why is this 1971 advertisement from the era before deejays were cool?

it's not the fashion - the sideburns, the superwide tie. 

that look was with-it then

no, it's the fact that being a deejay involved using a microphone

this is the era when deejays weren't silent figures intently focused on mixing one record into the other

as important as picking tunes and reading rooms was the smarmy patter they had to maintain between songs

Smashy and Nicey wasn't just a wunnerful Radio One archetype

it was a social fact across the nation, in discotheques and office do's catered to by mobile deejay outfits

the deejay was as much a master-of-ceremonies as a mixmaster

(few of them even mixed records in those days)

they were hosts of party - instigators of congas, announcers of the smoochy up-close slowie section of the night

often using a fake American smoothie accent I should imagine 

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"Hospital radio is a good beginning" says Radio 1 deejay Johnny Walker

 In June I went to Bristol to do a Still In A  Dream event at Strange Brew. Wandering around, we saw all these posters for jungle raves and drum and bass club nights. I thought, "wow the scene is more pumping still to this day than I could have imagined"

In amidst the endless how-to-hakken reels....

Listening to this perfect little tune - a favorite from 2step garage days - I noticed how the whole track is propelled along by horn fanfares.

I'm assuming they are synth-horns, if only because used in such a programmed riff sort of way, precisely the same in every iteration. 

They actually sound quite realistic in timbre, so it's possible the riff was played by a hornsman and then sequenced.

In "Clean Riddem"  the way the synthi-horn functions is very different from ersatz-sax is usually deployed in UKG. Typically it exudes a sensual, sultry smoky vibe and it takes the form of parping micro-vamps. 

Here it's more like the "jousting" fanfares that Dexys Midnight Runners went in for.  Sort of punchy and pugilistic. 

"Clean Riddem" and flipside "No Fighting" - ooh gosh!   Transfusions of pure joy...  ruff 'n' smooth in perfect balance. Unimprovable in every just-so detail. 

I did a whole post on  Angel Farringdon a while back

And here is the original Those Horny Horns post 

(oh and another slight return to the subject)

My Instagram keep throwing up reels of Charlotte de Witte, who apparently is one of the biggest deejays in the world.  

I thought I'd check out her stuff, so tried the Mixmag mix she did in 2021

Where I heard this:  

Thought it might be some old skool acid from back in the day I'd never heard - but it was originally released in 2019 by one Robert S.

I cannot believe this kind of thing is still being churned out. It's a 39 year old sound! 

I used to grumble about the eternal returns of acid in the early 2000s when e.g. Luke Vibert did a record of acid house jams - so I suppose I am locked in my own loop here.

Still, making acid house now, it's like Robert Cray doing the blues in the '80s. 

The whole mix is full of deja vu / deja entendu licks and builds, pulses and breakdowns - a completely terra cognita of trance and banging techno. Hyperstasis, without even the hyper bit, the frantic scurrying for an exit off the recombinant plateau. 

So then I thought I would try her more recent artist-album of 2025.

Where my eye alighted on the feat. of a familiar name, the sort of ethereal diva that the likes of Future Sound of London / Messiah / The Beloved / Utah Saints would sample way way backintheday: Lisa Gerrard, of Dead Can Dance, 4AD cult legends....

Lisa wafts mystic, effing the ineffable, over pummeling steroid-maxed techno that is like a Creatine-recreation of "Horsepower" by Ravesignal aka C.J. Bolland. (A Belgian, like de Witte.)

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Talking of eternal returnings, elsewhere on the 'Gram, I saw a reel where someone asserted that tech-house was played out and that UK Garage was the fresh thing coming through. 

Again with the flashbacks, this time to the end of the '90s, very early 2000s, when both sounds were in the ascendant in their respective - wholly unconnected - corners of the dance scene. 

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The other thing I'm seeing a lot of is hakken reels - people showing how to dance to gabber and its variants like hardstyle, etc. 

It looks a bit.... goosesteppy, to be honest, at times. 

But I suppose more wholesomely, hakken - also known as hakkûh - could be seen as being in the tradition of all-the-action-is-below-the-knee pan-European folk dance styles, from Morris Dancing to that Irish riverdance style to I dunno Tyrolean frolics beyond my ken

Hakken today seems slightly different to jumpstyle, involving more of the whole leg - so all-the-action-is-below-the-waist maybe.  Still, a stampy sort of dance

According to Wiki, hakken comes from a Dutch word meaning the heels of the feet 

I thought it had something to do with a Teutonic word that would be the root of our "hack", as in hack with an axe. 

I do remember the word being around in the '90s and I naively took it to be a kind of garbling of "hardcore". 

This also files under "eternal returns of....." but with variations - new complexifications (backsteps and what have you... dancers raising a knee at an angle and slapping their ankle... ) added to the stompy stampy core of it. 

A sort of volkist version of Baraka's "changing same"

I was quite taken with the Bass-O-Matic album, cringe though the band name is

In the review, I make that cardinal rockcrit error of looking for the dance artist who can sustain at album level.  Writing still from outside the culture at this point (October 1990, a year before the Conversion). 

The technorave-chillout yen for Pink Floyd is worth a mini-essay - wasn't there some ambient house (89-90 phase) track that samples "Wish You Were Here"?  Consults faded regions of the back brain - ah yes, Innocence, "Natural Thing"

The Orb obviously.... The KLF too. And there was an ardkore track by the wonderfully named E that interpolated from The Wall - "Nobody's Home", the line "I've got a little black book with my poems in"  became "oi! I've got a little black disk with me tune on it", and I think a bit of David Gilmour soloing also got sampled at the end. It's the first tune here

The technoptimism of  this end of '80s /start of '90s moment is endearing - painfully poignant  too, considering all that has happened since, from world stuff to the "bright promise of digital technology" going rancid. 

All this stuff - Shamen and Deeelite particularly, but also The Grid, Adamski, The Orb, KLF, 808 State , Underworld,  Humanoid / very early Future Sound of London etc, One Dove, Hypnotone ie. for the most part house music made by former rock people  -  all of it flashes me back to smart drinks, flotation tanks, Mondo 2000,  Terence McKenna books, Nicholas Saunders, Fraser Clark, "zippies", etc etc

These blogs are Ciccone-free zones but "Ray Of Light" was one of Madonna's more bearable singles. I hope William made a lot of money off it and the album. 

This is an Orbit tune the heads love

I am not sure I ever traced the William Orbit trail back to Torch Song

Joy pipes up: "I loved that song! I didn't know it was William Orbit!"

She thinks she must have heard it at Danceteria. 

Thanks to Gemma Ross for including Futuromania in the Mixmag list of summer reading for dance music fiends 

The full list is here, a worthy bunch to sit alongside indeed 

From a 1971 issue of Melody Maker

Still, there are two turntables - plus bonus feature of a built-in cassette recorder!

This slight return is picking up on the earlier post about the extensive prehistory of discotheques and "disco music"  - prior to disco as we have come to misunderstand it. 

A time when the music was as likely to be some form of rockin' pop as it was soul. And deejays used a  a microphone more than a mixer, since patter was a big part of their performance. 

Trawling through a load of early '70s MM's, Sounds, NME's, it is striking how they increasingly have disco sections in the advertising pages, speaking to the burgeoning market for mobile discotheques and all the attendant gear. 

halfway through the "Menace" diva  sample appears - much closer to its original speed rather than the ooh oohing whipped soul-cream  of the Rufige Cru track

But where oh where is the "Peace Sign (Classic Piano Mix)"?

Ah seems it Was reissued by Kniteforce

https://kniteforcerevolution.com/store/product/peace-sign-ep-12-vinyl

Ar least you can hear the original demo version

https://shadesofrhythm.bandcamp.com/track/peace-sign-original-demo

Shades of Rhythm do have one other track that really does it for me

Fun and fascinating -  with fabulous fotos - Danceteria oral history by Joy Press, aka the missus, who was a regular at the legendary New York club in the 1980s. 

Everyone from Madonna and Fab 5 Freddy to Mark Almond and Michael Musto to Beastie Boys and Butthole Surfers makes an appearance. 

Something in the air clearly - in freaky synchrony the final Soft Cell album is titled Danceteria, while Madonna has a single out called "Danceteria". Joy was working on this story for months for discovering these unexpected pegs to the piece.

