A Number of Names, A Trove of Titles

Talking about futuromania, about phases when the chase to get to tomorrow ahead of the pack is the fiercest... oooh that first half of the '90s. 

Looking back, it feels like not just the music and the  beats but everything that surrounded them and was attached to them - the names and the titles, the record artwork and typography, the flyers, promo videos - all of it, the sonics and the para-sonix constituted a massive surge of urge-to-newness

A kind of concerted front of cultural patricide - an across-the-board push by the young to make an adventure out of their own time.  

A will to junk as much of the old still-lingering pop culture and to innovate, often gauchely, on all fronts simultaneously: sound, dance moves, fashion, graphics, slang...

Here are some of my favorite titles trawled from that fast-forward era: 

"Noise Bleed"

100HZ - LOW FEQUENCY OVERLOAD (HEBREPHENIC MIX)

"Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit (Hysteric Ego Dub)"

Lory D – "Allucinazioneacustica"

"Techno Cat (Dance Like Your Dad)"

"God Shave the Queen"

Generator - Belgium Calling (Clash Mix)

C-Tank "House Hallucination"

Brain Cycl - Mind Darts (1994)

Spira - Disturbulance (1994)

Babies from Gong

(Oink Oink Version)

Hardware - Heavy Metal (Doing! Doing! Doing!) (1994)

Zoomroom - "Black Fumes"

"Straight Up (Wris Spec)"

"The Mad One"

"Brutal Deluxe"

Two Terrorists - "Welcome to Jurassick Park"

Amethyst - Krakatoa

(Dharma Bums Mix)

The Bionaut - Octopus

Dee Rex - Gaia's Revenge

"Drum Fire"

Skinnybumblebee (Stingin Dub)

Flying Forest - Cyberlove

Amorph - Sunflow

The Paingang

Flange Squad - "Justice Juice (The Justice Jam)"

"Warriors of Mind"

Dos Deviants - "Sharkbyte"

London Tranceport - "Argon"

Genetic Waste - "Palace of Wisdom"

"Throw the Madness" 

Members of Mayday - "Endspurt"

Braincell - "Time Is Suspended"

"Sunburst" 

"Innerstream of Consciousness"

Public Art 

"Transpulsation"

The Dentist - "Arena of the Gods"

"Burning Trash Floor"

"Starkissed"

"Possessed By Fire"

"Stealth Sonic Soul"

Disgraced Rolemodel

Z-Plane - "Hopium"

"Under City Rave"

"The Devil's Dandruff"

Holocube - "Noizology"

"Uncle Bob's Burly House"

"Angel-Headed Hipster"

"Nude Restaurant"

Energyflow - "Thunderstorm"

"I Could Be Him, I Could Be Her"

Annexia  - "Escalation Fantasy"

"King of Death Posture (Attack Version)"

"Plasma Flights, Pt 1"

"The Trancequilizer" 

"Mantra of X-Tremism"

Force Mass Motion - "The Pressor"

Phrenetic System - "Concrete Box"

"Nut Haus"

"Drying the Tears of the Forest"

"A Sonic Fairy Tale"

(Puddle Mix)

The Desintegrators - "Perfumes of the Deep"

Dancing Dolphins

"Bad Moog Rising"

Syncrotron II

"Tekno Bangelang"

"Sunhump"

Encephaloid Disturbance - Magnetic Neurosis

Encephaloid Disturbance  - Renegade Ectoplasm

Encephaloid Disturbance - Spasmodic Fusion 

"Moments of Inertia"

(Exterminated in 3D Mix)

"Infinite Climax"

Stardate 1973 - Planetfall (1992)

Ramirez - El Ritmo Barbaro (El Flagelo Mix) (1992)

Tracid Posse - Vivarium (1992)

The Saucer Crew - "Ghost Star (Long Drum Mix)"

Edge of Motion - "Overvolt"

Jambo - "Drumattack"

Spirit of Adventure - "L'Hysterie"

"Monotone Sickness"

"Waiting 4 My Shell 2 Crack"

