The first 30 Metalheadz releases

oh man.

i'm not sure a week is long enough to puzzle this one out.

shortlist:

Doc Scott - Far Away (Fourteen Flavours Of Funk) / It's Yours - 1994
Dillinja - The Angels Fell / Jah Know Ya Big / Brutal Bass - 1994
J.Majik - Your Sound / Tranquil - 1994
Hidden Agenda - Pressin' On / Get Carter - 1995
Adam F - Metropolis / Mother Earth - 1996
Optical - To Shape The Future - 1997

"The Angels Fell" is one of my favourite tracks for sure but I don't think the other two tracks on that 12 (though great) quite live up to it.

I think my other two favourite tracks are Hidden Agenda's "Dispatch #2" ("Dispatch #1" is excellent also) and Photek's "Consciousness", funnily enough. I guess when I like my metalheadz cerebral I like it super cerebral.

But the 12 I actually vote for it still totally wide open.

some of these a-sides are so epochal (and still hold up! just re-listened to both plat breakz for the first time in forever the other week) that i'm willing to forgive flip-side filler.

oh yeah totally I hardly begrudge a stormer like "jah you know big", just trying to sort through the competition here.

did hidden agenda have the best overall run of any metalheadz artist? (maybe source direct.) even though my fav hidden agenda track is still prolly "fish eggs," from that brief late '90s moment where reinforced seemed to think, well, if everyone is going neurofunk, we might as well make neurofunk that's as weird as humanly possible.

I haven't heard their metalheadz release "Channels" which I think is like number 31 or 32.

I think they hardly released anything else during this whole period! Maybe something on Creative Source? They definitely strike me as the group who had the most to gain from Metalheadz as a stable - the way their hyper-fiddliness connected between both jazzy jungle and neurofunk so fluidly and organically feels almost like an "only metalheadz" kinda thing.

:)

i really used to think this was the best jungle label, but now i wonder if stylistically it's way too narrow to make that call.

Many classics here, but IMO nothing Metalheadz released at the time beats Doc Scott's remix of "Ghosts of My Life" in its sci-fi roughness. Except maybe Dillinja's "Warrior Jazz", but that came later on.

Given that I hardly ever listen to D&B anymore and most of my favourite singles weren't on Metalheadz, I'm going to be a total coffee-table pussy and vote Pulp Fiction.

Photek, Peshay, Doc Scott and Wax Doctor all did better work elsewhere.

yeah pulp fiction for me too

What was that lame Alex Reece tune that became a big hit sometime after "Pulp Fiction"? It used to play on MTV all the time.

i'm going to guess it was "feel the sunshine."

Yeah, Feel the Sunshine. He dropped off a cliff after signing to Island. His Tricky remix was very good though - great Gary-Numan-does-My-Sharona riff.

No, I think it was "Candles". That was the first time I remember thinking all those jazzy vibes might end up ruining d'n'b.

and on orange vinyl! (hey dorian, longtime!)

btw metalheadz still releasing good records well into the last decade, even if their hit-to-miss rate is way, way, way down:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZXRt-Ml8ng

Hmm, I'm listening to "Candles" now Youtube, and though it's still kinda lame, it doesn't sound quite as bad as I remembered. I guess I just was more hardcore about these things back then.

Back then, Alex Reece was accused of KILLING drum'n'bass with his whiteboy jazzy vibes. Remember the "jungle council" which ostracised people for bringing it into disrepute?

Wasn't the "jungle council" formed because General Levy claimed to be running the jungle scene when "Incredible" became a hit? Or something like that? Kinda funny in retrospect.

they also had a big council meeting in the '00s hosted by Dillinja about how everything was getting too fast (+180bpm). It didn't work...

Metalheadz best release in a good while out now. SPY "Favella"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q4XHe5l5xw

From that list, "Your Sound", "Angels Fell", "Skylab" b/w "The Raven", anything by Hidden Agenda and Source Direct but despite the subsequent fall from grace I'd say "Pulp Fiction" hasn't aged and still tops the lot. If I could POO from the lable though it would be Doc Scott "Unofficial Ghost" which is tear-jerkingly great and has the best intro of any record ever made.

I voted for Your Sound. Metalheadz was never my favorite label. By the time Platinum Breakz II came out, I was completely bored with their sound.

wow, i've heard very few of these. it's been so long since i've listened to d&b, it's kind of a trip going through them on youtube.

I voted for "The Angels Fell." Second-favorite: "Pulp Fiction." ("Coffee-table pussy" = favorite phrase I've seen on ILM in a while.)

so unamashedly connoisseurial

awesome typo

Easy... Wax Doctor's The Spectrum for me.

