High Contrast - bringing French House funk to D&B: Part One
High Contrast - Make It Tonight / Mermaid Scar
Welsh drum & bass wizard High Contrast is supremely well named: not only is there a high contrast between his best and his worst material, there is a great gaping void of immaterial doom between his best and worst tunes, a genuinely alarming gap that made me forget for years how much I love a lot of his music. In fact, it was only recently, when Overmono remixed his classic 2007 track If We Ever, that I remembered how brilliant High Contrast - aka Lincoln Barrett - could be.
There are caveats in my appreciation of Barrett’s work. In many ways he represents what made me go off drum & bass dramatically in the late 2000s / early 2010s, when the insanely over-dark colours of techstep gave way to the ultra-bright neurofizz of pop drum & bass, and songs like DJ Fresh’s Louder became giant chart hits.
Barrett’s work was a pre-shadowing of this. His debut single proper, 2001’s Passion - released on Hospital a few months after High Contrast shared a 12-inch with Carlito and Addiction - was a shining light of soulful strings and catchy vocals, perched atop a rolling beat.
The song also showed off Barrett’s borrowing from dance music styles outside the world of drum & bass, something that would become key to his work, employing filtered disco samples that would typically be more at home in French house than jungle.
Behind this eureka moment was the Cardiff record shop Catapult. “For the first few years when I was teaching myself to produce, I was big fan of jump up and I was trying to make tunes that sounded like the records I heard Nicky Blackmarket play,” he told One More Thing. “But I hit a wall and I realised that I needed perspective and distance. It just so happened that I started working at Catapult and the guys there - especially Raeph and Lucy - were playing me house music.
“At the time my only knowledge was the stuff that drifted into the charts but they were exposing me to the stuff from New York and Chicago. Also at the time French house was blowing up. I was just like, ‘Oh my god, these sounds are so amazing! Why am I not hearing this in drum & bass? So I started to try and capture those sounds…”
Clearly there was an audience for this, despite the prevailing trend for darker-than-thou filth and High Contrast hit pay dirt with his second full single, Make It Tonight / Mermaid Scar, the former a stellar example of Barrett’s rolling, sunshine funk, Stevie Wonder-style clavinet and all, the latter a surprisingly moody take on Bukem-style ambience that borrows from the astral mechanics of Detroit techno.
The single was a huge dance floor hit and it was no surprise when Barrett made the leap into album drum & bass with the release of True Colours in 2002, a record that rounded up many of his greatest hits to date, including Passion, Make It Tonight and Mermaid Scar.
However, they key song from that album - if not the best track - was the opener Return of Forever, a song whose filtered orchestral sweeps and very clean drum programming pointed the way forward for High Contrast and perhaps drum & bass itself, into more commercial realms.
The Streets Vs High Contrast – It's Come To This
Barrett is known, among many other things, for his enthusiastic borrowing, which might sound like a sneaky insult but really isn’t. As well as taking the influence of filtered disco samples from house and glittering synth lines from trance, High Contrast samples extensively and even covers other people’s tunes, such as his 2007 take on Iron Butterfly’s proto-metal classic In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, a song better imagined that heard, sadly.
It’s Come To This - aka High Contrast’s 2002 remix of The Streets’ Has It Come To This - has a similar spirit of gleeful robbery, taking liberally from three of the biggest dance tunes of the previous few years: Has It Come To This, Double 99’s Ripgroove and Shimon and Andy C’s shuffling d&B monster Body Rock, a tune that was absolutely inescapable in the early 2000s.
The confluence of these three big tunes makes me suspect that It’s Come To This started off as a bootleg, something for Barrett to play in his DJ sets. But it soon got a full release and it is well worth it, an audacious collection of blatant influences that almost takes your breath away with its arrogance. (And, yes, I know I have complained about Jamie xx sampling Ripgroove. But it was a different matter, 23 years ago.)
A year later, High Contrast remixed The Streets’ melancholic banger It’s Too Late into a proper lip-wobbling seven minutes of orchestral drum & bass that reminds me of MJ Cole’s Sincere with a rocket up its private parts.
High Contrast - The Basement Track
About that borrowing… 2003’s The Basement Track samples the vocal from Indo’s UKG classic RU Sleeping as well as Danny Elfman’s Beetlejuice Main Titles (on some versions anyway).