"John Sex was singing there.... She said 'dear, I'm not a deejay, I'm an atmosphere engineer'"

"Everybody here is a work of art"

Here's a real-time tribute by Soft Cell, shaped by their New York clubland adventures, when they hooked up with a character called Cindy Ecstasy. She has a rapping cameo on the re-recorded version of "Memorabilia" that appeared on Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing. This was one of the first remix albums, alongside The Human League's Love and Dancing (released under the alias The League Unlimited Orchestra) and The B-52s Party Mix!

Really like the echo-chambered horn section on this, which reminds me a bit of "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone"

"Memorabilia" is much more in the zone of avant-funkers like 23 Skidoo and A Certain Ratio than the Northern Soul meets Suicide smashes that made Soft Cell pop stars. 

Had Instagram for ages but never got into looking at it regularly until quite recently....  the algorithm has learned to serve me up dance music, above all reels of deejays playing tunes, either in their living room, or it's clips of them performing at a rave. 

What follows are some thoughts on dance music today informed entirely by the Instagram perspective

TimeisNOTnow

I say 'dance music today', but the first thing that comes across on Instagram is not-todayness: how dance music exists in a state of complete atemporality.  Tunes from decades ago sit alongside current tunes that are either just incrementally different contributions to an established tradition (techno, house, d&B, trance) or they are outright retro (with just a glisten of contemporary production polish). Deejays draw from across a huge bank of stuff, where the long-ago and the this-minute are equally valid. 

There's a tremendous awareness of history - a lot of clips are like very brief history lessons, on a genre or even a sound (like say Reese bass), or an artist (DJ Zinc  doing a great little potted history of three key tracks by A Guy Called Gerald).  Yet offsetting that the effect of the platform interface is that chronology is completely jumbled, there's little sense of a tune's original context (let alone adversarial context) or its place in historical sequence.  

What has completely vaporized is the idea that anything is obsolete or passé. Everything exists in a permanent plateau of equal relevance - which has the side effect of making it impossible for any one sound (should an actually fully new sound ever emerge) to assert itself as supremely relevant and demanding of your undivided attention. Indeed, you could say that our attention is pre-divided, splayed across both an enormously expanded and accessible present  and a teeming archival vastness that feels vertiginously limitless.

An example of how this plays out.

The gentleman who calls himself Fish56Octagon - and who deejays in his front room wearing a dressing gown (I'm always expecting it to come open as he jigs about, genitals bouncing forth) and often is nibbling on his breakfast, which appears to be Weetabix bits in what looks like a dog's bowl -   played a nu-UKG tune on this label: 

Timeisnow

Sub-label of Shall Not Fade, specialising in UK bass-driven dance music styles.

Established 2019. Bristol, UK.

The record has a period-perfect title, Bubblers EP, and the sound is spot-on

According to Mr Fish, this labels and others like it have pushed nu-UKG to the point where deejays playing it are getting major sets at festivals all around the world.  

And this makes me queasy....  for all the reasons you can imagine. Like what happened to supercession? The dialectic of dance? Fanatical focus? 

(Mr Fish's picks from a huge range of genres and as a working deejay either jumbles it all up in a set OR plays a set dedicated to a single genre but just as one arrow from his quiver)

Atemporality and historical hyper-awareness has some strange kinks.

Here's a nu-UKG label called Move Silent, and Keymag asks the man behind it why the name: "This is really giving up the secret. Years ago, I had this t-shirt that sold really well, and had the phrase "Move Silent". It embodies how I operate in life. I'm a big believer in the phrase, "empty vessels make the loudest noises". "

Which is funny to me because I would have 100 percent assumed otherwise it was a nod to "Bad Boys Move In Silence" - could this dude really not know the foundational UKG track? 

 (Mind you, I only just realised the line "bad boys move in silence" comes originally from Notorious B.I.G.)

Another label Shadow System, the guy behind first heard UKG from his dad playing it!

(Reminds me of another reel I saw recently, a young kid playing "hardcore jungle"  - and the text reads: "When ur dad's in the crowd so you gotta blend in his favorite tune from back in the day")

Some of these nu-UKG labels are as far flung as Finland and Houston, Texas.  

So it's not just atemporalized, dance music, it's really postgeographicalized too - unrooted from any location socially and spatially. 

Well not completely  - in the Keymag article, one of the Finnish nu-UKG dudes (the label is Polar Dance) says: 

"I've been cutting icicles from roofs because when you snap it off, it makes an amazing sound rhythmically. There is a traditional Finnish instrument called a kantele, which is like a sitar. I've been trying to use it on some tracks as well."

The writer Nathan Evans notes of the Houston nu-UKG bods: 

"Aside from the way they literally went back in time with a black mask and comically large knit sack and stole from the Nice 'N' Ripe mixing desk, what struck me about Houston's UKG is how there is even a label pressing limited-run vintage garage vinyl at all. It speaks to shockwaves of the revival, that's enough to traverse space and time simultaneously."

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Another new-to-me genre  has popped up in these reels - not the living room ones but the (usually female deejay) playing to a big room.

The name of this genre is schranz. It designates a sort of hard, fast, banging techno with a scrapy, dirtily abrasive sound. 

I looked it up and was surprised to learn that the term has existed since the late '90s, very much a local-to-Germany term, associated with Chris Liebing … and it appears to have crept forward gradually to some kind of larger semantic currency without ever really taking off. 

I listened to a Chris Liebing associated album (Metalism) the other day and  thought it was rather good - and then with a shock realized it was over 20 years old. 

The female deejays playing hard as nails tekno brings me to InstaGrammatological observation number 2

DJ as showman not shaman

The hyper-visibility of social media and influencerization has turned deejaying into a performance art rather than a technical craft - or rather the craft aspect of working the deck has itself  become spectacularized

In these clips - at home alone as much as in front of a crowd - the deejays are really working those mixer controls, dancing while mixing and whooping it up as if the jock was a punter rather than a punter-pleaser. The etiquette of deejaying has clearly vastly changed from back in the day when jocks were still figures, impassive and grave as they went about their work... nowadays they performatively flaunt their own pleasure, and are if female are often glammed up and scantily dressed.

These deejays work the mixer frenziedly, fussily tweaking the EQ and fiddling with the fader. There is a kind of performative rhetoric where the arms are tensed as they reach for the knob and they pull away the hand and arm after the tweakage with a dramatic flourish. All while jigging around sinuously and often drawing on a cigarette (tense business, deejaying)

But... as far as I can tell little of this flaunted physicality is really necessary - it is all extraneous to the modest physical exertion that would otherwise be involved. It's all for show - and in that sense similar to, possibly inspired by, the rock guitarist's gestural repertoire, the expressive pantomime of "guitarface". You can make massive, devastating noises on the guitar with very small movements, thanks to amplification and effects. You can make them sitting down, as Spacemen 3 proved, without all the strutting or headbanging. And so it used to be used to be with deejaying (often the deejay was nowhere in sight, tucked away in some alcove)

Indeed I have seen a few Insta reels where the deejay goes against the norms of hypervisuality and goes about their work in a low key way, without the histrionics. Instead of performative hoo-hah, the deekay - usually filmed in a bedroom  - is impassive and subdued, limply moving their arm to tweak the knob and then withdrawing it slowly without any flamboyantly flecked gesture that says "decisive mix decision just made"

Also - this happens with the tracky techno and house above all - more often than not I cannot hear any huge difference made by these decisive moves to change the EQ or cut out a frequency band. It all chugs on much as before without a dramatic change - certainly not a wrenching shift that would require such gestural flourish.. 

DJ tools-y techno seems to me to be the most static of artforms, really unchanged in its fundamentals since the late '90s.

Sourced in

Shattering ecstasies

Part of its own mini-lineage of 'distraught divas' tunes - Johnny Jungle "Flammable", Omni Trio  "Mainline" , Acen's "Trip"

Well, a dream comes true - I appear on a pirate radio station. Except it's legal now, but still - Rinse FM!

I am talking - alongside Martin Clark aka Blackdown - about Burial's debut album, which came out 20 years ago - on Eclecticist's show on Rinse.  

Now I think about it, I have been on a pirate before - twice in fact. 

