(via Dan Selzer)
Love the ultra-New Wave - or I should ultra-Neu-Deutsche-Welle - sleeve with that type-on-tape, sticky-back print-out ribbon
[goes looking on t'internet]
Label Embosser is the technical term. One of these jobs.
Compare with
"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
(via Dan Selzer)
Love the ultra-New Wave - or I should ultra-Neu-Deutsche-Welle - sleeve with that type-on-tape, sticky-back print-out ribbon
[goes looking on t'internet]
Label Embosser is the technical term. One of these jobs.
Compare with
I always heard the sampled lyric in "Sub Dub" as "through rushes and through briars" - thinking the word "rush" with its ravey connotations snagged the ear of DJ Seduction
Actually it's "Bushes and Briars"
Through bushes and through briars
I lately took my way
All for to hear the small birds sing
And the lambs to skip and play
All for to hear the small birds sing
And the lambs to skip and play
I overhead my own true love
His voice did sound so clear
Long time I have been waiting for
The coming of my dear
Long time I have been waiting for
The coming of my dear
Sometimes I am uneasy
And troubled in my mind
Sometimes I think I'll go to my love
And tell to him my mind
But if I should go to my love
My love he will say “nay”
If I show to him my boldness
He'll ne'er love me again
If I show to him my boldness
He'll ne'er love me again
In Energy Flash I took a wild guess and said it sounds like Maddy Prior
See, I imagined some ardkore ooligan rifling through the parents's albums collection and alighting on some Steeleye Span
Slightly disappointing, then, to learn much, much later that it's from a sort of ambient house record, "West In Motion"
The song is a trad.arr and appears in the stiff (if beautifully Nic Roeg filmed) cinematic adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.
Julie Christie "sings"
Actually it's Isla Cameron reprising her rendition from her own album - putting a lovely quiver through the melody.
Apparently June Tabor did it also - on her very first recordings, which nobody has put out there
As did the witchily fetching Toni Arthur, best known for Play School as opposed to her folk-rock past
Sandy Denny done it too - except she didn't, the song is completely different but has the same title.
Which was then covered by Lee Ranaldo of all people.
In terms of traditional music royalty - dynastic scion Eliza Carthy has notably had a go, with Nancy Kerr
It's said to be the very first traditional song that Vaughan Williams collected:
"Sung by a 72-year-old labourer, Charles Potiphar.... Vaughan Williams... experienced a deep sense of recognition as though “it was something he had known all his life”. Being new to folk song collecting, he only transcribed the first verse, and got the rest of the words from a late 19th-century broadside published by W.S. Fortey of Seven Dials (London). John Clare also noted the song in his manuscripts, compiled in the 1820’s"
Here's a cool version by The Swingle Singers, it sounds like a madrigal
I had a fun and wide-ranging chat with The Underground Is Massive author Michaelangelo Matos at his substack Beat Connection, which is dedicated to deejay mixes. The chat touched on Futuromania, rave, jungle, UK garage pirate radio, digital maximalism, and many other topics, using the structure of five deejay mixes and radio sets: John Peel's legendary Punk Special from December '76, a Don FM Ezy D Xmas '92 show, DB's The History of Our World hardcore + breakbeat ultramix from 94, Tuff Jam's CD-mix Underground Frequencies Volume One which captures UK garage at a protean formative moment before either the "speed" or "2step" kicked in, and then Rustie's Essential Mix of April 2012, the frazzling dazzle of digi-maxed nu-progtronica.
My favorite was probably the Tuff Jam set, which reintroduced me to these old favorites:
It reminded me of a period when I owned about three or four speed garage comps, as that was all there was to own - and this was one of them. It was the main way - living in NYC - I was able to hear the music. A handful of 12 inch singles would reach the Manhattan dance specialist stores, and I'd scoop them all up, pretty much - but there was zero demand locally: the local jungle / drum+bass scene was at its strongest then, and they all regarded speed garage as apostasy, a def(l)ection from the True Path, while the New York househeads, as you'd expect, thought it was garbage not garage - too ruff-hewn on the production side, too fast, too bumpy. Not proper.
