Tapes

I previously completed a project based around club/electronic music that referenced the vinyl 12" single throughout. The use of records was to anchor the project to DJ culture and, initially, I felt that this particular project might also want to take some inspiration from the format. Certainly, visual clues have been taken from sleeves from the specific genres/eras to inform the design outcomes. However, after considering the importance of pirate radio to the music forms that make up Reynolds' Hardcore Continuum, I considered what might be the preferred formats for end users. And while vinyl has long had cult status and 'muso' appeal, the widespread and possibly more 'democratic' format has to be the humble tape cassette.

The cassette is interesting in terms of its ability to capture the more spontaneous aspects of individual scenes: radio transmissions and DJ club sets. In fact, the inexpensive copying of these contributed to an increased distribution network for the discussed sounds. So while a London pirate radio station might only be received within the capital, broadcasts could reach even wider audiences once recorded and exchanged. As for DJ sets, the black market for seamless mixes of the scene's more popular disc jockeys grew to such an extent during the early 1990s that record labels began to produce their own, officially licensed versions to capitalise on this interest.

What is interesting now is just how the cassette has recently been embraced as a cult format. For younger listeners it is perhaps a curiosity due to both the increased rarity of tape players and what is generally poor sound quality. For older individuals, it will have nostalgic associations with youth plus an interactive, DIY aesthetic that long preceded the internet. Perhaps if you look closely enough, you can see the blueprint for Spotify encased in a TDK C-90. Elsewhere on the web, you will still find many MP3s labelled as 'mixtapes'. So there is, I think it's fair to say, a real cultural legacy here. And one that isn't exactly being ignored in 2010.










While the above examples [respectively a Nano case, a USB hub and a storage device] are simply borrowing an iconic form, others have reverted to the cassette for its original purpose.

Will Bankhead created some great packaging alongside Ben Drury for the Mo Wax label but has more recently switched attention to his The Trilogy Tapes endeavour. In addition to carrying out some enviable work for other music clients, he issues cassettes compiled by a selection of interesting people. A couple have been put together by Salford resident Dan Dwayre a.k.a. Black Lodge.

Anyway, I'm considering using the format of the tape in some way as part of my deliverable. I think that there are a number of aspects to it that could be explored and exploited in a creative way.

The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds On The Hardcore Continuum #7: Grime (And A Little Dubstep) (2005)

• Issue #300 (Feb 09) | The Wire 300
• By: Simon Reynolds | Featuring: Dizzee Rascal, So Solid Crew, Trim, Wiley
• Links: Wiley on MySpace | Dizzee Rascal on MySpace | BBC 1xtra | Rhythm Division | Independance | So Solid Crew - Dilemma | Pay As U Go Kartel - Know We | Genius Cru - Course Bruv | Lethal B et al

Originally published as "The Primer: Grime " in The Wire #254, April 2005.

Grime emerged from London's pirate radio underground. Its immediate precursor was two-step (aka UK Garage), which at the turn of the millennium broke into the UK pop mainstream in a massive way. Two-step had been shaped by the "feminine pressure" for sing along melodies and wind-your-waist grooviness. Grime arose as a backlash against this crossover sound, a violent swing in the scene's inner gender-pendulum from yin to yang. Out went two-step's high pitched diva vocals, sensual swing, and sexed up amorousness; in came gruff rapping, stiff electro-influenced beats, and raucous aggression.

MCs have been part of the pirate radio tradition for at least fifteen years, going back through Garage and Jungle to the early days of Hardcore. By the end of the 90s, however, the MCs were moving beyond their customary restricted role as party 'hosts' and sidekicks to the DJ. Instead of gimmicky vocal licks and 'praise the selector' exhortations, they began to rap actual verses: initially, extended takes on traditional boasts about their own mic skills, but soon getting into narrative, complicated metaphors and rhyme schemes, vicious dissing of rivals, and even introspective soliloquies. The MC's rise swiftly eclipsed the DJ, hitherto the most prominent figure on rave flyers or the main designated artist on record releases. 2001 was the turning point, when MCs shunted selectors out of the spotlight. So Solid Crew broke into the pop charts, and the underground seethed with similar collectives modeled on the clan/dynasty structures that prevail in American hiphop and Jamaican dancehall.

Emerging from the transitional sound known as 'Garage rap', Grime really defined itself as a distinct genre when the first tracks appeared that were designed purely as 'MC tools' - riddims for rappers to ride. These Grimestrumentals were largely sourced in the electro diaspora - post-"Sleng Teng" ragga, Miami bass, New Orleans bounce, Dirty South crunk, and 'street rap' producers like Swizz Beats. Like these genres, Grime doesn't go in much for sampling but prefers synths, typically with cheap 'n' nasty timbres that vaguely evoke the Eighties and often seem to be influenced by pulp movie video soundtracks, videogame musik, and even mobile phone ringtones. But in Grime's textured beats and complex programming you can also hear the imprint of the Jungle that most of these late teens/early twenties producers grew up on, alongside folk memory traces of gabba and Techno. Sometimes, listening, you might imagine you can hear uncanny echoes of post-punk era electro-primitivists such as The Normal, DAF, Cabaret Voltaire, or the calligraphic exquisiteness of Japan, Thomas Leer, and The Residents.

Inherited from the period when two-step ruled the top 10, but also inspired by enviously watching the living large of American rap superstars, Grime feels a powerful drive to invade the mainstream and get 'paid in full'. Pirate radio, a broadcast medium with a potentially vast audience, encourages this grandiosity. One peculiar byproduct of Grime's ambition is the scene's craze for DVD releases, like Risky Roadz and Lord Of The Mic, containing documentary material with live footage. It's as if the scene is DIY-ing the sort of TV coverage it feels it deserves but isn't getting. Yet while some of top MCs are being groomed for stardom by major label-owned boutique labels, the day to day reality of Grime is grafting to get by in a narrowcast culture. Selling 500 copies of a track is considered a good result. The way Grime operates - small run vinyl-only pressings and mix-tapes, often sold directly to specialist stores - has a surprising amount in common with the microcultures familiar in these pages, such as Noise, free folk, Improv, and extreme Metal. Like these genres, Grime is what Chris Cutler would call an "engaged" culture, with a high ratio of performers to consumers. These aspiring MCs, DJs and producers have a deeper understanding of what constitutes skill and innovation in their scene. Grime even has an Improv element with its freestyles and MC battles. There's a glorious ephemerality to the way MCs riff off the cuff lyrics during pirate sessions, although fans have always tape recorded the shows and some are now getting archived on the web.

Unlike those globally dispersed microcultures, Grime is geographically concentrated. It's popular across London and has outposts in other multiracial UK cities, but its absolute heartland consists of a few square miles in that part of East London not served by the Tube. In truth, it's a parochial scene, obsessed with a sense of place, riven by internecine conflicts and territorial rivalries (the intense competitiveness being one reason Grime's so creative). Still, despite this insularity, Grime has never been easier for 'outsiders' to investigate, thanks to 1xtra (the BBC's digital radio station for UK 'urban' music; check especially the weekly shows by Cameo and Richie Vibe Vee), the trend for pirates like Rinse FM to go online as well broadcast terrestrially, mail-order via companies like Rhythm Division and Independance, and the swarm of blogs covering the scene.

So Solid Crew
"Dilemma"
So Solid 1999
Oxide & Neutrino
"Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty)"
East West 2000

So Solid are famous as the first MC crew to crossover big-time - they hit number 1 with "21 Seconds"- and infamous for their frequent brushes with the law. In Grime terms, though, their single most influential track is this instrumental, which replaced two-step's sultry swing with an electro-derived coldness and rigour. This new starkness was a timely move given that two-step had reached the inevitable 'over-ripe' phase that afflicts all dance genres, its beats becoming cluttered and fussy. With its hard-angled drum machine snares and single-note sustained bass drone veering upward in pitch, "Dilemma" rediscovered the Kraftwerk principle: inflexibility can sometimes be funkier than suppleness. So solid, indeed: "Dilemma" is like a huge block of ice in the middle of the dancefloor, a real vibe-chiller.

So Solid affiliates DJ Oxide and MC Neutrino also scored a #1 UK hit with "Bound 4 Da Reload". Initially a pirate radio anthem through 1999, "Reload" created a massive rift in the Garage scene: older types loathed it, young 'uns loved it. Today's Grime heads would probably disown their teenage favorite as a mere novelty track. Which it certainly was, from the Casualty TV theme sample to the "can everyone stop getting shot?" soundbite from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Gimmicks aside, Oxide's production is heavy, from the ice-stab pizzicato violins ('strings of death', perhaps, given the track's allusions to the rising blood-tide of violence on London's streets) to the doom-boom of sub-bass to the morgue-chilly echo swathing much of the record. Probably equally repellent to two-step fans was the nagging, nasal insistence of Neutrino's rapping, which is remorselessly unmelodic but horribly catchy. Instantly transforming two-step from "the sound of now" to its current nostalgia-night status as "old skool", "Reload" has strong claims to being the first Grime tune.


Pay As U Go Kartel
"Know We"
Solid City 2001
Wiley and Roll Deep
"Terrible"
Solid City 2001

Circulating on dubplate as early as 1999, "Know We" was in constant pirate rotation by the time of its 2001 release, alongside chip-off-the-same-block track "Terrible". Both are back to basics affairs: simple programmed beats, in each case adorned with the solitary hook of a violin flourish, functioning purely as a vehicle for the MCs. Another striking shared characteristic is the use of the first person plural. Each MC bigs up himself when it's his turn on the mic, but at the chorus individualism is subsumed in a collective thrust for prestige. "Now we're going on terrible," promise/threaten Roll Deep, and they don't mean they're about to give a weak performance. 'Roll deep' itself means marauding around town as a mob. But there's a hint of precariousness to Pay As U Go's assertions of universal renown. The sense of grandeur is latent; they're not stars yet. What does come through loud and clear on both tracks is the hunger. "Terrible" starts with a Puff Daddy soundbite: "sometimes I don't think you motherfuckers understand where I'm coming from, where I'm trying to get to." Both the PAUG and Roll Deep tracks were produced by a young prodigy named Wiley, whose catchphrase back then was "they call me William/I'm gonna make a million". Roll Deep are Grime's NWA (its ranks have included such luminaries as Dizzee Rascal, Riko, Flow Dan, Trim, and Danny Weed), with Wiley as its Dr Dre. If he's yet to make that first million, this human dynamo must surely have released close to that number of tracks these last four years.

Genius Cru
"Course Bruv"
Kronik 2001

The gangsta rap comparison isn't an idle one. PAUG and Roll Deep pioneered criminal-minded lyrics. Taking them literally isn't always advisable, as the imagery of "slewing" and "merking" is often purely metaphorical, signifying the destruction of rival MCs in verbal combat, the maiming of egos rather than bodies. Still, the genre wasn't always so relentlessly hostile. Just before the grimy era, 'Garage rap' outfits like Heartless Crew and Genius Cru exuded playful bonhomie. The follow up to their number 12 pop hit "Boom Selection", Genius's "Course Bruv" talks about spreading "nuff love" in the club and stresses that they "still don't wanna hurt nobody." The chorus even celebrates the rave-era ritual of sharing your soft drinks with complete strangers, the "course bruv" being Genius's gracious acquiescence to "can I have a sip of that?" Producer Capone weaves an effervescent merry-go-round groove of chiming bass melody and giddy looped strings, while the MCs hypnotise with the sheer bubbling fluidity of their chat. The verses are deliberately preposterous playa wish-fulfillment: "Number one breadwinner" Keflon claims he's "invested in many shares, many many stocks" while Fizzy purports to date "celeb chicks", "ballerinas" and even have "hot chicks as my household cleaners".

