High Contrast - bringing French House funk to D&B: Part two
Last week on the newsletter, I looked at the early career of Welsh D&B don High Contrast, taking us right up to 2004’s High Society and Racing Green. This week, we go from 2004 onwards, when things get… interesting.
Calibre and High Contrast - Mr. Majestic
Liquid funk - a soulful strain of drum & bass that puts an emphasis on musicality, melody and vocals - had been knocking around for a few years by the time High Contrast made his recorded debut in 2001, with Fabio releasing his pivotal Liquid Funk compilation in 2000.
High Contrast was, however, one of the first artists to take the liquid sound to a wider audience, alongside Northern Irish DJ and producer Calibre. So it made sense that the two artists would team up on the huge 2004 single Mr. Majestic, a tune that added sweet reggae horns and a gorgeously smoked-out King Jammy vocal to drum & bass roll.
Reggae was always a huge influence on jungle / drum & bass, particularly the rougher, dance hall styles. But Mr. Majestic took a far smoother route with the genre, creating a tune that vibrated with velvet-y class, even as the frantic Amen break did its work. I particularly love the intro, where it feels like it is raining a soft mist of Amens. Gorgeous.
The 12 inch’s B side - helpfully named The Other Side - had a similarly laidback charm, which spoke of the easily-flowing creativity behind the two tunes. “He [Calibre] did a gig in Cardiff and said, ‘My flight isn’t until 7am, shall we make a tune?’” High Contrast told UKF. “ We ended up making two tunes in five hours and I drove him straight to the airport. So there’s a lot to be said for immediacy and unplanned things.”
After True Colours (see part one), High Contrast seemed to go off the rails: his third album, 2007’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance, saw him delve a little bit too far down the pop avenue, with (frankly rather irritating) covers of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang suggesting that High Contrast’s effortless ability to bridge commercial sounds and underground funk was running a bit off.
For all that, the album was home to one of his very best tunes: If We Ever, a song that splits the difference between the hardcore rave from which jungle emerged and the slick modern drum & bass production of which High Contrast is an expert. It does this courtesy of an iconic piano melody - just try not to play along next time you hear it out - a gorgeously powerful vocal from the late Diane Charlemagne (her best since Inner City Life???) and a production shine that lifts the song out of the rave grot. (Not that there’s anything wrong with rave grot, of course.)
It’s a stunning track and it is no surprise that people haven’t been able to keep their hands off it ever since. There’s the VIP mix, the Unglued mix and now the Overmono collab. But for me it’s the original that wins out, its innocent simplicity shining through.
Adele - Hometown Glory (High Contrast remix)
High Contrast’s pop smarts and commercial profile made him pretty much the drum & bass remixer du jour for the late 2000s, taking on everyone from Eric Prydz to MGMT. (It’s worth mentioning that High Contrast’s 2009 best of album Confidential went gold in the UK, a rare achievement for a drum & bass producer, let alone one operating on an indie label.)
All the same, remixing Adele in 2008, when she was well on her way to becoming one of the biggest artists in the world, was something of a coup for High Contrast and he pulled off the task with incredible élan, producing a mix that managed to situate Adele within the world of liquid funk, while remaining largely true to the spirit of the original song. This is pop drum & bass as it really should be done: with energy, funk, backbone and hooks - and you can definitely imagine Adele having a dance around her kitchen to the song as she got ready for a night out. As it should be.
MJ Cole - Pictures in My Head (High Contrast remix)
It gives me no pleasure to mention that post 2007 High Contrast dropped off dramatically. Tough Guys Don’t Dance wasn’t great and his 2012 follow up, The Agony and the Ecstasy, was worse, while the less said about 2017’s Night Gallery, released on 3Beat after Barrett left his long-term label home of Hospital, the better.
For all that, High Contrast was at least interesting in his failed experiments. The First Note is Silent, a nails-on-the-blackboard trance & bass collaboration with Tiësto and Underworld, brings together three artists I would have never expected to see in the same room, let alone collaborating on a track, while The Road Goes On Forever, track two on The Agony and the Ecstasy, uses an interpolation of The Who’s Baba O’Reilly to shunt drum & bass into weirdly soft rock spaces, like Daft Punk’s Discovery done REALLY BADLY at 174BPM. I’m glad it exists, somehow, but I never want to listen to it again.
For more listenable examples of mid-period High Contrast, the listener is advised to explore the remixes. His 2019 remix of Jorja Smith was nominated for a Grammy, apparently making him the first drum & bass artist ever to get a Grammy nod and is very enjoyable in its half-stepping, metallic way.
For me, though, the real gem is his 2017 remix of MJ Cole’s Pictures in my Head, with High Contrast shunning the ultra-glow hugeness that made his name (and subsequent un-made it, at least for me) in favour of a subtle re-rub that kept the semi-classical charm of Cole’s original tune, while ramping up the song’s energy. Had this tune been released a few years earlier, I can imagine it being MASSIVE.
High Contrast - 20th Century Jungle
After the sugar-glaze headache of the mid 2010s, High Contrast succumbed to nostalgia on Notes From The Underground, his sixth studio album, in which he mixes the sound of 90s hardcore with modern studio techniques.
“I was definitely trying to keep my nostalgia in check in making this album,” he told The Line of Best Fit. “This album is kind of me thinking, ‘What would I have made if I had been making tunes in 1995?’ But I also didn’t want to be a complete slave to the past and let that completely dominate the creative process. It’s mixing those old ideas and this retro concept with where I am today.”
