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1/25/03:

A dig back in the Beta sack

My current record embargo (music and shows are one of the extras I have to completely cut in order to afford to move to Brazil) has me digging way back in my personal vaults for stuff I haven't managed to way overplay in the last year. It's not easy. I tend to keep my collection down to a hundred or so by reselling often, but the following two mixes have somehow managed to survive countless spare-cash raids, not to mention broad drifts in tastes over the years. These two nuggets, both dating from 1996 (which is dusty as far my electronic tastes go) are not only back in heavy rotation, but I'm really quite surprised at how well they inform the edgier jazz grooves that I'd currently favour.

The first is TEXtures, a two-disc mix of early-90s UK and European trance and ambient tracks from the seminal Trance Europe Express series. From this post-millenial vantage, the tracks encapsulate the giddy PLUR optimism of the early rave and Love Parade days in a rather appealing way, despite the whole scene's extinction a long time ago (or youcan prove me wrong). The second side, of hazy swirl tracks and overly cheeky dialogue samples by LX Patterson, is pretty unlistenable altogether (not unlike any Orb album, which I've long since sold), but the first disc, by Underworld's Darren Emerson holds up surprisingly well. The funky throb of the Detroit beat is given a thoroughly warm touch of early digital synthwork and even old tracks by Moby and Joey Beltram still find a comfy place despite the silly excesses both would evenutally realise. I can still get lost in the atonal layers of abstract rhythm in the track "Carino (Silencio)" by Pulse, still a favourite after seven years and billions of listens.

Another that I loved then hated and now hesitantly love again is a comp from Selector called Junglized:JazzyFunkyDrum'n'Bass. This is the first exposure to the dub and drumn'bass sounds that I've long since purged and this disc's seminal experience is quite probably the only reason why I've managed to hold onto it. The tracks that open it up, by still viable producers like Adam F and Subject 13, still sound fresh, and the beats stay quite light and funky throughout, all made early enough to avoid that annoying two-step throb that the entire drumn'bass genre would eventually epitomise. The disc also preserves the sound of the premier jungle nights in Paris, but even as an artefact most of the tracks song great alongside some current uses of the jungle beat -
"Earth" by Brazilian chanteuse Patricia Marx and MC Kontrol, Patife's remix of Fernanda Porto's "Sambassim", or Clan Greco's "My favorite step" are really fresh examples I've heard in the past year.

posted by jeremy @ 8:13 PM