Platinum 45 featuring More Fire
"Oi!"
Go Beat 2002

Pirate radio culture evolves in small increments, month by month. The onset of one genre or sub-flava overlaps with the twilight of its predecessor. There are rarely clean breaks. Still, every so often a track comes along that yells "IT'S THE NEW STYLE!!!!" in your face. "Oi!" was one of them. Drawing on the most anti-pop, street vanguard elements in black music history - ragga's twitch 'n' lurch, electro's (f)rigidity, jump-up Jungle's bruising bass-blows -producer Platinum 45 created a most unlikely #7 hit. Factor in the barely-decipherable jabber of More Fire's Lethal B, Ozzie B, and Neeko, and the result was one of the most abrasively alien Top Of The Pops appearances ever. The tune's pogo-like hard-bounce bass and uncouth Cockney-goes-ragga chants mean that "Oi!" has more in common with Cockney Rejects-style punk than you'd imagine. "Oi!", then - Grime's biggest hit to date, before the genre even had a name.

Musical Mob
"Pulse X (VIP Mix)"
Inspired Sounds 2002

Widely regarded at the time as UK Garage's absolute nadir, "Pulse X" is actually a pivotal track: the scene's first purpose-built MC tool. Locating a new rhythm at the exact intersection of electro and gabba, "Pulse" is virtually unlistenable - those dead-eyed claps, those numbly concussive kicks - on its own. But in combination with a great MC, the skeletal riddim becomes an instant and massive intravenal jolt of pure adrenaline. It's not just the headbanging energy, though, it's the track's very structure that is radical. "Pulse X" was the first 8-bar tune, so called because the rhythm switches every eight bars, thereby enabling MCs to take turns to drop 16 bars of rhymes using both beat-patterns. Far from being UK Garage's death rattle, "Pulse X" rescued the scene, rudderless and demoralized after two-step's pop bubble burst. The sheer phallomorphic rigour of "Pulse X" gave the scene a spine, a forward direction.

Dizzee Rascal
"I Luv U"/"Vexed"
XL 2003
Circulating as a white label from summer 2002 onwards, "I Luv U" turned London pirate culture around as much as "Pulse X". Legendarily creating the track in a single afternoon during a school music class, Dizzee took the same sort of sounds Musical Mob used - gabba-like distorted kick drums, shearing-metal claps - and turned them into actual music. Add a teenage MC genius desperate to announce himself to the world, and you have Grime's "Anarchy In The UK". The punk parallel applies because of the harsh Englishness of Dizzee's vocal timbre and the lovelessness of the lyric, which depicts the pitfalls of the, er, dating game from the point of view of too-much-too-young 16 year olds whose hearts have been calloused into premature cynicism. Dizzee's snotty derision is almost eclipsed by the comeback from female MC Jeannie Jacques, who throws "that girl's some bitch yunno" back in his face with the equally corrosive "that boy's some prick yunno." The original white featured the "I Luv U" instrumental, but tossed away on the XL re-release's B side is the classic "Vexed": Dizzee's stressed delivery makes you picture steam coming out of his ears and the music - beats like ice-floes cracking, shrill synth-tingles - renders obsolete the entire previous half-decade of retro-electro in one foul swoop.

Wiley
"Eskimo"
Wiley Kat 2002
"Ice Rink"
Wiley Kat 2003

Ex-PAUG but at this point still Rolling Deep, Wiley invented an entire mini-genre of low key, emaciated instrumentals: asymmetrically structured grooves based around sidewinder b-lines that are "slinky downstairs" (as DJ Paul Kennedy put it), and glinting, fragmentary melodies. From his legion of imitators, these tended to be strictly MC-funktional beats, but in Wiley's case, more often than not the tracks are highly listenable standalone aesthetic objects even without rhyming. The first in an ongoing series of ice-themed tunes ("Igloo", "Frostbite", "Snowkat", et al), "Eskimo" was the blueprint for this dinky-yet-creepy micro-genre (which Wiley dubbed "Eskibeat"). "Ice Rink" took the concept of MC tool to the next level. Instead of just being sold as an instrumental for MCs to use, it was released in some eight versions featuring different MCs. Spread across two 12 inches, "Ice Rink" constituted a de facto riddim album. Dizzee's turn is the stand-out, his scrawny voice oozing the impudence of someone at the top of his game, as he invites all haters to plant their lips upon his posterior: "kiss from the left to the right/Kiss 'til my black bum-cheeks turn white". Wiley's palsy of gated door slam kicks and mercury-splash blips jostles with Dizzee for your attention.

Jammer
"Weed Man"
Hot Sound 2003
Jammer featuring D Double E
"Birds In The Sky"
Hot Sound 2003

2003 saw a slew of 8-bar instrumentals suffused with cod-Oriental exoticism. As incongruous as a pagoda plopped smack dab in the centre of Bow, "Weed Man" is the supreme example of "sinoGrime", Hyperdub webzine's term for this micro-genre. Produced by Nasty Crew's Jammer, the track is dedicated to "all the marijuana smokers" and appropriately the tempo is torpid to a trip hop-like degree. The loping, sprained rhythm flashes back to Sylvian & Sakamoto's "Bamboo Music" while the ceremonial bassline and breathy flute conjure mind's eye imagery of Zen gardens and temples. But where Wiley's similar excursions Eastwards were fueled by record-buying trips to Sterns, Jammer mostly likely derived his notion of Oriental mystery from videogame music and martial arts movie soundtracks. "Birds In The Sky" has a similarly medieval atmosphere but, apart from the plucky twang of some kind of stringed Far Eastern instrument, is less obviously an ethnological forgery. The solo debut of one of Grime's greatest MCs, D Double E, "Birds" has a brooding meditational aura. The lyric pivots around the bizarre trope of a verbal drive-by, the MC firing off word-bullets that are also "like birds in the sky/Hit one of your bredren's in the eye". Double muses on his motivations -"why?/Cos I'm an evil guy"- then emits his signature vocal licks, the pain-pleasure groan of "oooh-oooh" and the mouth-mangled "it's me, me", which sounds more like "mwui-mwui".

Riko & Target
"Chosen One"
Aim High 2004
Ruff Sqwad
"Lethal Injection"
White Label 2004

Former PAUG stalwart and man behind the ace Aim High compilations, Target here creates one of Grime's most stirringly cinematic epics, placing a heart-tugging orchestral refrain amid a strange decentered drum track whose flurries of claps and kicks seem to trip over themselves. This groove's sensation of impeded yet steadfast forward motion totally fits the lyric's theme of determination and destiny. In his smoky, patois-tinged baritone, Riko (another PAUG alumnus) counsels calmness and composure to all those struggling, whether they're aspiring MCs striving to make it or regular folk trying to make it through everyday strife: "Use your head to battle through/Cos you are the chosen one." The synth swells favoured by Ruff Sqwad also have a cinematic grandeur, like gangsta Vangelis. "Lethal Injection", though, is one of their more minimal efforts, consisting of a wibbly keyboard line, the boom of a heavily echoed kick drum, and the Sqwad's rapid-fire jabber, swathed in a sussurating shroud of reverb and background chat. Not a tearjerker like "Chosen One", but incredibly atmospheric.

Terror Danjah
Industry Standard EP
Aftershock 2003
Various
Pay Back EP (The Remix)
Aftershock 2003

Judging by Industry Standard, you could justly describe Terror Danjah as one of the most accomplished electronic musicians currently active. On tracks like "Juggling" and "Sneak Attack", the intricate syncopation, texturised beats, spatialised production, and "abstracty sounds" (Danjah's own phrase) make this "headphone Grime" - not something that could be claimed for too many operators on the scene. Yet all this finesse is marshaled in service of a fanatically doomy and monolithic mood, Gothic in the original barbarian invader meaning. The atmosphere of domineering darkness is distilled in Danjah's audio logo, a demonic cackle that resembles some jeering, leering cyborg death-dwarf, which appears in all of his productions and remixes. "Creep Crawler", the first tune on Industry Standard, and its sister track "Frontline (Creepy Crawler Mix)", which kicks off Pay Back, are Danjah's sound at its most pungently oppressive. "Creep Crawler" begins with the producer smirking aloud ("heh-heh, they're gonna hate me now"), then a bonecrusher beat stomps everything in its path, while ominous horn blasts pummel in the lower mid-range and synths wince like the onset of migraine. From its opening something-wicked-this-way-comes note sequence onwards, Big ED's original "Frontline" was hair-raising already. Danjah's remix of his acolyte's monstertune essentially merges it with "Creep Crawler", deploying the same astringent synth-dissonance and trademark bass-blare fanfares (filtered to create a weird sensation of suppressed bombast) but to even more intimidating and shudder-inducing effect.

Mark One Versus Plasticman
"Hard Graft 1"/"Hard Graft 2"
Contagious 2003
Loefah
"Bombay Squad"
(on Grime 2, Rephlex compilation, 2004)

If you hadn't already guessed from the name, Grime inverts values. Dutty, stinkin', even disgustin' - all are positive attributes in Grime parlance. So when I say "Hard Graft" is utterly dismal, you'll know this is the thumbs up. Grime often represents itself as gutter music. Mark One and Plasticman go further, or deeper, with this track, and seem to plunge into the sewage system. Full of clanking beats, septic gurglings, eerie echoes and scuttling percussion, "Hard Graft" makes you imagine pipes, storm drains, dank chambers.

Mark One, Plasticman and their cohorts constitute not so much a subgenre of Grime as a side-genre, running adjacent to the scene proper. The sound is techy, MC-free, and more danceable than Grime. Although a number of black producers are involved, you could fairly describe this style's sonic coding as whiter than Grime, and situate it on a Euro continuum running through Belgian industrial techno (Meng Syndicate, 80 Aum) through the cold technoid end of rave (Nebula II) to No U Turn's techstep and Photek-style neurofunk (the beats on "Hard Graft" sometimes recall his "Ni Ten Ichi Ryu"). Plasticman's nomenclative proximity to the Richie Hawtin alias seems telling.

The black component to this genre without a satisfactory name is dub (indeed its precursor was a UK Garage micro-genre known as dubstep). Loefah's clanking skank connects to a lineage of industrial-but-rootical UK music: On U, bleep 'n' bass (Ability II's "Pressure", say), The Orb, Techno Animal. "Bombay Squad" is built around what feels like a half-finished, or partially erased, groove: massive echo-laden snare cracks, a liquid pitter of tablas situated in a localized corner of the mix, and… that's it, apart from the dark river of sub-bass that propels the track forward. The title's intertextual traces include Public Enemy's producers and 2 Bad Mice's rave anthem "Bombscare", but actually allude to the track's sole coloration, the plaintive ululation of a Bollywood diva.

Wonder
"What"
Dumpvalve 2004
SLK
"Hype! Hype! (DJ Wonder Remix)"
Smoove/Ministry Of Sound 2005

Wonder works on the cusp between Grime proper and the Plasticman/One/Loefah sound. "What" makes something compellingly atmospheric out of the most meagre components: a beat dragging like a wounded leg, sub-bass yawning ominously like a portal into the underworld, a dejected one finger melody suggestive of an autistic desultorily toying with a xylophone, occasional dank blips of electronics. Overall, the audio mise en scene is something like "twilight falls on the battle-scarred moon". Also vaguely redolent of The Mover's gloomy brand of ambient gabba, Wonder's remix of "Hype! Hype!" replaces the perky original backing track (produced by the great Sticky) with a groan-drone of sick technoise. This catastrophe in slow-mo makes a marvelously incongruous backdrop for the roaring vocal hook chanted by North West London crew SLK.

