A Remarc of obsession - saluting the Amen king
Much great music is the result of obsession. It might be obsessive love, obsessive hate or just that obsessive desire to keep on doing what you are doing until something truly remarkable drops out the other side.
Remarc, aka Marc Forrester from Brockley in South East London, is a perfect example of the latter obsession, his fixation with chopping up the Amen break into ever more extreme iterations resulting in a series of classic 12 inch releases in 1994 and 1995 that rushed jungle further into the future.
Everyone loves Remarc. When I interviewed Sully recently he mentioned him as one of his favourite producers; Squarepusher has frequently played Remarc’s music out; and Mike Paradinas loved him so much he put out two Remarc albums on his Planet Mu label in the 2000s.
And Remarc, in turn, loves the Amen break, his undying affection for The Winstons’ Amen, Brother earning him the title of “king of the Amen”.
“All I remember is sitting in front of my Atari ST and Akai S-950 back in '94 and constantly chopping and ripping my favourite drum loop - Amen - as much as I could,” Remarc told Shadowbox in 2005.
“I mixed it together with the music that I love and grew up on - reggae and ragga. I just fucked it all up the way I liked it. I was doing jungle, but I chopped and edited the drum samples a lot more than other producers. Now that those scattered amens are coming back, I think I was one of the first to take their deconstruction to the extreme.”
Remarc wasn’t the first producer to use the Amen break. And he wasn’t the first person to chop it into unholy madness. But he arguably went further than anyone else down this road in the early days of jungle, his production work going on to influence the drill & bass crew of Squarepusher, AFX and Luke Vibert and later on breakcore with it.
The key difference was, however, that Squarepusher tracks would never get played at jungle raves, while Remarc’s were all over the dance, keeping the fiery spirit of jungle intact even as the drum tracks fractured into ever more obtuse shapes. (The large amount of ragga samples also helped.)
To celebrate the genius of Remarc, I present my six favourite Remarc drum tracks - not necessarily my favourite Remarc songs, but the drum lines that levitated my head. I recommend listening to them at insane volumes when life is getting you down.
Remarc and Lewi Cifer - Sceptic
Remarc’s first record, Help Me, was released on his own Dollar records in 1993; and he broke through with Ricky the following year, a catchy as herpes jungle number that sampled Boyz 'N Da Hood (not Eastenders, as was widely rumoured) and devastated dance floors. Ricky was made with Lewi Cifer, another early jungle pioneer then riding high on the success of his rave anthem 99 Red Balloons.
The drums on Ricky are immaculate. But my choice for the drum lines is Sceptic on the B side, especially around 1.22, when the Amen (what else?) seems to swing in an almost jazz way, the pitch shifting, cutting and other manipulation sounding incredibly human for the way that the beat threatens to stumble and slip out of time but never quite does, prompting infinite re-listens as you try to work out what the hell is actually going on here.
PS The Remarc and Lewi Cifer remix of Ricky, which was released in 1994, is another classic, with the snare drums itched up into neat melodic riffs in a way I don’t think many people had done before.
Sound Murderer was the name that Remarc gave to his 2003 album on Planet Mu and it seems an appropriate moniker for someone who tortures his drum samples into submission.
But Sound Murderer was, at first, a 1994 12 inch that Remarc released on jungle label White House Records, backed with another classic, Drum & Bass Wise (see below). The drums on Sound Murderer are, naturally, chopped to perfection. But what is more important is how incredibly, unnaturally, viciously, sharp they sound, tearing through the speaker like an attack of 1,000 knives, setting the tone of Sound Murderer right from the start of the song.
White House Records also released a second Remarc 12 inch in 1994, with remixes of Sound Murderer (the not really very loaf-y Loafin’ In Brockley Mix) and Drum N' Bass Wise by Remarc himself.
