Here’s a longtime favorite, not particularly hard to find or pricey but I can’t say I’ve ever heard it played. M.A.D. (Mental and Dangerous) did a lot of EPs spread over a few labels, including M.A.D. (his own label), Direct Force, Renk, and a nice jungle remix on Greensleeves. Some of his tunes are more raggamuffin style hardcore, like the a-side of this release. Others (like this one) are just frantic ravey affairs, practically bursting at the seams with samples. There’s some variety in quality level and I wouldn’t recommend his tunes to newbies trying to check out polished “classic rave” for the first time… but they’re great for obscurity hunters who love raw sounding stuff and want to find some under-appreciated jams.
“Drum Dance” is a great example of the more mental side of his work, combining massive stabs and synths, some dark orchestral snippets (possibly from the Psycho theme?), layered breaks and tense diva shrieks. At 8 minutes long, you’d think it’d be much more of a track for mixing than listening to end-to-end… but there’s actually loads of changeups and samples which keep it interesting throughout. It almost makes me wonder how he mangaged to fit all these sounds in his sampler’s memory!
Enjoy, and big respect to M.A.D. for making such Mental and Dangerous tunes!
MAD – Drum Dance
Propa feel good tune. Love the cracky snares before the little vocal drops.
Just found your site, thank you so much! This’ll be a good jungle fix…
\o/ \o/
What a tune! Thanks so much for uploading all of the amazing music you have. Absolutely beautiful. Reminds me quite a bit of DJ Red Alert and Mike Slammer. Have heard very few tunes that progress this nicely.
i pulled out some of his records today..
he is so fuckin underrated.
there was one tune he made in 1992 that got rinsed here a lot until about 1994.