Various – Drum & Bass Selection 1 (16 Of The Most Requested Rewinds)

Such a good compilation, remember visiting London a number of times in the early 90s, a friend of mine said to me on one trip, "have you heard this shit they are playing on the pirates now?," for someone who had been a big Detroit Techno aficionado, but no longer inspired by the music coming out of there, that "shit" on the radio back then was revelatory, it was like music from another planet, it was the bleeding edge in dance music, brilliantly innovative, and a completely new trajectory in electronic music. Problem, was, unless you were living in London, trying to keep apace of things was difficult, so I settled for compilations like this, to at least get some kind of window on the scene. Drum & Bass Selection 1 gives a taste of the energy and excitement of that era, just try and imagine the last 28 years never happened, and you got home one night, put the radio on, and this music was blasting out... So many timeless tracks on here, sounding as fresh now as they did all those years ago, depressing to think it has been so long...

This release was the first to showcase (and name check) a new style of music that emerged from the ashes of rave and had mutated from the Darkcore subgenre. Whereas the latter eschewed the helium vocals and "toytown" samples (lovingly embraced by the nascent Happy Hardcore scene), the compliation title hints at the focus of the tracks in this compilation and where a newer style of music was moving towards. The tracklisting is chronological, with the link from Darkcore to D & B highlighted by the first three tracks - 'The Dark Stranger', the beat-driven 'Warpdrive', and the Uncle 22 remix. We are treated to the rapid machine-gun beats of Subnation's 'Scottie' and the Mad P-sampling 'The Way' along the way, but the overiding focus of the compilation is the emergence of the reggae/ragga vocal sample, showcased by at least two-thirds of the tracks here. The highlights however, are the two releases that do not rely on either the 'dark' or ragga vocal notions, namely 'Spiritual Aura' and 'Music Box'. Perhaps it is credit to the (reputation of the) producers involved, but these tracks still sound as fresh as they did back in 1993/94.