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In 1996, a new sub-genre of jungle began to coalesce called 'techstep', a dirge-like death-funk characterized by harsh industrial timbres and bludgeoning 'butcher's block' beats. The term was coined by DJ-producers Ed Rush and Trace, who shaped the sound in tandem with engineer Nico of the No U-Turn label. The 'tech' stood not for Detroit techno, dreamy and elegant, but for the brilliant brutalist Belgian hardcore of the early nineties. Paying homage to R and S classics like 'Dominator' and 'Mentasm', to artists like T99 and Frank de Wulf, Trace and Ed Rush deliberately affirmed a crucial white European element that had been written out of jungle's history.

The other important source for techstep was the first era of 'darkside', as pioneered by Reinforced artists like Doc Scott and 4 Hero. This was when the teenage DJs Trace and Ed Rush cut their production teeth with sinister classics like 'Lost Entity' and 'Blodclot Artattack'. The name 'Ed Rush' sounds like a take on the 'head rush', early rave slang for a temporary white-out of consciousness caused by taking too many E's. There's a big difference between darkside 1993 and techstep though. The original dark-core had still oozed a sinister, sickly bliss on the border between loved-up and f**ked-up. In 1996, with Ecstasy long out of favour, techstep was shaped by a different mindf**k-of-choice: hydroponically grown marijuana a.k.a. 'skunk', whose near-hallucinogenic levels of THC induce a sensory intensification without euphoria and a nerve-jangling paranoia perfect for jungle's tension-but-no-release rhythms.

The first stirrings of the return-to-darkness were heard in late 1995 withTrace's seminal remix of T. Power's 'Horny Mutant Jazz'. Working in tandem with Nico and Ed Rush, Trace tore the fusion-flavoured original to shreds, replacing its leisurely glidfe with slipped-gears breakbeats, spectral synths and a brooding, bruising bass sound sampled and mutated from Kevin Saunderson's Reese classic 'Just Want Another Chance'. Meanwhile Ed Rush's No U-Turn tracks 'Gangsta Hardstep' and 'Guncheck' took the explosive energy of hardcore and imploded it, transforming febrile hyperkinesis into molasses-thick malaise. The new sound made you feel like you were caged in a pressure-cooker of paroxysmic breaks and plasmic bass.

If Belgian brutalism and early breakbeat 'ardkore resembled sixties garage punk, techstep is like seventies punk rock, in so far as it's not a simple back-to-basics manoeuvre, but an isolation and intensification of the most aggresive, non RnB elements in its precursor. Over the six months, as the No U-Turn squad honed their sound-and-vision, they accentuated the self-same 'noise annoys' elements that punk exaggerated in garage rock: headbanger riffs and mid-frequency blare. Where intelligent drum and bass suffers from an obsessive-compulsive cleanliness, techstep production is deliberately dirty, all dense murk and noxious drones. The defining aspect of the No U-Turn sound was its bass sound - a dense, humming miasma of low-end frequencies, as malignant as a cloud of poison gas - acheived by feeding the bass-riffs through a guitar distortion pedal and a battery of effects. Another stylistic trait was the way techstep shunned the frisky fluency of jazzy-jungle's breakbeats in favour of relative simplicity and rigour. Although the breakbeats are still running at jungle's 160-and-rising b.p.m norm, the techstep feels slower - fatigued, winded, like it's had the crap beaten out of it. In tracks like Doc Scott's 'Drumz 95', the emphasis is on the 80 b.p.m. half-step, making you want to stomp, not sashay.

Techstep is a sado-masochistic sound. Ed Rush declared bluntly 'I want to hurt people with my beats', and one No U-Turn release had the phrase 'hurter's mission' scratched into the vinyl. This terrorist stance is in marked contrast to the rhetoric of intelligent drum and bass artists, with their talk of 'educating' the audience, 'opening minds' and 'easing the pressure' of urban life. Sonically, techstep's dry, clenched sound couldn't have been further from the massaging, muscle-relaxing stream of genteel sound oozed by DJs like Bukem and Fabio, all soothing synth-washes and sax loops semingly on loan from Grover Washington Jnr and Kenny G.

