Photek: Classic or Dud?

las time we did this i rolled out the reynolds line and got schooled: 'pparently early photek is pretty jump-up-ish.

im wondering how reynolds will treat post-1998 developments in 'energy flash 2: the blog years', because this argument over 'intelligence' has sort of gone away.

yeah photek started with mashy amen like everyone else but lol at outsiders who saw the switch from this to other areas as a duller direction given how boring and ubiquitous that sound seemed by late '95. still baffled by why so much seems to hang on what reynolds thinks tho.

http://www.lifesacharacter.com/cartooncharacters/rodneymoose.gif

i knew that was it, but "intelligent" totally misses the point re black dog and photek because we can talk about mystical alchemy or breaks-surgery but to me that confuses how we talk about the music with actual visceral impact. it all seems to hedge on this idea of class. like if you didn't use amens and looked towards detroit, you were upwardly mobile or something which is just ironic.

too bad there wasn't an equivalent late 90s detroitification of garage by home counties suburbanites eh

LOL

too bad there wasn't a late 90s ?-ification of detroit techno

anyway i show you a mix and this is the thanks i get

the mix is cool. i'm surprised by how non-photeky some of the earlier tracks sound (amens & divas, etc.).

there's also this one, as mentioned on "favorite dj mix" thread

Source Direct versus Photek
Download

Call & Response : Source Direct
The Physical : Photek
Computer State : Source Direct
Touching Down : Photek
Snake Style : Source Direct
Black Domina : Source Direct
The Fifth Column : Photek
Concealed Identity : Source Direct
Technical Warfare : Source Direct
The Water Margin : Photek
Love & Hate : Source Direct
Fusion : Photek
Capital D : Source Direct
Mind Weaver : Source Direct
Enemy Lines : Source Direct
Complex : Photek
Black Rose : Source Direct
The Seventh Samurai : Photek
Wanton Conduct : Source Direct
Ni Ten Ichi Ryu : Photek

http://drumandbassmixes.com/hades.htm

^^ there's some good, good mixes on that page

it's an interesting contrast hearing the two next to each other, considering how much ballyhoo people made about source direct being photek clones. photek comes across as the very much clinical breaks technician. spare, pure, surprisingly funky. source direct sound incredibly rigid and dark. the 2-step is so stiff it starts to push into into cristian vogel territory. (tech itch did some tracks like this)

having mentioned tech itch, it reminds me of a question i've always wanted to ask. just out of curiosity, what was the last drum and bass album you bought? i mean, the last one before you hung it up and said "fuck it, this stuff is over".

mine was ram trilogy's "molten beats"

full-length: probably breakage, a couple of years ago. didn't really like it. otherwise, just a macc 12" i think?

Photek's Solaris, assuming that counts

i never bought that many artist albums anyway so it's actually 'Saturnz Return' for me ha ha never did actually buy a copy of 'Mysteries Of Funk' (but did pick up 2nd hand copy of 'The Prototype Years' last year). you may be disgusted to know the dnb album from this decade i came closest to buying was John B's 'Future Reference' (also 'Malice In Wonderland').

i bought "mysteries of funk" and i was always really, really impressed w/ the sound design on the tracks but i never really liked listening to it. i was always like "whoa, grooverider optical did an amazing engineering this". i remember "rainbows of color", "starbase 23", "rivers of congo", "560 degrees" and "imagination" all being really good. also maybe "where's jack the ripper?" ... anyway RIP big man, at least it's not a turkish prison.

there's some great stuff on "prototype years"! "city lights", "deep inside", "silver blade", "subway" etc. but you NEED the 2-disc version with the VIP mix of "still' on the 2nd disc. incredible! i think grooverider in the liner notes he calls it "more devastating than the borg" LOL nerd!

i wish i still had my copy with the stereo cover that switched between images of grooverider's face and an x-ray of his skull

hey, did anyone hear that last venetian snares album? i didn't hear a word about it but the tracks on his myspace sound pretty great.

arrrggh don't even mention that guy

I bought that Hive/Gridlock album that Jess repped for. It's good enough, but not as amazing as he'd said.

Grooverider's in jail in Dubai right now, ain't he? LESSON 1: DON'T BRING DRUGS INTO THE UAE!

Before that it was the Soundmurderer/SK-1 thing, I guess. If mixes count I've bought a number (some Chopstick Dubplate stuff, various Offshore/Clever things, that Knowledge Introspective cover mount mix.)

mixes don't count, no

Oh wait I might have bought a Bong-Ra album since either of those if that counts.

you didn't have to buy the album, the videos are on youtube

Haha silly me then.

i think mysteries of funk is a great album as is the prototype years (i have the version with the holographic cover, but not the double cd). i still buy calibre albums. i think the last two-step dnb cd/mix i bought from the late 90s was the stakka and skynet comp on audio blueprint and the matrix album. there's probably others i am forgetting.

