late 90s tech-step

[tyranny]

"Stormbringer" was great...

His recent stuff as "The Panacea" is beyond dreadful though...

"The Bear of Berlin"





This thread isn't about tech-step though - according to the chap who started her at least - it's about all the stuff that happened as a result of the first ed rush and optical album

 

[dave]

It's just heavy metal weight-pumping crap, admit it.

haha, touché

 

[mixed_biscuits]

panacea...madness!

His rave-influenced stuff on Kniteforce Again is fantastic.

 

[joe.dfx]

since i dont think it's been mention i've always felt Audio Blueprint, was highly underrecognized, especially their first lp, "Voyager."

get rid of that lo-fi funk tune and to me at least it's as good as wormhole.

 

[rivet90210]

I agree. Early Underfire was good too. There is a swarming dark electro / bboy thing going on in their releases -which became more and more evident as time went on, they even did a planet rock remix.
They are distinct from others at the time, they definitely have 'a sound'. So who wants to disagree?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

re: neurofunk - I should think it's pretty self-explanatory. dry funk, funk stripped of the manic energy but retaining the one the one/stripped down funkiness. not sluggish, but sparse. see also the funky as hell minimal techno - Brinkmann, Hood & Mills, DBX, Mike Ink.

as in, funk is in what you don't play.

re: Panacea - I mostly find him unbearable. obv the newer stuff is worse but I don't like any of his work really. like this - if he's somewhere at the intersection btwn Ambush, early/good DHR (Empire '93-'96, C de B, Sonic Subjunkies), the hardest side of No U-Turn etc. & proto-breakcore - I'd rather just listen to any one of those things than Panacea. it's like most "hard D" or whatever, I mean it just gets so hard & stupid that it loses meaning - after all you can't be hard without a soft to contrast & he's guilty of the same thing that most latter day D producers are; missing entirely the sexiness/slinkiness of jungle proper.

also his stuff reminds of gabba - if not the sound then that martial volkisch vibe, oopmah military etc. like Panacea is marching music, whereas the best techstep is the soundtrack for a defeated army marching home e.g. "Squadron" or "Machines", it's melancholic. techstep is dude-ish to the max of course but it's an insular dudeishness, whereas Panacea & all that is aggro. even if dude himself seems like a nice guy it's a convenient soundtrack for cocaine & booze & casual violence. which some people enjoy I'm sure & there's naught wrong w/that (*EDIT* enjoying the music I mean, coked-up violence itself totally sucks of course - didn't want anyone to mistake my meaning).

 

[Tentative Andy]

re: neurofunk - I should think it's pretty self-explanatory. dry funk, funk stripped of the manic energy but retaining the one the one/stripped down funkiness. not sluggish, but sparse. see also the funky as hell minimal techno - Brinkmann, Hood & Mills, DBX, Mike Ink.

as in, funk is in what you don't play.

Putting cards on the table here, neurofunk as I understand it is where it really started to go wrong for me. So, around 98-ish I guess. Stuff like Optical solo makes me want to crawl into the foetal position and then slowly doze off. I'm sure it has merit, but it's just not for me. Wish it was like Hood/Mills robo-funky minimal techno, but nah.
(Usual disclaimers apply though - this is from the p.o.v. of a new listener investigating backwards from now, if I'd lived through it in real-time maybe I would have had more reason to persevere. But I suspect I would have been sneakily listening to garage alongside by 97-98. Also it depends how you define it - I've heard people describe the Photek/Source Direct style as neurofunk. Now that stuff I love, easily my favourites from the self-consciously intelligent stream of d & b, but a lot of their classic records were from 95-97 and had chopped-up breaks and everything, so.....)

Technstep though I'm really feeling at the moment, your 'soundtrack for a defeated army' idea seems very apt I think. Great thread idea, anyway, working my way through the suggestions as usual. Oh and as much as I love luka and Woebot, lol @ another appearence of the 'no worthwhile jungle after 1994' thesis.

 

[UFO over easy]

optical hardly made any solo records during the time you're talking about. almost all of it's 96-98, the era you like. he engineered for a lot of people around then too, that sound was his sound. he got pretty bad hearing problems apparently

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what a don

 

[Tentative Andy]

optical hardly made any solo records during the time you're talking about. almost all of it's 96-98, the era you like. he engineered for a lot of people around then too, that sound was his sound. he got pretty bad hearing problems apparently

Well yeah, it's just an opinion, and not a very informed one at that. It's not just Optical though, it's other things like Matrix and Johnny L that continued till a bit later, and which I see as connecting more to the sound of his solo records and certain of the Metalheads records from this time more than they do to, say, the No U-Turn. And yeah, I'm aware of the great engineering work he did for loads of people, but his own productions to me sound much less interesting, use fewer ideas.
It's a weird one for me, because I often like a lot of techno and electronic music that could be described by terms like stiff, dry, stripped-down, clinical etc. But neurofunk in general doesn't do it for me. A lot of that stuff sounds a bit like sound design for its own sake, y'know. But again, not saying it has no merit, just hasn't connected with me yet.

 

[UFO over easy]

no u turn and this kind of thing was all going on at the same time though, it's the same artists. it's not a distinction that makes much sense

matrix certainly did write a lot of solo stuff later, but again he wrote a lot from 96-98



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[droid]

I always think of Optical/Matrix prototype, 31 etc.. as second wave techstep. Emotif/ NUT being the first wave - despite the fact there was considerable overlap.