The first time was inadvertent: BBC radio (I think Radio 4) had done a report on jungle, then emerging, in the summer of 1994, and the reporter came around to our flat to get some quotes from me. And immediately after it aired, one of the pirates - Kool FM if I recall right - pirated it. Played the whole program a few times on the radio. So there I was, coming over the airwaves of the station I most  frequently tuned into at that time. (In 1994, after 8 years living in South London, I had finally made it North of the River and was living in Belsize Park, slipping out of range of my beloved Don FM but in compensation able to pick up Kool and other pirates that had mostly been out of reach when living in Brixton). 

Another time I actually deejayed on a pirate - but this was not a nuum pirate, it was a sort of hipster pirate in Williamsburg.  Sometime in the early 2000s or possibly very end of Nineties. I played gloomcore and stuff like that, but the guy before me played Anthony Braxton and such. So the station was a bit like The Wire on the air.  I have no idea if anyone listened. Still, a buzz to do. 

A few times I have been inside an actual functioning London pirate station - Flex FM at the height of 2step in 2000, that was in South West London, a big if delapidated house, when reporting on UK garage for Spin. Deekline was spinning.

And then in 2005, again reporting for Spin, this time on grime, I got to go inside Rinse FM's HQ, a basement of a building near Whitechapel. It had once been a travel agents and it was surprisingly smart looking still (compared with Flex FM). They even had a sort of ante-room with a sofa in it, and then the actual room where the deejaying took place - the Ruff Sqwad followed by Roll Deep - was quite tidy. And actually now I recall it was Martin Clark who made the connection for me and came long to the session (thrilling to watch close up - the young Skepta was there). So big up Blackdown. 

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I am reading Moby Dick at the moment - it's incredible, but it's taking me a long time - and one thing that surprised me is that seafaring men of that era did actually address each other en masse as "me hearties" e.g. "pull hard, my hearties" when rowing a small boat in pursuit of a whale

Well, I may not have provoked a musician to pen a retaliation tune (unlike my own flesh and blood, who recently joined a select pantheon of irritant critics). 

But I can now bask in having inspired a song, and one made by a well-known and highly regarded group too: electronic act Overmono. 

Their single "Lockup" - which heralds a new album Pure Devotion - apparently came from reading not Energy Flash, like you would probably have expected in the circumstances, but the other book of mine that people like.

 According to the Overmono duo, brothers Tom and Ed Russell:  

"We'd been reading rip it up and start again by Simon Reynolds and just generally on a massive post punk binge trying to find out as much as possible about how some of those records were made and the philosophy behind them".

"We got so obsessed with the all tactile soundscapes, the chaotic mix decisions, the use of physical processes and spaces and probably most importantly the approach to trying to break as many things as possible in the process of creating something new. "

For "Lockup", Overmono  sampled "What A Waste" - not the Ian Dury song, but a tune by Birmingham postpunk outfit Fast Relief, who I've never heard of (call yourself a postpunk historian!)

No trace of it on YouTube but it's on this comp of Midlands postpunk on the Easy Action label

Which you can hear on the streamers - like here at Tidal

And here's a photo of the group, who appear to only made the one recording, as excavated for Un-Scene

They could hardly look more postpunk. Flute in the line-up too.

Listening to "Lockup" I'm not really hearing the connection to postpunk beyond the sample. But it's a cool track - I like the way they loop the yammering vocal from "What A Waste", making it sound almost like bhangra. 

I seem to remember enjoying Overmono's earlier stuff while feeling they were, if not outright retro-rave, then consolidators of the tradition.

But then people making music today in most fields are unavoidably history-conscious, given the  accumulation of all that music behind them.

Whether it's rave or rock or rap, the tradition exists as a fact, a pre-existing thing, an arrayed archive of massed material - something to work with, to rework...  

It's in the way, and the only way forward is to go through it... 

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I await the album with interest, curious to see if there are other manifestations of postpunk

Made me mad? Sent me to sleep more like!

Especially when compared to the alleged hoi polloi of the day.

Far more interesting melody-dissonance clashes and harmonic strangeness to be found in the jungle tekno of the time.  

(And we won't even mention the rhythmic shortfall).

But I am preaching to the choir here, no doubt! 

"Mondrin" - I assume there's an "a" missing here

I liked the title of their second full-length effort, which was three years a-comin', Time Tourist but not sure I ever listened to it. 

Yet like so many IDM-ers they had a perfectly solid pre-career doing hardcore

Like this moderately entertaining bit of novelty bleep-acid

The chaste frenzy of the female dancers, who look like twins, but aren't

The sound, so original and consummate - not techno but pure rave: those swoops and the squitty synth riffs that mash and mesh into the breakbeats, which are choppige at its most advanced yet also pop euphoric.

Here is something I blogged 20 bleedin years ago about "Window" - first installment of an unfinished (barely started, more like) series at Blissblog:

instalment one of an irregular series

THE TOP 300 HARDCORE RAVE TUNES OF ALL TIME

300/ Acen, "Window In the Sky" (Production House, 1993)

