Since I’ve been slack about rerecording the 96-98 set from Sunday, here’s one of my favorite tracks I played during it: a lesser known tune by Facs. This tune pretty much defines hardstep for me – a heavy steppy beat (based on that processed “Life Could” break which is all over 96-98 tracks), classic b-boy samples and vocal snippets, kinda stressed and moody music without being full on dark technoid-y techstep… nothing too frantic, but oozing vibes with every measure. Though it’s very much optimized for spinning, there’s good changeups throughout, including a pretty big breakdown halfway through where it almost sounds like the tune ends…keep listening for more steppy goodness though. Also, though certainly not sounding like frantically chopped jungle, there’s quite a bit going on with the breaks… multiple layers at points, and a nice retrigger/delay effect on the edits.
Facs is best known to me for his tunes with Dylan (which I bought the majority of back then), but he also did loads of nice tracks on his own in those days, including a bunch on Based on Bass, Smokers Inc and the oh-so-classic Droppin Science label (run by Danny Breaks, who was another master of this sound/ quite possibly the don when it came to b-boy jungle/dnb in general).
Facs – Journey Into Sound
Wicked… Heard you drop this on Sunday. This was one of the first 12-inches I picked up for <1 pound back in the late '90s at the Notting Hill Music Exchange. I always loved to totally drawn-out intro. (Thanks for pointing out the break too, I always wondered what it was called.)
We used to play this a lot, top tune which I totally forgot about. now where did I put my copy???
did you master this at all? or is this a raw rip off the record and just normalised?
j
0=0
will have to check it out, does it sound over compressed? I usually don’t master the rips they’re pretty much straight off record.
it sounds awesome. It just has slightly more modern dynamics than the time (so i was curious)…but this was when people were really just starting to push the desks in DnB.
also (and you probably already know this). the mp3 encoding process adds volume…so if you normalize to 0dB you might get overs….apparently if you normalize to -1.1dB you don’t get that sort of clipping from the encoding process.
i just learned this the other week.