The Cosmic Jungle

undo wrote:90% of any music takes I attempt are just endless variations on "why did this music I like have to change?"

chrondog wrote:94-96 has some really interesting DnB fusion. "Sweet Sunshine" combines the breakbeat rinsing and jungle-y drums of earlier "jungle" while incorporating a sick jazz melody and rolling bassline throughout. A lot of the later "jazzy DnB" discards the heavy breakbeats altogether. I love both styles, so I have a sweet spot for tracks like this that do both very well.

undo wrote:On a brighter note, this is one of my favorite albums of all time

undo wrote:

This was in my recommendations this morning and it's all really good

chrondog wrote:

undo wrote:But in general, it just seems like everyone who was "good" in the 90s very quickly tried to change that as soon as the new decade came around. Compare the beautiful and haunting atmosphere of classic Photek, the complex but unpredictably swinging rhythms of that drum programming, to what he would make a decade later:



I checked this out in the car the other day and I was shocked at how basic and awful it is. It has nothing to do with the vocals (he can make really good tracks in this vein, or at least he could at one point), but just listen to the beat coming in at 1:30. What is this shit? Just throws everything about his music that made it unique into the garbage. Maybe it's unreasonable to expect people to keep making the same style of music over and over again? But it's so disappointing how the answer to that always seems to be regressing into a really boring, commercialized sound. Roni Size also ran in this direction as fast as he could once he got a small taste of stardom. New Forms was probably overrated when it came out but one could still get a really good single-length CD out of all its tracks if they wanted to today.

In a lot of ways, I think it's the fact that the great "rave music" and jungle simply isn't that commercial. I don't think the people who tried selling this stuff to a mainstream audience in the late 90s were very successful. Goldie's Timeless is one of the highs there and that was old reported to sell around 250,000 copies, which was massive on it's own but not indicative of a huge commercial appeal.

It's not easy to sell a lot of music this high tempo or sometimes chaotic to a mainstream audience. I guess what people like about this boring 2000s style is that it's not really a style? It's just a drum pattern and a tempo that you can paste whatever you want on top of it, so people starting pairing it with pop vocals and sounds.

Not to say a simpler style can't be good. I think the Bomberman/N64 jungle mixes do a great job of showing how you can do Amen Breaks and pop music at the same time, but for whatever reason that didn't catch on.

There's definitely a technology component to it as well. DnB got easier and easier to make and seemed to inspire less people. A lot of great DJs who used to produce DnB in the 90s even refer to it as a "phase" in their musical progression. Photek now produces music for television including "How to Get Away with Murder", good for him.

BGwaves wrote:Thankfully Philip Sherburne did that piece because I would have had an aneurysm otherwise. Pitchfork doesn't deserve M.O. It's the type of thing Brent D would have shit on in the 'heyday' but now it's acceptable 'classic album' review material.