Jammer featuring Kano
"Boys Love Girls"
Hot Sound 2003
Wonder featuring Kano
"What Have You Done"
New Era 2004
Terror Danjah featuring Kano & Sadie
"So Sure"
Aftershock 2004

The backing tracks are fabulous - Jammer's frenetic snare-roll clatter, Wonder's tonally harrowed synths, Danjah's aching ripples of idyllic electronics - but it's the MC who really shines. With some Grime rhymesters, the flow resembles an involuntary discharge (D Double E being the ultimate exponent of MCing as automatic poetry). But even at his most hectic, as on "Boys Love Girls", Kano always sounds in complete control. All poise and deliberation, Kano invariably sounds like he's weighing up the angles, calculating his moves, calibrating which outcomes serve his interests. That's blatant on "Boys" and "What Have You Done", both cold hearted takes on modern romance that depict sex in transactional terms, a ledger of positives and minuses, credits and debits; a war of the genders in which keeping your feelings checked and maintaining distance is strategically crucial. But it comes through even in the gorgeous ballad "So Sure", on which Kano blurs the border between loverman and soldier drawing up plans for conquest: "ain't got time to be one of them guys just watching you and wasting time/Next time I'm clocking you I'm stopping you to make you mine." As much as the acutely observed lyrical details, it's the timbre of Kano's voice that's enthralling: slick yet grainy, like varnished wood, and knotty with halting cadences that convince you he's thinking these thoughts aloud for the very first time.

Davinche
Dirty Canvas EP
Paperchase Recordings 2004
Essentials
"Headquarters"
White label 2004

"So Sure" is an example of the burgeoning subgenre R&G, basically a transparent attempt to lure the ladies back onto the floor, after they'd been turned off by the testosterone-heavy vibe of tracks more suitable for moshing than sexy dancing. As the name R&G, short for rhythm and Grime, suggests, the mini-genre replicates two-step's original move of copping American R&B's luxurious arrangements and diva-melisma. Alongside Terror Danjah, Davinche pioneered R&G with tunes like "Leave Me Alone". Too often these attempts at Brit-Beyonce fall short owing to a lack of grounding in songcraft and the studio art of micing vocalists, and end up sounding slightly thin and shabby. So I prefer Davinche's instrumental efforts like the Dirty Canvas series. The quasi-soundtrack orchestration of "Stinger" - flurrying strings, decaying tones from a softly struck gong - are designed to swathe any MC who rhymes over it with an aura of slightly harried majesty. Built out of similar pizzicato elements meshed to a beat like a clockwork contraption gone haywire, "Madness", I'd wager, drew inspiration from the paranoia zone reached after one toke too many on a spliff: racing thoughts, pounding heart, jangled nerves, the suspicion that you might just be losing your mind.

Grime is synonymous with East London, but other parts of the city are starting to get a look-in. Essentials, Davinche's crew, operate out of the South. This powerful sense of territoriality is integral to the concept of "Headquarters", which draws on the talents of a veritable battalion of MCs, some guests and some from Essentials' own barracks. At each chorus, a drill sergeant barks questions at the MC who's stepping up for his mic turn: "state your name, soldier", "state your location" (usually "East" or "South", sometimes a specific postal district), "who you reppin'" (usually a crew, like Essentials, N.A.S.T.Y, Aftershock, but sometimes just "myself"). Then the sergeant orders each recruit to get down and "give me 16" - not press-ups, but 16 bars of rhymes. The amazing production seals the conceptual deal, the chorus being accompanied by cello-like instrumentation that's been digitally contorted into an unearthly wraith-like whinny, or a cyberwolf howling at the moon.

Lethal B featuring Fumin, D Double E, Nappa, Jamakabi, Neeko, Flow Dan, Ozzi B, Forcer, Demon and Hot Shot
Pow (Forward)
Relentless 2004

Following a failed mainstream-bid album, More Fire looked all washed up in 2003, but Lethal B rebuilt their street rep from the ground up. In 2004, his "Forward" riddim became the scene's biggest anthem. Renamed "Pow" on account of its main vocal hook, it ultimately barged its way to the outskirts of the Top Ten, achieving Grime's highest chart placing since… well, "Oi!". The riddim is basic, verging on crude, a madly gyrating loop that resembles an out-of-control carousel. "Pow!!!", Lethal's chorus chant, evokes the fisticuffs of comic book superheroes. Matching the track's rowdy vibe (it was reputedly banned in some clubs for inciting mayhem on the floor), a squadron of top MCs lay on the ultraviolence, the cartoon flavor of which can be gleaned from Demon's immortal warning "you don't wanna bring some beef/Bring some beef you'll lose some teeth".

J featuring Wiley, D Double E, Kano and Durty Doogz
"Destruction Remix"
White label
D Double E & P-Jam
"Anger Management"
Dice

Like "Pow", "Destruction" is a rollercoaster of pugilistic noise and lyrical aggro, but Jammer's production is marginally more sophisticated, slicing 'n' dicing brassy fanfares (probably from blacksploitation movies) and filtering them to create a sort of surging yet leashed effect, like the track is simmering with pent-up rage. The four scene-leading MCs rise to the occasion, from Wiley's riffed variations on "I know Trouble but Trouble says he don't know you," to Kano's quaintly anglicized gangsta boast "from lamp post to lamp post, we run the road". But the star performance comes from D Double. Seemingly battling multiple speech impediments, he expectorates glottal gouts of raw verbiage. As so often, there's that characteristic sense of involuntary utterance, like it's him who's being spoken through. "Spitting" is too decorous a word for his rhyme style; retching is closer. Witness Double's astonishing first six bars on "Destruction", a gargoyle-like gibber closer to hieroglyphics than language, and seemingly emanating from the same infrahuman zone Iggy plumbed on "Loose" and "TV Eye". On Double's first solo single since "Birds In The Sky", rising producer P-Jam's snaking wooze of gaseous malevolence sparks one of the MC's most Tourettic performances. Barely tethered to the beat's bar scheme, Double seems to be wading waist deep through sonic sludge. He boasts of "sucking up MCs like a hoover", an image possibly cued by the Mentasm-like miasma unloosed by P-Jam.

Lowdeep
"Str8 Flush"
Colourful State 2005
Crazy Titch
"Sing Along"
In The Hood 2004

The sped-up diva on "Str8 Flash" might be a nod to Kanye West's Chaka-accelerating "Through The Wire" but equally could be a folk memory flashback to the early 90s, when Rave producers whisked female vocal samples into helium-squeaky hypergasms of spectral bliss. That said, everything else in Lowdeep's hot riddim testifies to the influence on Grime of the last half-decade of rap and R&B. Pizzicato harp-like sounds and stuttering beats create a frozen peak of tense glory. IMP Batch's "Gype", the inescapable riddim of early 2005 and the backing track for Crazy Titch's "Sing Along", takes Grime's quasi-orchestral ambitions to the next level. Using classical music samples (possibly Prokofiev), IMP Batch expertly chop up and resequence the refrains - fluttery flutes, cascading strings, a cello ostinato - to form a hilariously prissy yet dynamic groove. This parodic high-culture refinement makes a wonderfully incongruous setting for Crazy's hoarsely hollered anthem.

Trim
"Boogieman"
Aftershock 2004
Bruza
"Not Convinced"
Aftershock 2005

Like most producers in most dance genres, Grime beat-makers typically invent a striking sound, then wear it out with endless market-milking iterations. Terror Danjah has often approached that dangerzone, but on "Boogieman" he shows how much scope for inventive arrangement remains in the "Creep Crawler" template. You can hear the cartoon-comical wooh-wooh ghostly touches best on the instrumental version, "Haunted" (on Aftershock's Roadsweeper EP). "Boogieman" itself is a showcase for rising star Trim, here honing his persona of scoffing imperturbability: "I'm not scared of the boogieman/I scare the boogieman."

On "Not Convinced", Danjah draughts a whole new template that reveals the producer's roots in drum 'n' bass (the track's futuristic tingles vaguely recall Foul Play "Being With You" remix). Again, though, the MC makes it hard to focus on the riddim. More than anyone apart from not-Grime-really Mike Skinner, Bruza incorporates British intonation and idiom into a totally effective style of rapping, in which the not-flow of stilted English cadences becomes a new flow. It sounds "brutal and British," as Bruza puts it. As his name suggests, the MC has also perfected a hard man persona that feels authentically English rather than a gangsta fantasy based on Compton or Kingston. He exudes a laconic, steely menace redolent of bouncers. "Not Convinced" extrapolates from this not easily impressed persona to create a typology of character in which the world is divided into the serious and the silly, the latter lacking the substance and conviction to give their words authority. Bruza addresses, and dresses down, a wannabe MC: "I'm not convinced/Since you've been spitting/I haven't believed one word/Not one inch/Not even a millimetre/To me you sound like a silly speaker/Silly features in your style/You spit silly."

Kano featuring D Double E & Demon
"Reload It"
from Home Sweet Home 679, 2005

Circling back to "Bound 4 Da Reload", this track celebrates the pirate radio and rave tradition of the DJ rewind, when the crowd hollers (or home-listening audience text-messages) its demand for the selector to wheel and come again. Until Grime, the trigger for rewinds would be a killer sampled vocal lick, thrilling bass-drop, or even just a mad breakbeat. Nowadays, the MC being king, the crowd clamours to hear their favourite rhymes. "This is what it means when DJs reload it/That sixteen was mean and he knows it," explains Kano, before listing the other top dog MCs who get nuff rewinds (two of them, Double and Demon, guest on the track). "I get a reload purely for the flow," Kano preens, and you can see why as he glides with lethal panache between quick-time rapping and a leisurely, drawn out gait that seems to drag on the beat to slow it down. The track itself, co-produced by Kano and Diplo, is all shimmery excitement, pivoting around a spangly filtered riff that ascends and descends the same four notes, driven by a funky rampage of live-sounding drums, and punctuated by horn samples, Beni G's scratching, and orgasmic girl-moans. The old skool breakbeat-like energy suggests an attempt to sell the notion of Grime as British hiphop, yet if Trans-Atlantic crossover is the intent, that's subverted by the lyric, its theme being as localized and Grime-reflexive as imaginable. "Reload It" encapsulates the conflicted impulses that fuel this scene: undergroundist insularity versus an extrovert hunger to engage with, and conquer, the whole wide world.

Simon Reynolds

The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum Series #6: Two-Step Garage (1999)

• Issue #300 (Feb 09) | The Wire 300
• By: Simon Reynolds
• Links: Liverpool FACT | Kool FM | Simon\'s Footnotes On Feminine Pressure | Rhythm Division | Todd Edwards At Discogs

Originally published as "Adult Hardcore" in The Wire #182 April 1999.

If you live in London, perhaps you’ve scanned the FM spectrum and come to a halt at a pirate station whose sound you can’t quite finger or figure. It’s got House music’s slinky panache, but the rhythm’s wrong – too fitful and funked-up, and besides, there’s an MC jabbering over the top, Jungle-style. Maybe it’s Jungle, then – but then again, maybe not: too slow, too sexy. Sometimes it’s a bit like American R&B – except it sounds druggy, the wrong kind of druggy: like Timbaland on E.

So what is it, this genre-without-a-name? It’s the latest in a series of mutations spawned from London’s multiracial rave scene, the next evolutionary stage beyond Speed Garage (itself a swerve sideways from Jungle). And the new style does have a name, albeit an unsatisfactorily dry, technical one: ‘two-step’, increasingly a general rubric for all kinds of jittery, irregular rhythms that don’t conform to Garage’s traditional 4-to-the-floor pulse. Somebody really should coin a more attractive name, though, one that captures two-step’s lip smacking lusciousness. Because all the juice squeezed out of Jungle by the post-techstep school of scientific drum ’n’ bass has oozed back in the succulent form of two-step.
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“Truthfully, Jungle stemmed from House music. It has a reggae influence, but it’s still House,” MC Navigator from Jungle pirate Kool FM insisted back in 1994. Three years later, Jungle returned to the source, when its rude bwoy spirit and rhythmic science violently possessed the body of Garage (the most soulful and songful form of House), in the process creating a new London scene, ‘Speed Garage’.