More audaciously, it borrows heavily (if perhaps unconsciously) from the melody of DJ Pierre’s 1998 track The Horn Song, which had recently been, erm, adopted, into DJ Jean’s dance hit The Launch. Sounds horrible? Far too obvious? Perhaps. But damnit if High Contrast doesn’t make it work. This is largely thanks to the sheer, unadulterated swagger of it all, the song’s supreme self confidence almost daring you to look away first. The Basement Track demonstrates that pop drum & bass can work without recourse to the lowest common denominator, a lesson that High Contrast seemed to spend much of the 2010s ignoring.
If True Colours was a strong debut album, then High Society, High Contrast’s 2004 follow up, is his classic, the producer surfing on sheer musical confidence. And nowhere is this better illustrated than on Racing Green, a number 73-shaped hit in 2004 and one of my favourite drum & bass tunes ever. (Honestly, if you take nothing else from this piece, just go and listen to Racing Green. Your life will improve.)
Racing Green is, perhaps, the most euphoric drum & bass track ever unleashed onto vinyl, a combination of ecstatic string surges, filters, racing bass line and a unique stuttering vocal line that is once heard, never forgotten.
The fact that this joy can even exist in the same musical genre as Pendulum is a testament to the brilliantly malleable nature of drum & bass, like finding out Slayer once covered The New Seekers. What’s more, the song delivers this rapture without sacrificing any of drum & bass’s sonic oomph, a two-stepping, whip-cracking beat keeping everything moving along at corporal pace. (See also Brief Encounter, another High Society banger that nails the sweet and sour face off.)
… And here ends part one. Part two is coming next week, so why not sign up to the newsletter and get it direct to your inbox?
Some listening
Dub is anything but apologetic and I see absolutely no reason why so much dub techno should be so contrite and uneventful. Thankfully Golden Water Queen, the new single from Bruce, is bold, weird and dubbed out, electronic music that borrow from both the spirit and the sound of dub pioneers.
As if that wasn’t enough, the song is an attempt by the Bristol producer to merge the vocal music he made on the 2023 EPs Not and Ready with actual music for dancing, which is the mark of a producer with a very active mind and a disdain for standing still. The result is a scuba-deep and slightly nervous skank for adventurous dance floors.
Oh and do read my interview with Bruce from earlier this year. We talked about this and all kinds of things.
UFOs - in the strictly aviationary sense - are a wild connection of circumstances that surprise and delight observers. Whereas UFOs - the newly minted supergroup of Phoenix, Alan Braxe and DJ Falcon - are a wild connection of… well you get the idea.
As everyone knows, the best Phoenix is dance Phoenix - those moments towards the beginning of their career when the Versailles group veered closes to the French Touch (Heatwave et al.)* So this collaboration between Phoenix, Braxe and Falcon is an absolute dream for me, teasing out the golden melancholy of Phoenix’s greatest hits against Braxe and Falcon’s sun-dappled disco production in a way that sounds so obvious I had to check they had never worked together before. And, well, they sort of have, with Braxe and Falcon remixing Phoenix’s Winter Solstice in 2023. But this is even better, a genuine mingling of sounds that brings out the best in all parties. Watch the skies!
* I say “as everyone knows” - I’ve had this argument so many times before I could have it while snorkelling. And I stand by it.
Dania - Personal Assistant
It’s very much to Dania’s credit that you never quite know what you’re going to get with the Barcelona artist. I, for one, didn’t have shoegazing electronica high on my list of possibilities when I checked out, Listless, her wonderful new album for Somewhere Press. But that is precisely what I got - well, that’s how it sounds to me, anyway - on the album: pointed guitar drift, empyreal vocals, rumbling dub-ish bass lines and surprisingly potent beats.
The atmospherics are fabulous - but even better are the tunes, such as on Personal Assistant, my personal favourite of the seven-track album. It reminds me, variously, of Slowdive remixed by Reload; Chapterhouse and Global Communication; One Dove; james K; Cocteau Twins; Spooky’s remix of Lush - and lots more, but also doesn’t really sound like any of them. These are all some of my favourite things. And so too is Listless, an album for early hours dreaming and wandering around deserted mountains.
…. and talking of shoegazing, Valencian dreamers Gazella return with Velcro, a song that tones down the flamenco and electronic influences a touch but still comes across as perfectly pensive and exquisitely mournful, like they have opened a time portal to 1990 Reading and Slowdive have stepped right through. The backing vocals, in particular, give an extra sense of yearning for lost love, which is what shoegazing really should be about. And if you’re in Barcelona, the band will be playing a free gig at the Plaça de Catalunya this Saturday (September 27) at 22:30, which promises to be ultra emotional.
