walking upstream…
4hero
Dego McFarlane and Marc Mac were teenage record collectors from north-west London — reggae and soul first, then hip-hop, jazz-funk and rare groove — when they founded Reinforced Records in 1990 and, with the sample-collage jolt of 'Mr. Kirk's Nightmare', helped invent breakbeat hardcore almost by accident. Their studio doubled as an open classroom for the next wave of jungle producers, Goldie prominent among them, and 4hero themselves kept mutating afterward into jazzier drum and bass and eventually the broken-beat sound that grew up around their later work. Their catalog reads less like one genre than a running argument about how far a breakbeat can be pushed before it stops being one.
the sound in question
1990
Mr. Kirk's Nightmare4hero
walk the tributaries ↓
Afrika Bambaataa1980s · Electro / Hip hop / Funk
Marc Mac has named Bambaataa directly among 4hero's hip-hop touchstones; the duo's early breaks-and-techno records leaned on the same cut-and-paste, DJ-as-composer logic that Bambaataa's Zulu Nation records established a decade earlier.
listen: upstream & here
1982
Planet RockAfrika Bambaataa
1990
Combat Dance4hero
listen forThe dialogue-sample-as-hook trick that drives 'Mr. Kirk's Nightmare' — a spoken snippet looped into the record's whole identity — is a direct descendant of the block-party cut-and-scratch aesthetic Bambaataa's crew popularized.
Kraftwerk1970s · Electronic / Krautrock / Synth-pop
4hero's rigid four-to-the-floor productions and Marc Mac's Nu Era techno side project have both been described as running on the same machine-funk blueprint Kraftwerk laid down; the group's early breaks-and-techno hybrid sound leaned on that same cold, sequenced European electronic style.
listen: upstream & here
1977
Trans-Europe ExpressKraftwerk
1994
Parallel Universe4hero
listen forCompare Kraftwerk's motorik, train-as-metaphor pulse on 'Trans-Europe Express' to the sci-fi, sequencer-driven sweep of 4hero's own 'Parallel Universe' — different tempo, same faith that a machine rhythm can carry a whole atmosphere.
Isaac Hayes1970s · Soul / Funk / Orchestral soul
Dego has described his upbringing as steeped in reggae and soul before hip-hop, jazz-funk and rare groove got added to the mix; orchestral soul records like Hayes's Hot Buttered Soul sat in that same rare-groove crate that London breakbeat producers of the era sampled and revered generically, without one specific credited lift.
listen: upstream & here
1969
HyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymisticIsaac Hayes
1998
Loveless4hero
listen forThe lush, string-swept, unhurried build of Hayes's extended soul arrangements is the same instinct 4hero later chased on their more jazz-inflected drum and bass, like the orchestral, vocal-led 'Loveless' — breakbeat music slowing down long enough to sound like a soul record again.