Beyond Warhead: 10 reasons to love Krust, jungle’s most cerebral producer
From youthful pop star to life-coach consultant, Kirk Thompson aka (DJ) Krust, is one of the most fascinatingly free-thinking figures to emerge from the jungle scene. Thompson is probably best known for Warhead, a 1997 single and all-time drum & bass anthem that sparked the brackish rush towards the biggest, baddest bass lines in D&B, which continues today.
But, fabulous as Warhead is, it doesn’t even tell a hundredth of the Krust story, which wends from jazz to jungle to hip hop to spoken word and back again. And he’s still doing it, too: Krust’s 2020 album The Edge of Everything was a fascinating collection of cinematic vision and musical world building that ranks among his best work.
Given all that Krust has done, you’d need hours to really get under his musical skin. (Certainly, when I interviewed him for Line Noise, 40 minutes proved VERY short.) But, in the interest of brevity and celebrating one of my favourite artists, I’ve put together ten reasons to love one of jungle’s all-time greats.
1) Krust was part of the Bristol scene’s first chart hit
Fresh 4’s Wishing On A Star wasn’t the first hit single ever to come from Bristol, obviously, when it climbed to number 10 in October 1989. But it did beat Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy into the UK’s top 40 by a good 18 months, which means that the group scored the first hit of Bristol’s famed crop of hip-hop influenced producers of the late 80s / early 90s (Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky, Roni Size et al). And Krust was there, alongside his brother Flynn, Suv and Judge. Fresh 4’s career hit the buffers soon after - the group were ill fitted to their major label deal - but Wishing On A Star remains a fantastic example of smart, sample-based pop music that proved influential on the Bristol scene and beyond.
2) Krust co-founded Full Cycle with Roni Size
in 1992, after Fresh 4 split, Krust, Suv and Flynn released a 12-inch of serrated hardcore as Hocus Pocus on their own, short-lived Twisted Records before Krust hooked up with Roni Size to launch Full Cycle (né Full Circle) records in 1993. The label’s first record, a split 12 inch with Roni Size and DJ Die’s classic Music Box on one side and Krust’s The Resister on the other, set the scene for what was to come from Full Cycle, later one of jungle’s most esteemed labels. The two tracks were immaculately produced, thoughtful and deep, evidence of a Bristol jungle sound that was blooming independently from the genre’s roots in London.
Music Box gets most of the love these days; but The Resister is an absolute gem, kicking off with warped My Bloody Valentine-esque drone and accelerating through mournful chord sequences, like LTJ Bukem meets James Holden.
3) Krust helped introduce jungle to jazz
It’s impossible to say who was the first producer to introduce jazz to jungle. LTJ Bukem is certainly one of the candidates, as is Roni Size with his 1994 single It’s A Jazz Thing, which sampled Lonnie Liston Smith’s Shadows. But Krust, too, has his hat in the ring for his 1994 tune Jazz Note, a dramatic, cinematic and strangely tender work that showed the huge leap in quality jungle had taken in the two years since it had mutated out of breakbeat hardcore.
4) Krust was a key member of drum & bass supergroup Reprazent
1997 was an annus mirabilis for Krust. After a string of wonderful 12 inches in the years after Jazz Note - including the classic Angles - for Full Cycle and V, 1997 saw Krust unleash two all-time classic singles in Warhead and Soul In Motion, a 10-minute epic of towering ambition that pushed jungle to its limits by essentially ignoring any of the standard dance-floor demands of the genre.
1997 also saw drum & bass supergroup Reprazent release their classic debut album New Forms, a record that would take drum & bass off into new sonic and commercial pastures, spawning genuine chart hits, picking up the 1997 Mercury Prize, going platinum in the UK and even making some impact in the US, where the band set about touring hard. If you were to choose the most important drum & bass album in history, I think only Goldie’s Timeless could edge out New Forms from the top of the list. And, yes, it was Roni Size’s group - Krust called him “the main architect of the project” - but Krust, Die, Suv, Onallee, Dynamite MC and former Portishead drummer Clive Deamer all made huge contributions.
5) Krust pioneered mixing live instruments with jungle
Reprazent’s main innovation in drum & bass was to introduce live instrumentation to a genre that had previously relied on intense studio work and a panoply of samples. As well as Deamer on drums, New Forms featured Si John on bass, Tyrrell on guitar and Adrian Place on saxophone.
“The live thing came from trying to work out how to perform it [Reprazent] live and how we were going to do it,” Krust told the Red Bull Music Academy in 2006. “We didn’t just want to be DJing the project, we wanted to form a band and actually go out there and actually play it. We didn’t have an idea of how to do it… it hadn’t really been done before in the way that we did it so we had to work out how to get the samples and play them live and get the drummer to play in time.”
