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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Fantastic, don't think so.

Used to listen to jungle all the time and was especially fond of "Ambient" stuff (or whatever it's called).

One thing liquid dnb lacks (as does most modern dnb as far as I'm aware) is the mixture of light/dark. But I guess the energy of the drums is still there in the best stuff.

Stuff like


Which is pretty much one mood throughout. But then this is one of the "points" of dnb, the "roller", the envelopment in a mood. I agree (if this is what you're saying) that most dnb is in many ways more akin to sped up techno/house than jungle.
 

linebaugh

Well-known member
Like most liquid drum n bass where it excels is in the sumptuous, gorgeous sounds, the filtered/reversed(?) guitar(?) tones. At the cost of sort of neutering the bass/drums, a thoroughly domesticated form of jungle, ultra linear and predictable.

I should get pilled up and listen to some of this stuff again, see what happens. Pricking up hairs or fuck it who cares?
what makes that tune DnB and not Jungle. Sounds like jungle to my unsophisticated ears (assuming youre talking about this song)

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
No I meant the alias song.

That Dom and Roland is more jungle-ish, albeit with a 2-step element which places it more towards drum n bass on the spectrum. If I'm right and I owned it then it is probably faster than jungle too.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Which is pretty much one mood throughout. But then this is one of the "points" of dnb, the "roller", the envelopment in a mood. I agree (if this is what you're saying) that most dnb is in many ways more akin to sped up techno/house than jungle.

All dance music is like that, from techno to garage to happy hardcore, or should I say, all dance music becomes one mood when the producers learn how to produce properly. The Achilles-heal of the intelligent vs unintelligent dichotomy ultimately lies here, not that the unintelligent needs to be defended as being more objectively intelligent than the intelligent.

High production standards are better suited to hip hop and rnb, because of their commitment to the song form where the production is meant to shine and envelop as an accompanyment. Whereas with tracks what you want to do is bombard the listener with as much information as possible (this is why jeff mills and DJ E.Z have more in common than they don't.) Which can prompt the ostensibly heretical thought for people like us raised on rnb: maybe dance music (even london dance music) is closer to rockaphilia ideas of grit than we want to give it credit for. Even in deep tech the ruder less polished tunes were much more valourised in that thread. But then, my problem with rock music was never its intensity, its straightahead rebellion, or even its brute teenage anger, but just how pantomime acting was essential to the mythos of the rock star. And in that sense 80s synth music untied that association, you could have your sex freaks, yer soft cells, without them trying to spell it all out, a la Brian Eno. One did not have to be raw as an economy as form, one could now be sonically raw even if economically affluent or themselves preferring fastidiousness. The synthesiser opened up the ability for sonic fiction. It is this aspect I think the deconstructed club lot miss. To first create a world, you have to create a myth, a story. It cannot be something you hand out in an A4 printed leaflet to concert goers. It has to be the social engine of the music.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
I.E: if we simplify the rave experience as a continuous stream of data, that bad production becomes part of that information. Even older acid tracks sound more forceful due to this, because when something is fastidiously produced, you are actually leaving out a lot. The strength of minimal techno (of the mills/hood variety) is that it used minimal gear, a drum machine an fm synth. The reason why german mnml/microhouse ultimately ended up imploading is because less is more literally means you use less to make more, think of it as like homemade tape duplication (revealingly, there was a techno series called recycled loops.) Whereas the mnml/tech house guys tried to use more to make less. Which is counter-intuitive ultimately. the better ends of Flashcore I think will date well for this reason. It's absolute digital maximul hardcore. there is no space without information, no negative space where there doesn't need to be.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
this then ties into my contension that genres only really live as affiliations when they have been established and the moment is over. Noone would have seriously said in 95-96 that Autechre was leading the way vis-a-vis jungle, yet two years later jungle was in the pits, and well, 20 years later the influence of IDM is all over pop music. Don't get me wrong. My mast is firmly nailed to jungle but the owl of minerva flies at dusk. A lot of the jungle which might have been dismissed at the time has now taken on a world of its own, as if pointing at a future which was never achieved. Something amusingly Simon admitted in his faves/unfaves of 2000, which is just a great article in general that I revisited in Turkey, which is where the vibe migration piece is from.