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haha knew that wouldn't work.

Oh yeah, I always forget "V.I.P. Riders Ghost" is not the same remix of "Ghosts of My Life" as "Unofficial Ghost", which I think is even better. Well, "V.I.P." is dope too, so it doesn't matter that I voted for it. Was "Unofficial Ghost" ever released as a single, or was it only on Platinum Breakz?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYygVMtfy_s

If this would've been included here, I definitely would've voted for it. The first time I heard it on the "Metal Box" comp, it just blew my mind.

what's the Metal Box go for? Anybody want to buy mine? Think i only ever played the 90bpm track, the rest are all either unplayed or only played once.

Man, you should play "Warrior Jazz" and both of the Hidden Agenda tracks, they're awesome. Most of the slower tracks are pretty boring though.

Actually pretty sure that, despite the vinyl package suggesting otherwise, the version of "Ghosts" on the first metalheadz 12 is in fact the original "Ghosts Of My Life".

Of course "VIP Riders Ghost" was then on Platinum Breakz.

That'd be a fun taking sides actually:

the Ghosts virus ("Ghosts Of My Life"/"High Rollers Ghostin' Out"/"VIP Riders Ghost"/"The Unofficial Ghost")

vs

the Angel virus ("Angel"/"Saint Angel"/"Dark Metal"/"Ark-Angel")

The first whole "Ghosts" lineage actually began in 1993 on the Rufige Cru "Ghosts" EP on Reinforced:

http://www.rolldabeats.com/release/reinforced_records/rivet1244/, which has David Sylvian's voice slowed down intoning "Ghosts of my Life" repeatedly.

Fabio's Ghost on that EP forms the basis of the intro to Unofficial Ghost. The 12" single is also notable for Goldie's cool sleevenotes which are a dedication to Doc Scott and cru for inspiring him eto get into jungle.

VIP Rider's Ghost ( METH001)is therefore the second version.

Regarding the "Angel" series, I think the original is best

sorry, first sentence should read

The whole "Ghosts" lineage actually began in 1993 on the Rufige Cru "Ghosts" EP on Reinforced:

PS I got £50 for the Metal Box on ebay

Wondering why the Asylum EP isn't on here, but I guess it has a Cat # even though it's a Metalheadz release...

different Cat #

Fabio's Ghost on that EP forms the basis of the intro to Unofficial Ghost. The 12" single is also notable for Goldie's cool sleevenotes which are a dedication to Doc Scott and cru for inspiring him eto get into jungle.

VIP Rider's Ghost ( METH001)is therefore the second version.

Yeah, I'm saying that the version of Ghost on METH001 is actually the original "Ghosts of my Life" (from 1993 Reinforced) by mistake. It seems to have been a pressing issue.

metropolis is just awesome

Shit, forgot about Metropolis. Huge record.

sorry i've not been on this thread, i've been prepping for the dance listening thread.

my shortlist:

dillinja - angels fell
lemon d - urban style music <- POSSIBLE WINNER HERE
optical - to shape the future

well now

i had wanted at first to vote for "unofficial ghost", which might now be my favorite drum and bass track of all time. repeated listening to "unofficial ghost" in 1996 turned me on to the mind-warping possibilities of techstep. i love how doc chops the hell out of the synth swells, so that they just keep billowing out eternally into space. the finer doc chops the synths the more they fill the room, like chopping a little strip of paper into a chain of dolls. having perked our ears, he teases us with all sorts of sound effects occupying different little corners of sound: method man sounds like he's speaking from deep in a tomb, then the sample is suddenly drenched in echo so we're in the tomb with method man. at the same time the establishing beat: a rigid stepper that sounds like the exhausted breakbeats that idm-leaning techno dudes were pushing at the time (subhead, landstrumm, swordsmen, beltram).

all this time we're sitting still while he's setting up the soundstage. out of nowhere, he hits us with a flat, thick wall of impossibly dense, warped bass. this bass fucks with you on two levels. first of all it's smeared so thickly over those rigid, static breakbeats that it really challenges your perception of time. second of all it's right up in the mix, sort of dry compared to everything else. at this range, it sounds like the bass is coming out of your body, pushing you along to the beat. now that you're moving he switches up the beat, alternating between an impossibly "hot"-sounding sample and a more traditional sounding amen break. the "hot" cymbal and snare hits sound impossibly cramped against the rest of the sound; alternating with the reverb-y amen sets up areas of pressure and release. for a while he plays with cramming the hot sample into the same space as two or three simultaneous bass bombs, then he alternates that by setting the amen break against the ghost of a rave siren.

for awhile these two (three?) strategies rub up against each other. then the bass drops out and it's just those rushy noises, like rave sirens from mount olympus, up against the dubby amen break, which is given a little more space to breathe, and it's like racing out of hot, dark tunnels and onto vast and starlit peaks.

it's a masterful track.

the problem now was that nobody was really ever able to merge those strategies as successfully.

hidden agenda tried, a little bit later on, most successfully with "pressin' on". the same thick warping bass is there, the same strategy of setting a claustrophobic sounding drum-rush (some sort of mystical african gourds?) with a more expansive rinse out (jazzy, fluttery hi hats)

what drugs were you on

you know, the usual

That's a beautiful post.

vahid's post is the kind of thing i always want to write. superb.

