ANDY C

Double Vision - Easy Does It (1993)

Double Vision is an Andy C alias. Easy Does it is a surge that goes so hard(core) it totally rocks da house! 

Desired State - Beyond Bass (1993)

Desired State is Andy C & Ant Miles from Concept 2, Elevation & Higher Sense. The vocal hook here is a sample from Humanoid's Cry Baby which is turned into an urgent skittering blur. Add Amen breaks that smash their way through the dark atmosphere and blissful ambience to create quite a buzzin' tune.  

Andy C - Bass Constructor (1993)

We get mental chopped up hardcore chipmunk vocals amongst the insane drum choppage, whooshing keys, atmospheric bleeps and a classic bass drop at 0.58. Dark, intense and sinister. Bass! 

Andy C - Something New Part 1 (1993)

Includes babbling speedy chipmunks, hands in the air ambience, racing rave riffage, delirious backwards drumz and a deep bubbling bass drop at 1.25. Something New is a stampede in one hell of a rush.

Desired State - Killer Beat (1993)

Killer Beat starts out with ominous bells, disorienting synth smears then vocal snatches rush by in a blur as a deep wobbling bass enters amongst all sorts of frantic alarming sounds to rattle your brain.   

Randall & Andy C - Sound Control (1994)

An Amen smasher with mucho time-stretched and frantic choppage along with sirens, bleeps and horror soundtrack vibez. 

Randall & Andy C - Feel It (1994)

Sometimes hardcore jungle tunes can resemble arty audio collage music. Amidst rave sirens, crazy hardcore breaks and deep dub bass we get a slew of vocal snippets featuring jungalist and movie dialogue. As the comments say this wasn't played out very often but it's a booming track to lose your mind to. Bubblin psycho-delic RAMology.

Origin Unknown - Valley Of The Shadows (1993)

Now let's finish with the Andy C track that everyone knows because it's probably the most unforgettable jungle tune ever and definitely one of the best. This particular Valley Of The Shadows yt clip has been watched over 1.4 million times. Andy C is joined in Origin Unknown by his RAM Records co-founder Ant Miles. This Darkside Jungle masterpiece never gets old. It was whipped up in just four hours with most of the musical elements coming from a sample cd given away with the February 1993 issue of Future Music magazine. Apollo 11's 1969 lunar module landing countdown from NASA's Jack King provides the "31 seconds" dialogue snippet. The haunting "Felt that I was in a long dark tunnel" dialogue sample comes from a BBC documentary about near death experiences. The delightfully eerie atmosphere created here makes this one of the most memorable jungle tunes of all time. Perfection. 

Moving Shadow: The History of Jungle 1990-95

This mix is all killer no filler. These are the biggest tunes from 1990 to 1995 on the MOVING SHADOW label. I couldn't think of a better introduction to this mighty label. It covers hardcore turning into darkside turning into jungle. One glorious game-changing masterpiece after another. Uh...the vibe! If you are hearing any of these trax for the first time you are a lucky duck and in for a treat. I gotta say 30 years later it's still a joy to hear these fresher than ever cuts. Omni Trio and Foul Play are still giving me the goose bumps, sending me back to the euphoric future 90s.  

Hardcore!

 

Jungle! 

Check out the sheer quality in this playlist.

1 Blame– Music Takes You (2 Bad Mice Remix)Remix – 2 Bad Mice 

2 2 Bad Mice – Waremouse 

3 Hyper On Experience – The Frightner 

4 Kaotic Chemistry – Spacecakes 

5 2 Bad Mice – Mass Confusion 6 Hyper On Experience – Lords Of The Null-Lines (Foul Play Remix) Remix – Foul Play 

7 Foul Play – Open Your Mind 

8 Omni Trio –Feel Good (Remix) 

9 Foul Play – The Finest 

10 Omni Trio – Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix) Remix – Foul Play 

11 Cloud Nine* – You Got Me Burnin 

12 DJ Trax – Hightime 

13 JMJ & Richie – Case Closed 14 Deep Blue – The Helicopter Tune 15 Omni Trio – Thru The Vibe 16 Renegade – Terrorist 17 Cloud Nine* – The Pedge 18 E-Z Rollers – Believe