Jungle’s relationship with Garage actually went back some way. Instead of Techno clubs’ Ambient chill-out rooms, the second room at Jungle clubs usually bumped to US Garage; pirate radio stations often programmed Garage shows for mellow moments in the weekend (Saturday morning, Sunday afternoons). It was on these pirate shows that DJs started pitching up their Garage imports (artists like Masters At Work, Kerri Chandler, Todd Edwards) to 130 bpm, giving them the extra ‘oomph’ required by the London Jungle audience. DJs favoured the dub versions of the US tracks, says Spoony of DJ collective The Dreem Teem, because “not having much vocal element, you could play the dubs faster without them sounding odd”; these near-instrumentals also left gaps for the MCs to do their stuff. Soon the DJs started making homegrown Garage tracks that sounded like their pirate shows – faster than the US sound, with junglistic sub-bass, dub-wise FX, and ragga chants timestretched so that the vocal fissured and buckled like the wings of a metal-fatigued Boeing 707.

This UK underground Garage also radically intensified the aspect of the New York sound that most appealed to Jungle-reared ears: intricate percussion patterns, highly textured drum sounds, and above all, the skippy, snappy, syncopated snares and busy, bustling hi-hats that make Garage much more funky than regular House. Reticular and metronomic, house is ‘banging’ or ‘pumping’; polyrhythmically perverse, Garage is all bump ’n’ flex, twitch ’n’ grind. But House and Garage are both underpinned by a 4-to-the-floor kick drum that pounds monotonously on every bar.

Two-step transforms Garage into a kind of slow motion Jungle – a languorous frenzy of micro-breakbeats, hesitations and hyper-syncopations; moments when the beat seems to pause, poised, and hold its breath. In its simplest form, it does this by removing every second and fourth kick from the 4-to-the-floor pulse, creating a lurching, falter-funk feel. More adventurous two-step producers program irregular kick-drum patterns which syncopate with the bassline, akin to Timbaland’s double-time or triple/quadruple/quintuple-time kicks. Two-step has actually taken the ‘speed’ out of Speed Garage, or at least the sensation of velocity, because removing two out of every four kicks subtracts that steady-pulsing energy. The effect is similar to the way the dub bassline in Jungle used to run at half-time under the frenetic breaks. Indeed, some two-step tunes have a ska or rocksteady-like skanking feel.

To compensate for the energy deficit, two-step producers hype the funk by making every element in a track work simultaneously as rhythm, melody and texture. Organ vamps, horn stabs, keyboard pads, vocal licks, all interlock like cogs with the percussion patterns, which are processed through effects until the rhythm track alone offers an ear-tantalising panoply of textures: crunchy, squelchy, spangly, woody, spongy, scratchy. These tactile timbres combine with the twitchy triplets and syncopations to create weird cross-rhythm effects –nicks and barbs that seem to snag your flesh and tug your body every-which-way.

“The rhythm track is not just the backing for a song anymore,” declare Dem 2, the Thurrock, Essex based duo of Spencer Edwards and Dean Boylan, whose nubile nu-funk anthem “Destiny” was the UK blueprint for two-step. “The beats, the various instrument voicings, and any vocals within a track all carry equal amounts of importance – any one can be the hook that sticks in the mind.” Although Dem 2 correctly argue that you can hear this rhythmelody/texturhythm simultaneity at work across the gamut of contemporary dance music, it’s undeniable that UK garage mostly assimilated this knowledge from drum ’n’ bass; many of the leading two-step producers did their apprenticeship programming Jungle. But right now, it’s hard to imagine any neurofunk producer building a groove as seductively sleek and springheeled as “Destiny.”

This is ironic, because two-step is in many ways a reassertion of the Jungle influence in reaction to the alarmingly rapid crossover of first-wave Speed Garage, which simply proved too attractive to mainstream House clubbers across the UK. two-step is a semi-conscious attempt to make Garage “a London thing” (even an East London thing) again, rather than a short lived nationwide fad. The similarity with Jungle comes across in the way two-step DJs mix. “With traditional Garage and House, the underlying beat and instrumental arrangement is more continuous and pulsing,” says ‘Bat’ Bhattacharyya, the resident two-step expert on the internet discussion forum ukdance. “New York Garage is designed so that the DJ mixes in a new track with a slow continuous fade-up. But two-step, like Hardcore and Jungle, is far more amenable for chopping and cutting with the cross-fader – the sort of hiphop techniques you can’t use with a House pulse-beat, ‘cos it sounds funny.”

You can also hear the Jungle ancestry in two-step’s low-end seismology, which has evolved way beyond the Jungle-derived wah-wah/‘dread bass’ that drove Speed Garage in 97. Listen to pirates like Freek, Mission or Smooth, and you’ll hear bubbling b-line melodies, chiming bass-detonations, and pressure-drop booms that have nothing to do with House as hitherto known. The baleful electro-dub rumble, plinky melody-riffs and migraine-wincing synth-tones of Steve Gurley’s remix of “Things Are Never” by Operator & Baffled hark back even further than Jungle – it’s just one of a number of tunes that flash back to the bleep and bass era of Unique 3/Nightmares On Wax/Sweet Exorcist/LFO/Forgemasters, that dawn of the 90s moment when the British merged House and reggae for the first (but not last) time.

If Jungle really did stem from House, as Navigator claimed, the true continuity between the two genres is not rhythmic or textural: it’s the use of vocals (almost always absent in Techno). At a rough guesstimate, maybe two thirds of Hardcore/Jungle anthems between 1991–94 relied on sampled diva vocals as primary hooks. Producers lifted them from old House or R&B classics, or from CDs packed with a capellas recorded specifically for sampling. While there’s no diva refrain equivalent to the ubiquitous, endlessly revisited ‘Amen’ break, certain classic vocal phrases were reworked time and again, with producers using similar techniques to breakbeat manipulation: acceleration, pitchshifting, timestretching, looping, filtering, and so forth.

When techstep achieved dominance in 1996, vocal samples began to disappear from drum ’n’ bass. But the House/Hardcore/Jungle continuum of diva-worship didn’t end, it just branched sideways into Speed Garage. You can see it in the career of Steve Gurley. As a member of Foul Play, he sampled diva-vocals from SOS Band and Kleer for tracks like “Finest Illusion” and “Open Your Mind”; going solo as Rogue Unit, he crafted a gorgeous drum ’n’ bass revamp of “Say I’m Your Number One”, a 1985 hit for Brit-soul chanteuse Princess. Today, Gurley is a leading two-step producer, doing damage with torrid diva-driven tunes like his remix of Lenny Fontana’s “Spirit of the Sun.”

Traditional New York Garage privileges the classy vocal, draping its melodious melisma over the groove. In contrast, two-step producers subordinate the singer to funktionalist priorities, slicing ’n’ dicing the vocal samples into staccato, percussive riffs that interlock with the groove to create extra syncopations. ‘Vocal science’ is Bat from ukdance’s term for this vivisection of the diva, which effectively transforms the singer into a component of the drum kit. Two-step’s vocal tricknology has resituated Garage on the other side of House’s great divide: songs versus tracks, melody versus rhythm & FX. Right from the start, there’s been a tension in House between veneration of the Big Voice (Darryl Pandy, Robert Owens, Tina Moore, CeCe Peniston, et al) and a more pragmatic ‘trackhead’ approach that uses anonymous session-divas as raw material (Todd Terry and Nitro Deluxe creating stammer-riffs by ‘playing’ the vocal sample on the sampling keyboard).

Jungle producers like Omni Trio took these crude techniques to the next level of sophistication, molding and morphing diva vocals into a sort of passion-plasma, a body without organs fluid. Then, just as the hypergasmic diva was fading from Jungle, ‘vocal science’ flickered back to life somewhere else – US Garage, of all places. On his remixes of St Germain’s “Alabama Blues” and his own tracks like “Never Far From You”, New Jersey producer Todd Edwards developed a technique of cross-hatching brief snatches of vocals into a melodic-percussive honeycomb of blissful hiccups, so burstingly rapturous it’s almost painful to the ear.

Todd Edwards’s music had an extraordinary impact on London’s emergent Speed Garage scene. If anyone in two-step picked up Todd’s baton and ran wild with it, it’s Dem 2. “Destiny” features an android diva whose plaintive bleat is so tremulously FX-warped that for months I thought it went “dance-ta-tha-beat” instead of “des-tin-i”. Dem 2’s “Don’t Cry Dub” of Groove Connektion 2’s “Club Lonely” is an even more ear-boggling feat of robo-glossalalia. This 1997 remix sounds like the missing link between Zapp’s vocoder-funk mantra “More Bounce To the Ounce” and Maurizio’s dub House. Snipping the vocal into syllables and vowels, feeding the phonetic fragments through filters and effects, Dem 2 create a voluptuous melancholy of cyber-sobs and lump-in-throat glitches: “whimpering, wounded droids crying out in desolation!”, as Spencer Edwards puts it.

“You can add a different soul that wasn’t there”, is how Dem 2 describe this kind of vocal remixology. ‘Deconstruction’ is not too strong a term, for what is being dismantled is the very idea of the voice as the expression of a whole human subject. “Instead of the ‘organic’ female singer of early Garage, you get a legion of dismembered doll parts,” says journalist Bethan Cole, who’s writing a book about the diva in dance music. On tracks like Dem 2’s remix of Cloud 9’s “Do You Want Me” or Colors featuring Stephen Emmanuel’s “Hold On (SE22 Mix)”, the vocal – a paroxysm of hair-trigger blurts and stuttered spasms of passion – doesn’t resemble a human being so much as an out-of-control desiring machine. What you’re hearing is literally a cyborg – a human enhanced and altered through symbiosis with technology.

Two-step’s vocal science has intersected with the anti-naturalistic studio techniques of American R&B, whose producers have long been digitally processing vocals to make them sound even more mellifluous and diabetically ultra-sweet. US R&B tunes are routinely given a two-step remix these days. Two early, superior examples are The Dreem Teem’s sublime transformation of Amira’s “My Desire” into a gamelan-tinkling tumble of undulant percussion, and the sultry menace of First Steps remix of “Telefunkin’” by British diva-wannabes N-Tyce. Alongside such official remixes, there’s been a spate of bootleg revamps of R&B anthems like Jodeci’s “Freak ‘N You”. 1999’s heavy rotation pirate smash is Architechs’ unofficial two-step remix of Brandy & Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine”, which resurrects Hardcore’s infamous sped-up chipmunk vocals by whipping the dueting divas into a creamy warble of wobbly, high-pitched melisma. But two-step’s favourite R&B goddess is Aaliyah, whose Timbaland-produced “One In A Million” has been extensively pillaged. Best of the bunch is Groove Chronicles’s “Stone Cold”, which samples a handful of vocal phrases (“you don’t know/what you do to me,” “desire,” and other splinters of yearning) and deploys them to create endlessly fresh accents against the groove. The original song’s mood is totally subverted: what had been a devotional paean becomes a baleful ballad of sexual dependency, with Aaliyah digitally disintegrated into a multitracked wraith of herself, stranded in a locked groove of desolated desire.

Hang out at a Garage shop like Rhythm Division in East London, and chances are you’ll hear one of the blokes behind the counter say “the girls love that one” in reference to certain tracks – like Doolally’s Top 20 hit “Straight From The Heart” or the duo’s pirate smash/UK number one “Sweet Like Chocolate,” released as Shanks & Bigfoot. In most dance scenes, this comment would be a diss. Take the unwritten boy’s own constitutions of Techno and drum ’n’ bass, where overt melody, explicit emotion, and recognisably human feelings are regarded as ‘cheesy’, conventionally poppy – in a word, girly. For the UK Garage scene, though, “the girls love that tune” is a recommendation. There’s a striking deference to female taste. Pirate DJs dedicate tunes “to the ladies massive”. And most DJ/producers share Ramsey & Fen’s opinion: “When the girls start singing along to a tune like our own ‘Love Bug’, it gets the guys hyper! If the ladies love it, they all love it.”

