I live in the kind of haus where random zines and propaganda often appear and disappear like time-traveling nomadic visitors. This week, an issue of Cyclic Defrost from January 2005 appeared on the kitchen table. Cyclic Defrost, one of the most exciting and well produced zines on experimental music culture, is based in Australia; and the fact that I picked up an issue from January 2005 and thought it was something fresh will attest to how ahead of the game their content is. This particular issue featured an interview with DJ/Rupture about his travels, his music, his influences, etc. A Boston-native who was living in Barcelona at the time of the interview, Rupture is an extremely active experimentalist who mashes everything from world music to breakcore and makes it sound good. Rupture recently teamed up with one of NYC’s hottest producers, Matt Shadetek, to form the multi-media platform that we often Big Up on this site: Dutty Artz.
I found myself engrossed in this fantastic article as I woke up with my coffee each morning. The article is so thorough, it took two days of coffee rituals to finish it! I completed it today and now I want to share it with you because everything Jace talks about is still 100% true and relevant today, in 2008. I found the Cyclic Defrost website, and to my glee, they have every issue archived and available for download as a PDF!
Download Cyclic Defrost Music Zine
The January 2005 release is issue 10 and can be downloaded here:
After discussing a wealth of other topics, like his genre-bending DJ sets and his debut solo album on Tigerbeat6, Jace speaks briefly about jungle music. In particular, its resurgence in recent years, its blatant use of unauthorized vocal samples, and a discussion he once had with Remarc about the continuing popularity of ragga-jungle. I feel this is a topic that needs more airtime and discussion, especially among junglists, so I’ve included it here. Hopefully, this will make you want to check out the rest of the article and discover Cyclic Defrost for yourself!
DJ/Rupture’s thoughts on jungle music (as of January 2005)
A lot of breakcore artists are infatuated with dancehall in a really suspect and shallow way: making their ‘hardcore’ tracks sound more aggressive by using a capellas of deep, macho, black Jamaican voices – relying on and reinforcing tired old stereotypes of the virile violent black man. I really don’t like that. There was virtually zero crossover with the first wave of jungle, and there’s certainly no breakcore bootlegs making their way to Jamaican ears now. I was talking to [seminal jungle producer] Remarc about the sudden strange popularity of ragga jungle rewinds and jungle-breakcore and he was just bemused by it all.He said something to the effect of “We were doing Amen-cut-up breaks ten years ago, so I don’t really understand why kids are still so excited about it.” But for him, it means more gigs and a newfound fan base in places like the midwestern US and Japan. Remarc told me that one of the main reasons UK jungle slowly stopped using reggae elements was that as jungle skyrocketed in popularity, a lot of Jamaicans in the UK started complaining about how they were being ripped off and weren’t getting the cash, so it just got easier to leave the reggae samples behind, [thus] the reason I work with labels such as Shockout is that they actually deal with and pay the vocalists. That’s important. Dancehall is a very exciting music right now – there are a lot of very original, very strange productions coming out of Jamaica. It’s an exuberant, chaotic, bass-heavy culture, and in the quest for hit singles, the producers make some stunning, surprising music. That’s why I like it, I like all reggae, and to me one of the best things about reggae is the speed with which it evolves. It is quite easy to draw a narrative line connecting the conscious melodic roots reggae of the ‘70s up through to the weird, atonal, gangster synthetics of current ragga. The culture of versioning makes it wonderful for DJs too: if you find a riddim you like, then you get to select the vocalists who are giving the most interesting performance on that riddim to play out live.
What do you think? Any junglists out there? Any ragga/reggae artists? What’s your perspective on this?
Cyclic Defrost Links
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