andi

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 ⬇️

Here are five songs I liked that are defined by their beats (or by the conspicuous absence of beats).

1. "Hoss featuring the PERKONS HD-01", Generative Jane

This one is a wild ride, starting with a blast of strange FM noises and then immediately dropping hard into a gradually-mutating industrial dance beat. This is the kind of music you'd show opening credits to, probably over establishing shots of a futuristic city, or possibly people riding futuristic motorcycles at great speed to no particular obvious destination.

2. "Puppet Master", ZyeKali

This rocking chaos-&-strings jam was made with the Pocket Operator handheld sampler and a hand-modded "Chaos NAND" (seems to be an Atari Punk Console variant). Instead of using the Pocket Operator's sequencer, the musician plays the PO and Chaos NAND by hand, then samples the sampler, layering eight performances on top of each other. I think the colored Launchpad grid is starting and stopping the other video clips.

3. "Hardware Jam 0006 // Shared System and Friends // 162bpm atmospheric drum n' bass", kaleidasonic

This is a neat mix of a classical 90s Drum & Bass beat with modern modular-synthesizer sound design; it starts with 2 minutes of random-notes ambient, then drops an Amen and a lovely chonky bass and keeps evolving in interesting new directions for the entire 15 minute runtime. (Those without long attention spans may wanna quit around minute 7.)

4. "Ambient improvisation 4 (Soma Enner + Cosmos)", Più

Cosmos is an "asymmetric looper"— a loop pedal whose loops are of varying lengths and so can drift in phase against each other. Here it's fed with tiny sound fragments (with such sources as a small plastic frog, whose shape is sonified by rubbing it against the Enner's case and spring reverb) to build up an all-enveloping ambient soundscape partway between the sound of a rainpipe and a horror movie score.

5. "Lysergenesis", Lauri Paisley

Paisley in the early 80s was VP of the "International Electronic Music Association", which I've never heard of; this was the final song on a cassette album, "Real-to-Reel", she released in 1983. Not so much a soundscape as an ambient ocean you plunge into and possibly drown, this is probably just about the most progressive electronic music you're going to find in 1983; 15 minutes of synths following a weird internal logic.

I'm not completely sure but I think "lysergenesis" in biology is when a thing is created by dissolving another thing and allowing the contents to spill out independently.