Feminine Pressure is the name of an all-female Garage DJ crew. In a very real sense, UK Garage is organised around the pressure of feminine desire; a key factor in the scene’s emergence was when women defected en masse from the junglist dancefloor, fed up with the melody-and-vocal-devoid bombast of techstep. Two-step Garage bears the same relation to Jungle that lover’s rock did to dub reggae: it’s the feminised counterpart of a “serious” male genre. Like two-step, lover’s rock was a UK-spawned hybrid of silky US soul and Jamaican rhythm that restored treble to the bass-heavy frequency spectrum and replaced militant spirituality with romantic yearning. UK Garage pirate MCs send out shouts to couples cuddling at home (“or even engaged in horizontal activities”). The mic chat can get seriously lewd, in the beyond suggestive, explicit style of modern R&B; on one station I heard an MC rap “to the ladies, undo my zip/and you’ll find I’m well equipped”! There’s even a pirate station called Erotic FM.

Two-step is lover’s Jungle; it’s also Hardcore for grown-ups. Ravers who were teenagers during the 1989-92 era are now in their mid-to-late twenties, with jobs, marriages, even kids. At Rhythm Division, I saw a guy behind the counter bottle feeding a six month old baby, who seemed utterly unperturbed by the thunderous b-lines booming out the speakers; later that day I picked up a flyer for a club that boasted it was “the very first rave with a genuine crèche for the children – with registered child minders, five quid per child. So there’s no excuse, bring the fucking kids. Rather than abandon the drug and dance lifestyle, the first rave generation is finding ways to accommodate it to their new adult circumstances – coupledom, relative affluence. The Garage remakes of Hardcore tunes like Jonny L’s “Hurt You So,” the samples from Shut Up And Dance’s 1989 “$10 To Get In” redeployed in Some Treat’s two-step anthem “Lost In Vegas” – these represent not so much old skool nostalgia as a celebration of continuity. Hardcore to two-step, the subcultural infrastructure of pirate radio/specialist record stores/dubplates/etc abides. The dress code, crowd rituals, and other elements have evolved; MCs, for instance, now superimpose a smoov R&B patina over the junglist’s creole hybrid of ragga patois and cockney patter. But the subcultural project is the same as it ever was: the creation of ‘vibe’.

‘Vibe’ is UK Garage’s biggest buzzword – from Aftershock’s classic “Slave to the Vibe (Dem 2 Remix)” to Garage dons Tuff Jam’s “Unda-Vybe” remixes, from MC chants like “I’ve got the vibe to make you hyper” to Da Click’s “Good Rhymes”, an MC anthem that culminates with a roll call of the scene’s key players, all of whom “got the vibe”. But isn’t ‘vibe’ just one of those nebulous buzzwords, like “street” or “real”, used to evoke blackness? Yes, but it’s also what everyone (except maybe chronic hermits or Detroitphiles) is looking for from music: that palpable forcefield of tribal energy generated by the perfect convergence of music, drugs, technology, and popular desire.

‘Vibe’ works through evolution rather than revolution: producers simultaneously giving the people what they want and slyly seducing them into wanting things they’ve never had; DJs pulling off the same trick through sheer sleight of mix, all the while carefully avoiding a lapse into disparate (vibe-less) eclecticism. And ‘vibe’ only really occurs when music is a component in a subcultural engine, an urban folkway with its own privileged sites and rites. Its musical methodology may be postmodern, but two-step Garage has no truck with Techno notions of the post-geographical or transcending the local – hence the recurrent variations on the old Hardcore themes “just 4 U London” and “London sum’ting dis”. Like Jungle, two-step is heard at its utmost through a big sound system, by a body surrounded by other bodies (the massive). Which is why two-step, like most Hardcore dance styles, can sometimes sound flat when heard as an isolated 12 inch, outside the DJ’s mix, without MC chat or the participatory clamor of the audience. If you want to ‘catch the feeling’, the next best thing to being there is to tape pirate radio transmissions for free; third best is buying a mix CD like the Ramsey & Fen mixed Locked On, Volume 3, probably the finest introduction to the full span of UK Garage.

Compared with the anhedonic severity of its estranged cousin drum ’n’ bass, one of the most striking things about UK Garage is the scene’s relentless emphasis on pleasure. The names of clubs, labels, and pirate stations evoke melt-in-your-mouth, sensuous indulgence – Cookies & Cream, Nice ‘N Ripe, Chocolate Boy, Ice Cream, Pure Silk, Twice As Nice, Bliss, Lush FM – and mirror the sonic penchant for warm, organic textures and thick, succulent production. Garage’s fetish for ‘niceness’ and luxury – champagne and cocaine, designer labels, ‘rude bimmers’ – has a long history in black British dance culture, going back to the pre-rave dancehall and R&B scenes. The most charitable reading of such ‘living large’ is that it’s a refusal of your allotted place in the class system, an insistence that “nothing’s too good for us.” A more hostile viewpoint would argue that Garage’s opulence is mere hyper-conformism, deluded mimicry of the high life.

Either way, cocaine is the perfect signifier for Garage’s ambivalent politics – not only because of its associations with prestige, but because it’s a drug that stimulates the appetite for all pleasures, and because the dynamics of its use (insatiability, basically) offer a kind of parody of consumerism. Sonically, Garage seems to fit cocaine like a glove: the playa-pleasing patina of deluxe sound, the fidgety, febrile beats that feel itchy with desire. The ‘cocaine ear’ favours bright, toppy sounds – hence Garage’s harsh glare of crisp hi-hats, shrill brass, glossy synths, and trebly vocals.

Horny-making coke has changed the vibe in other ways, encouraging a return to the sexed up, dressed up mores of pre-rave clubland. The shift from Ecstasy to cocaine represents a kind of Fall from paradise, with rave’s androgynous asexuality displaced by repolarised gender roles and rapacious sexuality. And although the standard image of the cokehead is of a chatterbox who finds himself endlessly charming, the effect in clubland has been to replace loved-up bonhomie with charlied-up hauteur. “On coke, you don’t feel the need to talk ‘cos you’ve got so much brilliance within yourself,” says Bethan Cole. “But there’s no E-like empathy, it’s a hollow feeling.” You can feel the difference in the music – the gaseous diva vocals of Hardcore mirrored the swoony, boundary-melting intimacy of Ecstasy; two-step’s staccato vocal stabs accentuate coke’s cold, brittle glitter.

Drug phenomenologist David Lenson describes almost too vividly the “third stage” of cocaine intoxication, “hypersexuality”, a frenzy in which desire is unable to focus on any single object (kinky sex, grandiose fantasies, other drugs) for more than a few seconds before flitting off elsewhere. Ultimately, the mania fixates on cocaine itself – desire-for-desire. Not far beyond hypersexuality lies the paranoia and undead delirium of “stimulant dysphoria”. Whether anybody on the Garage dancefloor regularly reaches hypersexuality is beside the point – the music’s own internal dynamic is pushing it into the twilight zone. Often hidden on B-sides or released on white labels that circulate for only a few weeks, two-step is producing some fiendishly fucked up tunes that merge twisted vocals, convulsively DJ-unfriendly beats, and svelte but sinister textures. Easier to find pinnacles of darkside Garage include DJ Richie & Klasse’s “Madness On The Street”, productions by Skycap like their 97 classic “Endorphin”, and the “Plenty More”/“Get It” 12" by rising producer Chris Mac – tracks whose unsettling blend of brittle and supple, desperation and desire, show how the pursuit of pure pleasure can take music to some pretty strange places. Dem 2 also look set to probe “a darker, deeper electro direction” in 1999, what Dean Boylan describes as “Gary Numan meets Tina Moore”; the duo are also starting an overtly experimental label called Purple Orange. For now, check their alter ego US Alliance’s “Grunge Dub,” with its angular anti-groove and gibbering, strung-out vocal (like a crackhead Bobby McFerrin).

The original 1993 darkside Hardcore was a catastrophic plunge, the first rave generation succumbing to E-induced malaise en masse. With Garage, though, it’s more like ‘darkness’ is a normalized component of the scene, a zone some cross into if they overdo the stimulants, perhaps even a phase of any given club night (after 4am, say, when some of the clientele has crossed the optimal threshold of enjoyable wiredness, or reaches a weekly apprehension of the void at the heart of the hedonistic lifestyle). In fact, dark Garage existed right from the earliest days of the London scene. KMA’s “Cape Fear” combined breakbeat rhythms, ominous ‘video vocals’ and destabilising ‘bass warps’ that triggered crowd pandemonium the very first time the tune was played out, in late 96. “You could see the goosebumps rising on everybody’s neck, the hair standing on end,” says KMA producer/vocalist Six. “The crowd erupted, they were so confused about what just happened they forced the DJ to rewind the track.”

The anecdote recalls the early, stunned responses to the body-baffling pitchshifted beats in “Terminator”, the Goldie tune that pioneered darkcore. Six talks like Goldie, declaring “my music is like a movie” and “I see myself as a painter, a surrealist painter”. After following “Cape Fear” with another moody, breakbeat Garage anthem, “Kaotic Madness,” Six tired of KMA’s darkside reputation and decided to go in a smoother, more “musical” direction – just like Goldie did circa “Angel”. The result was “Re-Con Mission EP”, whose highlight track “Blue Kards” meshed disjointed emotions, phased vocals, bluesy guitar, and asymmetrical beats to create one of 1998’s most exhilarating sonic con-fusions. What’s exciting about “Blue Kards” and the other dark two-step tunes that have surfaced in the last year is that the music often sounds like a hybrid where the grafts haven’t wholly congealed. Sometimes, it sounds ‘wrong’, but only in the way that 1993 darkcore sounded not-quite-there-yet. If you want seamless, fully realised fusion, listen to drum ’n’ bass, a style that has arrived at a definitive version of itself and accordingly spent the last two years scratching its head wondering where to go next. Two-step sounds like it has a whole world of places left to go.

Simon Reynolds


Footnotes to this piece, originally published at Simon Reynolds’s blissout website, are now to be found at energyflashbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com

The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds On The Hardcore Continuum #5: Neurofunk Drum ‘n’ Bass Versus Speed Garage (1997)

• Issue #300 (Feb 09) | The Wire 300
• By: Simon Reynolds
• Links: Liverpool FACT | Grooverider At Discogs | Jonny L \"Piper (Grooverider Remix)\" | Nasty Habits \"Shadow Boxing\"

Originally published as "2 Steps Back" in The Wire #166, December 1997.

These are difficult times for Jungle. If Reprazent winning the Mercury Music Prize wasn’t bad enough (what scene could survive such a seal of mainstream, middlebrow approval?), Jungle has been ousted from its three year old status as the London underground by the advent of Speed Garage. Lured by its ‘classy’-but-torrid R&B vocals and designer-label flaunting, champagne swigging, no-trainers-allowed ethos of living large, much of Jungle’s black audience has defected to this most recent dancefloor mutation. The astonishingly fast conversion of jump-up junglists to speed garage was hastened by the emergence of an earlier mutant breakbeat strain, the essentially white Industrial-like dirgecore of techstep, as typified by the productions of the No U Turn label, which carried Jungle so far from its roots in Rave and ragga that by early this year many scenesters were complaining about a surfeit of ‘disgusting’ tracks, drenched in distortion and devoid of melody.

