Day: December 19, 2005

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Jungle Got Soul

Jungle got soul
Here’s my Christmas pressie for you all… a mix of vintage jungle. I don’t think any of the tunes on this mix are particularly rare, I just picked a load of good ones that I wasn’t bored of. The inspiration was Tom & Jerry’s peerless Maximum Style — present here in its original and “Lover to Lover” versions, and yes I could do with an expert to sort out what T&J tune is what, cos I am confused. In any event, I adore Maximum Style because it eschews Amen-style stentorian rigour for slinky soft soul’n’lovers rock groove, so I tried to put together all the good soul-influenced jungle I could find. A mix of raging Amen tunes is in preparation. There isn’t that much soulful jungle that still rocks, so the mix is a bit short, but that could be an advantage. The title refers back to the classic Toots and the Maytals album Reggae Got Soul: for if jungle reaches back primarily to reggae, and I think it does, then it also reaches ack to soul, as reggae does.

Most of these tunes are from 1994– not a deliberate decision but it does support the argument put forward by some that that was jungle’s best year. Here’s the tracklisting…

Lloydie Crucial: Ribbon In The Sky 1994
Tom & Jerry: Maximum Style 1994
Tom & Jerry: Lover to Lover 1994
Run Tings: Ruff Revival 1994
Firefox & 4-Tree: Warning (Powder Mix) 1994
Greenwood: Hold It Down 1994
Deep Blue: Helicopter Tune 1993
M-Beat: Style 1993
The Brock-Out Crew: Hardcore Romance 1994
M&F: How Many Ways 1994
Da Maytrix: Loverman 1994
DMS & The Boneman X: Sweet Vibrations (Push Up Yr Lighter) 1994
M-Beat: Surrender 1994
Undercover Agent: Oh Gosh! 1995
L Double Featuring Bassman: Da Base Too Dark 1995
Lick Back Organisation: Maniac Music (Lick Back VIP Mix) 1995

Jungle Got Soul
192K mp3; 47 minutes 34 seconds; 65.4Mb.
As ever, on Windows, right click and save as; on the Mac, option click (or right click if you are wise enough to have a two button mouse) and save as. This is likely to be the last “public” music mix released on this blog, since other sites leach our mixes, meaning loads of downloads but no feedback or contact. Anonymous leaching is not what it’s all about. There will be one or two non-music audio files however.

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A note of caution

protection rune

I suspect it may be valuable to clarify my position on paganism, especially to casual readers and the uninitiated.

As has been noted, I have something of a pagan identity, or rather a partial pagan worldview, and I have some practices which in the west might be called “pagan”… However, I never found a paganism with which I didn’t disagree by at least 50 per cent. I don’t swallow any of it whole. And I certainly don’t want to defend all those awful websites with black backgrounds that tout spells and all manner of other teen-gothery. Nor do I want to defend or engage with any of the other wanky pagan stereotypes.

As Robert Anton Wilson once said, I don’t “believe” any of it, in the sense of accepting pagan dogmas as all-encompassing and fundamentally true. We have no truck with Grand Narratives here. The subjects I am interested in are but one means of illumination, expression and liberation. Others have other yogas, such as the yoga of materialist left politics, for example, all of which are more or less valid. And my ideas in this area have changed considerably over the years, and assumptions you make about me as a “pagan” may not be well-founded.