While the intelligent and jazz-step producers prided themselves on their musicality , the techstep producers veered to the opposite extreme: a bracing 'anti-musicality'. With its incorporation of atonal, unpitched timbres, non-musical sounds and horror-movie soundtrack dissonance, the new artcore noir was simply far more avant-garde than the likes of Bukem. In an abiding confusion about what constitutes 'progression' for electronic music, the intelligent drum and bass producers were simply too deferential to traditional ideas about melody, arrangement, 'nice' textures, the importance of proper songs and hands-on, real-time instrumentation.

By the end of 1996, producers like Nasty Habits / Doc Scott, Dom and Roland, Boymerang, E-Sassin, Cyborgz and Optical had joined No U-Turn on their 'hurther's mission'. Techstep got even more industrial and stiff-jointed, at times verging on gabba, or a syncopated, sped-up update of Swans. Above all, the music got colder. The Numanoid synth-riff on Nasty Habits' awesome 'Shadowboxin'' sears the ear with its glacial grandeur, while the trudging two-step beat always makes me imagine a commando jogging under napalm skies with a rocket launcher on his hip. No U-Turn themselves reached something of a pinnacle with the dark exultation of Trace / Nico's 'Squadron', whose Carmina Burana-gone-cyberpunk fanfares slash and scythe like the Grim Reaper.

Where did the apocalyptic glee, the morbid and preverse jouissance, in techstep stem from? Nico described the music-making process - all night, red-eye sessions conducted in a ganja fog - as a horrible experience that poisoned his nervous system with tension. Ed Rush talked of deliberately smokin' weed to get 'dark, evil thoughts', the kind of skunkanoia without which he couldn't acheive the right vibe for his tracks. Like Wu-Tang-style horrorcore rap, techstep seemed based around the active pursuit of phobia and psychosis as entertainment. Which begged the question: what exactly were the social conditions that had created such a big audience for music that f**ks with your head so extensively, that appears to be 'no fun'?
Future-Shock Troops
'It's like this: some people are sharks, and some people are marks. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Play pussy, get f**ked. Come prepared or run away scared...You can't always count on E to shelter you from being vic'd.'
- Breakbeat Mailing Lists's Correspondent's riposte to other correspondents' complaints about the loveless, intimidating vibe at jungle events

If rave culture was a displaced form of working-class collectivity, with its 'love, peace and unity' running counter to thatcherite social atomization, then jungle is rave music after the death of the rave ethos. Punning on the Labour history of cooperatives and friendly societies, I'd call jungle an 'unfriendly society'. Since 1993 and hardcore's slide into the twilight-zone, debates about 'where did our love go?' have convulsed the UK breakbeat community, with grim tales being related of muggings outside clubs, of fights and 'crack' vibes inside. Disenchanted ravers sloped off to form the happy hardcore scene. Others defended the demise of the euphoric vibe, arguing that jungle's atmosphere wasn't moody, it was 'serious'.

In the absence of Ecstasy, jungle began to embrace an idealogy of real-ness that paralleled the worldview of American hardcore rap. L. Double and Shy FX's 'The S**t', a classic 1996 roller of a jump-up tune, kicked off with a gangsta monologue: 'Yo man, there's a gang of muthaf**kers out there on the d**k...Non-reality seeing, non-reality feeling, non-reality-living-ass muthaf**kas, man. And I don't know, man, reality, it's important to me.' In hip-hop, 'real' has two meanings. First, it means authentic, uncompromised music that refuses to sell out to the music industry. 'Real' also signifies that the music reflects a 'reality' constituted by late capitalist economic instability, institutionalized racism, and increased surveillance and harassment of youth by the police. Hence tracks like T. Power's 'Police State' and Photek's neurotic 'The Hidden Camera': lyric-free critiques of a country that conducts the most intense surveillance of its own citizenry in the world (most UK city centres now have spy cameras). 'Real' means the death of the social; it means corporations who respond to increased profits not by raising pay or improving benefits but downsizing (laying off the permanent work-force in order to create a floating employment pool of part-time and freelance workers without benefits or job security).