The result is a VAST improvement on Night Gallery (the toe-curling Met Her at a Dance in Leicester aside) and High Contrast has had, if not exactly a late-period renaissance in commercial terms, certainly a brighter creative period. (Although he couldn’t resist covering Blue Boy’s Remember Me on his 2024 album Restoration.)
My favourite tune from the period is 20th Century Jungle, from the 2024 Anti / Thesis: Vol. 1 EP, an unapologetically retro take on the jungle sound (it’s 20th Century Jungle, not 21st, after all) worthy of Tim Reaper, featuring a perfectly chopped breakbeat and an If We Ever-ish piano line that will bring tears to any dance floor. Because if you’re going to do this kind of thing, you might as well do it right.
Some listening
Catalan corner: ok dw (say it slowly, in a Catalan accent and it translates as “OK God”) has produced a perfectly judged rump-shaking anthem right out of the 1980s, with slap bass, ultra-brite synths, processed trumpets and a totally ear-worn chorus that - oh I don’t know - Gloria Estefan could definitely have taken to number one back in 1986. If okdw - aka Virts Martos - is going partying then I’m coming too, although Virts would probably get rapidly bored with me singing along to this hit.
Allow me to take you down the memory lane of dance to 1998, when well-connected Parisian duo The Buffalo Bunch released Buffalo Club, the only ever release on Roulé offshoot Scratché and a total filter disco banger.
Beautiful, by Danish producer Hekt, is like that, except metallic, nasty and infected by unsettled robot vibes, which is to say that the song is funky, addictive and sports an absolute killer of a descending bass line that will stop dancers in their tracks. The result is beautiful in the same way that a killer android might be considered beautiful before it laser lops your head off and treads on your bones.
South London MC Tia Talks’ Party Tonight is a Y2K 2-step banger that doesn’t try to do anything too clever with the template but does promise endless good times and a bass line you’ll be humming tomorrow when you reach for the Ibuprofen (plus production from LVIS-1990). My one criticism: it appears to have one bass drum hit too many in the drum pattern. But that is incredibly pernickety.
femtanyl & ISSBROKIE - NASTYWERKKKKK
When Primavera Sound announced its 2026 line up last week, we (at Radio Primavera Sound) interviewed Pau Cristòful, one of the festival’s booking team about the artists playing next year.
I asked Pau for his pick from the lower reaches of the bill and he went for femtanyl (AKA, as I later discovered, Canadian producer Noelle Mansbridge). And so I checked them out and found one of those artists I had never heard of, who has more than half a million monthly listeners on Spotify. More importantly on NASTYWERKKKK! - a song with ISSBROKIE, who I had also never heard of - I found a producer who mixes breakcore feeling with hyperpop vibes, huge rave stabs, glitchy production and absolutely loads of slightly scandalous fun.
Mohammad Reza Mortazavi - Zendegi
Pau’s other lower-down-the-Primavera-bill tip was Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, an Iranian percussionist best known for his work with the tombak and daf drums, whose sound he has radically expanded via new playing techniques.
Mortazavi’s live set is apparently very special, which I can readily believe on the evidence of Zendegi and Swamp, the two tracks released from his new album Nexus. His playing is incredibly nuanced, every creeping tap perfectly placed to weave spiderish percussive layers, to which he needs to add very little. The effect is to create wildly hypnotic, incredibly addictive, drum jams, which seem to operate entirely in their own sparsely logical universe.
Emma-Jean Thackray - Save Me (EJT Remix)
Weirdo, Emma-Jean Thackray’s recent album, is pretty much the opposite of NASTYWERKKKK!, in that it is incredibly profound and deeply sad, with only slight scrapings of fun to be found. And that’s fine.
But EJT is nothing if not diverse and her remix of Save Me, from that fabulous album, is an absolute scorching track, mixing Thackray’s gospel-ish vocal with the kind of ridiculous electronic blips and squirts that suggest a bad mood with a sense of humour.
Peter Perrett - WGB/WMD (David Holmes remix)
Peter Perrett’s 2024 album The Cleansing occupies a similar space to Weirdo in my affections being contemplative and bleak as hell, albeit with a sly sense of humour. Go and check it out: it’s a masterpiece.
… But it’s not a very danceable one, which makes David Holmes’ dramatically energetic remix of Women Gone Bad such a surprise, strapping disco drums and massive synth stabs onto the sardonic original in a Screamadelica-esque work of reinvention.
PS you can hear my interview with Perrett here.
Harps, jazz and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Such, from hereon in, is the world inhabited by Nala Sinephro, the über-talented London musician, who makes her soundtrack debut on The Smashing Machine, a film based on the life of MMA fighter Mark Kerr.
Except, well, there are no harps on Grand Prix, the gorgeous lead single, rather a blossoming of warmly glowing synths and orchestral arrangements that swoon and ooze with class, like Tangerine Dream sleepily rendered by the London Symphonic. Frankly, I can’t imagine a world where this has any connection at all to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and the terrible world of MMA - which, live and let live, but I DON’T want to see it - but I suppose that is the magic of Hollywood.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - BABii (2019)
I decided to dig into the archives to pull out the Radio Primavera Sound interview we did with BABII in July 2019, around the release of her fantastic album HiiDE. We talked about the sound of poisoning, being a carnivore, Margate heatwaves, Escape Room music and more.
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.