"Xabrax (Drill Mix)"

"Outermind (Glide Mix)"

"Percussion Overdose"

Dry Throats - "Acid Speed"

Cyberpsychose – You Will Die 

Generator - Narcomaniac (Adrenochrome Mix)

D.B. Hazard - Detro Mental

Mental & Dangerous - Xtrosy (Mary Poppins Hardcore Mix)

The Dead Kirks - "Mr. Kirk (Death Mix)"

Dry Throats - Acid Speed (1992)

DJ Dick - The Iron Raver (Part I) (1993)

Vauvenage - Flange Stereo (1993)

Nasty Django - Ey Loco! (Kinky Muthaship) (1992)

Phenomania - Phenothememia (1992)

i - Percussion Overdose (1992)

"Acid Eiffel"

Bi-Face - "Flota (Two)"

"Cyclotron"

"Lost and Intellect"

"The Realm of Spoo"

Aquastep - "Oempa Loempa"

Pot Cycl

"Franthic Thigh"

Sulfurex

"I Still Want Ya (the Nooshty Mix)"

Severe Damage - "Red Alert (Tremble Mix)"

"Afro Compressor"

 "Sugar Robots" 

"Megadrôme D'Yore"

"Jungle (Flappy Ears Version)"

Techno Trash Volume II - "Noise!"

"Mastercore (Brain Mix)"

Phase Phorce

"Industrial Metal"

"Face the Mastermind"

"Turntable Tribal"

4-Nu-Tek

"Locked in Madness"

Exoterrorist

"Microillusions (Day-Mix)"

"Illegal Consume"

"Hatt Flash"

"Victim of Hardware"

"Bash Your Brains In"

"Night of the Neon Maniacs"

Pultec

"Drugtrash"

"Psycho Drums"

Dutch Department of Techno

"Original Mix with Bats"

Force Mass Motion

"Feef Logic"

The Brotherhood of Structure EP

"First Fright (Video Mix)"

"Space Paranoia"

"Psycho Fly"

"Cosmonoise"

E-Rection - Colonisation Of Space (1995)

Gigi Galaxy - Interview with An Alien

Gigi Galaxy - Spores from Outer Space

Gigi Galaxy - Cosmic Forces As They Were Taught In Mu

Ilsa Gold

Emmanuel Top

"Moby Tits" 

Koenig Cylinders

Spastic Egg

"Entropy Step"

Public Energy

"Chronoclasm"

"Nightmares Are Reality"

Labworks

"Reptilian Tank"

Egma

"Stomach Basher"

"Korrekte Atmosphere"

"Trip to E-Land"

 Hypp & Krimson,

"Tibetan Jazz"

"Are Am Eye"

 Aldrin Buzz

Edge of Motion

 "The Glitch Relapse"

"Zombies in the Mist"

 "Sick (Dominator Is Dead)"

"Space Luxury"

 "Faces of the Moon"

Meng Syndicate

"(Heinous Scream Version)"

"Ravedrug"

"Rush Bubble Mix"

Pneumatic Distress

"Fulminic"

Tones Energy

"Tone Exploitation"

"(Fratty Energy Version)"

Master Techno

"Time Problem"

Problem House

 "Rhyde the Rithum"

"Twin Freaks"

80 AUM

E-Dancer

"My First Fantastic F.F."

"Tunnel Inspection

"Mindcontroller (The Obscure Mix)"

"The Kraken"

"Fairy Dust"

"Chiswick Days"

"Air Bounce"

"Cybernatic Noisefly"

"God's Percussion Dream"

"The Dove (Coloured Dream)"

"Planet Jupiter (Raggae Dream)"

"Acid Heartcore"

"Mutation Step"

"Technoblast"

"Biolunch"

"Single Minded People"

"Acid Creak"

"Trac-X"

Numbers & Feelings

"(Sexx Ambient Mix)"

Charlie Lownoise

Syncope

"Explosion of a Dancemode"

"X-Plosion of a Dancemode"

"Stronger Than Steel"

"Trance? Never Heard Before"

