This EP is somewhat of an anomaly among all the records I made. In 1996 I was tired of acid, tired of techno, and for several years enjoyed the rough Jungle sound coming from the UK that you could hear on local Amsterdam radio.
When I tried to make some tracks in this style, of course what came out was not this razor sharp UK sound or the mellower Bristol type of drum & bass, but what I at the time called sewer-jungle: basically my old overdriven analogue synths with lo-fi breaks cut up to the crazy max.
I had no idea what to do with this material until I heard releases from new German labels like Position Chrome or Don Q which were very similar in sound to what I was doing. It turned out there was a scene for this industrial breaks mayhem.
At the same time, through some mutual friends, I came in contact with 2 guys from Chicago’s Kultbox label who were releasing this kind of material, and were excited to work with my tracks. The release took a while in the end: the first pressing was not right, and I think there was an issue with the sleeves too.
Meanwhile I played these tracks live with two crummy 8 and 12 bit samplers, an Atari, a scratch dj and a Korg MS-20. Almost no one did this stuff live, but we did manage to reach the grand finals of a National Dutch talent contest for electronic bands. Jury and crowd didn’t know what hit them when these tracks jackhammered into their brains: needless to say we didn’t win.
By the time we played some shows in the US (Chicago/Detroit) invited by Kultbox, I had come to the conclusion that this music was fun to listen to, but a royal pain in the ass to make, staring at very small LCD-screens of samplers endlessly cutting up sampled breaks. No thanks.
So exit breakbeats, and the US shows we played in summer 1998 or 1999 were actually some of our earliest electro live shows. Soon after, Kultbox quit, drum & bass followed jungle and went a very formulaic direction I totally did not like, ad I never looked back. Until now.
The tracks, actually some of the meanest sounding shit I ever made, are of course remastered as the original pressing in the end was still pretty questionable. I even found one track that was intended for a follow-up release that of course never happened…so it’s included here as a bonus track.
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