Ironically, many of the most subterranean producers in drum ’n’ bass have since moved decisively away from techstep towards a new sound – although not one that’s likely to win back the converts to Speed Garage. Hardly known for its semantic restraint, the drum ’n’ bass community has failed to come up with a term for the new style, although some mutter about “nu-dark” or tracks that are “dark but technical”. Since discourse abhors a vacuum, I’m pitching in with my own genre designation: neurofunk. If No U Turn-style techstep is defined by deliberately dirty production, bombastic riffs and an explosive psychosis, this new sound is about obsessive-compulsive cleanliness of production, eerie electronic blips ’n’ blurts, ultra-complicated basslines, and an implosive neurosis. Techstep classics such as Trace & Nico’s “Squadron” sound like a maniac running amok; neurofunk tracks sound like a stalker, furtive and morbidly fixated.

The first hints of a new direction were audible late last year. At the time, Doc Scott’s awesome Nasty Habits track “Shadow Boxing” seemed like a pinnacle for techstep. Actually, it was the prototype for neurofunk, with its glacial, Numanoid synth-motif glowering like some cosmic scowl, and a two-step rhythm that made the track feel like it was jogging along at 85 beats per minute instead of 170. By the time the “Shadow Boxing Remix” surfaced this summer, the groove had stiffened even further – to the point of rigor mortis – while the flipside “March” crystallized the emergent neurofunk norm with its monotonously chugging beat and acrid emissions of synth-slime. Only the low frequency tremors of bassline pressure connected these Doc Scott tracks to the kind of kinetic, hypertensile Jungle he was producing just three years ago.

Just as he crusaded for techstep in 96, Grooverider, as both DJ and label head, has maintained a typically Godfather-like role all year long vis-à-vis neurofunk, premiering dubplates by new producers such as Matrix, Optical, and John B, and releasing their tracks on his Prototype label. Grooverider has also helped codify the neurofunk sound with his own Codename John productions, “The Warning”/”Structure of Red” on Metalheadz, and the forthcoming “Enigma” on Prototype. With its Mace-like squirts of astringent synth and squelchy, non-junglistic groove, “The Warming” opened up a whole new technoid path for drum ’n’ bass. “Warned”, the alternative version of the “The Warning” on the Grooverider Presents The Prototype Years compilation, is even better. Seemingly steeped as much in acid house as Jungle, the track’s viscous, mucus-like textures make you feel like you’re being stalked by some ravenous and implacable snot-monster.

The year’s ultimate neurofunk track, however, is Jonny L’s “Piper”, with its metronomic two-step beat, ghostly Ambient FX and affectless female voice reciting the title like a Dalek. If the original wasn’t clenched and clammy enough, Grooverider’s remix transforms it into a disconcertingly asymmetrical robo-funk groove that’s closer to Front 242 than Ganja Kru. On the remix’s flipside, “Obedience” reminds me of A Certain Ratio – sickly, wilting drones hang dank and dismal over a rudimentary shuffle beat and a quagmire of glutinous bass-goo. It’s so mausoleum-cold in here, you can almost see your breath. In early 80s death-disco fashion, the three elements of “Obedience” seem to have an arbitrary relationship to each other; the track grasps for funkiness without every quite getting on-the-one. But then, like the avant-funk of ACR and 23 Skidoo, neurofunk is a contradiction in terms anyway: the raunchy etymological roots of ‘funk’ – a West African word meaning ‘positive sweat’, Afro-American slang for a woman’s sex-smell – have long faded away, replaced by a cyborg’s distant memory of the body.

Check the review column written by the staff of the London Jungle shop Black Market for the clubculturezine Mixmag – virtually every promo and dubplate is described as a two-step. Close to the defining attribute of neurofunk, the two-step is a simple kick-snare rhythm that doesn’t even sound like a breakbeat anymore. The Wire’s Chris Sharp compares it to Tamla Motown or the skinhead moonstomp. Where the mashed-up, hyper-syncopated breaks of Jungle demanded extravagantly posthuman physical responses, making dancers strive for a hybrid of bodypoppin’ breaker, contortionist and Tex Avery cartoon character, the two-step incites much more rudimentary rhythmic reflexes: the feet trudge, the head jerks, and the torso folds at the waist like a pen-knife.

“It’s the easiest break to do,” says Phil Aslet, one half of production team Source Direct. “There are no real flutters in the snares or the hi-hats. It’s a straight-up, easy rhythm to get people on the dancefloor.” Although Source Direct have shaped neurofunk’s palette of atmospherics with such brilliant tracks as “Two Masks”, “Enemy Lines” and “Black Domina” – all spectral spaces, avant-classical atonality, glaring brass stabs and strings that attack like the ravens in Hitchcock’s The Birds – the duo have so far shunned the two-step option in favour of fitful full-kit funk. Aslet says that he and partner Jim Baker are still too enamoured of the breakbeat’s possibilities. But virtually everyone else on the scene seems to be retreating from breakbeat science towards the simplicity and rigour of the two-step.

The weird thing about neurofunk is that drum ’n’ bass seems to be turning back into Techno, albeit a brittle, staccato, non-hypnotic variant. All year, the synth-and-sample textures have harked back to the analogue sounds of the pre-breakbeat era: bleep ’n’ bass (LFO, Sweet Exorcist, Forgemasters, Unique 3, Rhythmatic), Acid House’s Roland 303 (revived on Dillinja’s “Acid Trak”), even the angular Orientalism of mid-80s synthpop (Thomas Leer, Sylvian/Sakomoto, John Foxx, Gary Numan’s later, ‘funky’ output). Listen to recent tracks by Bristol junglist DJ Krust, “Soul in Motion”, “Future Unknown” and “The Last Day”, and you hear curiously inhibited, coerced grooves overlaid with drone-swathes, melted sound-shapes, timbral smears, stereo-panning wooshes, and disconcerting belches ’n’ burbles of grotesquely distorted electronics. Amazingly, a scene that began with Shut Up And Dance and Human Resource has evolved towards the brink of Stockhausen-esque electroacoustic sound-daubs.

Even the scientific imagery seems more redolent of Techno than Jungle: artists names like Genotype, Isotope, Cyborgz, Cybernet Vs Genetix; titles like “Telemetry”, “DNA”, “Genetic Manipulation”, Controlled Developments (a Source Direct mini-LP available only in America). For Phil Aslet, such dry, dispassionate imagery reflects the fact that “We’re technical people… Our music isn’t an in-your-face thing that’s going to sell millions of copies, it’s more of a creation that you have to read, like a book.” Detached from their own, hopefully devastating creations, neurofunk producers are like lab researchers working on nuclear missiles, or gene-splicers designing viral pathogens for biological warfare. And military research, after all, is the avant garde of science.

The scientific imagery also seems to reflect the modus operandi (as Photek titled his debut album – pure neuro!), the weeks of incredibly intensive and fastidious labour that go into the average drum ’n’ bass track. Listening, you can hear the conditions under which the music came into being: bodies rigid with tension as they click the mouse; eyes fucked by the red-eye effects of ganja and staring at a computer screen all day. Neurofunk is the culmination of the perfectionist tendency in drum ’n’ bass, where artists like Photek and Boymerang devote months of ten-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week toil to construct a single eight minute track. (By way of contrast, No U Turn’s techstep tracks are completed in a single all-night session). Source Direct’s “Two Masks” took two months of trial-and-error and “deep concentration” to finish. Where once producers would construct tracks entirely out of loops, in neurofunk you’ll increasingly hear noises and effects that are used just once. “Two Masks” is riddled with sonic singularities and one-off surprises, designed, says Aslet, to ambush the listener.

Some of the new breed of neurofunksters are actual scientists: Grooverider protege John B is a 19 year old student of genetics and cell biology at Durham University, who cites his influences as Throbbing Gristle and Stockhausen. Like Techno before it, drum ’n’ bass has been taken over by boffins. Listen to Grooverider’s Kiss FM show – where once the station voiceovers came from ruffneck types, now you’ll hear phrases like “cutting edge beats” recited in the ‘middle class but trying to sound street-credible’ accents of Matrix’s Jamie Quinn and Boymerang’s Graham Sutton.

Quinn and his brother Matt, who records under the name Optical, are the rising stars of neurofunk. Operating out of West London’s Hammersmith/Shepherd’s Bush area, the brothers have released two records via Jamie’s own Metro label – Matrix’s “Double Vision”/”Sedation” and Optical’s “Shining”/”Dark Skies” – plus a host of tracks for other imprints, including Formation’s experimental sub-label New Identity. Matt Quinn is also starting his own Virus label with No U Turn affiliate Ed Rush, and doing engineering/production work on Grooverider’s debut album for Columbia. Confirming his man of the moment status, he also helped Goldie construct the hour long breakbeat-and-40-piece-orchestra epic “Mother”, the centerpiece of the forthcoming sequel to Timeless. The highpoints of the Quinn brothers’ output so far include Matrix’s chromium-plated two-stepper “Mute” and Optical’s slinky but sinister fluoro-funker “Grey Odyssey” (both on Grooverider Presents The Prototype Years), and a shared EP for Metalheadz. On the latter, Optical’s “To Shape The Future” and “Raging Calm” are two of this year’s most astonishing slices of drum ’n’ bass futurism: amorphous surges of drone-bass, distressed R2D2 bleeps and sampladelics ooze with an abject but inorganic quality, like the cyber-lymph frothing out of the haemorrhaging android in Alien.

According to Matt Quinn, “‘To Shape the Future’ was my angry reaction to the diluted crap that seemed to come out of the initially interesting ‘intelligent’ drum ’n’ bass camp,” while “Raging Calm” was “influenced by the sounds of 70s jazz funk but also trying to reflect the chaos of the 90s life beneath the calm exterior.” In a lot of ways neurofunk does represent a kind of truce between techstep and its former foe, ‘intelligent’ drum ‘n’ bass, merging the former’s edgy, let the bad times roll vibe with the latter’s pristine production and atmospheric textures. The new breed of neuro producers – John B, Skynet, Psion – often sound like they were probably still making LTJ Bukem/Moving Shadow style Ambient softcore or jazzy Jungle only a year ago.

John B’s debut album Visions is split into two CDs, subtitled “Organic” and “Synthetic”. The first contains jazz-step workouts like “Sax Therapy”, featuring real horn and flute solos, and programmed basslines that sound horribly close to slap bass. But the “Synthetic” disco is pure neuro, replacing the first disc’s fluency with unswinging two-step beats, plasma-morphic bass-tendrils and cryogenic synths, leavened by the odd jazzy flourish or Vangelis-like Ambient wash. Other names to look out for in this fusion-noir zone include Blade, Isotope, Kraken and Decoder (whose alter ego Technical Itch captures perfectly neurofunk’s obsessive-compulsive tendency), along with labels like Audio Blueprint, Nor, Chemical Warfare and Smooth.

The neurofunk sound has also spread to more established sectors of drum ’n’ bass. The Reinforced label’s new roster – Vortexion, The Sonar Circle, Arcon 2, Procedure 769 – shun two-step minimalism in favour of full-kit clatter, but share the neurofunkster’s pathological intricacy of production. At the other end of the breakbeat spectrum, neurofunk’s sci-fi vibe has infected such formerly jump-up affiliated producers as Swift (check his amazingly bleak and frigid “Load”) and Andy C (whose collaborations with Shimon, “Recharge”, “Mutation”, and “Genetix” are riddled with queasy bass-gurgles and fizzy electronics).

Judging by their latest release, Trace and Nico’s “Cells”/“Copies”, even No U Turn have swapped bombast for stealth and distortion for cavernous clarity. Chiming in with neurofunk’s scientific imagery, both tracks feature samples of scientists talking about cell formation, while the label’s engineer-producer Nico Sykes describes No U Turn’s imminent releases. On “Cells” and “Copies”, the No U Turn sound is drifting towards neurofunk, swapping techstep’s headbanger bass-riffs for complex, clinical and glossily textured basslines. At the No U Turn HQ, the buzzword of the hour appears to be ‘funky’. “Cells” is described as a “two-bar funk switch” (whatever that is), while one-time rock bassist Nico has been enthusing about Stanley Clarke’s “School Days” and fantasising about working with Bootsy Collins. Ed Rush has a collaboration with Optical forthcoming, entitled “Funktion”.