"Window In the Sky" was Acen's "River Deep Mountain High." After such a colossus was spurned by both general public and hardcore rave scene, what else was there to do but retreat from view. (Well there was a cool trip-hoppy thing as Spacepimp on Clear several years later, and I heard that more recently he's returned to making drum'n'bass in a low-key way). But "Window in the Sky," wow: a spectacular exit. The drum programming alone contains more creativity than most bands cram into their entire career. You want the mix ("Kingdom of Light") that's on Hard Leaders III: Enter the Darksideand also starts the 75 minutes CD that Profile put on in 1994, a weird little posthumous monument/semi-anthology that's highly listenable (six other mixes of "Window" by other Production House bods like DMS and Nino in state-of-art-94-junglist style, plus various other Acen tracks) but ultimately inadequate (doesn't have the definitive mixes of "Trip to the Moon" or "Close Your Eyes"). Someone really should do a proper Acen anthology, with the original mixes/remixes of "Trip" and Close". But yeah, with "Window", the moment at which hardcore could be pop has passed (it had passed with "Trip" which narrowly failed to be a hit in the late summer of '92) but it's like Acen is trying to hold onto that moment by force of will. And also hold the rave scene together (the sound at times is almost jungle-trance--epic and cheesy and dark and pop and hardcore all at once) under the roof of a single anthem-of-anthems.

~~~~~~~

Strangely Acen is not as proud of this personal zenith as you would imagine, see below from this extensive convo I had with him for the Wire pegged to my review of the Acen box set on Kniteforce.

 Acen Razvi

Simon Reynolds talks to the producer behind the reissued 1992 hardcore classic "Trip II The Moon"

Released by Production House in 1992, Acen's "Trip II The Moon" is widely revered as a hardcore classic. As the Kniteforce label prepares to release a six disc vinyl set dedicated to the track and its various B sides, including new remixes from the likes of Pete Cannon, Luna-C and dBridge, Simon Reynolds speaks to Acen Razvi about hardcore history and breakbeat science.

Simon Reynolds: In the 1980s there was a kind of street beats culture in the UK - almost everything came from America and Jamaica, but they got jumbled up here. That resulted in a series of only-in-Britain hybrids whose components all came from overseas. In America, the borders between scenes and genres was more demarcated, but in the UK people moved across scenes or they took bits of everything they liked and made a composite. The classic example would be B-boys into electro and early rap, who then had their minds blown by acid house, and started to mish-mash hiphop, house, techno, dancehall, dub and more into a new sound: hardcore jungle. That is basically your story arc, right?

Acen: Pretty much exactly that. In the early 80s I was doing a lot of breakdancing to electro at school discos. Then I was in a crew called Atomic Rockers, we'd put our lino on the street and practice crazy legs and windmills all summer. The Breakdance movie was a huge inspiration. Then came the harder mid-80s rap and I started to get heavily influenced by the Def Jam sound: Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy. Around 1987-88, I started hearing the DJ cut-up tracks by UK producers like Bomb The Bass, MARRS, Coldcut - that whole megamix scene. That's when I started listening out for samples and becoming aware of all the old James Brown classics.

My family lived in Greenford in West London. Ealing and the Broadway was my stomping crowd. I would go to the Warwick Road parties near Ealing Common and the Haven Stables club. That's when I started hearing acid house and then the warehouse 'bleeps' tunes like Nightmares On Wax, Unique 3, Sweet Exorcist.

SR: Around the same time as those Northern bleep records, a distinctive London sound combining bleeps with sped-up breakbeats and ragga chat emerged - the germ of what would become jungle. You have mentioned figures like Rebel MC and Ragga Twins as particularly inspirational.

Rebel's "Wickedest Sound" and the whole Ragga Twins/Shut Up And Dance set-up really cemented that fusion of raw hiphop and ragga with the warehouse rave sound. It was a melting pot of everything: bleeps, bass, breaks. Tunes by The Scientist like "Exorcist" and "The Bee" really moved me. I started religiously following labels like Reinforced, Tone Def, Kickin', Moving Shadow, Suburban Base, XL. Liam Howlett and The Prodigy were another big inspiration - the What Evil Lurks EP.

SR: Part of the mythology of hardcore rave is teenagers making tunes in their bedrooms with no musical training, messing about with technology without consulting the manual - leading to a lot of mutilated, mutant, so-wrong-it's-right results. That's not entirely a myth, as a listen to the early 90s flood of white labels would show. But quite a few rave producers had backgrounds in bands and knew how to play instruments. You didn't, but you had studied music technology - a different kind of technical expertise.

I did a BTEC media course at West London College in Hammersmith, where I cut my teeth on film making, drama and music technology. Originally I was interested in dance and fascinated with film. But once I went into a music studio for the first time I was hooked. The equipment I had available in the early days was simple stuff - hardware synths like the Yamaha DX7 and Korg M1, and drum machines like the Roland R-8. And an Akai S950 sampler. A bit later I got the Roland W-30 workstation, which was actually way ahead of the gear we had on the course. That was the beginning of gathering samples and obscure records - anything from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to The Wiz soundtrack. Then there were the soul and club tracks - those came back then with a cappella versions and dub mixes - so it was easy to isolate a vocal to sample.

SR: Production House, through which you released "Trip II The Moon", was not only one of the biggest hardcore rave labels, it was as crucial a cluster of multicultural mix-and-blend as Soul II Soul or the Bristol scene centered around Massive Attack. How did you hook up with them?

I already had a demo of the first single "Close Your Eyes" sitting on a cassette and a friend knew this DJ called DMS. He liked the tune and took me round to Production House's HQ in Harlesden, West London. It was a completely ordinary looking three bedroom suburban house in Herbert Gardens, but with two recording studios inside. The upstairs one was kitted out with synths, samplers and a tape machine, and then downstairs was a more acoustic studio with a vocal booth. Phil Fearon, the co-founder of Production House, had enjoyed chart success with the Britfunk group Galaxy in the 80s and produced some pop acts, so there was gold and silver discs on the walls of the studio, But by the time I joined, the focus of the label had shifted from street soul in the late 80s to house and rave - underground tracks.

SR:Alongside the three Acen singles, you became a mainstay of the Production House team. You worked with DMS on his classic "Vengeance" track, remixed/reproduced tunes by the label's core act The House Crew, made tracks like "Exodus (The Lion Awakes)" with Floyd Dyce under the name The Brothers Grimm, contributed to Russell Norris's releases as X-Static…

After "Close Your Eyes" started making waves, I got on a roll with other potential tracks and had demos of "Exodus" and "Field Of Dreams". But because "Close" was still hanging around the top of the dance charts, Floyd thought it would be better to put them out under a different names. He finished both tracks. Then DMS rolled in with the Run DMC "king of rock" sample, so that led to "Vengeance". X-Static was a similar process: Russell would bring in some dub records and we'd started jamming and ended up with "Murderous Style".

While we were finishing the X-Static EP, I was already into the process of making "Trip II The Moon". Originally, the "take me higher" sample from Britsoul group Tongue N Cheek was the main hook, but I felt it needed something else. I hit a wall, so I went out looking for vinyl and I just happened on the You Only Live Twice John Barry soundtrack at an Oxfam shop in Ealing. I had always remembered a haunting bit of music from the James Bond film and it turned out to be "Capsules In Space". That immediately resonated with me for "Trip II The Moon". And then I used "Mountains And Sunsets" from the same Barry score for the "Pt 2" remix "Trip II The Moon (The Darkside)".

SR: That subtitle would have been one of the very first times that "the dark side" became a buzz term on the British rave scene. The track came out late summer 1992, but by the start of 93, everyone was going on about darkcore and putting out records full of horror movie samples and sinister mind-bending sounds suggestive of a bad trip. Of course there had been darker moods in techno before: Eon's "Fear: The Mindkiller" and "Basket Case", and before that acid house tracks like Sleezy D's "I've Lost Control". But with that "The Darkside" subtitle were you tapping into the emerging drift towards dread and paranoia in hardcore rave?

I wasn't really picking up on anything dark side coming from the scene. It was more a double meaning to do with the dark side of the moon. And a darker reimagining of "Trip".

SE: Then there was third mix of "Trip II The Moon", showcasing some dramatic piano playing. You actually taught yourself to play the instrument just for that mix, right?

I really don't have any background in music. I don't even know how to read or write, I just play riffs and feel out the structure. Everything is from the gut but I see it visually also, so when designing sounds or creating patterns, that helps me. With "Trip" part three, I wanted to create something more synth based and I just kept jamming until I had this piano riff.

SR: Championing this stuff as a critic at the time, the polemical thrust was the idea of hardcore producers as untrained delinquents shredding all the rules of musicality. But what strikes me now listening to breakbeat hardcore and early jungle is actually how musical it often is. The tunes often involve multi-segmented arrangements, artfully structured with dynamics and builds, bridges and breakdowns. Partly because there's so much use of samples from film scores, the tunes are packed with melody and interesting harmonic shifts - or clashes. With producers like you, Hyper-On Experience and The Prodigy, it's a maximalist aesthetic, whereas most techno and house in the 90s was 'tracky' - one idea strung out over six minutes, subtly inflected. That kind of techno works as DJ tools: unfinished music that is completed by the decktician combining it with another barebones track. Whereas the best hardcore tunes are actually much more like finished 'works'.