19 Blame & Justice – Anthemia 

20 Omni Trio - Living For The Future 21 DJ Pulse – So Fine (Remix) 22 Essence Of Aura – Northern Lights

23 Higher Sense – Cold Fresh Air
24 Foul Play – Being With You 

25 Dead Dred – Dred Bass

Cold Fresh Air was the only track I couldn't i-d although it's familiar. Higher Sense are Ant Miles & David Thomas. Ant Miles was also in Jungle legends Origin Unknown and Desired State. It's a good day if I discover a cracking jungle tune from 28 years ago. I love that wasted vibe on the time-stretched vocal bit. 

*The remix of Cold Fresh Air was released by Moving Shadow but this original was on Ant's own label Liftin' Spirit. Which in turn was a sub label of RAM Records which was co-owned by Ant & another jungle luminary Andy C. Phew!...got it?

Marc Acardipane - The Most Famous Unknown Expansion Packs 6 & 7

Many more remastered classics here. Still the most modern music you'll here this year!

The Assembled Minds - Dirty Workshop Magick

Mathew 'Patterned Air' Saunders released a bunch of stuff recently under his fabulous moniker The Assembled Minds onto bandcamp. I've known for a while that he's had a stack of unreleased material waiting around have I? I think I even told some people to sign him up or was that Position Normal? Perhaps both*. My influence can't be that far reaching though as Mathew has released these himself. Hey I gave it a go! Anyway after purchasing all the everything which is both old & new, I'm just stuck on the first digital album I put through the bluetooth speakers. 

That's this terrific compilation DIRTY WORKSHOP MAGICK. First of all: Best album title in the haunty-logic game since Mordant Music's Dead Air. This compilation contains tracks that The Assembled Minds contributed to other compilations over the last seven years. So we get six trax from 2015 to 2020. Assembled Minds came to CardroosManiac2 prominence in 2016 with their brilliant LP Creaking Haze & Other Rave Ghosts which was a Top 10 LP in my end of year list. The brilliant second track The Face In The Mirror Is Not Mine made my 2016 Top 5 tunes list. So if you're across the goodness of this fine music you're in luck here.

"...a half remembered misty rural rave among blurry faced dancers with only their teeth shining bright in a marsh that might not have even existed, where you never belonged. Suddenly your brain connected 'ardcore to the sinister/anodyne conjured by the brown British world of 70s homemade telly where Radiophonica was surreptitiously squished in. In this moment library theme tunes mutated into hardcore rave trax that weren't in this dimension but a possible world of parallels between raves. Seven buttered english muffin people hunted you until you arrived back in an urban town planning nightmare as the suburban lights glowed in the early AMs, comforted by the cars splashing by in the night rain. Feeling good that all this never happened except did it? It's all a dilapidated sound and vision but weren't your parents synthesiser robots? Who've now rusted into squeaky regressed babies. Now including the super soundz of helium voices incorporated with vague slowed down distressed monSTer tones? Were you ever anywhere? Is your brain just an experiment inside a chipped tea cup within a room where the windows have no outside? So wrap yourself up in a beautifully patterned 70s curtain, but hang on, it's just withering satanic wallpaper turning into the ashes of that fireman's suit you'd stolen from an unknown village's station. Weren't you going to wear that to a rural rave at a misty marsh as you couldn't find an actual train driver's outfit in time. There was a whistle in your pocket though... I'll come to you... " 

[This is an excerpt from Tim's Haunted Bollocks Fiction] 

Dirty Workshop Magick is a 6 piece sonic jigsaw. A transmission of shadows of music's former self from this dimension, I think.

  

*Unfortunately amnesia has crept into some of my memory zones so I'm not sure anymore what I thought I knew or whether I even did the things I thought I did. The scans are fine but that's about what it rules in now as opposed to what it rules out! As many less sinister things have recently been ruled out. Now that I think about it, that's very Haunty-Logical although it's definately (sic) not fun or awesome. It's frightening.   