Matt Quinn defends the current vogue for two-step simplicity as a back to basics return to da funk, and a timely retreat from the baroque excesses of breakbeat science. “Unless they’re extremely well thought out, complicate patterns and edits tend to miss the point that this music, in all its forms, is about flow, rhythm and the funk. It’s not about who can spend a week programming the most complicated drum track ever.” But while the beats have become less complex – to the point of sounding like drum machines rather than looped breakbeats – everything else about neurofunk has become more labour-intensive and highly finessed, from the ultra-crisp production to the pretzel-like multiple basslines.

There’s no doubt that neurofunk has produced some of 1997’s most striking and accomplished music. But there’s something about the style that leaves me cold. This is the most alienated and obsessive ‘dance’ music since Cabaret Voltaire circa Microphonies or Material circa “Ciguri”. That’s no small achievement. But at times it seems like the producers are willfully excising all the things that made Jungle so exciting in the first place – the polyrhythmic exuberance, the explosive joy, the ruffneck boisterousness – simply because those elements have been co-opted by the mainstream and ended up in TV adverts and David Bowie albums.

Shunning obvious and crowdpleasing characteristics – anthemic hooks, rinse-out breakdowns – neurofunk is a music of timbral tweaking and endlessly recessive nuances. In this respect, the style reflects a triumph for the kind of obsessive production techniques pioneered by Photek. Modus Operandi might have been received by many as a disappointment, but so many tracks released this year share his music’s oddly amnesiac effect (compelling while you listen, but afterwards you can’t remember much about it) and numbing avoidance of explicit moods or emotions. (“The absence of feeling sort of becomes the feeling,” as he told Chris Sharp, optimistically, in The Wire #159).

Since neurofunk represents drum ’n’ bass’s latest attempt to alienate all but its most committed connoisseurs, where next for the scene? Jungle’s populist core has withered away: most of London’s pirate radio stations have switched to playing Speed Garage; recent jump-up Jungle events like The Roast have been almost empty. “A lot of the dread side of Jungle has gone into the Speed Garage,” says Phil Aslet, referring to the dancehall reggae fans originally lured into Jungle by its ragga samples back in 1994. Not only have those people left the scene, but Jungle’s sonic repertoire of rude-ness has migrated wholesale to Speed Garage, too: the ragga soundbites, the timestretched vocals, the booming sub-bass, all can be now heard fully assimilated and uproariously revitalized in a defining UK Garage track such as Ruff Da’ Menace’s “Kick the Party Into Full Effect”.

Of course it’s precisely these rude-boy/B-boy elements that neurofunk has shed as part of its realignment with Techno and Acid House. Drum ‘n’ bass seems to be on the verge of redefining itself as, and refining itself into, a purist genre comparable to the Detroit-pietist techno-phunk of labels such as Soma, Ifach, Ferox and Peacefrog, and artists like Ian O’Brien, Funk D’Void, Mark Broom and Russ Gabriel. It’s a realm where labels are referred to as ‘imprints’, tracks come cloaked with concepts and highly-designed sleeves, and the uppermost ceiling for sales is about 2000 copies. Caught between its reluctance to abandon the dancefloor totally for no-rules headfuck, and its squeamish disdain for the full-on fervour of the rave, this semi-experimental genre of ‘abstract dance’ suffered a humiliation of sorts earlier this year, when Colin Faver’s long-running Techno show on Kiss FM was dropped to make way for a Happy Hardcore programme. In that hideous, hilarious irony (‘proper’ techno displaced by the rave fodder it had always sneered at) lies a warning for the neurofunk tendency, and for its patron Grooverider, who has his own Kiss FM show based around a similar progressive ethos to Faver’s.

Purist Techno originally defined itself against the cheesy-ness of Hardcore Rave and handbag House –‘cheese’ meaning the corny-but-effective elements in music – by dedicating itself to the pursuit of endless subtleties. The thing about cheese, though, is that it creates flava and increases the phat content of any given music. When it comes to cheese, I’ll choose a pungent cliche over an insipid subtlety any day. In fact, the entire history of dance music is about the creation of potent cliches – sounds and effects so good that other people couldn’t resist copying them and caning them to death. Cliches like disco’s snare-crash, acid house’s faecal Roland 303 bass, garage’s skipping snares, Rave’s Morse code-like piano vamps, Hardcore’s Mentasm stabs, Jungle’s Amen breaks and dread bass, gabba’s distorted kick drum, and the EQ-ing/phasing/filtering effects used by House producers from DJ Pierre to Daft Punk.

To invent a cliche from scratch is a great feat. What worries me is that the neurofunk school of drum ’n’ bass is not generating any potent cliches, just a series of subtle tweaks and involuted nuances. Techstep was a slight return to the broad strokes and bombastic sweeps of Belgian Hardcore circa 1991. A year ago, I thought techstep’s destiny involved fusing with gabba and German gloomcore, thereby promising the reintegration of the original pan-European Hardcore rave of the early 90s. But now drum ’n’ bass seems more likely to link arms with the abstractions of Cristian Vogel and Surgeon, a far less appealing prospect. Amazing records will still regularly surface, for sure: there’s too much history, too strong a community of knowledge, for it all to peter away. But neurofunk represents yet another step away from Jungle’s roots in rave, and a two-step trudge towards a not so bright future as one of those not really that danceable dance music genres that appeals only to headnodders and trainspotters.

Simon Reynolds

The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum #4: Hardstep, Jump Up, Techstep (1996)

• Issue #300 (Feb 09) | The Wire 300
• By: Simon Reynolds
• Links: Liverpool FACT | AWOL Online | Public Entertainments Licences (Drug Misuse) Act 1997 | Ed Rush At Discogs | Roni Size\'s YouTube Channel

Originally published as "Slipping Into Darkness" The Wire #148, June 1996.

During the dark days of 1993, when Jungle was still banished from the media limelight, AWOL was the Hardcore club. Especially after the demise of Rage, one of the earliest Hardcore clubs, AWOL was where the scene’s inner circle of musicians, DJs and label runners would gather on a Saturday Night/Sunday Morning to hear DJs like Randall push the music to new heights of ruff-cut intensity. After a no fixed abode period in 1994, having been dislodged from its location at Islington’s Paradise, AWOL settled last year at The SW1 Club in Victoria, and re-established its former role. Some of the drum ’n’ bass elite may have moved onto Speed or the Blue Note Sunday Sessions, but that core Jungle audience is still to be found at AWOL (or similar nights like Club UN and Innersense at the Lazerdrome), shocking out to the underground sounds of gangsta hardstep and darkcore 96.

AWOL isn’t an acronym for ‘Absent Without Leave’, but for ‘A Way Of Life’. If you’re not involved in the scene, this article of faith – that buying records at specialist shops, going to clubs at the weekend, wearing MA2 jackets and Puffa jackets and smoking a lot of spliff, constitutes a set of tribal folkways – can seem a tad overstated. But the frequency and conviction with which the claim “jungle, it’s a way of life” is restated, suggests that for the true disciple, something massive has been invested in this music. Most external discourse about Jungle has been concerned with the music’s ‘progressive’ formal properties, and disagreements as to where the cutting edge is currently situated. What about the social energies embedded in the music? What exactly is at stake for fans? What makes them return week after week to experience the same thing, over and over again?

Ethnological research wasn’t on my mind the first time I checked out AWOL; fun was. I’m not sure if I found any, at least in the conventional sense, but the visit was a reaffirmation of flagging faith; a confirmation that, despite the surfeit of pseudo-jazzy drum ’n’ bass crossover tracks, Jungle is alive and kickin’. It was also a reminder that, despite all the success of album-length, home-listening drum ’n’ bass, Jungle’s meaning is still made on the dancefloor. At massive volume, knowledge is visceral, something your body understands as it’s seduced and ensnared by the music’s paradoxes: the way the breaks combine rollin’ flow and disruptive instability, instill a contradictory mix of nonchalance and vigilance; the way the bass is at once wombing and menacing. AWOL is a real Temple of Boom; the low-end frequencies are so thick and all-enveloping they’re swimmable. Inside the bass, you feel safe, and you feel dangerous. Like cruising in a car with a booming system, you’re sealed by surround-sound while marauding through urban space.

Tonight the AWOL vibe is neither celebratory nor especially moody, but neutral. In contrast to the rousing exhortations of the MC, the crowd response is subdued (not abnormal for Jungle). It’s a few days after the death of Leah Betts (the teenager who died of overhydration after she took a tab of Ecstasy at her own birthday party), and initially that’s how I account for the utter absence of any E-vibes in the area, and for the insistent –verging on desperate – dealer trying to offload her unusually bargain-price wares. Instead, it’s champagne, Pils and ganja that appear to be everybody’s intoxicants of choice. Later, I notice a gaggle of sofa-sprawled punters who do appear to be E’d up, but are struggling to conceal the fact; their flushed but impassive faces ripple and spasm as if they’re trying to hold down the rising high. It’s only later I realize the reason for their restraint: no one else here is luv’d up, and it’s as though any kind of blissed behaviour is deemed inappropriate, unseemly, a throwback.

The next time I go AWOL, a month later, the vibe has subtly changed. The sofa-zone, which had seemed vaguely upmarket, has been moved to somewhere out of the light, and now seems murky and seedy. Overall, the balefulness quotient has increased dramatically. This time, I’m struck by the fact that nobody seems to be having fun; or to put it another way, ‘fun’ doesn’t seem to be the reason everyone is here. It’s old news that the effervescent bonhomie of 92-era Hardcore is long gone, but basic civility seems to be in short supply. Even among groups of friends or boyfriend/girlfriend couples, smiles are rarer than hen’s teeth, conversation is minimal. I spot a gang of super-sharp stylists, eyes masked behind sunglasses, standing erect and statuesque in the middle of the dancing throng. Their faces are frozen, their arms folded across the chest, b-boy style, but whether this intransigent posture is a salute to the DJ or disapproval, it’s hard to say; their expressions are unreadable.

AWOL’s resident crew of DJs – Randall, Mickey Finn, Kenny Ken, Darren Jay – sustain the mercilessly minimalist and militaristic assault of hardstep, all parade-ground paradiddles and atonal, metallic b-lines that bounce joylessly like ball-bearings in a pinball machine. The night stays at a plateau of punitive intensity, no crescendos or lulls, just steady Ardkore pressure. By about 4am, the dancers are jigging about with a kind of listless mania. One girl twitches and bounces mechanically, her limp limbs inscribing the exact same patterns in the air, as if she’s animated by some will other than her own. For a Saturday night out, the compensatory climax of a week’s drudgery, this seems like hard work. I start to wonder if she, like me, got sucked in by Ardkore’s explosive euphoria, its manic, fiery-eyed glee, and then got carried along by the music’s logical evolution to wind up at another place altogether, dystopian rather than utopian. Maybe that stunned, dispirited expression on her face comes from finding herself in the midst of an entirely new cultural formation, “a way of life” that can no longer offer release, let alone a redemptive vision.

This new cultural formation started to emerge from the Hardcore rave scene in late 92 and early 93. Two things replaced Rave’s smiley-face fervor with skrewface attitude. The first was ‘darkness’, the trend for producers to deploy sinister atmospherics and sick-joke soundbites that reflected the paranoia and psychic malaise engendered by excessive, long-term Ecstasy use. The second factor was ‘blackness’, as ragga, dub and Hip Hop influences (already percolating in Ardkore) broke Rave’s ties to House and disco. Following the late 94/early 95 initiatives of LTJ Bukem, Alex Reece and Wax Doctor, who began making tracks heavily influenced by Techno and House, Jungle has looped back to 1993 and reaffirmed both of those initial breaks with Rave. The blackness is reinforced by a conscious alignment with US hiphop, which now extends beyond breakbeats to the use of melancholy melodic refrains from West Coast G-funk and vocal samples from East Coast rap, whether boastful (“raw like Reservoir Dogs”) or threatening (“hit the deck, I got the Tek right on your neck”). As for darkness, there’s been a resurrection and intensification of darkcore’s bad-trippy effects.

