bugbin
here's what i wrote (in my Over-Rated of 1996)
(which is findable here
http://simonreynoldsfavesunfaves.blogspot.com/2008/12/faves-and-over-rated-of-1996-from.html )
THE "BUG IN THE BASSBIN" REMIXES (MO WAX)
Carl Craig's original 1992 versions--mystified out of all proportion, largely
because they've been for so long impossible to hear--revealed themselves, on
their re-release late last year, to be engagingly peculiar and damn fine pieces
of music. But for the life of me I can't hear them as drum & bass prototypes:
the breakbeat is looped, sure, but not fucked with or chopped up, and the
jungalistic feel just isn't there. Maybe Fabio and Grooverider did drop "Bug"
down at Rage, legendarily pitched up to 45 rpm--but the idea that the track was
a seminal and formative influence on the nascent jungle sound is preposterous.
It's one of those myths cultivated by A/ drum and bass producers grasping for a
supposedly more elevated ancestry for what they do, and B/ johnny-come-lately
technoheads and breakbeat-niks like James Lavelle (i.e. people who would never
have gone within sneering distance of Rage), for whom the idea that Carl Craig
and Black Dog devised the blueprint for drum and bass is reassuring. It allows
them to avoid the truth: the real inventors of jungle were oufits like 2 Bad
Mice/Kaotic Chemistry ("Waremouse", "Bombscare", "Drum Trip II"), Noise Factory
and the rest of the Ibiza/Third Party crew, Urban Shakedown, the Suburban Bass
acts (Krome & Time/Q-Bass/Hype/Sonz of A Loop Da Loop Era,etc), DJ SS and the
Formation crews, Shut Up and Dance, hell, even The Prodigy. These people,
utterly ignored and marginalised, invented the future. Rave producers, in other
words; 'ardkore, in all its pilled-up, made-in-two-minutes, spotty teenager,
Amiga-in-the-bedroom glory. Belgium had more to do with jungle than Detroit,
ferchrissakes."
Fab and Groove used to talk in their Mixmag and Muzik interviews circa 95-96 about how they played a real mix of stuff at Rage, tracks on Nu Groove and so forth, but i have to say, on the mixtapes from the early 90s i've found on the web, their sets don't appear to be radically different from what e.g. Top Buzz was playing at that time