 

[Tentative Andy]

no u turn and this kind of thing was all going on at the same time though, it's the same artists. it's not a distinction that makes much sense

It probably doesn't make sense in terms of trying to split up the personnel, no. I can accept that. That's part of why I mentioned that I lack the first-hand understanding of the scene as it evolved (and obviously haven't put in as much effort as you at researching back into it, so fair enough). But it's tempting to make some kind of distinction in terms of just the sound of the tunes. 'Neurofunk' to me means a style that is somewhat less busy, somewhat more clean-sounding techstep. And again, those aren't bad qualities for music to have per se, but the end results don't seem very compelling to me.

Btw, from tunes you posted, Dark Skies is one of his better efforts. Though doesn't justify going on for 8+ minutes. IN MY OPINON . The Matrix tune is alright I guess.

 

[UFO over easy]

I always think of Optical/Matrix prototype, 31 etc.. as second wave techstep. Emotif/ NUT being the first wave - despite the fact there was considerable overlap.

yeah but that overlap is there sonically and socially, the lines are blurred enough so that a statement like 'neurofunk is where it all started to go wrong' is just an unhelpful simplification

i'm not saying you have to like the music andy. im also not saying that there's no difference between something like dark skies and something like guncheck, its just there's no straightforward dividing line at any point

 

[droid]

yeah but that overlap is there sonically and socially, the lines are blurred enough so that a statement like 'neurofunk is where it all started to go wrong' is just an unhelpful simplification

i'm not saying you have to like the music andy. im also not saying that there's no difference between something like dark skies and something like guncheck, its just there's no straightforward dividing line at any point

There may not be a sharp line, but there is a line nonetheless! I see the early NUT stuff as being quite a distance from even good post 96 techstep (like the end pt.2 or something)

EDIT - wasnt 'Neurofunk' a post 99 thing anyway?

 

[UFO over easy]

Torque is an example of something that for me is right in the middle

it's probably come to mean that but simon reynolds did use it to mean earlier matrix/optical i think

 

[Tentative Andy]

yeah but that overlap is there sonically and socially, the lines are blurred enough so that a statement like 'neurofunk is where it all started to go wrong' is just an unhelpful simplification

i'm not saying you have to like the music andy. im also not saying that there's no difference between something like dark skies and something like guncheck

Well, 'all started to go wrong' is really just another way of saying 'stopped being the sort of thing that I like'. But it gets a bit boring to express everything in terms of personal responses like this (use bloody 'I' in all of my posts too much as it is!).
But I think I'm starting to see your point - I've just been accepting the historical account given by people like Reynolds and Pete Shapiro that places neurofunk slightly later than techstep, at least in terms of peak popularity with the scene and number/percentage of productions being made. And from there going and listening to tunes out of context on youtube etc without checking exactly when they were made. But I can now understand your point that the two sounds overlapped so much in terms of period and key figures that they were really part of one bigger thing. It's just that in terms of own respose, the neurofunk tunes were less interesting strand of this, as it were.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

yeh Droid remember that bit about NUT & Emotif being the great transition labels from jungle->D. Metalheadz too of course tho it was more evenly split btwn '95-'96 hard ambient jungle & more 2-step-ish business (sometimes both on the same release i.e. Hidden Agenda's (great) Dispatches 12").

yeah I think people really confuse hardstep (of the proto-tech, rather than proto-jump up, variety), techstep, neurofunk etc. it doesn't help that the lines are rather hazy & there are some records which could fit in more than one place. "Metropolis" for example is right on that hard/techstep line. even Torque - nearly every track mixes super dense chopped breaks (but clean & precise, not raw '94 rinseout stylee) with slamming 2-step, still pretty junglistic.

I dunno, until quite recently I was quite averse - almost like a phobia - of any D post-'98 (post-Wormhole really) but recently I've begun to dip my toe in here & there. I understand what you mean Andy about it being hard to connect with, I think it's one of those cases (like minimal techno) where you just have to keep listening until it clicks. a lot of the better post-techstep is quite trance-inducing, unlike techstep itself which is pretty maximal & junglistic still.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

re: techstep later than neurofunk - isn't this essentially cause neuro as such is the techstep heavy hitters - the NUT crew really - getting ever more stripped down/drier/death funk? whatever the term was coined for, that's what it is really.

the big thing is as UFO & Droid have mentioned people placing techstep later. that shit ran concurrently with Ganja Kru jump-up, latter Photek & Source Direct, the whimper not a bang death of ambient jungle etc.

hardstep is really the convergence/divergence point I reckon. which is why hardstep is awesome. especially that crazy '95 variety of like ambient hardstep - Randall & Andy C - Sound Control, Flatliner - Big Bang (Ram were all over that sound), Dom & Roland - Definition EP, J. Majik - Your Sound, T. Power - Amber...

 

[droid]

Need to get back to that other thread with 'my definition of hardstep'!

Torque is, for me - the end of days. Didn't really dig it too much at the time, but as I go through more and more old jungle, I like it less and less. I think its a pretty good marker - the scene on the gurney dying form blood loss.

Wormhole is 6 feet under business.

 

[Tentative Andy]

I dunno, until quite recently I was quite averse - almost like a phobia - of any D post-'98 (post-Wormhole really) but recently I've begun to dip my toe in here & there. I understand what you mean Andy about it being hard to connect with, I think it's one of those cases (like minimal techno) where you just have to keep listening until it clicks. a lot of the better post-techstep is quite trance-inducing, unlike techstep itself which is pretty maximal & junglistic still.

Yeah I dunno, maybe over time I'll end up getting something out of it. As ever the current opinions are tentative and open to revision. In some way I want to like it, because unless I have really clear justification for it I try to avoid being one of the 'early abandoners' who just decides that everything within a style of music after a cetain date is crap, or at least not worthy of attention. It seems a very callous sort of attitude to take to music. But ultimately, no matter how fair you try and be, you can't like everything, y'know?