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Ed Rush and the sign that reads No U-Turn Back in 1996, Ed Rush, Nico and the No U-Turn crew were way out there, cooking up and defining what was probably the cutting-edge in darkside drum n’ bass. Whilst the west London-based label’s output dates from ‘93 with the release of Ed Rush’s ‘Bludclot Artattack,’ and had been consistently active in releasing a series of steadily improving/inventive material, it’s really been from the end of ‘95 (Ed Rush’s ‘Gun Check’ and ‘West Side Sax’) that NUT have really pushed out and carved a truly distinctive niche for themselves, pioneering and refining their own unique sound. Since then, they’ve released a consistently excellent stream of releases, each attempting to outdo its predecessor, blitzing dancefloors, leaving jaws dropped and heads reeling in their wake. Although it’s Ed Rush who’s generally been picked up on by the media and lauded as the figure pioneering this dark, technoid sound, it seems that co-conspirators Nico (No U-Turn’s founder) and Trace are equally responsible. Nico is the engineer behind all the label’s releases and has remained (until now) anonymous as Ed Rush’s uncredited co-writer. Having worked as a sound engineer for some years before meeting Ed and discovering hardcore (via the latter’s ‘Bludclot...’ demo), he is the man with the technical know-how, and proudly describes his role as some kind of studio-mentor: helping enable DJ-protégés to get to grips with the studio technology and realize their ideas. "When I first met Ed, he was just this young DJ...I helped teach him a studio language, taught him how to really use a sampler." Besides running No U-Turn, its Nu Black imprint, and another label, Saigon, Nico has a long list of writing/engineering credits that includes work with Dom & Roland , Phil Legg (including an amazing rush of a track is due out on R&S under the pair’s TMF moniker), Pete Lazarro (who worked on the Spider Net track), and Lars Vegas (as Doppleganger). I meet him at the No U-Turn soundlab, where he’s rinsing out a new track with Trace, who’s returned from Philadelphia just a few hours ago, and is now totally locked into the composition process - jetlagged, heavily stoned, yet highly animated. Their base is a small storage unit on the third floor of this humble Victorian warehouse in Acton Vale. Inside, the walls are covered in mad cyber-tech. murals (menacing alien figures; futuristic, ‘Blade Runner’ - style cityscapes; biotech bodies, etc.) and lit by overhead fluorescent tubes. Dingy and bunker-like, in one corner of the room is a pinball machine, in another a table and cabinet from which the label is run. the floor is strewn with piles of records, papers and magazines. In its center is a sofa, and against the back wall, the hardware that forms the miniaturized modern studio: an Akai S1000 and a rack of a half a dozen FX units; an SY22 keyboard; a 16-track desk, and an Atari with keyboard and monitor, all hooked up to the obligatory Cubase package. A modest single room, this is the No U-Turn nerve-center. The track they’re working on (‘Resident Evil’) is immensely dark, littered with eerie strings, haunted industrial noises and delays, and monstrous slabs of bass. Incredibly, it’s started and finished in under six hours, which as Nico explains is a regular process. "We just work very intensely, just start and keep going until the job’s done...Sometimes we’re at it until seven in the morning. There’s none of this leaving a track and coming back to it the next day." Our ‘interview’ turns into this massively ruptured affair. I just kind of hang around whilst they’re recording - observing, getting odd responses and bits of chat between tracks. Nico is wired and restless, pacing the room, boasting and ranting semi-coherently. So stoned he can’t finish his sentences, he just looks at me, gestures to the speakers, and opens his arms: "you know what I mean?", as if I intuitively understand what he’s trying to explain, as if the answers are all there in the sound, and talking around it or attempting to theorize is pointless, unsatisfactory. Basically he’s shitfaced. It’s intriguing to watch the way the pair work together, and hear the hybrid mix of terms they use in describing the track’s construction: part junglist slang ("rinse out", "rewind") techno-terminology (time-stretching, quantising, etc.), and more traditional music references (bars, beats, sections). Trace has certain set ideas, and advises Nico with almost technical precision (exactly when to drop a certain track in, what weight a track should be). Nico does the hand-on work, manning the Atari, making alternative suggestions, tweaking EQ’s and filters, and instinctively finding the sounds for his partner. Trace crumbles off another bud of skunk, wanders around the room, and barks out "darker! Make it darker!" It looks hilarious. It sounds incredible - stupendously heavy and dripping with malice. I remember first hearing the Spider Net track (‘Awake’ - one of the first really feature that swarming, distorted bass sound) at The Blue Note, and the whole place just fucking erupting, recalling scenes from ‘94 when Dead Dred’s ‘Dread Bass’ first dropped, rolling out those cavernous basslines for the first time, carpet-bombing the senses and opening up a whole new dimension for hardcore: the reign of the bass. What’s so curious here, is that such an undeniably dark and apocalyptic sound can give rise to such collective euphoria - bodies jerking and leaping about in a