It’s an incredibly hard choice between the original Drum N' Bass Wise and the remix but the rejig wins out in the end by virtue of its mind-boggling intensity, where the relentless beat-trickery doesn’t let up for a second. Somewhere around this time Remarc bough Cifer’s studio gear from him and this might explain the mangled intensity of the drums here, with Remarc unwilling to leave them alone for even a second.
The section from 2.08, in particular, is ridiculous, as Remarc brings to play all of those long, late nights sitting at the Atari ST, tumbling the beat to and fro, here and there, upwards and downwards the melodic scale, like the best drum solo you could possibly hope to hear. It’s weird as hell - and yet you can still dance to the song. And thousands of people did.
R.I.P. is perhaps Remarc’s best known tune, getting a release on Dollar on test pressing in 1994 before being snapped up by the rave giant Suburban Base a year later. It might be his best tune as well, with huge samples swiped from a couple of reggae soundclashes coming up against space-y synths, a snatch of ethereal vocal and an obnoxious bass line, in what is a perfect jungle period piece, both ridiculously hard and kind of cosmic.
The drums, meanwhile, seem like an exercise in slippage, reversing and stuttering around the beat like a race car in a monsoon, always threatening to career out of control, heart in mouth, only to heroically make it out the other side. See, particularly, from 1.18 to 1.41, a masterclass in ice-y trickery.
Ice Cream and Syrup (Hard mix)
On the B side of R.I.P. we find Ice Cream & Syrup in both original and Hard Mix form. The latter has what might be the most outright fun of all Remarc rhythm tracks, as the ferocious Amen gets warped, melted and bent into all kinds of melodic shapes.
It’s called the “Hard” mix and it is, in a way, the Amen hitting with its usual punishing vigour. But there is also something distinctly soft and rubbery in the way that Remarc makes the beat sing for its supper, like a once-terrifying Alsatian forced to roll over or a magician making ever more elaborate balloon animals, with the section from 1.09 perhaps my favourite of all Remarc’s drum programming.
When I interviewed Sully, I asked him how he came up with his production technique of pitching drum hits to make them sound like musical notes. He mentioned Portishead’s Machine Gun. But you can hear a clear precursor to this idea in Ice Cream and Syrup, as Remarc teases fantastically silly melodic riffs out of pitched drum samples.
Remarc’s output slowed after 1995, as dance trends swerved off into drum & bass and ragga jungle fell out of fashion. But there was still time for the mighty Menace / Thunderclap 12 inch on White House, a record that spotlights Remarc at the peak of his powers.
Thunderclap, especially, is astounding, as Remarc shows off all the skills and rhythmical tricks he has picked up over the last few years, to create a virtuoso display of abject drum savagery that sounds permanently on the verge of spewing its guts. The section from 1.57 to 2.17 is jaw-dropping, its peaks, troughs and weirdnesses suggesting a whole new universe of drum possibility.
It was around this time that Luke Vibert, Squarepusher and Aphex Twin started playing around seriously with breaks, on releases like Vibert’s Plug EPs, Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Things album and AFX’s Hangable Auto Bulb EP.
Nothing against those records, of course, but listening to Thunderclap you kind of wondered why they bothered, with Remarc’s drum programming so perfectly aligned, a mixture of ultra precision, swing and gnarled funk, that it renders most other music irrelevant. I would argue, in fact, that you can hear about 75% of Squarepusher’s whole career in Thunderclap, proof, if needed, that Remarc is one of the most influential electronic music producers of his generation.
PS Remarc didn’t stay away from jungle for long. He produced precisely one garage EP, TNT, then got back to making ragga jungle, largely for his own Dollar Digital label. You can still find him DJing today, finding his natural habitat in Bangface’s deranged breaks parties.
Some listening
Jon Dasilva & Skyskrapa Feat. Donald Waugh - Sun Brings Joy (Bass Id mix)
Sweet and sour; peanut butter and jam; chilli and lime. And now The Bass Id remix of Jon Dasilva and Skyskrapa’s Sun Brings Joy, a song that lets the sun come pouring into the heart via Donald Waugh’s honeyed vocal, then tramps all over it with the blackened boots of a robotic beat stamp and a metallic funk bass line that is repulsive and addictive at the same time. Luke Una has apparently called this the song of the year and, frankly, he knows better than me.
