Dance music of the 1990s largely rejected the simple, jovial, hedonistic approach to body movement that had ruled since James Brown invented funk music in the 1960s. Disco, techno and house had simply imported new technologies (both for rhythm and arrangements) into the paradigm of funk. The 1990s continued that process, one of the most important ideas to come out of Britain was jungle or drum & bass, a syncopated, polyrhythmic and frantic variant of house, a fusion of hip-hop and techno that relied on extremely fast drum-machines, epileptic breakbeats and huge bass lines.
Few genres of popular music underwent so many changes and reached such ambitious heights as jungle did. Within a few years, jungle musicians were already composing abstract and ambient pieces, integrating breakbeats with pop vocals, adopting jazz improvisation Thanks to ever more intricate beats and to free structures borrowed from jazz, jungle music rapidly became the foundation for a new kind of avantgarde music, pursued by the most austere of the genre's visionaries.
>drum & bass, a syncopated, polyrhythmic and frantic variant of house, a fusion of hip-hop and techno that relied on extremely fast drum-machines
oh god just shut up you annoying little pseudoroman
Jacob Ward
He's right though
Evan Nelson
he's fucking clueless m8
Matthew Cruz
reminder that Scaruffi is a STEM major
Thomas Price
>annoying little pseudoroman
God I fucking hate this place. He just gave a good written descrpition of the genre.
Andrew Nguyen
he didn't though wtf does house have to do with jungle what jungle producer uses drum machine sounds why did he forget to mention dub
Kayden Hall
Amon Tobin well impersonated the classical composer in the hip-hop age. Instead of composing symphonies for orchestras.
Bricolage (8.5/10), unified classical, jazz, rock and dance music in a genre and style that was universal. Tobin warped the distinctive timbres of instruments to produce new kinds of instruments, and then wove them into an organic flow of sound. Tobin kept refining his art of producing amazingly sophisticated and seamless puzzles on Permutation, Supermodified and, best of his second phase, Out From Out Where.
Julian Price
Jungle/rave was literally hip hop breaks and hardcore techno + piano samples. The dub influence existed from hip hop already.
Evan Russell
How is the 'approach to body movement' in Jungle less 'hedonistic' and 'jovial' than techno or house? Because it's le fast and le rhythmically complex? (still mostly 4/4 though, just lots of kicks and snares!) This is one of the dumber things I've seen posted as bait here
Aaron Williams
The first star of jungle, Goldie, born Conrad Price), made his name with the extended singles Terminator (1993) and Timeless (1994), which were mini-symphonies of hardcore techno, and the groundbreaking Timeless (1995), that used breakbeats to construct atmospheric music. Thanks to his skills at sound manipulation, he turned songwriting into sound painting.
Brandon Barnes
Modus Operandi (Astralwerks, 1997) is a triumph of recording techniques. The all-instrumental tracks employ massive doses of sampling and electronics. Photek's music has three elements to it. First comes the dance, which is never pure energy, and it is often drowned in metaphysical atmospheres. Hidden Camera builds a hypnotic texture of neurotic drum'n'bass drumming, jazzy bass lines and sparse piano notes, then lets cosmic drones and ambient strings sail on top of it. The most propulsive track, Trans 7, is inhabited by a multitude of subliminal electronic effects and is continuously changing below the tribal surface. Second, the psychological aspect, part Alfred Hitchcock and part noir. Minotaur mixes disquieting tidbits of animal voices and metallic reverbs coming from the sewers. 124, possibly the standaout here, has anemic beats immersed in gothic humming of the bass and languid waves of synthesizers. Finally, Photek loves to flirt with jazz and the avantgarde. The syncopated synthesizer theme of Aleph 1 is a bunch of androids dancing on a desert moon. Modus Operandi is carried by a latin-jazz piano theme over a backdrop of soul strings. KJZ is a cross between a free-jazz jam for bass and drums and a rock and roll drums solo. The limit of Photek's rhythmic poems is that they often sound artificial and cold.
