The junglists are coming
Breakbeats and low-end bass are penetrating Boston's club underground.
by Marcus Wohlsen
It's Halloween night. Two silver Technics turntables sit on the snack bar of a
low-ceilinged student lounge at the Massachusetts College of Art, bathed in the
iridescent glow of black-lit graffiti-art murals and psychedelic video collage.
Wearing a white lab coat, ESP, a/k/a Mike Esposito, hovers over the turntables
and sends frenetic shards of accelerated hip-hop beats skittering across the
small room.
Drum 'n' bassmasters
A crowd of 50 or so has gathered for the rhythmic ride. A skinny
twentysomething artist dressed as Oedipus, eyes smeared with fake blood, and a
bald woman, cigarette butts glued to her head, mingle with Tommy Hilfigered
teenagers wearing exponentially oversized pants. The event, "Tricks and Beats,"
organized by the Boston-based Toneburst music and arts collective, is neither a
rave nor a club nor a concert, but it is one of the few public opportunities in
Boston to hear the sound that may yet bring electronic dance music to the
masses: the unmistakable aural assault called drum 'n' bass.
A musical genre spawned by the UK rave scene around five years ago,
drum 'n' bass -- or jungle, as it's often called -- synthesizes the
relentlessly fast pulse of techno music and the funked-up groove of hip-hop
(see "Jungle," Arts, page 14). The essence of the compositional technique is to
take drum samples digitally lifted from jazz, funk, and hip-hop records, speed
them up, rearrange them with computer editing tools, and lay them over sinewy
bass lines moving at half the tempo. The result is a complex and fierce
rhythmic stew that some say is impossible to dance to and others say is
impossible not to.
Fast-forward a few weeks to Sessionz, a regular drum 'n' bass night
at the Spot, on Boylston Street. Al Fougy, who hosted Boston's first
drum 'n' bass club nights more than two years ago and has been a
tenacious promoter of the music ever since, is cuing up a record in the DJ
booth. After fiddling with it for two minutes, he looks disappointed. "Too damn
slow," he says. "I like the speed."
Costumes aside, the crowd at Sessionz looks similar to the Toneburst audience:
predominantly under 30, dressed down to dance rather than up to impress. There
is one well-oiled couple, dressed in black, whose glam posturings stick out a
little painfully among the laid-back kids in warm-up jackets and Mecca gear.
The dance floor gets increasingly packed as the night goes on. Most dancers
move in the jerky, twitching style that has become a characteristic
accompaniment to drum 'n' bass, with some throwing in old-school
break-dancing moves that pay homage to the music's hip-hop roots.
This scene is relatively small in the dance-music world; there are only three
weekly drum 'n' bass club nights in Boston, compared with nightly
opportunities to hear house, which is probably the city's most popular dance
beat. But even within that small scene, differences are evolving: Toneburst and
Sessionz, for instance, are distinct enough in atmosphere and sound that they
could be considered the two faces of Boston drum 'n' bass.
Toneburst represents the more experimental side. Organized a little over a
year ago by a group of students hailing mostly from Mass Art and Harvard, the
collective has since hosted numerous events: multimedia feasts that include
video, sculpture, poetry, food, and live electronic performances.
"We look at the events like installations," says Jake Trussell, a founding
member of Toneburst. "The whole thing is like the work of art, as opposed to
just focusing on the music."
From a musical standpoint, Toneburst members are not drum 'n' bass
purists. Inspired in part by the New York City illbient scene and late-'80s UK
rave culture, Toneburst exhibits a musical eclecticism that mingles
drum 'n' bass with hip-hop, Jamaican dub and dancehall, ambient, and
whatever else is floating around the fringes of electronica. At a September
event called Junk (a contraction of "jungle versus punk"),
drum 'n' bass DJs alternated sets with local punk bands and noise
artists.
"I've been thinking about it in terms of lab experiments," Mike Esposito says.
"By the nature of the type of experiments I've been trying to do -- and we've
been trying to do in general with Toneburst -- I guess a style is emerging, but
it's a style of experimentation and a style of testing out different
possibilities."
Though Toneburst events occur irregularly, Toneburst DJs did organize a weekly
club night called Microtone, held at Central Square's Phoenix Landing, in
September. Microtone is tentatively slated to start up again when the bar
finishes renovations in early 1998. In the meantime, Toneburst's particular
take on drum 'n' bass can be heard on Herbanism, a CD produced
by Trussell under the name Electro-Organic Sound System and released on Bliss,
his own label. A Toneburst compilation CD should also be available in the next
month or so, according to Esposito.
