“My music is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be able to make people tap into things.” — Goldie, “Heavy Metal Soul,” Urb magazine, December 1995
Drum ‘n’ bass came from the hyper rhythms of house, techno, funk, reggae and hip hop whirling and twisting through circuits and microchips. It was the sound of time warping more than two decades before machines would distort global reality.
It’s amazing to think back on just how big the buzz about drum ‘n’ bass was in the mid 1990s as an art form that many predicted would utterly transform the future of music. There was plenty of hyperbole about the hyper-breaks-centric electronica. And much of that hype was thanks to the jungle scene’s first superstar, Goldie, a biracial orphan born with the name Clifford Joseph Price, now a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire — high and low, sharp, and deep — sonic knight extraordinaire.
Goldie is himself the Art of the Impossible, an art-former of space and time. And his debut album, which was burdened with perhaps the biggest British press puffery of the 1990s, was itself shot through with a kind of streetwise pomposity: Timeless was a puzzle. On the one hand, a lot of critics didn’t want to be caught sounding uncool or completely out of depth. In 1995, many underground journalists and even DJs didn’t quite now how to listen to the serpentine double onslaught of speedy drums and rolling sub-bass. On the other hand, the title and the music itself was also a smart double entendre, since to virginal ears, drum ‘n’ bass was “time less,” or more like time’s exploding center in a Big Bang.
Where were the ears supposed to home? Where was this slithering bombastic sound trying to make your body go? Where was the through-line between all the drums and bass lines that seemed to constantly deconstruct and reconstruct at the same time, like cobras charmed endlessly into fractal loops?
“There’s no pulse!” was what some said. Like techno before it, hypocritically there were techno heads saying, “You can’t dance to this!” But they were wrong. In fact, it was the outcome of DJs and ravers pushing dancing to the abstract limits of musical discovery. The co-pilot to Timeless was none other than Rob Playford, whose Moving Shadow label was a major cornerstone of the drum ‘n’ bass movement — in parallel to Goldie’s own Metalheadz label, helping light up the careers of Photek, Peshay, Hidden Agenda, J. Majik, Lemon D, and Dillinja. Playford himself had been at the center of the British rave breakbeat sound with 2 Bad Mice, helping score the rave anthems ‘Bombscare,’ ‘Waremouse,’ and ‘Hold It Down’ in 1992.
The DJ duo of Grooverider and Fabio were the leaders of that revolution, playing faster and faster techno and house tracks, especially productions with breakbeat loops and rhythms, as if they were sublimating hip hop into an acid wave that stripped away the metronome, leaving only a smoldering molten core bending and distending the air with its searing heats — hardcore. It’s as if the music went so fast that time slowed down the faster it went, introspection emerging from its hyper crosstown traffic, accelerations that zipped right past one’s grasp on the present.
“Goldie was a hyperactive character with an apocalyptic turn of phrase — another of those charismatic individuals who brought new dimensions to the dance scene — and whose life embodied the entwined histories and cultural miscegenation that birthed jungle,” wrote Matthew Collin in his essential book on the history of acid house and rave culture, Altered State. “He was mesmerized by Fabio and Grooverider and spent his nights dreaming of giving them a ‘forty-foot graffiti masterpiece,’ a dark side epic, assembled from beats morphed out of those he recalled from his breakdancing days.”
That dark graffiti epic was Goldie’s Terminator E.P. in 1992 under both the guise Rufige Kru and Metalheads. The title track ‘Terminator,’ with as Collin wrote, “its shredded, snake-like drum loop that contorted and writhed around the speakers,“ was a sonic blast that almost single-handedly altered the audio landscape in an era when music was already rolling into the future with the tug of a relentless tidal wave. Goldie did not do it on his own. There was A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘28 Gun Bad Boy,’ Geneside II’s ‘Narra Mine,’ Future Sound of London’s ‘Papua New Guinea’ and Shut Up and Dance’s ‘Derek Went Mad’ — a fractured time-road that included Joey Beltram’s hoover-phonic ‘Miasma’ and Kevin Saunderson’s brooding ‘Just Want Another Chance.’ But the innovative explosion that ‘Terminator’ crystallized and then detonated was Goldie in pure sonic form.
It’s a historic turning point, that in one fell swoop, it was as if Goldie cut open the belly of the underground. You can hear that leap in real time with one of the record’s other cuts, ‘Knowledge,’ which includes the rave riffs of hardcore as well as its sped-up 4/4 beat marching through the crossfire of machine-gun breaks. “Urban Blues” is what Collin dubbed it. “Heavy Metal Soul” is how Raymond Leon Roker, the founder and head editor of Urb magazine, described it.