Austin Sullivan
the dub came straight from jamaica to london house wasn't in the mix at all, it was electro and hip hop kids who didn't like house who made jungle
Jackson Diaz
Roni Size's early singles, such as It's A Jazz Thing, Brut Force, Timestretch, Dayz, Only A Dream, were not particularly original in their take on rave music, but they showed Size experimenting and progressing towards a full-fledged "auteur" approach to composition. The monumental double disc New Forms (Mercury, 1997) created a sensation because it blended jungle's breakbeats with live instruments and singing, and it even reconciled dance music's suite format with the traditional song format of rock music. The music was no less innovative, borrowing freely from a vast array of musical styles, particularly jazz and soul. Brown Paper Bag, nine minutes of languid guitar and bass doodling in a ghostly soundscape of keyboard drones and dissonances, could be a composition from Chicago's "creative jazz" school. Even better, Let's Get It On boasts the instrumental sensitivity of bebop and free-jazz. The guitar and trumpet duo in Hi-Potent blends Steve Reich's minimalism and New Orleans' street fanfares. Ballet Dance exhibits a similar sense of disorientation, as themes meander, vaguely resonant of Miles Davis, in a deep mud of double bass, metallic percussions and trumpet buzzs. Jazz and avantgarde keep reoccurring (Trust Me, Change My Life, Jazz) in a combination that was pioneered by the Soft Machine and Matching Mole, not in Bristol but in Canterbury. The album's songs are still engaging, although less original. The alien rhythm and the sensual whisper that duet on Digital, the dadaistic forest of sound effects and thick syncopated polirhythms in Mad Cat, are sophisticated touches from a master of the arrangement. Heroes and Share The Fall are particularly effective as songs. The album is way too long for what it has to say and the fillers are countless, but it does rival with Goldie's debut in terms of historical importance. Its jazz flavoring may even have unveiled a formidable jazz talent.
Nathan Ramirez
it takes you 10 seconds to google it and realize it's from scaruffi to think how much anger that would have prevented on your part
Jaxson Gutierrez
4 Hero is the duo of Dego MacFarlane and Marc Mac, two debuted on London's hip-hop scene in the mid 1980s, but left their mark when they started pioneering new forms of drum'n'bass since 1990. Mr Kirk's Nightmare and Journey From The Light (1993) were the gloomy classics that signaled a change of mood within the rave scene, although initially 4 Hero was mainly known for harmless dancefloor hits such as Risin' Sun, Combat Dance and The Scorcher. They were all released on their own Reinforced label, soon to become the headquarters of drum'n'bass. In Rough Territory (Reinforced, 1991) collects and remixes some of the early singles and adds a few more tracks.
Mac Mark also launched the Manix project with singles like Oblivion and Hardcore Junglism, while MacFarlane launched the Tek 9 alter ego with sophisticated singles like A London Sumtin and Just A Dream.
With Parallel Universe (Reinforced, 1994 - Selector, 1996), the duo abandoned the genre they had helped pioneer and embraced a form of "armchair jungle" that offered a groundbreaking marriage of fusion-jazz and ambient music, bordering on Weather Report and Sun Ra rather than on their friend Goldie. Lush strings and free-form electronics defuse the breakbeats of Universal Love, Terraforming and Wrinkles In Time.
Nicholas Campbell
>Bricolage ( I already knew it was from Scraruffi you jackass, thanks for not answering my question though meathead
Luke Mitchell
The two-disc album Two Pages (Talkin' Loud, 1998) furthers the investigations of Parallel Universe (i.e., continues the experiments with live instrumentation, thanks to two string quartets and a three-piece horn section) and Jacob's Optical Stairway. Mellow, kitschy orchestral arrangements highlight Star Chasers, a natural progression from Universal Love and Loveless, halfway between Curtis Mayfield and disco divas, perhaps reminiscent of the styles that turned Roni Size and LTJ Bukem into millionaires. Golden Age Of Life is basically a soul-jazz ballad decontextualized through an arrangement of harp, choir, piano. Escape That is relaxing, atmospheric lounge music. Wishful Thinking is shameless Bacharach pop. Third Stream features African percussion and dancing violins, but the main theme is "beaten" (more than played) by the piano as a mechanical pattern, and is rounded up by a fantastic clarinet solo. Spirits In Transit returns to the "classical" arrangement of Planetaria, but with a festive, fanfare-like attitude (not too distant from Philip Glass's minimalist scores). All the tracks of the first disc are heavily imbued with jazz. So it is appropriate that the last words are carried by the romantic saxophone that highlights Normal Changing World. This first disc is as baroque as a psychedelic album in 1967. The second, all-instrumental and more experimental disc challenges the arduous structures of Spring Heel Jack and Squarepusher with the eight-minute percussive pastiche We Who Are Not As Others. The other tracks sound a little amateurish and it may not be a coincidence that the best is Pegasus 51, another melodic offering. As avantgarde composers, the duo is definitely not up to the task, but, at least in their intentions, this is the Ummagumma of drum'n'bass.