When Reprazent then got together to record their debut album, they spent eight months jamming with their live band, working out ideas on the fly and finessing these to sharpened junglist points. This may sound old hat now but it felt pretty extraordinary at the time. No one, up to this point, had actually seen live musicians play jungle, much less put them in a studio to jam out ideas.
What is less well known is that Krust used a similar live set up on his remarkable 1999 album Coded Language, which featured Si John on bass, Soul Coughing’s Yuval Gabay on drums and Mike Crawford on guitar and keyboard, as well as a 50-strong string orchestra and Morgan’s dazzling vocals.
“I sat down with these musicians over a period of eight months and sampled them,” Krust told DJ Magazine. “Put them all in this pot and said, ‘Thank you - now let me do my thing’. I went into my cave and started chopping everything up, using drum & bass ideas about production and applying that to live musicians. It became like this classical jungle experience, where you’re using those sounds but with the hard edge of the drums and bass, and this experimenting with the jungle mindset.”
Coded Language is nowhere near as famous as New Forms but - frankly - it deserves to be, coming across like New Forms’ hip older brother who went away to university and came back immersed in French literature and experimental music. The album is pretty much all gold; but listen to how Krust captures the subtle shimmer of the hi hats on album opener High Plains, creating a kind of aqueous wash, for a masterclass in how to make a jungle break out of a live drummer’s work.
6) Krust is one of jungle’s best producers at working with vocals
Coded Language also showed how skilled Krust is at working with vocalists. There was no shortage of vocal drum & bass tracks by 1999 and - of course - lots of the credit must go to the vocalist themselves, who are often undervalued in their contribution. All the same, on Coded Language, Krust showed that he has the knack for choosing a simpatico vocalist, giving them something interesting to work with and then moulding the results into a winning final track.
Two songs in particular show this. On the album’s title track, which is one of Krust’s classics, the producer matches an electric spoken-word vocal from Saul Williams with a furious drum break and fiery selection of electronic spray, the intensity bubbling like flames under feet.
Re-Arrange is just as impactful but in a very different way. I can find very little detail about Morgan, the singer on the track and a good proportion of Coded Language. But she is fantastic on Re-Arrange, somehow both off-hand, slightly theatrical and bursting with passion, like Beth Gibbons doing musical theatre on a night off.
Her vocal melodies are unusual, often landing on unexpected notes and perhaps even wavering out of tune. And Krust seems to take advantage of this by building a track that seems to almost be working in opposition to Morgan’s vocals, the unsettling, fascinating contrast drawing the listener further in.
7) Krust’s production style is fantastically wrong
What actual style of jungle does Krust make? I’ve been listening to his music for 30 years and I still don’t think I could tell you. Sometimes he plays it hard as nails - Warhead being the classic example - at other times he is a real jazz dreamer. And some of his very best songs - like Burning and Asian Love Dance (Remix) - sit somewhere intriguing in between the two, the kind of jungle bangers you could put on a C90 tape to give to someone you fancy.
What unites his productions, however, is that they are almost always downright weird, the work of someone with a very individual musical mind, who is not averse to doing things the wrong way. There are hundreds of examples of this but let me give you two. Most famously, to make the bass sound for Warhead Krust held a live studio jack in front of a speaker and recorded the feedback, creating a sound that left other producers scratching their heads because that’s really not what you do in a well-mannered studio.
The other example is from Kloaking Device, his stellar collaboration with Roni Size. In many ways, the track is fairly conventional - super sharp break, sci-fi vocal and eerie two-note chord wash. But the nasal-y bass line is brilliantly bizarre to the extent that it feels like it comes from a different song and, perhaps, even different style of music. The modulated echo (I think) on the bass feels like it is constantly threatening to slip out of time, while the melody sounds ever so slightly warped out of tune. Needless to say, it all sounds utterly glorious too.
“I do what everyone else doesn’t do,” Krust said in his RBMA interview. “Not on purpose but I just try and be myself. And if you’re yourself, you’re going to be different. That’s why you get some artists that stand out, because they’re really just following their own thing, what they should be doing. And that’s what I try and do, just do what I think I should be doing and this is what comes out.”
8) Krust is one of jungle’s most cinematic producers
Krust is something of a film buff, so it is no surprise that his music is so cinematic. One one, rather basic, level this comes down to the sonic palette he uses, from the gothic organ on Hegel Dialectic to the THX-noise woosh of Constructive Ambiguity (both from The Edge of Everything).
But there is also something cinematic in the epic and often rather unusual structures of this songs, which can play out more like cinema scripts moving between acts than the cyclical grooves of dance music.
“I wanted my music to be like a film,” Krust told RBMA. “I had this thing that I would want to make widescreen music and for me it was about when you watch a film, you don’t normally get it until the end and that’s why I wanted people to listen to the whole track, it was a journey… you had different sections, different stories, the journey went up and down and I wanted to emulate that in the music.”