Meanwhile, for those who want their shoegazing a bit more abrasively weird, I bring you Crimewave’s White Label, a song that puts My Bloody Valentine’s guitar glide at the centre of a glitched and degrading electronic world, in a way that really shouldn’t work but does. The experience is like being battered by bees as someone in the next room promises a warm cup of Camomile tea.
Nia Archives and Clipz - Maia Maia
Brazil is absolutely fundamental to drum & bass history, being (probably) the first country to really take to the sound after the UK and providing legendary artists like DJ Patife and DJ Marky.
Nia Archives has been here before, with the devastatingly hooky Baianá in 2022, and Maia Maia, produced with Bristol legend Clipz, follows a similar path, joining the perfect Brazilian vocal sample to a looming bass line and a brilliantly cut-up breakbeat. (Extra marks for the whistles, obviously.) And, yes, it’s kind of similar to Baianá but to complain about that would feel a bit like moaning because you’ve got too much ice cream on a summer’s day. Sometimes it really is that simple.
Charlotte Gainsbourg - Blurry Moon
Roughly half way through Blurry Moon, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s first new music in seven years, it strikes me that Gainsbourg is basically the French Lana Del Rey. Or, perhaps, Lana Del Rey is the American Charlotte Gainsbourg, given that Gainsbourg releases her first record considerably before Dey Rey did.
In either case, my rampant Francophilia suggests that the French Lana Del Rey will inevitably be better than the US version - this is no slight on Americans, I just love France. Sadly, though, on the basis of Blurry Room, which is atmospheric and dainty and mysterious and lovely but with a slightly disappointing melody, I have to admit that the American Lana Del Rey largely has better songs than Charlotte Gainsbourg. Then I remember that the two artists can happily co-exist and it is my idiocy to put them up against each other in this way and I go back to enjoying Blurry Moon. (Which, incidentally, was produced and arranged by SebastiAN, if you’re thinking that Line Noise really is getting away from electronic music this week.)
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - With YU QT
The Line Noise podcast is back. And after a bit of a summer break, we gently ease you back into things (well, not really) via an interview with Nu-UKG duo YU QT, aka Darryl Reid and James Cooper, who recently blew my - and many others' - mind with their devastating take on 2-Unlimited, Y'all Ready For Dis. Obviously we spoke about that but also about working with MCs, the cross-generational appeal of UKG , being closet romantics and a lot more.
One minute review - Big Thief’s Double Infinity
OK it’s slightly longer than a minute and you have to look at my awful face but do check out this new video review strand we are doing on RPS Music, in which, this week, I grapple with Big Thief’s new album. You can actually say quite a lot in a minute or two and my children think I look like a YouTuber, so maybe we all win.
How can you not love someone who refers to their music as indie / jazz /J pop and makes tunes that combines math rock complexity with jazz and the sweetest bossa nova? Well you couldn’t. So it was a pleasure to speak to Mei Semones when she came to Barcelona earlier this month. We talked about math rock, high school jazz programmes, writing in English and Japanese and doing what you want. We should all be more like Mei Semones.
Kieran Hebden / William Tyler: 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s
Wasn’t I just on here the other day complaining about Four Tet’s Into Dust? Yes I was. So how come I am now on Pitchfork talking about how much I love 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s, Kieran Hebden’s new album with William Tyler?
Because Hebden is still an ultra-talented artist who can produce brilliant work, like 41 Longfield Street Late ‘80s, when he puts his mind to it. (And William Tyler is fantastic, too.) And maybe that makes me judge him more harshly. Who knows?
Anyway, have a quote from the review and please go and read it. “41 Longfield Street Late ’80s feels like a work of careful reduction, the product of thousands of smart decisions. Hebden spent two years doing what he modestly refers to as “the computer bit” of the album, with the duo sending songs back and forth for additional edits and overdubs. It is fitting, then, that the record has a time-weathered feel, suggesting music that has been chipped out of the mountain and smoothed off by sand.”
The Playlists
Apple Music users! You can now access my two main playlists of new music: The newest and the bestest and The newest and bestest 2025.
Please do keep your opinions coming in about where I should host these playlists. For the moment, they are both also on Spotify: The newest and bestest 2025 and The newest and the bestest. But I personally use Apple Music.