'Real' is a neo-medieval scenario; you could compare downsizing to enclosure, where the aristocray threw the peasants off the land and reduced them to a vagabond underclass. Like gangsta rap, jungle reflects a medieval paranioascape of robber barons, pirate corporations, secret societies and covert operations. Hence the popularity, as a source of samples and song titles, of martial arts films and gangsta movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, Goodfellas and Carlito's Way, whose universe revolves around concepts of righteous violence and blood-honour.

Where gangsta hardstep shares the Wu-Tang Clan's neo-medieval vision of late capitalism, techstep is more influenced by dystopian sci-fi movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, Terminator et al, which contain a subliminally anti-capitalist message, imagining the future as a return to the Dark Ages, complete with fortress cities and bandit clans. Hence No U-Turn tracks like 'The Droid' and 'Replicants', or Adam F's 'Metropolis'. 'Amtrak', another late 1996 Trace / Nico meisterwerk pivots around the sample 'here is a group trying to accomplish one thing - that is, to get into the future'. Given the scary millennial soundscape No U-Turn paint, this begs the question: why the hurry to get there? The answer: in a new Dark Age, it's the 'dark' that will come into their own. 'Dark' is where primordial energies meet digital technique, where id gets scientific. Identify with this marauding music, and you define yourself as predator not prey.

What you affiliate yourself to in techstep is the will-to-power of technology itself, the motor behind late capitalism as it rampages over human priorities and tears communities apart. The name No U-Turn captures this sense that there's no turning back. It also has a submerged political resonance: one of Margaret Thatcher's famous boasts was 'This lady's not for turning' - her refusal to bow to pressure from liberal Tories to make a U-Turn on Conservative policies like privatization and the assault on welfare. These same policies led to the catastrophic realization of another infamous Thatcher pronouncement: 'There is no such thing as society.'

The persuasive sense of slippin' into a new Dark Age, of an insidious breakdown of the social contract, generates anxieties that are repressed but resurface in unlikely ways and places. Resistance doesn't necessarily take the 'logical' form of collective activism (unions, left-wing politics); it can be so distorted and imaginatively impoverished by the conditions of capitalism itself, that it expresses itself as, say, the proto-facist, anti-corporate nostalgia of America's right-wing militia, or as a sort of hyper-individualistic survivalism.

In jungle, the response is a 'realism' that accepts a socially constructed reality as 'natural'. To get 'real' is to confront a state-of-nature where dog eats dog, where you're neither a winner or a loser, and where most will be losers. There's a cold rage seething in jungle, but it's expressed within the terms of an anti-capitalist yet non-socialist politics, and expressed defensively: as a determination that the underground will not be co-opted by the mainstream. 'Underground' can be understood socialogically as a metaphor for the underclass, or psychologically, as a metaphor for a fortress psyche: the survivalist self, primed and ready for combat.

Jungle's sound-world constitutes a sort of abstract social realism; when I listen to techstep, the beats sound like collapsing (new) buildings and the bass feels like the social fabric shredding. Jungle's treacherous rhythms offer its audience an education in anxiety (and anxiety, according to Freud, is an essential defence mechanism, without which you'd be vulnerable to trauma). 'It is defeat that you must learn to prepare for', runs the martial arts movie sample in Source Direct's 'the Cult', a track that pioneered the post-techstep style I call 'neurofunk' (clinical and obsessively nuanced production, foreboding ambient drones, blips 'n' blurts of electronic noise, and chugging, curiously inhibited two-step beats that don't even sound like breakbeats any more). Neurofunk is the fun-free culmination of jungle's strategy of 'cultural resistance': the eroticization of anxiety. Immerse yourself in the phobic, and you make dread your element.

The battery of sensations offered by a six-hour stint at AWOL, Millennium or any 'non-intelligent' jungle club, induces a mixture of shell-shock and future-shock. Alvin Toffler defined F-shock as what happens when the human adaptive mechanism seizes up in response to an overload of stimuli, novelty, surprise. Triggering neural reflexes and fight-or-flight responses, jungle's rhythmic assault-course hypes up the listener's adaptive capability in readiness for the worst the twenty-first century has up its sleeve. If jungle is a martial artform, clubs like AWOL are church for the soul-jah and killah priest, inculcating a kind of spiritual fortitude.