Oh wait I bought that Digital Dubzilla record for $1 from the Tower sale.

:-o

>:-o

^^ revolted emoticon

@ bong-ra

Haha I like the EP collection of his that I bought, but the other albums are uh not so good (plus terrible terrible covers.)

I bought Fanu's album the other week. Still digesting it. Kinda Photek X Inperspective stuff.

Before that it was Kryptic Mindz & Leon Switch's album, which is 3/4 great, like Source Direct's Controlled Developmentsp X Lexis (there's also 1/4 typical 2-step tracks for the floor).

Planning to write a piece maybe on their alternate takes on breakbeat presha revivalism - it actually pretty cleanly plays out the Photek vs Source Direct HOW CLOSE WERE THEY REALLY?!? angle Vahid raises above.

NOT SO CLOSE AMIRITE

Um, the conflation is something like saying Russia and China have a common border, hence they're the same. I think there's a point of convergence, but yeah the core of their work is different. I'm only just picking this up now though. You're right re the relative rigidity of Source Direct, and I think this is part of the real value of techstep qua techstep - that joltiness, where the groove just seems to trip up and vault you forward and over things. Photek has this too though at times, but what is really clear with the contemporary breakage stuff is that you can have super-complex beats and still have quite a flat or smooth rhythmic sound, and I think Photek's work also shared that vibe at times as well. A lot of it's actually not to do with the beats but the relationship between the beats and the synth riffs and stuff like that. The best techstep is very blocky, not in the sense of being a single block but in the sense of the music sounding like an assemblage of blocks (the rhythm, keyboard riffs, the bass) all knocking into one another constantly.

So to put it this way: Photek was devoted to complexity not rigidity (but at times he was rigid); Source Direct were devoted to rigidity not complexity (but at times they were complex).

Back on topic, "Consciousness" is still one of the most amazing tracks ever. Imagine a whole album like that eh.

I still dispute the suggestion that Photek was way out on his own with his programming though (although his best work is very distinctive I'll grant you). That argument is a bit like people who say "oh my El-B (or Steve Gurley) beats were just so out there and revolutionary compared to the rest of 2-step garage", when in truth you're talking about first amongst (a lot of) equals status.

Not much to say here, but very gratified that this revival has been so popular. If only my Acen revival a month or so ago had proved to be so, sigh.

there's only one SD track i ever went mad for and that's 'Call And Response'. Hidden Agenda just as good if not quite as prolific (didn't get a deal with Virgin).

a point of convergence ... Photek was devoted to complexity not rigidity (but at times he was rigid); Source Direct were devoted to rigidity not complexity (but at times they were complex).

well said ... except i get hung up on the fact that, as you pointed out, there were many other producers you could rightly say were devoted to complexity. 4 hero and lemon D are two that immediately comes to mind, i'm sure there are lots of others we could figure out after five minutes of thought. and as far as rigidity goes, there's pretty much half the genre up there w/ source direct!!

so i wonder that when you say (although his best work is very distinctive I'll grant you we maybe haven't really yet got down to what it is that people were reacting to about photek and source direct, and that people *still* react to when they hear latter-day inperspective and reinforced tracks...

immediate smart-ass answer would be asian woodblocks and jazz hi-hats

Yeah Hidden Agenda! I'm not sure if either Photek or Source Direct ever topped "Dispatch #2".

Just listened to some of Modus Operandi again and I think it does have the joltiness I was implying it lacked upthread. Maybe what is notable about it though is how spare the programming is: very complex and precise, but Parkes wants you to hear every single snare. (x-post - maybe this is what you're looking for, Vahid - the individual drum sounds don't get lost in the blur of drums like they did in earlier jungle, or in mid-nineties Lemon D etc. But I think the breakage stuff is quite a bit about getting lost in the blur of the drums).

Also I think the Leon Switch/Kryptic Mindz album is in a similar ballpark (rather than allied with SD and Lexis against Photek as, again, I implied upthread).

The key maybe is that I forget how similar Lexis and Photek were - much more so than Photek and SD. Lexis also had that desire to shine a spotlight on each single drumsound. But I do like Lexis slightly more. Not sure why. He's hookier maybe? More melodramatic? Obv. he was following in Photek's footseps. This is a Lexis track ("Irrampent") I posted to another jungle thread a short while ago:

http://www.zshare.net/audio/87602446672097/

Something like Source Direct's "Enemy Lines" has a very different strategy to Photek: that very simple opening kick groove, the tick-tick hi-hats, that bassy synth riff on top of the flooding sub-audible dub bass, the throbbing wasp hum, and then (and this is U&K) the sudden rush of hyper-speed, hyper-complex metallic drums that almost sound like they're playing in anothe room (they also feel quite "high" in the mix - not loud, but actually high as in somewhere above your head). I love this track to death but the "groove" is about the interplay of different elements, whereas on Modus Operandi at least Photek is always keen to keep the drums really visible and clear - though I agree they would be better if they were mixed to sound louder vis a vis everything else.

