andi

"Drum & Bass!", I say, confidently.
"Can't accept Drum & Bass, we need Jungle I'm afraid," replies Amol Rajan.
I begin to sweat nervously.

1. "Thunderclap 1995", Remarc

At some point I was trying to figure out exactly when "breakcore" broke off from Jungle and D&B. At least two sources I found (OK, Reddit posters) clamed this (Thunderclap) to be the first breakcore track. Is that true? What differentiates this from "Drum & Bass"? I've decided I don't care, and all I care about is that this track is sick. Sparse, spine-grabbing, this is a complex machinery made entirely of liquid. "Recommend".

Note: This track is mastered for 90s sound systems, so if you're listening on laptop speakers, you may prefer this rip, which sounds a little worse but does compress the bass higher in the mix.

2. "Matter of Fact", Roni Size Reprazent

To those of us who couldn't experience UK dance culture firsthand in the 90s¹, "New Forms" is indelibly associated with drum & bass— it practically defines it. But Reprazent was also doing something bigger than D&B, weirder. Listen to this track, the album's biggest jaunt into outright jungle and a demo of its tendency to atmospherics that suggest spaces so well it could practically be a video game soundtrack.

3. "Precision", Spinscott

I've heard it said that Drum & Bass, as a genre, couldn't have happened without Cubase. (Wait, have I started a track description like this before?) Anyway that's not strictly accurate, but… you do get the sense of D&B/Jungle as something made "offline". A person at a computer pondering a grid. All those sixteenth-note hi hats.

But then this dude just loads an Amen break into an MPC 1000 and fingerdrums some jungle. Triggers each sample live by hand. It's like watching someone fly without an airplane.

4. "FastTracker 2 Jungle Style", Dee-Shaya

Jungle made in 2022 by 1996 methods (if you look at the top you'll see "FastTracker II by Triton Prod 1996" and then next to it a track label saying "2022 Jungle Style"). Short, unpretentious, immaculate, satisfies some primal need (to listen to Jungle). This YouTuber's channel mostly consists of C64 retrocomputing stuff, but here she has chosen to indulge us with some DOS.

5. "Run", Michiel van den Bos

This is from Unreal Tournament (1999), a game I don't think I've played.

One nice thing about sample trackers is the files are small and playing them back has low CPU impact, which makes them ideal for embedding in video games. Apparently UT1999's tracker files can just be extracted and played in Impulse Tracker. Lacking any personal nostalgia, this soundtrack feels tonally all over the map to me, especially compared to my memories of the much-more-focused, single-player-friendly 1998 original (which I did play). But, some of the tracks hold up well; this one in particular is great, with Drum&Bass inflections, an authentically classic feel and emotionally dead-on Vibes.

⬇️ Click below for Zoomer breakcore ⬇️

1. "roland s-1 dnb drum play", alarky

It's been said the Drum & Bass genre couldn't have happened without Cubase, the software that originally let 90s artists artisanally place all those 1/16-note hi-hats on a grid. This artist on the other hand says who needs grids, and just sorta mashes the buttons on his drum machine front panel. It's messy, but sorta works! Combined with the weirdly overpowered synthesis of the S-1 it forms an intense mood.

2. "I'm Afraid of Americans", David Bowie (Photek remix)

Heterodox drum & bass artist Photek leans heavily to a kind of minimalism that when it goes too far can feel sparse and strung out. Here the strung-out feel works strongly in the song's favor, as it gives us more time to luxuriate in the voice of David Bowie.

Incidentally I think this mix (from a 1997 remix EP organized by Trent Reznor) might secretly be an early draft of "Seven Samurai"

3. "YAMAHA SU10 DNB JAM", Electromachines

Armed with the terrible Yamaha portable sampler I was talking about before, plus one of Korg's "Monotron" toys and a voice sample from a really old interview with Squarepusher (Do you know Squarepusher?), this musician goes hard on some budget-bin drum & bass. Got those kind of wobwob synths you normally associate with dubstep, but it isn't dubstep, it's drum & bass. It really has that 1997 feel

4. "Mood // Lyra-8 // Drums - Ambient Creation", André Davies

This is a deliriously weird video that I don't think I'd find that weird if I only had the audio. With just audio you'd think "oh, horror movie soundtrack music". With the video, you've got a man seated at a drumkit proceeding to make what seems to be every possible sound other than the sound of a man playing the drums. A step up from metal plates and contact mics maybe? Is this jazz

5. "TANMO", BENDYmusic

YouTube description: "there are no mistakes orchestra, made for interaction, as presented to, you."

Two minutes of mysterious noise, recorded with mysterious electronic boxes on what appears to be a table in a cafe. The feedback wobbles and distorted kicks interweave with passing snippets of conversation from the cafe and a radio which I think is actually patched into the recording device. If you love noise as much as I do you will dig this two minutes. (This post got zero likes on Mastodon).

⬇️ Click below for Dreamcast Drum & Bass ⬇️

Let me tell you about what might still be my favorite genre of music.

1. "Law – Unreleased Jungle Selection"

Jungle is the older, rawer, more chaotic older brother of "Drum & Bass". This YouTube video is a fluid mix of 17 songs by 10 artists recorded in jungle's initial flowering between 1993 and 1995, clocking in at exactly the length of a CD-R. When I linked this video on Mastodon I only had a poorly attributed YouTube repost and I found it very mysterious— who is Law? What does "unreleased" mean? (Some of the songs seemed to have been previously released, but often those were only released in the late 10s, or the Discogs entry for the "release" turned out to refer to a never-distributed test press; other songs or artists from the mix I found no hits for on Google at all.)

"Law" turns out to be the operator of the Drumtrip blog, and this turns out to be a mixtape he posted in 2014, along with a track list and explanations of about half the tracks. Anyway it's a very good mix, dark, driving and grimy.

2. "Digital", Roni Size Reprazent

So "Jungle" lands in the UK underground around 1992 as an ill-defined genre of rave techno with dark chaotic rhythms, dub reggae influences and, often, complex explorations of the Amen Break. Within a few years this is being refined into "Drum & Bass", a narrower genre even more focused on the Amen. This then finally grabbed the attention of the international music press, and the Mercury Prize committee, and me as a techno-obsessed teen in Texas, when Roni Size and his clique released "New Forms", a D&B position paper that definitely feels like the apex of the genre to me (but of course I'm biased— how can you objectively judge something that changed your life?).

Besides being a genre product demo tho this particular album has an amazing, incredibly unique, self-confident tone that nothing else has ever replicated exactly. "Digital" isn't the most avant-garde track on there but it's maybe the stickiest, building an incredible groove out of soul-flavored vocals and an approachable skeleton of D&B.

3. "Threat Actor", Jamie Myerson

What I'm listening to today: "Threat Actor", Jamie Myerson

I have post of recommendations for Bandcamp Friday here on Cohost that I update once a month, and so I have a Simplenote file where I stash a reminders list of bands to add to it. When I came back to look at it this month, I found the last line was

"threat actors?"

What… was this? I had no idea. Searching Bandcamp found only this one song, which I had never heard before. Actually it fuckin rules

(Then when I posted this on Mastodon I actually did get a reply from the composer of the "Threat Actors" I was originally thinking of. It was this.)

4. "7:10", Plug

Luke Vibert is a man of many names and many styles. This is the first track on Plug EP 1, which was released as "Visible Crater Funk" in Europe in 1995 or mashed into CD 2 of "Drum & Bass for Papa" in the US a few years later.

This is D&B (Jungle?) by the basics but the basics are pushed to a point of total chaos. Amen break in a blender to create a maelstrom of drums, and discomfiting, minimal synth tones. It grabs you really well.

5. "Brown Paper Bag (Nobukazu Takemura remix)", Roni Size Reprazent

Okay so back to Roni Size. "Brown Paper Bag" was the album-seller track on New Forms, mostly due to the incredibly sick timewarping music video which had a different, punchier, vocal mix not on the album. The album mix does have some virtue for being one of the best showcases of the lumpy timbres of the double bass ever committed to vinyl. But my favorite version of "Brown Paper Bag" remains this rare remix by Nobukazu Takemura, an excellent Japanese glitch musician I once saw live by accident.

(You might find the first two minutes here offputting. Give it a chance.)

⬇️ Click below for LTJ Bukem doing jazz ⬇️