Drum n' bass took its roots from jungle, which burst onto the British dance music scene in the early 1990s. It was inner-city music, the "jungle" in the name referring to the tough streets of London or Bristol. Jungle records were simple concoctions: ragga (fast, aggressive reggae) samples, fractured breakbeats, and simple basslines. Soon the mixture was modified; the ragga samples grew less popular, and in their place, artists created their own sounds on synths or traditional musical instruments, rather than relying on samples of already-released music. Drum n' bass was born.
Rob Playford and his record label Moving Shadow are often credited with founding the genre of drum n' bass. He founded the label in 1990, after forming the group 2 Bad Mice and releasing seminal tracks like Bombscare and 2 Bad Mice. He then engineered Goldie's classic drum n' bass album Timeless, but fell out with him during the making of Goldie's second album, Saturnz Return. Later, he began throwing the now-defunct but well-loved Voodoo Magic series of parties at Equinox in London's Leicester Square. Now he runs both Shadow and another label, Audio Couture, and records under the name Timecode.
Goldie began as a member of the Metalheadz collective, a group of D n' B artists that includes such luminaries as Photek, Dillinja, and Optical. He's named not for the many gold teeth he sports, but for the golden dreadlocks he used to wear. Goldie's first album and collaboration with Rob Playford, Timeless, is aptly named; even the Los Angeles Times lists it as an essential drum n' bass record. It's filled with staccato beats melted into swirls of jazz guitar and the dulcet tones of R&B chanteuses. This is definitely a foundation stone for your drum n' bass CD collection.
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