13 A GUY CALLED GERALD
Black Secret Technology
(Juice Box)

The title says it all really. Drawing on the black music potential for space-is-theplace cosmic otherness, Manchester's forgotten hero of house put himself back on the map with an epic saga of breakbeat sci-fi soldering.

[Reviewer: Unknown]

ARTS: A record Christmas
'Tis the season to give CDs ... Here, our critics choose their discs of 1995, from Pulp to Prokofiev, and Tricky to 'Troilus and Cressida'

A Guy Called Gerald: Black Secret Technology (Juice Box, CD/LP/tape).

Six years on from his bewitching acid-pop landmark single "Voodoo Ray", the enigmatic Gerald Simpson released an album to match. In tandem with Goldie's more widely touted Timeless, this is the perfect riposte to anyone who still thinks jungle sounds best coming out of someone else's car stereo.

[Reviewer: Ben Thompson]

Top-level security clearance allows you into Gerald's 21st century urban technopolis, a vast twinkling sprawl of detached, soulful vocals, subsonic bass and wild, fluttering beats.

(Reviewed in VOX 54)

[Reviewer: Mike Pattenden]

A Guy Called Gerald: Black Secret Technology (Juice Box, CD/LP/tape).

Can it really be more than half a decade since enigmatic Mancunian beat-mangler Gerald Simpson came out of nowhere to have a Top 10 hit with the hypnotic "Voodoo Ray", and then went straight back there? The intervening years of business wrangles and principled obscurity have not been wasted if this intense and innovative new album is anything to go by. By turns mellow and frantic, Gerald crochets soulful vocal loops and hyperactive biscuit-tin drum patterns into a supple and captivating mesh. At his best - on the blissful "Finlay's Rainbow", and with drum and bass pioneer Goldie on the aptly- titled "Energy" - he not only invents a new genre (Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . Lovers' Jungle!) but also stakes a convincing claim to some uncharted spiritual high ground.

[Reviewer: Ben Thompson]

Jungle is one place the dub legacy has ended up. Black Secret Technology from Manchester's A Guy Called Gerald (Juice Box) is a stinging piece of futurism, its rattling rhythms and ethereal washes of sound combining urgency and dreaminess in equal and contradictory measure. A version of Bob Marley 's To The Rescue is a case in point. But it is a good idea.

[Reviewer: Neil Spencer]

Even if you never danced to it, even if you never clocked who made it or what the track was called, you're sure to have heard 'Voodoo Ray'. In the late `80s, it became the Hacienda's theme tune: sparse, electronic, yet warm and soulful, it was a classy Manc-fix on the sounds of Chicago, house meets electro, Brit-meets-Yank. The man behind it was Gerald Simpson, better known as A Guy Called Gerald, but despite the track's legendary status and the Top 40 chart success which followed, when Manchester officially went Mad, Gerald went AWOL. He resurfaced in '92 with 28 Gun Bad Boy, a jarring, mind-boggling LP released on his own Juice Box label. Packed with hard jungle beats, it was streaked with spite and paranoia and not a lot else, a pessimistic homage (or so it seemed) to an increasingly violent city. It was a hard nut to crack and most gave up trying. Now, Gerald is back with a new LP, Black Secret Technology (Juice Box), this time arriving amidst a clamour of renewed interest thanks to the overground success of jungle. Name-checked as an inspiration to the '90s junglists ('Energy' is a collaboration with London's Goldie, of 'Inner City Life' fame), it's clear from the start that a lot has changed in the man's head since Bad Boy. We're still in breakbeat heaven, but now it's music with humanity and soul, street wise but optimistic, hard to resist rather than just hard. A double album totalling over 70 minutes, it's the sound of bass and drum done to perfection, mixed with spine-tingling female soul vocals, hypnotic dub and pan pipe-style melodies. 'Does time work in rhythm...or does rhythm work in time,' ponders Gerald in the sleeve notes. Whatever the answer, the rhythms on Black Secret Technology are essential listening.

