The Roots of Jungle

I have a gig tonight deejaying at the local jungle party, opening for Fanu (who is the bomb, if any of you like that mid 90’s mashed up breakbeats flavor, Fanu has drawn comparisons to old Photek and Source Direct). For my set, I decided to do what I call “the roots of jungle”, which is essentially anything that has been sampled by jungle tunes or otherwise heavily influenced it. I’ve been mentally choosing records for weeks, and it has reminded me of why jungle was so fascinating to me in the first place, and why it was the genre of electronic music that pulled me in.

I first got into jungle around the classic 95-96 era (Late, I know…), where the energy was still high and the tunes sampled anything and everything. My first exposure to the music was from a K-Tel compilation called “Jungle Tekno” (taped from CD by my then girlfriend’s little brother who is the other deejay tonight, Absolut…) and a couple dubbed copies of absolutely classic mixtapes by local Pittsburgh legend Dieselboy (these tapes: “Witness the Strength”, “East Coast Science Vol. 1”, and “Supreme” are all available for free mp3 download here on Dieselboy’s site). This new music was so insane, it combined the energy and DIY ethics from punk with the beats from hiphop and the bass from dancehall. I immediately fell in love, and began to learn about how the music was made. I remember hearing the names of these exotic sounding breakbeats: “Amen”, “Think”, “Assembly Line”, sounds that I recognized from hiphop records but never knew the origin of. I started digging for old breaks and samples: hearing “Westchester Lady” by Bob James for the first time was a revelation as Adam F jacked it almost straight up for his killer tune “Circles”, the same goes for Dennis Brown’s “Sitting and Watching” which was used by Shy FX for his classic “Simple Tings”. This connection between all kinds of music from the 30 preceding years really interested me and caused me to dig deeper. Jazz, dancehall, dub, funk, soul, hiphop, electro, it all started to become the same thing in my mind.

Of course, shortly thereafter the eclecticism and sampling that initially interested me died out. Records all started to sound samey and the rhythms lost all their funkiness. Thankfully, around the same time (98-99), i began discovering house and techno. It started off with sounds that reminded me of jungle: Recloose’s early records and the way he used his breaks was insane, also Basic Channel’s dubbed out bass heavy sound appealed to my ears. Of course, I eventually discovered house and techno’s place in that same soul music continuum. But there is still something about that 94-96 era jungle that moves me, it has that great melancholy feeling that the best Detroit techno has. It can be both rough and smooth at the same time. It’s not very cool to like that stuff right now, not in any “scene”. But some truly great music came from there!

If you’re in the Pittsburgh area and you wanna hear these sounds that spawned jungle as well as a couple classic jungle joints in addition to some of the best stuff the genre currently has to offer, stop by:

I’m playing the early slot so get there around 10pm!