All of this is why going to AWOL is serious bizness, as opposed to 'fun'. Jungle is the living death of rave, the sound of living with and living through the dream's demise. Every synapse-shredding snare and cranium-cracking bass-bomb is an alarm-call saying 'Wake-up, that dream is over. Time to get real.'

SIMON REYNOLDS

This extract is taken from Simon Reynold's brilliant history of rave music and danceculture "Energy Flash" (PICADOR ISBN 0-330-35056-0).



The setting is a cliched one. Or perhaps it's the perfect scenario for this interview. It's cold, it's wet and it's winter, and West London's social mongrels are trying to battle their way through a gridlocked, grimy Acton. everybody looks mean and Morose like in that Everybody Hurts video by REM. The building that houses the no U-Turn empire looms in the darkness like something out of a '70s horror movie, a latter-day Amityville sheltering something equally sinister and off the beaten track in an area which was never on the beaten track for f**k's sake. You get the feeling that if you're ever anywhere near this place then it would have to be for a reason. My reason is an appointment with Ed Rush, DJ Trace, Fierce and Nico Sykes, label boss of the imprint which, along with Renegade Hardware, is the label Most Likely To in the nine seven - No U-Turn.

Everywhere from the Blue Note (Metalheadz) to Bar Rhumba (Movement) to Bristol and beyond is nodding headz to that filthy, dirty, nasty, scary bass sound that picks you up, whirls you round in a Bacchanalian frenzy and then unceremoniously spits you out with a venom reserved for those you really hate. If you haven't had it done to you aurally by that sound recently then, in the words of the famous Westwood jingle (British Radio 1 hip-hop DJ), "Yer speaker's ain't working". welcome to the darkside.

"And d'you know what?" he says with a manic grin on his face, "It's my sound but I could make another couple of killer bass lines tomorrow". If that sounds like a man full of himself, then think again. It might seem that sound has already been around for ever - everybody from X man to the next man is talking knowledgeably about that distinctive 'dark' sound that we all know and love. At least we do now. But it hasn't always been that way - acclaim has been a long time coming. "I've worked really f**king hard with this label", is his opening shot, "I've sunk the last few years of my life into trying to make all this work and a lot of the time nobody was really interested. Now it feels like a plan is coming together. Do I deserve it? F**king right mate".

Before Nico arrives the studio is only alive to the sounds of the label ticking over - a constantly ringing phone brings plaudits from as far afield as America and New Zealand. DJ Trace, the first to arrive (only an hour late) is busy mixing almost perfectly without headphones from a box full of dub-plates. the black sounds spitting from the speakers bounce off the illustrated walls depicting androids and space mutants. The entire experience, although an assault to the senses, perfectly compliment each other - dystopian beats filling a room full of images of a Dystopia from the not too distant future. Or maybe that's the weed talking. On Nico's arrival the place immediately is lifted as the boss man buzzes from object to object, tweaking some electronic here, checking the fax machine there, chucking a dysfunctional video machine out of a window over there...

Right on cue the phones go into overdrive and he reads from a fax just through from over the Atlantic. "Check this! 'Nico when are you gonna send me some music? I'm hurtin' for your stuff'. D'you hear that? He's f**king hurtin' - that's what it's f**king all about. hurtin'!"

Now the rest of the crew bowl in. Preliminaries and opening spliffs give way to giggles, baiting of Nico and of each other. The core of the crew - Trace, Fierce and the most feted member, Ed Rush - are all west London youths who've grown up together, and are still growing up together, born and raised on the breakbeat who, after honing their skills as DJ's have taken from the club environment they inhabit and put the feeling on wax.

"When I met them I couldn't believe the fresh vibe they were coming out with", Nico remarks, looking at his charges fondly. "The fact is that they are all unbelievably talented. F**king good DJ's who have come to me and I've been able to help them. It was them that dragged me down this road. Ed Rush used to play all this mad stuff that they were all into to me, and I was just blown away".

