A Guy Called Gerald - ‘Black Secret Technology’
No. 26 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“Gerald deep in the jungle” — that’s how the man who penned The Haçienda anthem ‘Voodoo Ray’ saw himself by the mid-1990s. He was apart and on a solemn mission. Long gone were the acid house rhythms and joyous melodies of his earlier career. Following his seminal drum ‘n’ bass album, 28 Gun Bad Boy, A Guy Called Gerald continued to push his distinctive style deep through the forest of time. With Black Secret Technology, he hacked his way right into a vast new continent of sound.
Filled with ghostly vocals and electric paranoia, Gerald Simpson’s second jungle album is deeply nocturnal, a phantasmagoric trip through swampy ambience and streetwise drums. The greatest joy of Black Secret Technology is its dreamy beauty, accentuated by its disorienting rhythms and psychedelic flashes of light. Lost in a hallucinatory fever, it sometimes evokes a dreamlike sonic vision of a Dickensian underworld, caught between city and country, equal parts Oliver Twist and Artful Dodger.
Equally important is the album’s clash of urban and natural flavors. It drips with the modern and aches with the primordial. Starter ‘Hekkle and Koch,’ a sly reference to weapons maker Heckler & Koch, ducks and scurries in an alley gun fight, its battling drums exchanging rapid fire. On ‘Alita’s Dream,’ watery synths flow above and below crunching beats, the distant calls of vultures and trumpets placing the listener in a fertile shadow-land. Aquatic wood-tone rhythms churn under sensual chanting on ‘The Nile,’ a riverboat drift into the delirium of East Africa’s many chambered heart, calling to mind the Nubian desert and its mighty highland lakes.
Driving the album’s centrifugal force is its diced up beats, spurting electric currents through the mind or casting the spell of a fireworks show. Urb‘s Chris Campion aptly described Gerald’s drum ‘n’ bass aesthetic as “snapshots that defy time propelled by the chronographic motion of constantly revolving beats.” It’s that constantly smooth flow of time, punctuated by Gerald’s percussive constellations, that made him a master of Britain’s highly original sound.
The likes of London’s Goldie and LTJ Bukem would soon show up with their laser-guided beats and jazzy atmospheres. Photek would transform deconstructed rhythms into a martial art. Roni Size would crack the commercial ceiling with a Mercury Prize. Ed Rush & Optical would bring banging metal to the party. But only A Guy Called Gerald convincingly delivered music across the whole spectrum.
‘Finley’s Rainbow’ beautifully channels the reggae soul of Gerald’s West Indian roots. Tapping the then unknown Finley Quaye on vocals, it coos to rock steady rhythms and loving synths. Clouds breaking high overhead, a glimmer of sunlight shines through a thunderstorm as Quaye mournfully echoes Bob Marley‘s ‘Sun Is Shining.’ Elsewhere, the sultry gasps and trills of ‘Energy’ and ‘Silent Cry’ inject a feminine mystique, quieting the album’s edgy prowl into the lonely wilderness.
Yet this is jungle after all. The sweat and grind of the nightclub is never far. The trampoline trance of ‘Cybergen’ rolls to a hypnotic riff, swaying up and down to wheezing drums and metallic kicks. Tripped the hell out, it seems to heave up a rogue’s gallery of inventive sonic tricks — sleight of hand for the transfixed ear. The demented, eerie and clever ‘Survival’ and ‘The Reno’ call to mind Warp Records‘ Artificial Intelligence stable, as well as Future Sound of London‘s moody ISDN and Dead Cities phase, dark yet magical in its infinite imaginings.
But while FSOL, B-12 or Autechre also reveled in dark textures and tones, Gerald never lost the plot. Put rather lightly, his constant whirling rhythms and explosions of bass reminded listeners that this whole thing was about dancing first and foremost. That’s where the real energy came from. It’s a somewhat traditionalist approach given the day’s preoccupation with radio-friendly A&R and cyborg intellectualism.
“If you’re going to take it back to that tribal element, it’ll be mommy drum, daddy drum and baby drum,” Gerald explained to Campion in 1999. “It’s all in that code. The way circular theory works, you can have a rhythm that drifts off slowly and comes back on. If you get that, you’ve almost got like a rocking movement. You’ve got to be able to abuse the sequencer. Sequential timing is not law.”
Eschewing the perfect clock of digital sequencers for his older transistor-based gear, which slipped in and out of time, Gerald embraced nature’s accidental perfections, mirroring the relativity of human thought. The track ‘Life Unfolds Mysteries’ puts this philosophy into soulful song. “Ever changing! Changing! Life unfolds mysteries of the day to day.” A resonant, sweeping synth flows low into the solar plexus again and again. “Smoke on it, man!” It doesn’t get franker than that.
“Methods of rhythm helped early man get in touch with the universe and his small part in it,” Gerald opines on the sleeve of Black Secret Technology, connecting the sharpest drum hit to the eternal cosmos. “He discovered some of the secrets of the rhythm of nature. I believe that some of these trance like rhythms reflect my frustration to know the truth about my ancestors who talked with drums.”
Using technology with a fidelity to the power of rhythm — the heartbeat, the orbits of the Sun and Moon, the electromagnetic pulse — it’s no surprise this Jamaican son of Manchester answered the call of the jungle. Talking with his drums, he helped tune circuitry to our universal ancestry, turning broken time into the deepest of origins.
Tracks:
1. Hekkle and Koch
2. So Many Dreams
3. Alita’s Dream
4. Finley’s Rainbow
5. The Nile
6. Energy
7. Silent Cry
8. Dreaming of You
9. Survival
10. Cybergen
11. The Reno
12. Cyberjazz
13. Life Unfolds Mysteries
14. End of the Tunnel