I got into the music when it was minimalist, the repetitive acid and bleep tracks - just a square-wave riff over a four-to-the-floor Roland 909/Roland 808 beat. But by the time I was producing my own stuff, it felt like the music and the scene had turned a corner with full-on breakbeats and big riff changes every 16 bars.

SR: "Trip II The Moon" is literally orchestrated, isn't it? The rights owners to the John Barry tunes wouldn't clear the samples, so Production House had to hire a small orchestra to perform the parts and you resampled them.

And I sampled both pieces of music with the exact same settings I did with the original vinyl - the same low resolution bit rate. We used that to save space for memory because we always used to max out the very limited memory on these samplers. Or you could get creative with speeding up the record on the turntable and slowing it down in the sampler to squeeze more time out of the sample memory.

SR: Your first two singles under your own name, "Close Your Eyes" and "Trip II The Moon", were monster successes - the top one and top two dance tracks of the year in the Music Week chart, shoving The Prodigy's "Everybody In The Place" to number three. "Trip" cracked the Top 40 pop charts too, albeit only just - it got to number 38. Was the thinking with the follow-up, "Window In The Sky", 'this time, let's have a real pop smash'? There was a proper promo video, with a pair of female dancers doing amazing frenetic moves, and yourself as a shadowy figure, the rave magus. But it didn't cross over.

"Window" was released just a bit too late. The scene had already turned a corner. I wasn't fully satisfied with the EP compared to the first two Acen releases. I had changed my studio set-up and that slowed down the creative process. 1992 was the magic year where everything was on point. But around mid-93, it all changed. The darker, more minimalist stuff was ascendant again and "Window" still had that MAXIMALIST 92 vibe. Of all the "Window" mixes, I prefer the harder "Monolithikmaniak' version.

SR: Production House would actually score a UK pop number one with the 1994 release of Baby D's "Let Me Be Your Fantasy". That was through a deal with London Records and its dance sublabel Systematic. You also had an album deal with them - but nothing ever came out. What happened next?

Jungle had really taken over by 1994 and I was trying to make an album on that basis but London couldn't see a commercial angle in the way that they did with Baby D. I parted ways with Production House and took some time out from making music. For a while I was really into the Mo' Wax vibe and early big beat things like The Chemical Brothers. I made some slower tempo tunes. Under the name Spacepimp, those tunes - "K9 Law" and "The Pimp (Lino-Cut)" - came out on Clear Records. That was going back to the electro 808 bass sound and my days of getting the lino out in the street and breakdancing.

Then in 1997, I was really liking what was going in drum 'n' bass with Bad Company, Ed Rush, Optical, Dom & Roland. I started making some tracks in that vein, one of which, "116.7", came out on the American label Higher Education. My favorite release for them was the Eric B & Rakim "I Know You Got Soul" remixes - Ganja Kru on one side and me on the other.

SR: Rakim is someone you'd sampled on "Trip" - "I get hype when I hear a drum roll" . Your Production House tracks are full of 80s Brit B-boy touchstones - snippets of Ultramagnetic MCs and The Real Roxanne. I'm curious, though, whether you kept on following rap into the 90s. For me, after the cartoon hyperkinesis of hardcore, the East Coast sound of Jeru The Damaja, Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, sounded really flat - one break, one loop of orchestration. I suppose the counter-view would be that these beats are meant to function as plain parchment for the scripture of the rappers, whose intricate flows syncopate with the steadfast groove and whose complex lyrics should be the focus of your attention, not the music.

All the rap records I collected over the 80s transformed into a big sample library in the early 90s. I definitely went out and bought even more "flat" hiphop in the 90s simply because I needed more breaks and vocal samples, not really for listening pleasure any more. But I did like the rawness of Wu-Tang and in 1993-94 I was hugely into the Dr Dre/Snoop sound.

SR: After putting out a few more mid-tempo breaks tunes in the early 2000s, like "Dirty Raver", you dropped out of music for about 15 years. You switched lanes completely, plunging into a career working in video, while also moving to Dubai. But then suddenly in the last couple of years, the Acen name has reappeared with tracks like "Play 2092" and "Thrilla" that build from the classic Acen sound of 1992. You've done a similar thing with your re-remixes and the totally new track "Rings Around The Moon" that appear on the Trip II The Moon 2092 box set. What's it like trying to put on an earlier music self like an old pair of trainers?

I actually found it quite therapeutic to reinhabit the mindset of my 19 year old self and use the same methodology. The equipment was pretty much the same - I needed it to be authentic and so I hunted down the old Akai MPC60 and used a lot of the old methods of generating samples. Sometimes you need the old gear to trigger "that" sound and be inspired by that era.

SR: The Guardian placed "Trip II the Moon" at number two in its list of All-Time Greatest Rave Anthems. Many old skool hardcore fans would place it at one. Casting modesty aside, do you agree? And what would its competition be?

Honestly, it's impossible for me to really know what the biggest rave anthem was. Even for me personally, it was always a changing state of emotions: when a tune comes on at a particular moment and resonates with you, that is the biggest tune for you. At different times that would be The Prodigy's "Your Love", Genaside II's "Narra Mine", Nebula II's "Athema", Shades Of Rhythm's "The Scientist"… Sound Corp's "Dreamfinder" was another marvel.

SR; you are obliged to be diplomatic, I'm sure, but which of the nine guest remixers does the best reinterpretation of "Trip" and its original B-sides "Obsessed" and "Life & Crimes Of A Ruffneck"?

If forced, I'd say that I was equally impressed with Pete Canon's remix and NRG's. But I have a soft spot for drum 'n' bass and I also loved Danny Byrd's take and the dark rattle of dBridge's remix.

that's some folk-memory persistence

some contiNUUMity

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Ooh a UKG refix of what on some days is my absolute favoritest jungle tune of all-est time. 

This looks to have been not made during the height of speed garage but much later... 

It is admittedly not great but...  

It's the thought that counts!

Let's hear the original

I mean, how could tunes this glorious this not birth an ongoing and sustained cultural movement, I ask you! 

No wonder subsequent phase-stages felt compelled to honor and reactivate

Everyone knows about Moving Shadow coming from Stevenage

But I hadn't realized that Ruff Kut! Records was from there

As in The Good 2Bad & Hugly 

Like The Criminal Minds, the ruff-cut origins are in Britrap

Those are all from Ruff Kut!'s debut release from 1991, which wasn't a single but an album - a sort of scene sampler, mixing MC tracks, street soul, fast breakbeat instrumentals that aren't quite jungle yet, and some bleepy acid-y tunes

On Discogs it says the LP came out of a youth project - "thanks to Prince of Wales Trust"!

Now I think about it - actually I did know Ruff Kut! was from Stevenage. Because that's the label that put out Gappa G and Hyper Hypa's "The Information Centre" - and I discovered not so long ago that GG and HH played on a Hertfordshire pirate, Perception FM, whose existence I couldn't have imagined back in the day (on visits to my hometown to see the family,  it would never occurred to me turn on the radio).  But then again Stevenage was an London overflow town, like Hemel and Hatfield - and in that sense a kind of outpost of nuum demographics. In fact it was the U.K.'s very first New Town - albeit having existed in much smaller form for centuries before it. 

However I hadn't realized that Good 2 Bad Hugly was the main driving force behind the label

At a certain point Good 2Bad Hugly reactivated and has been churning out nu-jungle releases including New Town Sound Boy, Vol. 1. 

That record features the track "Never Give In"

https://good2badandhugly.bandcamp.com/track/never-give-in

on which the man behind the alias - Jimmy  Ryan -  muses on what jungle meant to him back in the day... 

Also powerful is "Brush Dem Off" 

Never give in, never give up, indeed - still hurling out EPs, with New Town Sound Boy, Vol 3 out  just this January 

There's also been a bunch of reissues, including Ruff Kut Reissue, Vol. 3, whose cover shows a famous pair of modernist landmarks in Stevenage - the Joyride statue and Clock Tower in the town centre. 

There's some similar but not quite as impressive statues in the New Hemel bit of Hemel Hempstead as it happens

Previous posts on the Hertscore Continuum

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Back in the day

G2BH did a track called "Wuthering Heights', sampling you-guessed-it the twittertastic vocals of Home Counties girl Katy B

Well in recent years G2BH went back to the Bush source for "Running Up The Road"

Enjoy this forensic analysis by Michaelangelo Matos of a classic pirate radio set. 

Presented yesterday at the EMP conference, it's titled "We Can Be Free": The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993) and can be enjoyed in script form at MM's Beat Connection Substack.

Enjoy also the set itself at Soundcloud 

I once gave a talk titled "Just 4 U London" at EMP, back when it took place in Seattle every year - I can't remember if I played any pirate radio snippets, though.... 

This lot had a Top 10 hit with a song that is basically about an intra-scene war - the nu garage rappists (Oxide + Neutrino, So Solid) versus the old guard. Represented here by the sour faced, jowly, paunching-out a bit deejays who get their comeuppance thanks to a G-Force rippling blast of noise. 