Without Pause is a thoughtful banger; the sneaky dance-floor hit you can imagine taking an interest in French literature. The latest instalment in Midland’s return is melodic, with a skin-tingling tinkle of effects and a beat that, frankly, isn’t messing about. You’d ask the DJ about it.
I see The Field has made his album again. (Joke copyright: Eamonn Forde). Which is harsh. But also totally fair. Now You Exist, The Field’s first album in eight years, is like a mirror staring back at you, ready to reflect your every whim. I wanted an early summer record. And that’s what I got, the album’s infinite loops and cheerful melodies the perfect reflection of a bright May day.
It seems almost rude to pick one song from Now You Exist, so perfectly does it sit as a unit. But the title track, with its suggestion of acoustic guitar and voice, wins the day. The sample is ever so slightly awkward in its timing - deliberately so - as if Axel Willner needed something to soothe with petroleum jelly production, which doesn’t go anywhere for eight minutes but still ends up in a different place.
Miami duo NVT draw from tech house - a type of music I don’t really like - on their new album 8AM Swim, while the single Lens Blur has edges of dub techno, a much abused style of music. And yet…. there’s something in the swing, in the lightness, in the summery mood and delicate touches to this song that goes perfectly with a Barcelona morning down by the sea. And, given that’s where I’ve just been, it feels almost rude not to include it. There’s a kind of smudgy bliss here, like looking back to holiday snaps from 20 years, where you’re stood next to people you don’t really remember.
Some Boards of Canada thoughts
I reviewed the new Boards of Canada for DJ Mag: "When the end eventually does come for humanity, it might sound like the 100th second of ‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz’, song two on Boards of Canada’s ‘Inferno’. “
Would you like some extra fragmented thoughts, which I had to cut? Oh go on.
The band’s catalogue is so deep - Inferno is their fifth official studio album, although it might be their ninth, if you believe in the five, semi-mythical records apparently released before 1998’s Music Has The Right To Children - that you can find precedents for most sounds, if you dig as deep as many BoC fans do….
Boards of Canada have long been a group who delight in the wispy and the vague, whose drum breaks are dusty, their samples submerged and their melodies elusive. Their music appeals to the very human emotions of nostalgia and longing but its cosmically detached nature means that it is often hard to believe it is made by actual, flesh-and-blood people. This perhaps explains why such a rabid cult has sprung up around Boards of Canada: it’s as if we can’t believe that behind music this mystical lies the banal reality of two brothers from Scotland with some esoteric interests…
…. This fulfils the idea that Mike Sandison expressed in a 2005 interview with Pitchfork of BoC as “just a band” like Abba and A-Ha. “Not an IDM band, not an electronic band and not a dance band,” he added.
Prophecy at 1420 MHz features a deep-toned, cosmic voice that reminds me of Zapp or early electro records, beamed through synthesiser technology to be given the tenderest musical edge, laid over the song with the suggestion of rhythm.
Elsewhere - on the sublime Age of Capricorn or Memory Death - the vocals are used to create a more traditional melody, their indistinct form suggesting BoC’s own In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country or the Cocteau Twins’ alien arias…
And if you want to see me talk about the album on video, then I have you covered here.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - With Michael Rother
I spoke to Krautrock / kosmische hero Michael Rother about Neu!, Harmonia, Kraftwerk and his solo career, taking in creative explosions, musical freedom, the perverse advantage of not having gear, the Neu "!" and whether he is a fan of Stereolab.
Electronic Music's Most Memorable Album Launches
I wrote about Radiohead’s (very prescient) experiments into short video ahead of the release of Kid A for this RA piece on electronic music’s most memorable album launches. Includes Two Shell’s boring rock, Mount Kimbie’s bouncing ball and Boards of Canada being typically cryptic.
The playlists
Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.
Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest
