The first signing of the label was the break beat hardcore outfit Bass Selective (Royal, Samuel, Hay, Clarke and Elizabeth Troy on vocal duties). Bass Selective went on to record four EPs; the highlight of their outputs being the piano-driven anthem Blow Out part 2.

Bass Selective disbanded in 1993 and one of the founding members, Marc Sebastian Royal emerged with the recording alias T.Power. He was readily signed as a solo artist by SOUR; a flying start for an illustrious and prolific recording career. It was only two years later however, that he would create serious waves in the drum and bass proceedings.

Fast forward to 1995, a year that proved pivotal for both T.Power and SOUR, Marc Royal started to experiment with new sounds, abolishing the stereotype that SOUR was a strictly “ragga jungle” label. The result has been the impeccable, genre-defining Mutant Jazz; co-written with Nigel Samuel (also a former member of Bass Selective, who had adopted the one-off moniker MK-Ultra), Mutant Jazz brought jungle closer to the abstract jazz territory of Ninja Tune and Mo’Wax and is still considered today as one of the genre’s absolute classics.

A few months later, T.Power’s first personal album, entitled The Self Evident Truth Of An Intuitive Mind, was released to critical acclaim; a pioneering, ground-breaking release that pushed the drum and bass boundaries even further. That same year T Power also launched his short-lived own imprint Deep Thought Records recording under the alias Atomic Dog.

In the aftermath of T.Power’s album success, came the Police State EP. The title of his album had provided a hint about T.Power’s views, who had always insisted that drum and bass is a form of intelligent music; however the Police State EP made the connection more apparent.

Thought-provoking, exhilarating and reminiscent of the “Intellect” part of his album, the EP is profoundly influenced by the works and lectures of Noam Chomsky, an American linguist, philosopher, political commentator, activist, cultural figure and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

Prospect For Democracy

The tune of the day is the dystopian Prospect For Democracy, taken from the the Police State EP (SOUR029/TPOW001, 1995). The title is inspired from the eponymous Noam Chomsky speech at the MIT, which was recorded live in November 1994.

Prospect For Democracy is a 13-and-a-half minutes composition, fusing ambient, techno and drum and bass flawlessly.

The track starts with two-step trademark T.Power drum beat, over warm synths and a desolated sax riff until the first breakdown, when vocal snippets** from Chomsky’s aforementioned lecture are introduced. In the second breakdown, the tempo changes for 3 minutes, with kick-in-the stomach gong percussions and additional chords, until the track resumes to a glorious climax.

A shorter version of the track is available on YouTube:

The next year T.Power released his second album entitled Waveform and decided to take a sabbatical from drum and bass. The album was engineered by Chris Stevens, with whom he formed the group Chocolate Weasel, recording for Ninja Tune. In 1999, Royal re-surfaced as T.Power, experimenting with nu-breaks for Botchit & Scarper, a breakbeat-oriented label established by members of the SOUR managing crew ca. 1995.

Return To Drum & Bass

In 2001, T.Power returned to drum and bass teaming-up with Andre Williams (widely known as Shy FX) recording a string of releases, under a variety of guises (Agent BLK, Automaton, Ebony Dubsters, Shy FX & T Power), on Shy FX’s labels.

Their collaborative work made an immediate impact; blending their highly credible drum and bass with pop sensibility, Shake Ur Body (featuring the vocalist Di), released on EMI’s subsidiary Positiva, climbed to #7 of the UK singles chart and received widespread support from both club and commercial radio djs, contributing to the introduction of drum and bass to wider audiences.

As a follow up, Shy FX & T.Power released the album Set It Off on Pete Tong’s F.F.R.R. in 2002. In 2005, Shy FX decided to consolidate his releases onto a new label and launched Digital Soundboy Recordings. In collaboration with T.Power, they subsequently released the album Diary Of A Digital Sound Boy the same year.

In 2009, Royal reincarnated into Mr. Sofalumpkins; an alter-ego (described as a trans-dimensional gestalt entity, embedded through divergence of time and space in our reality, as several inanimate objects) for his live Ableton performances and improvisations.

A short re-appearance in drum and bass took place in 2013 for a single co-produced with John Rolodex on V Records. As of 2014, Marc Royal announced that The Lazy Nine, the first album under his real name, is scheduled for release on his new imprint Adastra Recordings later this year.

