BC011 – Five Mixes: Drum & bass on Rinse FM, February-July 2022

Nia Archives, Fabio & Grooverider, A Guy Called Gerald, and Metalheadz keep it locked.

Nia Archives

Shortly after I began this newsletter, I decided to re-organize some of the many sets I’ve tracked myself playing on SoundCloud and Mixcloud since the fall of 2018—in particular, I gathered all the jungle sets, old and new, into a single playlist per site. What a surprise—there was loads of it. Sometimes old, as I expected—Deep Inside the Oldskool, in particular, provided 20 titles I dug over that four-year span. (I’m surprised it wasn’t more; then again, it shows how bitty my listening can be.) But just as frequently, and hearteningly, these sets tended to be new, and not just new versions of old material. I also subdivided my listening logs into sets from specific venues—Rinse FM among them. Some more of this shuffling-down later and I had a number of specific, and delectable, sub-categories ripe for this space. You’ll be seeing and hearing more of these down the line—including lots of non-jungle. But given the year it’s had, it seems mete to start there.

Here is a SoundCloud playlist featuring all five sets.

J:Kenzo with Subreachers, Rinse FM (February 3)

A two-hour radio show featuring a half-hour guest mix placed close to the thirty-minute mark, this is a showcase rather than a mixed-through statement. That’s one reason I prize it—selections of recent stuff tell us much about the moment, and J:Kenzo is skillful at making it cohere. It glides between glowering-ruff and unashamedly pretty—but even the latter selections (as, say, @ 1:14:00) focus far more on taut, minimalist drum play than on dawn-over-the-horizon pads, so that glistening element can stand out as it should, a glint of neon among the steel.

A Guy Called Gerald, Rinse FM (February 4)

Gerald is a monumental DJ, historically and now alike—a whole post dedicated to him is inevitable—and this rambunctious hour gives you a good idea why. It’s a bruiser, but it has a lot of style—Jet Li rather than Michael Bey, mostly. Granted, the final stretch does bring in a lot of CGI-sounding shit, but D&B has always been an Armageddon-evoking thing anyway.

Nia Archives, Rinse FM (March 24)

Here’s what I wrote for The New Yorker last August:

The British d.j. and producer Nia Archives is one of the brightest talents to emerge in the once again burgeoning field of drum ’n’ bass. Her selections tend toward the gleeful—a recent mix for London’s dance bellwether Rinse FM evokes nothing so much as U.K. pirate radio circa 1994. Even better, so do her original tracks, most recently on the EP “Forbidden Feelingz,” whose sure-handed hooks and finely layered rhythms earned Nia Archives a win for Best Producer at the NME Awards, in March.

She’s been busy since then; she appears to have left her monthly show for Rinse after May. Her Boiler Room set from October 27 may be even more definitive than this one—it’s got lots of anthems, for one thing. But the March Rinse set, which I listened to on deadline duty and have kept playing for fun, has that living-snapshot feel common to all these sets, and her timing and sequencing make this sound as on-point as that one with lesser-known material—one metric for a categorically good DJ.

Submotive & Total Science, Metalheadz (Rinse FM, March 29)

I’m going on nothing here except my own guesswork, but let’s say this two-hour show is split between the two credited DJs; there’s no voiceover to suggest otherwise, anyway. There’s no voiceover, period—another way this works as a set more than a radio show, per se. The gleaming-eyed steel-girders-in-flames stuff near the top of Submotive’s first hour has a lightness and airiness about it that makes it sail by. I am wary of overusing the word “snorkeling” to describe certain sorts of bass lines, but if you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta. Either way, it’s the tweaky highs that define the set, even more than the low end. Total Science’s second half is part neurasthenic orchestral soul and all snare pitta-pat—perfect for those who find comfort and joy in the sheer sound of rolling breaks.

Fabio & Grooverider, Rinse FM (July 1)

You never have to wonder if you’ll hear a voiceover on Fabio & Grooverider’s show—now or ever. The grand-geezers of the entire enterprise (see Laurent Fintoni’s oral history of their club Rage, foundational to D&B), they take their sweet time—this set eases in rather than rushing—the first mottled b-line takes a whole ten minutes to arrive! And even then, it’s more Barney the dinosaur than Godzilla exhaling fire. At first, anyway. But that playful quality to the bass, and a refreshing clarity of production, unites the tunes throughout.