"Working here is perfect 'cos we all understand each other", explains Ed Rush, the most vocal of them. "Because we've been working together for so long I can say something knowing that Nico knows what I want - with someone else it could take all day". Trace agrees: "Sometimes he's hard work, but when he's on it, he's f**king rinsin', no one can touch him".

You've heard all about the studio countless times, but over and above the weed, the environment or anything else, is the mutual respect each has for each other. The rapport with each other and with Nico is such that it isn't surprising they are making music as well as they are. Trace and Fierce, Ed Rush and Trace, Fierce and Nico, Ed Rush and Nico. The constant is the prescence of their mentor, playing the role of a futuristic Fagin surrounded by his mischevious beat thieves whom picking the pockets of the Reese Project, The Amen Brothers and lord knows what else and then distort and f**k them up beyond recognition. It is their tightness as a collective which shows through, making you understand where they're approaching this all from.

"The new album. It's about endless nights caning it with that lot over there and making mad music. Everything we do is as a group, first of all with Ed, and then with Trace and Fierce. I'm so proud that I've been able to work with such talented people, that it's finally coming together", adds Nico.

If I didn't know better I'd think I was in Detroit. Not that I've been there you understand. But I do read music magazines. The main problem separating my half-baked fantasy from hard-nosed facts (apart from the peculiar red buses and the curiously smelling kebab shop, naturally) is that I'm not listening to Cybertron or Strings Of Life but Amtrack and August.

I'm standing outside a derelict building. I've got wind in my face, rain down my back, and my dreads are platered to my head. And I've got these mad computer noises coming out of my headphones. Crazy sounds. Mad music obviously made by humans, but sounding as if it was made by robots. An uneasy truce between man and machine is at work upstairs, and what I'm hearing is the result of that tension spilling over while the play and record button are still down. I can hear bets working, the filthiest pieces of plastic that side of Soho and it sounds wicked. A futuristic sound right here and now.

"Torque" (the forthcoming album) is where we're at right now. right now. When we move to a new space then a new chapter and a new sound is gonna be the key. It's always changing. Always changing".

Torque is out soon. Buy it.

TAYO POPOOLA



Nico Sykes is the founder of some of the most diabolical drum n bass labels the world has ever seen: No U-Turn, Nu Black, and Saigon. He is also one of the most influential drum n bass producers in the UK. In the following interview, Nico and Sonic talk about the history of drum n bass, Marlon Brando, and living in the ghetto.

Sonic: When were you first exposed to electronic music, primarily drum n bass?

Nico: I don't know really. I've said before that I do. If you mean since the '89 thing then - I dunno - probably a year or so after that. The whole thing kicked off.

Sonic: So were you going to clubs or were you breaking into warehouses?

Nico: I was just exploring. This guy Ed Rush started playing me these records and I was like: "What is this?". He kind of really made me interested in this stuff that I thought didn't sound too good at the beginning.

Sonic: So how did you hook up with Ed Rush?

Nico: He lived across the street from me, and he just had this taste in this music that I dug. I knew a bit about sampling so we made some records.

Sonic: Where did you guys live?

Nico: We lived in this place called Barnes in London. Quite a nice area.

Sonic: So you guys weren't living in the ghetto?

Nico: Aw, no. Fierce comes from the ghetto though.

Sonic: A lot of people think that all drum n bass producers were growing up in the ghetto.

Nico: Yeah, that's true. That kind of bothered me as well cuz that was very much the feeling I had about it, and I think that's true. But we certainly didn't come from "the ghetto" as you put it. We kind of came from a nice house and shit. It was a problem for me at first. I was like, "hey, I'm the rich white boy who wants to this jungle thing as well." Well, I wasn't rich but I thought I might be perceived that way. So we always used to say if someone said, "where you come from?" we'd say Sherisburgshaw or from Acton which is slightly more like ghetto areas in London.

Sonic: So where did you get the cash to start No U-Turn? You said that you were doing some production jobs before that.

Nico: I was bumming around quite a lot and any cash that I had I spent on buying this sampler and the Atari computer and an SY22 keyboard. I kind of had no money left after that. My girlfriend was helping out a bit. Then some one said to me: "See that guy over there" in the pub... "He's got loads of money." So I went over and said: "Do you wanna pay for me to make a record and put it out? I'll give you the money back within a month. And he said, okay.