In his own words:

“If you want to know all about Adastra Recordings, you might want to brush up on your Latin. “Ad astra” is a Latin phrase meaning “to the stars”, but unless you’re a songwriter for Broadway musicals, “to the stars” just doesn’t cut it if you’re known for abstract basslines and unfathomable melodies.

Adastra Recordings is the most obvious step forward for a music producer like TPower who, after more… than twenty years of defining and redefining his craft, continues to indulge in the relentless pursuit of the purity of tone and the injection of science into sound that’s external to the creative process itself.

In essence, there is a much deeper understanding of music going on here and an immense feeling of reverence for the artistic methodologies from which music is born. It is TPower’s continuous exploration of the humanization of the electronic process and the seemingly effortless translation of waveforms into an orchestration of sounds that are relatable and communicable that characterizes the bulk of his extensive collection of work”.

*”Whatever happened to … Sound Of the Underground Records?” coming soon

***excerpts from Chomsky’s lecture about democracy, education, financial institutions and the new world order, as viewed 20 years ago. The live recording is available for online streaming and on audio cd. Parts of the transcript appear in a wide array of Chomsky’s bibliography.

About Spyros

A music enthusiast hailing from Greece and blogger at "God Is No Longer A DJ" about all things jungle / drum & bass having a profound impact on his music taste.

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The post T.Power – Prospect For Democracy appeared first on Drumtrip - Hardcore / Oldskool Jungle Blog.

By the first half of the 90s, UB40’s constant touring had taken its toll and the band was ready for a well-earned rest. During their sabbatical, several of the band’s members worked on their own musical projects. Earl Falconer, the group’s bassist, would follow his passion outside UB40, engaging in jungle/drum and bass production and promotion activities with remarkable success.

In 1992, alongside sound engineer Gerry Parchment and reggae trumpet player Patrick Tenyue, Falconer formed the music act E.Q.P., launching Rough Tone Recordings as a platform to release their own outputs and develop young local artists. The label’s operations were suspended after three years, coinciding with the time UB40 reconvened to record new material. Furthermore, in 2000, Falconer and long-time friend DJ Swan-E, set up Maximum Boost Recordings, a Dope Ammo Records offshoot, in an effort to introduce professional artists, across a wide array of other music genres, in the drum and bass scene.

Back in 1996, in an era when drum and bass was already attracting media attention and many artists were signing to major record labels, Falconer commissioned a limited edition series with drum and bass mixes of UB40’s tracks. Acclaimed artists, including the likes of Grooverider, Deep Blue, Dj Ron, Blame & Justice, Swan-E and Ellis Dee, have been involved into remixing duties for some of UB40’s early classics (One In Ten, an explicit reference to UK’s record number of unemployed in the early 80s, King and Burden Of Shame) as well as later singles (Where Did I Go Wrong and Until My Dying Day).

All remixes were released on UB40’s own imprint Dep International. Dep International was set up after UB40’s contract with Graduate Records expired, with all eight members owning an equal share, effectively enabling the band to exercise total control of their production outputs. Soon, the label signed a word-wide distribution deal with Virgin Records, operating since under Virgin Records’ wing.

Today’s Tune Of The Day is the Icons remix of Until My Dying Day…

Icons

One of the recording aliases of Tony Bowes (aka Justice) and Conrad Shafie (aka Blame). The two met while studying media at college in Dunstable, and went into the studio in 1991 to try their hand at producing hip-hop tracks. Instead, they emerged with Death Row – one of the earliest examples of hardcore breakbeat – on Chill Records, a UK bass, bleeps and breakbeat label which was based in Tony’s home town of Luton.

While the rave scene progressed into a self-parodic fluff, Blame and Justice continued producing, both together and on their own. Pushed into new directions by the emergence of a mellower, atmospheric sound in the drum and bass spectrum, the duo released a string of seminal singles on the legendary Moving Shadow and on Basement Records’ sub-label Precious Materials. In late ‘95 the duo formed Modern Urban Jazz Records (rebranded and re-launched as MJAZZ by Justice 12 years later). On Modern Urban Jazz, Blame and Justice released the label’s first two singles, under the Glider-State sobriquet, as well as the critically acclaimed Icons LP Emotions With Intellect, that is still highly praised to this day.

