“As if the boat were being sucked upriver and the water was flowing back into the Jungle”
Back in the late ’90s — there was a period of time when it seemed all musical roads led to Jungle. More, for awhile it seemed like all roads led to Jungle.
They probably still do — but back then, when you were gloriously downloading every single track you could find. Or interlinked snatching in some crazed gold rush treasure hunt of crate digging through peoples’ shared collections, linked articles, names referred due to genre or artist searched…
…I never have found that particular copy of Orbital ‘Dr Who Live’ again…
“No no, don’t laugh…it’s true…”
Electronic file sharing was a mixture of wordless archives offered up — tribal swamps where you had to trawl through chat rooms and strange social voodoo, or quixotic new services like Audiogalaxy and actual website babble.
Sometimes you got advice, sometimes that meant waiting on scripts and connection times to gradually work your way through someones offered archive. DCC connection sends may not resume — “Try moving it and and redirecting” “Nope?” “Fuck”.
Dance would lead to hardcore, hardcore would lead to ambient, ambient to acid, acid to classical music, classic to dub to ’60s acid rock. ’60s acid rock to alt country to Pink Floyd to Bentley Rhythm Ace to Add N to X to Tom Waits to Jungle.
“Of course, this all leads to breakcore and that’s where we’re trapped now”
It didn’t matter much how I searched, I always ended up there. Somethingsomething…you can’t stop Jungle from something…
One of the files I found was named J.J. Jellybean Unites Jungle and Drum’n’Bass. It was a rip of the B side of a Cassette actually called
Jungle Unites
J.J. Jellybean
This is, was, remains one of my favourite mixtapes of all time. It’d kick the tits off a moose. In a remembrance of Jungle when all searches and shuffles are going back there. Some digging found it’d been youtubed. So here it is, sides listed in the order I first heard them.
I would not hear side A for a few years. Cassettes had typos… it was a golden time of innocence and amen breaks…
Originally published 6/7/2014
