hardcore junglism lifetime achievement award: DJ DB (s&d)

and oh yeah "history of our world" yadda yadda

gosh, this looks sort of ill ... and so does this!!!

planet love ink - "living In pain"??? O RLY?

dr walker - "don't fuck with cologne"??? OK!!

bizz OD - "i'm comming out of your speakers"??? YES!!!!

yeah, it's a little bit too much DJ.Ungle.Fever / Rising High / Force Inc and a little bit too not enough Auftrieb / Structure / Profan but still looks killer!!

ANY COP??

i understand jess likes cosmic nerd shit, he should have an opinion for us on this

while we're at it, is the new dj clever covermount worth buying? did they can the column at pitchfork? if so, what's replacing it? the month in ELECTRO ROCK?

and what about this. rob playford says it's "the best chill drum & bass album ever". wow!! better than "the killa hertz" for falling asleep to?? better than "big bad bass"???

a jazzy atmospheric d+b album that's got EBTG on it!!! AND it's got LIL LOUIS on it! AND PFM!! you know i like that!!

I just bought this but mainly just so i could get a CD copy of 'Darkage' instead of my cruddy vonyl-rip mp3 (tho that has a certain 'charm').

only just realised it also has "FUNKIN EM UP, FUNKIN EM UP GOTTA MAINTAIN" on it - be good to hear that again!

Any mid-nineties material by Dr. Walker & Jammin' Unit (aka Air Liquide), Kerosene, Khan, etc. is most likely the shit! They don't make stuff like that anymore.

dude those Acid Reistant comps are so FUCKING good. he also deserves sick, fucked up props for compiling all those great Profile/Sm:)e comps w/"Best of" in their titles (esp. Best of Techno Vol. 3, one of my favorite albumse ever ever ever). not to mention that History Part 2 and Shades of Technology are nearly as good as the first History.

dj db = good any time get into heaven for free pass

breakbeat science exercise 04 = okay! not mindblowing or anything and i wouldn't buy it new. (haha though its probably, only, what $7.99?)

(p.s. i shitcanned the column a few months ago. trying to keep up with vinyl-only subculture in dance-unfriendly city and with full-time/non-dj job was fools errand. if someone wants to pick it up, they should!)

DB and Dara at Jungle Nation in NYC were my first intro to jungle and i stayed til 3am every time, even though it happened on Thursdays :) ... anybody remember all the venues that shifted to? there was 2 Eyes, there was... anyway, it was all a bit darksteppy from what i remember at the time but the DJing was just incredible, i can't remember a single miss.

that was 1996-1997 days

Clever Knowledge cover-mount = GREAT!

Ahhh...96/97. Crap now though.

vahid do you like this> klute album?

worth the two bucks for "40 miles" by congress:

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/B000005VT1.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V1115831890_.jpg

and "the vamp" by outlander!!

I'm not Vahid, but that Klute album disappointed me a bit, especially after the excellent Silent Weapons CD and some of his amazing one-offs for Certificate 31 ("Leo 9"!!). I haven't heard the album prior or any since - any recommendations? Basically I'm looking for complicated beats. I'm not 100% anti 2-step pound but I found Fear of People kinda annoying for that reason, in a vaguely Wormhole-ish style.

klute always kinda disappoints me. for whatever reason he's got this quasi-leftfield rep but his beats always feel too streamlined and (ulp) boring. i think he's a bit more like modern metalheadz, where it's moved slightly left (of the clownstep norm?) simply by delivering 170 bpm rollers without the oompah-oompah riffs.

(and to be perfectly honestly i'd rather listen to clownstep for a happy hardcore/gabba-style fix of moron populism than yet another iteration of boom-bap-boom-bap with hidden agenda/optical textural stuff.)

Jess check out "Leo 9"!!! It's on the second Hidden Rooms comp that Certificate 31 put out in about 99/00. Also the Silent Weapons ep. definitely, the first track on that is about as good as techstep ever got (up there with "Elektra", "Dispatch #2" etc. for me)

the reason i asked about casual bodies is that it has "chicks" on it which is a db anthem if i've ever heard one (also "phone call" which isn't dnb, but is so nice). IIRC it is also the album before he pushed two-step to the forefront of his beats. i am thinking of "song seller" here (clownstep??), which was great, but i prefer the earlier stuff. and klute was always prettier than optical. i lost track of klute after lie, cheat, and steal which was has some great aggressive two-step moments ("song seller" and "ambient hell") and was notable for having a second disc of tech-house. no complicated classic-era techstep tricksiness though. certificate 18 was a great label. the first polar album is a hidden gem i think.

