Black Secret Technology

The first one is lots better I reckon - a soupier, nastier sound overall.

As for downloading you'd have to trust to whoever you're getting stuff off.

A Guy Called Gerald (founder member of 808 State and all-round legendary figure in electronic music) will be making his back catalogue available through Bleep.
First instalment is this album from 1995, one of the first full-length albums to emerge from the nascent Jungle/Drum and Bass scene that pretty much defined the movement at the time. Unlike the prog pomposity of Goldie/Rob Playford's 'Timeless' (the other big album from that year), Black Secret's simple kicking amen breaks and vocal snippets still sound classic and relevant today.

I don't really agree with that last sentence and would still take Timeless over both BST and The Deepest Cut on account of better basslines if nothing else. The samples on Bleep make BST sound still like it's coming from someone else's earphones rather than direct - why is the quality so weak?

i have the original issue CD with this cover artwork

and it sounds tinny and weak compared to just about anything else from the same time period. i prefer it to "timeless", maybe because i've heard "timeless" too many times, maybe because there's not much on "timeless" that compares favorably to the heart-stopping euphoria of "finley's rainbow" (really, what does? not even bukem's "atlantis" or jazzmin's "tango" or origination's "heavy vibes" / "maracas beach" come close)

i know there was a remastered reissue from 1997 (missing "voodoo rage", but with new tracks "hekkle & koth" and "touch me" ... either of these the same as the untitled bonus track on the original CD??)

maybe they used a transfer from the original issue and not the remaster?!?

finally, gerald has been promising an expanded reissue of BST w/ a 2nd disc of juicebox rarities for about year now ... what's up, gerald?!?

simple kicking amen breaks

roffle.

the colorful cover is the remaster, the black/purple cover is the original.

oh my, the remastered reissue!

I HATE to buy the same thing twice, but this new version is a revelation, you can finally hear all the crazy things going on in the mix...(I swear there's a Scritti Politti sample in "Cybergen")...

been listening to it *a lot*. i think this is one of the best dnb full-lengths ever. surprised how short this thread is/was, but i think i remember lots of talk on other related dnb threads.

the remaster is good. but its still not as 'deep' as it should be. just sunds like he pressed the 'loud' button on his hi-fi when remastering ;)

its one of the best d&b full lengths but it sustains pretty much the same vibe for a full album. doesnt really break out of that aquatic?/etheral techno-meets-abstract d&b thing.

i like cybergen but doesnt quite fit - sounds like a hardcore rave/early jungle track to me.

Is the remaster significantly different from the last remaster (the '97 or so one)?

haven't heard the '97 version, but this towers over the '93 disc...

(to my untrained ears, at least)

and true, it doesn't really break out of the "aquatic/ethereal techno-meets-abstract D & B" mold, but I love that sort of thing!...to death, I do!

'93? It's from '95 I thought.

Thought there was supposed to be some bonuses on it. No "Gloc", "Darker Than I Should Be", "Nazinji-Zaka" 12"s is kind of annoying.

oh yeah, '95...

theres something really warm about this album compared to a lot of modern electronic music. sounds not exactly lush but just really 'thick'.

agree and i think that it sounds deep, but i am sure that is up to the environment and system you are listening to it on. (i have been playing it at medium-loud volume on a system with a nice subwoofer in a room with very "active" sound. i am not an audiophile, honest.)

it would have been nice to see a bonus disc. i am almost never a fan of lp remasters or releases where a bunch of singles are tacked on at the end. i suppose that in they are easy enough to remove and re-burn if necessary though.

in

it's pretty neat to listen to BST and then AGCG's new-ish single for perlon.

yeah i imagine this would sound pretty voluminous and awesome with some big woofers.

q for junglists - what marked this out as being so different to stuff from what ltj bukem, omni trio and co were doing in 1995? is it that he took it way further than the 'endless rolling break+ambient loop on top' method?

as good as jungle was in those days, it seemed like there was a fairly strict template (2-minute intro of ruffed-up beats, blissed-out diva vocal interlude, combination of the two, etc.) that the "art-core" crowd was working with...BST seemed deeper, less predictable, less linear...

A: It was an album. A real live honest to goodness album!

I admit I was not much of a junglist in '95, but I suspect that's the major diff. between this and Omni Trio.

does anyone have a link to the 2 hr essential mix agcg did back in '95 or whenever it was? i used to have it but the hard drive it was on failed :( i thought it was incredible

i wasnt a junglist in 95 either but listening to bst the other week it seems like it integrated techno and jungle perfectly, without compromising either side. def deeper and all those things henry mentioned too.

Yeah don't get me wrong, I think BST is a great amazing toweringly awesome record and it does what it does better than practically anyone else was doing at the time (well Omni Trio and Foul Play could make a case, but otherwise he's the bees knees.) That said I think one of the major reasons why BST (and consequently AGCG) are remembered so fondly are for very rockist "HE MADE A GREAT ALBUM" reasons. If most of BST had trickled out as a series of singles like Deepest Cut/MFTNM, I don't think it would have quite the same cache.

yeah, most of the praise seems to be based on 'drum n bass artists can make real albums too!' but i think the sound of bst is what makes it different. its more auteur-y d&b. reminds me a bit of the 2nd two pages disc (i need more like that). oddly i dont really return to it that much - maybe making an album-album made gerald make each track less stand-alone but its a bit samey. in a good way, but samey nonetheless.

the sameness is my favorite part about it.

and the willingness to take big chances with the template

I think Gerald was never quite part of the "scene" as it existed at the time. He was chums with Dego and Marc from Reinforced but was never accepted by the inner fraternity. This, coupled with his acid house proto-Madchester lineage meant he came to jungle with a very different set of influences from Bukem, Omni Trio, Foul Play et al. This made for a fairly unique take on the genre. This could be contrasted with with other "fringe" junglists such as Spring Heel Jack who were never quite good enough and London Elektricity who won acceptance after a period.