'Unofficial Ghost' is a masterpiece of the genre/sound, and when I heard Fabio play 'VIP Riders Ghost' on Kiss for the first time - even tho pretty much everything i heard connected with Goldie at that point was blowing my mind - it really felt like nothing else. so fucking future.

tho perhaps if Digital's remix of his own 'Space Funk' had come out on METH instead of the Timeless label i would be voting that (tho i've always been confused about which version i mean - is the one from Goldie's Essential Mix which was linked to on another thread ages ago and that i got on tape from a friend at the time and will always be my favourite EM ever). But funnily none of my top 5 techstep tracks came out on this label (other four are Boymerang 'Still', Ed Rush 'Subway', Blame's 'Planet Neptune' and Source Direct's 'Call And Response'), despite its general supremacy.

'Pulp Fiction' remains remarkable more for its effects and the reactions it brought. How could this moody minimal standout be such an anthem? Remember it being played 5 times at Wembley Arena on New Years Eve 95. The shit he got from people was dumb (+ bust-up with Goldie over money iirc) - but then if you will have a ponytail...

Think the years are wrong on some of these e.g. Your Sound and Angels Fell are 95 but whatever.

Favourite A and B here may actually be Predator/On The Nile. Predator is one of Peshay's almost-token techstep foray and dece but On The Nile is probably my favourite jazzstep (which he was generally better at), with 'Melt' close behind. I always did sleep on Hidden Agenda a bit tho.

No one complete release here is quite excellent enough for me tho so individually:

3rd place: The Flute Tune (subtle experimental jazz-funk and fuck you every bit as good as that sounds)

2nd place: Your Sound (A+ optimism + dexterity...just a bit too lacking in bass and on that basis quite the successor to much Omni Trio)

1st place: The Angels Fell (does not need what it has not got - kind of a darker dreamier successor to my favourite casual b-more based jungle stepper 'The Burial'. also fun if you think of the two-note bass signature as like Nelson Muntz laughing thru a megaphone connected to a mile-long steel tube pitched at -12...also demonstrates Dillinja's not immediately obvious playfulness, which usually comes thru the brass hooks and is more evident on 'Warrior Jazz' and the Sade-sampling 'Promise'). And the other two tracks on the release are strong enough to clinch it.

Going to download the ones I don't have (quite a few tbh) and the rest of the label's output since and listen to the whole lot.

Your Sound, for me.

More good new Metalheadz, I like this Jubei dude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6x8WGlsbZU

i've been thinking hard about this one guy, and is it really fair to vote for "angels fell"?

some large percent of the greatness of the track must be down to vangelis' "blade runner blues"

"this one guy" = "this one, guys, ..."

That's sorta like saying it's not fair to vote for anything with an Amen break though, isn't it cuz some large % of the greatness belongs to the Winston's drummer?

eh i think we can draw a line here based on the fair use principle

"Angels Fell" is distinguished by one of the best programmed rhythms ever though - if it was awesome cinematic intro followed by standard amen choppage I think this might be an issue.

Over the years I've kinda gone off "Your Sound", it's so memorable that it stars to wear me down after a while. Maybe doesn't help that it leads off my favourite and most listened-to jungle mix ever though.

Always found J Majick's other work (and actually this applies to "Your Sound" too but it's classic enough to transcend this quality) to be very messy, especially compared to the other producers in the stable - stuff like "Jim Kutta" and "Arabian Knights" sorta feel like they need a bit more finessing. Though I'm sure many people like this aspect of them vis a vis other hyper-clean Metalheadz releases...

you're right about that tim, and i'm not saying "angels fell" isn't incredible. i'm just saying that what he did with that big clip is *nothing* compared to what lemon d or hidden agenda could do with a sample.

though even if it was down to vangelis and not dilly it wouldn't really affect how it polled ... thread is asking for best release, not whether dillinja is better than doc scott or hidden agenda

If we were voting stupidest, most meaningless title Shiatsu would walk it.