Xylem Tube

"Space Metal (Pt 1 and Pt 2)"

"Sulphur Stories"

"The Ravesignal"

"Demonomania"

"Walk on Base"

Spiritual Combat

"Lake of Dreams (Bay of Rainbow Mix)"

"Lake of Dreams (Dream of Drums)"

DJ Edge, "Bass Trnce"

Boscanese Hedgehogs Fall To Earth

Madame Xerox, "Fluxpod"

Cyberchrist

Sons of Aliens

(Sadcore Mix)

"Ooh Aah…Just A Little Bit (Hysteric Ego Dub)"

"Techno Cat (Dance Like Your Dad)"

"God Shave the Queen"

Generator - Belgium Calling (Clash Mix)

C-Tank "House Hallucination"

Spira - Disturbulance

Brain Cycl - Mind Darts (1994)

Babies from Gong

(Oink Oink Version)

Hardware - Heavy Metal (Doing! Doing! Doing!) (1994)

Zoomroom - "Black Fumes"

"Straight Up (Wris Spec)"

"The Mad One"

"Brutal Deluxe"

Two Terrorists - "Welcome to Jurassick Park"

Generator - Narcomaniac (Adrenochrome Mix)

D.B. Hazard - Detro Mental

Mental & Dangerous - Xtrosy (Mary Poppins Hardcore Mix)

The Dead Kirks - "Mr. Kirk (Death Mix)"

Dry Throats - Acid Speed (1992)

DJ Dick - The Iron Raver (Part I) (1993)

Vauvenage - Flange Stereo (1993)

Nasty Django - Ey Loco! (Kinky Muthaship) (1992)

Phenomania - Phenothememia (1992)

i - Percussion Overdose (1992)

"Acid Eiffel"

Bi-Face - "Flota (Two)"

"Cyclotron"

"Lost and Intellect"

"The Realm of Spoo"

Aquastep - "Oempa Loempa"

Pot Cycl

"Franthic Thigh"

Sulfurex

"I Still Want Ya (the Nooshty Mix)"

Severe Damage - "Red Alert (Tremble Mix)"

"Afro Compressor"

 "Sugar Robots" 

"Megadrôme D'Yore"

"Jungle (Flappy Ears Version)"

Techno Trash Volume II - "Noise!"

"Mastercore (Brain Mix)"

Phase Phorce

"Industrial Metal"

"Face the Mastermind"

"Turntable Tribal"

4-Nu-Tek

"Locked in Madness"

Exoterrorist

"Microillusions (Day-Mix)"

"Illegal Consume"

"Hatt Flash"

"Victim of Hardware"

"Bash Your Brains In"

"Night of the Neon Maniacs"

Pultec

"Drugtrash"

"Psycho Drums"

Dutch Department of Techno

"Original Mix with Bats"

Force Mass Motion

"Feef Logic"

The Brotherhood of Structure EP

"First Fright (Video Mix)"

"Space Paranoia"

"Psycho Fly"

"Cosmonoise"

Ilsa Gold

Emmanuel Top

"Moby Tits" 

Koenig Cylinders

Spastic Egg

"Entropy Step"

Public Energy

"Chronoclasm"

"Nightmares Are Reality"

Labworks

"Reptilian Tank"

Egma

"Stomach Basher"

"Korrekte Atmosphere"

"Trip to E-Land"

 Hypp & Krimson,

"Tibetan Jazz"

"Are Am Eye"

 Aldrin Buzz

Edge of Motion

 "The Glitch Relapse"

"Zombies in the Mist"

 "Sick (Dominator Is Dead)"

"Space Luxury"

 "Faces of the Moon"

Meng Syndicate

"(Heinous Scream Version)"

"Ravedrug"

"Rush Bubble Mix"

Pneumatic Distress

"Fulminic"

Tones Energy

"Tone Exploitation"

"(Fratty Energy Version)"

Master Techno

"Time Problem"

Problem House

 "Rhyde the Rithum"

"Twin Freaks"

80 AUM

E-Dancer

"My First Fantastic F.F."