Kodwo Eshun’s term for the new flava is ‘gangstadelic’. Ganjadelic fits too. Just check the Dr Dre-like marijuana leaf on the cover of the Ganja/Frontline compilation Still Smokin’, or the Pure Rollers anthology with its image of a turntable whose tone-arm is a gigantic, smouldering spliff. But these days smoking isn’t a mellow, Marley-esque affair. With their much higher THC content, super-breeds of weed like skunk are near hallucinogenic, offering a sensory intensification without euphoria, tinged with a jittery, nerve-jangling paranoia: a mind-state perfect for jungle’s tension-but-no-release rhythms.

At AWOL, the ruling sound is the ‘ruffneck soldier’ hardstep of labels like DJ Hype’s Ganja, Pascal’s Frontline, Dread, and the Bristol based Full cycle affiliate Dope Dragon, as well as artists such as HMP, The Terradome, Renegade, L Double, Shy FX, Swift, Zinc and Joker. Somewhere between this stripped-down, martial drum ’n’ bass and the dank neurosis of Photek and Source Direct, you’ll find the artcore noir of Ed Rush’s “Guncheck” and “What’s Up?”, Roni Size’s “Ready or Not”, Dillinja’s “Muthafucka”, Soul-Jah’s “21212”, DJ Krust’s “Angles” and Doc Scott’s “Drumz 95” (a remake of Scott’s original 92 darkside tune “Here Come the Drumz”).

The big difference between the new noir and darkside 93 is that the latter still retained traces of Ardkore jouissance. Even seminal darkcore tracks such as Boogie Times Tribe’s “The Dark Stranger” or Hype’s “Weird Energy” oozed a sinister, sickly bliss (perhaps because the scene was still caning the E in a desperate attempt to recover the old buzz). With E a distant memory, today’s dark tunes are claustrophobic, costive and curiously devoid of affect, instilling a numb compulsion-for-compulsion’s sake. An almost omnipresent motif is a tightly coiled, rattlesnake roll of a breakbeat, first heard, I believe, on DJ Trace’s seminal “Mutant” remix of last year. It’s a hyper-syncopated spasm, the aural equivalent of a panic attack or heart-tremor, and it’s all over state-of-art compilations like Nu Skool Flava and Tech Steppin’. Then there’s the bass sound pioneered by Trace, Ed Rush and Nico, a dense, humming miasma of low-end frequencies, as malignant as a cloud of poison gas or swarming killer bees. In tracks like “Mutant” and Ed Rush’s “The Force Is Electric”, all the explosive energy of Hardcore is imploded in it: listening is like being caged inside a pressure-cooker of paroxysmal breaks and plasmic bass.

Compare the new darkside’s dry, clenched sound with the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of sound oozed you’ll hear at Speed. Dubbed “dolphin” by one correspondent at the internet’s Breakbeat Mailing List, because of its immersive, aquatic vibe, this Bukem-invented style is all heart beat basslines and breaks that roll smoothly, without much disruption; every sonic gap is filled with caressing synth-washes and sax loops that could be on loan from Grover Washington Jr or Kenny G. Brooding and bruising, the new artcore noir is cutting edge because it’s all about cut-up, jolting beats and edgy, treacherous bass. But the real difference is one of intent: music as therapy versus music as terrorism. Where Bukem and his acolytes talk about “educating” listeners, opening minds, Ed Rush has said bluntly, “I want to hurt people with my beats”.

When Origin Unknown’s 93 darkcore classic “Valley of the Shadows” gets dropped during my second visit to AWOL, its creepy “Felt like I was in a long dark tunnel” sample and baleful bass undertow fit as perfectly into the current vibe as Origin’s recent “Truly One” track. Which prompts the ostensibly heretical thought: maybe Jungle is actually a rather conservative music, and maybe it’s this very insular intransigence that is the scene’s strength. Conservative, in that the musical experience when you enter AWOL is the same as when you leave five hours later. Conservative, in that the ruling producers are much the same as in the first phase of darkness: Andy C and Ant Miles (Origin Unknown), Dillinja, Ray Keith, DJ SS, Hype, Pascal, Bizzy B, Remarc, Ed Rush. And conservative, in that Jungle’s basic musical parameters (fucked up breaks and warped bass) haven’t expanded significantly since 93, and moreover, the music’s future course of development (hard won increments of polyrhythmic intricacy and sub-bass brutalism) appears to be set.

This phenomenon has led many ‘non-scene’ observers to reject hardstep in favour of what they regard as the more avant garde drum ’n’ bass tracks produced by outsiders such as Witchman, Luke Vibert (as Plug) or Richard James (with AFX’s “Hangable Auto Bulb” EPs). But the point here is that these players are free to take greater liberties with Jungle’s idiomatic motifs because they don’t have to service DJs and dancers, because they don’t belong to the community. And while their breakbeat elaborations sound astonishing, they lack the electric charge of relatively formulaic stuff made by hardstep fundamentalists. When music is divorced from its subcultural context, it suffers from the meaning-deficit that vitiates all art-for-art’s-sake activity. Listening to records such as the newly reissued Plug EPs, you sense that nothing’s really at stake for the creator, let alone the consumer.

If Ardkore was a fluxed-up con-fusion (stylistic, racial, social, chemical), it’s now possible to talk about drum ’n’ bass essentialism. Jungle’s ‘intelligent’ strain has proved that the music’s rhythmic chassis can be welded to all manner of other genres, from House (Alex Reece, Jacob’s Optical Stairway) to thirtysomething pop-jazz (Everything But the Girl produced by Spring Heel Jack). But the music’s vital pulse, its unique contribution, resides in that essence: breakbeat science, bass mutation, and the use of samples as opposed to synthesizers. In purist AWOL-style hardstep, synths occasionally contribute colouration or unnerving drones (and in the case of the Roland Juno 106, Jungle’s distinctive spectrum of bass tones). But once synths start to be deployed in a keyboard-like manner, Jungle gets closer to conventional notions of ‘musicality’ (which usually means Bruce Hornby-style piano trills or Tangerine Dreamy cosmic flatus).

What’s invigorating about darkcore is its bracing anti-musicality. With its incorporation of atonal, unpitched timbres, non-musical sounds and horror movie soundtrack dissonance, darkcore is simply far more avant garde than intelligent drum ’n’ bass. The latter, in an abiding confusion about what constitutes progression for electronic music, is too deferential to traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, ‘nice’ textures, the importance of proper songs and hands on, real-time instrumentation. Paradoxically, it’s the shit that ‘s most uncompromisingly anti-melodic, that has the highest quotient of rhythmic dissonance, which really gets the punters going. Like Wu Tang Clan’s brand of paranoid, melody-free hiphop (which sells by the half-million), hardstep is what you might call a popular avant garde. The real question, though, is what are the social conditions that have created such a big audience for music that fucks with your head so extensively, that appears to be ‘no fun’? Similarly, what’s going on when Ed Rush talks of deliberately smoking weed to get “dark, evil thoughts”, the kind of ‘skunkanoia’ without which he couldn’t achieve the right vibe for his tracks. Wu Tang-style horrorcore rap and darkside jungle are subcultures based around the active pursuit of phobia and psychosis as a form of leisure. As musics, they offer a drastic amplification of everyday unease and dread (just check track titles like Pascal’s “Mindstresser”). What gives?

“Yo man, there’s a gang of muthafuckers out there on the dick.... Non-reality seeing, non-reality feeling, non-reality-living-ass muthafuckas, man. And I don’t know, man, reality, it’s important to me… So fellaz, tell these niggas what it’s like in the minds of real niggaz” – monologue at the start of “The Shit” by L Double and Shy FX

“It’s like this: some people are sharks, and some people are marks. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Play pussy, get fucked. Come prepared or run away scared... You can’t always count on E to shelter you from being vic’ed” – Breakbeat Mailing List correspondent’s riposte to other correspondents’ complaints about the loveless, intimidating vibe at Jungle events

Since 1993 and Rave’s slide into the twilight zone, Hardcore has periodically been convulsed by debates about “where did our love go?” Some mourn the eclipse of bonhomie by moodiness and attitude; many of these disenchanted ravers sloped off to form the Happy Hardcore scene, currently massive in England and Scotland. Others defend the demise of the euphoric vibe, arguing that Jungle’s atmosphere isn’t moody, it’s ’serious’. This faction pours scorn on the happy ravers for their cheesy music, white gloves and other nostalgic trappings of the rave dream, which is felt to be not just lost, but utterly discredited.

In the absence of Ecstasy, as both a chemical and as a redemptive vision of utopia around which the scene pivots, Jungle has begun to embrace an ideology of ‘real-ness’ similar to the worldview of American gangsta rap. In hiphop, ‘real’ has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry and soften its message for crossover. ‘Real’ also signifies that the music reflects a ‘reality’ constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalised racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. ‘Real’ means the death of the social: it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but by what the Americans call downsizing (the laying-off the permanent workforce in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).

‘Real’ is a neo-Medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocracy threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, Jungle reflects a Medieval paranoiascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, conspiracies and covert operations. Hence the popularity as a source of samples and song titles of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honour that predate the liberal, social-democratic era. Then there’s the influence on Jungle of dystopian sci-fi movies that contain a subliminally anti-capitalist message, imagining the future as a return to Medievalism, complete with fortress cities and bandit clans: Robocop (sampled in A Guy Called Gerald’s “Gloktrak”, Terminator (which provided the title for a pioneering 92 darkcore track by Metalheads), Predator 2. Jungle has long had an ambivalent investment in the future, ranging from the utopian anticipation of Omni Trio’s “Living For the Future” to the millennial anxiety of Redlight’s “The Future Is Dark.” Yet there’s also an impatience to reach this apocalypse noir, because that’s when the ‘dark’ will come into its own. ‘Dark’ is where primal, predatory energies meet digital technique, where id gets scientific.

The pervasive sense of slipping into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn’t necessarily take the ‘logical’ form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it express itself as, say, the proto-fascist, anti-corporate nostalgia of America’s right-wing militias, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.
In hiphop and, increasingly, Jungle, the response is a ‘realism’ that accepts a socially-constructed reality as natural. To ‘get real’ is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you’re either a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There’s a cold rage seething in Jungle, but it’s expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream. ‘Underground’ can be understood sociologically as a metaphor for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche: the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat in capitalism’s war of all against all. As music, as a form of cultural resistance, Jungle works by eroticizing anxiety: it’s as if, by immersing yourself in the phobic, you can make dread your element. That’s the true meaning of “A Way of Life”. Jungle is a sound-picture of a world that is falling apart, and the art of being a roller, a steppa, is to somehow groove on all that fragmentation and instability, handle the ruff ride, take it in your stride.

The battery of sensations offered by a six hour stint at AWOL induces a mixture of shellshock and future-shock. Alvin Toffler defined the latter as what happens when the human adaptive mechanism seizes up in response to an overload of stimuli, novelty, surprise. Triggering neural reflexes and motor responses, Jungle’s rhythmic assault course hypes up the listener’s adaptive capability in readiness for the worst the 21st Century has up its sleeve. If Jungle is a martial artform, clubs like AWOL are church for the soul-jah and killah priest, inculcating a kind of spiritual fortitude. All this is why going to AWOL is serious bizness, as opposed to ‘fun’. Jungle is the living death of Rave, the sound of living with and living through the dream’s demise. At AWOL, every synapse-shredding snare and cranium-cracking bass-bomb is an alarm-call saying “wake up, that dream is over. Time to get real”.

Simon Reynolds