“His hands cut intricate shapes in the air as he accentuates stabs from the robotic snares, his fingers spreading open like fireworks as the music cascades into a sonic abyss,” wrote Roker in some of his most inspired prose, detailing Goldie’s animated and physical expressions of his musical philosophy. “I recoil from a shotgun of thoughts,” Roker continued, before breaking down Goldie’s intricate ideas.
Himself an astute observer of the racism and cultural divides running through popular music, Roker caught Goldie in all of his metal-spiked glory, translating the music that he exudes not just sonically, but hitting upon Goldie’s breakdancing and graffiti story: the breaks maestro was a street artist before he became jungle’s superstar; he sojourned in the U.S. in the 1980s, soaking in hip hop’s golden age.
The fluid running psyche of Goldie shines forth, a multiplicity of percussive consciousness. He gets deep on the beauty and the breaks: “the attitude of the fucking loop and discovering that the loop was the loop and beyond the loop there was something else…” Timeless sounds just like that, an ever flowing spring of busy and stunning insights, consciousness broken and re-fused into something stronger. One of the album’s highlights, ‘A Sense of Rage (Sensual VIP Mix)’ is a dazzling and sensual masterwork of crisp high hats and cymbals, susurrating ecstasy and wicked elastic bass pops — sampled in Darren Price’s breakbeat techno epic ‘Long Haul 747’ in 1997, Goldie’s influence echoes ever outward.
Runnin’ is how Goldie describes music or art to Roker that is on point, in the zone, hitting you deep down in the soul. Timeless is chock-full of runnin’ tunes, not least the title track, a 20-minute plus overture and love letter to not just drum ‘n’ bass, but rave and its multitudes of electronic creations, from ambient to breaks to Detroit techno. Containing the soulful ‘Inner City Life’ within its expanse, the vocalist Diane Charlemagne lifts and weaves her longing through its winding wily edges.
“I look at canvases from the past, I look at tracks from the past that I’ve done and questioned them,” Goldie told Roker, reflecting on how his search for the perfect beat is instinctive and thus unpredictable. It was also driven by rage. “Because, if you’re an artist you do things spontaneously, you know you don’t necessarily know why you’re doing them in the beginning and that is what separates you from the rest. My life is completely like my music, completely like my art without a doubt.”
Goldie suffered greatly growing up as a mixed kid. Nowadays, being multiracial is much more common and accepted, though the planet and the web quake once again with the flames of intolerance. Timeless is riddled with these hopes and fears. ‘Saint Angel’ is a warrior song, a call to arms for those who know that the system was built on slavery and imperialism. Tear it down with the moves. Break free with its slashing, scissoring grooves. Meditate to the rumbling ‘This is a Bad,’ its soaring synths and chirping melodies flashing like stars in the heavens. Hover above the ‘Sea of Tears’ with its entrancing guitar strums and faintest dolphin cries, or dive down into the deepest churning cold waters of ‘Still Life.’
Did Timeless live up to the hype? Emphatically, yes. It still does. Partly in thanks to Goldie and Playford’s clever and versatile production. While it sounds very much of its time, it also sounds outside of time. The human voice helps give all of the synthetic fireworks a warmth that in decades on, makes Timeless a far out cousin of Marvin Gaye and Billie Holiday. Charlemagne’s voice softens Goldie’s moody techno blues. ‘Angel’ and ‘Kemistry’ glide high to her soprano, sustaining over gutsy exorcisms. Around every corner is a séance of the machine, looking into the empty flats of abandoned tower blocks or stumbling into brawling convulsing androids.
Cleveland Watkiss gives the beat-less ambient cyber jazz of ‘Adrift’ a ghostly but gorgeous yearning for the sky and flight. On ‘State of Mind,’ Lorna Harris gives the album an early ballast, its downtempo stand-up bass grounding the mind before the onslaught of drums to come, from the submarine attack of ‘Jah of the Seventh Seal’ to the closing ‘You and Me,’ where her softer tones kiss the crunching snares, its piano leading us into electronic gusts and plaintive melodies, its last gasping calls evoking the torrential response of Goldie’s wolf-like bravado — assured and relentless.
Tapping into things, Timeless IS timeless. It was a risk to give any album such a name, but Goldie put his finger on something bigger. Accelerating faster, and faster, harder, and harder, the dawn of the 21st century gave way to unrest, violence and madness. His intricate shapes and abyssal bass predicted a world come undone. And with his hands, cutting a wolf apocalypse, masking that orphan soul, with such bittersweet sounds of a future hyper real, the truth unbound. We’re always — runnin’…
Track Listing - Double Album:
1. Timeless (I. Inner City Life, II. Jah, III. Pressure)
2. Saint Angel
3. State of Mind
4. This is a Bad
5. Sea of Tears
6. Jah the Seventh Seal
7. A Sense of Rage (Sensual V.I.P. Mix)
8. Still Life
9. Angel
10. Adrift
11. Kemistry
12. You and Me