Drum'n'bass 98-99

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tyranny

Well-known member
Loads of absolutely fantastic stuff in 1997, I reckon if 1998 and 1999 sound so stale and dated it's because the whole Ed Rush & Optical sound seemed like a template it would be very easy to copy so lots and lots of people did but with immediately terrible results, and this largely coincided with the arrival of the Mitsubishi pills that noticeably sped BPMs in every other genre up by 5-10bpm in the space of six months, while ALSO coinciding with the musical alchemy of Garage getting underway and sounding much more fun.

Absolutely none of that will ever stop me from caning this though:

 
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gremino

Moster Sirphine


Interesting turning point in jungle/dnb's history: breakbeats were switched to 2step beat, but the crowd in rave were still multicultural and there were a lot of girls. Maybe a year on and many of the blacks and girls moved to UKG?

Also, compared to '94, fashion had turned into Y2K
😎
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Corpsey said:
I do like some ed rush and optical tunes but often i find their drums so horrifically flat and brittle

I suppose it works a lot better when you've got a massive sub pumping out the bassline, ala. dubstep
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actually the best techstep is when the drums are deadening and brittle. some of you are romantic for a time which can never and will never come back, which is fine, (I love that time 2 da max as well) but it's like the jungle version of bob dylan boomers, really quite pathetic, no wonder this forum has degenerated to bob dylan and joni mitchell fandom, and in her case, without even knowing what her best album is.

 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
tyranny said:
Loads of absolutely fantastic stuff in 1997, I reckon if 1998 and 1999 sound so stale and dated it's because the whole Ed Rush & Optical sound seemed like a template it would be very easy to copy so lots and lots of people did but with immediately terrible results, and this largely coincided with the arrival of the Mitsubishi pills that noticeably sped BPMs in every other genre up by 5-10bpm in the space of six months, while ALSO coinciding with the musical alchemy of Garage getting underway and sounding much more fun.
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easy to copy but never really managed imo. I heard this on kool fm yesterday and it's still a game changer. sounds like a weirdo electronica/techno tune which could have come out in the 2010s. mindblowing.


But I guess, like techno, you have to appreciate it as electronic music in and of itself, rather than a recontextualisation of sampled acoustic sources.
 
0bleak

0bleak

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
I do like some ed rush and optical tunes but often i find their drums so horrifically flat and brittle
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thirdform said:
actually the best techstep is when the drums are deadening and brittle.

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The Ed Rush and Optical stuff is more neurofunk than techstep though, isn't it?
I'm also not sure that I would consider that Riddler/Dylan tune you posted above to be techstep.

(also not a big fan of neurofunk)
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
some neuro is amazing, and a lot of it is very bad.

mostly though again, as it crosses with the jump up arena aesthetic.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
0bleak said:
It is pretty interesting, but it's interesting that you mention Mills because it's almost more like fast techno.
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yeah, the kind of neuro I like is much closer to fast techno if you will, just not four to the floor. It ties in with my love for basement records, dj ratty, ron wells, that kind of thing.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
thirdform said:
actually the best techstep is when the drums are deadening and brittle. some of you are romantic for a time which can never and will never come back, which is fine, (I love that time 2 da max as well) but it's like the jungle version of bob dylan boomers, really quite pathetic, no wonder this forum has degenerated to bob dylan and joni mitchell fandom, and in her case, without even knowing what her best album is.

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This tune would basically be dubstep if you slowed it down
 
dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
@Corpsey yeah its the same beat with less swagger. @thirdform which is why when it comes to this era I do prefer Turn U On over No U Turn. I’m listening to the first Horsepower Productions LP and its miles better than that Monophace tune you tagged me on. Yes I really do like early tech step stuff, Rollers Instinct, Nu Black/NUT etc. The tech step sub genre without a doubt has an integrity of its own, even if I consider it a precipitous downgrade from other stuff circa ‘93-7. You know, maybe I’m just too much of a pussy to take much more than that. You probably have a more sophisticated theory than that, which is fine, but I just don’t enjoy the experience of listening to it at a really basic level. I do have doubts as to whether that fact can be appreciated as such when you insist on filtering minute aspects of people’s taste in jungle through Energy Flash historiography and mapping ideology onto aesthetics in a far too literalist manner.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
dilbert1 said:
@Corpsey yeah its the same beat with less swagger. @thirdform which is why when it comes to this era I do prefer Turn U On over No U Turn. I’m listening to the first Horsepower Productions LP and its miles better than that Monophace tune you tagged me on. Yes I really do like early tech step stuff, Rollers Instinct, Nu Black/NUT etc. The tech step sub genre without a doubt has an integrity of its own, even if I consider it a precipitous downgrade from other stuff circa ‘93-7. You know, maybe I’m just too much of a pussy to take much more than that. You probably have a more sophisticated theory than that, which is fine, but I just don’t enjoy the experience of listening to it at a really basic level. I do have doubts as to whether that fact can be appreciated as such when you insist on filtering minute aspects of people’s taste in jungle through Energy Flash historiography and mapping ideology onto aesthetics in a far too literalist manner.
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It's funny you say that as I'm the champion of the techno direction on here whereas everyone else are pretty orthodox reynoldsians, but in a pretty forced and ham-fisted way. Witness how corpsey has to qualify all the time that he likes some noughties dnb but dissensus showed him the way etc. With Reynolds it's fine because he was actually going to the raves and appreciates the music on a physical level.

Now if someone argued with me that robo minimal techno is better than techstep, I'm all ears, but its always the same fear of the machinic and the aggressively amusical. Maybe eminem had a point.
 
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