Tony Bowes’ recollection of events

“We met Earl from the group through our friend Terry Wilson, who ran the Funk 21 label and there was talk of some remixes that they wanted to do. So between Earl and Terry the re-mixers were gathered. Our Icons project was blowing up at the same time, so they asked us to do one. Until My Dying Day was a tune they had done, which was touted to be the theme for the latest Bond film at the time*. Anyway this was the track we were given, which was great because it had the great sax bit and nice bits of vocal work, that we used with a nice reversed reverb effect on them. We added a nice break, some guitar licks and stabs along with an 808 bass. We gave the track to Danny Bukem and he used to hammer it at Speed nights. I think Fabio had it as well, which propelled it into being a bit of a Speed anthem, which still gets interest to this day.”

*that would be GoldenEye, 1995 – Tina Turner’s eponymous song was used as the main theme eventually.

Stripped from Ali Campbell’s unique vocals, apart from the snippets “If you’re looking for a war” and “I’ll be leaving”, which are present throughout the track, the remix is dominated by Brian Travers’ original captivating sax riff, gorgeous synth stabs, chopped beats and a sweeping 808 bass, in full accordance with the sound Icons were representing; keeping the basic components intact, giving a modern urban jazz feel to the mix.

The interest in the particular track has revived the last few years, due to an obscure cassette tape rip of a Speed session with Bukem & Fabio (which took place ca 1995 at the Crime Club, in the town of Lampertheim, Germany), that has surfaced on the internet. The Icons remix features in Bukem’s playlist of that night.

About Spyros

A music enthusiast hailing from Greece and blogger at "God Is No Longer A DJ" about all things jungle / drum & bass having a profound impact on his music taste.

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The post UB40 – Until My Dying Day (Icons remix) appeared first on Drumtrip - Hardcore / Oldskool Jungle Blog.

Ashley Brown (aka DJ Pulse, owner of Creative Wax and 1/3 of the hardcore act Dance Conspiracy alongside Adrian Shortman and James Hoyte) and Jamie Giltrap (aka Tango), both regular artists of the Creative Wax collective, joined forces in 1995 for the one-off project The Committee.

The duo reunited after the label’s hibernation, forming the second incarnation of Initial Research focusing on breakbeat projects (the members of the first incarnation have been DJ Pulse and Justice).

Tango’s remix of Final Conflict is also referred to as We Are At War ’95, a direct reference to Sister Souljah’s proclamation (the vocal sample appears in her second personal single entitled The Final Solution: Slavery’s Back In Effect released in 1991 and was the tagline of her famous speech at Cheyney State University in Pennsylvania in 1994).

The track is dominated by the desolate saxophone riff sampled from the song Darkest Light by the funk/soul group Lafayette Afro Rock Band. This particular sample had been heavily used before by several artists, including the likes of Public Enemy (for the track Show ‘Em Whatcha Got featuring in their album It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, 1988), Dance Conspiracy (for the seminal hardcore anthem Dub War, XL Recordings/Metamorphosis, 1992), Badman (aka Marvellous Cain), James Hoyte (aka Sponge and founder of IQ Records) and Tango himself for various versions of the track War for ’94 released on IQ Records.

Adrian Shortman (aka Professor Stretch) has been credited on the info side of the record for his contribution to Dub War; however both Final Conflict and Profound Love (on the flipside) have been written and produced by Pulse & Tango.

The additional eerie, female vocal snippets are sampled from the techno track (Yeah You!, Occasions mix, WARP Records, 1991) by The Step with Sarah Jay on vocal duties. Haunting strings accompany the sax riff until the introduction of the “We are at war!” vocal hook, followed by a cascade of trademark Tango amen edits and a deep sub-bass underpinning the bass line.

Frequently overlooked, due to the plethora of classics in Creative Wax’s back catalogue, the particular release is a fine bridge between the label’s earlier outputs and the ones that followed, until the suspension of the label’s activities in 1998.

About Spyros

A music enthusiast hailing from Greece and blogger at "God Is No Longer A DJ" about all things jungle / drum & bass having a profound impact on his music taste.

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The post The Committee – Final Conflict (Tango remix) appeared first on Drumtrip - Hardcore / Oldskool Jungle Blog.