kind of pre-millennial madness - a nihilistic abandon in the face of darkside’s symbolic apocalypse. Since ‘Awake’, each new release has elicited a similar pandemonic response. You get the sense that 3 years of hard graft and exploration, of learning the rules and then exploding them, is starting to pay off. That, buoyed by this knowledge, and working almost intuitively together, the confidence and euphoria of it all suddenly coming right big time is now a spur for No U-Turn to push on to even dizzier heights. Nico and Trace know this, are literally glowing in the knowledge that what they’re doing is on fire, right now. As Trace boasts: "we’ve just go the formula!" What’s so distinctive about the label in ‘96 (and the tracks they’ve produced for other labels, such as Ed Rush’s ‘Kiliminjaro’ on Prototype, or ‘Skylab’ on Metalheadz) is their monumental sense of darkness, a mood which seems utterly at odds with the current, summery vibe and the mellow meanderings of jazzcore/artcore junglists like Photek, Omni Trio and E-Z Rollers. (One of the enduring memories of the summer was watching this scowling group of junglists moving sinisterly through a festival sea of sundrenched, shirtless bodies, clad in huge black puffa jackets, eyes masked menacingly behind ‘alien’ - style shades). This year’s NUT releases have explored and defined the darkest reaches of techstep, which has been the development in drum ‘n bass. Whilst NUT may have pioneered this style, it’s Grooverider who’s taken it to the masses, caning it at The Blue Note and on his Kiss FM slots. Draining as it is, darkside has come as a vital shot in the arm for jungle. Now, the scene’s exploded once more, being dragged and twisted into a wealth of new shapes and permutations, as a glut of producers rush into the breach (Arcon 2, Dom & Roland, Alpha Omega, Doc Scott’s incredible ‘Shadowboxin’ and ‘The Unofficial Ghost’, Adam F’s ‘Metropolis’, John B’s ‘This Warning’, Panacea’s ‘Tron’, labels like Dread 31, Renegade Hardware). Taking its cue from the earlier (‘93) technoid sounds of darkcore (Metalheadz ‘Terminator’, Ray Keith’s ‘Terrorist’, Tango’s remix of Flytronix’ ‘Disturbance’, Doc Scott’s ‘Here Come The Drumz’, Shimon’s ‘Predator’, etc.), this is a sound of saturated with washes of grainy irradiated noise, clanging metallic sounds, and malevolent, deep bass dirges. Simon Reynolds links its gloom and frigid whiteness to some of the more gloomy, experimental gabba coming out of Germany on labels like PCP, Dance Ecstasy 2001 and Cold Rush, where titles like ‘The Endless Fog’, ‘Symphonies of Steel’, ‘Doomed Bunker Loops’(!!!) and The Zombie Leader is Approaching’ aptly describe a similar sense of industrial desolation and dread (Cold Rush’s slogan is "recorded somewhere in the lost zones"). Brooding and distressed, this style of gabba is similarly marked by an aggressive mid-range which, like some sinister, synthetic fog, forms an all-engulfing, electro-static wall of noise (chilling, droning, buzzing). Whilst it may be less rhythmically warped (all zombified, 4/4 insistence), there’s still no escaping its relentless, paranoid sense of future-shock. There also appear to be a faction of operatives within techstep who are shaping it into an increasingly ambient atmosphere, to what could be termed ‘ambient darkside.’ Nico’s New Black releases (along with tracks such as Source Direct’s ‘Stone Killer’, Six Degrees of Separation’s ‘Uuurgh’, and others by the likes of Dom & Roland, Innervisions and Arcon 2) perfectly fit this territory, a sparse and thoroughly alien void, where tracks are often left to unfurl beatlessly over long periods, and where the periphery, rather than being subordinated to drum n’ bass’ traditional rhythmic thrust, is given at least equal weight, if not promoted to the foreground. As such, the sub-genre is more geared up for (uneasy) home-listening than the utilitarian demands of the dancefloor. In fact, if you stripped away the breakbeat exoskeleton entirely, the residue would be a kind of immensely spectral, unsettling isolationist ambience: paranoid and discomforting, in direct contrast to the soothing new age slop served up by the majority of ambient practitioners. Techstep/ambient darkside thus becomes the inheritor of the uneasy atmosphere’s evoked by isolationists like Main, Total or Zoviet France. Built as a series of sprawling structures, and "100% sample-based," tracks are filled with a peripheral dread-fulness (overlapping loops of grainy ambient noise: gaseous hisses, spectral, tingling metallic tones and drones, washes of sweeping alien eeriness) forming a bubbling, pulsing ganja-delic unease which is pushed to the foreground, and often left to unfurl alone. Grainy vocal samples flicker repetitively, partially buried. Then, of course, there’s that huge, malevolent bass sound that’s been jumped on by everyone from Doc Scott to Boymerang: double-heavy and laid on in thick, aggressive slabs; a kind of dense, swarming mass of distorted, low-end frequencies. Nico describes the bass sound as easily achieved: "We just sampled this bass line from a Reese Detroit thing, which we simply put into the sampler and fed through a mass of distortion...we just distort it to the point where other people might say ‘that’s horrible - that’s just too overloaded!!’, and would never use it..." Elsewhere, he talks about the scouring an disguising (roughing up) the cleanliness of digital, how "the mission at No U-Turn is not to improve and polish the sounds we sample, but to leave the mistakes and