V Knid esq
27th September 2003, 01:28
It’s been a little while now since drum & bass has been considered a particularly vital form by most experimental music heads. Somewhere along the line (possibly around the time that the chief players of the scene formed a cartel to define the direction of the sound) most D&B producers seemed to get embarrassed with the chaotic, ruff’n’ready sample-based lunacy that emerged from the darkside of hardcore, and retreated into smooth digital loops territory. Even when people kept it hard – the joyously stoopid jump-up of Hype, Mickey Finn etc and the crunching techstep of Ed Rush, Trace and the like – the blingy love affair with expensive studio technology and the edging away from the old rave chaos meant that most of the tracks ended up very linear, very slick and very, very predictable. The crazed, multi-layered Amen and Apache break cutups of old were rejected in favour of crisp, repetitive drum machine loops. The huge drops of total silence punctuated by soundsystem sirens, ravey diva wailing and movie samples became simple swooshy synth-pad breakdowns with simple snare-roll type buildups back to the beat. What exactly triggered all this, I have no idea. Partly, I suspect, it had to do with the move from the disorientation of Es to the moody head-nod vibe of hydro skunk and cocaine. Possibly also, the fact that the DJ/producers became much busier on the international circuit and didn’t have the time to spend wigging out in the studio. Perhaps it was just because the insanity and intensity of the music of ’93-95 simply couldn’t be sustained as the participants grew older…
And yet… across huge swathes of the UK, from small provincial towns to the inner cities, D&B is still THE going-out music of choice for ravers of all ages. And unlike other ‘survivor sounds’ of the rave era – e.g. trance, hard house and happy hardcore – its continued popularity can’t simply be put down to the mindless narcotic herd behaviour of harder-faster die-hard muppets (or Antipodeans, which generally amounts to the same thing). To start with, the hip hop culture elements that have always been more explicit in D&B than in other post-rave forms emphasise intelligence, sharpness and cool (at least compared with the whacked-out exhibitionism and dumb pseudo-spirituality of the aforementioned genres). More importantly, no matter how simplistic it becomes, Drum & Bass always retains two vital elements: the drums, and, erm, the bass. Even in its most mindless looping nosebleed manifestations, the drum programming always contains the genetic memory of the rolling funk, an off-the-beat bodyrocking stagger which forces the listener into DANCING rather than just pumping and stepping along to the relentless 4/4*. And the bass – well, scientists have recently proved what any of us with any clubbing experience know only too well: very low frequencies at very high volumes can dramatically effect the brain, causing dissociation from the self and a feeling of unity with one’s surroundings above and beyond the effects of any chemicals the listener may have ingested.
Which brings us neatly to Lemon D, Dillinja and their infamous Valve Soundsystem. Out of all the old school of D&B producers, they have stayed most true to the stepping hyperfunk and the power of pure bone-crushing sub-bass. In fact, as others have tidied their sound up and become more sequenced and formulaic, the Valve boys have steadily made their sound more analogue, more ragged round the edges, more live, more… valve-y. The sounds on ‘The Killa-Hertz’ have been honed on the Valve Soundsystem as it has been gradually built up into what they claim is the most powerful club soundsystem in the UK, and it shows. The production and dynamics are second to none in the world of Drum & Bass; in fact, the sound is so far removed from their nearest contemporaries that the closest real comparisons are with ‘experimental’ bassheads like Neil Landstrumm and Kevin Martin (Techno Animal / The Bug / Golden Vampire). OK, there is a basic formula at work in all these tracks: atmospheric intro - usually involving congas, strings and vocal snippets – building to a sudden drop-out then crashing into a relentless beat and a bassline which alternates between a jagged synth sound and vast sub-bass, with various screaming/siren synth sounds shooting over the top. However, the analogue production values mean that even when the pattern is seemingly looping, it never actually repeats, as the different parts of the drumtrack vie for supremacy through the fierce compression and the live synth parts modulate their own merry way through the rhythmic minefields.
There are practically no ‘original’ individual sounds here; everything is superficially familiar, whether it’s the deceptively soft female vocals of ‘Good Girl’, the ‘Blow Your Head’-style Moog splats of ‘Just Roll’ or the Mentasm screeching of ‘The Box’. Yet everything is made fresh by the sheer size of the beats and bass around it, and the gutsy way that effects are whacked up to full and further – see the aforementioned Mentasm sounds on ‘The Box’ being pitch-shifted continually downwards, creating total mindfuck vertigo sensations of tumbling into abyss, with only the hyperspeed knife-sharp breaks to cling to for any sense of stability. At points like this the old shouts of the Hardcore MCs – ‘Srictly for the headstrong!!’ – spring to mind; this really is trial-by-fire music, its sense of exhilaration constantly threatening to tumble into total panic if you can’t ride the beat through to the next reassuringly grounding bass drop. The key track on the album is a new mix of Lemon D’s awesome ‘Generation X (Crush U)’ with its atonal violent punk vocal hook: “I’ve had enough of this… I’m going to clear my mind and then I’ll break through… Don’t want to be a part of this… I’m gonna take you down and then I’ll crush you… Ohhhhhh….”. It’s totally confrontational, it’s confused and confusing, it’s alienated and alienating… but when the refrain comes around again with the brutal breaks and bass underneath it, hitting your adrenal system before your forebrain can try and make sense of it, it’s also celebratory, participatory and proper fucking funky. Damn, there’s even a track called ‘No Future’ on here – what’s not to love?