Though Chill Pill's pretty lol 90s.

isn't shiatsu a massage where you get hit with (drum)sticks?

"not whether dillinja is better than doc scott or hidden agenda"

Dillinja was better than Doc Scott or Hidden Agenda though!

not

also unlike doc scott and hidden agenda - tho much like obvious prole favorite j majik - he turned into an absolute tool in later years

Well I'm not going to dispute that.

i guess the worst you can say about "your sound" is that it's the "ode to joy" of d'n'b

I don't even know what happened to Doc Scott or Hidden Agenda? Did they just fall off a cliff?

Looking at Discogs it appears that Doc Scott did indeed fall off a cliff...

i immediately regret saying that about "ode to joy" and want to point out that i don't think it's a good idea to draw any parallels between classical and programmed music

anyway it's pretty straightforward. all of the bass bombs hit exactly in the center of a cymbal or snare hit somewhere along the beat. the beat itself just runs along treadmill-fashion, more or less on it's own, as the bass does its own thing in the background or underneath the beat, which may be why the track was so popular with the "logical progression" set? though, credit to j majik, it's not *anywhere* near as straightforward as "pulp fiction". with the benefit of post-fruity loops hindsight you can practically see the bassline as big flat blue blocks under a pink grid of metronome hats and cymbals. nor is the bass quite as detached from the proceedings, either. it's so deep it pretty much threatens to swallow the beat whole, which keeps it from attaining that floaty quality that the best dolphin-step tracks have.

it does have that great silvery metalheadz production sound and it's fully resplendent in all of that dub frippery i was talking about upthread, though as far as spatial tricks go it doesn't get anywhere near the lunatic heights of peshay's "nocturnal (back on the firm)", which basically just sounds like voltron flinging death star sized drum samples around the periphery of a black hole. the way he treats the amen break is legitimately dope. i particularly like the syncopation on the 1-2-3 cymbal hit in the second bar, the way it holds you in the air before knocking you down.

i mean, it's a master class in a lot of different tricks, without really being the last word in any of them.

part of me wants to be perverse and build a case for wax doctor

or the skylab EP, rumored to be crafted by the hand of dom & roland

Nocturnal might actually be my favourite track on Platinum Breakz - the orchestral stab is the borderline-genius shuriken to the evil bionic dolphin-head assassin's jugular....

Your Sound is one of the few of these tracks I actually got to dance to the one time I went to the Metalheadz night at the Leisure Lounge (i was too young/uncool for the Blue Note) but it had one of the best (if simple) breaks switcheroo i'd heard in any DnB at that point without getting into the choppier jungle stuff (as good as what Scott was doing imo...tho J was one of the youngest on the label). The Spell is also dope.

Doc Scott has been putting a lot of really great mixes on his Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/docscott31

31 Records is back in full swing, too.

Wasn't released on Metalheadz but i'm gonna post this gem anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TExlTNK850

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Argh I still can't decide!

Favourite A and B here may actually be Predator/On The Nile. Predator is one of Peshay's almost-token techstep foray and dece but On The Nile is probably my favourite jazzstep (which he was generally better at)

This is quite true, though Vahid is dead-on about "Nocturnal (Back On The Firm)" being the tune. I like how much Peshay splices between different beats on his techstep efforts. I think that and the explosion in a kettle factory percussion techstep you often get on techstep tunes are my two favourite things about the style.

running out of brainpower for this thread, especially with dance listening club looming on monday ...

i wanted to do a compare-and-contrast between dillinja's "angels fell" and optical's "to shape the future", and then to hidden agenda. i think they are all working with a similar thing: manipulating samples in and around the space between the bassline. dillinja and optical of course warping their drum samples, hidden agenda doing the same thing with snatches of spectral jazz or "oriental" samples.

since i've been listening to a lot of 2562 i've also been thinking about source direct's "made up sound" and imagining connections between SD and dubstep.

What 2562 have you been listening to Vahid? In general that connection makes sense.

I like "A Made Up Sound" and "The Cult" but think that Source Direct really took off with their super-scary sound from "Stonekilla" onwards.

Though I adore "Fabric of Space" which I'm guessing slightly predates "A Made Up Sound".

this 2562, tim

oh well of course

my favorite source direct is the "controlled developments" EP on photek's label. so perfect. don't really care too much for the "mind weaver" type stuff. one critic once said it sounded like god sharpening his knives, i find it a little wearying to listen to six minutes of endlessly distorted amens. it's a bit like listening to an autechre liveset. it's cool to watch the constantly shifting drum patterns but it's a bit one-trick-pony for me.

Yeah "Enemy Lines" is their best IMO.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.