graininess in, all the dirt..." Thus, ‘The Droid’ becomes a ruffed-up, terrified crawl through a series of overloaded/distressed drones, loops and beats: the perfect sound-snap of a society in a state of crisis/distress or industrial meltdown. Where so much drum n’ bass is static in structure, or seems content to find a half-decent beat and lamely ride it out over a track’s entire length, No U-Turn fuse this sense of suspension/stasis (endlessly long loops, repeated motifs) within a modulating, dub-wise fog that’s never less than gripping. Gradually shifting structures are constructed from some complex, cut-up breakbeat programming and tiny events of macro (or peripheral) level (almost inaudible movements; tracks lined and prickled with little shocks and jolts), making the whole sound devastating and horribly hypnotic. The effect is similar to that of the Wu Tang crew (particularly Genius/GZA): a dread-full, inescapable sense of suspension. The first release on the label’s Nu Black imprint, an Ed Rush/Trace/Nico collaboration, is a superb example of their process. Constructed as a series of looped drones and dissonances, ‘The Droid’ opens with a head-splitting lattice of overloaded trebly eruptions. Cold, aggressive blasts of mid-range noise scythe through the track; occasional clips of delayed bass echo out like muted meltdown sirens. The whole thing sounds as teeteringly dissolute as Mark Stewart’s ‘As the Veneer...’, Disco Inferno’s ‘D.I. Go Pop’ or Third Eye’s ‘Semtex’: bubbling away, disintegrating, falling apart at the seams. Cities crumble, walls and buildings cave in, the ground slips and cracks open beneath you, reactors go into meltdown, industrial complexes are gutted by fireballs, ripped to pieces by a continuous series of rippling explosions. If Main’s cold, barren dronescapes are calm and post-apocalyptic, then the seismic tremors of ‘The Droid’ or ‘Input’ are restless and feverish, imagining the future exactly at the point of catastrophe: everything is frenziedly consumed and erupting around you. The second release in the series (Trace/Nico) is an equally ominous fucked-up slice of postmodern urban psychosis. On ‘Input’, thick chunks of liquid bass slide around menacingly, as breakbeats are cut to ribbons and frantically filtered. ‘Crystal is an incredible, hypnotic tapestry of locked-groove noise and clanging steel. A monstrous, slowed-down vocal sample creeps beneath the track, and near its end, massively distorted clips of bass lunge in and out. This (skunk-fueled) fixation with darkness and dissolution/collapse is continued in the scene’s continued intrigue (since ‘Terminator’) with, and perpetual use of imagery and sounds of sci-fi futurism (particularly flicks like ‘Predator’, and ‘Terminator’, ‘Robocop’ and ‘Bladerunner’). As ‘Amtrak’s sample explains "here is a world trying to accomplish one thing/and that is to get to the future" (and check that demented accompanying laugh - nasty!) Like the PCP and Dance Ecstasy productions, the beat is militarized, and often infinitely/precisely shaped through the use of the sampler and computer-based composition packages (where sound material becomes as malleable as the shape-shifting, chrome-bodied terminator in Cameron’s ‘T2’). Both gabba and techstep’s fixation with a monumental bleakness prompt you to some pretty grim predictions for the future (on Source Direct’s ‘The Cult Remix’, a sampled voice even pretentiously announces that "it is defeat that you must prepare for." No humor or exclamation mark, just a statement of ‘fact’). Just as the noise-music of Russolo’s Futurist orchestras echoed the violent advances of industrialism and urbanism at the start of this century, so at its end the sound of darkside reflects the confusion and fears of a world on the threshold of all manner of massive, unparalleled ruptures and rapid transformations. Its scene is one of exploding urban populations, where surveillance becomes more and more prevalent, where genetics is increasingly understood and manipulable, where the social is increasingly eroded, and the notion of reality itself undergoes a huge flip. As the future mapped out for computerized machinery (much of which is controlled by the military) is one of increased self-intelligence (humans increasingly taken out of the loop of control), darkside describes a chaotic, dystopian world that’s dominated by cyber-technology, where machines have got smart or even out of control. With the individual increasingly withdrawn and alienated, life is recast as a paranoid and confused struggle for survival. Nico brushes off discussion on the reasoning behind the scene’s current emphasis on darkness, describing "the dark thing" as simply "...the place where Ed Rush and Trace and other DJs want to go at the moment." Whilst he admits a personal preference for "a more musical style" of drum n’ bass (check out his work as Doppelganger on Mind The Gap), he simultaneously gets off on the possibility helping his cohorts achieve ever-darker sonic plateaus: "I really think I can get it darker and nastier for them...but I don’t enjoy the process of being in the studio and actually making it, because it gets just too intense! But then, when it’s all finished, and I listen to it later, it just sounds so baad!!" As pioneers and prime movers on the darkside scene, No U-Turn stand on a bleak and confused future-frontier, provide this dark, immense (and immensely addictive) blitzkrieg to the senses. Laughing and grinning wildly, you dance on: an interface between terror and bliss. |