"Tunnel Inspection

"Mindcontroller (The Obscure Mix)"

"The Kraken"

"Fairy Dust"

"Chiswick Days"

"Air Bounce"

"Cybernatic Noisefly"

"God's Percussion Dream"

"The Dove (Coloured Dream)"

"Planet Jupiter (Raggae Dream)"

"Acid Heartcore"

"Mutation Step"

"Technoblast"

"Biolunch"

"Single Minded People"

"Acid Creak"

"Trac-X"

Numbers & Feelings

"(Sexx Ambient Mix)"

Charlie Lownoise

Syncope

"Explosion of a Dancemode"

"X-Plosion of a Dancemode"

"Stronger Than Steel"

"Trance? Never Heard Before"

Xylem Tube

"Space Metal (Pt 1 and Pt 2)"

"Sulphur Stories"

"The Ravesignal"

"Demonomania"

"Walk on Base"

Spiritual Combat

"Lake of Dreams (Bay of Rainbow Mix)"

"Lake of Dreams (Dream of Drums)"

DJ Edge, "Bass Trnce"

Boscanese Hedgehogs Fall To Earth

Madame Xerox, "Fluxpod"

Cyberchrist

Sons of Aliens

(Sadcore Mix)

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Other neophiliac fever phases

The original "neophiliac" era, the 1960s - that would be the real rival. But it had older sonic forms embedded within it - blues, soul, folk, country....  Although FX, electrification, amplification, and studio tricknology increasingly come into play, the instrumental line-up is largely shared with earlier forms of popular music like jazz: drums, guitars, horns, bass.  So not quite as a big a break as the digital 90s.

New Wave is another rival (especially with all the  inorganic fabrics and hair-dyes... the angular graphic language and dance-moves... the quirky vocal styles and herky-jerky rhythms and melodies). But New Wave was largely based in rock's well-established instrumental template (gtr-bs-drms)  and it had echoes and deliberate reach-backs to the Sixties in much of it. Rather than synths, New Wavers tended to use keyboards - 60s-style organs, Farfisa etc. So overall it doesn't match the tekno-rave era for full-bore futurism . The first half of the '90s had all these newness-enabling tools to work with (samplers, digital audio workstations). 

Eighties synthpop, yes - but it is still tied to the Song, and to the impassioned human voice - to the idea of  "soul"  and to actual influences from soul music (think of all those fire-and-ice singer + synthesist duos). 

Electro... yes, especially with the clothes and the dancing. But it was over a bit too quick. Perhaps it is like a preliminary stage, a dry run, for the '90s eruption (so many ravers had electro childhoods). Mantronix and Nitro Deluxe in particular seem like bridges between electro and the house-techno-rave moment. 

Theory of Names, aka Nameology. 

I've mooted this before, based on ample empirical evidence that the shitness /  non-shitness of a genre is in direct relation to the shitness / non-shitness of its artist names and track titles. (Same applies to the decline of a once-great genre - the canary in the coalmine is the enshittification of names, titles, graphics).  

To me it makes sense - the names and titles would be a textual efflorescence of the music, reflecting and revealing its inner essence. 

The milquetoast mildness of most postdubstep is given away at the pre-auditory stage from the aroma wafting off  the artist aliases and the opaque titles they come up for their tunes.... Ditto broken beat, ditto downtempo, ditto all the other tasteful, "good music society", cosmopolitan / cosmigroovy sounds.  

The you-won't-like-this-steer-clear of most contemporary music (not just dance, across the genrescape) alerts my antennae through the advance warning system of  names (the album artwork is also a fairly reliable giveaway - has it ever been shitter than the present era?).  

But that corny-yet-awesome spirit of the '90s survived in pockets into the 21st Century...  flickering in bassline, in donk, in brostep, a little bit in deeptech....   UK drill too...  and I daresay it is out there to be found even now. 

nuumiest of the nuum nuum

 

Well I did not know this existed until recently  (via Pearsall at Dissensus )

An almost remake of this just-pre-nuum classic 

the funk frontline: tribal vibes and family fervour

Fascinating 1980 program presented by Danny Baker, who fiercely argued in the pages of the NME at that time for jazz-funk as the real-deal music c.f. the constipated faux-funk of  A Certain Ratio and Gang of Four, and here takes the battle to the television screen. 