Portion of the lyric

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

If I recall right, there was actually something - called maybe The Council - , that was formed or mooted to ensure that UKG was run correctly, in terms of media coverage, who got to represent the scene etc

An echo of the Committee (I believe that was the name) formed during jungle over the whole General Levy fracas...

Maybe the jungle era one was The Council, and the garage one was the Committee

Videos from this era of UKG (see also Truesteppers) have a cheap-and-nasty digi-quality (obviously age and wear have worsened it in this case, making it look really los-res - like an ancient 128kps mp3). Feels like it was clumsily processed to have a sub-Hype Williams gleam to it. Actually what it looks like is a Nathan Barley episode. 

Mark Fisher thought "Up Middle Finger" was the spirit of punk reincarnated as UKG.

Here is a piece he wrote for Hyperdub when it was a website rather than a label, under the name Mark De'Rosario

Hyperpulp: It's All the Rage 2001 

by Mark De'Rosario 

Oxide and Neutrino's Up Middle Finger is as important for 01 as the Pistols' Anarchy in the UK was in 76. Like Anarchy, Up Middle Finger is both a call to arms and an darkly exuberant gesture of joyful defiance. Alongside Ms. Dynamite's Booo! (an instant classic, surely the biggest tune in the last year), Up Middle Finger demonstrates that UK garage's efforts to ethnically cleanse the genre of all impure' elements has failed, big style. Everything exiled from the snooty, purocentric higher echelons of UK garage - jump-up ragga-chat, abstract numanoid electronix, frenzy-inducing MCing, deep darkcore bass, film samples, kiddiecore refrains - has returned to terminate its former masters. With extreme prejudice. 

Up Middle Finger captures a mood, a growing undercurrent of rage in the country about the discrepancy between the sunny vistas projected by managerialist PRopoganda and the webs of corrruption and incompetence that are lived everyday reality. Neutrino's fury will resonate with anyone who has the misfortune to have tangled with Style London's sad coterie of promoters, PR zombies and A and R people. But, more generally, his invective also speaks to and for anyone who has been blocked and patronized by the complacency and arrogance of all the bullet-pointed, empty-headed drones who officiate in the blurry liar lair of Blair's Britain. Neutrino brings back an edge, an aggression, that has been lacking for too long in a British culture that has seemed to pride itself on its tolerance of mediocrity. 

Whilst totally contemporary, Up Middle Finger (and the Execute album from which it hails) sound like a return to the vibe - if not exactly the sound - of jungle in its earliest, most fissile and molten phase, when the sonic contours of the new genre were first becoming audible. 

Effectively, O and N have rejected everything 'progressive' that's happened since then - they have rescinded the supposedly inevitable maturation process which proceeds from bolted-together, frankenstein-monster cyborgianism towards the smooth and seamless surfaces of the painstakingly simulated organically 'pure' sound that has enjoyed dominance lately. Listening to O and N, you're reminded of the cargo-culting, skip-scavenging exuberance of Rufige Kru, Tango and Ratty, even the early Prodigy. You're taken back to that vertiginously exciting moment, or series of moments, when rave's synthetic hyper-energy was swept up into the sorcerous vortex of timestretched breakbeats and hyperdub bass. 

Ms. Dynamite and O and N are being sold as 'garage', but as their interviews on this site show, they are themselves uneasy about the classification. The currents passing through them belong to ragga, rave and hip hop as much as to garage. Essentially, like early jungle, they are hyperpulp. Hyperpulp is a mode of hyperdub, but defined by a particular relation to mass culture; it is a cybernetic monster that feeds on pop culture and trans- [or de-] forms it into a blobby, seething multiplicity. 

Hyperpulp culture finds its model not in the club scene, with its cult of the DJ, but the Jamaican soundclash, with its ruff and rugged indifference to smooth mixing, and the pivotal role it accords to the MC. Oxide and Neutrino - the DJ and MC team - re-effectuate this abstract machine. For those schooled in a white European post-romantic tradition, MCing sounds like something supplemtary to the 'primary text' of the music itself. But in hyperpulp, there is of course no primary text, only an intense multiplexed libidinal experience, which includes and is intensified by the MC's chatting on the mic. The MC's melting of dominant english into the lyrical flow of patois sloganeering functions as an excitation-heightener for those who want to get hyper. 

Like NYC hip hop in its early days, Jamaican dancehall culture is fuelled by the antagonistic energy of competing crews. (It's no accident, of course, that Oxide and Neutrino are part of the So Solid posse.) Whilst the intense competition between collective groups is sometimes transected by hard war gangsta/ yardie territorialized violence, it is essentially a soft war - a gift exchange in which no-one loses, and the pressure to outdo the other crew produces a spiralling intensity of experience for da massive. 

Da massive is crucial in all hyperdub genres, but it is especially important in hyperpulp, which feeds on and amplifies hype-waves. Witness Oxide and Neutrino's sampling of 100,000 Scottish ravers on Up Middle Finger. The sheer size of the collective body is used as an audio-weapon targeted against the closed-system entropy of scenes which pride themselves on their disdain for popularity, as much as it is directed against the dismal tastefulness of overground popculture. O and D's use of samples of the Casualty TV theme and of dialogue Lock, Stock... are acts of audio-abduction or sonic viracy, in which existing mass cultural associations are radically deterritorialized and minoritized; the certainties of spectacular culture are de-faced, contaminated with traces of rogue semiotic virus. 

Where pop tends to interpellate the lone consumer, the solitary spectator, hyperpulp dissloves private subjectivity in the oceanic bassdrome of collective delirium. In overground capitalist popular culture, maturity is signalled by the move from impersonal collective pulp-out into privatized, facialized emotion. Goldie's career offers an exemplary map of this dreary trajectory. Beginning with Rufige Kru and Metalheadz, in which he anonymized/ pseudononymized himself into the collective while simulating the synthetic POV of the terminator and the replicant, he ends up sold as a 'solo' artist, hangs around with saddoes like Noel Gallagher, and devotes much of his last album to baring his soul. 

Soul and soulfulness are of course crucial terms for the anti-pulp purists. It's worth remembering here Foucault's remarks in Discipline and Punish on the production of the modern soul. The soul, Foucault tells us, does not precede modernity's disciplinary institutions: it is precisely constructed by schools, prisons, and factories, all of which act to extract an individual subject from the dangerous, teeming multiplicity of 'compact masses.' Baudrillard's arguments in Symbolic Exchange and Death take Foucault's position further. According to Baudrillard, the arrival of the immortal soul marks the imperialistic triumph of monotheism over primitive cultures, which transforms its swarming pantheon of warring entities into 'demons.' 

The tyrannical domination of Dance's SS - the Style and Soul gestapo - has kept the demons out, but they are everywhere in hyperpulp. (Even Goldie, never fully seduced by the soul paradigm, was still invoking Demons on Saturnz Return.) Hyperpulp trades in sonic fiction, and as such feeds upon pulp modes effectuated in other media, especially Horror and SF video. Video samples, once so conspicuous in jungle and speed garage, have been noticably absent in the re-musicalised, soul-dominated phase of garage. 

Over the years, there has been a remarkable consistency in the sonic textures of the various reactive, boracratic genres Style London has tried to foist on the rest of us. From rare groove through to acid jazz, from 'intelligent' drum and bass through to soulful garage, the same sonic traits are always evident : there's a preference for melody over rhythm, for 'real' instrumentation over the synthetic and the samploid, for personalised emotion over dehumanised abstraction. Naturally, these are reinforced by snooty social codes based on snobbery and exclusivity, which are diseminated by the scene's lapdogs in the depressingly hedonistic dance music media and in the style press - all of whom are dissed, hilariously, by Neutrino on Up Middle Finger. 

The so-called garage wars are nothing new, and in fact date back at least as far as the emergence of jungle. Jungle, don't forget, was so named as an insult. Devotees of the original US garage sound - that finessed-to-the-point-of-body-numbing-tedium 'lush' production identified most closely with that high priest of sonic bureaucrats, David Morales - decried the use of breakbeats, essentially for exactly the same reasons that Style London's current hipoisie are cussing Oxide and Neutrino - lack of purity. 

Purity is no more real in music than in ethnicity, and no more desirable. It is only ever a retrospective simulation, something hallucinated after the fact by a group of control freaks resentfully anxious about its fading status. Inevitably, purity has no positive features of its own, but is defined negatively, by what it excludes. What purocrats hate about hyperpulp is its ruffness, its refusal to close down into a well-formed aesthetic object. But this is precisely what is exciting about hyperpulp - its dubtractive removal of all that we thought we knew about identity, genre, about where sonicultures had come from and where they are going. Subtract identity, contaminate 'purity', and potential is produced. Now that Soul and Style are losing their grip on garage, something new can be heard emerging. 

Hyperpulp has come back to corrupt its illegitimate offspring. Celebrate its return. 

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Up Middle Finger Written by Oxide/Neutrino 

(Up middle finger I show dem) 

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

The garage scene well it's really fucked up

