blissblogger
Well-known member
Surely the greatest label of the first half of the Nineties.
Not just in jungle, but on all fronts.
The militant commitment to a vision-quest.... the sheer sustained strike rate combined with the relentless forward drive....
If you have a spare 19 hours....
(And that sweep through their own archival anthologies (Reinforced Presents...) doesn't include a lot of the odder stray tracks, the Enforcers anomalies, the eccentrics... nor certain artists who could easily warrant a Reinforced Presents... e.g. Nebula II)
(Nor indeed the enormous Tom & Terry tuneage)
But what about Reinforced during the second half of the '90s?
I carried on loyally buying a lot of their stuff - not loyally, really, just genuinely excited by things heard in the store (by that point usually Breakbeat Science the NYC hub for the city's junglists)
However very little of it has stuck with me - in the sense that I literally can't remember it.
Part of it is that tracks by Arcon 2 or Sonar Circle or whoever, the tracks get so convoluted and dense with editing and processing, they actually defy memory.
Also they weren't things you'd hear played out, like, ever - so no memories got attached to them.
So the last thing from that camp that really stuck with me is actually not technically on Reinforced - it's the Jacob's Optical Stairway album, which came out on Crammed or something like that.
Reinforced proper, would probably be the Cold Mission stuff.
Not just in jungle, but on all fronts.
The militant commitment to a vision-quest.... the sheer sustained strike rate combined with the relentless forward drive....
If you have a spare 19 hours....
(And that sweep through their own archival anthologies (Reinforced Presents...) doesn't include a lot of the odder stray tracks, the Enforcers anomalies, the eccentrics... nor certain artists who could easily warrant a Reinforced Presents... e.g. Nebula II)
(Nor indeed the enormous Tom & Terry tuneage)
But what about Reinforced during the second half of the '90s?
I carried on loyally buying a lot of their stuff - not loyally, really, just genuinely excited by things heard in the store (by that point usually Breakbeat Science the NYC hub for the city's junglists)
However very little of it has stuck with me - in the sense that I literally can't remember it.
Part of it is that tracks by Arcon 2 or Sonar Circle or whoever, the tracks get so convoluted and dense with editing and processing, they actually defy memory.
Also they weren't things you'd hear played out, like, ever - so no memories got attached to them.
So the last thing from that camp that really stuck with me is actually not technically on Reinforced - it's the Jacob's Optical Stairway album, which came out on Crammed or something like that.
Reinforced proper, would probably be the Cold Mission stuff.