Sonic: And that is how No U-Turn began?

Nico: Kinda. This guy, when he saw it worked, when we sold the records really quickly and made some money, he said: "Alright, let's do it again." Then it pretty much became a necessity to have some kind of company to put the records out.

Sonic: You guys were pioneers at the time, just messing around, exploring your equipment. Do you remember pushing your equipment to the limit to make some of your records?

Nico: Ab-so-lute-ly not. No way. I'm pretty ashamed to say I don't challenge the equipment much at all. Especially nowadays with the amount of software that's around. I've rarely used filters or sequencing techniques. I was just really getting off on looping a breakbeat. You just find a good beat, I can listen to it go round. Every record I make comes out of a sampler.

Sonic: A lot of journalists claim that this dark side of drum n bass originated, not only from the ghetto, but from chaos that was involved in the UK rave scene. Parties were getting busted, people were O.D.ing, drugs had gone bad, the music hit a dry spot... "Sesame's Treat" was the top of the charts at that time I think. And some journalist argue that drum n bass was a progressive form of hip hop that originated in England's ghettos, same as the Massive Attack story. So what really happened? You were down there. We just hear stories about it.

Nico: What you said there's all kind of true. All of those things were happening. But I think there seemed to be a lot of competition going on between the producers to outdo each other. Who could come with a harder beat than the last guy or a heavier bassline - a kind of competition thing which is probably why the music got so good. It was just everyone trying to outdo each other all the time. Dillinja won in the "Amen" contest, and Roni Size and those guys won maybe in the rolling groove contest. No U-Turn, we were into this dark thing. I dunno. I mean, the ecstasy thing kind of stopped I felt. Everyone around me stopped doing ecstasy. And that kind of meant things were less happy. For a couple of years when we were making these records I was walking around sort of upsetting people at house parties by putting on dark drum n bass or a rolling jungle tune I liked, and saying: "Ya gotta listen to this. This is what's up." If you can imagine if each day some one else is getting a sampler and a sequencer and making software and the whole thing is spreading like wildfire and the standard is just improving so fast all the time that to try and put it down to particular social events as to why certain records got made is maybe a bit like highbrowing it. People just like good beats. Some people were playing the records or dancing at parties and then journalists try to work out the social reasoning behind this. I wasn't into the love, peace, unity movement, or anything when I got into it. I was like: "My God, this music's strong. This is developing very quickly. Each week there's a new, wicked tune, and all the other scenes seem a bit stagnant. i want to be apart of this animal that's just changing and growing and moving." People are still debating "what's jungle?" "What's drum n bass?"

Sonic: Are people really nitpicky about differentiating jungle and drum n bass up in England?

Nico: No, not like they seem to be in America. It's all the same kind of thing I think. People always want to try and put it in a bracket. I think it's best to go: "That's DJ Die". "That's Grooverider". "That's Dillinja".

Sonic: Did you ever get upset when journalists called the sound No U-Turn created "Tech Step"?

Nico: No, I liked that.

Sonic: A lot of people have said No U-Turn's sound developed out of Doc Scott's "Here Comes The Drums", and Alex Reece's "Pulp Fiction". Those were the first two songs that sort of used that two-step pattern. And then Trace did the T-Power remix and then it moved on from there. What were some of your other influences that influenced the sound that you guys concocted?

Nico: Every record that I ever heard that I liked. The No U-Turn sound is this unique situation that can only happen when Ed Rush and I sit in a room together and say: "Were going in. What sample have you got today?" Or Trace. It was really about the mood that we got each other in. Whether it was smoking weed, whether it was just playing each other's sounds and somehow taking an initial idea, maybe just a simple loop and going down a road where each guy is sort of telling the other guy that we're on the right track. If Ben (Ed Rush) wasn't feeling something, some beat I'd made, he'd be able to say: "No, I don't like that...that's wrong." And it wouldn't be a problem. We'd move on. I guess there was a kind of production thing going on where I kind of felt my job was to help Ed realize his dark ideas. It was his decision on beats, which beats he'd like to use, which sounds he'd like to use. I would try to get as much out of his head into the computer and then add in my flavor to it which I guess is something to do with the relationship of the sounds to one another.

