensities from ecstasy to unease – and even fear – is crucial to the thread that linked Hardcore to Jungle, but which Drum n Bass long ago severed in its quest for ‘musical’ credibility… The ever-straighter ‘musical’ paths that even the best of Drum n Bass has trodden since bears out the fact that, as a distinct genre, it initially emerged as a comparatively E-free zone by comparison with Hardcore (and even by comparison with Jungle): E’s were too unstable and too likely to induce non-‘musical’ ideas… which – ultimately – are harder to sell.

(09:20) 3.Unknown - LSR 028 (Lucky Spin)
(13:48) 4.Foul Play - Beats Track (Moving Shadow)
(16:06) 5.The Sentinel - Heavy Vibes (Basement)

This seemed the perfect place to darken proceedings up a little, and so comes this dreamy number (a track I haven’t been able to identify – anyone? LSR 028?), a supremely laid-back little roller on Lucky Spin… As a lesson in making ‘chilled-out’ compelling, this one is about as good as it gets; it plays with clichés but carves a path all its own by refusing to do the obvious and instead sucks us into its strange world. Rollin on… to more rhythmic magic from The Masters: Foul Play… and if Photek didn’t learn 90% of his tricks from a close study of their work in 93/94, then I’ll eat my own shorts – and his as well if necessary. And hey! A heavy, heavy amen workout from Photek himself (aka The Sentinel) follows: it’s all here in his trademark style in ‘Heavy Vibes’, big, bold, decisive moves – no waste, but at this point (still fired up on breakbeat’s fury, and still fuelled by the vision of ‘drum n bass’ as a 3-D soundtrack to urban living rather than as a throwaway form of mass-produced entertainment) – the technique remains subservient to the vibe. Later… as the process came to take precedence over the content, the technique became the ‘vibe’ i.e. that which we are to appreciate most i.e. that which makes the track ‘work’, or ‘not work’. And so it goes…

(19:25) 6.Code Blue - Angels In Dub (Dee Jay)
(22:19) 7.Goldie - Jah The Seventh Seal (ffrr)

Rolling darkly and dubbily into ‘Angels In Dub’ from Code Blue (aka Slipmaster J, aka one half of Future Sound Of Hardcore w/ studio maestro Pete Parsons), this one plays the old-time emo-chords shamelessly (reminds me of that ol’ tear-jerker Skanna in that way), but pulls it off via deep drops into minimal echoing drum rollouts… And on, teasing in Goldie’s ‘Jah The Seventh Seal’, engineered by Dillinja for the ‘Timeless’ LP… Dillinja does some very similar drum-panning bizness to this on his own ‘Heavenly Bass’ (more of which later) – and on his ruffneck ‘Sky’ on Philly Blunt too, for that matter – but as always, Goldie knew how to get technique from the people with the skills, and then to employ it on a wider canvas. Simon Reynolds described this track as Goldie’s ‘cyber-dub riposte’ to the ragga junglists… I’m not sure how much substance there is to that (and listening to Remarc’s ‘Thunderclap’ or to numerous other examples… Mensa’s ‘Bad Boy’ on Tearin Vinyl also springs to mind), I’m not sure if I could agree at all… nonetheless, it’s an interesting way to counterpoint what Goldie was at within (roughly) the same space at that time… and by mid 95 I was certainly already gagging to hear mixtapes featuring something other than endless Amens mixed into Amens…

(26:00) 8.Intense - Time Space Continuem (Rugged Vinyl)
(30:37) 9.DJ Hype - Mash Up Da Place [Origin Unknown Remix] (Ganja)

More dark interstellar voyaging next from Intense with ‘Space Time Continuem’, living up to their name once more with ruff cuts on the drums and a widescreen sensibility on the samples. And BOH! One of my favourite Jungle tracks - Andy C and Ant Miles remixing Hype’s badboy ‘Mash Up Da Place’ on Ganja… actually I can remember thinking that the vocal sample here was “Martial Display” whilst still hearing it only on mixtapes; while it wasn’t that, I think ‘martial display’ certainly does captures something about the ballsy ruffneck intensity of this one… like the NZ rugby team doing their pre-march wardance… except there’s no rugby… and these guys eat you when they finish their moves… Where Hype’s original is rolling and ruff, this remix is pure psychedelic Jungle Surround-Sound, a mesh of interlocking grooves and martial riffs working over a vibe of pure dark energy. Savage.

(34:18) 10.Dillinja - Heavenly Bass (Logic Productions)

And now the flex from Dillinja. Holy shit. Just listening again! …. mutating the Amen rather than torturing it (which is what most amen-flexers before – and since – have been guilty of i.e. Amen-abuse)… and here he teases it into new shapes, rather than deconstructing it from the ground up like, say, Remarc. I always think of a dancer suddenly moving in slo-mo when I hear those time-stretched beats, as he fucks – not just with our sense of rhythm but with our sense of time itself. The weird thing is of course that nearly all club systems are in mono, so if you play this out you lose some of the most crucial edits in the drum-panning. But doesn’t it appeal that someone like Dillinja used neither to know – nor perhaps even to care from time to time – about some of the restrictions imposed by the environment in which his music was to be heard? That there was a time when he was expressing something in his music other than a slavish and fearful subservience to ‘technique’…?