Dominic Morgan
Rachel Point opens Disappeared (Thirsty Ear, 2000) with methodically pounding drums, Miles Davis-style trumpet licks and looping keyboard wails. The calculated geometry of this track contrasts with the Wagnerian intensity of Mit Wut, a mind-warping distortion clashing with symphonic staccatos over a martial pow-wow beat, first interrupted by a gentle piano figure, then torn apart by a hard-rocking bass riff and the whole finally soaring via a church-like organ drone, a minimalistic piano pattern and insistent drumming. Galina is no less extreme, at least the way it sticks cascading dissonant sounds into the crevices of tribal, resounding, robotic, industrial beats. These are Spring Heel Jack at their best: a storming, Foetus-like power that crushes a steady flow of sonic debris. Often, these dances are driven by a titanic bass propulsion (Bane) The grotesque, distorted horn theme and the gargantuam rhythm of Wolfing end the album on a comic note. Not all tracks are so sonically challenging. The duo's romantic side surfaces in the epic trumpet crescendo of Trouble And Luck and the Bacharach-tinged orchestral aria of the reggaefied To Die A Little. A playful, funky, quasi-surf theme turns I Undid Myself into post-modernist musical graffitis. Aided by jazz-rock glory John Surman in person, the duo vent their passion for jazz in two shimmering interludes that deserve to be called chamber concertos. They both begin with harsh notes and dissonances, but then settle into trance-like moods, although of a very different kind: Disappeared 1 is a languid, dreamy lake of neurotic saxophone and romantic vibraphone noises; Disappeared 2 weaves minimalistic fanfares of clarinet and saxophone that sound like Anthony Braxton waltzing with Albert Ayler.
Carter Price
Coxon and Wales play all instruments, and would easily rank among the best players of each instrument for the year. They seem to have an unerring talent for secreting the best out of every musical source they touch. The way they mix those spectacular sounds is no less spectacular, and they would also rank among the most original composers of modern music.
Jeremiah Morales
>why doesn't the bait make sense the absolute state of you
Julian Edwards
His first masterpiece was Hard Normal Daddy (Warp, 1997), the album that left behind jungle's facile and sterile exercises with samples, and that sailed full-throttle towards jazz fusion, melodic synthesizers and what would be called "breakcore". The birth of "drill and bass" arose from the marriage of the sexy grooves of funk and the cerebral noodling of progressive-rock. The manifesto of the new genre was the supersonic funk of Coopers World: while the keyboards weave a fantasia of melodic themes and counterpoints, the guitar and the bass heavily accent it with syncopated moves. In tracks such as Rustic Raver, Fat Controller and Male Pill Part 13 drum programming is no longer the subject, it is merely an object. The music revolves around the bass and the electronic keyboards. These are abstract paintings, not manic dancefloor explosions. Imagination and sense of humour permeate these pieces (especially Chin Hipopy) to the point that they recall the provocations of futurism and dadaism. The jamming is so fluid (especially in E8 Boogie) that one is reminded of progressive-rock giants such as Colosseum and Phish. The surreal, spacey, quasi-psychedelic ambience of the first album survive on Beep Street (augmented with a fantastic "musique concrete" effect of a creaky door). However, the music has replaced its moody and cryptic attitude with a sprightly and organic flow, more akin to Terry Riley's minimalist scores. The new synthesis shines in Papalon, a touching jazz madrigal led by (the electronic equivalent of) bassoon and vibes, a chromatic orgy worthy of the most astral ECM sound.
Jaxson Bell
Scaruffi seems to favor the precise kind of jungle that Simon Reynolds tends to dislike, and is generally disregarded by people within the "scene".
Benjamin Robinson
he seems more bothered about genre expansion and pushing or how-close-to-muh-classical than the intention of great tunes to dance your tits off to
Easton Stewart
>jovial
Isaac Edwards
>it was electro and hip hop kids who didn't like house who made jungle
Charles Robinson
oh go on m8 play me some housey jungle then
Evan Rivera
>So why don't you listen to jungle, Sup Forums? Because it all sounds the same.
Parker Walker
>I've never listened to more than 3 jungle tunes
Jason James
Retard lol
Ayden Evans
They all follow the same structure and use the same breaks. Even anime openings are far more original.
Samuel Thompson
>They all follow the same structure and use the same breaks. factually false, try harder
Lucas Brooks
>use the same breaks You total fucking n00b. Why are you even here?
Leo Jackson
why don't people say the same about post-rock or dream pop or noise rock or other such genres here on Sup Forums
