CARRIER - PRE-MILLENNIUM WITCHCRAFT (1995 - 1998) a side [Berceuse Heroique]

"deadly deadly deadly 70 minute session from cult UK club technician Carrier hailing his roots in mid-late ‘90s D&B with a ridiculously strong mixtape of pre-millennial, post-junglist rufige - 100% essential for fans of the golden era, the bruk out, and anyone sick of being recommended Intelligent Liquid D&B to Chill and Study to.

‘Pre-Millennium Witchcraft (1995 - 1998)’ is Guy Brewer’s love note to his teenaged years, when older siblings and their mates introduced him to the hardcore jungle-derived phenomenon of D&B. Aged 16 in '96, Brewer was perfectly placed to soak up the sound which had by then reached a critical velocity and was spreading beyond the usual big city hotspots to places such as his home in Cambridge. Too young to get into clubs, it was in cloud-chamber bedrooms that Brewer was bitten by the D&B bug, exposed to crucial tunes at the time they were produced and available in shops - long before you could pick up practically anything on 2nd hand sites - so long as you knew what you were looking for.

This mixtape speaks directly to his lived experience, locked-in to the sound at its purest and most deadly with 70 minutes of technical witchcraft and noirish dread often produced by artists who were relatively peripheral to the original early ‘90s jungle movement, but came into their own as the scene expanded and mutated into its D&B form as the decade quickly accelerated thru stylistic shifts. Thanks to Carrier’s flawless selection and frankly ridiculous arrangement, ‘Pre - Millenium Witchcraft (1995 - 1998)’ ideally portrays the fundamental, rolling and stepping chronics and unique, sensual pressure of the sound at its most compelling. The advanced mechanisms of early breakbeat hardcore jungle are heard fine-tuned in motion, distilling its dark/light switches and irresistible aerodynamism in a seamless flux of cyberdub and technoid synths that animate limbs like electrodes.

As disciplined as a martial art, and radically styled out to fuck, this sound is where form and function pushed each other to unrepeatable heights in an intense feedback loop of DJ, dancer, and producer. The results are rudely elegant, brutally adroit, built to sustain and bend dancers in a way that bands or acoustic instruments never could. Ultimately it’s a unique expression of its times: the mindbending strength of new weed strains; advancements in technology; and self-sufficient network of clubs, promoters and ravers who were in hot competition to keep things moving forward.

With his current productions as Carrier, Guy Brewer most vividly characterises how the original D&B genus has mutated in translation over the years, operating in what Kodwo Eshun identified as a “double-refraction” of influence as his productions pull from D&B’s near cousins in Chicago footwork and Berlin techno to pursue a recombinant sound whilst taking care to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Play this mixtape, then some new Carrier bits on Felt or his own label, and it’s not hard to join the dots across decades.

ah man, so fire."