("Enemy Lines" is quite unusual for a SD track though - this is the problem with generalising about how particular producers approach rhythm etc.)

the individual drum sounds don't get lost in the blur of drums like they did in earlier jungle

right!

so i just went out for an hour, went to the bookstore, picked up some groceries & drycleaning etc. and as i'm driving around town, decided to grab "metalheadz 2", stupid choice because photek's not even on it, but whatever, figured i'd try to understand what made source direct so "complicated"

here's the best i can figure

1) they do all sorts of different fills. their "dark metal" is sort of ridiculous in this regard. the first three bars are fairly constant, they do a different tiny fill at the end of every fourth. but then they also are constantly adding and dropping tiny elements all over the place

2) you are absolutely right, they mix the drums differently. all of the other producers use very "wet" drum sounds that definitely overlap each other. j majik is quite complex - at least "my sound" remix is - but his drum sounds blend into one another, as do grooverider's, ed rush's, etc.

interesting to note that the other producer on metalheadz 2 that mixes the drums that way is optical, who is like the poster boy for rigid! but he does weird things with smashing the bars into each other, truncating the drum loops so the whole thing sounds rushed and strange.

but i think aside from drum sounds this point here is totally key:

3) they're doing DRUM & bass rather than drum & bass. meaning that there's a huge sense of space in the source direct productions. unlike, say, ed rush or digital they don't bury the sound under a thick wall of bass pressure. they're very judicious with the bass, almost reserved to a fault. they basically keep things open except for some thudding accents on the end of bars. and the bass is NEVER midrangey, it's always sub-bassy, so it sounds less like a bassline and more like something huge smashing into the wall of the club, just a concussion in the air.

adam f's "metropolis" seems to share the approach. a very source direct-y track.

"hidden agenda" stood out as being the most self-consciously complicated in their approach. they also have some sort of fundamental difference w/ the rest of the pack that's hard to pin down. maybe that their tracks have basically NO forward momentum at all??

Yes! "Metropolis" fits in very well with both Photek and Source Direct.

Totally the connection with Optical is there too, really the problem with Optical is that "To Shape The Future" is as interesting as he ever got.

Re "Dispatch #2", for me no other track better sums up how confounding the rhythms can be in D&B. It's especially important that the first two minutes are so are like the sparsest, most straightforward 2-step track you've heard, and then the beat just breaks down into this absolutely weird groove intent on eating itself - yeah, it doesn't really have forward momentum, it just coils inwards, it's like a machine that keeps malfunctioning more and more dramatically.

"Pressing On" takes this internal coiling to a point that just becomes a bit messy, it's the malfunctions but there's no machine, though I still really like it. (this balance between operation and malfunction is pretty important for this kind of late-90s D&B though - techstep ultimately recoiled back into smooth operation but it is possible to have too little operation and too much malfunction. This would be my criticism of some of the most hyper-complex breakage stuff and Fanu to some extent: it verges on drill & bass style loss of groove.

"1) they do all sorts of different fills. their "dark metal" is sort of ridiculous in this regard. the first three bars are fairly constant, they do a different tiny fill at the end of every fourth. but then they also are constantly adding and dropping tiny elements all over the place"

Vahid I assume that, if you didn't already know it, you've read me harp on about Dom & Roland's "Elektra" enough times to track it down? It really is the absolute pinnacle of the "dark metal" style I think.

mutant revisited = more interesting than optical ever got! techstep must be the only genre that just got worse and worse from the blueprint! or maybe all genres are like that ...

is the adam f album ('colours') any good? i keep seeing it in my local secondhand shop, consider buying it for a few seconds then move on. he was so mindblowingly good with "metroplis" that i was always a bit disappointed with the rest of his output - mainly the jazz funk influenced stuff. i wish he'd stuck with those razor sharp beats / basslines. lets face it though, you're never going to top a track like metropolis.

alex reece is another one who produced a seminal record for metalheadz and then got bogged down in jazz d&b lite. (having said that, i loved the "feel the sunshine" ep when it came out).

although alex reece seemed to disappear all together after about '97. is 'so far' any good?

wait you like "feel the sunshine" but you don't like "jazz d&b lite"?

i actually love me some alex reece too - i ESPECIALLY love dj pulse's remix of "feel the sunshine". but i never really listen to my copy of "so far". put it this way, the tracks are linear to a fault. like even his best stuff, "pulp fiction" or whatever. the groove is established in the first 30 seconds and it goes like that until the end. at best he adds an acid line, a trumpet, a soul sample. but very very linear. and if i'm going to listen to stuff like that it's gotta be loud and rude, like urban takeover or click'n'cycle or mulder.