Certain guys can't, won't keep their mouths shut

All they do is talk about we

Something about we're novelty cheesy

Smelling your top lip stop the jealousy

What, 'cos we didn't start from 1983

Oh, I was in my nappy

Did I mention we're only 18

Carnival '99 DJs put up a list telling other

DJs not to play this

But when I asked a certain DJ why

He gave me a shit of a reply

Later a bitch said to me

We'll never make it with Casualty

Ha ha ha, he he he

Now the silly bitch wants to try and hire we

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Certain guys can't face the fact of

What we've done

Sold over a quarter of a million Casualty went

Straight into No 1

And they still wanna cuss come on

Oh yeah about the Casualty theme

Well no one controls the scene

So you do what you want

And you do what like

And you do what you please

Yeah, guys want to cuss our tunes, say it's shit

Think other people don't like it

But boy we don't care

And we got something for you

This is DJ Oxide playing in front of about a hundred thousand people

Listen to this

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

When I say you say we say they say make some noise

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Neutrino, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no

Didn't wanna back we

Now they beg friend

Up middle finger I show them

Back in the day, they didn't wanna know

They wanna dis bound 4 da reload

They wanna talk to Oxide no, no no no

They wanna dis so solid so, no no no 

Brand-new anachronism from Z-Neo

Fault-less -  very-nearly-convincing as time travel

release rationale

"Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a '92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP's and previous Trueskool album (both sold out), then this is a must for your collection. & guess who is behind the artwork illustration on this one? Yep, non other than Brighton artist and legend AROE. Only 250 black vinyl being pressed".

I wonder if it'll get to the point where there's more new-oldskool than there is actual old oldskool?

The guys doing this kind of thing tend to be insanely prolific  - at the rate he's going Tim Reaper could probably soon singlehandedly surpass the total amount of stuff put out back in the day!

Also, the nu-skool scene has time on its side - given that the original era was finite, with a cut-off point. 

People could keep making 92-93-94 type music in perpetuity.... 

Same thing already happened, I feel certain, to punk rock, and probably soon will happen to postpunk and to shoegaze.  When you factor in the international factor. 

Especially as these days it's so much easier and cheaper, with modern technology, to record and disseminate music. 

You can make a convincing sounding rinse-out 94-junglizm track, or a  Slowdive-knockoff, on your phone at this point... 

Talking of spectral imaginings... 

Somehow missed this -  from a few years ago, Fracture's 0860 Mixtape - a sort of aunterlogikkal ardkore phantasm of a pirate set 

release irrationale 

The 0860 album is a continuous hour long piece split over 2 sides of C-30. It includes multiple additional tracks and skits (on top of the 8 full length tracks on the double vinyl LP and download / streaming) and is stitched together with fuzz, interference and overlapping broadcasts competing for space on the FM dial. The 19-track '0860 Mixtape' is the full long-playing form of Fracture [aka Charlie Fieber]'s 0860 LP.

Accompanied by a zine and much much else besides... 

Somewhere About Town Zine: A meticulously curated 64-page zine designed by Utile featuring photography of towers that housed the pirate stations Charlie first tuned into, portraits of contributors to the 0860 podcast, transcripts from broadcasts, police reports, and details of a notorious DTI raid. It's a snapshot of the culture—a homage to zines like Ravescene and Atmosphere, which offered grassroots reviews and commentary ignored by mainstream press, capturing the DIY spirit of pirate radio.

If we can't turn back time, maybe we can slow it down...  dilate the Lost Moment in perpetuity

SLOW860 is the latest chapter in Charlie Fieber, aka Fracture's, celebration of pirate radio culture, merging it with his Chopped & Screwed-inspired Slow Astro world. This third "Slow" adventure pushes the concept further, adding another album to his critically acclaimed 0860 project. The result is a 60-minute, unbroken collage of 14 new compositions and 6 'slow ambient' 0860 remixes, interwoven with pirate radio skits and fuzz. Drawing inspiration from The KLF's Chill Out and his teenage experiences falling asleep to stations like Kool FM and Weekend Rush, familiar elements from Fracture's work emerge, yet remain hauntingly just out of reach as he deconstructs and extends 0860.

SLOW860 is presented as a 21-track, hour-long album available on cassette, digital, and streaming platforms, along with a 9-track unmixed version. Staying true to pirate radio culture, the deluxe package comes in 'The First Aid Kit'—a term used by stations to describe listeners' stash boxes for enhancing the listening experience. The kit includes 0860 Astrophonica-branded rolling papers, stickers, and three cassette albums: SLOW860, the original 0860 Mixtape, and an exclusive cassette-only bonus, Ambient Signal Test—a 90-minute album of degraded Jungle breakdowns, originally broadcast to test the signal from the accompanying pop-up station, 0860.fm.

Extensive write-up from Fracture exploring ideas of haunting, hypnagogic states, memory work and dreamwork -  Oneohtrix Point Never-ish stuff applied to the pirate nuuum:

Over the past few years, I've been experimenting with slowing down music in the style of DJ Screw's Chopped and Screwed aesthetic, specifically with Astrophonica's back catalogue, which I presented as Slow Astro Vols 1 to 4. It felt natural to apply this process to my 2022 solo album, 0860—the name Slow860 alone was enough of a calling. In my constant search for new ways to present music, I aimed to push the slow concept even further by creating new material from scratch.

A big part of my pirate radio experience involved leaving the radio on all night at a low volume. I'd drift off to sleep, float in and out of consciousness, and wake up to the morning shows. I loved how the tone shifted: evenings were banging and rave-esque, with MCs hyping up the energy, while morning shows were lighter, with sprightly presenters cracking jokes. The 2-6 a.m. "graveyard slot" was especially captivating. The music was often different, with minimal DJ voiceovers and little interaction on the phonelines. It felt ghostly, distant, and lonely—a theme I explored in my 2023 track Graveyard Slot, a homage to the music I heard during that eerie witching hour.

One DJ in particular that caught my attention was DJ Footloose, who seemed to have a stint of late-night shows where he played deeper, darker Jungle tracks like Lemon D's Pursuit Thru Darkness, Photek's The Water Margin, and Intense's The Quickening.

During this hypnagogic state, my sensory perceptions were skewed, and fragments of Jungle music drifted in and out, feeling both familiar and alien, like memories and dreams unraveling at the edge of awareness—a sonic adventure that deepened my fascination with the seemingly mythical world of Pirate Radio. In a time before social media, DJs and MCs often remained anonymous, leaving my young, impressionable mind to create images, stories, and folklore, almost as if I were part of a dystopian sci-fi role-playing game—vignettes of empty council flats, run-ins with the law, and boxes of dubplates.

There are similarities between my experiences and The KLF's 1990 seminal album Chill Out (re-released as Come Down Dawn in 2021)—a 44-minute collage of deconstructed KLF songs, samples, and found sounds blended into a woozy sonic landscape, with familiar yet warped melodies drifting in and out. Thematically, Chill Out portrays a psychedelic journey across the United States, but to me, it evokes emotions similar to my own sleepy, subliminal Pirate Radio sessions. When I listen to Chill Out, it transports me to a car journey somewhere between Texas and Louisiana. There's enough in the music to suggest these themes, but much is left to the imagination. Images of diners, arid expanses, and endless highways fill my mind with every listen, just as when I listened to DJ Footloose at 3 a.m.

Slow860 aims to connect these personal experiences and transform my influences into something new. As always, when reflecting on my own work, more influences and patterns start to emerge, and the dots stretch back even further—before Chill Out or, in some cases, before Pirate Radio.

The link between Slow860 and other classic albums from my childhood that incorporate sound effects to blur the lines between music and collage, enhancing their profound narratives, has gradually become apparent over my years of listening and making music. When I was in primary school, a particularly eccentric teacher played us the entirety of Jeff Wayne's 1978 Musical Version of The War of the Worlds over the course of several weeks, and I remember being transfixed by the sound of the Martian Heat Ray dancing around the dramatic orchestral-rock fusion, creating vivid visions of panicked crowds in an old-fashioned London. Or how The Beatles' 1967 theatrical fairground ride, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, used sound effects and ambient sounds to bring the fictional Sgt. Pepper's band to life. The more I dig, the more I uncover—Pink Floyd's The Wall, Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, and Future Sound of London's Lifeforms are all woven into the fabric of Slow860 in some way.

The sampling of atmospherics, sound effects and dialogue from films has always been part of Jungle's genetic make-up which, again, added thematic storyline to the music. My particular faves are Johnny Jungle's Johnny, Subnation's Scottie and Remarc & Lewi Cifer's Ricky-a nightmarish triptych of world building madness which I talk about in the Slow860 accompanying, Utile designed, zine 'Somewhere About Town'.

The zine includes my personal photography, essays, and memories, alongside various cultural artefacts—such as a legal document and a DTI statement from a studio raid involving Pulse FM's DJ Warlock, as discussed in S1 EP14 of the 0860 Podcast. It's well documented how punks in the 70s adopted zines as a reaction to their lack of representation in mainstream music journalism and the industry—much like rave music fans who launched pirate radio stations in the 1980s and 90s. Rave culture also embraced zines, with amateur publications like Ravescene and Atmosphere offering reviews, news, and cultural commentary ignored by the mainstream press, further contributing to the DIY grassroots, self-sufficient world that pirate radio was part of.

