Krud
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Reg.: Jul 2002
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da gibts auch noch ein kleines geschichtchen...
There's no such thing, of course, as the first ever jungle tune. Some might try to tell you tha Lenny D Ice's "We Are IE" or Dee Patten's "Who's the Badman" were the starting point. Others might delve further back. And in the same way, nobody quite knows how or when jungle first acquired its tag. One theory is that the early nineties hardcore label Ibiza spawned it, with their first ever release, 1992's white label "Jungle Techno". Some point to Rebel MC's constant mic chant, "Calling All Junglists!", itself derived from the Jamaican MC?S favoured chant in the seventies. There were even suggestions that it began as a racist and derogatory term - "jungle" being a reference to the fact that most of its early practitioners were black. What is certain is that it emerged from the so-called darkcore scene during 1992-1993. This was a period when many of today's drum& bass producers decided to remove their music from the populist end of rave by making it darker, scarier, moodier, a reflection not just of their own desire to push the music as far from the mainstream as possible, but also a mirror holding up to the psychotic and the paranoïd. This was the time of "snidey" Es, of "Snowballs", being "monged", of mixing drugs with impunity and pushing yourslef to the edge of OD without tipping right over. 4 Hero, Origin Unknown, Goldie's Metalheadz project, all were invoking the sinister dark side of the rave, so perfectly summed up in the spoken vocal from Hyper On Experience's seminal "Lords of the Null Lines" - "There's a void where there should be ecstasy". Rave was casting off its mantle as cartoon kiddy music and recasting itself as the soundtrack to the disintegration generation.
The years 1993 - 1994 saw jungle's coming out of age. As it shed the last vestiges of hardcore - the shrill vocals, the cheap samples, the naive drug references - producers began to concentate on the science of the breakbeat. Rather than simply sampling it and speeding it up, they began to ptu it under the microscope, atomising it, reducing it to its barest essentials. Each hi-hat, each snare was broken down and painstakingly reassembled to form a completely new break. Coupled with this dissection of the breakbeat, the bassline was reclaimed. Where house and techno had relied on the overpowering kickdrum with its relentless 4/4 drive, jungle pumped up the bassline itself. Reverb, echo, delay and intense subsonic frequencies were applied to give it bowel-shaking propetries previously only experienced in Jamaican dub reggae. It was slowed down to 70bpm or 80bpm, roughly half the speed of the drum breaks themselves. It was like travelling in the front seat of a Porsche and the back seat of a steamroller. At the same time.
For a brief while, ragga jungle was all the rage. Incorporating samples from Jamaican artists like Buju Banton and Cutty Ranks, and adding attitude with snatches of gangsta dialogue from movies like "Godfellas", it dominated the pirate stations so crucial in the development of this predominantly London sound - Kool FM, Rush, Eruption and Destiny. MC's such as Moose, Five-O, Navigator and GQ freestyled over the top. At clubs like Sunday Roast and Telepathy, MA1 and MA2 jackets, puffas and hooded top were the new dress code. Spliff, not E, was the drug of choice, usually accompanied by champagne, not beer. The ragga/reggae connection could be seen in the DJ techniques too. "Rewinds" - winding back a popular record mid-tune - were often called for by the MC. And DJs began to rely increasingly on dub-plates, one-off pressings of the best tunes that would give one DJ the edge over his rivals. When General Levy became the first artist to hit the Top 40, the revolution had truly begun.
There's a theory of music which holds that new types of music spread like viruses. No sooner have they formed than they diversify, the better to spread an attack. And as they come under threat, so they strengthen through further strains and mutations As one type decays, so another is born. Certainly, that's how jungle exploded in the last four years. In answer to the hardstep, minimal, almost devilish strains of early jungle, "ambient jungle" or "artcore" was born. Producers like LTJ Bukem, PFM, Hidden Agenda and Aquasky countered te ferocity of the jungle breaks with swathes of swooning, oceanic sound and cosmic orchestration. This was the sound of Speed, Fabio and Bukem's groundbreaking London residency that turned on so many to the jungle sound. There were producers like Alex Reece and Wax Doctor, who spurned the roots of rave and instead co-opted their favoured deep House and Chicago acid sounds into a mellower strain of breakbeat. Others like Photek preferred to namecheck Carl Craig and Detroit techno. Soon, anything from Latin Bossa to Afrikan Funk was being thrown in the mix, breakbeat science allowing the appliance of virtually any other sonic influence.To counter this perceived "watering down" of the pure jungle sound came tech-step, *******ed by Ed Rush, DJ Trace and Nico, harking back to both the techno-rave sounds of early Beltram and even the white noise/punk trash aesthetic of extrem heavy-metal. "Jump-up" the sound of Aphrodite, Mickey Finn, DJ Hype and the Ganja Kru, chose hardcore hip-hop as its crux, working the basslines into new funky extremes. And over in Bristol, Roni Size, DJ Die and their crew took the jazz route. For them this implied the cocktail samples of smooth saxophones and chep bongos, but rather an exploration through pure drum & bass rhythms of the freestyle experimentalism of Seventies Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock
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28-01-2003 - 21:01
junglistica
leiwand..