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Story by Jess Harvell
A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology is the Holy Grail of jungle
long-players. Whereas you can still find Nice Price editions of Goldie's
Timeless or Reprazent's New Forms, Gerald's masterpiece has been lost
nearly since its 1995 release. Chalk this up to major label muscle or
Gerald's own distrust of the music industry. Either way, its
reappearance-- with little fanfare earlier in the month on Warp Records'
mp3 store, Bleep.com-- is the best news of the new year so far.
Like 4Hero's Parallel Universe (another classic now consigned to eBay),
this is drum & bass taken to extremes. Rhythms dissolve in mid-air,
scatter like fireflies. Drums liquefy, spill in fountain arcs, dart like
kingfishers. The whole mix sags under its own humidity, heavy with hazy
phasing and synth precipitation. More than any other jungle record, Black
Secret Technology actually sounds like the jungle.
By 1995, Gerald Simpson had already been bruised repeatedly by the music
industry. Though he had co-written (at the very least) 808 State's 1989
smash "Pacific State", he received scant credit and fewer royalties.
Licensing woes meant that he got royally screwed when his eternal classic
"Voodoo Ray" became the first British-made acid house hit. He recorded an
entire album, High Life Low Profile, which was scrapped by Sony when they
deemed it too "uncommercial."
So Gerald said fuck it. Inspired by clubs like Grooverider's Rage, he
abandoned his drum machines for breakbeats. He formed his own label, Juice
Box, the first fruits being a series of underground 12-inches like "Cops",
with its menacing Robocop sample ("Cops don't like me/ So
I...don't...like...cops"). Long before ragga jungle, Gerald released the
(even harder to find) 28 Gun Bad Boy LP in 1992. Like jungle writhing
uncomfortably out of a techno exoskeleton, its jack-knifing rhythms and
acid riffs felt like Gerald could shake down the record industry with just
two turntables.
The records that followed were even deeper and blacker. "The first rhythms
came from Africa," the sample announces at the start of 1993's "Nazinji-zaka".
Gerald replies by spinning a cat's cradle of atomized percussion, like a
man who could build an entire world of music out of a single drum. "Toward
the end of the 90s I felt like I was a little bit too black to be doing
drum & bass," Gerald said in a recent press release. Not for nothing did
he title a 1994 track "Darker Than I Should Be".
All this was a lead up to BST. At a time when you could count the number
of jungle full lengths on one hand, here was a true album, with a unified
mood and a sense of expansiveness, rather than a collection of
singles-so-far. Hearing it in early '98, thanks to a pair of far-thinking
professors, was one of the few true musical headfuck/transformative
experiences in my life, up there with hearing Run-DMC, the Dead Kennedys,
and Arthur Russell for the first time.
The drums on the opening tracks "So Many Dreams" and "Alita's Dream"
follow zero-gravity nyanbinghi drummers across similar tribal patterns,
all leading up to Gerald's masterpiece. "Finley's Rainbow", here in its
"Slow Motion Mix", is one of the few true "jungle ballads" and Gerald's
loveliest moment. Forgotten reggae crossover crooner Finley Quaye hums a
snatch of "Sun is Shining" to himself and Gerald steams it like an
envelope over a teakettle. All around, insect bellies pop like
firecrackers in showers of phosphorescent sparks.
"Energy", co-produced with Goldie, takes the "4D" programming of the
Metalhead's own work of the time ("Timeless", et al) and removes the
obnoxious parts (crying whales, "fluid" jazz guitar, Anita Baker vocals).
The final two tracks "Voodoo Rage" and "Life Unfolds His Mystery" are a
one-two punch not often equalled in this genre. The former recycles a few
samples from "Voodoo Ray"-- apparently Gerald's primitive sampler circa
1988 couldn't fit the "-ge" onto "voodoo rage." The once celebratory
wordless female vocal now sounds wracked with desperation and confusion.
The latter is simply one of the more gorgeous ambient jungle tracks, while
a terse ragga commands "smoke on it, man."
"I felt that this music was a key to explaining who I was - even more so
than house music," Gerald has said of jungle. "This was everything I grew
up in. This was reggae that formed me when I was in my mother's belly,
this was the early electronic music that made me realize what I wanted to
do for the rest of my life. This was the inventiveness of jazz that was to
formulate soul then funk and which are deeply embedded within this music.
Everything that is the material of my early childhood and teenage years is
embedded within this music."
Unfortunately, BST has one of the worst mastering jobs I've ever heard,
like a transistor radio playing at the bottom of a dirty aquarium. On a
home stereo it can sound painfully muddy and distant; heard on a decent
system, bass cranked hard right, things improve slightly. But this is not
helped by the transfer to mp3, which can never compete with a
well-mastered slab of vinyl (no matter what partisans argue). Then add the
fact that most of us listen to mp3s on less-than-adequate computer
speakers or iPod earbuds.
Last year there was talk of a re-release of BST, 28 Gun Bad Boy, and a
collection of Juice Box singles on CD, re-mastered and with new liner
notes by Woebot blog's Matt Ingram. Needless to say they've yet to
materialize, and I pray daily they eventually will. Until then, the mp3
re-release of BST will have to suffice. Like Smile before Brian Wilson got
around to "finishing" it, you'll just have to listen with open ears.
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