In the program, he just uses the word "funk", though. 

Bunch of things that jumped out at me

1/ The self-conscious organization of the scene around tribes - a local squad or crew like Frontline from Brixton - who then at the dances amalgamate into a mega-tribe, which deejay Chris Hill here describes as the Family. The tribes have their own regalia - sometimes T-shirts with the tribe name, sometimes some other goofy identifying element - and they also often bring banners that they drape over the balcony at the venue. 

2/ You would tend to think of  U.K. working class scenes oriented around black-music to be very much about style and elegance. What surprised me about the Funk All-Dayers captured here is how amiably uncool the dancing and the general larking about is....  It's very much not in the tradition of Mod, it's not about a Face dancing alone in this moat of personal space....  the deejays exhort and entrain the crowd to all kinds of daft behaviour that is collective and synchronised.... they seem to be consciously trying to create the crowd-body consciousness, like in spectator sports with the Mexican wave...  Then there's individual kids who take off all their clothes.... a wonderfully silly mass sing-along 'n' dance to the Ovalteenies theme (you'll recognise that from Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore - "we're happy girls and boys").  And perhaps most bizarre of all - a fad for building human pyramids on the dancefloor (something I've only ever seen at Enter Shikari shows).

As Hill explains - again it's interesting just how self-conscious he is about how it all works as a subcultural machinery - the get-away Weekends at Caister and other seaside resorts are about escalating this sense of the scene as a world unto itself. A world where normal rules of behaviour get suspended and overturned in a carnivalesque fashion (not to put too Bakhtinian a spin on it though -it is also rather  Club 18-30). "Pride and dignity", the soul-boy ethos, doesn't come into it. But it's also very different from how people danced and behaved on the Northern Soul scene.

3/ The other thing that came across was that the fervour seems to be somewhat out of proportion to the music...  Now I love funk, indeed particularly at this time (early 80s) I loved it with a convert's fetishistic passion - but while I wouldn't describe myself as a connoisseur, I always felt that the jazz-funk, especially the UK offerings but most of the US imports then too, tended to be a bit bantamweight.  There are some great tunes but there's a lot of slick 'n'  tepid.  I put that down to the same dynamic on the Northern scene where there's a fetish for obscurity. Instead of rare soul singles that were barely released in 1965 or whenever, in the jazz funk scene it seems to be about a deep cut on an import album, something tucked away on side 2 of a Tom Browne or Grover Washington Jr LP.  

But perhaps the music is simply a pretext for identity, a trigger for fervour, an excuse to mobilize. Still, it's a little weird when Hill says that after going to a weekend away in Great Yarmouth, the kids become fully committed, like "they've been on a campaign. And the music is a crusade". 

Once interviewed Randy Crawford, wouldyabelieve?

jump to 4.10 of Fiorucci for the Ovalteenies scene

and 19.18 mins for the Ovalteenies dancealong - singalong in Funk

Danny Baker crusading for the funk cause in the pages of NME - with "intro" from Chris Hill

Hi-Tension bringing the funk to the punks on Revolver

Punk discofunkafied by the Black Arabs, a scene  from Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle 

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Edmund in Comments directs to another film, from slightly earlier, about the scene - British Hustle -  tons of footage of fervid dancers and Chris Hill emceeing through echo FX

And isn't Isaac Julien's Young Soul Rebels a recreation of these times - what the Black British kids were into, as opposed to punk... 

"A mind with no ceiling" (RIP Roy Ayers) (It's "Daylight" Raving Time!)

I love Roy Ayers...

But when I say that I mainly mean I love RAMP, a Roy Ayers Music Project composed of other musicians and singers, with Roy producing and co-writing the songs, mostly with Edwin Birdsong.