Proto-Dubstep, Speed Garage & Recreations

Funny how much I'm loving this Proto-Dubstep Mix 99-03 from J Rolla considering I was off the hardcore continuum come Speed Garage, 2 step & Grime. I didn't really make it back until the rowdier/wobblier side of dubstep showed up in trax from Skream, Rusko et al. Even then I was only into a handful of tracks compared to the hundreds of hardcore/jungle tunes that I loved (they would be into the thousands now since my rediscovery/reappraisal of rave a couple of years back). I mean I liked Burial's 2 records and Kode9 & Spaceape's Memories Of The Future but was that dubstep? I had Burial more aligned in my brain with Hauntological/90s Berlin zones and and the later with trip-hop territory.  Maybe I'm loving this mix because the material is so unfamiliar and perhaps I didn't need to get off the nuum around the tech-step to speed garage time. Especially because I've been diggin this tune (below) I Don't Smoke, which is soo good. It starts off like something from those nutty scallywags Position Normal doncha think?

Oh and this from 97. 

er...and this from 97 and I could go on..... Is this strictly speed garage though or more like something on the peripheries of speed garage? I don't know but I like it. There's even reenactments of this style today, check below Hodgson's One Spliff which is hard to resist as it's so damn addictive (No pun intended. Or would it be better to intend that pun?). This one via Energy Flash.

Anyway back to J Rolla from London, not to be confused with J-Rolla from NZ, who has a hyphen. Rolla's got a great bunch of mixes over at Mixcrate of 90s hardcore and jungle which are worth checkin out and er... some boring dubstep ones but you don't have to listen to those if you don't want to. 

Reign - The Zombie Leader Is Approaching

Old skool German hardcore on Dance Ecstasy 2001 from 96! How good is that bass drum outro. A myriad of bass drum soundz...... Oh yeah!

And this....on the B-side. The mighty Skeletons March. How about that sinister and cold synth sound? Doooomcore! You know the score.

Stop The Music

Tune!

Uh...Hold on to the love...wicked!

PCP Sub-Labels Mix

Here's a mix I only just discovered on the youtubes. I've road tested it and it goes well on me bike. DJ Djero's got a whole other bunch of mixes that look like they're worthy of checkin out as well. This one features Dr Macabre, Rave Creator, Pilldriver etc. Stuff from Power Plant, Cold Rush, Kotzaak Unltd. etc.

Lee Gamble - Girl Drop

This could be my favourite track of the year too. This is from Lee Gamble's Kuang EP. It feels like a ghostly cavernous space where the rave action used to be, now there is just reverberation and lost time. I can also sense some hope perhaps, sunlight creeping though the cracks of a past time. Anyway it is beautiful and brilliant. It's up there with anything from his Diversions 94-96 record which made my end of 2012 list. It's probably the best thing he's done so far, stunning!

Ratchet & Trap Explained

"Trap = derived from southern "gangsta" rap; particularly mid-2000s stuff like gucci mane, young jeezy, t.i. lots of intricate, rattling 808 percussion & snare sounds along with booming kick drums and bass. a lot of the original producers used a lot of big wall-of-sound, gothic sounding synths and there was a noticeable influence from electronic genres like trance and electro, but filtered through a rap production aesthetic. now a huge influence on rap, r&b and electronic music, and the production is often a lot sleeker and less bombastic."

 "Ratchet = term for the recent production style that draws on hyphy (e-40, keak da sneak, mistah fab etc), jerk music, crunk and g-funk. lots of simple rhythms, kicks and claps, squelchy synth bass. i think the term was originally used by lil boosie in Louisiana but now usually refers to west coast rap and r&b stuff like dj mustard, yg, ty dolla sign etc."

*This was left by an anonymous commenter. Thanks Anonymous I think you know your shit!

They've intermingled and cross-pollinated though haven't they and not just with each other but most other forms of 90s electronic music and some 90s rap ie. 666 Mafia, right?