[Reviewer: Chris Sharratt]

A GUY Called Gerald rose to prominence during the acid house wars, on the back of the club hit Voodoo Ray. In dance lore, this is now regarded as a classic. But Gerald Simpson, who comes from Manchester, was also among the first of his peers to corral the acid sound on to a satisfying album. Here, we find him doing precisely for jungle what he helped do for that earlier form. Anyone who's been wondering what all the fuss was about should hear this, just to learn what jungle can be in the right hands - enthralling.

****

[Reviewer: ASm]

A GUY CALLED GERALD
Black Street Technology
(Juice Box/CD/tape)

THE COOL irony about jungle is that for all the aggro urban vibes and the ubiquitous use of fierce ragga rumblings, the underlying attitudes are unity, self-support and peace.

In indie guitar land, the equivalents of Goldie (long-time jungle pioneer, erstwhile would-be street bad boy) and A Guy Called Gerald (UK house and techno veteran with remixes for everyone from The Stone Roses to the Suns Of Arqa in his biog-bag) would be way too competitive forces to collaborate, as the pair do for one crucial and wonderful track here called 'Energy'.

Perhaps it's because both artists recognise the important task in hand i.e., for jungle to jump those few remaining hurdles and gain wholehearted, nationwide respect. With output of the ilk of 'Black Street Technology' - a rare one-artist LP in a scene dominated by compilations - the sniffers won't be able to look down their noses at the genre much longer.

The beauty is Gerald Simpson's skill. He knows every techno/ambient/jungle trick in the book, and employs the best of them with confident clarity: silky, billowing synthscapes for the 21st Century ambience, basslines that throb like a heart beat, adrenalin buzz breakbeats, breathy soul vocals - all these components are part of a sophisticated mix 'n' match, a highly calculated interplay.

Take the Goldie collaboration. The first voice is so warped it's nothing more than an android, yet it's soon joined by 'real' jungle sounds, such as bird calls, and all are driven by a sub-sonic bass and stalking breakbeats.

When somebody like Gerald - with 29 releases behind him - has been around the block too many times to have a phobia of either the streets or studio technology, you get something like 'Survival', the best track here. An outer limits voice tells us, "Some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic impulses than others/These people will at times feel a strange, tingling sensation... Don't be alarmed..." and cybernautic jungle kicks in: African flutes flutter, three different sets of breakbeats run riot, a woman cries "Survival" ad nauseam, but the whole wrap is one Star Ship Enterprise smooth, sophisticated automation.

An Afro-centric view of a Europe to come? Perhaps. Good old-fashioned British hybrid inclinations and old school audaciousness? Definitely.

Gerald has come up with the jungle that takes it from the loony experimentalism of the 12" rough cuts you hear on pirates, and peers right into the next century. But British music as a whole, not just jungle, benefits. 'Black Street Technology' is definitely black. To the future. 

(8)

[Reviewer: Angela Lewis]

[Reviewer: Unknown]

A GUY CALLED GERALD
Black Secret Technology
(Juice Box)

Just what is the sound of the city? On America's West Coast, it is the phat, stoned basslines of G-funk; in post-industrial Detroit, it is the pulse of the 808; and in NY it is the incendiary discharge of The Bomb Squad. The UK regularly soaks up all these influences, but its own generators hum to the rhythms of breakbeat cultures, the much-derided sound of the underground that everyone suddenly wants to embrace. Jungle, with its mix of frantic breakbeats, samples and ragga vocals contrasts the sharp urgency of the modern British metropolis and the energy of its youth-that well of underused talent-against a backdrop of decaying-high-rise culture, joblessness and racism. Last year saw Jungle break through and crack the charts. It also saw it begin to morph in fresh directions like Ambient Jungle or Intelligent.