And when I say I love RAMP, I mainly mean "Everybody Loves the Sunshine" and the title track of their single solitary album Come Into Knowledge. 

And mainly, even more so, I love "Daylight". Love it to the bone, to the marrow.

In the main body of his work I've not found anything I like as much as this tune - which I must have played hundreds of times at this point. 

Nate White's bass alone is miraculous... those keyb chords.... the whole track glows, it's like glistening honeyed strands of sound cross-hatching and wrapping round your head.  

My gateway drug for "this kind of thing" - the less-Milesy, smoother end of fusion, where it turns into  jazz-funk - was of course jungle.  

Jungle paradoxically enabled me to build up a tolerance for this kind of mellow mystical-tinged sort of warm-glowing softness 'n' slickness - rather than the other way around.

And with "Daylight", it was this specific track that was the gateway. 

Roni Size and DJ Die and the Bristol lot did this rather often - take a slice out of a rare groove / jazz-funk tune and build up a whole track around it. 

Here's a non-Roy example: 

Which became

It's like a combination of zoom lens and time dilation - the Good Bit is so good, but also so almost thrown away in the original track, or at least rapidly left behind - the track just goes off somewhere completely different, never to return to the Good Bit... instead it develops and builds and is, you know, good-bitty all through in its own right (stellar cast of players, arranged and conducted by Bob James, in this case)  BUT, if you've heard "Music Box" first, then you can't help wondering why does it never go back to the Good Bit? You can't help pining for its return.  Sampling and looping the Good Bit speaks to our desire to arrest time, to make a golden moment last longer.

This mode of sampling and the listening mode that developed out of it - it's a sort of anti-jazz appreciation of jazz. It subverts all the propositions and principles of the original music, the very process that generates the Good Bits in the first place. The sampler chucks away the improvisation and variations around the theme: all the lyrical unfolding and "going somewhere" that happens with the melody and the chords. Instead, the sampler fixates on a isolated section that's cut out of developmental sequence: a cutting (stem is the word, they use, right, remixers -  appropriately horticultural perhaps but is that even the right term, given that there's something axiomatically inorganic about digital logic?). The isolated bit is fetishized for its textures and warm tone, a chord shift maybe, and just the exquisite lightness of touch - but it's removed from where those original human hands took it next. It becomes mechanistic - a loop. Uncanny as a GIF.  It works through flow / anti-flow.

The souljazz sample is like a plush bit of a carpet fabric, a little patch of luxury, that is excised from a larger patterned rug.  

I wonder if Roni + crew heard "Daylight" first as an element in "Bonita Applebum" by A Tribe Called Quest? (A group I've never really got into). 

Here's something I don't recall hearing before - A Guy Called Gerald versus A Guy Called Roy. 

It appears to be  the title track of The Sunshine EP from 1991 - was this ever properly released? 

3/12 update - answer provided by Ciaran in comments: 

Here's a track sampling Roy's own version of "Everybody Loves the Sunshine"  with that thin reedy ecstatic synth-line that 4 Hero and their aliases spent a lifetime chasing... 

Another external project that Roy had a hand-in as co-producer and co-writer is Sylvia Striplin, whose "You Can't Turn Me Away" is another "Daylight"-level favorite of mine. 

This has also been sampled - I think by 4 Hero (a tiny snippet of the blippety groove) and more famously by Junior M.A.F.F.I.A.

Great name, Striplin

She was once a member of the group Aquarian Dream....  which is very Roy Ayers-ish.

Did not know about Roy's team-up with Fela Kuti

Ah, well that's where 4 Hero got the name for their broken beat label 2000 Black, then...

Oh and then there was this team-up with the Man himself

This is where it breaks down for me, as something that holds the ear...  the sampling procedure produces the new.... but just trying to do fusion, to play like the 70s bods they revere, or play with them.... it's redundant.  It (re)covers historical ground already covered. And after peak junglizm, it can only sound like a depletion in intensity. 

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It's funny that the transmitter of such positive vibes played as his principal instrument the vibraphone.