Another part of the physical presence of this project comes in the form of a 'first aid kit', packaged in a custom metal tin. The term "First Aid Kit" was something I heard repeatedly on pirate radio, particularly on Kool FM. Like much of the slang and dialect used by the DJs and MCs, I had no idea what it meant at first. It didn't take long, though, for me to realise it referred to your stash box—weed, tobacco, rizlas. One of my favourite DJs, DJ Jinx, hosted a Sunday morning "wakey wakey, rise and shine" show on Kool FM during the mid-90s. His show was designed to soothe weary ravers back to normality with positive vibes and a bright selection of classics and dubplates. Every week, he'd remind his groggy listeners that it was "time to draw for the First Aid Kit," creating a sense of mass audience participation as the hive mind dusted off the cobwebs in a huge communal but anonymous boomshanka. This Sunday morning show became legendary and stands as a great example of the power of pirate radio. Weekly interaction from regular listeners, along with a lexicon of catchphrases, are both etched in my memory. If a caller didn't get their request in for a rewind quickly enough, it was "a bridge too far," but if they made it, Jinx would say, "taking this one back to the outside edge for Anita in Charlton." Each show would begin with the infamous DJ Jinx intro dubplate sampling For A Few Dollars More ("What did you say your name was again? Thhhhhhhheeeeeeee Jiiiiiiiinnnnnxxxxxxxx!"), and end with his signature send-off: "Seeeeeeeeee ya!"

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Talking of aunterlogikkal ardkore - from the same Astrophonica camp, "The Re-Animation of Scottie" 

That's from over ten years ago) 

Not that chronology and recency count for anything in this retro-recursive reality

This seems to be homaging - but less directly - "fuckin' voodoo magic" aka "Lord of the Null Lines"

Came across through this already recently posted tune with the sample shared with M-Beat

Teehee, this artist name - Philip D Kick

Fracture's most recent effort, at the top, from late summer 2025 - a  a collab with Mighty Moe from Heartless Crew. 

release rationale: 

I've been a long-time admirer and fan of Mighty Moe, going all the way back to the mid-90s and the early days of Heartless Crew. We all went to the same sixth form—Islington Sixth Form College—and although we didn't know each other at the time, I was often in the crowd at North London house parties where they were learning their craft.

Mighty Moe has always brought a positive, uplifting energy on the mic. Any party he performed at was guaranteed to be full of vibes. From those 90s house parties, to his iconic 2011 Sidewinder set with DJ EZ, to his recent 2024 appearance on DJ AG's London livestream—the energy has always been top-tier, and the crowd participation infectious (cue the "we got the vibes, yo" lyric). Even now, listening back to those sets as I write this, I'm grinning from ear to ear.

Though best known for garage, Mighty Moe has always been a jungle lover. His roots trace back to 90s pirate radio, with London's legendary stations like Mission 90.6, Freek FM 101.8, and Y2K 90.6, before moving on to BBC 1Xtra and gaining a MOBO nomination in the 2000s.

Fast forward 30 years, and I'm in the studio experimenting with clean, modern jungle—crisp breaks, a vibey bassline, simple and direct. I came across a Mighty Moe acapella, bursting with the energy and clarity I've always loved about his style. I dropped it over the beat, and it just clicked. I finished the track, sent it to him—he loved it and gave it his blessing. I've been playing it out, and the response has been incredible. I knew I had to do something with it.

Thinking about how to release it, I liked the idea of nodding back to sound system culture and the 90s UK Garage tradition of having a vocal with a dub version on the flip. Not just an instrumental, but a full reworking—with new drums, new bass, and a focus on weight and space. It's a continuation of the lineage from classic King Tubby or MJ Cole dubs, reimagined in my world of modern jungle . . . Mighty Moe always with the wickedest kinda flavour! 

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The label name Future Retro always makes me think of this skit

Another old (2013) example that coincidentally has the title of my chapter on revivalism in Retromania

Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase.

THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma

Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far...

I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker's Everywhere at the end of time.

Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit?)

So despite the enormity I thought I would give the entire list a listen, in both categories. (There's also a list of mixes). 

I got about a third of the way into the albums, skipping the ones I already knew. But then - as always seems to happen with such undertakings (e.g. the enormous playlists of an artist's entire discography that you might pull together yourself, or of a genre)...  inevitably the will to carry on crumbles away. It's just too daunting. It comes to feel like work. As a way of discovering things, it's not the way that the music you end up loving generally tumbles into your life. Especially not with dance music, which is most meaningfully encountered in a club and in the thick of a crowd. 

But I did hear some things I'd never heard that I really liked, along with quite a lot of things that were excellent but ultimately sounded like superior-sound-design updates of  sono-rhythmic ideas that existed in rawer form in the 1990s.  

As always happens with these canon-making pushes by publications, I was surprised by how few of the artists or works that I love figure in these lists. (And quite often when an artist I like did get mentioned, the track honored wasn't what I would have selected). 

But you know what - people are different!  

So much music - electronic, dance, everything else - came out in the 21st Century that entirely different cartographies and canons can be constructed that barely overlap with your own trajectory as a listener or personal pantheon. 

One new-to-me tune in the RA list that I really liked

Now if you know anything about where I'm coming from, in terms of what I like in dance music, it makes perfect sense that this is a tune that would appeal.   It's fresh and exciting but audibly in the tradition of "Party People". 

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I'm not sure how much this RA list is ultimately based on the votes of the contributors and how much determined by decree from above, but they did ask me for a list of nominations, albeit only in the overlapping categories of hauntology / ambient / conceptronica. This is what I suggested, which is unranked: 

ALBUMS

Boards of Canada - Geogaddi

The Focus Group - Hey Let Loose Your Love

Oneohtrix Point Never - Rifts

Belbury Poly - The Willows

The Advisory Circle - Other Channels

Mordant Music - Dead Air

Moon Wiring Club - An Audience of Art Deco Eyes

Rashad Becker - Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol 1

The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time

Debit - The Long Count

Runners up (unasked for, I couldn't resist supplying)

Lo Five - Geography of the Abyss

Dolphins into the Future - On Seafaring Isolation

Lee Gamble - Diversions -  1994-96

eMMplekz - Rook to TN34

Roj - The Transactional Dharma of Roj

Hybrid Palms - Pacific Image

ML Buch - Suntub

Second Woman - S/W

Huerco S - For Those of You Who Have Never

Burial - debut album

patten - Mirage FM

TRACKS

Mark Van Hoen - Holy Me

eMMplekz - Gloomy Leper Techno

The Focus Group - Modern Harp

Oneohtrix Point Never - Physical Memory

The Advisory Circle - Sundial

Holly Herndon - Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt

James Blake - If The Car Beside You Moves Ahead

Burial - South London Boroughs

Belbury Poly - Caermaen

People Like Us - World of Wonder (Why We're Here)

Moon Wiring Club - Mademoiselle Marionette

MIX

bit stumped here, I don't tend to remembrance mixes like other folks do, but then I thought, "oh yes, there's - 

The Arkiteket - The Deep Ark

And then when I saw their list, I slapped my forehead with a 'gah' and realized I really should have - and really would have - included this mix: 

Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo (Japan, 1980-86) - by Spencer Doran

And the follow up Vol 2 was great too. 

It's especially amnesiac of me given that in this big piece on Ambient / New Age as a phenom of the 2010s written for Resident Advisor, these mixes feature prominently (along with the Japanese interior music / 4th world compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990 plus quotes from Doran in his Visible Cloaks guise). 

Talking of those who remembrance mixes, here's mixologist (and RA 2000-2025 contributor) Michaelangelos Matos's faves 

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Maybe, maybe,  I'll go back and finish that 2000-2025 albums list... do it in stages... then do the tracks... and maybe even the mixes. 

I already tried and enjoyed this mix which sounded intriguing from the write-up and mixologist Nono Gigsta's side reflections

https://soundcloud.com/gigstab/freerotation-2024-the-house-of-crocodiles-part-2-live-recording

Amid the near-infinity of sources out of which it is woven, this new-to-me tune jumped out particularly

Which itself contains a sample of - or perhaps more accurately, is a re-edit of? - something I dimly recognise (from being sampled elsewhere - some track on Reinforced?) but the source song "Misdemeanor" is new-to-me and quite delicious, sort of avant-ized Jackson 5

Less delicious is learning about the actual misdemeanor the artist would much later commit.... Wiki Fear strikes again, or at least, it didn't, otherwise I wouldn't have read the offending entry 

Ah, Anon comes through in the comments with the ardkore jungle tune that samples Foster Sylvers - not 4 Hero and crew but M-Beat 

Here's another use (out of loads and loads in hip hop etc)

Here's a Misdemeanor sample-chain playlist