Another Pop Mystery I've been contemplating recently relates to the life cycles
of genres, their arc and fall. You can be basking in the blooming fullness of a
genre's annus mirabilus, and somehow it never occurs that this is obviously the
golden age, the peak, the best it's ever gonna get, and that the only way
forward now is downhill. When you're in the thick of it, you think it can just
carry on forever at this perpetual crest.... Records that at the time seem like
portents or glimpses of so-much-more-to-come turn out, years later, to have been
swan-songs, the last of the summer wine. Who'd have thought, for instance, that
Adam F's 'Metropolis' and Nasty Habit's 'Shadowboxing" were destined to be the
historical pinnacle of techstep (and therefore drum'n'bass), that they were
form-defining and form-exhausting ultra-tunes?

A peculiar twist of hind-hearing is that even
tracks I didn't rate particularly at the time sound fabulous now, like PFM's
"One and Only"---the way the bass moves and drops, the ripple-trails and
glistening vapors of ambience, the explosive entrance of the diva vocal. Then
there's Peshay, a producer I've never rated--his track on the first Logical
Progression, "Vocal", is amazing, and I never even noticed it at the time; that
kind of Speed-oriented mellow jazzual track was the enemy, back then. Now, long
after the battle's subsided, whatever was at stake a faint memory, I can hear it
as a tour de force of exquisitely mashed-up beats and diva deployment, using a
vocal sample (Anita Baker? Barbara Tucker? it's the vocal lick that goes "I'm
singing to you") that's got more in common with a beautifully designed
commodity, a sports car or leather sofa, than say Aretha Franklin; it's all
burnished technique and poise, not raw soul. After 2step I can appreciate what
is basically a kind of capitalist utopianism behind such fetishising of elegance
and surface slickness. Another example: in my disappointment that Omni Trio had
abandoned the euphoria fireworks of the "Renegade Snares" formula, I missed how
good bits of Haunted Science are--"Who Are You?" and especially "The Elemental",
an early neurofunk-style two-stepper beat with keyboard lines as delicate as dew
settling and bass-drops like tender thunder--how cleverly Rob Haigh had
developed a new, calmer but still compelling style of drum'n'bass for the home
environment.

The truth is that there always was an integral side to drum'n'bass that wasn't
about rudeness (nasty B-lines, mash-up breakbeats) but about supreme dainty-ness
and neat-freak finesse. It's a different kind of rush--the tingle you can get
from the groomed delicacy of a hi-hat pattern, the nimble, glancing panache of a
synth-chord flourish. Jacob's Optical Stairway, the oft-maligned alter-ego album
by 4 Hero, is some kind of pinnacle in this respect: the detail in the music
induces its own kind of high, the aural equivalent of putting on your first pair
of glasses and suddenly everything's ultra-sharp.

 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
just saw this discogs review for a tune I was going to post and it validates my point perfectly.

obsessionrecs April 12, 2021

referencing Snow / Jazzmin, 12", Whi, SHADOW 56, UK SHADOW 56
This release is rated 5 stars
Jazzmin was one of those “intelligent“ tunes that ended up in a lot of junglists record boxes, would be smashing out some Ragga /Hip Hop influenced amen jungle then all of a sudden this pure white chilled out groover would come on, just had a wicked vibe we all loved it.
Snow just as good, a top quality track with a lush atmospheric piano laced intro then into some smashing amens but it was always Jazzmin i’d come back to, a very playable tune.

Can imagine, if i'd heard this in '95, i wouldn't think much of it. Yet, first listening to it back in the 00s when the absolute sorry thing that was liquid dnb was dominant, it sounded other worldly, like you could be on a beach with comrades in arms or a nice boy/girl and just bathe in the sunshine. Whereas of course in reality beaches (especially with family/overly familiar people) can be nothing but torture, where you are begging that you go back into your induced pleasure prison of isolation.


Still so great.
 
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