(37:47) 11.Studio Pressure - The Lightning (Photek)
(42:47) 12.DJ Crystl - Warpdrive (Dee Jay)

And now comes the linear Photek... with ‘The Lightning’. This was the first ‘drum n bass’ record to make me think differently about mixing – very little really ‘happens’ in it, so to be really effective it has to be layered up with other tunes and dropped just right (I hadn’t come from techno, you see…). As always though with early Photek, its mood is perfectly pitched, and fine-tuned with artful subtlety… The heaviness continues with the original mix of ‘Warpdrive’ from that lost legend, the King Of The Beats: DJ Crystl (with, as always, a little help from Pete Parsons on the controls). I always imagine Crystl – the hiphop B-boy – brocking out like a rave-demon on (as he claimed) a mere quarter of a pill to this stuff shortly after his conversion to breakbeat rave. So many seriously intense tunes in such a short time, and yet Crystl had disappeared from the scene by ’96… What might have happened had he ended up in a studio with Nico during the heady days of No-U-Turn / techstep’s ascent in ‘95? One can only dream…!

(47:01) 13.The Renegade - Terrorist (Moving Shadow)
(52:02) 14.DJ Nut Nut feat. Frankie Paul & Top Cat - Special Dedication (Hardstep)

Ray Keith’s anthemic ‘Terrorist’ gets a seriously deep and moody reworking from Grooverider next. Still cutting up his beats and piling them atop one another with little concern for technique at this stage (no surprise that in the long term he pushed ‘Hardstep’: the style with the easier-to-mix-and-make beats!), the effect here is nonetheless fat as fuck… Grooverider always had a good ear for picking just the right samples to create a unique vibe… no-one else ever sounded quite like him... And on to another one of my favourites (you’ll be getting a lot of that in here!): ‘Special Dedication’ from DJ Nut Nut… with vocals from reggae veterans Frankie Paul and Top Cat. A slick-as-fuck blend of street-rudeness with wilful ‘musicality’ (check the breakdown, where everything just… times out….), this is for anyone who thinks that they don’t like ‘ragga jungle’.

(56:04) 15.Higher Sense - Bizarre [Desired State Remix] (Moving Shadow)
(59:43) 16.Omni Trio - Be There (Moving Shadow)

Next: the remix of ‘Bizarre’ from Higher Sense on Ram… so busy, teetering on the claustrophobic – you can feel the darkness all round, but there’s still a light at the heart of the music at this point: hence the overall charged, upbeat vibe on here. Which is exactly where Omni Trio fits in – at precisely the point where the darkness can still be dissipated by the optimism of ecstasy. This track is off the ‘Renegade Snares’ 12”… can’t say as I’ve ever heard anyone else play it… ever! Apart from being a motherfucker to mix, many of Rob Haigh’s startling tracks were too ‘pop-weird’ for the emergent Jungle scene in ’94 despite the success of ‘Renegade Snares’… and thus many kinda got overlooked, in my book. This one, ‘I’ll Be There’, is a strange electro-skinny rush of hyped-up mood switching – ebullient one moment, and then uncertain the next – and it’s that tension that keeps it vital.

(63:29) 17.Tek 9 - A London Sumting (Reinforced)

On to the Dollis Hill cru now, as they don their Tek 9 hoodies to show the ’94 Junglists just how to ruffen things up but in fine style – on their extraordinary rework of Code 071’s ‘A London Sumting’. With its spliced-n-diced vocals ‘n’ drums teasing out the tension behind the coolness, this track exhibits a kind of staggering poise: so minimal, so finely executed… and yet so raw – an absolute masterpiece that, like the best graffiti art, somehow manages to seem like it was just thrown up on the fly. Awesome.

(67:28) 18.Q Bass feat. Skeng Gee - Gun Connection (Suburban Base)
(70:12) 19.Inna Rhythm - Carrie (Tone Def)

Q Bass aka Suburban Base supremo Dan Donnelly comes next with a track that sounds like it was made in the 19th century (that loop sounds positively steam-powered!)… with nary a hint of synthesis, he pushes the clattering woodblock drums and the ghetto-style vocal to the fore, and the track sounds all the tougher for it… “take out me riiizlaaa, me take oot Em-bass-y!” And then dropping straight into a beautiful deep roller from Darren Jay’s Tone Def label: Inna Rhythm with ‘Carrie’. Again it’s all in the samples (taken from the movie)… but they’re applied with a delicacy of touch here that put this track in a league of its own; one can only imagine how a remix done in today’s style would approach using such source material…! Aieeeeeeeee

(74:36) 20.Studio Pressure - Fusion (Photek)

And paving the way for ‘95… we round off with Photek once more, and just the merest touch of his sweetly vibrant ‘Fusion’ (the name still does my head in) before fade-out! That’s it, Part 3 has yet to be recorded, so seeya in 2009 hahaha! Big up to Droid once again for getting this mix up and out – and please take the time just to say hi on here if you’ve downloaded and enjoyed this mix or indeed any of the mixes: poor old Droid needs just a little encouragement from Humankind occasionally despite his apparent heart of steel!