The other face of the local drum 'n' bass scene is more club-minded
than Toneburst, but it wouldn't be fair to paint this aesthetic divergence as a
rift. On the contrary, club regulars like Al Fougy, G White, and Lenore
have played Toneburst gigs, and Toneburst members are quick to offer their
support for drum 'n' bass promoters' efforts in the clubs. Fougy, the
driving force behind Sessionz, and DJ Bill Crook of Bassline, a regular Tuesday
drum 'n' bass night at Axis, are among those working more consciously
to bring drum 'n' bass into Boston's clubland mainstream. But so far
progress has been slow.
"It's not an easy music to get into," Fougy admits. "It's not one solid beat
like the four-four time signature in house music, where you could be the worst
dancer in the world but still get it 'cause the beat is so repetitive." Even
so, Fougy sees drum 'n' bass primarily as dance music, an effort on
the part of producers "to incorporate house music with that hip-hop flava."
In September 1995, Fougy's Jungle Roots party at Quest (now the Spot) became
the first regular drum 'n' bass night in the city. His early crowds
were made up of regulars at the Loft, where area house DJs Jason Mouse and
Overload would spin an occasional jungle track between house records. Since
then, the fan base has grown slowly; Fougy and Crook estimate that about 100
people attend their nights regularly, with larger turnouts for big-name DJs
from out of town. Many DJs admit that attendees are fans already ensconced in
the area rave culture. Crook, however, points out growing pockets of diversity
that reflect the music's potential to bridge subcultural divides.
"People were talking on the Boston raves e-mail list about how a lot of punk
-- no, hardcore -- kids were starting to convert to jungle because their scene
was kind of dying. They were seeing similarities of a dark, hard, evil music,
or however you want to put it. Another night, I caught some Gothic people [at
Bassline]," says Crook, who got his start in New York City and moved to Boston
to attend BC. "The scene's definitely growing."
Indeed, last spring saw the opening of 4 Front Records, Boston's first
drum 'n' bass-only record store, located on Newbury Street. Owner
Scott Gottesman, who spins at Sessionz as DJ Static, calls
drum 'n' bass a "highly evolved form of dance music" that still
suffers from underexposure in the Boston area. Although he asserts that "there
is a market here in Boston" for drum 'n' bass, the store depends on a
national mail-order service to sustain itself. As seems to be the case with
most of the scene's DJs, Gottesman's almost obsessive dedication to the sound
is what keeps him going: "If you're a junglist, you're a junglist. It's the
power of the music driving us, no doubt."
Brynmore, a/k/a Brynmore Williams, an area DJ who spins regularly at
Spacecakes, a Thursday event at Western Front, in Cambridge, takes an approach
that seems typical of the Boston drum 'n' bass scene. He's dedicated
to electronic music, but he doesn't feel constrained by the rigid subgenre
divisions that usually limit what individual DJs play. Although he spins mostly
drum 'n' bass, Brynmore does not consider himself a
drum 'n' bass DJ.
"For me, if you're a DJ, it should be a story that you're telling," says
Brynmore, a student at UMass/Boston. Translated into strictly musical terms,
"telling a story" means blending other music -- techno, ambient, dub -- into
the drum 'n' bass mix. "In that context, you see the relation between
considerably different styles of music. You realize that it's all electronic
music and the categorization of it is a bit pointless."
Brynmore's attitude may point to the most likely future of
drum 'n' bass in Boston -- that it will find its place both in DJs'
dance mixes and with serious critical listeners.
"Whereas the DJ has a job to provide and play good music and play it well, the
listener also has a job to be critical enough and aware enough to understand if
it's a good mix," Brynmore says. "I know that might be a tall order for a
listener, but quality control comes from both ends. The goal for a Spacecakes
audience is, yes, to dance, but also to appreciate weirdness and diversity when
it's happening."
Marcus Wohlsen edits Boston Low-End Theory,
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wohlsen/lowend, a Web 'zine devoted
to electronica.
beat happenings
Sessionz, Sundays at the Spot, 1270 Boylston Street, Boston. Starts at
10:30 p.m., 18-plus. Call (617) 728-1446.
Bassline, Tuesdays at Axis, 13 Lansdowne Street, Boston. Starts at 11
p.m., 18-plus. Call (617) 262-2437.
Spacecakes, Thursdays at Western Front, 343 Western Avenue, Cambridge.
18-plus. (617) 492-7772.
Information on upcoming Toneburst events is available on the World-Wide Web at
http://www.seacoast.com/~c/toneburst.htm.
Also see flyers at 4 Front Records, 279 Newbury Street, Boston, and Satellite
Records, 49 Mass Ave, Boston.
Schedule information for drum 'n' bass events in the Boston area is
available on the World-Wide Web at
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wohlsen/lowend.