For The Edge of Everything, Krust was inspired by filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese. “I’ve fully engaged with understanding script writing,” Krust told DJ Magazine. “The stages of a film, the hero’s journey; the story and character archetypes. I’ve tried to grasp that and apply it to this art form.”
Many musicians are inspired by film making, of course. But often this results in a surface level reproduction of cinematic score. Krust, however, is inspired by the wider concept of cinema and the creative process. Which is a pretty fascinating difference.
“You’re allowed to be unpredictable and uncertain in movies, more than you are in music,” Krust told DJ Magazine. “It’s always acceptable to have a surprise ending in a movie. Like, ‘Oh, I didn’t see that coming!’ But in music when you do it, it’s like, ‘Ooh, you’re breaking the rules’. What fucking rules? When did art become like that?”
9) He draws inspiration from far and wide
As you can see, Krust’s influence are a particularly varied bunch. But they don’t stop with cinema and script writing. Speaking to Resident Advisor before the release of The Edge of Everything, he revealed he had studied “film, engineering, astronauts, psychology, spirituality, consciousness… business” in working on the album, which is certainly more interesting than yet another producer picking up J Dilla’s Donuts.
10) He has a fascinating life outside of music
If you’re getting the impression that Krust isn’t much like other drum & bass producers, you’d be right. In the late 2000s and 2010s, when he took a break from music, Krust studied neurolinguistic programming and launched Disruptive Patterns, a lifestyle coaching consultancy, which speaks to a brilliantly active mind both inside and out of music.
“Disruptive Patterns is the way I approach things now,” Krust told DJ Mag in 2020. “I always have this mindset of thinking intuitively, using imagination. It’s a tool to really disrupt yourself: changing your thought patterns, your belief systems, tapping into your fears, your limitations. Figuring out ways to go to your next level.”
“Why else are we doing what we’re doing, if you’re not making art for people 10 or 20 years from now?” Krust once said in an interview with Music Radar when talking about Coded Language. And that is Krust in a nutshell: brilliantly ambitious and with plans on a grand scale.
And a bonus reason
Unlike many jungle producers, Krust’s back catalogue is well looked after and the recent Irrational Numbers compilation series - “a treasure trove of hand-picked records and archival gems from Krust's extensive discography, thoughtfully remastered and presented anew for both devoted fans and newcomers” - represents a handy starting point.
And here’s a Krust playlist I put together for you too.
Some Listening
Youthful Chicago noisemakers Twin Coast return with To Feel, a song that takes their murky My Bloody Valentine-ness even further out into space, their umbral guitar ooze anchored here by what sounds like the ghost of a four four beat. MBV (and their shoegaze followers) are a very overused reference point for guitar bands these days but Twin Coast genuinely merit the comparison.
Kelly G. X Candi Staton - Power Of One
When I interviewed Kelly G - him of the epoch-quaking, 2-step inventing remix of Tina Moore’s Never Gonna Let You Go - last year he mention he was working on a song with disco legend Candi Staton that was already moving dance floors. That song has finally arrived in the form of Power Of One, a sticky, bumping, disco-ish, gospel-esque slice of good-time house music with a surging Hammond organ groove that reminds me why I love the genre so much.
Just as you’re wondering whether you really need ANOTHER anniversary re-release of Moon Safari, Dirty Hiroshima noodles into your era drums to justify the latest re-packaging. The track - which is previously unreleased although I SWEAR I have heard the name before and I REALLY don’t recommend you Google “Dirty Hiroshima” early in the morning if you want to start the day well - feels like a remnant of another Moon Safari, where beats were slightly more to the fore, in an almost Kraftwerk-isn feel. You can see why the song didn’t make Moon Safari, then, but Dirty Hiroshima is a gothic, cinematic gem that could fit on 10 000Hz Legend easily.
Eliza Rose and Calvin Harris - Body Moving (Special Request Extended mix)
I didn’t expect Calvin Harris to feature on my Substack. Then again, I didn’t expect him to get together with Eliza Rose and invite Special Request in for an eight-minute jazz funk-break remix that mutates - via, oh Heavens yes! a mid-song speed up - into a filthy jungle hardstep tear out. Remix of the year so far? Perhaps.
Things I’ve Done
This week, I spoke to LA-via-Detroit-via-Berlin producer Monty Luke about his new album Nightdubbing, dub, inspiration, Planet E, his Black Catalogue label, the Blessed Madonna - who he persuaded to change her name - and much more.
The Playlists
What are you doing for the next 113 hours, four minutes? Nothing? Well, why don’t you listen to my newest and the bestest playlist, where Twin Coast rub up against Kelly G in unlikely harmony, alongside loads of other things that I love, which I don’t have time to write about. You can follow it here. If you only have five hours 21 minutes to spare, then I will forgive you for going for the newest and the bestest 2024 playlist. But only this once. You can follow that here.