Hmm I've never really gone for the Polar tracks I've heard but I've never heard the albums. The stuff I have heard always struck me as a bit clinical, like a more melodic Jonny L circa Sawtooth.

The Lexis album is excellent though, basically presaging that whole Offshore/DJ Clever style (though not so much the Inperspective breakbeat overload stuff).

Speaking of which that new DJ Clever mix is great indeed.

"The stuff I have heard always struck me as a bit clinical, like a more melodic Jonny L circa Sawtooth."

that's exactly why i like it!

Casual Bodies is a decent record, tech-steppy yes, but very *klute* in that it's still melodic. That's the thing, I think, that gets Klute his quasi-leftfield cred (as Jess put it above): the musicality and melodicism. Unfortunately he never gives up the modern dnb signifiers in their entirety in the way that Macc, Polska, Martsman, dgoHn, and others have. Both in Klute's DJ sets and in the releases on his label, you see his aesthetic: it's almost emo in terms of harmonic emotionalism (a good thing), yet beatwise and production-wise it still very much has one foot in the modern dnb sonic aesthetic (not a good thing). I rarely buy Klute on vinyl, unless I'm trying to pad sets for a more mainstream audience -- in which case Klute and his label, Commercial Suicide, both come in handy ( = passable pop dnb that's relatively smart and cheese-free, yet not particularly confrontational, esp for a mainstream club crowd [e.g., not confrontational like the inperspective releases]).

I suppose Klute also gets respect for putting out Amit's stuff. Though I've never, ever liked Amit's style (Jess' long ago comment that amit 'amit only has one idea' still rings true to my ears). The guy gets a lot of love in dnb world though, whoa.

Klute's double album last year, No One's Listening Anymore, was half techno, half dnb. He can still nail a beautiful vocal tune in either genre (Torrential Pain in the former, Crosby, Acid Rain, Silently, Saviour et al in the latter, though the dnb tunes are all quite sedate beatwise). I know that Pieter K absolutely loved the record, was raving about both the techno and dnb sides, even said that it was the album that he himself had always dreamed of making (make of that what you will, b/c Pieter K is a prince of a fellow).

On another note, Clever's knowledge mix is definitely a beautiful thing in its own right, and will def stand up as solidly representative of some of the of best tracks/trends in 2006 underground dnb.

Clever's mix is also a treat not only for the excellent and memorable tracks, but because he truly loves the long blend. I could go on and on about this aspect of his mixes. The way he mixes the Graphic rmx of TDL over a drawn-out suspended synth pad in the ASC & Motion track forever changed the way that I hear Graphic's remix, and it furthermore showed me what Graphic missed by making the harmonic choices that he did in his rmx (Martsman's rmx is better; and the engineering on Graphic's TDL rmx is a bit weird in the bass frequencies). Thing is, it's hell setting the track markings for one of Clever's mixes -- a good friend of mine had the unenviable task of setting them for this particular mix of Brett's and said the same.

Shame about the column, Jess, Had been waiting to read what you'd say about the Clever mix and anything else that passed your way!

"Clever's mix is also a treat not only for the excellent and memorable tracks, but because he truly loves the long blend. I could go on and on about this aspect of his mixes."

yes, and it's a great aspect of it precisely b/c he mixes b/w quite different tracks.

db is great! i've seen him spin maybe four times and every time was magic.

"yes, and it's a great aspect of it precisely b/c he mixes b/w quite different tracks."

Exactly. And he establishes his ability, and willingness, to mix stylistically quite different tracks from the very first blend, going from Macc's "Way of Small Thought" into Sileni's "Another Track" -- two *very* different production styles from two of the best producers around . . . totally brilliant selection and mix there. The mix from Martyn's "Virgo" into Frac & Neptune's "Our Sound" is another one sure to raise eyebrows, though to be honest, the whole thing demonstrates skill, depth, and class at pretty much every turn.

It's a bit odd, though. to think of Clever releasing a dubstep mix and touring with Paul Rose/Scuba!

i never grabbed the solo albums from certificate 18. if i had one criticism w/ the comps it was a lack of variety, and so i didn't really think buying an artist album was going to work that out.

i think the one i picked up was a POLAR album, and i thought it was really wack. i'd like to hear the LEXIS album.

btw the best d+b dj i've ever seen was DJ TEEBEE in san francisco, circa 1997. his style was a sick mix of pitched-up public enemy / ice cube samples, fuzzy urban-takeover style bass farts, weird acidic synths that sounded like lazerbeams and stuttery splintered breaks. great shit.