#90s dnb

If you followed this blog for a bit you might know I make music. Here I’ve compiled a group of spooky season/ fall inspired songs. Inspired by horrorcore, 20s/ 30s jazz, mid west emo, and twin peaks style synth, I hope whoever listens to this finds themselves in a cozy, spooky mood.

Also Spotify has this new feature that allows users to mix the playlists kind of like a dj with transitions and effects. I tried this and got… ok results, I’m a little inept at anything that isn’t playing or composing.

Doppler 20-20 - “One Small Step” Avantgardism Vol. 2 1997 Drum n Bass / Abstract

Although he’s worked in a number of genres in the past 30-plus years that range anywhere from ambient, to trance, to acid house, to breakbeat hardcore, to trip hop, and more, London’s Martin Lee-Stephenson has had a foot firmly planted in the worlds of jungle and drum n bass pretty much ever since jungle first emerged in the UK in the early 90s. From starting out with the jungle group, Law & Auder, to working in the dnb/power pop trio, Moondogg, his jungle and dnb work appears to have run the full spectrum between weird and conventional. But Stephenson has always loved the weird, and sometimes that weird mixes with his dnb and spills over into one of his few solo aliases, Doppler 20-20.

Doppler 20-20 isn’t strictly dnb, though. Really, it’s mostly just abstract and experimental stuff. Stephenson kicked off the project in 1996 with his first Doppler album, Art Électriqué, released on his own little label, December Dawn. That same year, following its disbandment, Law & Auder relaunched as a label and quickly became known for its thematic, double-disc various artist compilations, all of which had an experimental or abstract streak to them, and were mostly comprised of idm and dnb tracks. Stephenson would contribute a wild, nearly seven-and-a-half-minute piece of abstract dnb to Law & Auder’s Avantgardism Vol. 2, in 1997 called “One Small Step.”

While both its title and its opening sample of Neil Armstrong’s famed “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” quote might lead you to think that this track sounds like space exploration, you’d be wrong, because rather than flying itself to the moon, “One Small Step” appears to be burrowing itself far beneath the ground instead. In fact, most of this song sounds like my man did a wee bit too many hits o’ acid and got himself trapped in one of those subterranean levels from Super Mario All Stars for a few hours. But rather than having that sharp and metallic melody of synth stabs from the SMAS score, Stephenson uses soft double bass tones instead. And to drive that Super Mario idea even further, he inserts a couple things that sound an awful lot like effects from the games, as well as a two-note tag of tweeting chimes that resembles when Mario is doing his numismatic thing. Truth be told, I guess one could construe this whole song as Stephenson’s own conception of what Super Mario music could be, but on drugs, because it’s also full full of harried drum n bass stutters, assorted bleeps n bloops, random noises, and stabs of staticky distortion, too. 

Aka Alias - “Titled” Now What Kind of Music Do You Call That? 1998 Drum and Bass

Here’s some fucking ephemera for you all. I have absolutely no clue who this is. There’s barely a trace of this compilation anywhere on the internet and it’s a miracle that I’ve found it. And what’s weird is that, even though electronic music junkies are good at digging up overlooked shit, this one seems to have been ignored and forgotten by virtually everybody. I get that whole thing about rare stuff being coveted, but this is rare to the point of irrelevancy. It’s not even on Discogs for fuck’s sake. That database that specializes in electronic music that has an entry for literally everything doesn’t have an entry for this. This album is too rare for even fucking Discogs. And that’s weird because you’d think some drum and bass fiend would add this to the website, because it’s actually a pretty good comp, but nope. 

Now What Kind of Music Do You Call That? was released in 1998 on a label called Nebula Entertainment and it was the label’s only documented release. Based in Liverpool and started by another group on the album, Timeshard, every track on this release is of the outer space drum and bass variety. Kicking it off is a track called “Titled” by someone named Aka Alias.

This thing is a less than five minute journey, which i guess is appropriate for a song that sounds like it was made for space travel. A bit abstract and dark, Aka Alias uses a sort of minimal approach with their percussion and bass, constructing unorthodox and unpredictable rhythms that are surrounded by a whole host of rotating sounds that we typically associate with space. Those sounds include weird bloops and bleeps, ominous ambient synths, long string synths, and a bunch of eerie, detuned, squealing horn stabs. Aka Alias takes all these sounds and a bunch more and spreads them all throughout this song as they build up something cohesive and then bridge to something different. 

Today’s compilation: