Raime – FACT Mix 292

A legendary jungle mix expertly put together by Raime. The deep & dark sound of 93-95 jungle coming at ya. Highly recommended!

"The London-based duo of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead has only released two 12"s to date, but the substance of these records has earned them a hallowed reputation that many more prolific artists would kill for.

It's taken a certain amount of time and delicacy to coax them into recording a mix for us, despite, or perhaps because of, their affiliation to Blackest Ever Black, a label independently operated by FACT's Kiran Sande. To date, Raime have created two mixes for public consumption, and they both showed links between their own music and that of passive-aggressive industrial and goth artists from the late 70s and early 80s.

But there's something else that exerts an influence on Raime equal to, perhaps even in excess of, that of anything from the post-punk era: jungle. Jungle, particularly that made in 94-95, when the music was as rough-hewn as it was progressive, is an essential part of Raime's make-up, and it's also the focus of their FACT mix. Upon first hearing Raime's own records, you might doubt the links to jungle, but the more you immerse yourself in their slender catalogue, the more obvious the similarities become: the absolute primacy of rolling drums, the sub-bass pressure, the cerebralism and the brute-force, the dynamism and the dread. Hell, you could argue that Raime's music is a vision of how jungle might have sounded if it had embraced goth's thorny romanticism and early industrial's queasy bio-mechanics.

We can but speculate; all we know for sure is that Raime know their onions, and that their blistering FACT mix aims straight for the heart of the 93-95 sound, with one stretch into 96. From the disorienting drum choppage of Dillinja to the rudeboy tear-jerking of D'Cruze's 'Nightvision' mix, via the none-more-debonair roll of The Truper, this mix isn't some art-school misappropriation of the past, it's a lean, mean love-letter to a future that never quite came to pass - but may still yet." - Fact