Notes from the forest #8

Proto-Halftime Jungle Drum and Bass tracks

I was recently sorting my CD collection and stumbled across the first release by Jonny L on his own label Piranha. Bell is the main track on it and it has that irresistible bboy vibe to it, still love it. The last track Approaching though made me stop sorting - that is a true halftime drum and bass track! The single came out in 1999 a year before Deadline by Digital on Doc Scott's 31 Records. Deadline featured a rhythm and an air horn that made it an exceptional drum and bass tune at the time: The tribal beats had no up-tempo snare and the groove focused on the genre's halftime tempo of around 170 bpm. The tune is considered the breakthrough halftime jungle drum and bass track, spawning a whole subgenre in the 2000s and a more minimal turn with the autonomic wave led by dBridge and Instra:mental in 2011. So if Approaching by Jonny L slipped through my memory, could it be that there are more proto-halftime tracks out there?

I remembered there were non-drum and bass tracks on the Metalheadz Box album which I found exciting back then and yes, ten out of eighteen tracks were 140 bpm and below. The tracks had a distinct downtempo character: Urban Style Music 90bpm Reprise by Lemon D, Westway by Ed Rush and Reckless Mission Dub Mix by Optical. They are all around 90 bpm and have that hiphop swing feel, not exactly halftime dnb as we know it today. So I started asking around on Dogs On Acid and in a local bass heads group chat. I collected 16 tracks that met the requirement of having a groove that, for the most part, revolves around a half-time jungle drum and bass tempo – before it became a thing in 2000:

1. Hyper On Experience - Half Stepper (Moving Shadow, 1994 / 82 bpm)
2. Boymerang - The Don (Leaf, 1995 / 84 bpm)
3. T.Power - Indigo (Avex Trax, 1995 / 82 bpm)
4. Boymerang - Secret Life ( Parlophone, 1997 / 81 bpm)
5. Tsuneari Fujii - The Mirror (Precision Breakbeat, 1997 / 82 bpm)
6. Tsuneari Fujii - Flowers (Precision Breakbeat, 1997 / 82 bpm)
7. Decoder - Connect (Vibe'z, 1997 / 84 bpm)
8. Luke Vibert - Fused Into Music (Mo Wax, 1997 / 84 bpm)
9. Decoder - Vapour Dub (Hardleaders, 1998 / 84 bpm)
10. Deep Blue - Oceans Above Life (Partisan, 1998 / 80 bpm)
11. Matrix - Convoy (Prototype, 1998 / 83 bpm)
12. Banaczech - Ipcress File (Partisan, 1998 / 82,5 bpm)
13. Photek - Yendi (Science, 1998 / 85 bpm)
14. Tertius - Structure (Deep Blue Mix) (Partisan, 1998 / 85,5 bpm)
15. Jonny L - Approaching (Piranha, 1999 / 86,5 bpm)
16. Q-Project - Radar (Good Looking, 1999 / 86 bpm)
17. Digital - Deadline (31, 2000 / 86 bpm)

I know that I'm stretching my own requirement with the Deep Blue remix and the Q-Project track but hey, they are so good they had to be in the list. Check out the tracks in this YouTube playlist: Proto-Halftempo Drum and Bass 1994-2000.

Subvert previews artist page

Last week I wrote about the co-op based Bandcamp competitor Subvert. Since then, they have released a preview of their upcoming artist page, which looks promising. The discussions in the platform's forum on this topic, but also in general, are interesting to say the least, the signal to noise ratio is way above average. There is no better time to get involved than now.

Apple Music doesn't get artist fan relationship

Last summer I wondered why I couldn't follow an artist on Apple Music. A community thread told me that Apple had removed the feature in 2018. What I didn't know at the time was that in the summer of 2023, they reintroduced the ability to follow an artist. How could I have missed this? Apple didn't bother to implement the Favorites button in the desktop Music app, where I prefer to manage and listen to my music. My 2015 laptop runs macOS 12, and the Music app on that system does not have the same feature set as the newer version on the current MacOS. I could think of good reasons to support older software with simple but essential features to support the artist-fan relationship, but what can I do?

With an Apple Music subscription and a phone running iOS 17, I was able to favorite artists in the app by tapping the star icon on the artist page. I don't remember if the app told me what to expect when I favorite an artist, though. What I did not expect to happen was that after about half an hour, the artists I favorited appeared at the bottom (!) of the Apple Music home screen, and I only know this because I looked for it. Now, what I expected to happen is that when I tap on the artist icons, it takes me to the artist page, right? Lol no, it plays a random song from the artist, and not even from the latest release, just a random song from their entire repertoire, while a full screen player interface shows you the controls and which random track from the artists is coming next - that's it. If you're curious enough to tap on the artist name, a pop over will give you two buttons, one to the artist page and the other to the song's album.

I can navigate to favorite artists in the mobile app only and not in the desktop app since that feature is not there in my version of the app. As a label owner I wanted to know if an artist gets a notification when a new fan hits the favorite button and if the artist can see the fan count in the Apple Music for Artists app. No, the artist won't know if there's a new fan on the app or the total number of fans, where the fans are from and what releases they are favoriting by them. In fact, everything that artists can learn in real time about their fan relationships from the Bandcamp for Artists & Labels app is completely missing from the Apple Music for Artists ecosystem.

To be fair, the Apple Music for Artist app offers two insights that no other app does: it shows the number of Shazams for each track and the city in which it happened. It also shows information about radio plays and the exact station.

Please follow Bob Macc

Robert Macciochi is a professional mastering engineer with a deep love for music, musicians, and engineering. He occasionally writes smart and funny posts on his blog about mastering but more importantly about mixing and the relationship between the two processes. Every time my rss feed reader tells me he has posted something new, I instapaper it immediately - because I know I will learn something new. Yes, it is that good.

What I'm working on

At the moment, I am mainly busy writing applications.

🌱 The title of the weekly notes refers to Erik Kissane's dark forest metaphor for a resilient and non-gamified human network on the web.