If you like disc 2 of Two Pages then you may want to check Krytic Minds and Leon Switch who present a similar vibe. Or Seba's very recently released album.

BST sounds "thick" beacuse it's made on samples and outboard hardware rather than everyting now which is compressed to buggery on Reason and ends up sounding a bit thin.

To be fair to Bukem (serious acid-jazz fusion fan) and Omni Trio (former avant-industrial head) and Foul Play (beats me) had completely different influences.

Also I think you understate Gerald's place in the jungle scene a lot. Goldie doesn't appear on any SHJ records.

xpost: as did Spring Heel jack, who sounded (at least on their first EP) that they were coming into (the) jungle from indie-rock...the real problem with the fringe junglists (see also: Graham "Bark Psychosis" Sutton) is that they ultimately bagged their influences and chose to make jungle on it's own terms...

xp - Yeah but acid jazz fans were commonplace - Roni Size, Wax Doctor etc

Avant industial - yes agreed a less common background, although Goldie himself could be classed as one of these

I meant more that Jungle, particularly before Bristol came along, was, with a few notable exceptions, a very London-centric scene - to have someone come along who had a previous life as an acid house pioneer and could call upon friends like Lady Miss Kier from Dee-lite as a colab ( admittedly e) was very unusual and made for quite a different take on the music.

I'm not criticising AGCG or BST - in fact it may be the best single artist jungle LP.

As for Foul Play - agreed, I couldn't really place their influences ( although there's the Simon Reynolds quote about injecting the collected works of MBV into your spine - I doubt, however, that they would cite MBV as an influence) - suffice to say they were the Dog's Bollocks and strode over dnb like a colossus from 93 - 94

The Perlon stuff was ok but maybe that was just nostalgia.

Hmmn. That's an interesting way of reading him, because if anything I see AGCG's take to mirror very closely the entire rave continuum (up to 2-step anyway, he was pretty irrelevant from 95 on) from acid house to breakbeat hardcore to early darkcore/ragga to artcore. I mean you could argue that the stuff he was producing was better (and I could even see an argument that his pre-figured some of these leaps--28 Gun Bad Boy seems particularly prescient) but his history pretty closely mirrors the generic innovations that ultimately produced all these other guys.

That said I think one of the major reasons why BST (and consequently AGCG) are remembered so fondly are for very rockist "HE MADE A GREAT ALBUM" reasons. If most of BST had trickled out as a series of singles like Deepest Cut/MFTNM, I don't think it would have quite the same cache.

I think around 95-96 jungle/d&B was already heading for the "serious music" direction, some key people like Goldie, 4 Hero, T Power, etc. dropped albums that definitely were meant to be regarded as albums and not as collection of tracks like Deepest Cut. Even Haunted Science (which is still my favourite d&b record ever) sounds much more like an album than Deepest Cut. But then the jazzstep/techstep divide took place, and the torch of "serious album music" was carried mostly by jazzstep I guess (I stopped actively following d&b around this time), which is a pity, because even if it's a rockist attitude I think the 95-96 stuff did and does still sound more compelling than most of what followed. And yeah, I guess the second disc of Two Pages could be seen as part of the same continuum, maybe the last blossoming of that particular sound.

If anything, I think T Power's The Self Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind is the artsy d&b album of 1995 (right down to its title), but maybe it was too proggy and artsy to have gotten the same sort of rep as Timeless and BST.

No one heard it and it's not as good as BST (neither is Timeless.)

It was a great album and still stands up as pretty good. The beats remain fascinating - so quickly after the techstep tyranny removed the fun from them. There was a lot of detail going on and if the reissue shows more then it's clearly worth buying the same album twice.

"No one heard it and it's not as good as BST (neither is Timeless.)"

i remember it being so over-hyped at the time, too.

If anything, I don't think people paid that much attention to BST in 1995... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it only became more hyped later on?

i remember that everyone complained about how it sounded, but i think it's always been very highly regarded.

Hmmn. Where is the wayback version of Mediacritic to settle this pointless argument.

That's an xp.

Yeah I think critics liked it. I believe the original press was small though so it's possible that more people have heard it with subsequent reissues.

Well yeah, could be that the small press meant the album never even found it's way to Finland, I don't remember seeing it at my local record store around that time.

joe 40oz i think this is it

Whereas T Power, Omni Trio, and 4 Hero were readily available.

(x-post)

thnx!!! awesome. everybody get that

yeah i think the original BST was one of those releases where if you didn't buy it immediately, it was gone for good. i am not sure if i miss that or not. xp

You could get BST pretty easily in the UK at the time - remember it being in record chains, but it was a tiny label so not sure it was so easy to get elsewhere.

SMOKE ON IT MAN

I see the Kodwo Eshun thread has been revived, too.

Ha I was thinking about that guy too this morning.

This album is just perfect in every possible way.

Gddammit so there's 3 versions? So irritating.

Noodle vague otm re: SMOKE IT MAN

ON