Sex Drugs & Ratchet Again.....With Beatking

More Sex, Drugs & Ratchet. I think Beatking's music is the most fully realised confluence of 90s rave culture and 10s rap so far and it's such an addictive sound. This one from last year's got rave horns, talk of mixing Es with codeine and echoes of 4 Hero's (Mr Kirk's Nightmare and Where's The Boy?) cautionary tales. Beatking says "These Molly's are gonna kill you in 5 years. But it's not 5 years right now so mix that shit with codeine." Not quite the same but 5 years is a long way off so party on right?

Marc Acardipane On Me Bike

These tunes came up on my Fuck Yeah! Mix on the i-pod whilst cycling today. These tracks really get your legs moving. Is it illegal to ride with your i-pod in your earballs? It does feel unsafe. I was definitely riding into the future and possibly could have ridden front on into a truck and wouldn't have cared. These are still incredible soundz.

RIP Alexander Shulgin

Simon Reynolds tribute to Alexander Shulgin here. Well I didn't know much about him until today. He rescued MDMA from historical obscurity in 1976 and is now a legend. Somewhere along the way MDMA became known as Ecstasy. I'd like to thank him for the hits and the memories. In my teens I remember first reading about Ecstasy in The Age (Melbourne equivalent to The Guardian/New York Times) in an article that featured S'Express and 70s fashion. I recall being fascinated by this drug and the subculture surrounding it. I'd probably only ever been pissed previously and never even been stoned. I think I cut this article out. Then a few months later there was an entire expose on Ecstasy and it's effects on its users in like The Age's weekend magazine (probably sourced from The Guardian actually). It had all these great modern fried psychedelic graphics of people being wasted on E. I cut that one out as well. You'd think I was well on the way to being a total E head but I reckon it would have been five years at least until I tried it. Maybe Shaun Ryder and Bez, from The Happy Mondays, put me off trying it any earlier. I was a very infrequent user of the substance but I gotta say I enjoyed it every time.

Then there's the music it helped create. Wow, Shulgin couldn't have foreseen such a flourishing musical movement being created for and by this drug. Ecstasy has been the catalyst for some of the greatest genres of the modern music era of the last 30 years and still continues it's influence today. MDMA was revolutionary and that's an understatement. I've possibly listened to more music created for and by Ecstasy than anything else. It's a testament to the drug that you don't even have to be on it to enjoy this music. Rest in Ecstasy Mr Shulgin.

I could go on probably forever posting E related tunes. Oh hang on this captures something about E-ing. That moment when you think you've been ripped off and bought a dud. Then minutes later it kicks in big style.

Don't Touch That Stereo Part I

Millie & Andrea - Drop The Vowels (2014)
This is one of the dudes from Demdike Stare and some other bloke. For some reason I'm really enjoying this record which I didn't really expect to. I don't think anything much new is happening here. There a bit of post dubstep, some gamelan vibes, isolationist type ambience, a dose of Basic Channel, hardcore continuum styles, drum & bass pops its head up, tech-house (that was a thing wasn't it for a minute there in the 90s?) and I dunno it's all a bit zombie rave (that should so be a genre). Not really hands up in the air more like your arms fall off as you try to raise them above your waste. Is it undeconstructed or reconstuctured deconstruction or constructed unreconstruction? More to the point does anyone give a shit at this point? More nails in the coffin for rave in the best possible sense.

Clouds - Ghost System Rave (2013)
A bit late on this one. Ghost System Rave was only hipped to me in early January by Reynolds via Energy Flash. This is far and away the best album I missed last year, the only other contender being Holden's The Inheritors. It most certainly would have made my top 9. As far as album titles that describe their contents go this is perfection. Whilst the ingredients suggest the 90s, something pulls this away from mere retro-activity. Perhaps Future 1 is the only exception to that rule here as it soundz like an obscure 91 grimey 'ardcore gem that Blog To The Old Skool might have dug up. Ghost System Rave is not just techno micro-genres revisited. Its like you're hearing an early 90s rave through a ghost's ears. You feel like you've heard it before but you haven't, not like this. This is a delightfully askew musical experience. It sounds/feels like you've already dropped the drugs and you're occupying an inbetween dimension. This is an incredible musical achievement. Rave from the otherside. We just had Zombie Rave and now this is Ghost Rave.