If there is a downside to this record it’s the lack of rhythmic variation – it doesn’t have the insane syncopation of the real old school Amen / ragga tunes - but that is no longer really the point of this music. Lemon D and Dillinja have evolved it way past that phase, and introduced new forms of disorientation in the huge contrasts within the sonics of the tracks to replace the spiralling breaks of old. Rhythmically it just powers onward, daring you to question its method, and even with the seeming repetition, it’s still funkier than most. Sure there are some other inventive minds at work in the junglist genre, and the scene is more varied than it’s ever been, but no-one is doing it like this. So make like a dishwasher and rinse out some plates.
*n.b. this is NOT a diss to four-to-the-floor techno, which as I'm sure we all know retains syncopation and funk beyond the plain old boom-tish-boom-tish. Or at least the good stuff does.
Discuss this review.... (http://www.no-future.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?&threadid=5007)
And yet… across huge swathes of the UK, from small provincial towns to the inner cities, D&B is still THE going-out music of choice for ravers of all ages. And unlike other ‘survivor sounds’ of the rave era – e.g. trance, hard house and happy hardcore – its continued popularity can’t simply be put down to the mindless narcotic herd behaviour of harder-faster die-hard muppets (or Antipodeans, which generally amounts to the same thing). To start with, the hip hop culture elements that have always been more explicit in D&B than in other post-rave forms emphasise intelligence, sharpness and cool (at least compared with the whacked-out exhibitionism and dumb pseudo-spirituality of the aforementioned genres). More importantly, no matter how simplistic it becomes, Drum & Bass always retains two vital elements: the drums, and, erm, the bass. Even in its most mindless looping nosebleed manifestations, the drum programming always contains the genetic memory of the rolling funk, an off-the-beat bodyrocking stagger which forces the listener into DANCING rather than just pumping and stepping along to the relentless 4/4*. And the bass – well, scientists have recently proved what any of us with any clubbing experience know only too well: very low frequencies at very high volumes can dramatically effect the brain, causing dissociation from the self and a feeling of unity with one’s surroundings above and beyond the effects of any chemicals the listener may have ingested.
Which brings us neatly to Lemon D, Dillinja and their infamous Valve Soundsystem. Out of all the old school of D&B producers, they have stayed most true to the stepping hyperfunk and the power of pure bone-crushing sub-bass. In fact, as others have tidied their sound up and become more sequenced and formulaic, the Valve boys have steadily made their sound more analogue, more ragged round the edges, more live, more… valve-y. The sounds on ‘The Killa-Hertz’ have been honed on the Valve Soundsystem as it has been gradually built up into what they claim is the most powerful club soundsystem in the UK, and it shows. The production and dynamics are second to none in the world of Drum & Bass; in fact, the sound is so far removed from their nearest contemporaries that the closest real comparisons are with ‘experimental’ bassheads like Neil Landstrumm and Kevin Martin (Techno Animal / The Bug / Golden Vampire). OK, there is a basic formula at work in all these tracks: atmospheric intro - usually involving congas, strings and vocal snippets – building to a sudden drop-out then crashing into a relentless beat and a bassline which alternates between a jagged synth sound and vast sub-bass, with various screaming/siren synth sounds shooting over the top. However, the analogue production values mean that even when the pattern is seemingly looping, it never actually repeats, as the different parts of the drumtrack vie for supremacy through the fierce compression and the live synth parts modulate their own merry way through the rhythmic minefields.
There are practically no ‘original’ individual sounds here; everything is superficially familiar, whether it’s the deceptively soft female vocals of ‘Good Girl’, the ‘Blow Your Head’-style Moog splats of ‘Just Roll’ or the Mentasm screeching of ‘The Box’. Yet everything is made fresh by the sheer size of the beats and bass around it, and the gutsy way that effects are whacked up to full and further – see the aforementioned Mentasm sounds on ‘The Box’ being pitch-shifted continually downwards, creating total mindfuck vertigo sensations of tumbling into abyss, with only the hyperspeed knife-sharp breaks to cling to for any sense of stability. At points like this the old shouts of the Hardcore MCs – ‘Srictly for the headstrong!!’ – spring to mind; this really is trial-by-fire music, its sense of exhilaration constantly threatening to tumble into total panic if you can’t ride the beat through to the next reassuringly grounding bass drop. The key track on the album is a new mix of Lemon D’s awesome ‘Generation X (Crush U)’ with its atonal violent punk vocal hook: “I’ve had enough of this… I’m going to clear my mind and then I’ll break through… Don’t want to be a part of this… I’m gonna take you down and then I’ll crush you… Ohhhhhh….”. It’s totally confrontational, it’s confused and confusing, it’s alienated and alienating… but when the refrain comes around again with the brutal breaks and bass underneath it, hitting your adrenal system before your forebrain can try and make sense of it, it’s also celebratory, participatory and proper fucking funky. Damn, there’s even a track called ‘No Future’ on here – what’s not to love?
If there is a downside to this record it’s the lack of rhythmic variation – it doesn’t have the insane syncopation of the real old school Amen / ragga tunes - but that is no longer really the point of this music. Lemon D and Dillinja have evolved it way past that phase, and introduced new forms of disorientation in the huge contrasts within the sonics of the tracks to replace the spiralling breaks of old. Rhythmically it just powers onward, daring you to question its method, and even with the seeming repetition, it’s still funkier than most. Sure there are some other inventive minds at work in the junglist genre, and the scene is more varied than it’s ever been, but no-one is doing it like this. So make like a dishwasher and rinse out some plates.
*n.b. this is NOT a diss to four-to-the-floor techno, which as I'm sure we all know retains syncopation and funk beyond the plain old boom-tish-boom-tish. Or at least the good stuff does.
Discuss this review.... (http://www.no-future.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?&threadid=5007)