As I mentioned to Matos, my evangelism - like with jungle several years earlier - involved making tape introductions to the new style for friends and colleagues. But because most of the best tracks I only had on these DJ-mixed CDs, I had to fade them up and fade them down in order to get them to resemble proper tracks, on these cassette compilations. I'm sure this is one of the reasons - all these three or four minutes portions of a track, sometimes with a bit of another tune lingering at the start, or coming in at the end - why these tapes confused my intended converts. But mostly they just couldn't hear the subtle radicalism, the contamination of American lush sexy garage with jungly flavor, the exaggeration of the bump+flex in the original music. I would get responses like "isn't this just house music?". Well, yes, but also no.
On the Tuff Jam ceedee, it's very nascent and early-days-yet indeed - the selection is equal parts American house, emulative British stuff that attempts to sound as smooth 'n' sexy and palatially polished... and then really just a few things that are true speed garridge. There's also stuff by those unorthodox Americans who would help to catalyse the UK thing and then be pulled along by it and pushed further - Todd Edwards, Armand Van Helden.
Great days - I remember the hunger
a/ the hunger just to get hold of the bloody music
and
b/ the hunger, the itch, just to see where it was going to go next.
I couldn't have imagined 2step, even though there was a clue on this Tuff Jam CD right near the end of it.
Along with the sound of the New Thing, what hooks me as a language-fan is also the sense of a new argot creeping in - new buzzterms - "bumpy", Tuff Jam's term "Unda-Vybe"
I had no idea this ever came out - the first MC-fronted jungle album. 1996.
This later EP from 2002 has a title that nods towards - perhaps forms a matching book end with - an era-inaugurating album from 1991.
What Ragga Twins and Det had heralded was at that moment reaching fruition with grime
Wonder how this post-SUAD Ragga Twins effort from '95 sounds? Probably not very ragga-y.
As Carl acknowledges in his review, jungle MCs rarely worked as "feat." artists on record - their style was built for and around the live set at a rave on a pirate
What are the great examples of a jungle MC doing it in the studio?
MC GQ is grrrrrrreat on this but it's really just one lick. Well one hook-lick and a bit of chat.
This is an exciting performance by UK Apachi - it cuts back and forth between a singjay sing-song mode that's quite plaintive and jabbered fast-chat that's raggaruff.
This from Stevie Hyper D is very early - 1991 - but it's more like a dancehall vocal rather than jungle MC-ing
Likewise this from the next year
Fun but pales next to this
Stevie Hyper D also did EP called Junglist Hooligan and the track "Junglist Soldier" in '95 and '96
A take on "Rub a Dub Soldier"
Another very early effort - 1991 - is Killer Man Archer - on "Narra Mine"
But it is more like a dancehall deejay guesting than a junglist MC (okay it's points along a line but feels like there's a distinction )
I went looking and found that MCs featuring in jungle records seemed to happen more towards the end of the '90s (which surprised me) and that earlier quite often if I look for say a famous MC like Navigator, they'll appear in discogs as the producer of a track. Bit like with MC Duke.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Suggestions in comments
nominated Anonymously
MC Dynamite on Roni Size / Reprazent's "Brown Paper Bag"
DaveK in comments pointing out the Conrad remix of PFM - which features his uniquely smoov and serene style of chill chat - reminds me that I have been remiss about RIP-ing MC Conrad.
DaveK also mentions this early effort involving MC Fearless on the Boogie Beat label
That's rather good and I like the melodic interpolation from "Moments in Love" too
Here's the whole Weekend Rush Part 3 EP
He also mentions Bassman's contribution to this classic
That's more on the lines of GQ on "Roll Da Beats"
Going back to Fearless, here's a bunch of later 'feat.s" from around '96
Aha - bit later than the period I'm looking at - but in 2003 Fearless teamed up with Shabba D, Skibadee and Det for this release under the group name The Professionals
There's a great tune featuring Skibadee but it's UKG
uploaded by yourstrools 4 da commonwealth
Another one that doesn't really count - it's not a release, it's an advert - is this pirate ad for Telepathy, the MC whose name I'm blanking on is also the guy who ran the club, indeed he voiced all their ads