Sonic: So the music is a reflection of your collected personalities?

Nico: Nah, I didn't like it when we were doing "Area 51" with Trace and flying saucer and U.F.O. conspiracies. That's not really my thing. I'm quite the other way. But Trace was exploring that area at time, as you'd say. The title seems to be kind of a joke, I think

Sonic: Like "Torque" for example?

Nico: Yeah, I gotta thank my dad for that. That was him really. I said, we need a hard word that looks good when you write it down that talks about moving and everything." And a couple days later he emailed me "Torque".

Sonic: Throw some robotic creatures on the cover here with some syringes sticking out of it. Yeah that's hardcore.

Nico: Yeah, that was a good album...it really was. It could be the best that we ever do. I dunno.

Sonic: So you're never influenced by science fiction cuz I know Optical's really into that.

Nico: Well, I like the film "Alien". That changed the way I thought about things a lot. "Bladerunner", "Apocalypse Now" - I watched it last night with my mate Brock for the tenth time or something.

Sonic: Your production work for No U-Turn has set new standards in drum n bass mixing and in shaping its current sound today.

Nico: I agree.

Sonic: Why did you start up Saigon? Cuz, it seems to go in a different direction.

Nico: Yeah, at the time, the distributor said, "Hey, we want you to sign your label to us for a long time" and I was like "Ooooo." And I thought if I start another label I could always sign away a label and still have a label that I control. So I thought of Saigon. And also there was a lot of what was being called "intelligent" kind of music at the time, y'know? And a friend of mine, Dom Angas (Dom and Roland), was really into that kind of sound and making these really good like - we'll call them "nice tunes" but not really, really dark and heavy. And I really liked them. I'd say to Ed or Fierce "what about putting this record out?, and they'd be like: "No, no, you've got to keep it dark. No U-Turn should always be pushing that area." And so I thought, well, we need another label to kind of put out that sweeter side of life or something.

Sonic: Yeah. Your music has often been characterized as dark in every shape and form.

Nico: Yeah. I like dark stuff. I think the future is probably pretty scary. For a lot of people anyway.

Sonic: Especially with the year 2000 coming on.

Nico: I'm into lightening up really. I'm getting old. I'm going to be doing some more melodic, sweeter things I think.

Sonic: Some aphro-funk?

Nico: I don't know about that. There'll always be people trying to make things darker than the last thing that got made, and some people would say the darkest stuff's been done already.

Sonic: Let's talk about albums. There's "Torque" off No U-Turn, there's Saigon "Incoming" that you released this year, and then there's the album you're throwing around right now. Two of them actually.

Nico: Yeah, the second Saigon album's called "Ambush". I really like it a lot, more than the first one cuz it's just better. Everyone tells me it is, so you should check it out. I haven't decided how it's going to be released or when, and I've still got decisions about artwork I've got to make. I've really got to find a good time to release it. You're gonna be able to get it off the new way before I get around to putting it on the shelves.

Sonic: So wait, you are holding the album back cuz you haven't found artwork yet?

Nico: Naw, it's not just that. I haven't found a distributor in the U.S. to do it.

Sonic: You don't need a picture on it. You could release it in a black slip case and people would buy it.

Nico: Yeah, well I would feel guilty not putting some nice ideas or nice images or something inside when you get it.

Sonic: Put Marlon Brando on the cover.

Nico: Well fuck that! ...Wait, maybe that's a good idea.

Sonic: It'd be great. Have a snail crawling on his face.

Nico: I don't think he'd be into it really, the other information I suppose I should be relaying here is there's also this No U-Turn album. I think I'm gonna call it "Trauma", which is also the name of a Dom and Roland tune..but hey. And it's a 17 track mix cd, which Fierce did in the studio shortly before I left for America in november. It's 17 of some of the most interesting things we did over 6 years. I'm really, really proud of it. And I think it's a really, really great, pure, drum n bass/jungle experiment. It's kind of like an anthology of the work I've done in the studio. So, again, I'm considering when to release it. It should be available soon.

-- Sonic