Thoughts on 'Jungle Mania 2'

This is a little piece I wrote as a prelude to my being interviewed on ‘Three on the Ones and Twos’, a music podcast where interviewees discuss their favorite albums. I had chosen the compilation album ‘Jungle Mania 2’, and I felt some additional context might be useful for the Americans involved. I had, at least in part, chosen this compilation to undermine the typical ‘classic album’ chat - Jungle Mania 2 is a dense collection of frenetic music, a dizzying whirl of samples and project names, with no faces or consistent personalities - it is a true work of ‘scenius’.

This seems like an appropriate spot to memorialize the legendary Randall, too cold to hold and too hot to handle, who was an integral part of this particular scenius, and who died earlier this year. The sleeve notes of Jungle Mania 2 advise you to check out Randall on Kiss FM on Wednesday nights, and thanks to the late-night cassette tapings of fans, you can still enjoy his sets from that same year.

Anyway, lest the prologue be longer than the actual piece of writing I’m posting, here it is!

In London and the surrounding area in 1994, Jungle music was the most exciting thing around- experimental, multicultural, utterly new and totally local. Jungle Mania 2 encapsulates the moment that this underground scene erupted from the clubs and pirate radio stations of London into the national consciousness (and childhood record collections) of Britain, in the wake of the top 40 breakthrough success of “Original Nuttah” by UK Apachi & Shy FX.

The circumstances surrounding the release of Jungle Mania 2 illustrate the push and pull between the underground and the mainstream that has been a long standing feature of Jungle and Drum & Bass. It was released on Telstar, a label who specialised in budget compilations like Slade’s “Crackers (The Christmas Party Album)” (1985), “Morning Has Broken (20 Religious Favourites)” (1988), and the popular “Deep Heat” series, compiling crossover dance hits following the boom of Acid House in the UK.

Evidently, Telstar were fairly agnostic about the content of their releases and were just giving the dads/Christians/kids what they wanted, and the kids wanted “35 Of The Most Cantankerous, Ruffneck Jungle Ryddims Ever”! Jungle Mania 2 was widely advertised on TV, was available at high street shops like Woolworths, and I will go out on a limb and say it was probably the double cassette that was rocking most bedroom stereos, as many of us did not have access to CD players.

The sleeve notes give some indication as to where all of this art has sprung from. The ‘licensed in association with…” section is an extensive list of 25 labels, some of whom are legendary in the breakbeat scene: Aphrodite, Ibiza, Ganja, Moving Shadow, Reinforced, Surburban Base. This was the bedrock of the scene, a totally grass-roots, London-centric phenomenon that sprang from the ashes of acid house and hardcore rave, fusing breakbeats with dub basslines and ragga MCing to spawn a new, darker dance hall hybrid. At this time the scene was resolutely DIY- a good portion of the artists featured on this compilation owned and managed the labels releasing the music, or worked in the record stores selling self-released white label 12”s, or DJ’d on the many pirate stations that were proliferating across the tower blocks of the city. This is truly Underground music, but packaged and marketed by the people who brought you “Rock Legends (12 Timeless Rock Classics)”, and with a funny googly-eyed face on the front.

To digress for a second, where did this manic emoji spring from? Does it represent a new, overstimulated mutation of the classic aceeed ‘smiley’ of yesteryear? It certainly tells us something about the assumed target demographic for this comp- hardcore-curious kids, very possibly in Spliffy jeans.

For the “full-on live experience” the sleeve notes advise that we “check Jungle Mania events in the London area”. Jungle Mania was (and still is, 30 years on) one of the biggest and best Jungle promoters in the UK, and in 1994 were perfectly positioned to lend their credibility to these compilations. Respect to the young entrepreneurs who managed to get their name on this marquee without losing their audience, I hope they got some money out of it.

What to say about the music? Well, obviously, it’s brilliant - massive, even. To this day, for many die-hard Junglists, 94-95 is the golden era, a zenith of boundless experimentation, effortless innovation, and (perhaps most key here) popularity. These tunes are the fruits of a perfect cultural micro-climate, shaped by affordable music equipment, pirate radio, and a vibrant rave scene that took innovation for granted - it was a given that music would not sound the same next year, or even in 6 months, something that seems to have been lost over the subsequent decades.

Jungle’s influence looms large, perhaps more so today than any other time since - the only thing that troubles me about some of the very fun music being made today as part of the ongoing ‘Return II Jungle’ and a new generation’s awakening to the scene (particularly in the USA, where they’ve been working backwards from Dubstep) is that it has been rendered as nostalgia now. A lot of it sounds 30 years old by design, a sad, grindingly inevitable end for music that always sounded like the future.

For more reading, I highly recommend “Generation Ecstasy”, by Simon Reynolds, and please do check out my own installation project inspired by Jungle pirate radio, “Can’t Stop the Pirates”.

Sound art: the most mainstream and culturally important of cultural commodities?

“There is a perception, particularly amongst contemporary arts critics and arts commentators, but also among members of the public, that sonic art is a relatively new art form. The truth is that sounds produced by voices are among the earliest raw materials to have ever been subjected to any form of creative manipulation.

Speech itself is an art form, and therefore, poetry and literally all literature of the oral tradition are, alongside music, the oldest forms of sonic art, and probably, arguably, the oldest art forms, full stop. On that basis it could be argued that far from being a marginal or any way a difficult art form, sonic art is instead arguably the most primal, the most pervasive and arguably the earliest form of creative art.

Paraphrasing Aristotle's poetics, since written language is based on symbolic visual representations of indivisible sounds, the earliest form of sound recording technology was not any form of machine but was in fact written language. Alongside poetry and literature in the oral tradition, written literature and poetry are therefore also forms of sound art.

So, when one considers music, poetry, literature, theatrical dialog, theatre sound effects and architectural acoustics, and particularly sound design for contemporary cinema and computer games, it can be argued that in its various diverse and widespread manifestations sound art is one of if not arguably the most mainstream and culturally important of cultural commodities.”

The quote above is taken from a presentation given by Joe Banks (Disinformation) on their research as presented in the book Rorschach Audio. Access their presentation in podcast form via Liquid Architecture.