Manchester's Gerald Simpson, aka A Guy Called Gerald, calls it New Urban Blues and is, with Goldie (aka Metalheads), one of its prime exponents. Black Secret Technology places him on the music's cutting edge and consolidates his reputation as a dance music pioneer that began back in 1989 when he released the exotic UK House classic 'Voodoo Ray'. Building on that, he wrote the cybernetic, trilling 'Pacific State' and encountered his first taste of music-biz unscrupulousness when he had to fight 808 State for a writing credit. Worse was to come at the hands of Sony, to which he signed in 1990. One low-key album, Automanikk, appeared; another was never released. Two years later, he left to start his own label, Juice Box, in an effort to make things happen his way. Black Secret Technology is the result, and it's the sound of a man forging his own creative path, secure in the knowledge that no one will fuck with the program.

Black Secret Technology shines like gunmetal glinting in the cold, winter sunlight and sounds like a handtooled mechanism locking precisely into place. Skipping breakbeats flutter across the speakers, subsonic bass wells up, samples shimmer and rolling synths float low in the mix. Drifting through this dense patchwork is the sound of human voices singing soft, almost sweet, melodies. It is what makes this steely album so approachable, so warm. This is carried out to maximum effect across the album's 13 tracks and in particular on the opener 'So Many Dreams', the mellow 'Finlay's Rainbow' and the Goldie collaboration 'Energy'. Elsewhere, like the melancholy 'Silent Cry' or 'Dreaming Of You', the vocals become completely detached, or they are subjugated totally to the insistently flickering beat as with 'Cybergen' or 'Gothtrak'.

The underground has broken cover-and not before time. First Leftfield, now Tricky and this – 1995 is already shaping up to be a shit-hot year for UK dance music.

8 (out of 10)

[Reviewer: Mike Pattenden]

The digital clatter of Jungle music is already mutating into subtler, more ambient styles, as the soundscapes of Manchester's Gerald Simpson prove. The world they describe is somewhere between today's urban realities and an idealised science fiction future.

[Reviewer: Neil Spencer]

GERALD'S role in the development of drum n' bass cannot be over stressed. But whereas early jungle experiments, like '28 Gun Bad Boy', were rough and ragga, 'Black Secret Technology' is dreamy, ethereal, other-worldly even. Gerald's sound has taken flight, soared away from street-tough realism and now dwells in the fluffy, weightless clouds of the imagination.

'Black Secret Technology' refers to the effect of TV and radio's subliminal messages on the brain and it's an apt title, because Gerald himself is creating a soundscape of the subtlest seduction. 'Finley's Rainbow' provides a glorious visual apex, whilst 'Voodoo Rage' explores the communication disturbances of the album title more literally, scuffing up Gerald's acid house classic with muffled snatches of interference. 'Energy', a Goldie collaboration, simply drifts - a thick smoky mass gently punctuated by tingling snares.

Gerald's gift is to invert melody, so that it takes on the off-kilter improvisational qualities of harmony, or emulates the patterings of rhythm, as on the 'Gloc' Remix. The result, combined with his hallmark multidirectional pattering drums is a sophisticated assault on the senses. Somewhere between the second and third hearing of this album, you'll be hooked and you won't quite know why. But then that is how 'Black Secret Technology' works.

[Reviewer: Bethan Cole]

An original drum and bass cadet, Gerald's "28 Gun Bad Boy" LP suffered only from unfashionability back in '92. Now the world's caught up and he's opted to move on, fusing softened beats with gentle vocals. Keep up with him this time round.

[Reviewer: Ekow Eshun]

Gerald Simpson is the single most innovative and most underrated figure on the Manchester music scene and this is his new L.P. Snatches of melodica fuelled dub, subliminal jazz, sublime melodies, sheer blunted whackiness and the cybergenic sounds of techno city weave in and out of Black Secret Technologies 12 tracks to produce something that's, at times, indescribably unique. Even 'Voodoo Ray' is put through the ambient jungle blender and re-invented as 'Voodoo Rage'. The sheer soulful ness of this collection is awesome. Urban Inner City Music for you mind body and soul.

[Reviewer: RC]