The Angels Fell
A meandering reflection on Jungle
Hello internet pals of music. Today is a free preview of the kind of thing I would send to paid subscribers. It was sparked by some DMs a few weeks back between myself and a DJ in Houston called Starsign, who wanted some drum n bass recommendations.
But, mate, do you have any jungle?
It was myself, my closest friend Chris and this British guy we’d met hours earlier while playing pool downtown. We were now on Chris’s couch, and it was 1994.
I don’t remember the other guy’s name now. We’d gone back to Chris’s because during those games of pool we’d all gotten excited talking about music. Chris mentioned there were turntables at the house. British guy asked if we wanted to go skin one up. But now, back at the house, we were at a crossroads.
I threw on a Mo’ Wax compilation. He winced and shook his head no. I mixed it into something a bit faster. No, mate. I realized immediately Chris and I were still in the past, and he had come from the future. We settled on some 70s dub.
He was only in town visiting his cousin for a few weeks. Neither of us saw him again after that night.
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It stuck with me though. What was bothering me was that I couldn’t get a grasp on what he had tried to describe to me. And my ego wouldn’t let that go.
I dug for clues and trails and somehow ended up on the right path so by the time I saw a copy of Goldie’s Timeless, I grabbed it and lost my mind over to that sound. I got very focused on it. Dialed in laser-like. By the late 90s, I was buying Knowledge, a British drum n bass magazine, at $15 an issue. Listening at weird hours live online to broadcasts happening in London. I started buying records around 1997 until I started losing interest in its direction around 2003. I still have a box, at least, of singles and white labels. I know I’ve also lost some great ones to time.
In 1995, when Timeless was released, it was given unanimous praise. It’s an amazing album that masterfully blends its icy futurism with warm humanity. The full twenty minutes of the title track (actually three parts: Innercity Life, Jah & Pressure) are unlike anything you’ve heard or will ever hear again.
I’m particular to this era, especially looking back now.
It’s exciting music, but, before the sound got mutated and centered around the bass versus the drums, the era around the turn of the millennium sounds the most compelling.
You can still hear in it the refrains of the past rave culture. It feels like a sweaty night. It feels like motion.
After the good years, the genre got really boring. The bass became squelchy and the drums were like pistons, and the whole sound had this pumping feel, like the dying breaths of a once great beast.
When you listen to a song like Ganja Kru’s Science, it’s like being thrown into the sea at night. At first, everything feels frantic but if you can slow down your perception, you can catch your breath and see (hear) it differently.
Good drum and bass, or jungle, has that reggae backbone. But it came out of the hardcore scene, as in post Summer of Rave, electronic dance music. It’s a perfectly British working class movement, as it seems all dance scenes in Britain (and maybe even in the US as well) tend to be a form of class revolt. The blending of counter-culture: like punk & dub, like skinheads and ska, like Northern Soul and so on.
Jungle begat drum n bass. But all drum n bass is was a clever rebranding when the scene got too bad a rap. The same thing happened later with grime music. It always starts and ends with class.
When jungle got banned from the clubs, drum n bass took over. But it lost the original rude boy ragga sound that it had developed. You can hear that in the early jungle anthem by Rude Bwoy Monty, Warp 10, with it’s cartoonish dancehall bassline.
That hardcore rave sound though, was always the other element. You can hear it in those synth stabs, and the tempo. Only about twenty years after later did I realize I’d bought some of those early records, when happy hardcore started its evolution out of the water and onto land. At the time, 1990, I had a job as a pizza delivery driver and listened regularly to a college radio show that was playing more adventurous and obscure dance music. I’d hear a track, make a mental note and then during the week stop in this tiny record shop next door to this church that had been converted into a shop called Dream Merchant, where you’d go to your Doc Martens, Manic Panic hair dye and a Jane’s Addiction t shirt. Anyway, I was getting these cutting edge imports, and having my brain rearranged by these new possibilities of what music could be.
But it always felt like something happening over there. And it never really did feel like it got over here, not the way I wanted it to.
So without much more rambling, here’s a small playlist I’ve put together of some early drum n bass. These artists have always stood out to me; if anything, the genre is less about songs than it is about producers. And each of these producers have their signatures; I always know a Dillinja track because no one’s bass sounds like his.
I’ve titled this playlist Post-Millenial Tension as a reference to a phrase that I often saw popping up at the time to help explain the paranoia and tension lurking underneath the drum n bass sound: Pre-millennial tension. I think we’re still in that tension, but stuck in a general anxiety.
POST MILLENNIAL TENSION PLAYLIST HERE
I’ve wanted to write more on this stuff, and have been motivated a bit by reading a book by critic Mitch Speed on the video piece, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, by artist Mark Leckey. The video is a hypnagogic memoir and rumination on British working class youth and dance culture, and is highly recommended. You can watch in full on youtube.
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