BC017 – Five Mixes: The Hardcore Years, 1991-95

London’s Andy Pav and Toronto’s DJ Virus excavate the year-by-year history of breakbeat hardcore turning into drum & bass and happy hardcore.

Early UK hardcore hero Danny Breaks, a.k.a. Sonz of a Loop da Loop Era; via Discogs

I’ve never quite been a real-time junglist. Though I call the rise of breakbeat hardcore (or UK hardcore) through jungle into drum & bass, from 1991 to 1995 in particular, my favorite music of the nineties, I was also reacting to a lot of it after it’d already made its mark. I heard a lot of the classics on compilations, often on American labels. I still stand by some of the best of these—namely, The Joint, a tandem release by Suburban Base and Movin’ Shadow from 1993 that got licensed in the U.S. by Moonshine under the third volume of the Speed Limit 140 BPM Plus series. And that goes for DJ sets, too—though DJ DB’s History of Our World Part 1: Breakbeat & Jungle Ultramix (Profile, 1994) announced itself as a classic the first time I played it, and plenty of other official D&B mix CDs have made their way into the pantheon, during the nineties I didn’t much keep up with mixtapes, per se, though I danced to a lot of jungle sets and heard many others in various vehicles. And there was so much jungle about, so many dubplates, so much frantic activity, that the pirates alone could keep me going for years to come. They will, rest assured, start showing up here, as well. But there are a number of DJs who agree that early-blossoming jungle was so fertile it bears the most minute re-investigation, such as the two spotlighted here.